viz.

I want to take a break from politics for a second to address alcohol. Er, wait....hard to divorce the two when Absolut runs the following image in their Mexican advertisements:

It's part of Absolut's campaign to define the brand as "perfect" and follows in the footsteps of:

A couple of discussions online of late have got me thinking about what happens when we interpret an image one way and are called on the carpet for "mis"interpreting it or reading too much into it. What do we reveal about ourselves and our own possibly subconscious biases when we publicly interpret an image, especially a problematic one?

A couple of weeks ago, a blogger on Feministe.com posted the cover of the current issue of Vogue, which features LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen in a pose that the blogger felt was racially insensitive:

Note here that her commenters were pretty much split in their assessment that they couldn't see the problem with the image or that Jill was spot-on in her analysis.

The Copyranter, a blogger I'm becoming more and more of a fan of, recently posted these images from an Italian ad campaign for stove-top coffee makers. The title of the ads, or the slogan paired with them is, "the bite of coffee."

By reproducing it, I'm probably playing right into the hands of the creator of this image, but, I thought it deserved to be commented on here:

The copy reads, "Terrorism-related deaths since 2001: 11,337 • Tobacco-related deaths since 2001: 30,000,000."

A year ago today, the city of Boston was brought to a standstill by led advertisements for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. Here’s how I described the incident way-back-when in viz.’s first blog post:

on Jan. 31, 2007, some members of the the Boston police force interpreted some electronic, guerrilla marketing devices for the movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters as bombs. The city closed down bridges and shut down the river to boat traffic. In the ensuing fallout, video artists Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested and the president of Adult Swim resigned over the incident.

Today, graffiti artists and other pranksters have commemorated the incident by posting similar LED art all over Beantown:

Although Cannon probably sells a lot of photography equipment to journalists, according to a www.news.com article, they made some of these loyal customers very angry when the NFL made it mandatory for photojournalists to wear a red vest with the Cannon logo on it for "security" reasons.

Dove expertly uses visual rhetoric to combat the insidious forces of ... visual rhetoric.

This video does contain some pretty disturbing imagery of people receiving shock therapy and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. So consider yourself warned before you click "play."

I’m a big fan of Seth Stevenson’s advertising columns at Slate (he’s going on sabbatical and will be missed). On Monday he posted a new column, where he discusses readers’ submissions for the worst ads on TV. Like a therapist, Stevenson doesn’t so much agree with the contributors as he commiserates with the feelings of anger, betrayal, emptiness and loss directed at or prompted by these advertisements. One question that we can ask ourselves (and our students) is: Why do we care so much about ads? Take this McDonald’s ad for example:

Slate V has posted nine soap commercials shot by recently deceased film director Ingmar Bergman. As Dana Stevens, Slate’s film critic, points out in the commentary below, Bergman’s ads challenged the conventions of most commercials—in one case, Bergman depicts a character being injured by the product, Bris soap.