May 2009 – Page 2 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

"The Real Thing"

Last week I encountered a number of photographs in various mainstream journalistic slideshows of the Terra Livre (Free Earth) indigenous camp meeting that took place in Brasilia and where thousands of Indians from numerous Brazilian tribes congregated to demand government attention to indigenous issues. Most of these photographs, shot in middle distance and at oblique angles that put them on display for the viewer, featured Indians dressed in colorful tribal costumes, applying or displaying body paint, playing instruments and performing traditional dances, and the like. Not a single caption mentioned a single indigenous issue nor could I find I newspaper article anywhere that described or discussed the event. There to be seen, there evidently wasn’t anything worth reporting on—or at least writing about.

In order to understand this somewhat odd situation we might take account of one photograph that actually stands out from the rest for its apparent critical and ironic appeal. It is a fairly tight close-up of Cacique Raony Kayapo, a member of the once nomadic Kayapo tribe that now lives in the Brazilian rainforests, as he downs a can of Coca-Cola before attending a protest march at the Terra Livre indigenous camp.

The photograph could be an ad for Coca Cola—and indeed, I would not be surprised if I were to see it on a billboard in the near future. Or it could be a critique of western, cultural imperialism (think “The Gods Must Be Crazy”), though that seems less likely if only because the tight close-up and low angle invite the viewer to identify with the scene. But there is another point to be made. For the image also performs—or perhaps neutralizes—the ideological problem at the heart of the tension between traditional society and modern globalization. Indigenous groups like the Kayapo recognize the need to protest against modern concerns that threaten their very survival, such as the building of dams and the polluting of rivers caused by growing gold mining projects, but at the same time they have become “addicted” to the sweet allures of modern society—whether nutritionally empty soft drinks or the technological wonders produced by late capitalism such as satellite television. And as long as one has to have a swig of Coke before standing up to the lords of globalization it seems that the battle is over before it ever begins.

Appearances aside, then, publications of the photograph (and it showed on a number of mainstream journalistic slideshows) function less as an act of visual irony and more as prima facie evidence in support of the globalization thesis itself. No articles accompany the image (or any of the images of the Terre Livre indigenous camp published by the mainstream media) because they aren’t necessary to make the point: whatever “local” issues vex the Kaypao and threaten their ecology, what matters is that they have embraced the economic symbols of western globalization. Seeing is believing. What more need be said?

Photo Credit: Eraldo Peres/Reuters

0 Comments

Alert: Swine Flu Products Rapidly Replicating

It’s easy to make fun of the media panic over the outbreak of swine flu, and to laugh again when other marketers jump on the bandwagon. This photo shows how an enterprising supermarket in Taipei quickly put together an “Anti-Flu Section.”

Maybe they can use that pig again for the Summer Barbecue Section. And in the meantime, there can be additional media alarms about children swallowing the disinfectants now being stacked in kitchens and bathrooms. And then there can be an “Anti-Poisoning Section,” and maybe the economy will begin to rebound after all.

I told you it was easy, didn’t I? There is more to the story, of course. The media and marketing systems help contain the spread of disease, and activating the network now may hone capabilities that can save additional lives should a more virulent pathogen develop later. But we know that, just as we know the story of the boy who cried wolf. Rather than ask what is an appropriate response, I’d like to consider how the photo is making a larger point as well.

I am often amazed when I survey the seemingly endless abundance of goods in the supermarket. Look again at the display in the foreground of the photograph: the boxes, bottles, spray bottles, spray cans, and jugs are perfect copies of each specific product, just like hundreds of thousands of other identical items, and all have been produced and distributed with machined efficiency. As have the rows of products on the shelves in the background of the photo, leading off to the right and the left to take up aisle after aisle in nearly identical stores all over the world. And behind them, the trucks, roads, ships, factories, and labs that continue to produce and distribute the 100,000+ products that typically are available in any one of those stores.

This is a replication system that any virus would kill for. And isn’t that the truth of the photograph? Any virus can spread quickly because the modern world has become linked together by distribution systems of astonishing scale and efficiency. Airports are just one small part of it, and a high quality of life for billions of people (though not nearly enough people) depends on the continual, constant mechanical reproduction of products, information, and services.

Photography, as Walter Benjamin noted, is one of the technologies of mechanical reproduction that has given the modern world its distinctive character, powers, and vulnerabilities. The photo above is part of the process it documents. (How else do you keep a pig in the air?) And viruses that are continually developing also are part of the modern world system, ready to replicate themselves throughout global networks that can no longer be dismantled without dismantling modern society itself.

The hastily assembled “Anti-Flu Section” of products is a miniature version of the anti-flu response more generally. The same practices that create the flu can be turned against it, perhaps to good effect, but they also are the conditions in which the next virus is already developing. The epidemic is not a modern thing, but only modernity makes a virtue of replication.

Photograph by Pichi Chuang/Reuters. Additional photos on the swine flu outbreak are available at The Big Picture.

1 Comment

Sight Gag: Frost/Nixon Rediva

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Condoleezza Rice Interviewed at Stanford, April 2009

Q: Is Waterboarding Torture:

Rice: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture ….

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

Rice: I just said, the U.S. was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

Credit: Mr. Fish

The “Sight Gag” 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.

0 Comments

In the Interest of a Useable Past, Part II

By guest correspondent Patrick Wade.

As long as we are cataloging historical moments of American injustice, violence, protest, and trauma in early May–and their importance for ongoing memory-work “in the interest of a usable past”–we shouldn’t forget about the labor dimension of May Day, and its origins in the Haymarket tragedy of May 4, 1886.

On May 3, Chicago police officers killed two strikers in a fight at McCormick Reaper Works. In response to the killing, a meeting was called by August Spies and Albert Parsons at Chicago’s Haymarket square. As the meeting was winding down and Samuel Fielden, the evening’s final orator, was speaking, 175 Chicago police officers marched on the gathering and demanded that the remaining crowd disperse. An unidentified person in the crowd threw a dynamite bomb into the police ranks, instantly slaying Officer Matthias Deegan and wounding several others. The police began to fire into the crowd, and, in the aftermath, eight prominent anarchists and labor leaders were arrested and tried for murder. Five were executed by hanging, although Chicago Mayor John Peter Altgeld would later pardon the survivors and exonerate the executed, as none of the men could be proven to have taken part in any conspiracy to murder.

On May 15th, 11 days following the initial events, Harper’s magazine published the illustration that you see above. The image–like much of the editorial commentary at the time–blamed anarchists and labor agitators for violence. Samuel Fielden is pictured exhorting the crowd in spite of the melee unfolding below him. One crowd member is shown firing on the police. The image depicts a riot, one with villains (the crowd) and heroes (the police). The illustration is composing a useable past–for the state.

Photography’s realism doesn’t hinder depictions of “wild” crowds of protesters to paint dissent as illegitimate, blameworthy acts of violence against the legitimate guarantors of social order. We would do well to remember this as we look at contemporary news stories displaying the violent outcomes of May Day rallies across Europe. See, for example, the MSNBC.com article “May Day Turns Violent across Europe, or the New York Times article “Anger and Fear Fuel May Day Protests.”

Conventional images of protest such as this foreground the wild-eyed, long-haired, bearded anarchist as a threat to the social order. And are images like the one below, that represent the “pure” possibilities of peaceful protest, any less naive in their erasure of the inherent potential for violence in the gathering of crowds?

When the New York Times leads the online version of its story about European May Day protest with this image, the viewer is encouraged to see legitimate protest as serenely peaceful, which makes images of violent protest distressful, disturbing, and illegitimate by comparison.

But of course, we need not be trapped between these two images of protest. There is a third, democratic possibility, one that relies on a different strategy that falls outside of the play of guilt and innocence in the two photographs above.

Here we see a photograph of the community gathering together to engage in collective action to bring about change. The crowd is always potentially violent, and this is part of its strength. But this violence is always implicit, and it creates the possibility of a political demand–one that can best be represented in the gathering of bodies together in a collective, embodied argument, under a banner, in plain view of a seat of governmental power.

Can we not draw a further parallel to a different photograph, another image of a crowd taken from the civil rights movement in the US? One that draws upon all the aesthetic powers of photographic design to eloquently depict collective solidarity?

Yes we can.

Illustration by Harper/s Weekly/public domain. Photographs by Mustafa Ozer/Agence France Press – Getty Images; Fred Dufour/Agence France Press – Getty Images; Lucas Dolega/European Pressphoto Agency; Warren Leffler/US News and World Report. Patrick Wade is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University. He can be contacted at wpatrickwade at gmail.com.

0 Comments

Mainlining on Wall Street

American journalism’s vaunted self-image as a watchdog apparently stops at the curb of Wall Street. Instead of investigative journalism, the public is fed executive hagiographies and paeans to entrepreneurship and productivity. Even after the downward spiral of the last few months, the analysis often is devoted too much to praising the intelligence of the players and the complexity of the deals. The accompanying photos of gilded office towers and middle-aged guys in sharp clothes hardly diminishes the luster of those supposedly being scrutinized. And then, in a single stroke, an image appeared this weekend that stabbed through to the truth.

The image accompanied a New York Times article in the Sunday Business section of the paper on “How Lehman Got Its Real Estate Fix.” The title and this stunning photo illustration are the only suggestions of addiction in the paper. By contrast, in the article we learn of the keen intelligence and deeply reflective character of Mark Walsh, the financier who “pioneered” the practice of repackaging real estate debt to produce huge short term profits–and a massive backlog of toxic debt. But read all you want, as long as you look at the image and the truth exposed by its visual artistry.

Drug addicts can be smart, real smart, and also well educated and highly creative. They’re still addicts. A culture that is based on addiction can be dazzling and also incredibly destructive. The rest of the world is now waking up to the fact that we’ve been living with unchecked addiction, and the savings account has been looted, the future mortgaged, and trust destroyed.

And finally someone said so. The image doesn’t speak directly, of course, but a statement has been made. The image manipulates available iconography and our sense of scale to create a powerful sense of dislocation and abuse. How could that building be there? Well, how could trillions of dollars in wealth be shrunk to next to nothing, isn’t the entire debacle about losing any reasonable sense of proportion, any sense of natural limit or appropriate restraint? Why the Chrysler building? Well, wasn’t the damage done by some of the classiest firms on the Street, and weren’t they willing to use anything–anything–to feed their habit? And shooting up? Well, they were tough guys willing to take any risk, right?

If the image is scandalous, it is because that is what is needed to expose a culture of enabling and denial. Think about it. You don’t deal with addiction effectively by taking away the drug–or by giving the addict money and another chance at self-regulation. The life of the individual and of the family has to be re-examined and restructured to some positive end. The artists at the Times have revealed the true nature of the problem. That’s as much as they can do. Now we need to see if the current administration is willing to admit to what is wrong, and what needs to be done.

Photo illustration by the New York Times, May 3, 2009. Cross posted at BAGnewsNotes.

1 Comment

In the Interest of a Useable Past

There are only a very few dates in U.S. history that are instantly recognizable by most citizens: July 4, December 7, June 6, September 11; for baby boomers, maybe, November 22. But beyond that, we tend to remember events more than dates; and when such events are no longer present to the collective mind’s eye they tend to fade into the dustbin of history—part of the academic historian’s palette, to be sure, but increasingly difficult to access as a usable past. Few people recall the significance of May 3rd in U.S. history. I didn’t, and I have studied and even published essays and books that speak to the momentous events of that day in 1963; or at least I didn’t recall the significance of the date until I literally stumbled upon the two photographs below while surfing the web and looking for something to write about yesterday morning.

The images were included in a slide show titled “This Week in History” and buried deep on the Camera Works page of the Washington Post beneath twenty three other slide shows on a potpourri of topics ranging from the swine flu crisis, the Chrysler bankruptcy, and President Obama’s first 100 days in office to the Kentucky Derby, a photo exhibit at the MOMA on the recent history of fashion, a retrospective on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the visit of an eight year old beaver to a veterinary dentist, images of animals from around the world, and the top ten sports photos of the week. As far as I can tell, nothing else in the WP commented on the events of May 3, 1963 in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, nor for that matter was the topic addressed by any of the major news outlets or agencies, including the local Birmingham News. It is almost as if the events of that day have faded from collective memory, no longer necessary to a productive and usable understanding of our nation’s bloody racial past.

The point is accentuated some by the front page of Sunday’s NYT, which included two stories above the fold, one touting President Obama’s professorial pragmatism in thinking about the Supreme Court and the other titled “In Obama Era, Voices Reflect Rising Sense of Racial Optimism.” Replete with photographs, the later story featured polling data indicating that 2/3s of Americans hold that “racial relations are good” and illustrates the point with anecdotal data of blacks and whites “communicating” on the streets, at the gym, and so on. The article concludes with the words of an African-American auditor from Tampa, FL, “I’m not saying that the playing field is even, but having elected a black president has done a lot.” It would seem as if we have moved beyond the days of Bull Connor and the KKK; and if so, maybe it is time to let the images of water cannon and attack dogs fade into the recesses of our collective memory as the nation heals its wounds and moves forward.

Or maybe not … for buried within the NYT article is the report of statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center indicating that there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of active hate groups in the U.S. since 2000. The Times barely recognizes the point, concerned more with the “sense of racial optimism,” but the significance of those numbers is underscored in last week’s edition of Newsweek, which repeated them as part of a feature story on the recent “rebranding” of white supremacist groups as “mainstream” political organizations. The online version of the article was accompanied by a slide show of images such as these:

What is disturbing about these photographs is not just that they put hateful symbols on display, but that they are happily posed—and by young people, the next generation of Americans—without the hint of public shame. Indeed, it is no stretch to imagine these individuals proudly posting these images on social networking sites like Facebook or You Tube with full expectation of their viral dissemination.

Walter Benjamin says that to “articulate the past historically” means to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” and thus to recollect the present (and one can only assume its implications for the future) in relationship to a prior moment in time. To fail to do this, he suggests, is to take the risk that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” I would like to think that the election of President Obama has put an end to the American Tragedy of racial discord and set the nation on a trajectory to an ever hopeful future. I would like to believe that we could securely tuck away the photographs of May 3, 1963 or to recall them with the same simple curiosity that leads me to wonder about Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural genius or the dental problems of aging rodents. I worry, however, that if we fail to articulate our image of President Obama’s election with our images of that fateful day that we do a grave disservice to ourselves and to the safety of future generations of Americans – and more, to the many who gave their lives in the name of racial justice.

Photo Credits: Charles Moore/Getty; Bill Hudson/AP; Bruce Gilden/Magnum and Newsweek

2 Comments

Sight Gag: Don't Forget to Wash Your Hands Frequently

Photo Credit: Unknown e-mail.

2 Comments

Child Labor, The Sequel

By guest correspondent Megan Bernard

When I was seven I saw a picture of a little girl and a machine that I have never forgotten.

The vivid incongruity between her and her surroundings gave me an uneasy sense of disproportion and wrongness. She was a child like all others—like me—but something was not right. Her eyes and shoulders showed deep fatigue and her ragged, dirty dress sagged on her frail, brittle-looking little body. All that mysterious metal in front of her was menacing but she reached to touch it almost casually–it was clear that she was familiar with the thing. She was not alone— a blurred figure hovered in the background—but she was isolated, her downcast eyes turned away from the light and focused on the machinery. Although I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing, intuitively I recognized that I was a witness to a thing that should not have happened. The picture was a striking glimpse of a realm of routine hurt and unfairness; it revealed a chronically vulnerable kid in a place where she did not belong.

Lewis Hine took this photo and many others as he systematically documented exploited children in America from 1908-1912. Hine was an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee and his pictures circulated widely as part of the Progressive movement to ban child labor. Hine’s vivid photos contributed significantly to this cause by revealing American child laborers to the public, and his legacy as a prominent, active, socially conscious artist is secure.

That legacy includes the work of G. M. B. Akash, a photojournalist who is documenting living and laboring conditions for dispossessed people in India, Pakistan, and Nepal.

Like Hine’s images, Akash’s photographs foreground big, rigid machines against small, soft children. And as with Hine, a sense of disproportionate scale and incongruous textures emphasizes the wrongness of such scenes. That sense of irreducible impropriety is amplified when the century-old photographs reverberate through their modern echoes: the problem of child labor has not yet been solved.

Does this repetition of visual themes suggest that child exploitation cannot be eradicated? That the ills of industrialized labor will persist because of our human greed, thrift, need, and ignorance–and the mobility of capital? I take a more hopeful view. These pictures, photographers, subjects, and viewers are separated by continents and a century, but images in this style have not lost their power to establish connections across profound social, geographic, and temporal distance. Such exploitation thrives when it is hidden, so exposing it is a crucial step to fighting it, but the mode of exposure also matters. Not all pictures of child laborers are equally powerful, and Akash’s repetition of established masterworks is a strong strategy. Echoes of Hine’s photos visually spotlight similarities between casualties of the second Industrial Revolution in Vermont and the global economy in Bangladesh. Concerted progressive activism helped in the first case. Those same efforts are called for now.

Photographs by Lewis Hine, 1908-1909 (estimated) and G. M. B. Akash, 2009. Megan Bernard is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University. She can be contacted at megan@northwestern.edu.

2 Comments