About

Vision & Voice is a place to archive and view examples of visual imagery in Shape Note singing

The process begins with careful credit and attribution of examples. Add cataloging and description to create a visual record for future reference. Try to include:

  • Date and Time
  • Place and Event
  • Photographer and/or artisan
  • People included, as an index for later searches
  • Describe the particular moment or instant being depicted
  • How did you acquire the image?
  • Assign a “genre” or “form” of the item if possible—a general category

Here are examples of material which might be included by posting a photo

Still photography, for example

  • Leaders in the square, and their interaction with the class
  • Singers seated in the class, particularly interacting with the leader and the rest of the class
  • Hollow square set-ups
  • Venues for singings
  • Dinner on the grounds
  • Demonstration singings
  • Singing schools
  • Camp FaSoLa
  • Social occasions

And there are plenty of other items to be documented:

  • Educational graphics
  • Illustrated minutes
  • Book decorations
  • Hybrids of image and text
  • Digital images and memes, particularly from social media
  • Digital and app interpretations of the printed music, particularly the visual representations being used
  • Advertising, signs, handbills, and promotional materials
  • Photos of ephemera
  • Crafts, stickers, tchotchkes, rubber stamps, block prints, etc.
  • Tattoos
  • Paintings, posters, and sketches

I’m sure you can think of other things.

Shape-note notation, typeface, and tune books are fine examples of visual culture, but inadequate to understand the transmission of Sacred Harp culture. Still, there might be interesting posts that deal with things like:

  • The Revision Process
  • Accessibility
  • Marginalia
  • Music education

We are largely excluding direct video posts, enforced by a 50 MB upload limit. But other possibilities are:

  • Very short video extracts
  • Still captures from video
  • Links to on-line videos, with appropriate description and commentary

How else could we describe these items?

As you are able and interested, try your hand at these:

  • Describe the communication of emotion due to design: line, mass, space, light, color, etc.
  • Analyze items for natural content, symbolism, theme, representation, attitudes, and cultural content.
  • Recognize the different levels of meaning being assigned by the artisan, photographer, poster to social media, viewer, commenter, etc. Make those varied interpretations more explicit.
  • Use your own intuition to take a stab at how culture is being transmitted by the image.

Interested singers and viewers can register to participate in posting and commenting

How is Sacred Harp culture being transmitted and influenced by visual imagery?

Visual culture is the study of how people use imagery and visual practices to perceive, communicate, and construct reality in everyday life. In this context we are paying particular attention to our shape-note history, social behavior, norms, values, and institutions, and how our imagery of them is organized, interpreted, and given meaning.

The way we perceive and interpret visual imagery—visuality—is a social and cultural construction. Visuality depicts and also shapes our identity, social interactions, and power relations. Contrast this with the teaching (“singing schools”), written materials, and in-person enculturation we experience through participation and personal example.

Sacred Harp is participating in the “pictorial turn” (Mitchell 1994) from text to imagery as a primary vector of transmission of culture. We could end up spectators of our own culture if we don’t learn to analyze and interpret visual communication, and in the process improve our visual literacy.

Sources

Atlanta Sacred Harp

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972.

Fry, Roger E (1866-1934). An Essay in Æsthetics. In, Vision and Design (pp. 16–38). London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.

Fry, RE. The Double Nature of Painting. In, Reed, C, ed. A Roger Fry Reader (pp. 380-392). Univ Chicago Press, 1996.

Mirzoeff, N. How to See the World. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Mirzoeff, N. An Introduction to Visual Culture, 3rdEdition. Routledge: July 2023. 1st ed., 1999 is online.

Mitchell, WJT. The Pictorial Turn. In, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (pp. 11-34). Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Mitchell argues for a shift in thinking where images are considered active participants in culture, rather than just supplements to text, and a move away from purely linguistic analysis to include visual communication.

Panofsky, Erwin (1892–1968). I. Introductory. In, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (pp. 3-17). New York: Oxford University Press, 1939.

Sacred Harp on Wikipedia

Sacred Harp at The Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association