NO CAPTION NEEDED

ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

This week we feature a CBS report that celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Berlin Wall by drawing upon the work and reminiscences of photojournalist (and longtime friend of NCN) Peter Turnley.  Click on the image to view the video, or click here to read his column on the fall of the Wall at the Digital Journalist and here to see a stunning gallery of his photographs that includes both the fall of the Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

Photo Credit: Peter Turnley/Corbis

November 11th was originally proclaimed Armistice Day by President Wilson in 1919 as a day for remembering those who sacrificed their lives in the first “war to end all wars.”  In 1926 the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution in which November 11th was designated as a day for commemorating “with thanksgiving and prayer exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”  In 1954 Armistice Day was renamed “Veteran’s Day” by President Eisenhower in order to acknowledge and honor all veterans in the wake of World War II and the Korean conflict. The movement from commemorating a “war to end all wars” in the name of peace, good will and mutual understanding to a day for honoring Veterans of all wars without prejudice is not subtle, although we rarely if ever seem to acknowledge the difference.  The point to be made here, however, is that this very shift in meaning correlates in no small way with the difficulty we have had in recent times in judging any national military aggression lest we risk doing harm to those who actually do the fighting.

The many slide shows at mainstream journalistic websites marking Veteran’s Day this past week make the point, as photograph after photograph presents visually eloquent and decorous displays of the sacrifices of those who nobly served and often died in the service of their country without any specific reflection on the particular wars being fought. This battle, that invasion, it doesn’t really seem to matter, as the reasons for fighting are visually trumped by an abstract, visual display of national sacrifice that, in the end, reduces the individual to the nation-state.  The photograph above from the Wall Street Journal is a case in point. The hearse carries the flag draped remains of a soldier recently killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.  There is nothing in the image that marks that fact, although the caption does give the deceased’s name and rank, but notice how the photograph itself works to deflect attention from the particular sacrifice inside the hearse to the wall of flags that extends to infinity reflected on the vehicle’s highly polished, exterior surface.  The hearse is thus cast as a mirror, and as the photograph invites us to view it as such, what we see—as with any mirror—is a reflection of ourselves.  And what that reflection reveals is not the individual per se, but the nation signified by an inexorable march of the flag.  Whatever specific cause took the life of this soldier seems to pale in comparison, and certainly is not subject to question.

A second photograph from the same paper on the same day underscores and extends the nationalist implications of the first image above.

Here we have a boy who is described without a name as a “Junior Reserve Offices Training Corps honor guard” participating in a Veteran’s Day ceremony.  Lacking a name, he takes on the quality of a individuated aggregate—an individual cast in the role of a collective.  He stands for something more than himself.  But what?  The eyes, we are told, are the windows to the soul.  But here, notice that his  eyes are hidden from view; if he has an individual soul it is not accessible to us.  What we have instead is his serious countenance defined by the set of his jaw balanced against the bright, mirror-like surface of his highly polished helmet, an instrument of war turned to ceremonial purposes.  The helmet reflects both the deeply saturated colors of the national flag that he appears to be holding, and which shrouds his head and shoulders, as well as another flag, more difficult to make out, that appears to be in his line of vision.  There is no hint of the boy here, let alone the individual veteran, but a connection between past (behind him) and future (in front of him) defined only by the national colors.  His (and our) present is defined  by  a direct line from past to future and the trajectory is … well, fated.  And once again, the flag marches on.

We can and should remember those who sacrifice their lives for the common good.  But in doing so we are well advised to recognize and reflect on what is being sacrificed to what, and to avoid the temptation—however comforting it might be—to make a fetish of the flag and what it represents in the process.

Credit:  Darron Cummings/AP; Nati Harnick/AP

Credit:  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.

Like Hope and Crosby, your NCN guys are on the road this week. Unfortunately its nothing as exotic as Bali, or Rio, or Zanzibar … but who knows what mayhem we will create.  We’ll be back next Sunday with a new sight gag as we get ready to wind down another year.

Credit: Jim Morin, Miami Herald

“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.

Credit: John Sherrfius

“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.

Our language is fettered with visual clichés. “Seeing is believing,” but also “don’t believe everything you see.” And don’t forget that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Of course, our very favorite visual cliché here at NCN is “No caption needed.” As the title of both our book and blog, some readers often assume that we mean to be arguing that photographs speak for themselves and that captions are truly not necessary. In point of fact, our use of the phrase is meant to be ironic (it would actually be in quotes in the title of our book so as to call attention to it as a cultural saying and thus to set ourselves apart from it, but our publisher insisted that using quotation marks would confuse search engines and make it harder for people to find the book). The irony points in two directions. On one hand we mean to argue that in most instances captions are very much needed, and on the other hand, we mean to argue that whether needed or not, they are virtually unavoidable.

Both points are driven home by a recent NYT Lens showcase titled “Stirring Images, No Names.” The showcase reports on a photographic exhibit about to open in London titled “Beware the Cost of War.” The exhibit consists of violent and often gruesome images from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict taken by both Israeli and Palestinian photographers. And what makes the show unique is that it “lacks captions and credits next to the images.” The point, according to Yoav Galai, the photographer who curated the exhibit, was to “tear [the photographs] away from their narrative” under the assumption that (according to the NYT reporter) “without words, the pictures will be freer to speak for themselves.” The problem, of course, is that a “picture is worth a thousand words” but without some minimal narrative framing to guide and contextualize image for the “hearer,” it may as well be speaking in tongues.

The first image in the exhibit is a case in point.

It is really hard to know what this is a photograph of, let alone to have any sense of what it might mean or say. The person laying in the field appears to be a soldier. That much we can presumably tell from his uniform and gun. But can we be sure? And if he is a soldier who does he represent? Why is he alone? Or is he alone? After all, we cannot see outside of the frame. Perhaps he has friends (or enemies) surrounding him. Is he fighting a battle? Did he dessert his unit? Is he asleep or dead? And how did he come to be in this place? And where is this place? And on and on … There are no doubt a thousand things—or more—that the photograph could be saying. But apart from some narrative it is hard to know what the point might be. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that as art should be evocative in ways that speak to each viewer differently. But even there, no viewer comes to a picture as a blank slate to absorb the pure sense of the image without some baggage—some narrative frame—that directs their attention and guides the understanding.

That leads to my second point, which is that like it or not, captions (and the narrative frames that they impute) are unavoidable, even when a curator decides that he wants to tear the image “away from its narrative.” Look at the above image a second time, now as it is actually displayed in the exhibit and as viewers encounter it for the first time:

The title superimposed over the photograph is, of course, a caption. And it very clearly directs the viewers attention to a specifically normative interpretation of the image. That interpretation, guided by a warning, is reinforced by a prior warning that precedes the photograph to announce that the images in the exhibit are “graphic.” Taken together, the two warnings function as a less than subtle vector for guiding the viewer to “hear” what the image has to say in a very specific voice.

But even if the narrative framing here was not so obvious—and so explicitly verbal—there are a multitude of other ways in which the photograph is more subtly and effectively captioned and framed. For one thing, it is featured in a photographic exhibit in a London gallery, which if nothing else marks it as a special artistic or documentary artifact and guides our engagement with it. Were we to encounter it in a newspaper or on a billboard or in a Soldiers of Fortune magazine the specific meaning of the form of mediation would be different, but the general effect of its form as a mode of captioning and framing would still be palpable. Additionally, the many images in the exhibit (as with the selection reproduced by the Lens) are placed in a spatial and temporal relationship to one another so as to create a flow or montage effect according to which the meaning and force of any individual image is accented and implicated by the images that surround it.

One can withhold credits and specific captions from individual images, to be sure, but to believe that doing so allows the pictures to “speak for themselves” in any pure sense is simply mistaken—more a fantasy than a real possibility. The problem here is not that we might not learn something by valuable by bracketing or withholding the specific captions that name or frame a particular image—and indeed, the power of “Beware the Cost of War” is really quite valuable in this regard as it evocatively underscores the human tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict … and maybe of all human conflict; rather, the problem is in the risk that we might be fooled into forgetting that photographs are artistic creations—not ideologically neutral or wholly transparent windows on the world—and in that register they never entirely speak for themselves.

Photo Credit: Uriel Sinai

Kids have been in the news a good bit lately. A few months back you may recall the big flap when President Obama delivered a speech before school aged children and was accused of attempting to indoctrinate them with his “socialist ideology”: stay in school and work hard. Children, it seems, are especially susceptible to the siren song of presidential eloquence and need to be protected. Since then I’ve taken notice of the fact that children—much like animals—appear to show up more or less randomly in lots of the “pictures of the day” slide shows one finds on the websites of most national newspapers. What I mean by “randomly” is that such images oftentimes seem to have no direct connection to stories or events otherwise being reported. And yet it happens so regularly that it seems reasonable to assume that something is being communicated. But what? Consider three images that showed up this past week at the Wall Street Journal.

Here we have a mother and her son dressed up in super hero costumes for the “Big Apple Comic-Con.” If you don’t know what that is, well, neither do I, and there is nothing in the WSJ that gives us a clue. And it is probably besides the point anyway. But what is the point? The picture seems to lack any real drama. The costumes seem altogether out of place—notice that no one around them seems to be in costume—and thus direct attention to the one thing that stands out: facial expressions. The mother, whose face is partially veiled by glasses and hair, smiles possessively at her child who in turn stares at the camera with what can only be described as a measure of both skepticism and resignation.

A second picture offers a point of comparison.

The photograph is of a “tribal family” fleeing a military attack against militants in South Waziristan, as they approach a checkpoint near Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan. There is a bit more context here as the military assault against the Taliban leading to over 100,000 refugees was actually covered in the paper, but the affective meaning of the image itself is hard to read. All of the adults are women and their faces are veiled according to the local custom. What draws our attention once again is the face of a child, and once again the child bears the countenance of skepticism and resignation. The difference here, of course, is that the child is not looking directly at the camera—more in the manner of an offer than a demand—even as his countenance seems channeled by the goat in the lower right of the frame who does appear to be looking directly at the viewer.

A third photograph of a mother and her child walking past a pile of debris left by a series of storms in the Philippines provides an additional point of comparison.

Here, the scene is overwhelmed by what appears to be a mountain of rubble. Once again the face of the adult is veiled as our attention is directed to the face of child which channels the affect of the image. Once again that affect is difficult to read. It doesn’t quite seem to repeat the resignation of the first two images, but there does seem to be evoke a sense of discernment as something in the pile has captured his attention, even if he is not so concerned about it that he seems likely to disconnect from his mother and seek it out

I’m not entirely sure what to make out of this collection of photographs, but even though they are separated from one another in the slide show by other unrelated images, it is hard not to see some point of consonance. There is a degree to which the photographs animate a “Family of Man” sensibility as they direct us to something like the fundamental humanity of children from all around the world—New York, Pakistan, and the Philippines. But there seems to be something more going on here as well, as the affective force of each image emanates from the face and facial expression of a child that belies the presumption of their childlike innocence and intellectual naiveté in a way that suggests that children may be a bit more savvy than some think.

“Out of the mouths of babes” is an old proverb that reminds us that children are capable of knowing far more than we can imagine they know. Perhaps here we have something like the visual complement to that old saying that invites us to see the acumen that even the youngest of children can bring to the world.

Photo Credits: Natalie Behring/Reuters; Ishtiaq Mahsud/AP; Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Many of the more popular spectator sports involve athletes excelling at games the fans play not as well.  Only a very few can go pro, but lots of people can shoot a basket, throw a football, catch a baseball, defend the goal, or sink a putt.  And then there is gymnastics.

Not only is this athlete doing what you see here, but she is doing it while leaping on a balance beam.  Maybe you might try to jump high into the air and land again on a hard surface that is four inches wide and four feet off the floor, but not me.   Nor am I likely to do a poor back flip with a full twist vault, or a not so good iron cross.   Without years of highly disciplined training, the level of difficulty is way beyond anything to be attempted by a weekend warrior.

But I digress.  Perhaps by now the shock of the photograph above is being to wear off.  There is something horrifying about decapitation, even when we know that the severing is an illusion.  A trick of the camera, an accident of angle, we know intuitively that the head is merely out of our line of sight.  And yet.  The body works so well without it, the musculature is so perfectly developed and disciplined, it could almost double as a science fiction athlete in a future where everything has been genetically engineered for optimal performance, with all other aesthetic and moral values cut away as well.

The photograph may be showing us a glimpse of the future, but it also reveals thing or two about the present.  Genetics aside, the athlete has been engineered for optimal performance, and so the image reveals the extraordinary specialization that goes into the higher echelons of modern sport–and other sectors of modern society.  It also might hint at some of the costs for the individual athlete, who often sacrifices educational opportunities and much else in the short term while enduring chronic physical discomfort or worse later in life.

I think it also reveals a deeper condition that is intertwined with our visual experience.  The obvious distortion in the visual image (the fictive decapitation) exposes the actual distortion of the body that occurs in many forms of training.  Although images of athletes have been used since Greek antiquity to portray the Body Beautiful as a perfect expression of the natural physique, in fact, sport, like art of any sort, involves doing things that are not simply natural.  Excellence in any cultural activity involves making the unusual so ingrained that it seems to be second nature.  The athlete or artist or other performer takes what is arbitrary, contingent, artificial, and otherwise a matter of of choice and effort, and fashions it into an seemingly effortless act.

Our sense of beauty can beguile us on this point, and many photographs of gymnasts and other athletes may serve that denial of how strange, contorted, and otherwise artificial our use of our bodies can be as people dance, paint, do surgery, build houses, or sit at a computer and write.  Nothing we do can be contrary to the laws of nature or our body’s inherent incapacities, but as we live in cultures of bodily discipline we learn to function as bodies without heads, heads without bodies, and many other equally odd designs.

What people don’t do, however, is develop a sense of their bodies as plastic material waiting to be formed and reformed under pressure.  In fact, one use of both images and mirrors seems to be to maintain a sense of a proportionate bodily integrity.  Which is why I am closing with this photograph:

The intact body is visible, but there still is something wrong.  Now it seems that the athlete has become compressed by the powerful gravitational forces built up when torquing around the bar.  The body is still  trained and controlled, and one once again knows intuitively that the foreshortening is a visual trick and not the actual crushing of the body to produce the world’s shortest woman, and yet. . . . Second nature is again exposed: the body’s innate capabilities have been transformed into s specific and astonishing art, one that dazzles the mind.  If you think about what is being revealed, however, you might realize that artistic excellence depends upon deformation, and that because it is a product of culture, the human being has no fixed form.

Photographs by Carl de Souza/AFP-Getty Images and Toby Melville/Reuters from the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships 2009 in London.

The full title of this post could be Face/Paint Kitsch/Art Look/See Now/Then Pleasure/Pain Again.  If that isn’t perfectly clear, I’m not surprised.  The story starts here:

The photograph is of a soccer fan from Ghana painted for a World Cup qualifying match.  We see the bright colors and his intense expression simultaneously.  The image is vivid, striking, both festive and elemental, and it reverberates with shock, surprise, and dismay without registering any one of those reactions with any certainty.  Whatever he actually was feeling, there is no doubt that this was a moment of intensity.  You can see why it would jump out of the thousands of thunbnail images on a photo-editor’s desktop.

For all that, the photo also is thoroughly conventional. The slide shows at the major papers are full of such images throughout the various carnival seasons–and if the news is slow otherwise, there always seems to be a carnival somewhere.  Hindu holy men, Russian street performers, Brazilian revelers, American kids at a state fair–wherever vernacular life meets art, someone’s face is going to be painted.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and journalism and art and all of culture are at bottom repetitive.  This photograph is good of kind, and I would have left it there but for one problem: Not long after I saw it, I came across this photograph:

This self-portrait of Andy Warhol in drag presents another painted face, and the difference between kitsch and art. I generally avoid that distinction, which I see as one of modernism’s least impressive and most overused ideas, and I don’t want to demean the first photograph, which suffers by being put into this unusual comparison. But, my God, what a difference between the two images.

As before, we see the expressive face and the artificial colors simultaneously.  Instead of the momentary frenzy of a sporting event, however, we see a lifetime of pain.  Instead of intensity (alone), here the paint (and wig) ironically evoke the powerful imprint of duration.  As in, I’ve always been this way, always had to carry this inside, always. Although still a striking incongruity, the juxtaposition of male face and female makeup fuses into something that is at once the facial mask of a social type and the naked revelation of an individual soul.

But who’s soul?  The power of Warhol’s photograph comes in part from the realization that you could be seeing one of the many gay men who have been crushed in the closet, or one of the many transgender individuals who feel trapped in their body, or one of the  many women who also have become fused to a mask of silver hair and red lips that promised happiness but is good only to put a face on their suffering.  Because the photo was taken with a Polaroid, there is a hint of pleasure betrayed (just as in the first image above), and a blurring of the line between high and low media (and so of art and kitsch) in order to evoke a common experience.  Although a remarkable work of art, the image is still a photograph, and so it reminds us that what it shows does not happen only once.  Whether the image portrays the individual artist or a social type, we are seeing pain that has occurred again and again.

Photographs by Julian Finney/FIFA-Getty and Andy Warhol/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.  The photograph is on display as part of the exhibition Polaroid: Exp. 09.10.09 at the Atlas Gallery, London.