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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

The caption reads, “Towards the end of a two-day road-clearing mission, a marine got a moment’s rest.”  It is a reminder of war’s numbing brutality, not just as a matter of lives and limbs lost, but in terms of its impact on the human soul.  Bent double, his shoulders slumped, he appears to be exhausted by the sheer weight of his weapon and equipment, if not more so by the stressful weight of his charge to clear a road of bombs on what appears to be a road to nowhere; we might say that he is suspended in a state of rest—somewhere between standing and sitting, or perhaps in a liminal state between life and death — but we surely can’t say that he is resting.   His line of sight is directed downward.  He can see no more than the craggy ground beneath his feet—if he see’s at all.  And where he will go next is not clear as he seems literally to have come to the end of the road.  Perhaps that’s the point.

War takes its toll in many ways, not least by how it deadens the human spirit by thoroughly disrupting the ordinary routines of everyday life like eating a meal or taking a bath, or as in the picture below, getting a restful night’s sleep.

Once again we see a soldier who is utterly exhausted, or as perhaps the photograph implies, “dead to the world.” In Greek mythology Thanatos and Hypnos – the personifications of death and sleep – were twin brothers, hardly distinguishable from one another.  And so it is here.  The scene, with its bricked in doorway invites comparison with an ancient burial crypt, the sleeping bag calls forth images of war’s ubiquitous body bags, and the “bed” itself  bears resonance with a shallow grave. The awkward and rigid tilt of his legs and back implies the state of rigor mortis. His hands seem to be ceremoniously placed upon his breast, as one often finds with a funereal corpse, and the expression on his face is frozen in place.  Only the color in his cheeks resists a totalizing narrative of death.  One might confuse him with any number of images of homeless people slumbering in alleyways or under bridges—and how many of them are recognized for the veterans they are?—but for the conspicuous presence of an automatic weapon within his arm’s reach, a clear sign of his warrior status.

War kills, and there is nothing new in recognizing that.  What we too often fail to see is that it also produces a “living death” that bears its cost in different but no less tragic terms.

Photo Credit: Tyler Hicks/NYT

What is it about photo editors’ obsession with inked fingers?  After seeing dozens of the purple digits being offered to the camera, I want to scream “out, damned spot” and do a post on something sane–like fashion week.  It is just when the media are caught up in a new craze, however, that older habits can be revealed.

This might be the paradigmatic inked finger photo.  In the foreground, direct physical evidence of democratic participation; in the background, display of the traditional, nondemocratic society that is being brought into modernity by the electoral process.

The symbolism is comprehensive: the finger signifies an individual voter and perhaps liberal individualism; the ink implies both institutional legitimacy (one person, one vote, via reliably transparent procedures) and the manner in which democratic identity might become a second skin, voluntarily painted onto the flesh.  Likewise, the individual is otherwise wrapped in that society’s depersonalizing and oppressive traditions.  Thus, these highly gendered and Orientalist images of veiled women are particularly useful for maintaining Western mythology about colonial occupation.  The US is (and always was) there to provide democracy and other forms of emancipation, which occur when the client nation adopts Western procedures on their belated march into modernity.

Even if this were true, those in the occupation zones have always been able to see that there is another dimension to the story.  The second side of modernization is revealed in this photo of another inked finger.

“I VOTED” began the caption for this photograph of a member of the “security personnel” in Iraq. Yes, he voted, and he also locked and loaded.  Once again, we have the finger set against a backdrop, but instead of traditional costume we see a machine of the national security state.  Now democracy goes hand in hand with military force.  Of course, elections do need to be protected from disruption, and the state is to have a monopoly on violence, but this image of militant democratization may imply that the election is a temporary ritual while the projection of military power will remain the constant feature of national life long after the dye has washed off.

More telling is the lettering on the gun: all in English, it reminds us that the weapon was bought from-and very likely paid for by–the US.  “I voted,” but the US equipped, and this election cannot escape the fact that it is still being conducted in a country stocked with US troops and on the US payroll.

The first image implies (falsely) that Iraq’s past was one of traditional Islamic repression.  The second image exposes its present condition as a client state.  One might hope that there can be a third alternative for the future.

Photographs by Alaa al-Marjani/Associated Press and Mohammed Ameen/Reuters.

Credit:  Found at All Hat No Cattle

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

“Locked and Found” is part of Robert Gumpert’s “Take A Picture, Tell a Story” project begun while working on a short documentary concerning the closing of San Francisco’s County Jail 3, the oldest count jail in California at the time.  He had the idea of connecting photographs of inmates with whatever story they wanted to tell except for a story of an open case.  The project  began in 2006 and is regularly updated.  To see the archive of photos and to hear the stories click here or on the above photograph  of Thaddeus Stevens and Roy Westry taken in August 2009.

Some Americans like to think that Canada is a progressive paradise–not to put too fine a point on it, they imagine Canada as being America without the craziness.  You know, a place where you can drive the same car, sans road rage, or have all your favorite TV shows, movies, and music but not have to worry about society amusing itself to death.  Canadians strive and shop just like Americans, but still are the soul of decency, tolerance, prudence, civility, and common sense.

Like this:

According to the caption at The Big Picture, “Entertainers dressed as Mounties perform during the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics.”  So that’s what they are: entertainers.  And what about the elephant in the living room, by which I mean the giant Mounty cake?  And speaking of Mounties, isn’t that other fine example of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police a Giant Cut-Out?  Not just any nation could have mashed up the Rockettes and a Victorian greeting card, but Canada is not just any nation.

I get a kick out of this photograph, which can be read in either direction on the big question of Canadian exceptionalism (just like American exceptionalism, except nicer).  On the on hand, we see the same ridiculous, over-the-top, mass pop aesthetics that we have come to expect from Olympic closing ceremonies, Super Bowl halftime shows, and the like.  On the other hand, it is still so, well, what you would expect from a nation whose frontier hero was a policeman.  That said, I want to side with the craziness and so cut back the myth of Canada the well-mannered America.  Face it, they’re nuts, too.

I should quit there, but I there is another point to be made for our academic readers.  Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle begins with the statement that “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (paragraph 4).  That important point is too easily overlooked, but it also lets Debord off a very big hook: what if a specific image or collection of images suggests a different social relation, or one intertwined with another?  And what if Canada is doing the good work of providing a spectacle that can be read in either direction: as the epitome of fetishism and false consciousness aligned with the state, or as something that somehow gets close to that but ends up, well, more negotiable and not so threatening?

Look at this image again, and it’s all there: state power, the commodity fetish, the cult of the copy, separation celebrated, and gender ideology materialized.   But more is there as well: in a word, it’s nuts, and obviously so; more important, it is so obviously a theater of duplication that you have to believe irony is in the wings.  Excess may not be more of the same but rather one means for living within the spectacle.  And come to think of it, perhaps Canada knows a thing or two about being regarded as a copy, but with a difference for the better.

Photograph by Robyn Beck/AFP-Getty Images.

Another earthquake, this one 100 times more powerful than the quake that wrecked Haiti.  More photographs, although probably less than before due to some combination of better infrastructure in Chile and compassion fatigue in the American media.  Comparisons between the two disasters will be made–and sure to include both racist asides and warnings about the Last Days, such are the blessings of free speech.  The question remains whether the second quake provides an opportunity to learn something about disasters.  Nor is this a question about tectonic plates.

I think this photograph from Pelluhue, some 200 miles southwest of Santiago, is at once typical of the current disaster coverage and yet somewhat distinctive.  Typical, in that it documents the nature and extent of the destruction; distinctive, in that the wreckage was done by flooding, a secondary effect of the quake.  If nothing else, the photo can prompt one to recognize that this disaster, and every disaster, has more extensive causes and more extensive effects than those seen at the dramatic center of the event.

The photo’s texture may inflect the story further.  Instead of the arid, concrete, public, urban environment typically featured in the initial coverage, this rural setting was more lush to begin with and now is awash with the soggy debris of private life.  (Yes, those are refrigerators stuck on the strand, and perhaps a buoy for the recreational boating in the area.)  It is clear, also, that the disaster has washed up over the land, through no fault of their own, you might say, and that although human domesticity has been disturbed by nature’s excess, a more serene natural world remains, like the horse in the background, awaiting a return to normal activity and dwelling in relative harmony once things are cleaned up and rebuilt.  If there is a moral to the story, it is that disasters can have a greater reach than one might expect, but the advice remains the same: be better prepared next time, but get back to normal first.  One can almost imagine the scene flowing backwards: the refrigerators moving back into houses, the houses back onto their foundations, the buoy back into the bay, the chairs and buckets back onto the dock, and the flimsy walls of the dockside buildings slapping back together.

Something similar actually will happen, flowing forward, as the aid will come and the investments made and everyone knows what should be the result.  Not every disaster zone is so lucky.

This photograph was taken from a helicopter over “a rubble-strewn battlefield” in Marjah, Afghanistan.  Note how perfectly, although perhaps inadvertently, the “objective” caption captures the destructiveness so painfully evident in the photo.  The three buildings in the picture have effectively ceased to exist, to have ever existed.  They are not even mentioned, save to be designated as part of the rubble.  (They are another addition to Rubble World, a sector with excellent growth prospects in the 21st century.)  As before, the texture of the image speaks powerfully but now with a very different tone: this is sheer desolation, as if the environment had somehow been transformed into war itself, or at least a simulacrum of war suitable for a dark video game.  Only one dot of blue remains as the last hint of another purpose for this place of devastation, and soon, if anything is to be done, it will be bulldozed underground.

If anything is to be done.  This scene has only the barest trace of a past–shattered concrete without any evident purpose–and virtually no sense of a future.  It is a war zone, likely to be leveled for tactical security, and then what?  If the armies move on, they leave nothing.  If they stay, there is no return to whatever was there before.  Likewise, the relationship to other causes and effects remains obscure.  The scene was seemingly the center of a battle, but there is no sense of where the war started, why is it there, or where it is going.  (This elision of a grand narrative can be a feature of all war photography, as Alan Trachtenberg has noted, but we should add that it may say something about war and have more bite with some wars than others.)  War may be more or less destructive than a natural disaster, but only war destroys the future.

There is a political dimension to every natural disaster, but that is not quite my point today.  Wars are political disasters, and were we to see them much as we do natural disasters, it might be much easier to help those after the battle and perhaps even to be better prepared to maintain the peace next time.  But too often the images of political disasters may, in ways large and small, already be reproducing the damning implication that comes from not being defined as having natural causes.  Thus, instead of seeing how calamity has washed over the land through no fault of their own and that there remains only the hard work of rebuilding, the moral of the story is that for those in the wrong place there can be no return to normal life.  Earthquakes are episodic, but war and occupation, it seems, are endless.

Photographs by Roberto Candia and Brennan Linsley for the Associated Press.

Cross posted at BAGnewsNotes.

Credit: Nate Beeler, Washington Examiner

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

We are pleased to introduce NCN readers to Impact, an exploratory online exhibition site inaugurated by the Resolve collective of photographers and creative professionals and designed  to feature the work of independent photographs as they address a common theme or topic.  The initial theme is “On the Outside Looking In.”  The photograph above  is from Sean Gallagher’s “Desertification Unseen.”

If you even saw this photograph you probably didn’t pay much attention to it.  After all, it looks like many of the images that have come out of places like Lebanon and Iraq in recent years.  One more terrorist, suicide bombing carefully planned and executed by a group of political extremists and religious fanatics.  What more is there to say?  Nothing, perhaps, until we discover that the explosion is in Austin, Texas, not the war torn Middle East, and it was caused by a lone U.S. citizen who flew a small airplane into a building that housed the IRS as an expression of his rage against corporate profits and the U.S. government in general.

The key thing to notice is how quickly the whole event seems to have slipped from national consciousness despite the sense in which it might be characterized as a small scale 9/11 attack: an airplane flown into a government building, animated by a dissident, vengeful desire to bring the political system down.  That’s not the story we got, of course, as most reports focused on the bomber as a deeply disturbed, single individual animated by an inarticulate fury, despite the fact that he left behind a somewhat lengthy political manifesto explaining his long smoldering (and not irrational) anger at what he perceived to be an unjust political system. The above photograph is telling in this regard.  Shot with a long lens and tightly cropped around the point of the explosion shortly after impact, the building is consumed by billows of smoke that shroud the intense flames that burn just below the surface awaiting to erupt. It is in its own way a picture of latent affect that serves as an allegory for the predicament of expressing anger in contemporary times: The smoke can serve as a screen to mask the raw affect for a time, but ultimately it is incapable of giving it a productive form or containing it for very long.  The result is either dangerously explosive or sheer futility—and sometimes both.

Too often, it seems, we treat anger as an inherently irrational and inchoate expression of political engagement, typically representing it in the roar of an inarticulate mob.  But as Aristotle made clear, anger is not madness.  Indeed, it is and can be a legitimate and rational political emotion, quite necessary as a motivational resistance to the forces of injustice, and made effective in the careful and deliberate performance of the cultural norms of appropriate social and political recognition.  The problem is that in contemporary times we lack useful models for the effective expression and enactment of productive political anger. Either we get the silly rants of groups like the “tea-baggers,” which function as little more than a parody of anger, or we get the truly irrational futility of individuals flying planes into buildings or going on shooting rampages.  Neither serves the purposes of a robust democratic public culture.

What we need are exemplars of the performance of political anger that animate the demands for justice and restitution in pointed but measured ways.  Where we will find them, it is hard to say,  but in the meantime it is important to keep in mind that the political scenarios in which we frame enactments of anger carry a powerful normative force that should never go unmarked as transparent expressions of affect.

Photo Credit: Trey Jones/AP

The holidays are a distant memory, snow is falling again, and ordinary activity can seem frozen into work and routine.  What else is there to do?  Days are short, there is too little sunlight, depression lurks amidst the layers of heavy clothing, and just getting about can be a series of chores.  One’s options, it seems, are limited.

But don’t tell this woman:

The caption read, “Shenyang, China: A swimmer jumps into icy water at a park.”  Really?  You’d think the writer had seasonal affective disorder; doesn’t “jump” suggest suicide?  As it is, however, she is not jumping but diving, and instead of going to her death she is throwing herself into life.

The tension between death and life suffuses the photo. The snow shrouded treeline along the field of whiteness could be the frozen shore of the netherworld, and the cold, dark, glassy water seems a catch basin for dead souls–like the shadow solidifying under its surface.  But suspended against this there is the incredible vitality of her strong, beautiful body, and even the puff of snow testifies to her quick kick up into the air. And all this for one reason: the amazing shock of slicing into the cold water, the sharp gasp, the radiant fire of skin alive.

In 1872 Christina Rossetti penned a beautiful poem that many encounter as a Christmas hymn.  The first verse speaks to anyone regardless of faith–to anyone, that is, who has known winter.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

There is more than one kind of winter. Too much in American national life at the moment seems locked into bleak patterns of dysfunction and stasis.  Too many people are hoping to settle for what is safest, and too many are resigned to simply making do or getting by.  Who can blame them?  When leaders are abdicating right and left and the future looks bleak, it makes sense to pull the blanket close around yourself and not take any risks.

Stuck in the middle of winter, perhaps one should simply wait for spring.  I’d like to think, however, that somehow each of us could take the plunge into a better life.  This might mean nothing more than doing something unexpected or otherwise out of season.  Who knows how much that could change?

Photograph from Reuters.