Visual Culture
As you will be able to tell if you browse previous entries in this blog, I have mostly posted comments related to current politics. While that may well be a direction for future entries, I want to change this blog to fit topics related to visual culture, the topic for a current class that I'm teaching.

I have an interest in visual qualities of the ordinary, by which I mean the logical opposite of the visual sublime. Everyone who has seen the Grand Canyon, after driving up the road from Flagstaff, coming over the rim, and encountering that immense distance, will know what I mean. Other famous landscapes work in similar ways upon us--the view of the Thira hillside on the Greek Island of Santorini, the San Francisco bay with the Golden Gate bridge, and so on.

There are human versions of the sublime as well, or at least their film representations: Bo Derek on the beach in 10, Julia Roberts transformed in Pretty Woman--usually women. Masculine sublime might be more frightful, e.g., Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. Sublime visuals stand out in the extreme--whether they are positive or negative, they are very much out of the day-to-day.

The ordinary is something that does not cause a wave. The mom-and-pop figures in the laxative ads, the generic images that come up when you search Google images for "family," the drawings supplied by Microsoft for clip art--these are cheap, anonymous, meant to further positive associations without drawing attention to themselves. They are visual Muzak.

Consider the image below (source: Portraits of Hawaii, an image copied from Google images):


I'll have more to post about this shortly--I want to see whether the image works.

As it turns out, this works pretty well. The persons in the image above are very plain-vanilla sorts--presumably not native to the Hawaiian Islands. What strikes me about this image is that they seem to be wearing masks. I can't supply captions to these expressions.

I'll have more to say about the ordinary later.