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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

When I came across this photograph in the NYT yesterday I was stopped in my tracks. The story that it anchored concerned “the way we live now” in an era of debt, but all I could think was that this is a picture of the late modern ghost town.  A shopping mall without shoppers … or for that matter, without shops or shopkeepers.  Instead of sage brush and weeds we have rubberized plants, and while the store fronts are not boarded up it is a fair bet that the building has been locked down to keep vandals and scavengers away, but the scene nevertheless evokes the eerie, spectral presence of the now absent, bustling commerce that once filled these halls.

In the days following 9/11 we were told that it was our civic duty to consume in order to keep the economy on its feet; the now prolonged recession makes even this limited civic responsibility impossible for many to honor; and for others, well, as the Times reporter notes, “it just [feels] better to owe less money,” and so rather than to spend many citizen-consumers have resorted to saving, or paying down their debt.  It is hard to blame individuals for the same strategy being exercised by banks who severely limit the money they are willing to loan in a “risky” economy or corporations who refuse to invest or hire—or for that matter, the strategy being counseled by Republicans who think that the solution to our economic woes is to limit spending (including on such items as extended unemployment insurance) while extending the Bush tax cuts.  But nevertheless, the effect of such thrift on the economic recovery is palpable.

The question is, how do you give presence to an economic problem, particularly when it is animated, at least in part, by a psychology of risk?  The photograph above does a pretty good job as it visualizes the problem (or at least the effect) in chicken-and-eggs terms:  what comes first the shoppers or the shops?  What the picture makes most clear is not the old saw that a “penny saved is a penny earned,” but rather its counter, that one needs to recognize what is entailed by being “penny wise and pound foolish.” The members of Congress in particular should pay heed.

Photo Credit:  Brian Urich/New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

Before Deepwater Horizon there was Thunder Horse, a fifteen story oil platform that cost over $1 billion dollars to construct and was characterized as a marvel of modern technology.  According to then Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, “It is amazing that so large a structure … will have such a tiny environmental footprint, leaving almost no trace of itself in either the sea or the sky.” The photograph above shows it pitching in the seas of the Gulf of Mexico following Hurricane Dennis in 2005 before it had become fully operational. The efficient cause of its near sinking was not the storm however, but the improper installation of a check valve that “caused water to flood into, rather than out of, the rig when it heated during the hurricane.”  A simple enough mistake, perhaps, until we learn that the platform was hastily rushed into production “to demonstrate to shareholders that the project was on time and on schedule.”  And it was later discovered that the shoddy welding of underwater manifold pipes could have led to a catastrophe that would have made the current disaster seem small in comparison.

But there is more, for in the same year a BP refinery in Texas City, TX exploded, killing fifteen and injuring nearly 200 more.  And again, the cause was “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP.”  The next year BP was responsible for the leaking of 267,000 gallons of oil on Alaska’s North Shore. And yet, once again, the accident was foreseeable and avoidable.  In total BP ended up paying over $300 million dollars in fines.  No small amount until you compare it against their net profit for 2007 of $20.84 billion dollars (admittedly, a sharp decline from the previous year but more than enough to absorb the fines and still leave enough to pay investors a substantial dividend, aka, “the cost of doing business”).

There are two points to be made. The first and more obvious point concerns what the photograph above (and others like it from the Texas City explosion and the leak in Alaska) actually shows.  The evidence of the impending disaster of Deepwater Horizon was literally before our eyes at least as early as 2005, but we chose not to see it.  After all, progress entails bold risk, and where would we be without oil.  It is just the most recent iteration of modernity’s gamble, the wager that the long-term dangers of a technology intensive society will be ultimately avoided by continual progress.  Sure, safety is important, but … And as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as we dole out fines that amount to little more than a slap on the wrist.

The second point is less obvious precisely because it is harder to visualize, and it is all the more important because of that fact:  the economic model that is driving such decision making is not guided by anything even approximating the rationality of free markets or the law of supply and demand, but by the same culture of greed that has driven the world economy to its knees in recent times.  As one British economist put it, BP was run like “a financial company, rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets and then moving them before they had to deal with the consequences.  The troubled Texas City refinery, for example, had five managers in six years.”  Without putting too fine of an edge to it, we’ve learned in recent times that that is no way to run the financial sector, let alone an oil conglomerate.

In the end, the photograph of the listing Thunder Horse Platform might be a proper visual rebuttal to Gordon Gekko’s now famous declaration, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

Photo Credit: NYT.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the movie At First Sight, a story about a man, blind from the age of three, who recovers his sight. Because he had spent most of his life sightless his brain never learned how to translate the chemical and electronic impulses transmitted to it from his eyes in a meaningful fashion.  Like a child initially learning how to read has to figure out how to translate squiggles on a page into meaningful words and then sentences, the movie’s protagonist literally has to learn how to see: colors, shapes, textures, shadows, reflections … all the of the visual aspects of the world that sighted people take for granted, he had to learn, one dimension and one image at a time.  The most pertinent moment in the film occurred for me during a scene in which the now sighted man is walking around the streets of New York City with his girl friend, reveling in the cornucopia of images  available to him.  They come across a homeless person sleeping on a door stoop and he doesn’t quite know what to make out of it; his bewilderment is compounded when his girl friend fails to even see the person laying there.  When he points the homeless person out to her she admonishes him as if he were a child, “you’re not supposed to look at that.”  The scene is a poignant allegory of the the myriad ways in which we must learn to see, including the complex  network of social norms and conventions concerning what can and cannot (or should and should not) be seen.

I was reminded of this moment from the movie when I came across the above photograph in a NYT slideshow on November 27^th, the day after Thanksgiving  also known as “Black Friday.”  Cued by a number of symbolic markers, my first thought was that the camera was encouraging me to see seeming that was indecorous to look at: a homeless person—a barely recognizable individual sleeping in a public space, his face obscured and his body wrapped up in what appeared to be a grey and dirty blanket; surrounded by his few worldly goods, including the signature shopping cart, the only other person in the scene dutifully ignores him as if he isn’t there and shouldn’t be seen.  The awkwardness of the moment dissipated upon closer inspection, however, for there were things that didn’t make much sense, not least that we don’t typically see homeless people sleeping on the floor in grocery stores—after all, it’s not good for business.  And then I read the caption:  “Brian Garcia, 17, tried to nap on Friday at a Wal-Mart in Sugar Land, Tex., where he was first in line for a greatly discounted  plasma TV.”

It is possible that this photograph was intended as something of a visual irony, particularly when we consider that it was juxtaposed with other pictures in the same slideshow that implied something like an unrepentant, consumerist version of gluttony.  But there is a different and perhaps more important point to be made.  Stories and photographs about the frenzy of activity that took place in our stores and malls on Black Friday were ubiquitous across local and national media.  And for the most part what we were being invited to see was the world of commerce doing what it does.  Individual shoppers might be portrayed as going overboard in buying too much, or as being unduly cautious as they wait for “deep discounts” before they make their holiday purchases.  But in either case we were being encouraged to seeing consumers and businesses doing what they do.  What we didn’t see were those incapable of being consumer-citizens.  And most of all, we didn’t see the homeless.  To make the point take note of the fact that every year the week before Thanksgiving is National Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week.  This year that would have been November 15-21. If you rely on the major news outlets for your information—print or broadcast—you probably wouldn’t know that since, as far as I can tell, not a single national newspaper or network carried a story about it.  Not a one!  Apparently its not something we are supposed to see … or look at.

Photo Credit:  Michael Stravato/New York Times

As the Thanksgiving holiday in the US approaches, preachers, public officials, teachers, counselors, and even advertisers will be encouraging everyone to give thanks for what we might otherwise take for granted.  Because this was not likely to have been a bountiful year for most people, the ordinary, unsung features of daily life are being elevated to the status of blessings (which they are).  One might consider what would happen if similar advice were given regarding the way we look at things.  The sentiment need not even be one of gratitude so much as simple curiosity, if we would but look at what we otherwise take for granted.

This photograph provides one example of what I have in mind.  It is basically a novelty shot: a wild turkey on the street in Buffalo, New York.  Even at Thanksgiving, one doesn’t see many wild turkeys, and they are not expected to appear in an urban, industrial setting, and what could it be doing there but–I can’t resist–crossing the road to get to the other side.  No more serious response seems called for: the turkey is a small, awkward figure, yet it can dominate a scene that is both dismal and distant.  This is not the time of year for a turkey to be walking into the city, but it seems safe enough, somewhat like an ordinary commuter trudging through urban isolation.  The image might as well be comic, if it is to be noticed at all.

What strikes me about the image, however, is everything other than the turkey.  Almost every part of the photo is focused on some part of what we ordinarily overlook: the electrical poles, lines, guy wires, and signage; the cracks in the pavement, crumbling curbs, and weeds breaking them down; the rusted rail line, the road bed, and rail cars; the industrial back lot of utility buildings, ventilation ducks, smoke stacks, and air conditioners and other rooftop machines; and, increasingly, the emptiness haunting industrial sites that have been abandoned or neglected or put to too little use for too long.

Seeing the world is something that everyone in the US now does through a camera, whether they know it or not, but not the camera that shows all.  Instead, most of the time we see the beautiful vistas and happy people of what might be called the retail side of life.  We habitually edit out the power lines in the tourist photo of a busy street or the weeds lurking in the news coverage, and few stop to consider how they rarely are shown the gritty reality of de-industrialization or the sad dispersions of people, possessions, and opportunities that accompany a declining standard of living.

Were people to really look at what is around them, they would still see much to be thankful for.  But they might see reasons to become alarmed as well.  To be truly thankful involves not only a feeling of gratitude, but also a resolution to preserve the good thing and pass it along to others.  If one looks closely, it may appear that Americans are overlooking a great deal, and that their inattention and lack of care for their cities, factories, and other infrastructure is a sign not of gratitude but rather of giving up.

Photograph by Brian Snyder/Reuters.

This photograph may be one of the more ordinary images in recent photojournalism, and all the more eloquent for that.

The caption stated that “A labourer rests near his makeshift tent home in a park” in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Attentive readers will have noticed the British spelling (and usage), and the image did come from an online slide show at The Guardian.  My guess is that American papers weren’t so quick to run the photo, but can you blame them?  There is nothing dramatic or otherwise notable anywhere in the frame.  The focus is diffused from the man in the foreground across the darkened, nondescript scene and then up into the spare stand of trees and the vague sky.  The area on the ground is littered with generic consumer items, while the background vista is a mess of random tree trunks, scrawny branches poking every which way, and brown leaves not yet scattered. The scene is utterly without visual interest, while nothing is happening–or likely to happen.

Attentive viewers may have noticed another dimension to the scene, however.  There are several tensions, subtle yet troubling, that can guide reflection.  First, there is more to the man, if you will look for it.  He is brooding it seems, an attitude that resonates with the long shadows from the late afternoon sun.  And that sunlight gilds his face and his hand: the face is taut with interior life, and the gesture and veins of his hand suggest strength and skill.  Together they may signify the dignity of labor, and so this photograph can channel the realism and progressive sentiments of genre painting.  He is not at work, however, or have enough of a job to afford shelter, and so the worker’s capable hands (and strong back) are immobilized.

Note also the contrast between his personal possessions and the unkept woodland.  His clothes are clean while laundry is draped on a clothesline, there is a symmetrical order to the campsite, and it looks as if a calendar and similar items are tacked to the tree trunk on the right.  What should be natural setting has taken on the look of domesticity, and what should be a temporary site–a campground, as if for a weekend getaway–is becoming the place where he may spend the winter.

So it is that the banality of the photograph is the vehicle for its documentary truth.  What we are seeing is a man settling into a “new normal.”  He is homeless, even if he is working he won’t have any job security, and his ability to cope, adapt, keep his shirt clean, and otherwise be ready to move up may do no more than keep him from slipping lower yet.

Photograph by Carlos Barria/Reuters.

Reuters and MediaStorm have collaborated on a multimedia history of the current financial crisis.  The online project is entitled Times of Crisis.  In their own words, “The project has two parts – a short web documentary and an in-depth visual timeline. The latter contains hundreds of entries woven together into a visual stream of information to show how the crisis has touched lives everywhere.”

It’s a savvy project, and the interactive time line is a good example of how photoj0urnalism has become woven deeply into public communication.  The images are not the whole story, but they clearly provide resources for thought, association, and action.  The project also provides a case study in perspective: if you hang back and look at the thumbnails, you remain disengaged from a radically fragmented world; if you enter the individual panels and move from place to place, you begin to recognize both the many different injuries suffered around the globe and the deep continuities in need, anxiety, and adaptation.

“Falling through the cracks” is a common expression for something being neglected, forgotten, or otherwise subject to errors of omission in organizational life.  The same can happen in journalism.  We might even consider how a “news crack” develops: a series of events in several areas of interest will lead to a succession of stories that seem to cover a lot of ground, but one result will be that a genuine subject of concern will be forgotten, not least because a similar concern has been taken up elsewhere.  Thus, the news might cover the recession, health care, the war in Afghanistan, a sex scandal (or two), the rising stock market, and the war again, and one might think that leading issues of the day are being reported much as they actually happen.  In fact, if the public is told that the economy is rebounding and more people likely to be covered by health care, then they could be excused, perhaps, for thinking that the major question remaining is whether we are going to “abandon” Afghanistan.  So it apparently seems to recent proponents of military escalation in that country (note for the younger reader: “escalation” is a word that was used a lot in the Vietnam War).

Let me suggest, as long as we are talking about abandonment, that something is missing.

This is one of the photographs from Kevin Bauman’s collection of 100 abandoned houses.  I didn’t choose it because it was more striking or sad or poignant or provocative than the others in the collection.  The house is one of many such homes–thousands upon thousands in Michigan, Florida, California, and all around the country.  We are still in the midst of the most damaging foreclosure crisis in US history, and the news still could get worse before it gets better.  In any case, it has been surreal in some areas: At one point the Chicago Tribune reported that the median home price in Detroit was $7500.  Now it has rebounded to a remarkable $15,000.  I guess it’s good news when houses once again cost more than the cheapest new car (maybe), but I’d say we still have a ways to go.

And then there is the house in the photograph.  Spectators often resonate to a genuine pathos in these images of abandonment.  We never knew who was there and it is obvious that there is no one to relate to now, and yet the structure seems haunted with the ghosts of forgotten lives.  Houses have stories, and they are full of stories. Each of us can remember some house–it need not even have been our own–where we were running through the doors, gazing out the windows, and gasping with delight or shock while experiencing the many twists and turns of family life.  in place of that, the boarded up house offers only a shabby mausoleum.

There also may be another, less familiar reason for feeling the sadness in this photograph.  America is the most thoroughly liberal nation–in the original, Lockean sense of liberalism that, to put it baldly, has “liberty” deeply entangled with “property.” What is less often recognized is that John Locke (and others) defined property not merely by possession but also according to use.  So it was, they claimed, that the original inhabitants of the Americas didn’t really own the land as they had done so little to maximize its productivity.  I wonder if the sense of failure that pervades images of desolate houses doesn’t tap into that subterranean current of ideology?  If a house–or apartment complex or office building or factory–is shuttered, it isn’t being used productively; and, to Americans, at least, it then follows somehow that the place is returning to the wild.  And if an empty building can suggest that nature is encroaching due to an absence of productive labor, one might sense that the economy and the entire social order–and, with that, the ground of liberty–is being eroded.

Curiously, the photographs of abandoned houses demonstrate that the property is still there, right in front of your eyes, in the sense that the thing to be possessed exists.  But that is not enough, it seems.  Instead, a sense of failure looms, and not merely the failure of someone to pay a mortgage.  Frankly, I think this odd sense of collective danger, despite being based on a dubious idea of rightful use, may be, well, useful.  The house is not just the record of an autonomous individual’s loss in a rational, albeit heartless marketplace.  These houses are empty because they had been abandoned many times over a period of many years: by the banks, the corporations, Congress, various elites, and the press, to name a few.  There is no need to intervene in another country when so much of this one is being abandoned.

Credit:  Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2009

The recession has been bad for just about everyone, but it has been much worse for some than others.  And surely among those hurt the hardest have been the homeless who have become both the frequent target of hate crimes as well as the aim of criminalization laws in 273 cities nationwide making it making it illegal to eat, sit, or sleep in public places.  It is difficulty to fathom the fear that animates such violent reactions against those we might imagine are forlorn and hopeless—what is about such fellow citizens that evokes such animus?  what makes them appear to be so undeserving of our charity?— but since it comes from both vigilantes (the rock) and the state (the hard place) we can only assume that it is driven by deeply seeded anxieties.

A photograph featured by the New York Times in a story on efforts to enact hate crime statutes against those who perpetrate violence against the homeless perhaps offers the hint of an answer.

The photograph is of a couple who live in an underground flood channel beneath the Las Vegas strip. The image is shot at eye level, the vertical angle neither high nor low, and thus nullifying any sense of a power differential between the viewer and the subjects even as it suggests some degree of identification; at the same time, however, the horizontal angle is slightly oblique, detaching the viewer from the scene, perhaps even casting him or her as an outside observer. The image is thus framed formally by a tension between identification and dissociation.

The social tension that simultaneously separates and connects viewers and the viewed is marked in other respects as well.  The faces of the people are not recognizable, cast in shadows and blurred by movement, and yet they appear to be a normative heterosexual couple—perhaps even a family—as they share their neatly made bed with one another and their dog.  It is clearly not a normal house or apartment.  Distinguished by its low ceiling it has something of a cellar-like atmosphere, dark and damp.  The unrecognizable graffiti strewn across the wall and ceiling  makes even that an unlikely location however, suggesting something of a public space.  And yet for all of that it does appear to be organized as a private “room” that  bears many of the artifacts of modern living, including what looks to be a bulletin board that features colorful photographs—a reminder of or perhaps a hope for better times—and something like a desk.  And note too the book that sits next to the man’s leg as he apparently has tired of reading in bed.  Maybe he is listening to the boom box that sits behind the dog.

The most telling feature of the photograph is  surely the clothing neatly hanging on a rod in the background.  This sign of orderliness—here, a clear marker of civility—does not fit with our stereotype of the homeless as crazed, drunken or lazy vagabonds.  These are not social outcasts who tote their worldly goods bundled together in a trash bag or orphan grocery cart or who mumble to themselves while walking down the street.  They clearly know what it means to have a home. Indeed, these people could be us, the viewers, you and me.  And therein, no doubt, lies at least part of the answer to the cause of our intense fear and loathing of the homeless, for as much as scenes like this lead us to utter the mantra “there but for the grace of God,” so too do they heighten the need for dissociation.  And as history has shown, time and again, there is no more powerful mode of dissociation than casting about for scapegoats.  But that, of course, has not been history’s only lesson with respect to the practice of scapegoating.

Perhaps we too as viewers are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Photo Credit: Isaac Brekken/New York Times

Debates about the moral value of photography have to deal with poverty.  One might think that there is little to discuss: poverty can be distressingly visible, and photographs have been a principle means for motivating efforts to help those in need.  From the classic photographs by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine to those persistent Save the Children ads, images of poverty and particularly of its effects on children have raised awareness, shaped public policy, and opened pocketbooks.  All that remains, one might think, would be to continue to produce compelling images of destitution.

This photograph from Haiti may not prick one’s conscience, perhaps because we can’t see the child’s face, but it remains a striking image.  It also reflects the other side of the debate about photography’s moral legitimacy.  One argument against the image is that the photographic depiction of poverty is in fact highly sentimentalized: a continuation of the stock attitudes–including charity, but also condescension–of the Victorian era.  In short, the photograph of the poor child is a transposition of the Victorian waif from illustration into photography.   For this and other reasons, photographers such as Gordon Parks and others have been accused, not entirely without cause, of simplifying or otherwise aesthetically framing poverty as an object for concerned contemplation, instead of either exploring the social fabric of the poor community or exposing the causes of its continued oppression.

This photo would seem to fall under that criticism.  The image is too good: on the one hand, a near-perfect outline of the waif and, on the other hand, a composition of elegant design and rich colors that belies the child’s lack of resources.  Indeed, it could be in a Renaissance painting, and both the cropping and the oddity of the one shoe draw one into a close study of the image itself and thus away from critical attention to the social and economic conditions that lie behind it.

The photograph may reflect another criticism as well.  Somewhat paradoxically, photography is faulted (and by the same people) both for not evoking the correct moral response and for wearing out compassion or other charitable or progressive inclinations.  (Save the Children does come to mind.)  That idea could drive photographers to look for new angles on an old subject, and the image above certainly has been cropped in that manner.  Instead of the typical dirty face, we see asymmetrical feet (one shod and one bare); instead of the usual sense of need, there is a strange self-sufficiency in this child’s pose; instead of the same assurance that everyone knows what is needed, wearing one shoe creates a whiff of illegibility.  And so a photo that may be making poverty into art could also be reworking viewing habits to suggest that seeing is not knowing.

The debates about photography are not going to be resolved today.   I don’t think one can or should avoid the work done by public art, which includes channeling sentiments and thus risking sentimentality.   Photojournalism does traffic in stock sentiments, just as intellectuals rely on stock criticisms.  I’ll admit that there are days when I side with Oscar Wilde’s comment that “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”  But there is still reason to take a good look at the other side of privilege, and to consider how compassion must at some point be a way of seeing.

Photograph by Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press.  (This post is the second this week on channeling 19th century public art; the first is here.  Another relevant post is here.)