a lot about framing, ekphrasis, myopia

whoa whoa whoa-- DARKROOM!! i love and am impressed by everything about the way this graphic memoir is composed. there are so many original and interesting strategies lila quintero weaver employs in order to tell these stories and represent these experiences.

i was really struck by the ways she uses (and varies) framing and perspective throughout the whole text. to me, this whole graphic memoir is a lesson in how to employ oubapo, how to create your own new system for interestingly and unconventionally (but readably) representing and crafting a narrative. she is constantly zooming out and in and using her frames in interesting ways and from different angles. as in on pages 14-15, she narrows in on the process of photographic development, zooming out to the scene of her father at his work station, then zooming in in in to the intricacies of the process (the small frames up top on pg 15 showing her father's hands removing film from the camera, the slightly bigger frame showing him examining the negatives, to the larger, but narrow shot of the image transferring itself to paper). though she frequently uses conventional framing techniques (the black-outlined, square frame), she also creates her own unique methods of framing/panel creation (AND I'M FASCINATED BY WHAT SHE DOES). on page 17, for example, the developing trays in the photography studio become panels, and we know to read each panel from left to right and then down, as the image develops.

in other instances, we completely lack frames and panels, but we are not left without cues on how to "read" the page. also, frequently, what's pictured or written on the page isn't organized sequentially or from left to right (i.e. in a standard kinda way). back to framelessness, though. as in on page 89, the objects pictured almost become their own panels and also hold the weight of narrative and/or analogy/allegory/etc. on 89, she visually represents a metaphor that represents the truth and reality of the one drop rule. she's also visually representing the absurdity of it. no person is as purely black or purely white as milk or ink or as compositionally purely either. the boxy milk carton is more than an image of a milk carton, but holds the weight and "purity" of whiteness, and likewise, the bottle of black ink.

i was also interested in her use of the photographic frame and/or snapshot as a graphic and literary device. we see this strategy used often in literature and in art (a sort of ekphrastic tool writers and artists use to interestingly portray something via referencing another medium), but i've never really seen it used so uniquely and in a new way. it obviously makes a lot of sense for her to employ photographic techniques in representing this story given her and her fam's relationship to photography, but also serves the memoir well in other ways. the snapshot in this book correlates back to memory and history preservation. for times that there were no snapshots taken of the event, quintero weaver creates snapshots to represent the instances, drawing from memory (her own or her fam's). as in on page 21 and 25 in relation to her fam's immigration history. she summarizes her father's life journey in a series of small, abstract snapshots. this technique also goes back to what i was saying earlier about her interesting way of creating panels. these "photographs" become the panels on this page. in this case, she recreates photographs of some major events in her father's life to keep them alive. on 25, however, she uses negatives with blank gaps to show how certain memories and experiences in her own immigration and her sister's don't make it into their photographic family record. she doesn't recreate all of them to highlight the spaces in between. she uses illustration to take the snapshots of memory that the camera didn't and also highlighting the fact that they weren't recorded using the white frames in the negative strip.

she doesn't use these devices or strategies in the same way each time, though. for example, in another scene, on 94, she uses the negative strip as a strategy, but differently, to show the sequence and repetition of her father's weekly routine as a seminarian.

she uses photographic ekphrastic methods to show the impossibility of representing what happened in marion when a peaceful protest turned violent and deadly (jimmie lee jackson shot and killed). it's so interesting how she uses disjointed "photography" to get at how it couldn't be photographed because the streetlights had gone out. the "mayhem" of the event is shown thru the chaotic, disjointed snapshots of fists, boots, a young black person getting clubbed... all laid over the really daunting repeated sliver of the menacing wide eye, open mouth.

i can't find where or what the context was, but, in my notes, i wrote down "glimpses." i do remember my point in jotting that down, which is that this whole text feels like a very varied collection of glimpses roped together. it goes back to the snapshot technique-- capturing small windows into an event  or a life (or many lives and events) and stringing them together. but she also zooms out to the globe to shift perspective and remind us of the bigger picture-- bigger implications for and on the world.

it's interesting because though the graphics are very readable and sensible, they aren't organized in a standard way. the graphics don't even necessarily represent plot or scene at times, but still manage to create a narrative. i don't know how to explain this, but it's different than what we've seen. it seems like people would be tempted to draw correlations between this memoir and fun home, which makes sense, but this one just does so much so differently in terms of how narrative is created via image.

omg i have so much to say and so many notes-- about contrast and composition (decision to shade, blend, and use a lot of gray in her renderings) and how this relates back to the way she unpacks how race is defined and stratified-- white, black, often without the option of anything else... except for in that encyclopedia... also how aspects of USA pop culture act as frames in this memoir, frames for the visiion of the USA (thinking of pages 38 and 39--- women's magazines like mccall's framing desire via consumption, etc).

also there was something interesting happening around sight and vision, specifically in relation to how race is seen and understood (by various groups and subgroups and also personally). myopia is HUGE in this whole graphic memoir. she is literally myopic (nearsighted) and needs to correct it with glasses, but ALSO she wonders about a larger kind of myopia that exists around race and racism. how can folks not realize how fucked up and off segregation is? it must be related to an enforced (both institutional and personal) myopia.

in this way, every craft decision cycles back on itself. the literary and artistic devices keep coming back and reinforcing one another. it all becomes somehow photographic and related back to sight, vision, representation; which is really amazing and fascinating.

my 3 words would be... pensive/focused, enrapt, challenged (good way).