Today, supermarket tabloids run badly cropped composite images with their stories, which are meant to prove that Hillary's chosen Bigfoot as her running mate in 2008 or that trees are now detrimental to the environment because they've taken up smoking.
But besides blowing smoke, composite images have more importantly begun to be used in both industry and the arts, advancing the ubiquity of the image in the media and changing the way we see and think about what we see.
Professor Michael Leja of the University of Pennsylvania studies the visual aspects of art in the American media of the 19th and 20th centuries and traces the relationship between visual artifacts and contemporary culture, politics, intellectualism and social relations.
The art history and visual studies programs at the U will present the first annual lecture of the Visual Intersections Initiative today, which they hope will promote interdisciplinary study of images, conceptualizations and interpretations here at the U.
Leja's lecture, "Winslow Homer and the Composite Image," will mainly address the composite image and its defrayment in the pictorial press of the mid-19th century.
Winslow Homer is credited as being an inventive contributor to the clustered images that appeared in Harper's Weekly and other publications. Leja will argue that Homer's work with composite images is highly relevant to the mass production of images in 19th-century visual culture, and that its influence is still found in today's media and construction of imagistic messages.
Leja has culled this lecture from a larger work concerning the effects of mass producing pictures on fine art and changing perspectives of perception on cultural and social relations in America in the 19th century.
Leja's primary lecture will be held today in the Art Building, Room 158, at 4:30 p.m.
On Friday, a reception and dialogue on visual culture and interdisciplinary visual studies will be held in the Tanner Humanities Center, Room 115, in Carlson Hall from noon to 1:30 p.m. Lunch will be provided, and anyone interested in talking with Leja about his ideas or hearing more about them is invited to attend.
