Learning from Los Curries: Photographing Tourists in Magaluf and Palma

Mobility, Modernity, and Abroad

'Snapping and Wrapping' represents an original study in Japanese visual culture, pictorial communication, and photographic studies. Vernacular visual culture is highlighted, stressing ordinary people and everyday life to explore photographic expressions of Japanese family life. The theme of “how people looked” is described from two closely related perspectives: how people appeared in their own photographs, and how people looked at specific features of their own lives with analog camera technology. The book includes unexamined material based on a qualitative study involving personal fieldwork undertaken between 1993 and 2009. The metaphor of “wrapping culture” (Hendry) is suggested for ways of interpreting relationships of personal family photographs in conjunction with acknowledged cultural influences and values of Japanese culture. Across an introduction and six chapters, the book covers a series of research topics evoked by efforts to recover, repair, and return millions of photographs to survivors following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Memory, privacy and kinds of information control are reviewed as parts of strategies of sharing pictures, “presence” and the use of photographs for interpersonal interaction and communication. Throughout the monograph, emphasis is placed on understanding details of analog personal photography for potential comparisons to the intensely popular digitalization of photographic recordings and, in turn, facilitate making informed speculations for future photographic practice. This book will be of interest to upper-level students, graduate students and scholars in the fields of media and culture, Asian Studies (especially Japanese visual culture), as well as those working on sensitive relationships of family, memory and representation.

This essay examines how the significance of ancient South Asian monuments is transformed when reframed by the practices of cultural tourism, which are grounded in the values of a modern, globalizing, economic cosmology. Ethnographic evidence collected on a visit to the archaeological park and museum at Sarnath, site of the Buddha's first discourse and home to some of the most celebrated masterpieces of ancient Indian sculpture, are here analyzed to support and illustrate a broader, social-constructivist argument about the representation of reality in Indian visual culture. I will argue that the version of 'reality' presupposed by modern economic practices, such as tourism, works to
 objectify ancient South Asian forms and meanings, previously precipitated out of older living practices, into reified, collectable entities. Such objects and their objectified meanings further contribute toward naturalizing and universalizing economically grounded projects of self-construction among the practitioners of an economic worldview, wherein the self is shaped by routines of production and consumption: I am what I do for a living and I am the goods—including here, the touristic experiences—that I collect. It is this economic cosmology that moves to the foreground when ancient Indian 'art' is re-presented and consumed in the form of tourism products. Meanwhile the cosmology of dharma is pushed into the background. I hope to persuade the reader that the 'cost' of doing this is too high to justify the narrow economic benefits.

This article analyses the race and gender norms embedded in the verbal and visual discourse at an internationally acclaimed secondary magnet school in Philadelphia. While scholars have documented the visual learning of adolescents and elementary school-aged youth of colour extensively, few have focused exclusively on the nature of visual learning for young Black women in and around urban schools. The nature of looking and the visual is a highly contested and political process in the twenty-first century urban context. Images saturate the cityscape; these images teach. Thus this article examines the specific lessons related to race, gender, and place young Black women learn from the school adults who shape the visual culture of their school environment. Based on an ethnographic, photographic and discourse analysis study, this article argues that even in the context of an award-winning, progressive, liberal-minded school culture, young working class Black women are often softly encouraged to change and or are re-programmed into more palatable, commodifiable versions of themselves that both sustain and advance the school’s identity as different. This ‘re-programming’ often requires young Black women to alter their dress, speech, and physical demeanour in order to find belonging in a larger school culture dominated by a discourse of inclusivity and diversity.

This essay draws insight from George Caleb Bingham's painting The Verdict of the People (1854-55) to examine the gendered connections between virtue and politics in the decade before the Civil War, when woman's rights activists challenged the boundary that separated masculine politics from feminine virtue. The painting shows a chaotic masculine street scene just as election results are read. In the margin of the painting, high above the street, women appear to participate in the political event from the safety of a balcony. While art history accounts portray the women as traditional moral reformers who eschew politics, I integrate these accounts with more recent women's history accounts and nineteenth-century visual culture to show that Bingham and his audiences would have perceived the women as political activists. From this perspective, I argue, the contrast between the balcony and the street in Verdict provides a visual map of pervasive tensions between politics and virtue that still trouble American political culture today.

“Pagan Constellations in the Sky”(Re)Animating Muybridge in the Film History Classroom Colin Williamson (bio) makes me imagine what is out of framenot the studio in Philadelphia— instead it’s a darklypainted farmhouse predicting the Black Mariaand ol’ Muybridge grabs a chair and sits,pushing his thighs downas if his limbs forgot how to bend on their ownwhile everything creaks:knees elbows shoulders wriststhe chair under his weight,even his sigh comes out with a raspas he cranks himself up. — mollie murtagh, “descent” Writing about Eadweard Muybridge’s late- nineteenth-century experiments with chrono-photography, Rebecca Solnit remarks, “If Muy-bridge was at the root, the zero point, the dawn of moving pictures, then he is everywhere as the ghost at the end of those trails of photographs rushing by, beamed across the world as television, dreamed across the world as the shared content of contemporary life, present not only as specific images but as several media.”1 Solnit is not being hyperbolic; Muybridge is indeed everywhere.2 His photographic studies of bodies in motion have intersected with everything from popular culture and debates about the origins of the cinema to questions in histories of art and science; critical studies of race, gender, and disability; the avant- garde and digital media art; and philosophies of time and movement. Perhaps the pervasiveness stems from the scope of his work; his photographic output was prolific and monumental. Or perhaps it is the stubborn resistance of Muybridge’s motion studies to being easily categorized— are they art or science? do they belong to the history of film, photography, or painting?— that allows them to resonate with so many aspects of modern visual culture and the popular imagination. For someone so clearly obsessed with time, it is quite fitting that Muybridge is now caught up endlessly in it. Specifically, in relation to the cinema, his instantaneous photographs of moving bodies— stilled, serialized, and transformed into what Hollis Frampton called “pagan constellations in the sky”— move through film history with the same repetitive circularity that the photographed bodies exhibit as they move across their recognizable grids.3 Put simply, Muybridge is an uncanny figure. As Tom Gunning observes, “the image of Eadweard Muybridge haunts us, beckoning to us from the space between things, the interstices and gaps that appear, unexpectedly, within actions and between instants.”4 For many, simply mentioning Muybridge or his galloping horses calls to mind an array of commonplaces, associations, and myths that together form a picture (however focused or fuzzy) of early film history. The haunting ubiquity of Muybridge’s work is central to something that I consistently encounter in teaching early film history to undergraduate students. Along with Étienne- Jules Marey, Muybridge usually frames students’ introduction to the proto- cinema and early cinema periods. He is also fairly well established in the popular knowledge that students bring to my classes. If they do not know him by name, they are quick to recognize his photographs of horses in motion and have a general sense that his cameras played important roles in shaping the technological landscape in which the cinema emerged. Students also sometimes hold Muybridge up as one of the “fathers” and “inventors” of motion pictures and readily identify his images as “primitive” emblems of the cinema’s “infancy.” These perceptions reflect a teleological narrative about the emergence of the cinema that students no doubt inherit from popular culture. Especially at the introductory level, the narrative can conjure an image of that period as a mausoleum filled with the “dead” or inanimate remains of old media that subsequent innovations rendered obsolete, both as cultural artifacts and as objects of study. The challenge, as I see it, is in helping students overcome this perception so that they can [End Page 75] “imaginatively recreate the [cinema’s] past as a present lived moment,” to borrow Mary Ann Doane’s words.5 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Plate 490. Movements, Male, A, sitting down; B, sitting down; C, sprinkling water; D, stooping for cup and drinking. From Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro- photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements...