scholarly journals Instagram Photography of Havana: Nostalgia, Digital Imperialism and the Tourist Gaze

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
REBECCA OGDEN
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Tourist Gaze ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Visual Mapping ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article proposes to add Instagram photography to a historical visual mapping of Havana during a period of renewed visibility. Further enabled by the features of Instagram’s format to ‘age’ photos and highlight specific textures and colours, These images draw on and contribute to a nostalgic vision of an exotic, underdeveloped Havana. Instagram photography emerges as an important touristic mode of imagining and experiencing the city. Yet despite the aesthetic overdetermination of these images, their captions and hashtags often stymie any suggestion of political meaning. Nevertheless, the networked image, organized and anchored by metadata such as the geotag and hashtag, further cements the signifier ‘Havana’ to the photographic image, and confirms the city as worthy of the gaze. Lastly, the paper reflects on the broader profile of those creating and circulating Instagram images of the city, arguing that a relative lack of access to digital technologies in Cuba has resulted in a strongly asymmetric gaze from the outside in.

scholarly journals VISUALIZING THE CITY IN ROOFTOPPING PHOTOGRAPHY

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Vladimir V. Abashev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Energy Flows ◽  
History Of ◽  
Urban Imagination ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The City

The article examines the representation of the city in rooftopping photography. Methodologically, the research is based on A. Lefebvre’s concept of social space, and also M. de Certeau’s concept of spatial practices as agents of its production. The principal notions in this analytical framework employed in the article are the urban imaginary and the gaze in constructivist understanding, which not only reflects, but also forms the object of vision. Rooftopping photography is considered in the context of the history of the view of the city from above, which has become an important factor in the urban imagination. The expansion of rooftopping photography into the public space and the presentation of cities is associated with the development of new communication and optical representation technologies in the 2010s. The analysis of the rooftoppers’ visualizing of the city carried out in semantic, aesthetic and rhetorical aspects revealed its substantive and aesthetic qualities. Rooftoppers photos capture the moment when a person faces the city as a whole. The city converges with natural and landscape objects. In the night panoramas that make up the bulk of roofer photography, the city is represented as a space of energy flows. In rhetorical terms, in contrast to the metonymy of a promenade, roofer photography is metaphorical. In general, it is concluded that the subject of rooftopper photography is not so much the identity of the city as its universal urban beginning embodied in the centers of the world’s megalopolises. Following D. Nye and his interpreters, the aesthetic mode of the city in roofer visuality is interpreted as urban version of the sublime.

the Unknown Person: Post-Colonial Fictioning, Personal Stories and Surveillance

Leonardo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 442-445
Author(s):  
Eddie Wong
Keyword(s):  
Control Systems ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Video Documentary ◽  
Final Output ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

the Unknown Person connects the artist's family history to Britain's postcolonial “fictioning.” The project interrogates the gaze of surveillance and social control systems to explore the fiction of the self, data and liminal spaces of the City of London. The final output of this research is a video documentary that employs machine learning processes and facial recognition techniques to generate visuals to reveal the aesthetic value of a neural network. The project culminated as an installation of multiple screens mounted on a scaffolding structure.

Puccini's La Bohème

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
La Boheme ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

La bohème is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world. But how did it come to be so adored? Drawing on an extremely broad range of sources, Alexandra Wilson traces the opera’s rise to global fame. Although the work has been subjected to many hostile critiques, it swiftly achieved popular success through stage performances, recordings, and filmed versions. Wilson demonstrates how La bohème acquired even greater cultural influence as its music and dramatic themes began to be incorporated into pop songs, film soundtracks, musicals, and more. In this cultural history of Puccini’s opera, Wilson offers a fresh reading of a familiar work. La bohème was strikingly modern for the 1890s, she argues, in its approach to musical and dramatic realism and in flouting many of the conventions of the Italian operatic tradition. Considering the work within the context of the aesthetic, social, and political debates of its time, Wilson explores Puccini’s treatment of themes including gender, poverty, and nostalgia. She pays particular attention to La bohème’s representation of Paris, arguing that the opera was not only influenced by romantic mythologies surrounding the city but also helped shape them. Wilson concludes with a consideration of the many and varied approaches directors have taken to the staging of Puccini’s opera, including some that have reinvented the opera for a new age. This book is essential reading for anyone who has seen La bohème and wants to know more about its music, drama, and cultural contexts.

THE FREEDOM OF THE AESTHETIC: MONTSERRAT ROIG’S USE OF THE CITY IN RAMONA, ADÉU

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
Catalan Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.

scholarly journals Slumming on Social Media? E-Mediated Tourist Gaze and Social Representations of Indian, South African, and Brazilian Slum Tourism Destinations

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 106
Author(s):  
Mauro Sarrica ◽  
Isabella Rega ◽  
Alessandro Inversini ◽  
Laura Soledad Norton
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Tourist Gaze ◽  
Tourism Experience ◽  
Intercultural Encounters ◽  
Eye Opening ◽  
Slum Tourism ◽  
Tourism Destinations ◽  
The City

Slum tourism is a hotly debated genre of travel. While it may foster intercultural encounters with marginalised “others”, it is also accused of reinforcing stereotypes and exploitation. Both aspects are amplified by the communication through social media of the slum tourism experience, that contribute to challenge or confirm stigmatizing representations of slums and their inhabitants. Based on the theoretical constructs of the tourist gaze and of social representations, this article addresses this particular type of digital contact. A lexicometric approach was used to analyse an extensive corpus of reviews on TripAdvisor (N = 8126). The findings not only confirm common themes already identified by the literature: the eye-opening component of touring poverty and the gatekeeping function of guides; but also show the emergence of context-dependent specificities, such as a hedonistic feature in the Cape Town region; or the integration of favelas within the representations of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, the results show the tension between the “othering” and the “sameing” mechanisms, making this tourism practice a space in which shallow and deep tourist gazes interact and co-exist, and are crucially mediated by the gatekeeper of the tours: the guide.

scholarly journals O Cinema e sua dimensão estético-pedagógica: Bacurau e a Lógica Exúlica

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Ana Vitoria Luiz e Silva Prudente ◽  
Ellen de Lima Souza
Keyword(s):  
The Elderly ◽  
The Other ◽  
Continuous Action ◽  
Childhood Gender ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

The article “Cinema and its aesthetic-pedagogical dimension: Bacurau and the Exulic Logic” aims to express the aesthetic-pedagogical dimension of cinema, reaching many social fabrics for being a structure that allows a continuous action in the production of subjectivity and in the formation of taste and interest of its consuming agents, through possible representativeness and representation. We use the Exulic Logic as a methodology Souza (2016) to understand the relationships between collectivity, childhood, gender markings, the understanding of 'the other' and the city, centralizing knowledge at the crossroads. This dialogue forges possibilities of breaking away from the coloniality of power, enabling circularity of knowledge, which in itself already proposes a break with Cartesian reasoning, which is based on an imperialist, colonial construction that privileges: Eurocentrism to the detriment of African, Aphrodiasporic and indigenous cosmoperceptions; adultcentrism, disregarding children's knowledge and the possible practices of the elderly, thus, with a racist, utilitarian and capitalistic bias. It is in the removal of or, for the addition of and, in the valuation of the sum, that it is observed that there is no such order of importance that the Euro-straight-male-authoritarian Prudente (2019) proposes.

scholarly journals Under the Tourist Gaze: Kathmandu in Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Arvind Dahal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Tourist Gaze ◽  
Image Production ◽  
Cultural Negotiations ◽  
The City

 This research explores the shifts and continuities of representing Kathmandu City in Western cinematic and musical creations since 1970s. My research concerns with the representations of Kathmandu in the popular culture intends to explore the imagination of Kathmandu as a touristic place and how they represent the city and produce images in the popular culture which expands far beyond the visual apprehension and enjoyment of a landscape. While doing so my research first explores the representations, practices and processes of identity formation and cultural negotiations that are brought about in the city by tourism and secondly, it analyses the content and the visual representations of the movies and songs relying primarily on the theoretical tools of Popular Culture and secondarily the image production of the landscape in terms of Tourist gaze.

scholarly journals Photographs by Guilherme Glück: a methodology for analyzing the photographic image of the cultural landscape of Lapa, PR, Brazil

Terr Plural ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. e2116706
Author(s):  
Caroline Ganzert Afonso ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Electric Power ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
Photographic Image ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Piped Water ◽  
The City

To read photographic images through Iconography and Iconology can be an interesting way to help describe landscapes. Which is the intention that corroborates the sense of “landscape as a way of seeing” proposed by Denis Cosgrove. In proposing this research aims to understand how the urban and cultural landscape was portrayed in Glück´s photographs. This study object is delimited by Glück's records about 1940, in the urban environment of the city of Lapa. These spaces were registered through the eyes of an immigrant, presenting the temporal transformations, in the yearnings to change and update Lapa as a republican city and adapted to new urban infrastructures, such as piped water, paved streets, electric power, new means of transportation, and communication. Through the systematization of the photographic methodological analysis, from iconographic investigation proposed by Panofsky, observing Cassirer's symbolic forms, through which he presented the advances in Cosgrove's research, it is intended to analyze Glück's images in a context of a city eager to incorporate republican and “modernity” standards.

On Empty Spaces, Silence, and the Pause

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Amato
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Renewal ◽  
York City ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Community Gardens ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
World City ◽  
Growth Machine ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City

Before there is an aesthetic of gentrification, there is disinvestment. In between both is the production – and perception – of empty space ready to be filled. The production of empty space has a long history in New York City, from settler colonialism to urban renewal to gentrification under the neoliberal regime of today. Techniques such as filtering, investing in the aesthetic potential of aging neighbourhoods, and declaring vacancy, have helped fuel the process of gentrification. More recently, that process has accelerated to insure New York’s world city status by promising that every underutilized parcel will be filled with the tallest buildings, the greenest construction, and the densest use of land. Yet the city still has room for alternative visions that embrace a pause in the growth machine, such as cooperative centres and community gardens. These efforts, threatened though they are, provide models for inclusive cities where neoliberalism does not.

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