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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

We have all seen images like this before.  A photograph of photographs.  A wall of missing or deceased men, women, and children remembered by little more than their photographic residues.  Once they were here to be photographed, but now they are not.  All that remains are these images.  A visual aide-mémoire to what once was but is no more. The photographs here represent the thousands who were tortured, murdered, and imprisoned in Pinochet’s Chile, but it is no different in kind from the Holocaust Museum’s “Tower of Faces” and other such memorial installations.  One of the things that distinguishes such photographs (and the  installations that they represent) is the anonymity of the individuals being remembered.  And even when a name is available, it is little more than a verbal marker that designates the face portrayed, but tells us nothing of the person being memorialized, of who they were: their successes and failures, their joys and sorrows, their personal conceits and virtues, etc.  In an important and somewhat ironic way, that is precisely the point.  What makes photographs such as the one above notable is how they aggregate a mass of individuals as a collective, not by metonymic reduction of the many into the one, but by underscoring the sense in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  And the normative impact of that is palpable, all the more so since it marks a crime that has no name.

The torture and murder of any individual is unjust, to be sure, but here the injustice is magnified literally beyond comprehension.  To begin with, many of the images are simply beyond the range of ordinary human vision, both too high and at an oblique angle from the floor, making it very nearly impossible to register the visual representation of any individual with any  real precision.  And yet, even though many of the photographs cannot be easily registered there is no doubt that they are to be seen, just as those recorded in the images were once there to be seen.  But more, there is something of the quality of an optical illusion: Try to focus on an individual face and you are almost immediately lost in the collage of images that demarcate the sprawling but vaguely ordered mass, look to the whole so as to make sense of its collective order and your line of sight is drawn to individual faces, and then back again.  The overall effect is to underscore the sheer impossibility of taking in, let alone understanding, the magnitude of the crime imagined and being remembered.

And therein lies, at least in part,  the power of the photographic image: to help us show—and perhaps to see—when words are simply not up to the task.

Photo Credit:  Aliosha Marquez/AP

One might expect a silhouette to signify some deficiency, at least of knowledge.  Instead of detail, we see only darkness; instead of personality, anonymity.  When life is reduced to simple cut-outs, we seem to be in the realm of craft projects, not the sensuous intelligence of art.  Photography, however, can take us to a third place.

This boy has been caught in a sliver of time, just enough to isolate his youthful figure before it returns to splash and flow, all movement and delight in the water.  We can see exactly the odd proportions that characterize the child’s body, and the awkward awareness of that body in space–something that will be completely dissolved as he enters the water.

Reducing the individual boy to an outline seems to essentialize something–the human form, perhaps, and, more likely, Childhood.  Thus the image reminds us that, whatever is there, is fleeting.  Likewise, although the hard surface of the water will return to liquid, that igneous surface reveals another reality beneath his simple pleasure.  Enjoy the moment, kid, because soon enough the world won’t be so giving.  The mood is nostalgic, and with that, all too conventional.

No visual technique need have a single emotional effect, and adulthood is more than the loss of innocence.  This second photograph suggests another, very different experience.

Visitors stroll around the National Grand Theatre in Bejiing.  Here even silhouettes have silhouettes.  The ground appears to be something like a fun-house mirror, and yet the shadows are as crisp as the standing figures.  As above, motion as been arrested, but here many small details suggest continual movement as each individual projects a specific inclination.  The various groupings tells us that we are in a public space, one where individuals go their varied ways, small groups congregate for varied purposes, and everyone is comfortable enough among strangers.  Again, the silhouette reveals something fundamental about both a place and a time of life, or, perhaps, an historical period.  The mood, which comes from both figures and ground, is at once peaceful and agitated, like the modern civil society that it mirrors.  And whereas the first photograph made water appear like rock, this photo suggests that the ground itself can melt like ice cubes in a world where all that is solid melts into air.

Silhouettes depend on darkness, but these photographs are distinguished also by the play of light.  Each can prompt meditation in either direction: toward a more pessimistic or a more optimistic end.  I guess I’m feeling optimistic today.  If the first image captures a state of nature and the joy of childhood, the second suggests that there is something luminous about adult life in a modern society as well.  If that is so, the better images will be those that help us see, not the outline, but the form.

Photographs by Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press and Andy Wong/Associated Press.  You can see other posts at NCN on silhouettes by using the search function in the right sidebar.  The light in the images is today is silver, but the title of the post continues a theme also expressed with gold.

Credit: Marguiles

“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.

It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere and another snowstorm is descending across the Great Lakes.  Traffic will snarl, walking will become a chore, and those staying home will come to feel  like they are under house arrest.  It seems inevitable, yet almost cruel, to then dream of summer’s golden reverie.

The surfers are almost incidental–tiny figurines or animate shadows whose puny shapes are there only to remind us how much the lavish, liquid sunlight dwarfs human scale.  One has to labor to realize that the photograph shows only light, not pools of molten gold.  And yet, even as that gold pools on a plane of sand and sea that also seems forged of the sun’s metal, there is a dark undertone.  The day is long, and we know that this moment of sheer natural extravagance cannot last.  A moment out of time is still tinged with mortality.

Here the golden light is even more pronounced, and yet the drama of light and darkness is sharper still.  The brilliant horizon, as if the sea were another sun, flows like lava into the city of Cape Town, but both sky and land are already under another dispensation.

But the light always returns.  Indeed, it ennobles all that it touches.  Here an arid land, fractured by mountains and riven by war, appears like Shangri La.  The golden mountains of Afghanistan, one might imagine, looking like pure gold, set in the middle distance of God’s eye, surely a blessed place.

And surely not a blessed place, if you think of the suffering there, with more to come.  And so gold can seem to be no more than a trick of light, just as it also is an obviously artificial commodity, a fictional standard, and the stuff only of distraction and fantasy.  The eye is easily mislead, one might say, and so both photographic art and serious thought should stick to reality’s gray scale.

But these images reveal another truth, one that could have genuinely radical implications.  The golden light is but one aspect of the sun’s unending flow across the earth, and with that, of humanity’s ever present wealth.  No one–ever–accomplishes anything without this free gift of energy that could never be created otherwise.  There is a metaphor here as well (another extravagance), for sunlight not only gives of itself but represents other forms of wealth.  The lesson of these images is not that warmth or beauty or any human good is necessarily apportioned to certain times or places, but that the good life is constantly available for those who can learn to see.

As I’ve said before, the deeper challenge now facing politics, and so art, is not to manage scarcity but to realize the abundance already available in nature and culture.  Abundance that often is not seen up close and that might be waiting where least expected, as if far out at sea or on distant mountains.

Photographs by Sarah Lay/Guardian, Mike Hutchingst/Reuters, Moises Saman/New York Times.

The current war in Afghanistan began in October, 2001.  In U.S. history only the Revolutionary War and the War in Vietnam have occupied longer periods of time. For most of us this has been a quintessentially modern war fought at a distance:  we have “lived through” the war, but not “in it.”*  Temporally present, the war remains geographically distant, and as time has passed we have become increasingly inured to both, habituated to the war’s everydayness—an ordinariness made manifest by the capacity of realist photography to construct us, here at home, thousands of miles from the violence and suffering, as passive and objective spectators.  Recently, however, realist photography has given way to an artistic impressionism that seeks to open the war to a different affect.

Notice how the caption in the NYT features the conventional expectations of professional journalism, reporting exactly what we are seeing in all of its mundanity, while telling us almost nothing at all, the meaningful significance of the image elided by the abstract invocation of time and distance:  “US Marines and Afghan National Army soldiers carried out an operation in the Garmair District of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday.”  And, of course, it is the representation of time and distance that animates this image.  Were this an ordinary photograph of a patrol shot in middle distance, adhering to the realist conventions for focus and exposure, it is likely that we would not take a second glance at it.  We would see it, but we would not look at it.

But, of course, it is not an ordinary image.  Shot from a long view (almost, but not quite a panorama), mindful of the effects of linear perspective, and cast in muted, hazy light, the focus dreamy-soft to the point of distraction, the photograph has all of the qualities of an impressionistic water color. And as it animates an impressionist aesthetic, notice that it complicates the relationship between the scene and the viewer.  One can no longer look at the representation as an objective, mechanically reproduced image that provides all that one needs to know.  It is impossible to distinguish between US Marines and Afghan Nationals, time is elongated into an abstract and almost imperceptible future, and in the process, what is palpably distant becomes ever closer as the viewer is now encouraged (or dared) to look over the edge of the frame with a certain degree of awe and foreboding (perhaps invoking something like the sublime affect of Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog).

War tests the limits of  human communication: it cannot be experienced in its totality, and thus it can never known—let alone communicated in any complete way—by one individual to another; it mobilizes appeals for solidarity while separating people from home and community; and so on.  And all of this is made more problematic as we become habituated to these inherent dilemmas, made all the more “comfortable” with a war at a distance that we see but never really comprehend.  Photographs like the one above aestheticize war, to be sure, but in doing so they make it increasingly difficult to look and not see, to experience the distance between here and there at a distance.

Photo Credit:  Kevin Frayer/AP

*This quotation, as well as the inspiration for the post come from Mary Favret’s very important War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Warfare (Princeton UP, 2010).

Of all the photographs in the slide shows reviewing the last decade, this surely was one of the more perfect images.

A British soldier is reflected in a pool of oil near Basra, Iraq.  Because the individual soldier’s face is lost in shadow while his body is fused visually with the oil, the image seems made for allegorical reading.  It was all about the oil, right?  (If only that were true, for then the costs of extraction might have been considerably lower.)  Political meaning certainly is embedded in the photograph, but there is much more there as well.

Most important, I think, is the sheer beauty and artistic quality of the image.  The deep blue, which you can’t help but see as both sea and sky, and the brilliant crystals of sand that could be both islands and clouds, and then the terrible complication of the soldier emerging out of the blue liquid like an apparition, like some petrochemical genie awaiting a command. . . .  The sense of the photograph is that these elements have coalesced for more than any instrumental reason: no, they reflect a much deeper and more powerful hold on the imagination.

Audiences in the US have been lining up throughout the holiday break to see the film Avatar, in which an indigenous people living close to nature defeat high-tech, mechanized, military contractors serving an extraction industry that will stop at nothing to maximize profits.  Again, the allegory is all too obvious, and the fact that the beautiful people are blue doesn’t hurt either.  For all the New Age styling of the Noble Savage myth, the film presents war as unquestionably the means by which both individuals and peoples achieve dignity and security.  In the movie, as in other images such as the one above, war proves capable of aligning itself not only with rational self-interest, prudent adaptation, or any other virtue, but also with beauty and all it can represent.  As Chris Hedges noted, war is a force that gives us meaning, and it will stop at nothing to do so.

The photograph above is an image of a reflection.  “Avatar” refers to an incarnation of a Hindu god, a personification of a concept, principle, or attitude, or a virtual representation of a person.  The soldier in the photograph can channel each sense of the term–particularly if you run the logic in the other order, as it actually does run from person to war to the deification of war as a force fused with the power of nature.

War, beauty, and photography are all forces that give life meaning.  They are not the same force, however, and one challenge at this moment in the 21st century is to see how war is capable of capturing other dimensions of human experience that could be used to stop it.

Photograph by Dan Chung/Guardian, from Pictures of the Decade at Guardian.co.uk.