Just Looking ...

I have been very interested in Mitchell’s theory of images and have been more aware of how and why images appear in during ordinary, daily life. I recently came across a powerful article written by Rosemary Garland-Thomas who explores the “politics of staring” in popular culture. More specifically, Garland Thomas gives an historical overview and analysis of “visual rhetoric of disability in Popular Photography” and discusses the images of disabled and differently bodied people who worked in carnival side shows. According to the author, our visual fascination with people considered to be ‘freaks and monsters’ is more complex than based on mere curiosity but, is in fact what Garland Thomas labels “a choreographed relation between spectator and spectacle.” With the rise of bourgeois culture, side shows and displays of deformity became an affront to ‘middle class decorum’ and the non-normative were removed from the realm of the carnivalesque and interned in medical institutions and long term sanitoriums. According to Garland Thomas, however, the spectacle of the image continued under a new guise of the medical examination and scientific investigation. The author discusses the re-emergence of the monstrous and the power diad between norm-normative and mainstream society in popular culture, and the way that corporations now utilize sentimentalized images . More specifically, Garland Thomas discusses the use of the ‘disabled’ in advertising campaigns and public relations publications that are designed to communicate that companies such as Bennetton (which features an image of a developmentally delayed child in material that highlights the company’s ‘gift of ‘ love’…otherwise known as financial support the company donates to a school for ‘mentally challenged children.” According to Garland Thomas, this is meant to communicate the obvious message of ‘benevolence’ but, concomitantly (and more subtly) communicates a power relationship between the corporation, viewer, and the object of interest, (in this case, the image of the fashionably dressed young boy with Down’s syndrome) that is featured on the cover brochure. Garland Thomas provides compelling images and examples of how the image of the monstrous continues to fascinate viewers, and thus, be exploited for profit by powerful corporations. An especially striking example is of the sports star, model and double amputee Aimee Mullins who is featured in a high-fashion magazine layout dressed in a metal-cage skirt that is shot from below, thereby highlighting her prosthetic legs as a stylish accessory. I encourage you to check out Garland Thomas’s writing-she is a Disability Studies scholar and an astute analyst of visual culture and the powerful complexities of the image in popular culture.