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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

We are pleased to introduce NCN readers to Jessica Ingram’s “A Civil Rights Memorial,” a photographic exploration of the ways in which important moments in the struggle for civil rights in the American south are remembered—or perhaps more to the point, the ways in which such events risk being  forgotten as they fade into the landscape of time or are otherwise awkwardly remembered as part of the local context in which they occurred.  The above photograph  is the contemporary, unmarked site of of the store in Money, Mississippi where in 1955  Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was accused of whistling at a white woman, an event that led to him being beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. To see the exhibit click here.

We first encountered Ingram’s work at the Visura Magazine Spotlight—a site designed to support emerging artists and students. It is a web resource that we strongly encourage NCN readers to visit.

“Bumping into strangers in the dark is a figure for democratic citizenship.”

— Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers, 2004

When crowded onto an elevator we strain to fix our attention straight ahead and to avoid touching one another; when we can’t avoid the touching we try to find ways to ignore that it is happening.  These are habits of civic life in late modern society.  Richard Renaldi’s “Touching Strangers” exhibit challenges these habits by asking us to reflect upon them within the broader citizenship of photography.  The premise of his project is simple: Renaldi stops strangers on the street – strangers both to him and to one another – and asks them if they will consent to being photographed together while touching one another.  His catalog of photographs helps us to see how “notions of trust, love, social conventions and taboos are expressed through body language” and thus implicate the stranger relationality fundamental to life in late modern democratic public culture.

Those in the New York area can view his exhibit at The Gallery at Hermes through May 28, 2010.  For the rest you can see a selection of the exhibit here.  An interview with Rinaldi is available at Conscientious Extended.

The 365 Days project is a group of people dedicated to making one photographic self-portrait every day for a year.  Although I usually don’t pay attention to snapshot photography, the photos are posted at Flickr and now comprise an archive of 980,819 photos by roughly 18,000 people.  One way or another, this trove is a resource for thinking about how ordinary people use photography as a way of developing their own capacity of self-expression.  The photographs often are both personal and public, artistic and conventional, evocative and alienating, and otherwise both thoroughly familiar and yet uncanny.  And for better or worse, each has something to say about what it means to be a person.

This self-portrait was taken by David Sutton, a friend whose daily pics brought the project to my attention.  David is a professional photographer and so perhaps not the best example of the group for that.  Nonetheless, I was surprised to see how much his images exposed dimensions of his inner world that weren’t obvious amidst the banter of our conversations in an Evanston coffee shop.  The camera becomes a confidante, and then puts the public into not that role but something like it.

And so one might learn more than one wishes to know, particularly as the days go by and the photographer is pushed to experiment.  This image may reveal much more about David’s aesthetic background than his personality–although we can’t be sure about that–and thus the shift into the more artistic mode reveals another dimension of portraiture, which is an exploration of both social types and the realm of the inchoate that necessarily accompanies categorization without and within.

That possibility of seeing what lurks within and between the many mundane images of everyday people may be the surest appeal, and value, of 365 Days.  So it is that when looking for the image of a person, it may not matter at all who is in the picture.

David Sutton is a working photographer with a studio in Evanston, Il.  The third photograph is from latent_image at Flickr.

By guest correspondent Aric Mayer:

For the past three years I have been working on an intimate body of photographs [the slide show can be seen here] made within walking distance of my home and studio. Our property is in the middle of an orchard, parts of which have been left to go feral, the trees growing towards their natural grizzled tangle, while other parts have been bulldozed and prepared for development, only to be left for the weeds and the thistle.

For a time it has been a place grounded between categories, neither kempt nor wild. I have come to see it as a kind of crucible within which local tensions are played out in ways with global significance.

Probably the most significant issue of our lifetimes will be the emergence of global climate change as a consequence of human development. How we picture living with nature has everything to do with what we can imagine as a response to looming catastrophe.

There have been sets of parallel visual expectations that emerged over the last 50 or so years, on the one side there is a vision of nature as pristine ala Eliot Porter’s The Color of Wildness, and on the other side a vision of the American suburb that is bulldozed flat, gridded off and built up in a completely controlled fashion. Over the last few years, that American vision of the huge housing development has become quickly associated with decay and entropy as so many sit unfinished and empty, partially built and partially ruined. Suburbia and wildness developed mutually exclusive visions were neither had room for the other, and yet both have to exist.

A successful city is generally imagined as completely counter-entropic. It is permanent progress. Fully realized. In contrast, nature is understood to be cyclical. It is a system where the counter-entropy/entropy tension is contained and fully resolved within a system that is sustainable. An organism is generated, feeds, grows, dies and decays, returning its components completely to the ecosystem.

There is a dialectical tension between the constant effort required to sustain a counter-entropic city and the tendency of nature to absorb everything into a cyclical rhythm of growth and decay. As Carl Jung said in his essay “Alchemical Studies,” “Nature must not win the game, but she cannot lose.”

This interaction between home and wildness has profound psychological implications for it mirrors the evolution of human consciousness itself. A similar and analogous set of tensions is played out in the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousness, the first being the creator of technology and home, and the second being a product of nature, emerging from millions of years of evolution. These exist in dynamic tension, in constant movement to dominate or subsume the other. In fact, the history of development is in a sense the history of human consciousness, with many of the same tensions and contradictions.

Cross-posted from Aric’s blog.

During the 1998-1999 Kosovo/Serbian conflict more than 45,000 displaced Kosovar Albanians were saved in a refugee camp in the Macedonia town of Cegrane—that is more than three times the size of the town itself.  As they were leaving the camp to return to their homes in Kosovo the refugees left their handprints on the outer walls of the town that protected them as a sign of “freedom, peace, and gratitude.”  Subsequently, the meaning of the handprints have been forgotten in the town and the walls are slated for demolition. Boryana Katsavora’s photo gallery “Handprints of Peace” seeks to recover and to memorialize a humanist moment in history at which strangers reached out to help one another at great risk to themselves.

We are pleased to introduce  Boryana Katsavora, a Bulgarian-Russian documentary photographer, and her work to the NCN audience. To view “Handprints of Peace” click on the image photograph.  To sample Katsavora’s other work click here or visit her blog.

Peter Turnley, a frequent contributor at NCN, returns this week with his most recent work from the recent Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro.  The Rio Carnaval is one of the largest annual public festivals in the world, and it is not hard to find  photo slide shows that feature the colors and the “flair, charisma, spontaneity, sensuality and joy” of the event so emblematic of life in Brazil.  In this photo essay Peter turns the attention of his lenses away from the main event—the parades and dance competitions that take place in the  Sambodromo, the stadium of Samba—to the fringes of the celebration that include everything from preparation to aftermath.

To view the photo essay click here.

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin

Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, England

For more than 50 years, Don McCullin’s images have shaped our awareness of modern conflct and its consequences. His courage and integrity, as well as the exceptional quality of his work, are a continuing inspiration and influence worldwide.  The Imperial War Museum is collaborating with McCullin in  featuring a major exhibition of over 200 photographs, objects, magazines and personal memorabilia that shows how war has shaped the life of this exceptional photographer and those across the globe over that past five decades.  The exhibit runs in the Special Exhibitions Gallery of the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England, from February 6 to June 13, 2010.  It is free to the public and will travel to Bath (September to November, 2010) and London (October 2011-January 2012).  To see a slide show of McCullin’s photographs click here, to see a brief interview with him click here.

“Locked and Found” is part of Robert Gumpert’s “Take A Picture, Tell a Story” project begun while working on a short documentary concerning the closing of San Francisco’s County Jail 3, the oldest count jail in California at the time.  He had the idea of connecting photographs of inmates with whatever story they wanted to tell except for a story of an open case.  The project  began in 2006 and is regularly updated.  To see the archive of photos and to hear the stories click here or on the above photograph  of Thaddeus Stevens and Roy Westry taken in August 2009.

We are pleased to introduce NCN readers to Impact, an exploratory online exhibition site inaugurated by the Resolve collective of photographers and creative professionals and designed  to feature the work of independent photographs as they address a common theme or topic.  The initial theme is “On the Outside Looking In.”  The photograph above  is from Sean Gallagher’s “Desertification Unseen.”

We welcome back our friend, humanist and photojournalist Peter Turnley, who has spent the past month in Haiti documenting the human struggle between life and death.  The slide show “Haiti: Between Death and Life” is cross posted from The Online Photographer.  To see the show click here or on the photograph below.

Photo Credit: © Peter Turnley/Corbis.