As the ceremony from Theipval, commemorating the Battle of the Somme, plays in the background, it reminded me that I’d not posted my slides from a session I presented to the Visual Culture Research Group at MMU on Wednesday afternoon, in which I gave an overview of my book proposal to convert my PhD to publication (very slow progress, yes!).
My presentation came after Jim Aulich had talked about social visual media and the persistence of images, finding comparisons between, for example, the image of Alan Kurdi, and comparisons with religious iconography. Both presentations considered why certain images have meanings, and persist.
In my presentation, it seemed particularly pertinent that this presentation came the week after #Brexit, as we discussed how Keep Calm and Carry On has in many ways detached from its original context, but that the story does affect how people engage with it, that my Google Alerts for the phrase has produced much more interesting content this week than it has for the last couple of weeks, as people once again cling onto the phrase!
