Eliise: Visual Activism

The author Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is currently Deputy Director of the International Association for Visual Culture and organized its first conference in 2012. His research interests are visual culture, cultural history, disability studies, contemporary art and new media and human rights. Currently he is working on a project entitled “The Visual Commons #BlackLivesMatter”. (Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2016)

Pelican in the UK published Mirzoeff´s most recent book “How To See The World” in 2015. In chapter “Visual Activism” Mirzoeff is answering his question “So what then is visual culture now?” (2015, p. 289). According to author visual culture might be also known as visual thinking. The author goes through how visual activism has changed form past years, he also talks about another form of it called visionary organizing and what part social media plays.

For the benefit of the general reader in it giving examples of the different scenarios of visual activism. The author argues that even the issues of identity, gender and sexual identity and how artists and filmmaker present it might be the same that in 1990 but the way how we engage them have changed. Giving example of artist who calls herself as a “black lesbian” and a “visual activist” and about her work “between the freedoms offered by South African constitution and the realities of homophobic violence encountered by LGBTQI” (2016, p. 290 ).

The author´s tells examples of companies how try to replace labor with machines to make more profit and bring up another form of visula activism, visionary organizing. Instead of doing that visionary organizing way to think is “how we might use our creative energies to better end then cutting jobs and increasing profit” (2015, p. 295). People around the world are trying to find to new ways to establish it. The author deduces that the reason why 24 percent of young people in Germany wanted to became artist is that “art might seem to be only way to live for yourself in global economy, as opposed to the dominant so-called ´service economy´ in which we work” (2015, p. 295). What drives it is the constantly changing technology, which came with the new social media channels like Youtube and Snapchat. It makes possible to information to spread from country to other fast, what was´t possible in the past. The author exmaple of shooting incidend and spread slogan form scene “Hands Up, Don´t Shoot” is a good example how social media appers today.

The book has been published in 2015 and I think visual thinking will be crowing as technology evolves. Fashion designers and people part of fashion industry are a big part of visual activism and they are taking part of issues happening in world. Like example designer Sophie Theallet asked other designers to join her not to design clothes for Melania Trump to support her husband's presidential campaign. () Also Anna Wintour appeared sitting front row at multiple shows in a Marc Jacobs campaign T-shirt emblazoned with Clinton’s face.