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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

By guest correspondent Elisabeth Ross

A little while ago, the New York Times ran a story about the so-called “family dinner” predicament, which in this latest commentary was anchored by yet another study suggesting an association between frequency of family dinners and adolescent substance abuse rates.

The photograph accompanying the article on the front page of the Style section forecasts the nostalgic, eternal return to that staple of the modern visual lexicon: the mid-century kitchen, complete with iconic 1950s housewife emerging to present a casserole to her adoring family seated at the table.

The faded pastels, washed out background, and dinner table floating in a cloud of whiteness suggest an ethereal quality, interrupted only by the father’s black suit.  He sits slightly off balance, imitated by his son, but not quite able to project full parental authority.  The smile is a little too forced.  Is he nervous?  Maybe he and his wife have just had a fight.  Maybe he’s wondering if that casserole is about to hit him in the head.  Maybe she’s looking at it, gauging just how much she’d have to clean up afterward and if it’s even worth it.

Of course, that’s not what we’re supposed to be thinking.  But we have seen this sanitized domesticity performed so many times, that we should know better than to confuse the ideal with the real.  The image of the dressed-up housewife in her otherworldly kitchen can be considered today in terms of underlying doubt, anxiety, and potential for transgression.  In this way, the image speaks to another photograph from the same article:

In this 21st century family tableau, the mother is similarly turned inward, that is, facing her family and facing away from the viewer.  Comparison with the first image is supposed to be damming: look, for example, at how the four individuals are eating junk food while strapped into seats that keep them separated from one another.  But that’s not the only way to see it.  The space is private but mobile, comfortable, and with modern amenities at hand.  The mother–nothing suggests she is a housewife: no apron, no casserole, no husband, no house–is firmly planted in the driver’s seat.  The pink apron is replaced by business-casual black.  Mom’s in charge.  At least, of dinner.

And that’s part of the problem.

After presenting the inverse ratio of family dinner frequency to teen drug use, the article parenthetically notes that 80% of family dinners are prepared by women (while still holding 50% of all jobs) and then features interviews with 8 women, who describe their commitment to or reluctant abandonment of the family dinner (one woman would only admit to the latter on the condition of anonymity).

Every year for the last decade or so, we hear the same statistics linking family meals to an assortment of psycho-developmental benefits for children.  The data does not show causation, researchers admit, rather, simply an association.  Which means that any number of variables on both sides of the equation would change the actual cause and effect outcomes dramatically.

So what is really going on here?  The Columbia University authors of this latest study are also the folks who created “Family Day, ” designed to promote family dinners.  (This year, it was September 28, in case you missed it).  The website has a “sponsors and partners” link which, when clicked, display giant logos; among others are Stouffers, Coca-Cola, and Smuckers.  And anyone who has visited a supermarket recently will have noticed a revival of food products marketed as quick and easy ways to get the Family Dinner ready.

Keeping in mind that the iconic images of 1950s housewives and their kitchens were strategically deployed to promote an entire postwar aesthetic tied to consumer spending, one should ask what such images really show and what does that have to do with reality, then or now, not to mention quality time with the kids. “I don’t think we really know what a good family dinner is,” one psychologist notes in the article. And apparently we don’t know what one looks like either.

Conjuring up 1950s iconography may work for some, but for others it is an invitation to shifting interpretations and resistance.  The housewife and her kitchen should invite interrogation, not surrender.  And one question to begin with might be why, in 2009, we are even suggesting that kids might be turned into drug addicts unless women conform to a model of family life that never really happened.

Photographs by Getty Images and Scott Dalton/New York Times.

Elisabeth Ross, a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, has no idea what her kids will have for dinner this evening.  She would like to salute Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University on this week becoming the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Dr. Ostrom was not permitted to take advanced math in high school because women were routinely advised at the time that they did not need trigonometry or calculus, “if they were going to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” (NPR interview, 10/12/09).  You can contact Elisabeth at e-ross@northwestern.edu.

By guest correspondent Troy Cooper

One of the consistent visual conventions of the current economic recession is the photograph of a store closing.  Any number of major retailers have announced their intent to shut the doors at many or all locations, and the conventional image often accompanies such news.  Record stores, due to a number of factors, not the least of which is the popularity and availability of digital music, have been phasing out over the past decade.  So the demise of another one might not be surprising, but the closing of a music megastore suggests that more can be involved than discounts and shuttered windows.

With the closing of the Virgin Megastore in New York City comes a ritual normally relegated to human loss.  In the store’s last days, we bear witness to death, loss, and mourning.

In a space where one would aurally browse the latest albums now resides a repetitive emptiness, as if each of these stations is an individually numbered victim of the downturn.  One might even envision the cold steel drawers of the morgue in this photo, numbered to identify the dead.  The young woman in the photograph stares dismally into the poster bin, as if in mourning of the loss behind her.  Perhaps she is there to identify a fallen loved one.  No longer do consumers share in the experience of new music side by side in the store; instead, scavengers pick through the detritus that remains.

Here, amid the vast emptiness of the retail floor, exists a lone rack of black Virgin-branded t-shirts, one of the last remnants of the megastore’s inventory.  The composition of this image is notable. The image of a gurney or a casket comes to mind, as the shape of the rack on wheels centers the image; the blackened televisions above suggest flatlined heart monitors.  The deceased is prepared for transport to the cemetery.  The recession has claimed a mega-victim.

Yet, what is it about the death of the megastore that gives us cause to mourn?  Our investment in consumerism is intimately tied with civic responsibility.  It is the consumer-citizen’s responsibility to tend to the dying industry, for without her attention, its lifeblood is drained.  Despite one’s best efforts to the contrary, we are all part of consumer culture.  Our roles in the culture may differ, but our commitment to capital remains constant.  While some may applaud the death of a megastore, others lament.  We all have our ways of mourning.

Interestingly, in this particular case of the store-closing photograph, we are provided a glimpse of the store’s last days.  We are allowed to witness the slow and steady death of the retail chain; perhaps we are also called to witness the death of an industry. More importantly, we are privy to the mourning process; we see human grief for the loss of commerce, exchange, goods often enjoyed in common.  The photographs ask us to consider the utility of the megastore in troubled economic times, our reactions to various effects of economic recession, and our personal relationships to consumerism.

Photograph by Jessica Ebelhar/The New York Times.

Troy Cooper is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Dept. of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  His dissertation examines the visual rhetoric of consumer activism during the rise of modern advertising in the United States.  Troy can be contacted at tcooper2@illinois.edu.

By guest correspondent Daniel Kim

Peer into the small, circular opening of just about any camera’s viewfinder, and you’ll see the familiar, rectangular frame through which the photographer composes her image. There exists, however, within contemporary point-and-shoot cameras, another frame that is often relegated to the background—quite literally. This LCD frame is positioned behind the camera and it provides the photographer with an instant relay, or feedback, of what unfolds in front of her.

Photojournalists employ a pejorative term called ‘chimping,’ which denotes the act of admiring one’s own photo directly after each shot. The term is meant as a critique of the photographer who may otherwise miss an important shot within the course of his self-admiration. I do not share in this criticism, but I do want to discuss the chimping that is now ubiquitous in snapshot photography. My concern—or hope, rather—is that we can transform how we think about, and therefore, how we go about the process of looking at one another.

If we are to consider how photography can act as democratic speech—as a practice adding to the richness of citizenship—then the snapshot photographer should be capable of a degree of reflection, during the act of taking the photograph, that we have yet to witness with any regularity within the culture of everyday life.

The photo above can be read as part of a continuing critique on photography’s affair with the spectacle. But the predictability with which this phenomenon now occurs, be it at government inaugural or rock concert, reveals just how entrenched the habit of seeing through a screen becomes to those determined to capture rather than look. Taking a step back, Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt contemplates the sight in front of him, and freezes the moment—on film. The image registers both the banality of capture and perhaps the attempt by a photographer to push the other way.

The LCD frame shares several features with the camera’s viewfinder, particularly the display of representation in real-time. But the rear-facing frame has an unmistakable resemblance to the familiar, rectangular borders enclosing what had counted as western art for centuries (i.e., that which was worthy of framing). The molded, raised plastic on the back of the camera forms a physical border, a tactile frame that cues us toward what it is that we should shoot. The framing convention of the past is now resurrected on the back of today’s common camera.

This repeated ’shooting-and-looking’ at the ephemeral, frozen image is a two-step process that first addresses the photographic subject, and then immediately investigates the LCD frame for evidence of the photographer’s success. The photographer is now the viewer, and the viewer, the photographer. And because of the whiplash caused by chimping, the photographer now participates in a rash, malformed process—a process more interested in the ownership, or capture, of the camera’s subject than a meaningful study of another within his community.

Chimping, and the technology that enables this practice, strips away a photographer’s ritual of the past: an emerging likeness that magically appears under the red darkroom light bathed in chemically-diluted water (courtesy of Rochester). And this is not simply nostalgia. Nor is it a concession that the older craft is a better craft. Rather, the various technologies of photography can cause us to rethink, more thoughtfully, the ways in which the photographer participates in a measured exchange with not just friends and family, but also strangers we might get to know through the act of photographing.  We need not cover up our LCD screens with gaffer’s tape (as some have apparently done), but we can ask how technology leads us to look in certain ways, ways that resist contemplation and limit relationships. And we might consider how to use the same technology to see each other anew rather than as objects to be consumed.

Perhaps, we should celebrate a different kind of ubiquity–the prospect of affordable technology for the purposes of capturing loved ones, strangers, and the details of everyday life. And significantly, as argued here, we should celebrate that the shared viewing of a small LCD screen to show off images to others, enacts and instigates a sense of community. The larger point is this: accessibility need not be at odds with a reconsideration of our photographic practice.  Such rethinking can work toward the democratization of attentive, measured ways of photographing each other—looking at each other—for amateurs, enthusiasts, and professionals alike.

Photograph by Elliott Erwitt/Magnum

Daniel Kim is a former photojournalist and recently completed his first year of Ph.D. study in rhetoric in the Department of Communication, University of Colorado.  He can be reached at daniel.h.kim@colorado.edu.

By guest correspondent Elisabeth Ross.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported the death of Walter Cronkite with the headline, “Trusted Voice of TV News.”  That sentiment was echoed in obituaries across the country, many of which also suggested that there had been a decline in the character and credibility of news coverage from the days of network television.  The Times story also included this front-page photograph:

This image of Cronkite seated in front of television monitors hardly seems noteworthy, beyond serving as a fitting visual tribute to the news anchor whose career spanned the history of television news itself.  Of course, much has changed on both sides of the camera.  Cronkite’s pose here captures a sense of the newsroom as command center, a somber stage free of the competing visual cues of contemporary media sprawl.

Consider the subtle background: barely visible behind Cronkite, stacked next to the active screen in the image, are three additional monitors, each blank, waiting for a control-room command.  In the hierarchy of the nascent television newsroom of the 1950s, man still dominated machine, and the trustworthiness and reliability of the medium rested largely in the projection of the self-assured anchor.  The era’s bulky media equipment ensured that control over media images lay in the hands of a few professionals.  In the days before the now essential teleprompter, the news is literally in Cronkite’s hands.

Most obituaries could not help quoting Cronkite’s signature sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” a trademark phrase that, together with news show titles such as “You are There” and “See it Now,” played on the early television audience’s need to be reassured that they were experiencing something real.  Television anxiety is, after all, as old as television itself.  The medium that came of age during McCarthyism and the Cold War was prone to a paternalistic model of the authoritative screen, one whose audience–with far fewer screens to choose from–was alternately transfixed by and mistrusting of the powerful images newly anchored in their living rooms.

Not that there haven’t been dissenting voices.  Director Hal Ashby’s 1979 film Being There mocks the very idea that TV can bring the audience “there,” “now” or anywhere resembling reality.  When the simple-minded main character Chance Gardener, played by Peter Sellers, leaves his television-riddled home for the first time, he is armed only with his remote control.  The little hand-held piece of equipment appears laughable (and is promptly put to humorous effect by Sellers).  It soon becomes clear, however, that Chance and everyone else is already enmeshed within an enormous technological apparatus–one in which the news can never be “the way it is.”

In the thirty years since the release of Being There, equipment such as bulky cameras and big screens  has been augmented by powerful small technologies such as the portable, wireless digital recording device.  The possibilities for visual media experiences that could be called “You are There” and “See it Now” have grown, as has the media savvy of the viewing public, which itself is armed with increased means of capturing and deploying images through an ever-expanding variety of media outlets.

Cronkite’s death was lamented by most commentators as the end of an era in television news.  Certainly there has been a changing of the guard, not least because the public is no longer limited to the chronic mindlessness of network news.  When that change opens possibilities for increased reflexivity and citizen participation, “the way it is” can take on richer meaning, expressed by competing voices and disruptive images, meaning that hopefully reflects the complexity of relationships that in turn drives the critical consciousness of the viewing public.

Photograph of Cronkite from Bettmann/Corbis. Screen grab from Being There (Director Hal Ashby, Warner Brothers, 1979) taken on 7/23/09.  Elisabeth Ross is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University.  You can contact Elisabeth at e-ross@northwestern.edu.

By guest correspondent Patrick Wade.

As long as we are cataloging historical moments of American injustice, violence, protest, and trauma in early May–and their importance for ongoing memory-work “in the interest of a usable past”–we shouldn’t forget about the labor dimension of May Day, and its origins in the Haymarket tragedy of May 4, 1886.

On May 3, Chicago police officers killed two strikers in a fight at McCormick Reaper Works. In response to the killing, a meeting was called by August Spies and Albert Parsons at Chicago’s Haymarket square. As the meeting was winding down and Samuel Fielden, the evening’s final orator, was speaking, 175 Chicago police officers marched on the gathering and demanded that the remaining crowd disperse. An unidentified person in the crowd threw a dynamite bomb into the police ranks, instantly slaying Officer Matthias Deegan and wounding several others. The police began to fire into the crowd, and, in the aftermath, eight prominent anarchists and labor leaders were arrested and tried for murder. Five were executed by hanging, although Chicago Mayor John Peter Altgeld would later pardon the survivors and exonerate the executed, as none of the men could be proven to have taken part in any conspiracy to murder.

On May 15th, 11 days following the initial events, Harper’s magazine published the illustration that you see above. The image–like much of the editorial commentary at the time–blamed anarchists and labor agitators for violence. Samuel Fielden is pictured exhorting the crowd in spite of the melee unfolding below him. One crowd member is shown firing on the police. The image depicts a riot, one with villains (the crowd) and heroes (the police). The illustration is composing a useable past–for the state.

Photography’s realism doesn’t hinder depictions of “wild” crowds of protesters to paint dissent as illegitimate, blameworthy acts of violence against the legitimate guarantors of social order. We would do well to remember this as we look at contemporary news stories displaying the violent outcomes of May Day rallies across Europe. See, for example, the MSNBC.com article “May Day Turns Violent across Europe, or the New York Times article “Anger and Fear Fuel May Day Protests.”

Conventional images of protest such as this foreground the wild-eyed, long-haired, bearded anarchist as a threat to the social order. And are images like the one below, that represent the “pure” possibilities of peaceful protest, any less naive in their erasure of the inherent potential for violence in the gathering of crowds?

When the New York Times leads the online version of its story about European May Day protest with this image, the viewer is encouraged to see legitimate protest as serenely peaceful, which makes images of violent protest distressful, disturbing, and illegitimate by comparison.

But of course, we need not be trapped between these two images of protest. There is a third, democratic possibility, one that relies on a different strategy that falls outside of the play of guilt and innocence in the two photographs above.

Here we see a photograph of the community gathering together to engage in collective action to bring about change. The crowd is always potentially violent, and this is part of its strength. But this violence is always implicit, and it creates the possibility of a political demand–one that can best be represented in the gathering of bodies together in a collective, embodied argument, under a banner, in plain view of a seat of governmental power.

Can we not draw a further parallel to a different photograph, another image of a crowd taken from the civil rights movement in the US? One that draws upon all the aesthetic powers of photographic design to eloquently depict collective solidarity?

Yes we can.

Illustration by Harper/s Weekly/public domain. Photographs by Mustafa Ozer/Agence France Press – Getty Images; Fred Dufour/Agence France Press – Getty Images; Lucas Dolega/European Pressphoto Agency; Warren Leffler/US News and World Report. Patrick Wade is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University. He can be contacted at wpatrickwade at gmail.com.

By guest correspondent Elisabeth Ross

When President Barack Obama returned last week from his first official visit to Europe, a flurry of photographs documented the enthusiastic reception by a welcoming European public.  During the trip, Obama spoke of mending relationships and of the need for adjustments and self-reflection on both sides in order to rebuild an alliance between Europe and the United States that would withstand the demands of the 21st century.

The new millennium had been marked by the souring of relations with European allies under the Bush administration, a deterioration memorably accelerated by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s 2003 dismissal of France and Germany as “old Europe” for their opposition to the Iraq war.

Two recent images from Obama’s trip speak to the question of an old and new Europe and to why Rumsfeld got it all wrong.

The first image shows President Obama meeting with president Vaclav Klaus of the Czech republic, a country Rumsfeld would presumably have us believe is part of the “new” Europe, given its relatively recent NATO membership.  But the two leaders, off-center and passive, are dominated in the frame by the towering portraits adorning the walls of Prague Castle.  The portraits appear to challenge the authority of the diminutive figures beneath them. These rulers from the past bear all the trappings of their nobility: from rich robes and furs to powdered wigs and armor, their imposing presence a reminder of centuries of Austria-Hungarian dominance in the region.

The new media of press photography highlights here the assertive presence of old media, and the ceremonial portraiture recalls Jürgen Habermas’ description of representative publicness, which relied on “demonstrations of grandeur”: the staging of authority and status before a public which was excluded from participation.

The stage is entirely different in a second image that appeared the next day when Obama addressed the Turkish parliament in Ankara:

Against a sheer white background, Obama is an animated speaker before an attentive audience; the listeners behind him reciprocate his style of dress and hold their focus on him in a neutral stance.  Even the Turkish flag, unceremoniously cropped, with its crescent moon and star hidden by its own red folds, appears deferential, as if too shy to do its work.

Whereas the past dominated the Prague photograph, here the bare walls represent a clean slate. Turkey is, after all, seeking admission into the European Union, a process begun years ago and a prospect that arouses deep anxieties among EU member nations.  Rather than emphasize a glorious past, the photograph presents the democratic basis for a new era of statehood.

Obama praised Turkey for its strong secular democracy and promised to support its bid for EU membership.  Much has been made of the so-called European identity crisis, in particular when it comes to fears over the admission of a majority Muslim country into the EU.  These contrasting images speak to how to define Europe – old and new – and, of course, other players on this stage as well.  By reading between the images, old media and new media work together to reveal the complicated portrait of a union of states which, like the US, defies simple representation.

Photographs by Todd Heisler/The New York Times.  Elisabeth Ross is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University.  You can contact Elisabeth at e-ross@northwestern.edu.

Today we welcome guest correspondent David Campbell.

Photojournalism’s representation of war is often standardized, familiar, even clichéd. Regardless of the time or place it can seem like we have seen it before, regularly and repeatedly. But if we always approach the problem from the same vantage point – asking how the event is represented – we run the risk of missing vital dimensions and important effects of the image, as this picture from Nepal demonstrates.

This picture comes from that country’s decade-long civil war which ended in November 2006. The passenger was among 36 killed when Maoists bombed a bus near Madi in June 2005. As one of the 15,000 people who died in this period, he was an unknown statistic in what was, for the rest of the world, a forgotten conflict, an event that had disappeared from the radar even before it could be remembered.

We could read this image, which is being recirculated through a book launched at this year’s biennial Chobi Mela festival of photography, as the making visible of something we should have known about. Or it could be another testament to lives lost, marked by hands of death. Or we could see it as a further instance of the indirect marking of mass death, preserving dignity while recording loss. While such accounts provide understanding, they do not draw our attention to the larger significance of this image. If we shift our focus from representation to enactment, from meaning to work, we can appreciate this photograph for its vitality in the present rather than merely its record of the past.

As one of the 179 photographs by 80 photographers selected from the more than 2,000 submitted for the exhibition “A People War: Images of the Nepal Conflict 1996-2006,” this picture toured Nepal throughout 2008. As a book and exhibition, “A People War” contains what individually might be regarded as unremarkable images in the global archive of war photography. Its catalogue of uniformed guerrillas, grieving widows, destroyed infrastructure, damaged individuals and mobilizing soldiers could, by themselves, have been drawn from any number of conflicts. Despite the editors desire to forgo showing unvarnished violence (hence the photograph of the bomb victim’s hand), there are pictures that shock, especially those that record the lynching of a teacher and journalist.

If, however, we view the images collectively and ask ourselves what work they are doing through the book and the exhibition, then they become something quite remarkable. Being shown within a year of the war’s end, this collection is an act of raw experience, a detailed encounter with what the conflict’s participants and victims have suffered so recently. Nepalese responded to this act in large numbers, with more than 350,000 people queuing to see it in 30 towns across the country – as in this picture from Surkhet. With thousands of free copies of the book distributed to public and school libraries across the countries, and a Nepali language budget edition made available for widespread sale, the organizers have ensured the photographs the broadest circulation possible.

People did not just look at the pictures. They engaged with the photographs. Mothers looked for evidence of missing family members, soldiers faced the consequences of their actions, and children witnessed what the future could be like if politics did not triumph over violence. To this end, the exhibition is also a warning to a fragile country. It functions as a statement in defense of the new federal republic, using the photographs to speak of a time to come, declaring that even if that future is not yet capable of being pictured, Nepalese know only too well what it could look like.

Photographs by Kumar Shrestha and Kirin Krishna Shrestha/nepa-laya. A gallery of additional images of the exhibition is available here.

Guest post by Aric Mayer.

Over the past three generations, the volume of images casually generated out of family life has increased exponentially. From the early 1900s when the Brownie camera made photography something that can be practiced easily, families have made records of important events and people, hoping perhaps to create traces and artifacts that can bind the past into the present, keeping time from marching away. There is also the strange paradox that occurs as we stage current events in order to photograph them so that we can look back at a future time and see them again. We perform for a future audience of our selves and our friends, rewriting history as we live it. As film and now digital technologies have developed, the ease and number of these types of images has gown. It is hard to know what the final impact of this flood of visual information will be on the next generation.

Exactly eighteen months ago my wife gave birth to our two children Laszlo and Chloe. In our short year and a half as a family there is already the sense that time and events are forever passing—the first tooth, the first steps, the first words … every week seems to bring another first, and with it comes loss. The temptation is there to record everything, to make an effort to translate life into a document that we can hold and thereby inoculate our selves from the losses that time brings.  That would be impossible, of course, but it doesn’t stop me from trying, as in the process I have accrued 20,000 photographs of our personal lives together.

I recognize that when I am photographing, I am not simply recording events, but rather am converting them into frozen dioramas that do not necessarily recall the moments that they come out of. It is entirely possible to make a beautiful picture in the middle of crying and chaos. Likewise visual chaos can be made out of the mundane.

The photograph above is one of my favorites. Laszlo is drawing on paper. Chloe is drawing on Laszlo. And I am converting the scene into an image that frames them in that moment, creating a drawing of my own. It speaks to the multiple ways that we as families leave un-erasable marks on each other at so many levels. 

The taking of family photographs is not simply a way of stopping time or recording the present for future consideration. It is also a way of organizing how we see ourselves. After a day with my children, I still on occasion set up a slideshow on my computer and watch my photographs from that day for half an hour or more. Even though I was with them in person for the day, the photographs bring something different than our relational interactions. These images are also about me. Not in a narcissistic sense, although we must be careful how heavy handed we are in shaping our children’s images of self. These pictures contribute to how I see them and to how I organize my understanding of their place in my life. Included are pictures of the crying, scrapes and bruises, bad days, the other half of the picture. It is an intensely personal body of photographs. And by the time my children are in their early twenties, they will inherit hundreds of thousands of these images. Along the way I will select a few thousand that stand out for me. Who knows what these will mean to them? What will we even do with such an amount?

Editors Note:  The National Gallery of Art hosted a show titled “The Art of the Snapshot” in 2007.

Guest post by Marita Sturken

Of the many seismic changes signaled by this election, one is surely a change in the aesthetics of American political culture. Not only is Obama telegenic in a way that we have not seen in decades, but the aesthetics of his campaign and of the image economy that emerged around his candidacy signal a new kind of aesthetic, one that is embedded within a contemporary image culture of pastiche, play, and savvy image-making.

Let’s take, for instance, this flyer, which was handed out by volunteers in Pennsylvania in the last get-out-the-vote push (it was created by the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, not the Obama campaign). The flyer has a very specific informational intent (its reverse side gives information about voter rights and explicitly counters the misinformation campaigns intended to confuse voters), yet it is a strikingly visual document. It is derived from a poster that was made in support of Obama by Shepard Fairey, a street artist who became know for his Andre the Giant graffiti in cities such as New York, who has since made his name through a clothing line and his Obey Giant logo.

Fairey is emblematic of a new kind of cultural producer, at home with commerce and cultural politics simultaneously. In the new edition of our book Practices of Looking, Lisa Cartwright and I analyze the widely circulated Fairey-Obama posters (one features “Hope” and one “Change”) as both evocative of the historical image of JFK and as deploying the visual style of graphic poster design used by the Bolshevist agitprop artists of the 1920s. The graphic newsprint-like reproduction gives the work a sense of political urgency, playing with the idea of the image (and political figure) with mass appeal. The aesthetics of the image convey the spirit of progress and hope experienced both in the early Soviet context and in the Kennedy era. Contemporary viewers might be expected to read the poster’s graphic style as evoking a very modern kind of hope and optimism recoded within a savvy postmodern culture. The elegance of the poster is worth noting, with its deployment of a blue that is lighter than the stars and stripes blue, and a yellow warm tone—evoking yet not fully using the conventions of the red, white, and blue.

Of course the Obama logo (seen on the flyer) has already received significant attention (it’s been referred to as the “hardest working presidential candidate logo”) with its clever play on the “O” of Obama with the image of a sunrise evoking change, and its color scheme subtly signifying patriotism and the flag. Simple, evocative, smart. It was designed by Sol Sender of Sender LLC in Chicago in collaboration with mo/de, and was used in highly adaptable ways in the campaign. This week’s post-election coverage signals that the “O” will be played with throughout Obama’s tenure in office in headlines, political cartoons, and images (see, for instance, the cover of this week’s New Yorker).

It was amusing to hear that when Bush showed Obama the Oval Office for the first time this week, he took him on his standard tour of the kitschy artifacts in his personal collection on display there (one can see this tour on the White House homepage). Presumably the tour included his painting A Charge to Keep, which depicts a lone cowboy riding his horse up a hill followed by a pack of riders, an image from a pulp cowboy story about a thief fleeing a posse that Bush had mythologized as the lone “determined horseman” who has a “difficult trail.”

One can only imagine the aesthetic disconnect the president-elect might have felt in that moment, and perhaps in quietly “measuring the curtains” he might have considered for a moment what kinds of images he would take with him to the White House.

Sidney Blumenthal has written on Salon.com about the “peculiar aesthetics propagated in the age of George W. Bush” with its “contradictory styles of softening nostalgia and hardening cruelty.” Blumenthal saw the Bush kitsch as a rejection of the Reagan-era kitsch of patriotic sentiment, stating that “under Bush, kitsch has been transformed from sentimentality to sadomasochism.” The kitschy (and brutal) cowboy aesthetic of the Bush Administration has finally run its course, and a new aesthetic, one that rejects kitsch for a nuanced play off the visual codes that evoke America, is emerging in its place.

Guest post by Aric Mayer.

Let me just come out and say it. Barack Obama’s landslide victory on Tuesday is the greatest moment in politics for my generation. This is the fifth presidential election that I have voted in, and it is the first where I feel as though the country is being moved by the collective will of its younger citizens. As an eyewitness to many of America’s great domestic tragedies over the past eight years, this election affects me deeply and I can’t write outside of the relief and hope that it brings.

With that said, all is not champagne corks and confetti.

I want to draw your attention to two images by Alan Chin taken in Chicago at the Grant Park celebration where Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech as president elect.

Here the viewer stands alone while looking out over empty railroad tracks at Grant Park with the Chicago skyline spreading across the horizon. In the distant center, the letters USA are shining off of one of its buildings. As a symbol, a city represents the best of human cooperation and achievement. There is promise ahead. And it is going to take real work to get there.

In his acceptance speech Obama looked tired and sometimes grim. He knows what is ahead. Obama has often quoted Reinhold Niebuhr, the moral philosopher who wrote about the destructive nature of power and how it is sometimes necessary to use it even as it corrupts you. Obama inherits two lengthy and costly wars, the near bankruptcy of our own domestic policies, an American economy in free fall and a world economy that appears to be teetering on the edge of the unknown. But as dark as this may seem, the alternative was even darker. John McCain’s last efforts at character assassination and fear mongering left him in the isolated position of having nothing to win but a completely fractured constituency.

The election on Tuesday was won in part through the unprecedented turnout of minority and young voters. It ultimately came down to a contest between the nuanced, hopeful and inclusive pluralism of Barack Obama and the entrenched fears of a segment of conservative white working and middle class voters that was the final platform of John McCain’s candidacy. In contrast to the fear being spread by the McCain campaign, Obama focused on statesmanship, policy and the choice of pragmatism over idealism in forming a new government in America. In a theatrical paradox, while drawing huge crowds Obama frequently played down the drama to the extent that newspaper editorials began to call him boring.

What was happening though was not boring at all, but was and is a ground shift towards pluralism, nuance and complexity with aesthetic consequences. As Obama’s campaign traced its arc from the Democratic Convention until Tuesday night, he clarified his message by moving away from the inflammatory and the incredible and towards the gritty and the pragmatic. To live in a multidimensional society we must recognize that while our own positions are uniquely ours, they do not make up the entire country. The post baby boomers who had such a powerful impact on this election have been accused of self absorption and narcissism, frequently by baby boomers themselves. But there are advantages to self absorption within context, for it reveals the limits of self. It helps to know oneself in order to make room for one who is unlike you. At the heart of this is an acceptance of the “other” and a grass roots rejection of fundamentalist divisions along ethnic and racial lines. What is emerging in America is a more truly plural constituency. At the same time, the depiction of the American Dream as a place and an experience where you can have it all is being replaced by pictures of collapsing markets and a very uncertain economic future. The Great Depression and the New Deal brought us documentary realism. It remains to be seen what will emerge for us out of the current growing crises.

In the second image, Obama is surrounded by waving American flags. It is a triumphant moment, framed by reminders of danger. The bullet proof glass is already in place. In the back left the letters USA appear on an electronic ticker, the same lettering that streams up to the minute data of the market turmoil. There is a balance of hope and realism.

We need to cultivate this balance. Obama wrote it into his speech. While warning us of the difficulties ahead, he still took the time to remind us that there will be children and a new puppy in the White House. A new generation in American politics begins.

A complete slideshow of Alan Chin’s images from Grant Park on November 4 is available at BAGnewsNotes.