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This article revisits the lynching photograph to consider the rhetorical and cultural practices that instructed the unseeing of white mobs for what it reveals about dematerializing representations of the state in social media imagery documenting anti-Black police brutality. To do this, the author draws on creative, curatorial, and architectural examples that bring the eye into confrontation with the state's hidden hand – the rig that naturalizes the public's first-person (shooter) perspective, the body-worn or (para)surveillance camera footage, obscuring contemporary lynching's stately face from public view. The author reflects on the staging and circulation of lynching photography as well as the exhibition of representative artistic renderings; an example of transgressive spatial engagement at the recently opened National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama; and then turning to Canada, the author offers a case study that considers the outer-national visual implications, concluding with example works by visual artists, Anique Jordan and Jalani Morgan, whose transgressive creative practices demonstrate disinvestments in repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article endeavors to describe the impact of 'visual essentialism' as an approach towards trans visual culture, including the violence it enacts and the mistrust it fosters towards self-defining language for gender identities. It borrows Susan Stryker's insight in her introduction to her Transgender Studies Reader (2006, edited with Stephen Whittle) that trans phenomena move to the foreground when set against an ambient background consisting of gender normative conditions. It extrapolates this visual metaphor for understanding trans in contrast to non-trans into a method to analyze trans visual culture. The author argues that, by focusing on how the figure and ground relate in alignment, or not, the analyst can better examine how the components of visuality are working together to position one's value-laden perspective on visible transgender and non/trans things. This elaboration along three proposed categories of value, namely political, symbolic and commercial, is offered to better understand and parse the noted problem of trans visibility increasing alongside transphobic violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Roundtable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy brings together scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences to discuss historical constructions of Italian whiteness and national identity in relation to the current xenophobic discourse on race and migration, stressing their rootedness in as yet unchallenged modern notions of scientific racism. Building on postcolonial historian and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler's definition of the colonial archive as a 'site of knowledge production' and a 'repository of codified beliefs' in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009: 97), the discussants conceive the archive as a multi-layered, collective repository of aspiration, dominance, desire, self-aggrandizement and fear through which the development of society's self-image can be revealed but also – through a systematic and critical approach to the (visual) archive of coloniality – contested. Based on the analysis of visual cultures (photographs, news footage, advertisements, propaganda, fiction film, etc.) the Roundtable addresses and connects wide-ranging issues such as: the gaze from above and below in colonial-era ethnographic film; the depiction of migration in the Far Right's rhetoric; representations of fears and fetishisms towards Others in Federico Fellini's work; and the exploitation of the colonial past in the Italy–Libya Bilateral Agreements on migration. The Roundtable was organized in response to the surge in xenophobic violence sparked by the Italian Parliamentary elections of March 2018 and to mark the publication of Gaia Giuliani's monograph Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While some scholars claim that games are not primarily visual texts, the horror genre is obsessed with vision and practices of looking. The aesthetic concept of horror vacui describes aspects of this obsession. Horror vacui is the fear of empty space that results in the over-marking of visual space, excessive decoration that threatens to overwhelm what is being decorated, the stuffing of gaps and caesura with further representation. Shed of its standard aesthetic meaning, horror vacui could also be used to describe the fear operable in off-screen space, the monstrous unseen that lies outside the frame and constantly threatens to appear within it. Forced to move through this blind space, horror games create the conditions for excessive representation and practices of looking that erupt around the threat of the unrepresentable and invisible. In recent horror games this threat is mobilized by anxieties concerning online and networked culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines historical transformations in the relationship between the image, time, and knowledge after the war. One site to investigate these changes in representation is at the locus of science, design, film and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes for the Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT and in the interests of science education. In these works, including many science education and pedagogy films, the nature of the image, the materiality of vision, and the relationship between documentation and communication were being aggressively rethought. All these projects were deeply invested in the emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media. Ontology, documentation, and representation were seemingly replaced by discourses of communication, performance, and modularity; the world as interface for the mediation of ongoing, lively communicative exchanges. The work of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes provides evidence of a more global reformulation of the work of the document, the relationship between abstraction and materiality, and among science, aesthetics, and visuality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay asks: what is photography to the past, such that a photograph offers knowledge about the past? In an extended commentary on Katja Zelljadt’s account of early Berlin photography, the essay presents two broad positions on the quality of photographic knowledge. The ‘assimilative’ position seeks to equate photographs with all other signs in a semiotic universe, and to derive their meanings primarily from this context. The ‘exceptional’ position holds that photographs are indexical signs that carry a direct impress of the world, and thus carry true knowledge of the world. It is argued that the two positions can be collapsed in a radical spatialization of visual knowledge by expanding Gombrich’s thesis on the ‘primacy of meaning’ to include the powerful neuronal pathways through visual field maps and processing centers. The embodied mind requires that each interpretive event, each ‘reading’ of a photograph takes place in a perspectival position. The essay then considers cartography and the Google-powered HyperCities geohistorical platform as an example of the latest networks knowledge in the hyperspatial internet. Emplacing photographic artifacts in wider and wider networks of contextualization can expand the universe of interpretive meaning, while also deepening their inscription into the terrestrial locations of their production. Rejecting the radical skepticism of the assimilationist position, the essay concludes that photography’s exceptional qualities in the circulation of signs anchors interpretation as we build historical knowledge by clearing pathways to perspectival nodes in the bottomless semiotic-embodied topology of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visuality has become a keyword for the field of visual culture. However, while many assume that it is a postmodern theoretical term, the word was coined by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle in his lectures On Heroes (1841). The centrality of Carlyle's discourse of visualized heroism to Anglophone imperial culture was such that any claim to subjectivity had to pass by visuality. Here lies the contradictory source of the resonance of 'visuality' as a keyword for visual culture as both a mode of representing imperial culture and a means of resisting it by means of reverse appropriation. Reading Carlyle in the imperial context leads to a distinction between Visuality 1, which is proper to modernity, and a Visuality 2 that exceeds or precedes the commodification of vision. This tension was played out in the work of Carlyle's admirers Oscar Wilde and W.E.B. Du Bois and in the politics surrounding the abolition of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Hopi videomaker Victor Masayesva, Jr’s 1992 film, Imagining Indians, and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, as test cases through which tore-evaluate a central debate in visual anthropology about the meanings and values of indigenous visual media, and as complex representations which force us to move beyond that debate’s endorsements and critiques. Through their shared embrace of anti-visualist modes, both Masayesva and Silko develop alternative strategies of visualization intended to revise neo-colonial relations – strategies which seek to reconstruct the modes of visual mastery linked to a Western optic into a more desiring, pleasurable relation to the image through the resources of proximity and tactility. They not only redraw the territory of subject– object relations informed by the gaze, but more foundationally may be said to rewrite the ‘scription’ through which social rules are inscribed upon the body, and to redesignate what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘rules of recognition’ that regulate colonial encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]