NO CAPTION NEEDED

ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Now that Tea Party rallies have become “non-political” and dedicated to the vague ideal of restoring honor, perhaps the US media can get on with the business of covering what we might call the Real Government–you know, the one that makes laws, distributes resources, provides services, and generally is tasked with protecting the general welfare.  The Tea Party will be a footnote to history soon enough–no, not soon enough, but soon–and thus the weekend’s march on Washington provides a fitting moment for reflecting on political movements and their leadership.

According to the caption at the New York Times, this is a photograph of Glen Beck waiting backstage with security personnel.  The photo also is a critical study in American propaganda.  The center of the photograph is dominated not by any political actor but rather by a symbol: the Washington Monument celebrates both the nation’s first president and the Enlightenment rationality that his generation of political leaders valued so highly.  Austere, abstract, and not in any way religious (unless you count the Egyptian allusion), the monument perfectly captures both aspiration and stability as they are to be deep virtues of a federal government.

That is not to say that the monument shouldn’t serve as a rallying point for populist movements lead by demagogues preaching about “faith.”  The monument does set the key for the photograph, however, one that is developed further by the framed images left and right.  Abraham Lincoln is Washington’s equal in the pantheon of great leaders, and the figure who guided the nation through its second great crisis.  The Native American figure is apparently emblematic of natural nobility and honor–and perhaps of the honor of the Lost Cause now neatly brushed clean of slavery and Jim Crow lynchings.  In any case, it is clear that he is a warrior and perhaps a leader of his people.  Thus, you have three symbols of leadership on behalf of the nation: a triptych binding together the founding, the second founding, and those who were displaced, all supposedly united by–I hate to say it–a native sense of honor.

And then there is Glen Beck with his guards.  Perhaps we are to believe that dark suits and sunglasses are the latest incarnation of the warrior spirit, but the photograph is much more a depiction of contrasts than continuity.  Today’s political actors are dwarfed by the images of their forebears, and the supposed unity of the neatly balanced composition belies the tensions between the founding of the union, its being rent apart by slavery, and its reunification including the conquest and near eradication of the original peoples.

Most important, the symbols are inert, objects for manipulation.  And that is what the political actor of the day is all about: manipulating symbols and, through them, crowds.  And manipulating those symbols without any regard to the original history, commitments, or sacrifices of the real men and women who built the nation or suffered the often tragic turns of its making.  (One might note that both suffering and victory were eloquently joined in the original March on Washington, to which Beck’s rally was the “accidental” and parodic sequel.)  Indeed, the leader of this rally has rewritten the record book for those who trammel history, which one can do when leading consists in no more than giving speeches without ever having to govern.  And when the leader is far removed from his audience, a crowd that is visible only in the distance as a staged source of applause across the moat formed by the reflecting pool.

There is one more contrast built into the photograph, albeit one that requires a bit of history.  Construction of the Washington Monument began in 1848 but wasn’t finished until 1884.  One reason for the delay was that the project was hijacked by the Know-Nothings, the nativist reactionaries of the day who were precursors to the Tea Party movement.  Know-Nothings were virulently opposed to immigration from Ireland and Germany–immigration by people with names like Beck, for example.  They also thought that Catholics couldn’t be good citizens in a democracy, wanted Bible readings in the public schools, and otherwise endorsed positions that, with the change of a name or two, are all too common among those gathered on the Mall last Saturday.

Fortunately, the Know-Nothings became a footnote to history, and the monument was completed.  Perhaps we could do worse than to have our symbols outlast those who now would speak in their name.

Photograph by Brendan Smialowski for the New York Times.

The war began officially on March 19, 2003, and 43 days later President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” after landing a S3B Viking “Navy One” aircraft on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.  That was on May 1, 2003.  This past week—7 years, 3 months and 10 days later, to be exact—and with considerably less fanfare—the “combat phase” of the war came to an end as the last of  30,000 America’s combat troops crossed the border from Iraq to Kuwait en route to the USA.  I might feel slightly better about this if we were not leaving 50,000 “non-combat troops” behind to lend “technical assistance” to the Iraqis, a fact compounded by the lingering memory that the war in Vietnam was fought with “military advisers.”  All of that notwithstanding, my first thought was that it would be somewhat churlish to feature the above photograph on this occasion.  After all, surely President Bush cannot be responsible for the decisions made by President Obama … can he?    But then I recalled that the initial motivation for the invasion of Iraq was to seek out and destroy weapons of mass destruction; weapons, lest we forget, which were never found and were in all likelihood a neoconservative fantasy from the outset.  “Mission Accomplished,” indeed.

Bringing any troops home is nevertheless a moment for some celebration, and no doubt in the weeks ahead we will see more than a few photographs of loved ones as they jubilantly reconnect at the end of a gangplank or on the tarmac of an airfield.  It is, after all, a convention of war time photography.  But as we view these images we have to be sure to see past the immediate burst of joy to the long and extended pain and trauma—both physical and psychic—such soldiers and their families will endure.  It is unlikely that such images will be taken or if they are that they will be featured; and even if some are, it is a sure bet that they will not circulate widely or that they will quickly fade from memory as too painful to recall and attend to for very long.

As much as coming home can be a moment of celebration, so too is it in some measure a moment of mourning for those who return.  I was struck in this regard by expressions on the faces of soldiers leaving or preparing to leave Iraq. Where one might expect to see joy or relief most images showed men—and it is notable that such images were specifically of men, not women—bearing a serious if not actually somber countenance.  The photograph below, appearing in a Washington Post slide is particularly poignant in this regard.

Shot at night and from within the hold of a cargo plane preparing to leave Iraq, the image has a degree of sober familiarity to it.  We have seen scenes like this before, though typically the “cargo” being loaded is not a pallet of duffle bags, but rather flag draped coffins.  What makes this image particularly eerie is the way in which the workers appear to be mourning the cargo as if this were a burial pall.  That is hard to imagine, of course, because it defies our experience.  How could one possible mourn the return of cargo which metonymically stands in for the return of the troops?  But then why would troops about to return home not exude joy?  The problem is that our experience of the war is mediated, and from a distance; not being there it is impossible to know what the troops who were there actually experienced—or what their return to their former “civilized” lives might entail … what and how and  why they might mourn.

The photograph above is thus in some ways a reminder of the difficulties that we might all have in adjusting to the return of fellow citizens form the war zone—friends and family and strangers alike.  For just as in the image, shot at some distance and at a slightly oblique angle with a wide angle lens, our plight might be to witness but not actually to participate in the performative space of action in any direct way.  Put differently, the photograph is perhaps an allegory for the wide range of ways in which war entails mourning.  For those who were there and for those who were not.  Lest we forget.

Photo Credit:  J. Scott Applewhite/AP; Ernesto Londono/Washington Post

Credit: Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free 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.

The most direct means for inducing reflection about the photographic medium is to capture a literal reflection, making the photograph an image of an image.  One then can ponder, for example, how a photograph is itself a trick of light sure to include some degree of distortion.

This remarkable double image reveals how the camera can see what usually will elude the unaided eye.  You are looking at a swimmer in the European swimming championships, and also at his image as it is reflected off of the underside of the surface of the water.  The odd, upside down inversion is disorienting: Is that two swimmers or one?  Where is the surface of the pool, and which way is up or down?  (I’ve spent some time studying the image just to be somewhat confident I have it right.  Note that the air bubbles provide a referential anchor, and since the swimmer in the foreground is underwater the camera must be below him pointing up toward the surface.)  It seems that photographic images need not be clearly legible, and precisely because they can record the visible world somewhat independently of encultured habits of perception.  Fish, for example, probably would have no trouble seeing this photo for what it is.

But I suspect that only the human being can experience the uncanny.  The swimmer in the background is a strange double of the first.  Due to the refraction of light through water, some parts of him are a more exact reproduction than others; note, for example, how his right arm seems crippled as it is refracted by the water.  The comparison between the two bodies is unsettling: instead of two toned athletes, one of them seems to be bent by disease or disability.  He could be the athlete in another life, or working out when he is infirm with age.  One might imagine that we each carry such images with us all the time, saved from reflection on our luck and mortality only by the absence of the right kind of mirror.

Reflections of and on reflection are not limited to existential musings.  They also can be a study of collective life.

These children are reflected in a window at a camp in Pakistan for people displaced by the flooding.  As above, the reflection is on a surface that usually is transparent, and again the effect can be disorienting.  Are they all on the same side of the window, or only some of them?  Are they enthralled and amused by their own images or by something else that we can’t see?  And again the answers would not be enough to dispel the strange sense that some of those visible may not actually be of the present but rather a haunting from another dimension or another time.  However one speculates, the photographer has succeeded in making one pause long enough to no longer see only the stock images of Third World Children and Disaster Refugees in a Camp.

And once again the multiple images prompt reflection on more than the nature of the camera.  Instead of a few isolated children, one gets the sense of a multitude.  Instead of an appeal for charity in respect to a specific event, there is the suggestion that something vital and beautiful is multiplying regardless of natural disasters and political malfeasance.  There even is a theological concept that might apply: the Christian idea of a “cloud of witnesses,” past and present, whose labor, sacrifice, and presence will sustain the community of believers.  These children, wherever they are, can be thought of as such a presence on behalf of a better world.

That world is not yet available to be photographed.  These photos are also a study in contrasts.  Water plays a role in both of them, but consider the difference between the controlled environment of the European pool and the uncontrolled rivers disrupting millions of lives in Pakistan.  Together they represent a bi-polar world.  The swim meet and the camp, high energy and enforced waiting, personal achievement and talent wasted, wealth and deprivation.  An image and its reflection, you might say.

Photographs by Francois Xavier Marit/AFP-Getty Images and Aaron Favila/Associated Press.

With the dog days of summer upon us your NCN guys are taking a short break.

We wil be back on Wednesday, August 11th.

This week nocaptionneeded.com celebrates its third birthday.

As we did last year, this is a time to say “Thanks” and to take stock.  Thanks to all our readers, and not least to those who comment on the posts.  If anyone would like to give us any advice about the blog itself, now is a good time to do it.  We can’t say we’ll follow that advice, especially given our limited resources, but it always is appreciated and sometimes one thing can lead to another.  You can comment below or email us at rhariman@gmail.com and lucaites@indiana.edu.

A big party is not in the works–living large is so last year–but we will take two weeks off from posting to get caught up on some other work.  We’ll continue to read our mail, however, and hope that you’ll be back on July 7 as we start another year at NCN.

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has renewed debate about key elements of modern resource use.  How dependent should a society be on fossil fuels?  What constitutes “energy security?”  Can extraction industries and other commercial interests such as tourism thrive in the same ecosystem?  Advocates of various stripes argue that we should drive less, drill more, or rely more on either government or markets to mange complexity.  These are important debates, but the familiar antagonisms can create their own smoke screen.  To understand our predicament more deeply, it can help to look at those images that capture modernity’s basic promise and pathos.

This photograph of a plane at Heathrow airport is not only a stunning depiction of modern design, but one that evokes the dream of technology liberating humanity from earthly bonds.  The marvel of flight has been intensified into a few, sharp, geometrical lines.  The sleek lines of the machine represent sheer efficiency, while its dark undercarriage harbors the deep thrust of power that can lift everyone into the sky.  The terrain of earth is reduced to wisps of low-lying trees in the background, while machine and sky, technology and nature, exist in a pure space of perfect harmony.  The plane is at rest, yet poised as if waiting for a radio signal from heaven.  Flight has become a reality, while even greater potentialities for transformation are waiting to be released.

One might ask, however, why the sky is so golden, or whether the sun is rising or setting.  It might help to know that the plane was on the tarmac because it had been grounded by the ash clouds blowing across Europe last April.  Despite its technological prowess, modern society is still bound to unwanted natural constraints.  Indeed, looking at the image again from the standpoint of a catastrophic situation awakens one to another dimension of technological achievement.  Attending now more to color than line, a melancholic mood emerges to mark what is at risk.  The plane conquered the air only by consuming vast quantities of jet fuel.  The dark fuselage, wings, and engines now stand for the hidden cost of otherwise efficient design.  The darkness below becomes systematic denial of what continues to bind us to the earth.  The golden hue is not a sign of transcendental favor but rather the sunset of a civilization.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, but modern technology has allowed society to advance to a point where it is capable of engineering its own collapse.  That is an achievement, actually, and not for the first time.  It is small consolation, however, to imagine that at least we, too, will be remembered for our beautiful sense of design.

This insight holds even if the sun is actually rising, as it is in the photograph taken on the morning of the 50th anniversary of the city of Brasilia.  The epitome of high-modernist urban design, Brasilia has become a monument to both the Utopian dream and social poverty of modernism.  This beautiful image captures each condition and can stand as a complement to the one above.  Using the same economy of line and the same combination of color and darkness, the photograph exposes at once the precision, the promise, and the danger of a society organized around modern technologies.  Once again, society seems poised for ascension into a higher order of being, and yet also reduced to emptiness and darkness.  The golden dream, it seems, will be eternal, even when only one person remains.

Photographs by David Levene/The Guardian and Fernando Bizerra, Jr./EPA.

Don’t ask what it is, just enjoy it for a moment.  Earth and stars, a soft layer of cloud and a bright river of light–the scene is both timeless and transitory.  The stars wheel across the sky as night turns toward day, and the mountains will keep their deep geological time while that strip of  illumination flares for an instant and then is gone.  Perhaps it’s a line of fire, more likely something human and so even more impermanent.  One can imagine the stars slowly fading out and the universe sinking into final darkness, yet planet and sky would still be part of the same unity.

But if your fate were tied to that light snaking through the darkness, you might wonder just what it is.  The answer is, a US border patrol vehicle travelling near Otay Mountain, on the outskirts of San Diego, California. I don’t know enough about the area to say whether the vehicle is following the border exactly, but the time-lapse photograph nonetheless becomes an image of how the state draws a line in an otherwise  inchoate reality.  In place of the deep regularities of nature, here we see a division that could just as well be drawn a thousand different ways.

That assertion of sovereignty seems mighty puny against the galaxies passing overhead, but it is closer to human scale, for better or worse.  It also is not inconsistent with the world around it: the trail will be following the contours of the landscape, and its light and shape mirror the landform and firmament in the background.  What is inescapable, however, is that the patrol can only be a momentary traversing of a much bigger reality.

Like this, for example.  Now you are looking at shrimp boats dragging booms to collect oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  Like the border patrol, they, too, are drawing lines in the dark.  The effort to capture some of the oil has to be undertaken, but any attempt to capture all of it is surely futile.  This is not a brief against the state, however.  The boats probably are working for British Petroleum, but it is not likely they would be working at all if the US government wasn’t able and willing to enforce some corporate compliance with environmental protection.  Modern societies need to have states, and states are defined by borders, so what is the point?

These photographs are not images of trucks or boats or even of their visible traces in the darkness of a desert night or the deep waters of the Gulf.  These images are hieroglyphs of human limitation.  They mark the enormous difference between human–and, yes, modern–activity and the natural world encompassing it.  They remind us that large scale collective enterprises–states and corporations–are nonetheless very partial, incomplete attempts to manage a world that remains too often inchoate and beyond control.   In short, these images declare that we are overmatched–and not only by natural forces but by our own attempts to live well at all.

And for all that, they are beautiful.  Some would say that is a liability, but I think it’s a clue.  Even when working through the stupidities that define US immigration policy (too much policing) and regulation of the oil industry (too little), the hints of more harmonious relationships are there to be seen.  The societies that need to be developed will always involve drawing lines in the dark, but perhaps they will make more sense if they are undertaken with a sense of humility, and with the idea that beauty need not be accidental.

Photographs by Jorge Duenes/Reuters and Eric Gay/Associated Press.

On Memorial Day we want to honor the memory of all who have given their lives to the nation.  In the photograph above the Arlington Gay and Lesbian Alliance commemorates gay veterans at Congressional Cemetery.  Some day soon we hope that they can be honored in Arlington National Cemetery as well.

Photo Credit: Katherine Fray/Washington Post

When I first wrote about this photograph two years ago I marveled at the utter insanity of thinking that we could actually establish a 700 hundred mile wall fence across an otherwise barren dessert that would secure the 2,000 mile border that separates the US from Mexico.  And, of course, I was right as there is no evidence that the wall fence has done anything to slow down illegal immigration (in fact there is some evidence to suggest that the number of people sneaking past the borders has increased), though there is strong evidence to suggest that it has resulted in “borderland frgmantation” leading to serious destruction of the border ecosystem.  Notwithstanding the continuing need for serious immigration reform, then, the idea that we can maintain an impermeable barrier to secure us from “undesirable” outsiders is a preposterous fiction that only the likes of Stephen King can really pull off.  And, of course, the above photograph underscores the futility of thinking that this can actually work.

I was reminded of this photograph earlier this evening when I read a report that President Obama has ordered 1,200 National Guardsmen to the borders in order to “provide support to law enforcement officers by helping observe and monitor traffic between official border crossings” and to “help analyze trafficking patterns in the hope of intercepting illegal drug shipments.”  But for all that, “they will not make arrests … something they are not trained to do.” As with the photograph, the absurdity of the situation is pronounced, no matter which way we think of it.  If the troops are going to be used for interdiction, it makes no more sense to think that we can secure a 2,000 mile border with 1,200 troops (that’s one soldier for every 1.6 miles—and it assumes that each soldier is working 24/7/365) than that we can do it by building a wall fence.  And yet, if their primary purpose is not active interdiction, but to “help analyzing trafficking patterns,” one can only wonder why so many are needed on site to accomplish that task.

The bigger point to be made, however, is that we are not going to be effective in addressing the problem of our borders by resorting to simplistic and piecemeal military solutions.  I’m quite sure that President Obama knows and believes this, and were he to allow himself to be guided by the “better angels of his nature” he would move in a different direction towards more progressive immigration reform.  What is troubling is that he is doing it anyway, and for what are no doubt pragmatic political reasons that sadly (and ironically) belie an increasingly militaristic society.

Photo Credit: Don Bartletti/LA Times