Response to Ann Marie Seward Barry's Visual Intelligence

Barry's use of descriptions of the biological processes involved in seeing and perceiving was fascinating. The explanations of sight throughout my years in elementary and high school always seemed inadequate. We were given detailed pictures of the bones of the body, the chambers of the heart, descriptions of how the lungs work, the layers of the skin. But with the eyes, it always seemed like I was asked to rely on a type of faith. There were rods and cones. A teacher would hold up a prism and say something about different waves of light. Yet, even then, it seemed that sight was one of the best ways to start getting at the idea that our knowledge of the world was contextual, that our beliefs were situated and not universal. For a number of years when I was a child and young teenager there was a question that came up in conversations; it seemed that many people had individually had this thought and didn't know what to make of it. ... What if we each saw colors completely differently? What if my blue was your orange, but, at the same time, we were consistent in our difference and so we would never know?

I haven't thought about this question or my dissatisfaction over the rod and cone explanation in quite a while. In part, my reflections were inspired by Barry's descriptions of biological processes, the parts of the eye, the ability to see as learned. However, I wonder if I'm also brought back to my earlier years in school by the number of times in this text that Barry references "Channel One."

Barry doesn't seem to have a high opinion of the programming -- "Given the current pervasiveness of advertising in public schools under the guise of educational programming, particularly as part of "Channel One," this type of exploitation may be more generally acceptable than might at first be thought" (61). Ok. Yes, there was something about Channel One that seemed very similar to MTV. I don't remember the commercials, but I'll trust Barry on this one. However, Channel One also brought free televisions to each of the classrooms in my middle school. And every day we would watch roughly 10-15 minutes of news, engaging with current events in a way that many of us arguably would not have otherwise.

On a different note, I was immediately struck by Barry's epigraph to Chapter 1 -- "The map is not the territory" (15). We've heard this phrase so many times, and I think it becomes ever more relevant as we increasingly rely on things like Google maps, our GPS devices, and Yelp to guide us from point to point on the map. When GPS doesn't recognize that a road is shut down for construction, when a business isn't at the location that Google Maps shows, it's frustrating, of course, but it also makes apparent the difference between the map and the territory. What was surprising, for me, about this epigraph is that I had no idea before reading this book who Alfred Korzybski was. To find that he was the first to use this phrase, as opposed to Jean Baudrillard who used it and then argued not only was the map not the territory but that the map now preceded the territory, may seem like a little thing to take away from this book. However, this is a phrase that I've returned to several times in my writing, and am now grateful to have learned more of the back story behind it's origin. At the same time, it still upsets me to some degree that Barton and Barton's "Ideology of the Map" is so similar to Baudrillard's and doesn't explicitly give him credit. Their piece also begins with a reference to the Borges tale, discusses the difference between the map and the territory and then expands on this idea by saying that there are rules of inclusion and exclusion.

More thoughts on Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' No Caption Needed

The authors' case studies of iconic photos in this book continue to amaze me. I especially was struck by the follow up photo of Kim Phuc and her child and the authors' analysis of how a political event has moved into the sphere of domesticity for resolution. Also, in that same chapter, we find another reference to Disney in -- "the Disney theme park that would have been located near the Manassas battlefield" (200). The accompanying political cartoon is particularly shocking, maybe in part because of the expression on Goofy's face. Again, an analaysis of the relationship of the political unconscious to Disney seems to be something that, at least if we take the examples from the texts we've been reading in class as an indication, would lend itself productively to further research.

Several pages later in the chapter, the authors bring in another re-appropriation of the napalm photo in their analysis of an editorial cartoon that appeared in 2004 depicting a shrouded detainee fleeing behind Kim Phuc. The cartoon shares the iconic photo's composition, with the soldiers walking in the rear and the young man in the front silently mourning. From the cartoon, the authors draw a comparison between Abu Gharib and Vietnam. They say, "Once again, war crimes are occurring because of U.S. policy, once again, the public is trapped in a space between pain and indifference; once again, the war will not go away ... Worse yet, there is room on the road for more figures to be added as Americans continue to repeat history rather than learn from it" (202).

On one hand, I agree that the comparison is effective. Especially in the visual rendering, the image is shocking. However, in the conclusion to the book the authors return to a consideration of the photos of detainee abuse. Although I don't particularly mind that the authors have been up front about their politics throughout the text (in fact I agree with/ most if not all of their leanings), I'm not sure if I agree with all of their analysis of these photos.

Throughout the text, the authors have referred to the place of professional photojournalists in capturing iconic moments on film. (A separate issue here, especially when considering WJT Mitchel's description of the relationship between image and text is that many, if not all, professional photojournalists today are often referred to by their employers as multi-media journalists. They write, post to the web and shoot video in addition to taking photos.) However, with the Abu Gharib photos, these were not professionally shot. I would have liked to see more consideration given to the ways in which these photos function differently because they were privately shot and leaked through the Internet and therefore suggest something has changed about our world today.

Two additional points. First, the authors claim that learning of the detainee abuse "stunned the world" (292). Although it would be hard to argue that these photos did not stun, I wonder whether the influence they had was significantly less than it would have been in a different time period when the reading public was not constantly bombarded with images generally. Related to this first point is that it seems a significant number of Americans believe that torture is acceptable. Not having done a study or read any recent polls on this, it's hard to say with any authority. However, a fellow grad student at UF recently discussed torture with his class, and, according to him, only one student spoke against it. The other students apparently said they thought it was necessary. My second point here is related to the authors' claim that the photos of detainee abuse "revealed a pornography of violence at the heart of the occupation" (294). I would extend this critique to say that there is a collective "pornography of violence" in our culture (although culture may become a problematic term here, and I take issue with the degree to which it gets used to describe things like "print culture"). There was, around the time that these photos came to light, a growing resurgence of films that have been described as torture porn. I would argue that the success of these films was directly related to the invasion of Iraq and the nation's need to make visible a type of violence that had been authorized yet kept hidden from sight for the most part.

Response to Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites' No Caption Needed

The authors say, "The distinctive problem for a liberal-democratic society in such crises is that any political response has to be designed to meet needs defined in the aggregate, while still maintaining ideological commitment to the primacy of the individual" (88). They also say that "description of an individual's experience is the standard lead-in for any feature news story" (90). Here, I wondered not only about the effectiveness or the need of journalists to balance out their focus on more universal or wide-ranging issues with the focus on particular subjects, but more specifically how this tendency functions in publications as a whole. For instance, maybe several front page stories about government policy, the weather and local schools might be balanced out with a page 2 feature on specific individuals. Maybe this, in part, is the function of feature pieces (which also seem to be some of the easiest pieces to botch or make overly saccharin). There was an ongoing feature at the paper called "The Storyteller." The feature was usually devoted to an older member of the community's story (and, in a small, rural town many of the stories shared themes such as church, hard work, focusing on family)... what always struck me about these pieces, though, was the accompanying artwork, which tended toward portrait-like shots, highly detailed (realism over flattering shots) that seemed to, in some ways, echo the tone of "Migrant Mother." I had never thought about "The Storyteller" feature functioning to balance out the paper's necessary attention to stories about groups, stories about the impact on the entire city or county. Above Photo by Ken Ruinard, Independent-Mail, Anderson, S.C.

Overall, this book's case studies of iconic photographs were fascinating. One of the first questions to come to mind, however, is whether it is possible today for photographs to achieve an iconic status to the same degree that the photos discussed in the text have. Throughout, the authors refer to "print media" and the ways in which photographs function in print. Although the authors also use references to Google image searches to make some of their points about the recirculation of the photos, so far I found that the text left me wondering what the authors thought about the impact of digital forms of media. Additionally, and related to this question of how the internet might change the potential of images to achieve iconic status, is the authors' suggestion that there is still a definable difference between a public and a private culture.

They say, "Public culture includes oratory, posters, print journalism, literary and other artistic works, documentary films, and other media as they are used to define audiences as citizens, uphold norms of political representation and institutional transparency, and promote general welfare" (26).

The authors' model of the public sphere in this way ("other media") does seem to account for the influence of new forms; however, I would argue that the continual lessening of privacy and permeation of the mechanisms of surveillance have changed how the divisions that once existed between public and private once functioned.

They say, "Democratic publics need emotional resources that have to be communicated through the public media. That, and not the masses' childish yearning for enchantment, is why the public media include images" (36). To this I would add that the public media include images to turn a profit. Yes, maybe we have a collective unconscious desire for the affective nature of the photograph, but it is the attachment of a monetary value to the fulfillment of this need and not the desire to fulfill the need itself that seems to drive decisions of the "public media." In other words, "if it bleeds, it leads."

In chapter 3 "The Borders of the Genre," the authors discuss a statue at Disney World that is a play on the "Times Square Kiss" photograph. This was especially interesting to me considering Mitchell's claim in Picture Theory that we are in the "new world order of the theme park." Again, I would be interested in exploring further the connection between the mediation, through the theme park or maybe specifically through the Disney corporation, of how we view U.S. military policy.