Image Analysis

Image Analysis, Natalie Farrey

For this assignment my historical question was what did Oklahoma look like during the Dust Bowl and how did it affect the people living there? I specifically wanted to focus on Oklahoma because of how much it had been brought up in the readings and in class. I found this picture in the Library of Congress database and knew I had to use it. This image really shows how important documentary evidence is when teaching history and reveals so much about the 1930s. My great grandfather always told stories about the Dustbowl, but I never felt like I could see it in my head just right. By seeing photos from the time period, it makes it feel more real and I feel like I got a better sense of what was happening.

This photograph makes you realize that in the 1930s’ people had to abandon the lives they made due to something they couldn’t control. It not only showed what the Oklahoma land looked like in the Dust Bowl, but it also captured the despair people were feeling at the time. I used two methods that I used to realize that: image annotation and glitching. Both are very useful tools when it comes to analyzing historical images, though I did prefer image annotation to glitching.

Annotating the image was extremely helpful for me personally. I felt like it made me think more about what the photo was about and what Dorothea Lange was trying to say with it. I also felt that it’s much easier than glitching an image. Although glitching seemed fairly easy after I had read Trevor Owens’ article, I found it very difficult to understand the code and not render the image completely unrecognizable.

Once I figured out how to properly glitch the image, I learned how useful glitching could be. It can be used to make a statement using a historical photograph. For example in an article written by Michael J. Kramer called “Glitching History”, he shows a picture of an important folk artist named John Hurt during the 1960s folk music festival. Using the glitching method Kramer shifted Hurt to the center of the photograph. He did this to make a statement about how influential Hurt was in the folk music revival.

Glitching also taught me how simple it is to change a historical image; it really makes you wonder how many people have digitally edited a historical image in order to make it look like something it wasn’t. This thought makes you think more about where a photo on the internet is really coming from and what changes have been made to it.

Link to image analysis exhibit: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/image-analysis–farrey

Link to Omeka item for orginal photo:http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/472

Link to Omeka item for glitched photo: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/473

Citations:

Dana Cochran et al., “The Great Depression,” Matthew Downs, ed., in The American Yawp, eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Kramer, Michael J. “Glitching History: Using Image Deformance to Rethink Agency and Authenticity in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival.” Current Research in Digital History, January 1, 1970. https://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-08-glitching-history/.

Lange, Dorothea. Worn-out Land and Abandoned Cabins near Newport, Oklahoma. Photograph. Library of Congress . Library of Congress. Accessed January 21, 2020. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017770101/.

Owens, Trevor. “Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps.” Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps | The Signal, November 5, 2012. https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/11/glitching-files-for-understanding-avoiding-screen-essentialism-in-three-easy-steps/.

Blog Post 3: African American Sharecropping in 1940s Rural Georgia

Although the image I chose for my image analysis was taken in June of 1941, the implications of the Great Depression and the New Deal policies were still clearly in effect. This is essentially how I decided to choose my photo. I saw these African American men and women farming the fields of Georgia for cotton and the despair of the image drew me to it. I figured that even though it was taken in 1941, it could’ve easily been an image from the enslavement era because the realities of it were the same – African Americans were not afforded any type of economic or social opportunities. This is laid out in the American Yawp section, “XII. Equal Rights and the New Deal,” which states that, “Franklin Roosevelt did little to directly address the difficulties black communities faced.” ¹ Additionally, due to the passing of some exclusive laws and acts that particularly only benefited white men in the south, African American citizens couldn’t receive economic aid from the Social Security Act, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act “displaced black tenants and sharecroppers, many of whom were forced to return to their farms as low-paid day labor or to migrate to cities looking for wage work.” ²

A historical question I would explore using this image is how the exclusion of African Americans in New Deal efforts helped promote, or begin, the Great Migration? Is there any correlation? The American Yawp article hints at the answer being yes, but I think it would be worthing exploring at what rate did African Americans from this rural communities travel to cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, Detroit, etc. Furthermore, did the treatment of African American laborers shift during World War II, especially since the photo is from June 1941, right on the brink of American involvement.

I was skeptical of the glitching process before I actually used it. I didn’t understand why the same conclusions couldn’t be drawn by looking at original photos? After my fourth attempt at glitching my own photo, I started to become a believer. As shown in my item and exhibit, I think it’s interesting how there’s a black line perfectly over all of the faces of the sharecroppers, so that all you can see are their legs and equipment working the field. In my mind, I couldn’t think of a better representation of the time. Lawmakers and Southern white men took advantage of the bodies and labor of African Americans, but when it came to giving them rights, seeing them as people with families and necessities, it was impossible. They chose what they wanted to see – and it wasn’t anywhere close to economic equality.

Blog Post #3-Image Analysis

I sought out to select an image that would make me think about its cause. I felt art completed by hand would show more of the artist’s thinking process, and I wanted the image to speak to a specific issue, not just a promotional campaign. Based on looking at the poster, I thought of the following questions: Why did Vera Bock feel that this message needed to be delivered to the public? Who was she directly speaking to? Was she speaking in favor of the government or in protest? Was this an idea thought of by her or proposed to her by the WPA? A focus in class was how the government enacted the Federal Project One not only to put people back to work in order to strengthen the economy, but to use the power behind the voice of artists as “meaningful symbols” to gain acceptance and support from citizens in their time of distress. A criticism of the Federal Art Project was that some felt it was based in communist thinking, and artists could use their work to protest the government rather than speak as an advocate for them. ² The glitched image that I developed could be an example of this protest, and how easily the meaning of art can be changed, skewed, or misinterpreted just by its presentation alone.

Image analysis, in a way, forces us to look at the image in its various segments. Instead of viewing art at its face value, we investigate who created the piece, why it was created, and for whom it was created. I enjoyed the process of both the analysis and the glitching. I think it helps to really understand art when it is seen through its purpose, and that is what was done by analyzing its creator, consumption, and the image itself. Initially, I did not expect the glitch to show me anything exciting. I was prepared for the photo to look the same, but with some streaks thrown in. My image ended up looking chopped, which I feel is not only impressive, but helped me to see the presentation in a different way. If the poster had been published broken through the glitch, then the public may have held a different impression with what message the artist was trying to convey. The original image shows strength in the WPA, whereas the glitched image shows a broken system. This is a similar concept to what Kramer talked about in his piece, where he stated “glitching…through the manipulation of underlying code offer[s] untapped possibilities for historical inquiry.” ³ This is an idea that can be utilized by artists to alter the emotions and perceptions of their audience in a way that might not be obvious.

Exhibit: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/wpaposterfedartproject/wpa-rumor

Omeka Item: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/198

Glitching the Federal Arts Project

I found my image by delving into the Federal Arts Project Photographic division. I selected this particular image because it showed a direct experience of a child participating in the Federal Arts Project. This, combined with the image’s original caption, was very interesting. In a sense, it encapsulated the need for arts programs and the American people’s need for escapism and movement⁴

This image has also inspired me to ask questions such as, how did the Federal Arts Project specifically impact children? And to what extent should researchers consider the corruption of digital images when conducting research?

The methods used in this assignment allow for us to consider both the value and the hazards associated with digital images, specifically when it comes to glitching and digital images. We are also encouraged to consider how the source code for an image and an exhibit impact our experience when viewing and studying the information. How easily can these codes be manipulated in different ways? And how does that impact the conclusions that we draw as researchers. I believe that the creation of a glitched image does have some value, as it allows us to, in a way, view the image in the way that computer view images. We are forced to consider different focuses, areas, or outlines.

I was a bit surprised by how much I was forced to think about my image during and after the glitching process. When finding my image, I considered the context a great deal. The discussions of culture and segregation in The American Yawp had already encouraged me to consider the role that race played in the different Federal One projects. ⁵

However, I did not spend as much time considering the bits and bytes that actually constituted the image. The first time I glitched the image, the little boy, William, was completely gone from the image. Instead, I was left with his outline in varying shades of gray, while the background and outer edges remained mostly in tact. Future iterations of the glitched image continued to show me different aspects that I had not considered closely. The final version that I decided to upload for the assignment caused me to focus on William’s eyes, which are intently focused on the clay at his hands. His mind was not wandering to the other aspects of his life, which is part of the goal of the Federal Art Project. When people are creating artwork out of nothing, they focus their brainpower on their creation, instead of thinking about the uncertain future, things that were lost in the past, or the hardships of the present.

Links

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/liam-griffin–glitching-an-ima/federal-arts-project-brooklyn

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/197

References

Dickstein, Morris. “Facing the Music.” The American Scholar, December 11, 2014. https://theamericanscholar.org/facing-the-music/#.XZ9W8UZKg2y.

Wright, Benjamin, and Joseph Locke. American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Blog Post 3

When I began searching for an image, I was intent on finding something that showed the harshness of the Great Depression on people much like the famous Migrant Mother photograph from the 1930’s. The image I chose had the opposite kind of intent as that photo. The photograph I chose showed how some of these art programs helped people escape the harshness of the Great Depression and give some relief to those in need. This image specifically caught my eye because it was a young child and the effect of the Great Depression on the children specifically is not something I would normally think about, I would normally think about the effect on adults or families as a whole.

With this image, I’m asking questions like “How did the children of the Great Depression deal with the stress of the times?”. I think that this image in particular shines a light on the positives of the arts programs and how they impacted people’s attitudes. The monetary impacts of the Great Depression sent people into a state of panic or great sadness and these kind of programs had a significant impact on mood and morale especially for the youth. ⁶

I’ll admit that I don’t see the purpose of the glitched images as much as the next person but this process definitely helped me see the potential in it. The article by Kramer helped me see some of the potential applications for glitching an image but it wasn’t until glitching my own image that it started to click. The article even states glitching as ‘an unlikely candidate for historical inquiry’. ⁷ At first my glitched image made no sense to me and didn’t help me see the image in a different way at all until about the third time when it blacked out and distorted most of the image except for the child’s face. The face is what drew me to the image and the glitched image puts a larger emphasis on the intensity of that face.

These methods force us to look at these images in different ways that we wouldn’t have originally. Putting emphasis on certain aspects or blocking out the background can shine a light on a whole new meaning of an image. The glitching in particular helps with the blocking out of the less important parts of images and focuses the viewers attention to certain aspects and parts of an image.

I don’t think these methods helped me answer any questions as much as they sparked my interest for a new topic or raised different questions. This image in particular forced me to think about the effect of the Great Depression on the children adn how they coped rather than focusing on the adults.

Links: http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/196

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/arthur-smith–a-young-boy-name/image-annotation

Divided Focus

When beginning this project, I spent a great deal of time browsing the numerous photographs available through the Library of Congress’ collection of images produced by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. Although I did not have a particular subject in mind at the start of this project, I soon found myself skimming through photographs documenting the works of the Tennessee Valley Authority. I was initially drawn towards the aesthetics of early 20th century machinery captured in these images but later found a greater amount of pleasure in a photograph capturing a young man tightening a nut at the T.V.A.’s Watts Bar Dam.

In this image, the young man has on his face a look of both determination and satisfaction. While his task is simple – tightening a nut – he appears to do it with great energy and is fulfilled by his work. I believe this image to be an excellent demonstration of the energy that propelled this nation out of the Great Depression. This young man, like so many other workers at the time, is driven to repair his broken nation through his own grit. Tightening a single nut on a single guide vane would not ensure the stability of the dam, but neither would one person being employed solve the economic collapse of the Great Depression. Only through a collective effort could this country have hoped to recover from its economic collapse.

Although it is present in this photograph, this young man’s mission and part in the reconstruction of his country are more easily recognizable in a glitched version of this image which I have created. In his article Glitching History, Michael J. Kramer explains that these glitches help to bring about the same elements I have discussed above from photographs. These seemingly random changes highlight different aspects of an image and bring new critical analysis to the foreground.

In the case of my photograph, the young man’s hands, mouth, and eyes are all separated from one another and draw the viewer’s eyes to his helmet embossed with the acronym T.V.A. The young man’s grit (as symbolized by his hands), satisfaction (as symbolized by his proud smile), and focus on rebuilding his nation (as symbolized by the determined look in his eyes) all lead back towards his helmet which was provided to him by a government program set on rebuilding the nation. All these different pieces are emphasized in this glitched image and highlight their importance towards the central goal of reconstruction.

Thanks to the practice of glitching, viewers can recognize these powerful factors that brought our nation back from the Great Depression as well as those who helped to accomplish this goal.

Tightening a Nut Exhibit

Tightening a Nut Item

Blog Post – Image Analysis

I knew that I wanted to use a color photograph for this assignment, so when I went to browse through the collections at our disposal I was immediately drawn to the bright colors present in the image. I was also drawn to the expressions of the children, and what I considered a very classic setting—a state fair. It is a beautiful and simple scene, but full of chaos, and those qualities piqued my interest. I feel like the focus on the children is unique—often we focus on the lives of those who had already reached adulthood by the time the Great Depression hit, but I liked that this photographer chose instead to focus on the children who were born during that time, and who were growing up at a turning point in American history.

One of my lingering questions about the photograph is what the context surrounding the fair was like. The focus on this one moment of festivity might potentially create a harsh contrast at the return to daily life, or perhaps it could not. The children pictured in the photograph are dressed up in clean, matching outfits, likely their Sunday best, and it is obvious that some effort was put into presentation when their family decided to attend the State Fair. I feel that this may harbor some yet-unexplored cultural implications–how important were community events like this to people at the time? How does the importance (or lack thereof) compare to current trends?

Modern American society is heavily digital, and heavily reliant on digital images for everything from research material, to social interaction. I would even dare to hypothesize that just as a family may have put on their best clothes to present themselves at a community event, such as the pictured fair, that modern-day Americans practice the same meticulous self-framing to present themselves well in digital media every single day. As an anthropologist I am naturally curious about the seemingly inherent drive to look good to others, and although my main focus in my image analysis itself operates around the themes of nostalgia and romanticization, I think that it is interesting as well to look at the consistency of American culture’s relation to self-image, which is depicted through the figures in this photograph.

Links:

Omeka Item – http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/191
Omeka Exhibit – http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/francesca-reimer—at-the-verm

Works Cited:

“Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs – About This Collection.” About this Collection – Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (Library of Congress). Library of Congress, January 1, 1970. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/.

Jack. “At the Vermont State Fair, Rutland.” Home. Library of Congress, January 1, 1970. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877403/.

Skill Assignment #3 Blog Post

Originally, I used this image in my first Omeka skill assignment. I chose it again for this skill assignment because I thought that it was a very poignant depiction of a common occurrence in the 1930’s. This photograph is of a farm auction that took place in Derby, Connecticut. In the 1930’s, auctions were common as farms foreclosed due to unpaid debt. Many farmers lost their land and their most valuable possessions because of these foreclosure auctions. 1

My historical question was: what new perspectives can I find from glitching the photograph of the farm auction? When I started the assignment for glitching the photograph, I wasn’t sure if I could tease out a meaning from an essentially corrupted image. However, I still went forward with the assignment, unsure if I would find something worth writing about. I borrowed my grandmother’s mac laptop, the only mac computer nearby, and I set to work. Thanks to the tutorial posted to slack by a fellow classmate, I managed to successfully glitch the photo. The first glitch split the auction crowd in two and flipped the left side to the right, and vice versa. The next glitch desaturated a large section of the photograph of most of its color, and the last glitch almost completely removed all of the color from the bottom half.

The glitches forced me to look at the photograph in a new way. However, it was not easy for me. I had to look at the photograph in a way that went “against the grain of history”. 2 The first thoughts that came to my mind when I saw the glitches were confused and unimpressed. How could I find a meaning or new perspective from a corrupted and disjointed picture? I stared at the photo and wracked my brain for several minutes.

Then I realized something about the subject of the photograph. The subject was that of a farm auction, an event that must have been very distressing for the people whose property and belongings were being sold off against their will. The glitched photograph showed the auction and its attendees as split up and almost completely erased from the image. As I examined the photograph, I thought of what it would’ve been like if these farmers did not have to auction off their lands and belongings, if these auctions had not occurred. Many people would not have been forced to move and find a life elsewhere. Many things would have been different, if those auctions did not happen.

Exhibit References

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/farm-auction–derby–conn/farm-auction–derby–conn

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/admin/items/show/177

References

Ganzel, Bill. Penny Auctions Fight Foreclosures during the Depression, https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/money_10.html.

Kramer, Michael J. “Glitching History: Using Image Deformance to Rethink Agency and Authenticity in the 1960s American Folk Music Revival.” Current Research in Digital History, http://crdh.rrchnm.org/essays/v01-08-glitching-history/.

The Power of Art

The creation of art and the inspiration behind art pieces has changed significantly over time- as it obviously should. Life, society, politics, and so on are constantly transforming through each generation. However, a way to link new art to old art is the creative digital art form of glitching. Michael J. Kramer delves into the power of glitching images taken during the American Folk Music revival, and the glitched images themselves create a whole other meaning that previously wouldn’t have been seen had they not been glitched ⁸ . The photograph I chose to analyze and glitch was one titled “Augusta Savage posing with her sculpture Realization”, created as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, pictured here. I chose to analyze this photograph because I felt that it represented African American woman and African American people’s involvement in the New Deal era very well. It revealed that African American’s were an integral part of the Federal Art Program, and shows how important art was during the Harlem Renaissance, and the Great Depression era in general. The fact that an African American woman was documented posing next to her art that was funded by the government, speaks volumes about the change occurring in America at the time, and the obvious need of art and its power to bring others together. While we haven’t delved extensively into the Harlem Renaissance, we have touched on other African American artists, such as Leadbelly, as well as other american artists who demonstrated the power of music and the arts in a time where america was feeling less enthusiastic. Morris Dickstein, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in an article specifically about how song, dance, and art brought people out of the depression. ⁹

He makes a point to emphasize that the arts of the time were not a form of escapism, but rather a “speed, energy and movement at a time of economic stagnation and social malaise”. The photograph and documentation of Augusta Savage with her sculpture proves there was a speed and energy at that time. African American’s were just as much as a part of this artistic movement as were white people, and they were being more recognized for it.

With these theme of change and the power of art in my head, I found myself thinking about how art effects America now, and how art from the New Deal/ Great Depression era, still impacts the people of today. How did the artists of that era feel when creating their art? Did they know it would be so impactful or did they just think of it as a federally funded project for the Federal Art Project. And lastly, would something like the Federal Art Project work today? In analyzing the Augusta Savage photograph, and other documentations of artists at the time, I felt as though America was just in a different head space at the time. Documentation of artists with their work isn’t necessarily created today in the way it was back then. People wanted to boost morale, they wanted to change. America currently seems more divided than ever so the idea of art being used in such an obvious way by the government, and being documented by the government, doesn’t seem like something that would work. However, I do feel that interacting with the art of the past, as we did when creating our exhibits and the glitched image, does allow for people to get a deeper understanding of the art of the Great Depression/ New Deal era, and demonstrates that art is an extremely powerful thing that should be considered important and valid.

My image selection process was very methodical and precise. My skill assignments are dedicated to the memorabilia of the Latino culture and representation of the cultural groups through historic media. History, during the Great Depression does not demonstrate enough Latinos because a majority were sent back to their countries of origin. Therefore my assignments will represent the Latinos captured during these times in an effort to demonstrate how different groups dealt with the Great Depression.

My image is called “Child of a Migratory Farm Laborer” which shows a little Latino boy sitting on the ground of a cabbage field. While analyzing this image, a few questions I asked myself were, “Aside from immigration, how were Latinos managing survival as well as getting by through the Great Depression? Did they suffer equal or worse discrimination than Black people?”. More importantly “After a wave of deportation, how did that affect immigrations laws for Latinos specifically?”. The documentary evidence that could be gathered is that there are not enough laws or precautionary measures for children to be on the work place, or the existence of continuing child labor. This image was unique because the boy in the photograph was smiling. Most photographs from different collections showed little or no facial expression on both adults and children. However, smiling depicts a different environment that is not as terrorizing or “depressing” through the conditions of others.

While working on the glitched version of this photograph, I worked from the bottom up. I found these methods easy and rare with the ongoing thought that each movement was randomized. As stated by Michael Kramer, “glitching and deformance make it possible for us to brush history against the grain by, in a certain sense, changing the patterns of the grain itself. Digitally remediated, the source’s representational layers become more alive. Distortions to artifacts caused by these tactics ironically generate more accurate considerations of the traces of the past embedded in them.” ¹⁰ Distortions allow us to “rearrange” history and alter prespectives by changing an image into something entirely different. In doing so, it gives us less to think about by letting us see a glitched photograph for what it is and gets rid of a made up storyline by viewing an original photo. Trevor Owens stated “I think it suggests the value of understanding the integrity of digital objects not simply as ‘looking right’ in one particular reading out to the screen. In many cases, the integrity of the objects is something that can be expressed through a range of software enabled readings of it.” ¹¹ Trevor is reminding us that something as simple as a photograph is more complex as it appears by the underlying code. This has helped me comprehend underlying codes as well as study how these methods can create different perspectives.

Bibliography

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/items/show/159

http://jessicadoeshistory.com/cnd/exhibits/show/ana-talavera/child-of-a-migratory-farm-labo