Juxta/positions

Looking critically at OTR to disturb the visual demarcations and challenge the dominant way of seeing.

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“Will you take my picture?” -Man on the corner of 12th and Race

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Put to work a three step process of visual activism: look, think, act...it can create a sense of obligation that primes people to act in new ways: to vote differently, to spend money differently, to build the world differently, to treat people differently, and to look at people differently.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How we look

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13th Street

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Car Crash

Sometimes, we just want to coast for free. She wanted to go to an event for a fashion magazine where they were supposedly serving complimentary fried chicken on Belgian waffles with wine, so she brought her friend Alex.  They ran into his friend Max at the lofty boutique and the three of them pretended to be friends with the highly coiffed clientele and other well-dressed moochers. It was a chilly Thursday night in Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, a neighborhood rife with histories of racial tensions and violence. There they all stood, on the periphery of a gentrified encasement acting as a sort of white people haven amid crumbling buildings and vagrants; A sort of dream world imagined outside of histories, economic disparities, or the anxieties that produce that something that moves and dismantles us. We’d often rather just cruise in our air-bagged, child security-locked SUVs.

After her fourth or fifth chicken-and-waffle hors d’oeuvre, she notices a black man in a baggy coat and low-riding jeans saunter through the door and towards the table littered with food bites and alcohol. She notices him cradling his cell phone below his waist, hunched down over it and rocking back and forth, as though bouncing to an unheard beat. She watches the event coordinator approach the man after he grabs his second food bite and tells him that he needs to leave. There are some repeated phrases, pretenses, an explanation that this was a private event, a counter that if he were dressed the right way, the black man wouldn’t be kicked out. Eyes flickered in and out of the scene between the two men, and then: “WHAT, NO NIGGAS ALLOWED?”  Bodies and eyes of the spectators turned to face the outburst, voices hushed and the surge of silence bent everyone in the room towards the scene of the crash. The chill and the discomfort were palpable, like specks of flying glass caught in the eye or the heat from a flaming engine; it was undeniable and yet unseen. Life doesn’t always let us cruise.

Once the man was finally escorted out after the coordinator reassured that it was not “about race” and everyone had finally caught their breath, conversations resumed with a tangibly different timbre. She asked Alex what the man had done to get thrown out and he said something to the extent that coordinators have to regulate how much free food and alcohol gets dished out because they lose money on that. Also, he said if the person doesn’t show any interest in buying anything, then these types of events could soon become defunct. She couldn’t shake the flecks of glass from her eyes. The chill remained long after. What did he really do wrong, after all?

Months later, she recounted the story a little too loudly to date, David. They were at a restaurant in the same gentrified bubble of Over-the-Rhine, just a couple of doors down from the boutique. After an animated recount, she felt the singed hairs from the crash once again. David simply said “Well that’s awkward.”

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Vine Street again

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By means of cross-cultural...comparison, visual culture endeavors to create a decolonial genealogy for the paradoxical convergence of war, economy, religion, the environment globalized visual media. That is to say, this mode of comparison is not a lofty gaze from the ivory tower but a place in the midst of the conflict. Visual culture compares in order to understand such conflicts.

Nicholas Mizoeff, "Global Visual Cultures"; An Introduction to Visual Culture

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"Can I take your picture?" -Me

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Vine Street

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The power to authoritatively see and produce the range of phenomena that are consequential for the organization of a society is not homogeneously distributed. Different professions--medicine, law, the police--have the power to legitimately see, constitute, and articulate alternative kinds of events. Professional vision is perspectival, lodged within specific social entities, and unevenly allocated.

Charles Goodwin, "Profesional Vision"; American Anthropologist

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12th Street

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Critical Visions Project

I am UC student looking to disrupt the aesthetic of 3CDC's gentrifying projects in downtown OTR. My purpose is not to critique 3CDC as an organization but to cause people who navigate the space of OTR to think differently about beauty and the value of human interactions with people of all social brackets, creeds and colors.

It is my belief that there is a discordance between the economic disparity of the inhabitants of OTR and the newly "revitalized" buildings that encase businesses catering to affluent crowds of suburbanites. My goal is not to fix the system but rather to draw attention to visual cues such as what makes an area "nice" or "rough" and why such divisions exist. I would like to blur such distinctions and create a new dialogue for Cincinnati dwellers to participate in on a visual and conversational level.

Beauty, security, and comfort are all contingent on the one who defines it, but through these refractions we can have a justice of visual culture in OTR.