What kind of image is this? Is it a found image or created by the ethnographer (or a combination)? What is notable about its composition | scale of attention | aesthetic?

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Shahab Albahar's picture
February 29, 2020

Personally, I like the integration of comical humor in the form of illustration when addressing "gruesome" or difficult matters. The analogy visualized in the progression images between [re]productivity and alcoholism raises a critical question on the heteronormative message implied. It makes me think of the rhetoric used by Progressives in the late-nineteenth-century pertaining to alcoholism, violence, and diminishing productivity in the United States, culminating in the Volstead Act of 1919 which ushered the Prohibition Era.     

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Nadine Tanio's picture
February 28, 2020

This is an existing art work and cultural commentary that the ethnographer has found and situated with a larger cultural context. It is an image referencing El Borracho but transforming the original drunken character into a grotesque image of three "dick-heads".  The artist has simplified the visual elements however the stance and environment (seemingly against a wall outside a bar with a bottle of alcohol) remain consistent with the original image. As A. Mohammed notes, the changing clothing marks these images as suggesting that alcohol abuse is endemic across social class. Besides the logo tee in the last image, I can not discern the difference in dick-head's changing outfits. Noteably there is a progression of impotency across the image from left to right.

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