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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Guest Post by Jeremy Gordon

In his recent post Mythic Vision in Afghanistan, Robert Hariman writes that in the face of  “enormous organizational and technological power,” unseen enemies, non-identifiable strategy, unknown objectives, and forces beyond the scope of certainty, photographers have tapped into mythic visions of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After reading Hariman’s optical shift to science fiction I was reminded of a Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk and crew come across the ancient Greek god Apollo, who has been waiting for humans to believe in him again.  With faith in their technology and rational systems of knowledge production, Kirk and crew resist.  They spend the episode tearing Apollo down and so he retreats to the stars with all of the other disregarded gods, most likely taking cover as constellations, as seen here:

There are complex themes to be explored by looking at these images with a mythic vision, reflective of a much more complex tension between men and gods (gods here being the virtues and vices of human behavior, unseen forces of contingency, paradox, luck, and chance).  Mythic vision invites various poetic optics through which scenes from Afghanistan are not overshadowed by the instrumental laws of efficiency and technology championed by Captain Kirk.

For instance, as the scene from a Greek tragedy, we might imagine Ares brewing a storm over the camp, and that Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, is part of the charge.  We see all the armor and firepower Hephaestus, the god of fire who armed Achilles with his shield, has fashioned.  But rather than being captivated by the tools at our disposal, the Humvees and desert camouflage give way in looking elsewhere to understand what the scene is about, the unseen actors who were always offstage in ancient tragedy.  The encampment is silent and, as warriors hide amongst their vessels, we can see the gods, or what is left of them, watching, waiting to play their hands.  What is telling about this image of the Cosmos, and Kirk’s denial, is that what awaits us in the future, is what we have left in the past, the faith in gods and understanding that forces beyond our control make moments of domination and victory fleeting.  Using such a tragic optic urges us to look beyond the horizons to corners and edges, to the apparitions that induce us to question if we saw Ares in the .50 caliber round that accidentally discharged, killing a warrior at point blank range?  Was that whisper in the wind the just goddess of war Athene, who blew sand away from a hidden IED?

Recognizing gods requires looking beyond the earthly horizon.

The desolation wreaks of endlessness, but the trees blurred and dusted by the winds of the desert emphasize a destination, perhaps the River Acheron, the crossing point at which spirits move to the underworld.  What of the warrior illuminated in dusty green among the shadows?  Is he walking amongst the dead, following and being driven by ancestors?  Are the shadows Hermes like figures?  Hermes protects travelers and looks after boundaries, especially the one between the land of the living and the dead.  Hades’ presence is strong here, as the ground seems to swirl and blur beneath their feet.  The glare is stark and suffocating, and there is no telling what is beyond the horizon for the warrior still in color, but we can guess that violent contingencies may deny him the protection offered by body armor and firepower.  We see a spark of chance, a whisper of hidden secrets, and a hint of mysterious experiences in which the difference between technology and the Cosmos is not so clear.

If Kirk is right and we have outgrown the gods, is it any wonder warriors are instrumentalized to the point where war becomes merely an extreme sport? An ode to Achilles’ mastery of killing, as an extreme athlete?  Is it a surprise that we fail to recognize Hypnos and Thanatos on the heels of these “athletes?” When we outgrow the gods, we fail to grasp the tragic laws in the poetics of the ancient deities, always present but incognito, laying in wait only to sneak back into the rational world of warfare as violent epiphanies, even if present only for a moment, which is forever.

Photographs by Hyunsoo Leo Kim/AP/The Virginian-Pilot and Bay Ismoyo/AFP-Getty Images, thanks to The Big Picture.  Jeremy Gordon is a PhD student in Communication and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington who pays homage to (and is repulsed by) the gods of war, rhetoric, theatre, and myth.  He can be contacted at jeregord@indiana.edu.

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

The above photograph is of a group of “young supporters of the Islamic Jihad movement” marching at a rally in Gaza City.  When I posted on it earlier this month I called attention to the expression on the young boys face, noting that his expression teetered between being vacant and deadly serious, but in either case “dissociated from our expectations of an otherwise idealized world of youthful innocence.”  One commenter noted, “How many of his relatives are dead, how many in prison …?  Why do you ignore the context?  Why do you expect an ‘idealized world of youthful experience,’ where this experience clearly has no chance?”  It is a good question as it calls attention to a complexity of the photograph that my original posting assumed but failed adequately to interrogate: the sense in which the image simultaneously activates and resists the trope of “youthful innocence.”

The original point I was trying to make was that “the idealized world of youthful innocence” is a taken for granted assumption for western audiences.  That assumption is conventionally animated by the visual trope of children playing as if adults.  Ordinarily, the key to the effectiveness of the trope is the additional assumption that the viewer recognizes that the child has a very basic understanding of the sense in which s/he is “playing” at being an adult and is thus operating in an idealized world—a world that is free of all that would undermine or mitigate youthful innocence.  The telling marker in such images is the signification of carefree joy being acted out by the playful child.  In the above photograph the children are clearly playing at being adults—note the toy guns, which activate the trope for western audiences—but their facial expressions lack any sense of carefree joy, and hence the image concurrently resists the trope.  And the implication, at least for western audiences, is that these aren’t so much children as warriors, thus triggering yet a different common visual trope used to distinguish the Islamic, middle eastern world from the Christian, western world: “the warrior child.”

The tension connecting the tropes of “youthful innocence” and “the warrior child” is articulated in a somewhat different fashion in this photograph from Craig F. Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo-essay, “Ian Fisher: American Soldier.”

The similarities between the two images are palpable, but it is their differences that are notable. The guns are no longer toys, as indicated by the safety plugs inserted in their barrels; and note too that the disposition of the weapons is more aggressive as they are being aimed rather than held at ease.  These aren’t children playing at being soldiers, they are the real thing, however young.  Attend, in this regard, to the different facial expressions depicted in each photograph. In the earlier image the lead child appears to be working hard to maintain his countenance, to appear like a serious adult, almost as if he knows he is being observed, but there is no question that he is a child; here, however, the expression on the face of the American soldier, while no less intense, nevertheless seems less affected.  The eyes are cold and calculating; carefully and intently focused, they are machinelike, almost as if an extension of the weapon being aimed.  It would not be hard to imagine him as a cyborg rather than a human, let alone a child.  And yet the face of this teenage soldier is nevertheless childlike; both slender and smooth, it belies a physical immaturity that activates the trope of “youthful innocence” even as the photograph as a whole resists it.

In one photograph we end up with the warrior child, in the other we see a childlike warrior. The question is, what difference does the difference make?

Photo Credit: Ali Ali/EPA/WSJ; Craig F. Walker/Denver Post

We have written here at NCN on numerous occasions about Joe Rosenthal’s iconic “Raising Old Glory on Mt. Suribachi” (here, here, here, here, here, and here).  While there is much to be said about the photograph our basic approach has been to call attention to how it operates as an eloquent inventional resource (by some accounts, a national treasure) for performing civic identity.  The power of the photograph, we maintain, is in large measure its aesthetic capacity to transcribe three related but nevertheless different (and sometimes competing) commitments to egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic republicanism.  This transcription animates an  expansive public emotionality that opens the image to to a wide array of interpretations and subsequent appropriations or usages that range from reverential civic piety to a deeply seeded public cynicism.

A month doesn’t go by that we don’t encounter new appropriations of the photograph (and we are much indebted to the many readers who direct our attention to them), and interestingly enough, increasingly many of these appropriations come from sources outside of the U.S.  Sometimes such appropriations seem to be reflecting directly on U.S. foreign policy (as with the first two images below), but in other instances the appropriation seems to speak to a more transcendent meaning that the image invokes as it appears to have little or no connection to the location of the photograph in the symbolic economy of U.S. public culture(as in the last image).  We are not entirely sure what to make out of all of this just yet and we will return to the subject of the global appropriation of U.S. iconcic photographs in a subsequent post.  But for now we leave you with three of the most interesting recent appropriations of the Iwo Jima icon and invite your reflections.

Die Burger: Iwo Jima (FCB Advertising Agency, Cape Town, South Africa)

Raising the Flag at Museumplein (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam)

Raising the Flag in the U.K.

Photo Credits: Chad Henning, Zoran Koracevic, drawgood

We have written about Eddie Adams’ infamous, Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner in the middle of a street in Saigon before (here, here, and here) It is among a small handfull of photographs regularly referred to when one talks or writes about the Vietnam War—the others include most prominently the “Burning Monk,” “Accidental Napalm,” and the “Kent State Massacre.”

As with so many other iconic photographs, it retains its symbolic currency through mass circulation and reproduction, a process of distribution that animates it as an inventional resource for cultural commentary and critique as it is appropriated, performed, and parodied to particular cultural and political interests.  We were recently reminded of the ubiquity of such usages by a post at frgdr.com where a number of such efforts have been collected.  A quick google search turned up a number of others, including one by an artist named minipliman that appears to be joining the mass media celebration of Barbie’s fiftieth birthday:

We leave it to our readers to decide how the legend for this image should read … though on second thought, perhaps in this case “no caption” really is needed.

Photo Credit: Eddie Adams/AP; minipliman

Several months ago in a post entitled Shades of Gray, I suggested that the use of gray tones in photojournalism could make a subject appear otherworldly. Thus, the photograph could alternately buffer the viewer from the those being depicted or reveal an inability to reach across the gulf between different cultures. Even if I got that right, there is more to be said about seeing gray. For one example, take a look at this photo:

The wildfires burning around Los Angeles this week were so hot that they could melt steel. Here a wheel rim has puddled into globs of dull metal. It’s as if the vehicle were being smelted back to its original elements, reversing the long process of civilization that turned iron ore into a truck. The fire might have been started by a match stick–or, more likely, a random lightening strike, one among thousands that happen in the area every year–yet it can become a raging inferno capable of devouring cities. In the aftermath, green shoots will appear amidst blackened devastation and the great cycle of life will continue. But nothing there will put that wheel rim back together. Nature, it seems, is no respecter of machines.

The image is a color photo, of course, and that makes the point all the more poignant. The gray metal isn’t an artifact of the photographic process. Instead, a color print reveals how gray has flowed into view. What had been hidden behind chrome has been released into the environment like lead or some other industrial toxin ready to leach further into the landscape. What had been crafted to help a society hum along now is neither artifact nor nature but that third thing: waste.

Like this:

Again, a color photo reveals a world turning gray. It actually took a moment for the colored shirts on the Iraqi police officers to assert themselves into my focal vision, rather than merely providing a felt and uneasy sense of contrast. The wreckage from a car bomb dominates the foreground of the picture and is reinforced by the second smashed vehicle in the center rear. The scene as a whole is tonally consistent with these gray/white wrecks. But for one taillight and other minor reddish hints, this is a world of grays, greens, and other dull surfaces. Whether war zone or concrete yard, it’s a world being given over to gray. No wonder the police seem out of place: colorful, nonchalant, they imply domestic peace and all the life that can be a part of that. They are balanced and then some by the soldiers opposite them, who seem more of a permanent fixture. By contrast, the police are just passing through.

People like to think that wars, like fires, are accidents; and that fires, like wars, could not have been prevented. In reality, the California conflagrations are predictable outcomes of poorly regulated housing development. And the war in Iraq–well, we know that story, and it was no accident. The truth is that for all the art and energy that goes into building up modern societies, they also carry within themselves powerful forces that are continually turning people, places, and things into waste. Alongside familiar scenes of peace, prosperity, and color, another world is also under construction: Gray world, inert yet dangerous, making waste seem like second nature.

Photographs by Phil McCarten/Reuters (thanks to The Big Picture) and Karim Kadim/Associated Press. Note that because NCN doesn’t have a style sheet or a copy editor to keep my erratic spelling in check, I use both “gray” and “grey”; something I learned, somewhat to my embarrassment, when I searched for the Shades of Gray post and turned up more entries under “grey” than “gray.” Both terms are correct, but consistency would still be a virtue were it to be found here. For that, readers will have to look elsewhere.

What we have here is a photograph shot from inside the new, “bullet train” that will begin running on the high speed Beijing-Tianjin express railway starting on August 1, 2008, just in time to accommodate the high traffic of foreigners who will be attending the 2008 Summer Olympics.  It runs at a speed record 394.3 kmh, thus traversing the 135 km from Beijing to the port city of Tianjin in less than 30 minutes and representing the height of modern urban mass transportation technology.  The photograph puts the viewer just behind the driver, and thus aligned with both the technology and, perhaps not so incidentally, efficient and effective modern state control of the world in front of it.  

What struck me most about the image is how it operates both in tandem and in tension with the now famous photograph of the lone protestor stopping the tank near Tiananmen Square in 1989.  On the one hand, it shares all of the aesthetic conventions of high modernism that we find in the iconic image of the man and the tank.  The orientation is universal rather than parochial, geometric rather than organic, functional rather than customary, and so on.  This aesthetic—what anthropologist James C. Scott calls “seeing like a state”— is reinforced by the tonality of the image which, while in color, nevertheless veers towards the grey scale of the photographic spectrum and thus gestures towards the abstract and schematic orientation of  much scientific representation.

On the other hand, there is something of a reversal of perspective.  In the original Tiananmen Square photograph the viewer is an outsider looking in on another culture from a safe distance—and in this context it is important to note that as famous as the 1989 photograph is in the western world for its manifestation of an heroic, liberal individualism, it has very little recognition and resonance within China itself—whereas here the outside viewer is invited to share the panoptic vision of the modern state from the inside.  And note how that view is circumscribed by the window that narrowly restricts any peripheral vision, creating something of a tunnel vision effect that enables us to see no more than how clean the tracks ahead are, how totally devoid they are of anything that might derail the train from its appointed task of moving passengers from here to there quickly and efficiently.  In short, we can only see what the apparatus—state, technological, what have you— enables us to see.  And, of course, this can be a problem when you are on the inside looking out, whether as the driver or as an unwitting passenger. 

The question then is, what are we missing in the process?  If there were a lone individual standing on the tracks trying to stop the train he or she couldn’t be seen—and at this speed perhaps all that would remain is that reddish-brown smudge on the windshield.  Then again, protestors—individuals or otherwise—are not likely to stand in the way of this train as they have been relegated to “Olympic Protest Zones” in designated parks, and at that it is unlikely that most dissidents will successfully negotiate the bureaucratic barriers to political protest that include applying for a permit in person, five days in advance of a demonstration, and with detailed information such as the slogans to be used, the number of demonstrators, and so on.  Maybe that is what we miss when we look only from the inside out.

Photo Credit:  STRA/AFP Getty Images and The Big Picture

I was among those who were shocked and thoroughly dismayed by the report that Eliot Spitzer had been busted for frequenting a prostitution service. I also should admit that dismay can turn to laughter very quickly when you start following the story in the blogosphere, not least at the Wonkette. If you go there, you can peruse some of the advertisements from the Guv’s high end whore house, otherwise known as The Emperor’s Club. (Did someone forget to tell Eliot that he’s a governor, not an emperor?) Spitzer deserves to be the the butt of every single joke that is made in the next year, but that’s not why I’m writing today.

As usual, some bystanders will have been hurt as well. If Hillary Clinton is one of them, you can understand why she might be really, really tired of this kind of news. Tired of, but not as sad as Silda Spitzer.

Photojournalism provides a record of the art, rituals, and performances of political theater. This photo is one of many that we can classify as portraits of the political wife. I saw the image for the first time yesterday afternoon and it stayed with me through the rest of the day and into the evening. Whenever I thought of some aspect of the scandal, I soon would be back to her standing there, taking the hit. Eyes down, hands behind her back, face and neck exposed to the camera’s glare, she is a picture of vulnerability. The contrast with him is all too telling: his stance remains combative, and although caught in the glare of publicity he’s still maneuvering, still fending off his opponents while protected by a lecturn that bears the great seal like a shield.

Although close beside him, she appears to be a study in isolation. She could be a statue, and one that surely would be able to represent not only loss and grief but also duty and loyalty. That probably should be admired for what it is; I also look forward to the day when the ritual changes and the emperor has to stand there alone. But that is not this day. She has chosen to stand beside him, however far away she may wish to be. Her response is not to fight back but to reflect, perhaps to think about how she got here, or what she still can hold on to, or just to remember better days. Perhaps she might be remembering a day like this:

She’s even wearing the same pearls.

Photographs by Patrick Andrade/New York Times; Jim McKnight/Associated Press.

Robert and I have not written very much about the current political season. Part of the reason is that our good friend over at the BAGnewsNotes, Michael Shaw, has been tireless in covering the campaign and we encourage our readers to check in there. But there is another reason as well, for while there was a time when the political campaign for president truly constituted a quadrennial season, something that political junkies like ourselves would look forward to, the current campaign seems to have transcended any sense of being seasonal; indeed, it has become altogether ordinary and everyday –- if not downright monotonous. I find myself checking in on the various candidates and their doings as a matter of mindless habit, much like the way I check in on the baseball box scores in mid-June (or the way in which some friends of mine watch the afternoon soap operas). And if I miss them for a day or two, or even a week, I can usually be confident that little of real or longstanding consequence will have changed.

The length and mundanity of the campaign seems to have taken its toll on photojournalists as well. If I see one more picture of the various candidates shaking hands with citizens, or speaking from the stump in a town square or in a quaint little café, or against flag draped backgrounds, or surrounded by spouses or celebrities with cheesy smiles … I think I might die from excessive exposure to visual cliché.* I realize that this seems like it is all that there is to capture visually in these contexts, that photojournalists are working on deadlines and the tried and true genres and conventions are easy to supply, and further that it is the media’s job to “report” what is actually happening (even if that turns out to be … well, nothing), but all of that may well be part of the problem. The campaigns have become so quotidian that it seems like there is nothing “new,” nothing really to see. Of course, one of the things that Robert and I have been suggesting all along is that it is precisely at such moments that we need to look all the more closely.

Consider this photograph from this week’s Sunday NYT:

At first blush, it could be a photograph of a singing group, say, Hillary and the Three Pips (sorry, I couldn’t resist). But in fact it anchors a story about how Senators Obama and Edwards joined forces to “go after” Senator Clinton in a televised debate in Manchester, NH. The attack turned out to be pretty mild stuff, with Obama and Edwards accusing Senator Clinton of being an advocate of the status quo after she had suggested that Obama had unfairly characterized Edwards’s positions on several issues. And one can only imagine what Governor Richardson (the third “Pip”) might have been thinking when he noted that he had been in “hostage negotiations” that were “more civil.” In any case, apart from the separation of Clinton and the three men, it seems to be a rather generic and ordinary campaign picture. In fact, we have seen it before. Look at this photograph that Robert posted on in August:

The first thing to notice, of course, is how little has really changed. The staging and background are effectively identical to one another, with each enveloping the candidates in a red, white, and blue color scheme. Clinton is clearly separated from her three rivals in each image, and more, she stands in almost the exact same spot and strikes the exact same pose, presumably making contact with someone in the audience. She may even be wearing the same suit. The male actors have changed, but more in name than anything else as they all represent the Democratic party and the Washington establishment.

But of course the differences are pronounced. In August the separation of the four people seemed to be a function of random movement, and the sense in which Senator Clinton was disconnected from her rivals was minimal at most. In the more recent picture the separation seems forced, or rather calculated – the relationship between Clinton and the others is one of disconnection and not just separation. Note in this regard that while Clinton still looks out to the audience, seeking (or at least seeking to appear) to make contact with one or another of the spectators, the other three are talking to one another, a closed group seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are on stage or in front of an audience, while nevertheless appearing to conspire about what to do with this woman. One can almost hear them figuring out who will play what roll in the drama that is about to unfold (or if this is an after moment, assessing what actually took place). While in the earlier image Clinton seems to be channeling the energy of the audience, in the later image she seems “defiant,” rather as the title of the article suggests, standing strong and independent in opposition to the men bonding together to attack her.

And so, perhaps the photojournalist here has captured not just another in the continuing and everyday moments of the campaign, but what the editors have recognized as an image that goes beyond what words can say easily or prove (or what it might be injudicious for a journalist to report), i.e., a male conspiracy against the candidacy of the New York senator. The story does not seem to have achieved very much traction, however, and one has to wonder why.

One reason might be that the whole issue of opposition between the candidates seems so much like political melodrama put on simply to accommodate the daily news cycle. So, for example, take note of this photograph that also appeared in the NYT on Sunday.

Here we have something close to the full slate of candidates for president kibitzing with one another in between the Democrat and Republican debates. No less staged than other pictures from the event – a picture of the performance of civility really – nevertheless it makes one wonder how the participants could be engaged in the incivility of hostage-like negotiations at one moment, and hand shaking and back slapping at another. Sure, Hillary is separated from the three Pips here, but it is hard to imagine that she has any more regard for those with whom she is socializing. The point, of course, is not to make light of public displays of civility, but to wonder what to make of them when they lack narrative fidelity with the stories being reported or seem to be altogether feigned, merely staged for the camera.

Then again, maybe it’s just another day in the never ending political season …

*UPDATE: Since writing this post I came across Alan Chin’s black and white photographs of the New Hampshire campaign. His work stands out as a stark exception to many of the claims made here. I will try to post on it in the near future, but in the meantime check it out at BAGnewsNotes.

Photo Credits: Doug Mills/NYT, Peter Wynn Thompson/NYT

Back in September I commented on the allegorical design of the new U.S. passports and focused attention in particular on the opening page, a cornucopia of signs and references to American hegemony. The visual tableau there begins with an image of Baltimore Harbor being “bombarded.” Subtly but noticeably blended into the background so as to encompass both the inside cover and the first page is the American flag. The “alien” force then was the British Army, but the reference to more recent alien bombardments and expressions of the indestructibility of the American banner are hardly veiled. I promised to continue to examine the visual design of the passport and was reminded of this while traveling recently in the U.K.

The last two pages of the new U.S. passport offer an interesting allegorical complement to the opening two pages, and complete a framework for engaging the intervening twenty-seven pages of image and text that activate a history of the American sublime rooted in the nation’s divinely ordained, adventuresome and inventional spirit.

Reading from left-to-right and from top-to-bottom, we first encounter an inscription from Ellison S. Onizuka, “Every generation has the obligation to free men’s minds for a look at new worlds … to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.” This is quickly followed by a notice, centered and in bold face–and at least twice as large as anything else on the page–indicating that “This document contains sensitive electronics.” The remainder of the page contains addresses “for information” on importation restrictions, customs and border protection, agriculture, U.S. taxes, and social security. All of this information is obscured, more or less like the legalese we ignore and yet are required to sign-off on when we install new software on our computers. Instead, our attention is directed to the connection between “new worlds,” “higher plateau[s],” and “sensitive electronics.” This connection is animated by the photographic illustration that occupies the right hand page and to which our attention is drawn by the formal articulation of the bold faced font of the notice, the reddish hue cast by the sun on the left hand page, and the dark sky of outer space. Here we encounter the earth, centered in the image and, on close inspection, featuring the North and South American land masses. In the foreground is what appears to be the moon. Situated above the two and in-between them, as if the tip of an triangle connecting all three objects, is a satellite. At the bottom of the page is a bar code that corresponds to the passport number.

There is much to comment on here, but what I want to focus on is how the inside back cover is something of a formal “mirror” of the inside front cover, albeit with a difference that coaches the viewer to treat the ideological implications of American exceptionalism as the result of a natural, technological determinism.

The passport begins with a painting and ends with a photograph, the two genres of visual representation framing the historical shift from early to later modernity. The implications of that shift are formalized by the contrast between the quill-and-ink script that sits atop the painting on the inside cover and the computer generated bar code indicating the passport holder’s identification number that rides across the bottom of the photograph on the inside back cover. The shift from “then” to “now”–from painting to photograph, from quill-and-ink to computer generated bar code–is thus marked as a sign of technological progress. Each operates within its own aesthetic register, but the almost perfect symmetry–from left to right, from top to bottom – encourages the viewer to acknowledge a transcendent beauty predicated on the concept of “orderliness.” Notice, for example, how the quill-and-ink script is perfectly measured (at least for its antique medium), and thus anticipates the even more perfectly measured, technologically enabled bar coding on the back page. The shift from “then” to “now” is thus coded aesthetically as a sign of ordered, technological progress.

This aesthetic coding underwrites a politics concerning the relationship between American-style democracy and technology. The key marker here is the reference to “sensitive electronics.” The specific referent is the “electronic chip” embedded in the passport and designed to record the movement of citizens (and others) across borders, but its visual juxtaposition with the satellite looming over the galaxy implies something more. One might expect that technological progress would enable greater latitudes of individual freedom, as is the promise of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” but here it offers not freedom of movement but panoptic oversight. Such control might be necessary in a world fraught with danger, but the point to notice here is how it is aesthetically domesticated and naturalized.

This post has gone on too long already, but two points are worth noting in this last regard. The first has to do with the way in which the passport is color coded from start to finish. As I indicated above, the inside front cover is encompassed by a washed out American flag that serves as the background to the painting and text, and it bleeds across the margins of the page on the right side, inviting us to turn the page. The color scheme carries its way throughout the passport to the back cover, where we see a tree looming over a land mass in the distance. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see that the color coding here might be analogous to the flag unfurled. The tree leans like a flag pole, the leaves recall the dark shield of starts, the red and white hues of the setting sun reminiscent of the alternating stripes. And so the banner originally sewn by a woman is here replicated by nature’s pallet, an almost perfect representation of America’s manifest destiny. But note too that the very last page is severe and abrupt in its difference. Virtually all color is lost as the world is now rendered in black and white; virtually, that is, but not entirely, for on close inspection we can see that the colors of nature/the flag bleed here too, though the threat that they will be washed away remains stark and foreboding. And so, of course, the need to mobilize technology, whatever risks it might invoke to freedom and liberty, seem warranted in the name of security.

But there is more, for we have yet to comment on the somewhat odd quotation from Ellison S. Onizuka that leads off the left hand page. The quotation is odd, less for what is said than for who is doing the talking. Few readers will easily identify Ellison Onizuka, nor could I until I researched it (even though I have previously written extensively about the key event for which Onizuka is known!). Ellison Onizuka was a mission specialist on NASA flight STS 5-L. You know it as the “Challenger” spacecraft. He died along with six other astronauts on January 28, 1986 when, in the famous words of President Reagan, the crew “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.” Onizuka’s words, locating the “obligation” of “free men” to “look out from a higher plateau” is thus not just an analogy for the spirit of progress—and the calculated risk that it always entails and yet we work so hard to repress—but operates in an anagogical regiser that puts man (and by implication the technologically advanced American, with his “sensitive electronics”) in proximity to the face of God. In this context the starkness of the black and white world on the facing page takes on an even more sinister, Manichean resonance.

Surely the dangers that the world poses have to be more complicated than this, and yet, here, it seems so natural … almost as if it is destined.

Welcome to 2008.