The Visual Politics of Elections: A Conversation with Matt Schneider and Gizem Melek

Are visuals biased? Is the media biased? Is it possible to be politically neutral? What is the role of “fairness?” How do visuals make themselves felt in elections and who is giving them their meaning?

In this episode, Immaterial Voices host Brian O’Neill sits down with two scholars to understand the visual politics of elections. First, Matthew Schneider of the University of North Carlina at Wilmington discusses what President Trump means in terms of the visual culture of American Presidential elections, getting into topics about race and racism in America, the role of whiteness in the election cycles of recent memory, and the limits of news media communications. Then, sociologist and former journalist Gizem Melek of Queen’s University Belfast, discusses her research on the media framing of elections. In so doing, we talk about the rise of social media and the polarization of politics and society in the United States. And, she also draw parallels and contrasts with election politics in Turkey. Taken together, we hope this episode provides a well of insights about the role visual media in elections globally and across different visual and political regimes.

Additional Notes:

The opinions expressed here do not reflect the position of the University of North Carlina Wilmington, nor do the opinions that might be expressed reflect those of Queen’s University Belfast. In the same way, the opinions expressed here do not reflect those of the University of Washington.

This episode contains explicit content, because profanity is used to describe signage visibilized (meaning, there is profanity on the signage) on some of the images that the conversation unpacks.

Links:

Matt Schneider: https://mjschneider.net

Gizem Melek: https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/persons/gizem-melek

The Grift: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/grift

Matt Schneider’s Review of The Grift: https://photobookjournal.com/2023/06/14/andrew-kochanowski-the-grift/

Gizem Melek’s article on US elections: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1472586X.2023.2209050

Gizem Melek’s article on Turkish elections: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15551393.2023.2232292

Music provided by Wyoming Toad: https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com

Brian O’Neill: https://www.brianfoneill.net

Immaterial Books: https://www.immaterialbooks.com

How do photographers deal with elections? What is the role of the visual in election politics?

In this episode, Brian O’Neill interviews three photographers and scholars of visual arts and media to help contextualize the visual culture surrounding elections. Photographer and sociologist Tim Hale revisits the podcast and discusses two books little talked about together. The first is Garry Winogrand’s Public Relations, and the second is William Eggleston’s Election Eve. Tim, a one-time newspaper photojournalist, provides insights into his history of image-making around elections. Then, he sets that as the context for beginning to understand Winogrand’s concept of Public Relations. This book corresponds to what sociologist Erving Goffman called the interaction ritual at the “front stage” v. the “back stage” of social life. As Brian and Tim work through the book, they share stories from their experiences photographing the “spectacle” of the so-called “target-rich” environments that engender rallies and other political events.

Brian and Tim then pivot to discussing Election Eve, a lesser-known and discussed project of lauded photographer William Eggleston. A book that emerged as a self-published artist book in an edition of 5 in the 1970s was re-released in 2017 and chronicles Eggleston’s journey across the South leading up to the election of Jimmy Carter. What was Eggleston looking for? What did he find? Tim and Brian discuss this elusive work, which they argue is interesting because of the way it speaks to a historical moment in a way that is rare for Eggleston, who, as it is widely known, seldom edited his own sequences of images or worked on what might be called documentary projects. Contrastingly, Election Eve makes one wonder what America Jimmy Carter had in mind, for he too was a man of the South, a place where the land itself was troubled, with histories of colonialism, racism, and slavery. Furthermore, and unlike Winogrand’s Public Relations, Election Eve presents an overall troubling ambiance, in which one can speculate about the societal impact of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Oil Crisis.

Links:

Tim Hale: https://www.timhale.net/about-the-photos

The Grift: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/grift

Election Eve: https://steidl.de/Books/Election-Eve-0812354652.html

Public Relations: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2372

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: https://monoskop.org/images/1/19/Goffman_Erving_The_Presentation_of_Self_in_Everyday_Life.pdf

The Photobook Journal: https://photobookjournal.com

Music provided by Wyoming Toad: https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com

Brian O’Neill: https://www.brianfoneill.net

Immaterial Books: https://www.immaterialbooks.com

Today, Brian O’Neill sits down to talk about “The Grift.” This was a 2023 release by Immaterial Books, and so with the upcoming election and events occupying life in the United States, we thought it an important opportunity to sit down again and speak about the project with the author, Andrew Kochanowski. In this episode, Brian and Andrew cover the book itself and its concept, and so much more: from how Andrew got started on the project and how it unfolded, to how he composes a frame, to how he thinks about the longer-term trajectory of a self-directed documentary project.

The Grift is not a political book in the traditional sense. Instead, it takes a dispassionate look at a phenomenon enabled by conventional mass media, new digital channels, and informal word-of-mouth networks. It looks to actors playing their parts, but more broadly to mutual, bottomless need and dependence. Feasting off the spectacle, the speaker and the crowd crave one another. One will lie to the other, and both will lie to themselves. Who is grifting who?

Andrew Kochanowski is a photographer based outside Detroit, USA. Since 2007 his work has appeared in both solo and group exhibits in Detroit, London, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, New York, Brighton (U.K), Cardiff, Milan, San Francisco, and elsewhere, at venues such as the London Street Photography Festival, Street Photo Milano, and the Miami Street Photography Festival. His essays, images, and interviews have been published in numerous publications, including Leica Blog, Metropolitan Detroit, Eyeshot Magazine, and others. He is a founding member of Burn My Eye, an international photography collective that has been operating since 2011.

Episode Links:

Buy The Grift: https://www.immaterialbooks.com/store/p/grift

Andrew’s website: http://akochanowski.net

Andrew’s Instagram: @andrew_kochanowski

The Grift Website: https://the-grift.com

Review of The Grift at The Photobook Journal: https://photobookjournal.com/2023/06/14/andrew-kochanowski-the-grift/

Jeff Jacobson’s work: https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2020/11/02/jeff-jacobson-life-photos/

Jeff Jacobson’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/My-Fellow-Americans-Photographs-1991-10-21/dp/B01HC12YBM

Burn My Eye: https://www.burnmyeye.org

Podcast hosted by Brian O’Neill: https://www.brianfoneill.net

Immaterial Books Newsletter: https://substack.com/@immaterialbooks

Music for Immaterial Voices by Wyoming Toad: https://wyomingtoad.bandcamp.com

Immaterial Voices is a production of Immaterial Books, an independent publisher of contemporary art and literature on photo media and its practice based in Champaign, Illinois.