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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Car accidents, like the one above, are pretty common events in the US, somewhere in the vicinity of 12 million per year.  And that’s probably one reason why we don’t see very many photographs of them in national and regional newspapers.  That the above photograph of an accident in Queens showed up in the WSJ’s “ New York Photos of the Week” slideshow for October 2-8 is thus a bit odd.

For one thing, it’s not a particularly good photograph.  The caption reports a head-on collision but we can only see one vehicle; the car we can see is obscured by the person standing in front of it; and the cropping is somewhat off kilter yielding an unbalanced image with too much empty space on one side, and too much clutter on the other. But more than that, there is nothing that seems to distinguish the event itself.  No one died, though there were injuries, and it doesn’t seem to have been the result of road rage, alcoholism, or texting while driving … all topics that seem to be of some recurring interest—at least in local newspapers. It appears simply to have been a run of the mill car crash.  One of the 12 million.  And what makes its placement all the more curious is that there are two other photographs of relatively ordinary car accidents in the same slideshow for a total of three out of eighteen images.  One can only assume it was a very slow news week in the Big Apple.

Or maybe something else is going on here. Maybe the point is precisely the ordinariness of such accidents in contemporary society. Amidst the work and play of everyday life accidents simply happen.  Individuals may be responsible in some measure, but in an advanced technological society calculated risks are also systemic, animated by the conditions of modern life.  And yet, as the photographs in the WSJ imply, there is also a certain randomness to all of it.  Here two cars hit one another head-on, there two police cars run into one another, or a van runs into a store front.  All we can do is clean up the mess and move on.  Its how we live our lives.

Of course, what counts as ordinary is relative to time and place.  And so we have another photograph concerning an automobile “accident” that circulated across  the blogosphere and showed up on more than a few photographic slide shows in the past week:

The place is East Jerusalem.  The driver of the car is the leader of an Israeli settlement. The boy hurtling through the air is a Palestinian youth who, along with the other boys in the photograph, was allegedly throwing stones at the car. Depending on who you want to believe the driver was either trying to run the youths over or attempting to escape their attack.  There is plenty of evidence to support each interpretation, but truth to tell, the photograph really does very little to help us sort it all out.  What the photograph does indicate, however, is the ordinariness of everyday life within the settlements of the West Bank, a world where settler violence is so common that it becomes impossible to distinguish an accident from a violent assault.  Or, perhaps more to the point, it suggests the sense in which the ordinary risks of everyday life in some parts of the world life far exceed the otherwise simple concerns of random mishaps and misfortunes.

Photo Credit:  Ken Maldonado/Wall Street Journal; Ilia Yefimovich/Agence France-Presse/Getty

It wasn’t but a few weeks ago when the ballyhoo in the US was that the congressional elections this fall were going to be determined by the economy.  Unless the rate of recovery improved, and particularly with regard to the critical variable of unemployment, the Democratic majority was sure to be doomed.  Such conventional wisdom can’t be entirely mistaken, because discontent can drive people to vote for change, but now that the election is approaching the tea leaves are turning a bit muddy.  One reason, of course, is that the airwaves are full of ads about everything but economic policy.  Such reticence is not surprising: the Democrats don’t have a lot to crow about–it’s hard to get excited about saying that things could have been worse–and the Republicans have the even bigger problem of wanting to restore the very policies that created the disaster in the first place.  The result is that we are treated to discussions of Sharia law, the right to carry a concealed weapon while you are drinking in a bar, and whether Social Security is constitutional.  (As for the latter, no, that’s why you have slaves.)

I don’t want to disregard the more obvious explanations for the continuing dysfunction in American public discourse today, but let me suggest another, overlapping reason for the difficulty that the US seems to have when it comes to thinking about the economy.  That reason, as I’ve suggested before, is that too many people don’t think of themselves as workers and of workers as labor, and their distorted conception of themselves is reinforced daily by the images of work that do circulate.  Stated otherwise, neoliberal fantasies about the economy now dominate not only government policy but also the conventions of representation that we rely on to think about the economy.

The photograph above is a convenient example of what I have in mind.  This week the Dow Jones climbed back above 11,000-good news, right? Well, yes, except that it did so after the announcement that 95,000 jobs were lost in September.  This troubling relationship between corporate profits and unemployment is captured neatly in the photograph of Japanese white-collar workers seen through a scrim of stock market data.  On the one hand, the photo seems to depict that labor and stock prices are indivisible parts of the same economic whole.  For there to be profits, there have to be workers; for there to be workers, there have to be profits.  On the other hand, the photo could also reveal how labor and finance are not coordinate, and how the electronic data flows of the stock market are obscuring, displacing, literally writing over the body of labor.  Despite the many workers massed to cross the street, they are becoming invisible beneath the numbers, spread sheets, and abstractions that have become, not merely representations of productive work, but their own reality.

There will always be work, of course; the question is whether it will be seen, recognized, and rewarded.  That’s why I like this photo.

These are workers–and perhaps one customer–at a German Octoberfest.  Needless to say, the photo is a bit different from the typical images of happy waitresses serving tall steins to happy customers.  Here, the waitresses are on break–a couple of smokes, a phone call, a text message.  These last details are informative: although still a part of the global data sphere, the ratio of bodies to electronic display has been reversed.  This is a place of actual work.  Another reason we know that is because there is nothing romanticized about it.  Unlike the smiling faces and effortless activity seen in ads, here we understand that working people can be bored, tired, and having to manage the rest of their lives around the edges of their work, which is tightly scheduled and often includes having to deal with people, like the kid on the left, who are not exactly at their best.

And even if this photograph shows labor, the workers are still back stage, caught in an unguarded moment that might not be subject to company surveillance and proprietary control.  In the US, anyway, we’re not accustomed to looking at work in public, and not at all comfortable–the word should be “competent”–at talking about labor.  Until workers can have their rightful place in the pictures that animate public discussion, the results on the ground are going to continue to be grim.

Photographs by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters and Matthias Schrader/Associated Press.

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.

Remember the oil spill–you know, Deepwater Horizon, millions of gallons spilled, disruption of both the ecosystem and the economy for years to come?  Oh, yeah, that spill, the one we’re now being told wasn’t so bad after all.  Somewhere between Monday Night Football and mid-term election coverage, a massive industrial disaster has sunk to the bottom of the Gulf.  Fortunately, Zoe Strauss has not forgotten, and her documentary project On the Beach is still available at this page.  If you take a look, you can begin to understand why the national news coverage never gets close to the story on the ground, which is that for too many people the US is a catastrophe, and one that has condemned them to internal exile.

Zoe is a progressive photographer and installation artist living in Philadelphia, PA.  Her book America offers profound witness to the people living amidst the faded strip malls, desolate urban spaces, and other scenes of abandonment that can be found across the US.  This is the other “real America,” one where people have to deal with a society that provides freedom and nothing else while lavishing its wealth elsewhere.  To her credit, Zoe never condescends, and her work is not another celebration of human dignity.  We are offered something at least as important in a democratic society: a view from inside their world.

You can learn more about Zoe’s work at her blog.

Well, not any old day, actually, but Game Day:

And it’s not primitive, either: those nails are a product of the machine age, thank you very much, as is the plastic material used to form the mask.  But it is a mask, and he is masked, painted, draped, and otherwise transformed externally and internally for ritualized combat.  That combat has to be imagined between individual warriors, as there is no point in one man trying to frighten a platoon or a plane.  The attempt to terrify is more intimate still, for he bares his teeth as if to rip your throat out.  The fact that they are painted the same colors as the mask adds to the threat, for it says that he has been made into a single being for a single purpose.  Man and mask have become one thing–and it is a thing, as the eyes, window of the soul, are vacant.

If you have any doubt of his now inhuman will to power, look at the nails: he has cannily challenged his adversary by mortifying himself first: what can be done to terrify him, when he has already mutilated his own image?  But who is he, anyway, now that he has fused his identity completely with his team, his tribe?  Although merely a very modern Miami Dolphins fan enjoying the carnival culture of a live football game, he is nonetheless channeling the artistry, psychology, and mythic resonance  associated with primitive societies–at least as they are used to supplement or escape (temporarily) the dominant designs of modern life.

Designs such as this, for example:

Although wearing wrinkled corduroy slacks, this museum visitor is neatly turned out for public viewing; you might call it uptown casual, and you can find it any day of the week in the museums and similar venues for Art and Culture.  The basic black jacket, corresponding gray slacks and gray-white hair with just a hint of muted color in the scarf for accent, along with the sheer geometric surfaces devoid of ornamentation–these are standard features of modern design (and, since men started wearing black in the 19th century, of modernity itself).  If you aren’t sure, just look at the painting, where the design principles have been perfected.

As with the first photograph, the image is striking because of the homology that ties person to thing.   Just as colors joined mask, teeth, and tribe, now color joins spectator, painting, and modern design.  And where the first image was carnivalesque, this one is gently humorous.  What is there to see in that black void?  Will peering intently discover anything in black but black?  Isn’t it amusing that person and artwork seemed to be doubles: that a black surface mirrors an actual person?

It takes only one more step for the joke to turn into something else: perhaps the painting does mirror the person, who may be largely a void after all, and also not much more accessible to the rest of us who can only see the individual from behind, as it were, and as a social type.  And is art imitating life, or is life being made over according to an aesthetic that is abstract, impersonal, dehumanizing–the expression not of the individual person but of mechanization?  And what is the photograph but a witness to Nietzsche’s admonition that “When you stare into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you?”  Perhaps this photograph is a study not only in modern design, but also in a distinctively modern form of terror.

But not the worst terror.  Here we have a third thing: simultaneously primitive and modern, machined and animal-like, horrifically Orwellian yet an actually existing scene from the present.  The workers in their Hazmat suits are cleaning up a toxic sludge spill that inundated a village in Devecser, Hungary.  The costumes are awful, terrifying, and yet not intended to scare anyone.  Even so, there is something terrifying about the suits, not least because the workers seem so completely habituated to them–as though this was just another day on the job.

And that’s one more thing all three images have in common: each is a photograph taken from a relatively special event rather than a typical day’s activity–and yet each of them suggests that something both terrifying and deeply continuous is in fact present.  Blood lust is always there; it’s just a question of how it is sublimated.  The abyss is always there, along with the grinding uniformity of modernization; it’s just a question of how to live well anyway.  The catastrophes that result from industrialization, environmental exploitation, and the continual assault on the commons are becoming woven into the fabric of everyday life in far too many places; the question remains of who is going to do what about i

So take a look at each one and ask yourself which world you want to live in.  You can stare as long as you want to.

Photographs by Allen Eyestone/The Palm Beach Post; DPA; Bernadett Szabo/Reuters.  The Nietzsche quote is my translation of the passage from Beyond Good and Evil, part IV, section 146 (1886).  On the role of black in modern dress, see Men in Black by John Harvey.

The military is a brotherhood.  The battlefield a cauldron of male bonding.  And so it is that we are accustomed to thinking that war is men’s work.  “Real” men’s work.  So much so that even the thought of a homosexual in camouflage is enough to make some in the Pentagon almost apoplectic as they seek to explain the deleterious effect such “integration” would have on unit cohesion.  And generally, the conventional wisdom goes, women are really no less problematic inasmuch as they create “distractions” that disrupt the fragile ecology of the band of brothers. As the photograph above suggests, however, one solution to this problem is to have all-female units, a band of sisters, as it were, who might lend a softer touch in the battle for the hearts and minds of  those whose land we have chosen to occupy by military force.

This photograph leads off a slide show at the NYT titled “The Female Marines” that tells the story of a group of women warriors who have been attached to the 2^nd Battalion, 6^th Marine Regiment in the Helmand Province with the express purpose of “engaging” Afghani women.  The assumption, apparently, is that gender trumps nationalism, and when Afghani women encounter other women they will see past their uniforms and body armor—as well as the fact that they are carrying high powered, automatic weapons—and they will identify with them as women.

The premise relies on a cultural reductionism that is altogether implausible, if not downright absurd given the circumstances of the American occupation of Afghanistan.  And so one has to wonder about photographs such as this one, which show the “engagement team” sitting on the floor in an Afghani home, drinking tea and playing with a toddler while members of the family look on.

The photograph has all the qualities of a snapshot in which the principals studiously avoid acknowledging the camera so as to feign a natural or candid moment. But there is nevertheless a tension in the image that belies the illusion of a comfortable identification between the family and its “visitors.”  Note, for example, how all but the toddler—who presumably has no knowledge or experience that would signal danger or caution—holds back from any direct interaction with the marines. And notice in particular the boy who stands deep in the back corner, his line of sight riveted upon the automatic weapon that sits on the rug in the middle of the floor.  It is hard to know exactly what he is thinking, but it seems unlikely that he is counting his blessings that the people who have taken over his home are women and not men.

That wars such as the one we are fighting in Afghanistan are a struggle for hearts and minds is obvious, and it should give us serious pause as we continue to commit to the use of military force as a way of overcoming the influence of the Taliban in a country that has withstood occupation for centuries.  But more, we need to challenge the notion that such force and occupation can be made less noxious or troublesome—let alone more successful—by trying to feminize it.  In the end, female marines with guns are, well, simply marines with the guns.

Photo Credit:  Lynsey Addano/NYT.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

Credit:  Jim Lo Scalzo/European Passport Agency

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.

By guest correspondent Emily Dianne Cram

Two children in Afghanistan play in an alleyway between two houses.  The child on the left awkwardly turns forward while looking back towards the viewer.  The child, whose name is Mehran appears to be running toward a place in the distance where bodies blur almost indistinguishably from one another.  Or maybe Mehran is running away from the spectator watching the scene unfold.  Whether moving towards or away from particular coordinates, the important point to note is that the viewer of the photograph sees Mehran suspended in what appears to be a moment of stasis, yet simultaneously always moving.

Mehran’s story is one of several featured in a recent New York Times essay and slide show that chronicles a practice known as “bacha posh,” in which female-bodied youth pass as boys to secure their families’ status within their communities.  The title of the essay—“Afghan Boys are Prized, So Girls Live the Part”—cues the spectator habits the “gender abroad” genre typically evokes: condemnation of a misogynistic practice.  Yet, such a judgment seems problematic if we take another look from a perspective that troubles how we think about gender.

What is remarkable about the slide show is the banality of bacha posh in a cultural context Westerners typically see as marked by strict gender segregation.  In the image, below, Azita Rafaat, a member of Parliament, leans down to address Mehran, who dresses as a boy.

The entire scene invokes the narrative of a mother attempting to quiet and contain an unruly child in public. Rafaat’s hand curls firmly around Mehran’s shoulder as she demands the child’s attention with what appears to be a stern look. Rafaat reacts with an expression that is in equal parts puzzlement and discontent.  What is especially distinctive about the photograph is how Mehran’s white clothes blend into the bodies of the men in the background, while Rafaat, shrouded in black, awkwardly ushers the child through the scene.  And what we get is something of an allegory for the often confusing norms of public and private behavior that implicate the equally confusing norms of gender and sexual identity as they manifest in their local contexts. And in the end, Mehran’s particular identity hangs in the balance.

These photographs illustrate how gender in particular is a way of moving one’s way through the world to produce forms of social relationality.  Yet, this view is contingent on seeing gender as a permeable category that people use as a means of building their communities.  Accordingly, gender is an embodied act, something that is done to produce a relation to others in the world.  This perspective enables us to see gender in transition, and how cultural practices often exceed the strict binaries of male/female and woman/man.  Perhaps if we take our everyday embodied violations of categories more seriously, we can see the work gender does in a different light, rather than rush to judgments about others.

And yet, the act of seeing gender in transition is imbued with its own paradoxes.  In the photograph below Zahra, a girl who has passed as a boy since childhood, gazes pensively through sheer curtains towards a bright, sunlit day.

The juxtaposition between the shadows behind Zahra’s back and the white light greeting “hir”* face and torso suggests that the secret past is coming to an end.  Part of bacha posh is a transition into womanhood and the rites of marriage and motherhood.  For Zahra and others, such a transition is difficult and at times undesirable because of the way their bodies sediment a particular way of being with others.  Another look shows Zahra gazing towards an inevitable future with a sense of heavy dread, and we learn not only of hir desire to live as a boy, but that s/he has never “felt like a girl.”

Zahra’s story shows the contingency of gender, and the heartbreak that emerges when one’s own desires for a particular embodiment conflict with community norms and practices.  This tension is endemic to the human condition, one that we all embody as we attempt to find the way our bodies fit into spaces of the world.

* “Hir” is a neutral pronoun that serves as one alternative to the gender binaries embedded in the English language.  I choose to use “hir” in this case because of the way Zahra describes hir embodiment: female bodied, yet desiring a male public presentation. “Hir” emerges from a transgender critique of language, a perspective that understands the limits of and inventional potential of language in articulating the complexity of embodiment.

Photo Credit: Adam Ferguson/NYT

Emily Dianne Cram is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Indiana University, and her research engages the intersections of visual culture, embodiment, and gender and sexuality.  She can be contacted at emcram@indiana.edu.