Camera Obscura articles from May 2004

Camera Obscura archives from May 2004

Dead woman glowing: Karla Faye Tucker and the aesthetics of death row photography.
May 1, 2004... On 3 February 1998, the state of Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker by lethal injection for her role in the murders of Deborah Thornton and Jerry Lynn Dean. She was thirty-eight years old, white, and a devout Christian convert who had, in the...

Recovering the lone mother: Howards End as aesthetic anodyne.
May 1, 2004... On 12 February 1993, two ten-year-old boys lured two-year-old James Bulger out of a shopping mall in England and dragged him two miles to a railway yard, where they threw bricks, stones, and iron bars at his head and then pitched his body in...

Beyond the gaze: visual fascination and the feminine image in silent Hitchcock.
May 1, 2004... Are not the traits which I indicated (the make-up, the whiteness, the wig, etc.) just like the blunting of a meaning too clear, too violent? Do they not give the obvious signified a kind of difficulty prehensible roundness, cause my reading to...

Envisioning the (w)hole world "behind things": denying otherness in American Beauty.
May 1, 2004... Sam Mendes's American Beauty (US, 1999) explicitly affirms the importance of upholding the prohibition against incest. In his DVD commentary on the film, Mendes himself sees his work as the tale of a man, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), who...

The legend of the white-and-yellow black man: global containment and triangulated racial desire in Romeo Must Die.
May 1, 2004... How may I touch you across this chasm of flown things? --Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed Searching his murdered younger brother's apartment for clues to guide his investigation, Han Sing (Jet Li), the protagonist of Romeo Must Die (dir....

Some kind of grace: an interview with Miranda July.
May 1, 2004... "I come from very far away. I come from the basement." This line, from one of Miranda July's sound pieces ("I Can-Japan," on the CD The Binet-Simon Test, issued by the indie rock label Kill Rock Stars), captures the absurd logic that pervades...