"On Photography" and other links

Hi guys,

I want to share with you a couple links to some of the pieces that I worked with to create my presentation for The Photographer. For one thing, I think these articles and books are super interesting, and I also hope they may be useful to those of you who'd like to get a better-mediated look into some of the issues and ideas regarding photography and photography+comics I discussed yesterday, whether out of personal curiosity, for your final projects, or as a way of transition to Radioactive, which also includes some photographs.

First, my personal favorite...here's Susan Sontag's condensed look "On Photography" (from a textbook) and here's the full book. Sontag really made me rethink a lot of my presumptions about photography and I would recommend her to anyone.

In class we mentioned and read excerpts from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. So I'm linking the full book here. It's a bit denser than Sontag, but equally fantastic and the writing's more beautiful. What's more, for the fans of Richard Howard, he did the translation of this version of the book.

For those interested in lynching photographs and the like, here's the link to "Behold the Tears: Photography as Colonial Witness," a great article that deals with the nuances of how photography can work both as a colonizer's tool and a way to reclaim the past for the oppressed. (To access this one, you might have to log in with your UC Library access code),

And last but not least, here's the other Nancy Pedri article (the one we didn't read for class), "When Photographs Aren't Quite Enough: Reflections on Photography and Cartooning in Le Photographe," that deals with the marriage of photography and comics in The Photographer specifically.

Have a great AWP, if you're going, or a great week without us writers if you aren't!

Cheers,

Ondrej

Media Mixing and Memory in The Photographer

The graphic work The Photographer mixes Didier Lefèvre’s photographs and Emmanuel Guibert’s illustrations in a sequence that chronicles Lefèvre’s humanitarian mission with Doctors without Borders in Afghanistan amid the Soviet-Afghan War. For this post, I’m thinking about what’s at stake when a graphic narrative is conveyed through mixed media. Many graphic narratives appear in print media (e.g., shiny paper) that remediates compositions in pencils, inks, paints, type and more. The Photographer stands out because, unlike many graphic narratives, it refuses the comics tradition of sticking to one style that emerges from an artist’s media. Put differently, by integrating documentary photography with illustrations, The Photographer is a collaborative project both in process and on paper, in a way that challenges long-held traditions of the comics form. In rhetorical terms, the book’s mix of image styles, carefully arranged in a way that respects Lefèvre’s trade and Guibert’s documentation of his life, makes the book’s delivery noteworthy. So, I'll offer that at stake are theories of comics as well as the credibility of the collaborators, whose work relies on archival documents and Lefèvre’s memory.

The interplay of photography and illustrations in The Photographer warrants a return to Scott McCloud’s oft-cited definition of comics: "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information and/or to produce and aesthetic response in the viewer”. I italicize the “ands” above because they speak to the image mixing of The Photographer. If I place the book in McCloud’s picture plane, Lefèvre’s photographs are located in the “Reality” corner, whereas Guibert’s illustrations, I’ll guess, are located somewhere between “Reality” and “Language.” But here’s the rub: The Photographer is “Reality.” Lefèvre’s photographs are from his camera rolls used in Afghanistan, and Guibert’s illustrations were created in response to Lefèvre’s recollections of his journey. That said, I could be swayed toward the idea that Guibert’s illustrations tighten the looseness of Lefèvre’s memory, given that the book was composed more than 10 years after Lefèvre’s trip (The Photographer 262).

Noting that Guibert completed The Photographer shortly after Lefèvre passed away, I’m left wondering who deserves more credit for composing the book. I assign priority to Lefèvre because without his photography and recollections we wouldn’t have the book (at least in this form). One of Guibert’s invention strategies was to examine Lefèvre’s materials and conduct interviews, methods that shaped his illustration style. In 2009 interview with Newsrama, Guibert said the project was borne from two friends attempting to convey one lived experience. “That’s what I like about those stories made with friends: try to experiment so, if two persons really listen to each other, mutual comprehension turns polyphony into some sort of single melody.” Guibert, then, shouldn’t be viewed as Lefèvre’s lesser than collaborator. He was responsible for filling in the gaps between Lefèvre’s photographs, arranging the book in a way that brought narrative closure to the photographer’s timeline.

First-Person Gaming and The Photographer

Recently, I’ve been playing Campo Santo’s February 2016 release, Firewatch, a first-person exploration-based video game set in the Wyoming wilderness in the 1980s. I’m interested in approaches to narrative in video games, particularly in the techniques that games use to immerse and involve players in action, and some of the approaches used in Firewatch seem similar to those used in Guibert, Lefevre, and Lemercier’s The Photographer. The more that I think about it, video games and comics have significant elements in common, and some of those commonalities may help to explain why graphic formats are so effective at challenging mass-media stereotypes and assumptions.

For those that aren’t familiar with the game, in Firewatch, players experience the world through the perspective of Henry, a middle-aged man who has begun a job as a firewatch in a Wyoming state park as a way of escaping tragic elements of his life. Most of the game is spent guiding Henry through the park as he investigates a series of mysterious happenings, as well as selecting his walkie-talkie responses to his colleague, Delilah. Although players occasionally catch a glimpse of Henry’s hands and lower body, for most of the game, “Henry” is simply a role that the player inhabits, an avatar that stands in for the player’s own consciousness and presence in the game.

The sense of inhabiting an avatar is evoked extensively, too, in The Photographer through the use of photographs. Most of the photographs included the book are offered without explanation, and readers are expected to look closely and to make sense of what is being shown, to determine meaning without extensive guidance. At the same time, Didier’s representation in the rest of the book, gives a strong sense of his character, and while looking at the photographs it is difficult to avoid the sense of seeing through another’s eyes, of inhabiting another person and attempting to understand his thoughts. Often, while reading The Photographer, I felt that I was not only expected to create my own meaning for the photographs, but that I was also trying to puzzle out what these photographs meant for Didier, to develop a close understanding of his psychology and perspective.

This kind of reading promotes a strong sense of reader participation, the feeling that the reader is also, to a degree, present in the text, and closely aligned with the characters. Many games such as Firewatch use choice to create a similar effect. In selecting Henry’s actions (Will he respond flirtatiously to Delilah’s advances or will he be more standoffish? Which trail will he take on his trip to the lake?), the reader effectively becomes implicated in Henry’s story, and intricately involved in the world. Similarly, by asking readers to create meaning and by allowing them to make basic small choices while reading (Should I look at the images first or read the text? Do I examine the photo outlined in grease pencil before the others?), The Photographer, (and many other graphic narratives), involves the reader in the process of storytelling in a way that can immerse readers more deeply in the world than traditional text and that results in a deeper engagement with and connection to the subject.

A common stereotype of video games is that they distract players from the physical world in a way that can be harmful, by limiting physical activity, for example, or by inhibiting social connection. But what about the ways that gaming can encourage people to become intimately and empathetically involved with subjects that they might not encounter otherwise? It’s difficult not to be astounded by the natural beauty of the world in Firewatch, in a way that, I think, encourages players to pay attention and be moved by natural beauty in the real world. Similar approaches in graphic narratives can result in the same effect. By involving readers in the act of storytelling, as The Photographer does by encouraging readers to see the world through Didier’s eyes, and as many comics do by asking readers to make choices and to decipher the visual messages at work, graphic narratives may be uniquely capable of increasing empathy and altering perspectives in the same way that games are, by creating a deep sense of connection to and involvement with the subject of the narrative.

Literacy Sponsors in Arab of the Future and Beyond

By Rich Shivener

For this post, I’ll spend some time working through the idea of “literacy sponsors” and how such an idea integrates well with this week’s readings. By literacy sponsors, I mean “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold literacy––and gain advantage by it in some way” (166), as explained by Deborah Brandt in her 1998 article “Sponsors of Literacy”. Enable, support, regulate, suppress––I want to run with these terms because they illuminate passages in Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future in addition to al-Saadi’s article on the Arab comics movement. I’ll give most of my attention to moments when enablement and suppression, regulation and support (if there are such lines, that is) converge.

In Arab of the Future, Sattouf draws critical scenes of his childhood from 1978-1984. Among those scenes, Riad’s father serves as a sponsor of literacy, largely because his literacies are sponsored––in varying ways––by a university and/or a government. In fact, I’m drawn to pages 14-15, a series of panels that depict Riad’s father reading Gaddafi’s widespread “Green Book”. Sattouf’s omniscient captions contextualize his father’s reading, suggesting that the the leader encourages reading but regulates it in a way that fits with his vision and beliefs; such a suggestion has weight when Sattouf’s depicts Gaddafi’s regulation of television as well as the national anthem (12, 17). In and outside the pages, views conflicting with Gaffadi are suppressed. That is, Sattouf’s panel don’t work against his father but form of portrait a man whose academic literacies were enabled by a dictatorship, who then expected reciprocity in terms of similar literacy sponsorship and political ideology. Allow me to connect the former point with a passage from Brandt’s article: “Sponsors enable and hinder literacy activity, often forcing the formation of new literacy requirements while decertifying older ones” (179). This is say: Literacies of capitalism would not be televised in Libya.

Thinking more literacy sponsorship, I’m also drawn to panels in which Riad and his father are discussing/practicing literacies.. The panels depicting the two drawing cars is key to showing that Riad’s father holds strong opinions, whether about drawing or language practices in the Syria. Illustrating his father often, Sattouf is effective in showing the tension between Riad’s French literacy sponsors and those expected of his father in the Middle East. In fact, I’ll hold the position that Arab of the Future's narrative arc is bound up by literacy scenes that shape little Riad. I like that Chapter 4 raises the stakes for Riad, insofar as his father is visibly irritated by Riad’s Arabic practices (148). It’s a scene that has me wondering when and how Riad will navigate his literacy worlds.

Speaking of world literacies, I had a chance to check out al-Saadi’s article on the Arab comics movement, and I have a few reactions. On the one hand, I admire that the administrators and contributors of arabcomics.net are committed to recovering historical comics from the Arab world, and I also admire their firm stance on translating new works (e.g., DC Comics). Comics literacy emerges from access (i.e., the web) and translators are supported by the community. On the other hand, it appears that the administrators aren’t interested in those who just want to visit the site. Take this passage from al-Saadi’s article: “‘If someone is a member and hasn’t written a post or commented on a topic, we remove them,’ he emphasized. ‘It’s not about having 5,000 users who aren’t active; we’d prefer a hundred active users.’”. The argument could be made that arabcomics.net is at once making a good-faith effort to promote Arab comics while at the same time suppressing it from the Arab world at large. Perhaps in class we can discuss the legal and ethical implications of such a site.

"Drawing Blood"

"Drawing Blood" from The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/drawing-blood

One thing that struck me about the critical discussion surrounding The Arab of the Future was a common praise of Sattouf ‘telling it like it is,’ which largely gets its license from choices in form and narration: we’re offered a memoir that hangs tightly to a child narrator’s experience. This profile might not dig deeply into global politics, comic history, or even Sattouf’s trajectory as an artist, but it does provide an interesting context and insights into process. 

I was drawn to think about the way that point of view both implicates and exonerates an artist as their work enters a broader conversation. The article explains that Sattouf “read no histories of Syria, barely looked at family photographs, and imposed a rule on himself: never to stray from his childhood perspective, and to write only about what he knew at the time.” His production focuses on personal memory and experience; Sattouf doesn’t want to let his adult self swoop in and shape the narrative. 

Yet it would be a kind of authorial wink to suggest that a book doesn’t make the case for a way to perceive the world-- not just for a child in trauma, but for the adults learning about global politics through it. For better or worse, these authorial choices (I’ve focused on POV, but we could also discuss color, dialogue, and the temporal structure) have the potential to remove the author from certain kinds of culpability. As we see in this New Yorker article, this framing can be interpreted as a pure gesture: “Subhi Hadidi, a leftist member of the opposition who fled Syria in the late eighties told me, ‘Sattouf is faithful to what he sees, and he doesn’t beautify reality.’” I’d be curious to hear how others interpret the stance of the author, the statement of this book’s narration, and how its meaning changes as it’s read by diverse audiences.

Permeable Boundaries in The Arab of the Future

For me, one of the most striking features of The Arab of the Future is its portrayal of the permeable boundaries between countries and cultures. Abdel-Razak seems to have immense freedom of movement in the narrative: he leaves Syria to study in Paris, meeting and marrying Clementine while there; he is offered a professorship at Oxford; and he moves his family from France to Libya, back to France, and then to Syria. Despite the one moment of uncertainty with Syrian customs on pages 68-69, the Sattouf family appears to have few restrictions placed upon their international and intra-national travels. A prime example of this freedom of movement is when the Sattouf’s visit the Isle of Jersey to collect Abdel-Razak’s salary from his time teaching in Libya (152-153). Not only does this show the international exchange of money at play behind-the-scenes of the narrative, but it also highlights the scope of the international movement of the Sattouf family (work in Libya leads to money in Jersey which leads to the prospects of a new home in Syria). Finally, alongside of the immediate Sattouf family, their extended family also enjoys freedom of movement, as family members visit one another from country to country.

In addition to physical movement, cultural boundaries also appear quite permeable. Abdel-Razak speaks French and Arabic, and it is likely that Clementine learns to speak and read Arabic to some degree as well. Also, Clementine’s short tenure as a French language radio newscaster in Libya and her purchase of Paris Match in Syria suggests that she is not the only French speaker in either country. Abdel-Razak listens to Radio Monte Carlo in France as well as in Libya; he enjoys eating “toutes” in both Libya and Syria; and the Libyan government supplies the Canadian drink Tang as a part of its food rations. Finally, the children in both France and Syria seem equally fascinated with vulgar language. While there are important cultural distinctions between each of the countries within the narrative, there nevertheless seems to be many similarities.

On the one hand, the narrative’s emphasis on permeable international boundaries does have its limitations, which is visually suggested by the different colors washed over scenes taking place in each locale. While some movement and interactions may be permitted, complex and significant distinctions persist, and they cannot be overlooked. On the other hand, the permeable boundaries provide an important perspective on the openness of Levant and North African countries with their European neighbors. Unlike the Iron Curtain which forcefully limited physical and cultural interaction between Soviet and NATO countries, the boundaries between Syria, France, and Libya appear much less restrictive. Whereas certain Arabic countries are often portrayed to Westerners as closed-off to the rest of the world, as insulated and wary of letting their citizens travel to or learn about European societies, The Arab of the Future tells a different narrative. Instead, it suggests that people in Syria and Libya, if they have the financial and educational means to do so, can indeed experience European culture, and they have the freedom to emigrate. Therefore, the myriad motivating forces behind expatriate return to these countries, rather than their isolation and distinction from Europe, appears to drive Abdel-Razak’s continual movement back to Syria.

Obscurity and the Archive in King

I don't know about the rest of you, but I found Ho Che Anderson's King just as difficult, if not more so, to read than Hernandez's Human Diastrophism--and for similar reasons. It seems like Anderson makes the history he is relating in his graphic novel purposefully obscure, to illustrate, perhaps, how difficult it is to re-access those major historical moments that deal with major figures, figures who have been designed in the media as heroes. Though his project seems interested in getting a "real" picture of who Martin Luther King, Jr. was as a man, the man behind the myth, he exposes the layers of mythology and artifice that shape not only King in the press and in history books, but shaped King himself through pressure and public expectation.

As Michael Chaney notes in his article "Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels," "The first two thirds of King demonstrate a noir style of chiaroscuro and high contrast lighting" (181), a fact that made determining which character was speaking very difficult--because not only are the pictures all in black and white, as well as the words, many of the characters are drawn to look very similar; additionally, Anderson suspends the revelation of what King looks like for nearly twenty pages, so we do not know exactly how he is going to be depicted. On top of these factors, scenes do not clearly open and close--often scenes end abruptly, mid-sentence, and begin before the Time and Place tags mark them. I am very curious to know what the individual issues of King looked like, where they made their narrative breaks, because trying to follow along in the hefty, convoluted, fragmented story line was challenging.

Of course, this changes after King and his compatriots organize and perform their march on Washington, DC, and King makes his dramatic "I Have a Dream" speech--the coloring of the pages and the thought bubbles, colored according to who is speaking, suddenly makes the story legible. Chaney agrees that "This creates a sudden easiness in matching speakers with dialogue, whereas earlier textually-dense sections of the book tended to be more difficult in this respect" (181). This suggests that the "I Have a Dream" speech is meant to be a kind of turning point for King, or for us as readers--perhaps things were more closely recorded historically after that moment, or perhaps making the speech solidifies King as a kind of mythological hero whose individuality is suddenly the most important thing--as opposed to being one man among many who are working to make a difference.

The fragmented nature of the narrative is further complicated pictorially by the inclusion of historical photographs worked in as sequential art , and verbally by the many different voices that interrupt and comment upon the larger historical narrative. At times the photographs show different perspectives, or add a historical, realistic layer to the story, and at other times they become very unsettling and confusing (I am thinking of the image of the two naked women inserted in the the narrative when the group is discussing whether or not they ought to recruit children to march [116]); and the different narrators, the "Witnesses," the newspaper articles, the history books, the news anchors, etc., all help to show a fuller picture of reactions and perspectives on King and his efforts, but because they are not clearly marked, sometimes it is very confusing as to who is speaking, or how they are related to the events (190, 198). Overall, King seems to be purposefully obscuring access to its main character even in its efforts to expose a truer image of a man who has been mythologized for fifty years. The truth may not be accessible, because not only did the mythology shape the way we as students, generations later, learn and think about King and his efforts for Civil Rights, but, Anderson suggests, the mythology shaped the way King thought about himself, and the way he behaved.