Opie, from "The Andy Griffith Show," a popular American TV show that ran from 1960-1968 and was set in the fictional small town of Mayberry.
Mr. Greenjeans (right) on an episode of "Captain Kangaroo," a long-running children's TV series (1955-1984). The show was based on "the warm relationship between grandparents and children."
Hoss, from the show "Bonanza," a popular western TV show that ran from 1959-1973.
Gomer Pyle (right) and Sgt. Carter from the show "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." (1962-1964). Jim Nabors played Gomer Pyle.
A clip from The Brady Bunch, in which Jan runs for Most Popular Girl at her school, ft. the Bradys’ housekeeper, Alice (in blue). The show ran from 1969-1974.
FREEWRITE QUESTION
Like Tony Earley in his essay, consider what television shows are popular today, or were popular when you were a kid.Think about how these shows shaped your expectations of family, love and relationships, work, school, etc.
How has television influenced your view of the world?
Since the 1970s, Jean Kilbourne has been asking people to take advertising seriously. Her in-depth analysis of advertising’s messages has spawned an entire field of study within popular culture. While Kilbourne focuses her research and analysis on advertising’s images of women over time, such analysis could just as easily be done on images of race or sexuality or class, etc.
Kilbourne’s analysis is an excellent model for your own as you work on your Visual Analysis essay. Pay attention to the way she makes a claim and then supports it using specific ads and their copy, and to how she examines these ads in a larger context, considering even its global impacts.
This Vogue cover from 2008 created a great deal of controversy and received a lot of media coverage as critics argued that it perpetuated age-old racial stereotypes. Arguments cited its shocking similarity to an American World War I-era propaganda poster dating from around 1917, which depicts a German soldier as a “mad brute,” a dark gorilla stepping onto the US shore, carrying the ravaged Liberty and a club with the words “kultur” and “militarism” written on it. The intertextuality evident in Vogue’s cover changes the way we read it as a visual text.
Intertextuaity: A World War I-era propaganda poster and the controversial Vogue cover from 2008, feat. LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen.
More recently, Nivea’s recent ad campaign raised quite a lot of debate about whether or not we’ve come as far as we think.
Nivea's recent ad campaign was criticized by many for its racist message.
Or try flipping through some magazines at a book store to look for some contemporary ads. Have a favorite organization (e.g., PETA, the Army, World Wildlife Federation, etc.)? Check them online – you’ll probably find their ads posted on the websites. You might even google “controversial ads” to looks for advertisements that have made headlines in the blogosphere recently.Keep in mind that your ads do not need to be from American companies. In fact, they can be from anywhere in the world – just remember that you need to understand their context and you may need to translate the text, called the copy, that accompanies the image.
BROWSING PHOTOGRAPHERS
You can find books of photographs in the HSSE library on the 3rd floor in the Fine Arts Oversized Book section. Have a seat and flip through a few to find one you like. Here’s a handful of names to get you started with your browsing, but feel free to search beyond these artists:
Josef Koudelka Margaret Bourke-White Dorothea Lange
Diane Arbus Henri Cartier-Bresson Walker Evans
Weegee Alfred Stieglitz Annie Liebovitz
Find a photographer whose work you’re really interested in (and focus on the subject matter you find most compelling); zero in on two or three photographs from a particular series or project that capture your attention.
Now that we’ve discussed Susan Sontag’s chapter from On Photography, let’s look at the work of two photographers to analyze the social constructions of power that lie behind the image, behind art and representation – i.e., what it is to be the one looking versus the one being looked at. This is integral to conversations about the ethics of how we represent a person, or a population. In both of the following projects, the photographers were outsiders going in to photograph disadvantaged populations.
EDWARD S. CURTIS: REPRESENTING NATIVE AMERICA
Edward S. Curtis (February 16, 1868 – October 19, 1952) is a controversial photographer who worked at the beginning of the 20th century to document Native American people and cultures. In 1906, J.P Morgan paid Curtis $3,000 to produce a series of photographs on the North American Indian. All in all, he took some 40,ooo photographs of 80 different tribes. While his photographs were largely responsible for shaping the way Americans came to think of American Indians – including the belief that Native cultures were disappearing/extinct – his documentary practices have been criticized as unethical. Many, however, still see his work as culturally and historically important.
Watch a clip from the documentary Coming to Light on Curtis’s work:
ONE BIG SELF: ART AS ACTIVISM
Photographer Deborah Luster and poet C.D. Wright collaborated on the project One Big Self: An Investigation as a critique of the U.S. penal system. Wright was motivated by the idea that “art is not apart, but a part of,” that poetry is not isolated from social discourse. Luster wanted to make the “invisible population” of those incarcerated in Louisiana prisons visible to the outside world.
Project Background
“Louisiana incarcerates more of its population than any other state in the Union. The United States incarcerates more of its population than any other country in the free world.” -Deborah Luster
The Prisons
East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, Transylvania: built in 1935; a minimum-security parish facility; houses app. 200 men with short terms for parole violation and drug possession.
Louisiana Correctional Inst. for Women, St. Gabriel: a minimum-, medium-, and maximum-security facility housing about 1,000 women, most serving out sentences due to drug violations; Luster stated that St. Gabriel “more closely resembles a campus than a prison. The grounds are immaculate, and elaborate hand-made decorations are rotated throughout the year to acknowledge the changing season’s celebrations.
Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola:a maximum-security facility built on 18,000 acres of Delta farmland that was once used as a slave-breeding farm; the facility houses over 5,000 men: 87% of the inmates are violent offenders, and 88% of those incarcerated at Angola will die there.
Collaborative Representation
Luster let the inmates who volunteered to be photographed decide how they wanted to represent themselves; she did not pose them, but let them pose themselves. Some dressed in their prison rodeo outfits while others donned the costumes they wore for their prison’s Easter, Halloween, or Mardi Gras events. Others showed off tattoos or held photographs or signs. Each inmate who participated received several wallet-size prints to send to family or friends outside.
As some of you may be aware, last week on Valentine’s Day, the portrait of Dr. Cornell A. Bell, noted African-American chemist, teacher, and long-time director of Purdue’s Business Opportunity Program, was defaced with hate speech. Tonight, Purdue is hosting an open forum for students to share their thoughts and feelings about the need for diversity and understanding on campus and to discuss possible solutions in light of this act (see flyer below for details).
I strongly encourage all of you to go. I will give extra credit to any student who attends and who turns in a one-page (double-spaced, typed) response to the discussion that takes place at the forum, due Monday. This forum relates to many of the discussions we’ve had this semester, including our debates surrounding the University of Wisconsin’s decision to alter a photo to show more diversity; and think back to “Preparing Minds for Markets” and the blog on microaggressions. As an event that deeply affects the Purdue student community, you should all be concerned with this act of defacement, but I hope you will also see it as an opportunity to be part of the solution.
As you’ve probably noticed on the syllabus, we have the first of two quizzes over The Humble Argument scheduled for Tuesday of next week. I have put the study guide for the quiz up on Blackboard (under the folder “Quizzes”). This study guide is the quiz, and while you cannot simply fill it out and bring it with you on Tuesday to turn in, it will help you prepare and memorize the material for the quiz – so you’ve no excuse to do poorly!
Questions cover Parts I through III of the book. Since we’ll be discussing photographic projects on Monday, you have no reading due and can focus on studying for the quiz.
The poet Robert Bly once argued that the image was a particular form of intelligence, a nexus of emotional and intellectual information capable of presenting an entire in a moment of looking (or in Bly’s case, reading a poem).
Our culture is a visual one. Every day we are bombarded with thousands of ads, TV commercials, music videos, store window displays, and iPhone apps. Reading and analyzing these images requires its own unique form of visual literacy, one that asks critical questions about how such images reach their audiences and what they tell us about history, culture, and identity.
ANALYZING VISUAL IMAGES
Refer to the handout “Analyzing Visual Images” from class while considering some of the images below as examples:
Genre
Dorothea Lange's famous photograph "Migrant Mother," taken during the Great Depression in the 1930s, is a portrait. Historically, only wealthy people could afford to have their portraits painted, but the advent of photographic technology made portraiture more readily available.
Convention
"John, Day of Release" by Michael Stipe is also a portrait, but it defies some of the conventions of portraiture by focusing on the subject's hands rather than his face, as we might expect.
Scale
The scale of the shoes in this photograph, compared to the scale of the man and the Eiffel tower in the background, capture our attention because they are not what we expect.
Balance
This photograph by Margaret Bourke-White employs the rule of thirds to make the balance in the picture interesting: 2/3 of the photograph are devoted to the billboard while 1/3 is taken up by the people in the breadline below. This photograph also makes use of contrast to make its argument.
Context
As with written tecxts, visual ones acquire meaning from their immediate context, as well as the larger sociohistorical moment in which we read them and in which they were composed.
The unusual context of this ad campaign - printed on a park bench - makes a striking argument, especially at a time when more and more people find themselves unemployed and/or in danger of losing their homes.
This parody of a Marlboro ad depends on the reader's familiarity with the Marlboro Man and also with colonialism and an increasingly globalized economy.
As you read through your partner’s draft in class, feel free to make margin comments, but steer clear of doing too much editing. Once you’ve finished shaping a draft, you enter the revising stage of the writing process; editing comes later. What good is it to edit a sentence you may end up cutting? The purpose of peer review is to check for global issues that the writer can work on revising over the weekend, issues like:
Thesis (central claim) and Argument (supporting evidence)
Organization (logical flow of ideas you can follow)
Structure (paragraphing, topic sentences, and transitions)
Clarity of ideas
However, sometimes wonky sentence structure and/or frequent grammatical errors can interfere with out ability to understand ideas. If that’s the case, then help the writer with the most pressing errors, but don’t feel obligated to fix every one – keep your eye on the quality of his or her ideas and argument and let the writer know that the errors were distracting.
Tips for Proofreading/Editing on Your Own
Read the paper out loud: your ear is always a better judge of language than your eye.
Read your paper backwards: Begin with the last sentence and read to the first; your brain will shift gears.
Have someone else read your essay out loud to you.
Don’t rely on spell check (or believe everything it tells you).
Don’t believe everything yourroommate tells you (even if he or she is an English major).
Taylor Mali, a spoken word artist and former middle school teacher, gives writers some advice on proofreading their work:
Too often, we think of structuring our writing as a formulaic act rather than a search for form. But writing isn’t usually a plug-and-play ordeal. The five-paragraph essay, or what Humble calls “the trainer essay,” is utilitarian – it offered some scaffolding when you were first starting to write essays – but it’s the equivalent of training wheels on your bike. You’re likely ready for something more sophisticated.
A HUMBLE REVIEW
As you work on your draft, you’ll need to organize your ideas into a coherent piece of writing that supports the argument you present in your thesis.
Rule #1: you should be able to connect every paragraph in your essay directly back to your thesis. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.
In chapters 6 and 8, Humble discusses structure and gives you several examples of how you might organize your ideas on pp. 127-132.
Internal Patterns:
Chronological
Cause-and-effect
Problem/Solution
Spatial (Hint: a spatial pattern would probably work well for a spatial analysis!)
Visual
Textual
Logical Patterns:
Least-to-most or Most-to-least
Comparison (alternating vs. block pattern)
Most of the time, our ideas don’t flow onto paper already organized in a way that the reader can follow – this is why we write a shitty first draft and worry about structure during revision. The writer’s job is to create a structure to present his or her ideas so that the reader can follow the argument logically from one point to the next. You may know what you wanted to say, but did it make it onto the page for the reader?
Put yourself in your reader’s shoes:
Is there enough information to paint a clear picture? Remember what Humble says about details on pp. 140-141: “Details show readers what your summaries look like in the real world […and] give readers mental images, something that readers can see for themselves with their imaginations. “
Which points do we need to understand first? Second? Third?
What background information will we need to fully understand your main points?
Paragraphing
One of the keys to sound structure is paragraphing. Paragraphs are the building blocks for your essay. Each paragraph should have a clear purpose: think of each as a box with a label on it. Only information that relates to the label can go inside the box. Other information should go in another box, or perhaps needs to be cut entirely.
Topic Sentences
Most of us are tempted to make that topic sentence of a paragraph the first point. Resist! In reality, a topic sentence should present the overall idea of the paragraph, and subsequent sentences should break down that idea until you arrive at your main point, or claim, of the paragraph. Generally speaking, paragraphs tend to move from broader to more specific terms/examples.
The Academic Factory 