Since around 2000, there has been a growing body of work which tells medical stories using the form of comics. This genre has come to be called “Graphic Medicine” and has been organized and supported with annual (since 2007) global “Comics & Medicine” conferences and a publication series at The Pennsylvania State University Press. The seminal “Graphic Medicine Manifesto” was published by that press in 2015.
In this panel presentation, scholar Robert Graham reviews ways in which artists have used maps or map-making strategies as icons, as survey, or joined with time to render the human geography of place and pathway; sound artist Kathy Kennedy discusses artists’ use of the web as a repository for kinds of mappings that hold sonic information and artist, scientist and inventor Juan Geuer, whose work appears in Conceptual Cartographies, discusses differentials in the art and science of mapping.
Graham, Robert. (2006, May 29). “Thief” – Michael Mann’s Human Geography Lesson [conference presentation]. Film Studies Association of Canada Annual Conference 2006, York University, Toronto, Ontario.
Graham, Robert. (2003, September 19). Combat Photography [conference presentation]. Symposium for Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Quebec.
During Michael Mann’s 1981 film Thief, the title character Frank (played by James Caan) proposes marriage to Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a waitress he hardly knows. For her he pulls out his wallet and presents a folded photo collage that we have seen briefly before – he had been shown consulting it as if it were a compass or a map. Among the imagery it included were a few human figures, an old bearded man, a woman with a child, a house, some cars. “Here,” he says, “that is my life and nothing, nobody can stop me from making that happen.”
