Visual Politics & Environmental Communication

Muhammad Rahman

Visual culture is malleable and impermanent.

Political narratives suggest visual forms and meaning-making. They also influence how we analyze cultural forms and practices. Thinking through ingenuities in design and theoretical engagements of anthropology, the articles in this section (1) explore how politics complicate design forms and praxis, (2) assemble a series of approaches to visual politics and environmental communication, and (3) foreground people who are affected by the images they analyze.

Ethnographers—both anthropologists (Abu Hatoum 2017, Dorsey and Diaz-Barriga 2010) and designers (Cué 2014)—are able to unpack nuances of material culture by deconstructing relations between people and politics, culture and community, knowledge and wisdom, appreciation and appropriation, tools and methods, among others. In doing so, they encourage visual re-imaginations, which are urgently needed. In a postcolonial, postmodern, and late-stage capitalist era, reductive phrases like universal design, widespread simplification, and well-drawn (Zender & Cassedy 2014, 72), among other taken-for-granted foundational terms used in design contexts, often ignore parallel non-western timelines of design, diverse possibilities of unknown methods, and connotations of design across cultures. Anthropology, too, must account for its own presuppositions and reflect on how its own forms, like the photo essay (Dorsey & Diaz-Barriga 2010), circulate and intervene (or not) in public imaginaries.

As the breadth of these articles show, public accountability is necessary in all visual communication. By putting design and anthropology in conversation, we can enable inclusive research that goes beyond disciplinary forms of knowledge production. To approach new knowledge in design methodologies, we must address the predicaments of culture, including the production and consumption of political regimes.

Abu Hatoum, Nayrouz. 2017. “Framing Visual Politics: Photography of the Wall in Palestine.” Visual Anthropology Review 33 (1): 18–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12118.

Walls enact both “territory and terror” (Mitchell 1999). In her analysis of photographs of the militarized wall in Palestine, Nayrouz Abu Hatoum (2017) compares images made by Israeli and Palestinaian photographers and their own discourse about them. Taking the premise that visual politics are explicitly part of Israeli occupation in Palestine (Hochberg 2017), Abu Hatoum shows how the Wall “generate[s] a visual dilemma” (20) of colonialism.

While both groups of photographers take a political stance against Israeli occupation, they each reframe the Wall depending on their perspectives. The Israeli photographers tell Abu Hatom that their photographs must render the Wall visible because the visual politics of the Israeli state insist on its invisibility, while the Palestinian photographers prefer to either explore the Wall’s details or abstract its form because they cannot help but see it. The political frame for the photographers alters their artistic vision.

Abu Hatom argues that the Wall’s simultaneous presence and invisibility becomes part of the discursive absence of the state of Palestine. The political framing of walls here disengages the visual senses of those who adhere to the Israeli state. The Wall’s physical distance from Israeli urbanites keeps the colonized landscape and its violence unseeable so much so that taking a photograph of the wall, according to the Israeli photographers, becomes a “politicized act” (19). 

While both groups of photographers describe a political anxiety over the how to depict the Wall, Palestinian photographers already understand the militarized infrastructure as a visual intrusion in their lives. Israeli photographers, on the other hand, must (re)imagine the Wall’s presence because Israeli visual politics insists on the invisibility of its occupation. In her comparative field work with photographers from both sides of the Wall, Abu Hatoum argues that the refusal of depicting the Wall resists “colonial subjectivities” (19) and enables visual decolonization (Appadurai 1997).  The photographers in both contexts activate political encounters, allowing for a rereading of discursive politics by isolating the blanketed visual representations.

The presence of the Wall in photographs by Palestinian photographers as a disconnected yet “hysterical” monument depicts both political anxieties and a kind of visual decolonization. Palestinian photogapher Yazan Khalili’s “Wall-less” interpretations of the Palestinian landscape expose the photographic monument of the Wall by foregrounding people’s stories (24–25). For Khalili, the Wall is visible through its negative space. For Abu Hatoum, to provide a critical analysis of these images entails understanding the positionalities of the photographers even if they all stand against (and photograph) the same subject.

Dorsey, Margaret E., and Miguel Diaz-Barriga. 2010. “Beyond Surveillance and Moonscapes: An Alternative Imaginary of the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall.” Visual Anthropology Review 26 (2): 128–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7458.2010.01073.x.  

As part of their ethnographic research project on the construction of the border wall at the U.S.–Mexcio border, Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barriga (2010) investigate the context of the place, seeking to portray the people and lived experiences of the borderland. They use their own images to undermine the anonymity, authority, and influences of the visual representation of the landscape in popular media, showing how media images render the landscape of the border wall either as a moonscape, with the wall/border-fencing appearing as an “unnaturally naturalized otherworldly intrusion” on the land (132), or as militarized and poverty stricken (130). Through the visual emphasis on “rust, dust and death” (130), journalistic depictions of the border naturalize violence and focus on isolation, anxiety and stress. Resonating with U.S. national anxiety over the “encroachment of Mexican poverty and lawlessness” (131), this imagery not only reinforces enduring racist stereotypes, but also reaffirms the oversimplified conclusion of the border and its placeless-ness without agency and social trajectories. These themes reject the living community, activities, and landscape of the place and enforce public imaginaries of militarized fencing (129), desolating public imaginaries of the landscape. The border landscape--both physical and visual--remains both private and anonymous through nationalist media narratives.

Foregrounding borderlanders’ perspectives, Dorsey and Diaz-Barriga’s documentary photographs counter mainstream media images, depicting the region as a verdant space while also showcasing its transformations into brown-space over time during wall construction phases. They depict a dual understanding of the border region, portraying both surveillance and the lived experience of the people at the border. Their anthropological photo essay retains socio-cultural sensitivities about the land, challenging the bleak and homogenous narrative the media has heightened about the land and borderlanders. 

Cué, Patricia. 2014. “On the Wall: Designers as Agents for Change in Environmental Communication. Visible Language Design Research Journal 48 (2): 71–83. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/48.2/on-the-walldesigners-as-agents-for-change-in-environmental-communication.pdf

Patricia Cué (2014) underscores the role of environmental communication in shaping the use of public space. She demonstrates how professional designers, rooted in modernism and committed to sharp distinctions in the “before” and “after” of their interventions, have often worked against “the cultural identity, social needs and values of communities” (71), eradicating functional vernacular forms in their wake. This practice, she argues, has led to design’s complicity and active engagement in the increased  “privatization, sanitization and commodification” of public spaces, preventing processes of placemaking that nurture truly democratic public spaces (73). She offers a case study of vernacular mural designers in Mexico who paint bardas de baile, “typographic murals that announced the arrival of popular bands or local dances through a consistent visual pattern language developed as part of the traditional sign painting” (73) as a way of realigning the goals of professional design to “facilitate more inclusive, sustainable and socially engaged solutions” (71). Interviewing rotulistas (sign painters) and documenting their work, Cué employed an ethnographic approach to better understand their work practices.   

Cué describes rotulistas as “proud anachronisms—rooted to their communities and keeping their craft alive” (75) and learning their trade through informal apprenticeships. They have created a national tradition and visual style through their vernacular craft of typography and form. Rotulistas use “irregular appropriation” to blur the line between public and the private property (79). While their practices are technically illegal, their work is tolerated given the affordability and accessibility of their designs. The murals they create (rótulos) fabricate striking patterns of color and formal experiments. Their “vernacular branding,” enables placemaking in urban “third places.” Cué finds that through their self-organizing social network, rotulistas are able to balance both design and communal forces. 

Zender, Mike, and Amy Cassedy. 2014. “(Mis)Understanding: Icon Comprehension in Different Cultural Contexts” Visible Language 48(1): 68–95. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/48.1/misunderstanding-icon-comprehension-in-different-cultural-contexts.pdf

​​​​Building on previous research that challenged the universality of icon design, Mike Zender and Amy Cassedy (2014) tested the comprehension of 54 medical icons across four cohorts, two in rural Tanzania and two in the urban US, divided by advanced or standard medical literacy measures. They sought to capture which (mis)understandings were due to culture and which were due to lack of domain-specific knowledge (here: medicine and technology). As they note, aside from the quality of an icon’s form, both cultural forms and norms may produce different meanings that are misaligned with the designer’s original intent. Despite designers’ cultural sensitivity to both avoid “learned signs” and generic but perhaps contradicting and controversial metaphors in the particular context (69), universal icons designed without research in the specific context they will be implemented are nearly impossible to achieve. 

To measure this, Zender and Cassedy probed 54 medical icons designed to work universally (71), asking each subject to provide a written response to two open-ended questions (What does it mean? What would you do?) to measure both the abstract and actionable comprehensions of the icons (74). An array of quantitative matrices resulted in intertwined yet expansive insights from the study. First, seven icons each either succeeded or failed across all cohorts, “leaving 40 icons with misunderstanding either due to knowledge or culture” (80). The successful icons in both cultural contexts, they argue, demonstrates the universality (or ubiquity) of common icons like a microscope, eye, brain, and emergency vehicle (87). Still, a staggering “52 of the 54 icons failed to perform at 85% across cultures” (87).  This shows that  designers presume universal meaning making that does not apply on the ground. 

References Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. 1997. “The Colonial Backdrop.” Afterimage 24(5): 4–7.

Hochberg, Gil Z. 2015. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone. Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 1999. “ Landscape and Idolatry: Territory and Terror.” In The Landscape of Palestine: Equivocal Poetry, edited by Ibrahim A. Abu-Lugbod, Roger Heacock, and Khaled Nashef, 235–53. Birzeit, Palestine: Birzeit University Publications.

Image Credits

From Zender and Cassedy 2014, 78–79. The caption reads: “Summary of results. All percentages are percent correct. Upper row USA, lower row Tanzania; Left icon ‘standard’ medical literacy; R icon ‘advanced’ medical literacy.” 

From Abu Hatoum 2017, 25. The caption reads: “On Love and Other Landscapes, 2011. Book, 91 pages, size 46 × 32 cm. Yazan Khalili©. Used with the permission of the photographer.”