NO CAPTION NEEDED

ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

We don’t write about sports very much here at NCN and today will be no different.  After all, what is there to say here.  The photograph pictures the Miami Heat’s  four time MVP LeBron James about to take the Chicago Bulls’ Jimmy Butler to the basket.  The only suspense is whether it will be a three point play or not.  No, what makes this photograph notable has almost nothing to do with the actual action taking place and everything to do with the way in which the camera has captured two scenes at once—one on top, the “real” scene, and the other, on the bottom, a reflection from the highly polished floor.

Of course, one might argue that this is only one scene, the inverted image on the bottom a natural extension of the top image.  And that would be true also.  The question, really, is how one wants to “read” the image.  We typically think of a mirror reflection as an inverted but otherwise identical (re)presentation of the original.  It is one of the reasons we are so often challenged to “look at ourselves” in a mirror, so as to see what is “really” there, or at least what others purport to see  But here, while the original and the reflection bear enough points of similarity that one might identify them as the same scene, they are not identical.

The top image is sharp and clear, consonant with the photojournalists avowed dedication to the realist aesthetic that purports a sort of mechanical objectivity—everything to scale, the light natural, the natural plane of the image represented as if one were actually there witnessing it. The bottom image has more of the quality of an impressionist painting, the appearance of thin brush strokes that call attention to texture, especially as it relates to human movement; emphasis on the quality of light as it effects the scene; and finally notice of the unnatural angle that resituates the viewer, underscoring the sense in which what we are looking at is clearly a representation that needs to be decoded and not the thing itself.

The effects of the image and its reflection are different as well.  Note, for example, how the realist image locates the contest between James and Butler in a multiplicity of scenes that first calls attention to the game itself as we see the coach calling out orders and other players positioning themselves to respond to the central action, and then calls attention to the immediate crowd watching the event.  The focus is clearly on the two principles, but they are part of a larger event.  By contrast, the impressionist image focuses our attention almost entirely on the central actors, giving them an almost epic significance, everything else cast with a spectral patina that suggests that they are both there and not there (perhaps like the external viewer of the image).

Whether you see one scene or two either (both) is (are) shot with the same camera, with the same aperture, from the same vantage point, and at the same moment in time. And yet what we see are two potentially and palpably different (albeit related) events, each calling attention to the otherwise taken for granted conventions that underscore both what is present and what is absent in the other and thus animating the possibilities of meaning.  What makes the photograph particularly interesting then is how it schools the viewer concerning the everyday necessity of visual literacy, always “reading” an image, not just glancing at it, seeing it for what it always is: an artistic construction.

Photo Credit:  Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

Tweet

Yet another prize winning photographer has been accused of visual deception.  Subsequently, Paul Hansen’s World Press Photo of the Year passed the forensic review that was set up hurriedly–by WPP–to address the scandal, but it has become clear that the image was substantially “improved” in post-production.  All commercial photos are enhanced, and few news photos have ever appeared without some artistic manipulation, so there is at the least a sliding scale involved.  At some point, however, art becomes deceit, and with that the integrity of the press as an institution is at risk.  Thus, the press needs its own watchdog, and from the beginning of photojournalism there have been those who were happy to question whether the images in the news were telling the truth.

I’m fine with that, but what I don’t get is why captioning so often gets a pass.

This photo was captioned by Time as, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers, left background, near the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus.”  Now, the photographer and magazine were playing by the rules, carefully identifying who, what, when, and where in sufficient detail to place the photo within the event being covered.  We now know that the photo was not taken on April 29th and that it was near Yitzhar (the Jewish settlement) near Nablus (the Palestinian city) and not near some other settlement or city.  Given either forensic or historical questions, those could be crucial details.

Those are not the only questions that apply, however.  There also are political and moral questions, for example.  In respect to those questions, a very significant detail has not been identified.  Look closely: the man is double over in pain while trying to get something out of his eyes.  He is a large, well-muscled man yet unable to resist the two soldiers grabbing him, so the pain must be debilitating.  Now look closer still: the two soldiers are trying to spray something into his face. The one is spraying–you can see that he is holding and firing a spray canister, and that the foam or mist is coming out as white blur.  The other soldier is trying to hold and turn the man so that the first can hit him directly in the face.  Hit him squarely in the eyes, that is, and perhaps for the second time.

The caption did not say, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces try to force a second dose of pepper spray into the eyes of a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers.”  That probably would be the more specific, more accurate description of what is being shown.  It also would shift the sense of political blame: instead of a man being “arrested,” as if a criminal, we have Israeli soldiers siding with the settlers who rioted following a stabbing.  (The stabbing of a settler was of course criminal and should lead to an arrest, but ask yourself how rioting following a crime would be treated in your town.)   Instead of settlers violating the rule of law, here the Palestinian is the sole law breaker.  Instead of soldiers attacked a wounded man to deliver a second dose of punishment, we have merely an arrest.  Of course, I’ve had to make some suppositions here and may be mistaken, but keep in mind that this is a result of the caption not supplying key information.

The saving grace of photographs is that they can show what is happening contrary to the interpretation that is applied to them.  Even so, as many commentators have pointed out, captioning can significantly influence what is seen, what is remembered, and how it is used.  The caption tells you both what to see and what to ignore in the photograph.

Most of us would see a vicious beating.  The London Telegraph apparently wasn’t so sure, as it captioned the photo this way: “At least five people were killed when police fired on about 100 Muslim youths in the Kenyan capital who were protesting against the arrest of a radical Jamaican-born Muslim cleric whose teachings influenced one of the 2005 London bombers.”

Well. I guess we are to think that they guy on the ground is one of the lucky ones–after all, he’s still alive, isn’t he?  (Barely, I would guess.)  And if he is getting a good beating, perhaps we are to think that it might be deserved: after all, he is associated with one of the London bombers.  The paper is showing the violence, of course, but it also is coaching the viewer in how to look past it, minimize it, pretend that even though nasty things happen on behalf of homeland security one really doesn’t have to say that they happen.

So it turns out that there really are two sets of rules: the rules that guide reporting what is supposed to be said, and the rules that ensure that some things are not said.  That second list probably is longer than we would like to think (speaking of learned denial).  To give one indication, in my own not-scientific survey of documentary images, it seems to me that police brutality often is not mentioned.  To the credit of the news organizations, it is shown, but it it not mentioned.  That strategy probably is safer for the news organizations–they are less likely to be accused of being “political,” or of having their photographers beaten.  But the omission is not just a prudent division of labor: it schools the public in seeing and not saying.  In short, it encourages the worst form of bystander behavior.

Words were being manipulated long before photography existed. They still are being manipulated with all the power and subtlety that we expect of Photoshop.  When attached to a photograph, they can seem all the more innocent, as if providing nothing more than background information that can be checked instantly for its accuracy.  Except that those words often are not innocent, and they are persuading us to not see, not check, and not ask.

Photographs by Nasser Ishtayeh/Associated Press and by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters.  To read a better caption of the second photo, go here.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

Tweet

The man we see here is in the clutches of death. Still alive, but only for a few seconds before his body meets with the pavement five floors below, his death is imminent and all but certain.  As Barbie Zelizer points out, such “about to die” images sanitize the visual representation of death, emphasizing the contingency of the moment while nevertheless gesturing to the only logical conclusion.  Such images not only neutralize the emotional affect and spectacle of a broken and mutilated body, but they serve as well to draw the viewer into the scene, inviting contemplation of the subjunctive moment and to consider the possibilities inherent in the image (if not in history itself).  Photographs of death have a finality to them that the visual trope of an “about to die” photograph challenges.  And because the still image stops the action for all time it leaves open—for all time—the tentative possibility of alternate outcomes.

The photograph above is of a man who has “fallen” from a burning building in Lahore, Pakistan.  Or at least that is how the caption for the image typically reads.  It is more likely that he jumped to his death—as did at least four others—to avoid the immolation that killed at least seventeen people.  But whether he jumped or fell, it is clearly an “about to die” image.  It was reproduced in many of the “pictures of the day/week” slideshows that are now featured at most journalistic websites.  What drew my attention to it, however, had less to do with the simple fact of its quality of an “about to die” image and more with how it reprises similar images of people plunging to their deaths from Manhattan’s Twin Towers on 9/11.

There is no official count of how many people jumped from the towering infernos on that fateful day, but the lower end estimations put the number at nearly 200.  Many of the jumpers were captured by videographers and a number of still photographs appeared in newspapers, though almost never on the front page.  More importantly, these photographs disappeared from public view almost as quickly as they had originally appeared, virtually erased from the public record through at least the tenth anniversary of the event itself.  One can now access some of these photographs by searching on the internet, but the larger question has to be why it was deemed inappropriate to broadcast and publish such images then, and yet now it seems acceptable to document the tragic fire in Lahore with virtually identical images and, indeed, to feature the photograph in institutionally sanctioned journalistic websites?

One answer to this question is the assumption that foreign lives count for less than American lives; it is hard to abide such cynicism, but events in recent years make it an answer that we should not discount altogether.  Nevertheless, I think there is something more going on here than an hyperbolic and over-extended American exceptionalism.  One of the features of the “about to die” photograph is that it activates an audience engagement with the image that bridges the distance between here and there, implicating the viewer in the scene being depicted by requiring them to complete the event frozen in time, both cognitively and affectively.  This can produce an especially powerful identification when the actors portrayed are strangers, distant others, as we would imagine most Pakistani citizens to be for most American viewers.  When the actors are easily identified with—by type if not as particular individuals—the problem is reversed, as there is an emotional need to provide some measure of distance.  In the immediacy and aftermath of 9/11 the problem of distance from those who died in  the terrorist attack had to be managed differently as the photographs operated in an interpretive register that distinguished social identity (which arguably needed to be pushed to the background so as to mute social pain) from political identity (which needed to be placed in the foreground to animate the anger needed to spur collective action).

The point is a simple one, but worth emphasizing:  as with linguistic conventions, so with the conventions of visual representation, literacy dictates attention to context at multiple levels: historical, social, cultural, political, and so on.  And perhaps most important in recent times, international and global.  And more, it is in learning how to interpret and engage with such images that we begin to get a sense for what it means to see and be seen as citizens in all of these different registers.

Photo Credit:  Damir Sagolj/Reuters

Tweet

Images like this one used to be depictions of the impersonality, alienation, and anomie of modern life.

Perhaps the retro chic and post-feminist nostalgia of Mad Men has changed the way we think about mid-century modernism, but the show is more likely to be a symptom than a cause.  For whatever reason, these completely uniform, featureless, rectilinear, steel and glass cages no longer have to carry the symbolic baggage of an earlier era’s popular sociology.  The Organization Man, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Lonely Crowd, Death of a Salesman, and other titles of sixty years ago documented the anxiety and desperation that hung like second hand smoke throughout the new society of imposing office towers and distant suburbs.

Individuals still have their preferences, of course, but modernism is now a period style rather than a dynastic order.  The technologies, architectural designs, and engineering have become ubiquitous and are used to support a wide range of artistic and political initiatives, while also no longer being directly coupled to either capitalist hegemony or authoritarian regimes.  (Le Corbusier once said the choice was between “Architecture or Revolution,” and, not to be outdone, the Soviet Union and China converted their revolutions into disastrous schemes for centralized, state-controlled modernization.) The modernism that was the leading edge of 20th century development has been relegated to the background in the 21st.

Just like the carpet at the office, you might say.  And with that demotion in status, it may be time to take another look.  Ironically, modernism’s abhorrence of decoration proved to be no safeguard against other kinds of excess, including hubris.  But cut back to scale, the functional simplicity, elegant abstraction, geometric patterning, subtle textures, and other characteristic features of modern design still are capable of evoking a sense of beauty and even of serenity.  Take away the imperial power, crushing hierarchies, and totalizing extension into all aspects of the lifeworld, and you are left with a sculpted space and muted tones that could nurture both comfort and creativity.

As with the two images above, modernism always was about radical manipulations of scale.  The same aesthetic could be found in a gleaming skyscraper and the chairs or staplers inside the building.  Usually it was about scaling up, however.  The sequence of images here provides a scaling down, much like the change in status that they represent.  One thing I like about the second picture is that the aesthetic is taken down yet another notch by the slight fraying of the wall covering along plastic baseboard.  Look closer still and you can see the line separating two swatches of carpet on the left.  Whether the original piecework or evidence of deterioration over time, these details give us a modern environment that isn’t so far removed from the human condition after all.

This corner, like the building above, will have become almost invisible.  Nothing distinctive to be seen either on the skyline or down the hall. They haven’t just faded into the background, they now are the background for another era still struggling to define itself–in fact, still struggling to even begin to become something other than another repetition of a culture hanging on past its time.  Perhaps one small way out of that dilemma is to see all of modernism as a useful backdrop to a future yet to be designed.  And when caught in one of those moments when the mind seems stuck, perhaps we might look a little closer at the surface of those things now taken for granted.  Things that, once the old urban angst no longer applies, we can see both for what they are and for how they might suggest better things yet to come.

Photographs by Michael Wolf, The Transparent City, and Lars Tunbjork/Agence VU, Office.  Both images are part of the slide show “A Major Case of ‘the Mondays’: Photographs of Office Life,” curated by Myles Little, Time Lightbox.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

Tweet

There is no doubt that landscape photography is popular, but is it really important?  When people take photography seriously, they almost always are doing so to focus on the people who are being shown.  War, poverty, politics, sports–whatever the subject, the point is to show what people are doing and experiencing.  They are shown in specific circumstances, but there is no doubt that who matters more than where.

So why would we value an image that shows us only the land, the flow of light over a hill, and the ease with with the earth exceeds human scale?  Perhaps this photograph from Donglan county, Jiangping, Cbina isn’t the best example, as it allows a concession for admiring human handiwork.  The exquisitely fitted paddy fields are the result of many generations of careful agriculture, and if their beauty, as if fine jewelry, can’t be appreciated from the ground, they are no less artfully wrought for that.

Like any garden, most landscapes reflect human engineering of one sort or another–and not least the framing and other artistry provided by the camera–so perhaps it’s not such a bad example after all.  The landscape could be a subtle exercise in narcissism: Humans can pretend that they are looking at nature while actually admiring their own reflection.  Or these photos could be another form of vanity: suggesting an easy harmony between humanity and nature (and perhaps nature’s God).  Such photos rarely feature nature’s harshness, where animals will eat their prey before it dies, and in any case the camera will not let you feel how cold the desert gets at night or how flies can drive you mad.

Some landscapes have been put to very good use, and very serious use, in the service of the environmental movement.  With images from Ansel Adams’ portraits of Yosemite to the Earthrise on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog to the successive Sierra Club magazine covers to the many documentaries of environmental degradation, landscape photography has been a powerful means for political advocacy on behalf of a planet that cannot speak for itself.

I wouldn’t want to leave it there, however.  At some point, the environmentalism (which includes some posts at this blog) overwrites the images; they become merely means to an end, rather than something also capable of guiding other forms of reflection.  Let me suggest one such alternative, one that is consistent with an environmental ethos but not the same thing either.

Whatever else it is, the landscape photograph can be an image of abundance.  Whether capturing purple mountain majesties or the traces of the wind on a barren sand dune, the landscape shows a world that is immensely larger, more interconnected, more amazing than anything any human society will ever make.  Buddhism has tried to capture that immensity, and to contrast it to the paucity of human meaning-making, but I’m not sure the Abrahamic religions and the civilizations they are part of have an equivalent point of departure.  Sure, there are Biblical passages celebrating cosmic power, but that’s just the beginning of how one might marvel at the richness of this planet in this universe.

None of this denies the role of scarcity in nature or human affairs.  Indeed, the photograph above can be seen as a subtle meditation of how to build a sustainable relationship with scarcity on behalf of abundance.  But often abundance is misunderstood and under appreciated (“under theorized,” as they say on my side of the street).  A few have approached it–Georges Bataille, Paul Feyerabend, Anne Norton–but an abundance of writing on the subject is not yet the norm.

I don’t think complaints about over-consumption qualify as a sufficient account of abundance, as they presume a more beneficial scarcity.  And don’t conclude that this post a brief for obesity, gluttonous oil consumption, or other dysfunctional or non-sustainable habits that harm individuals, society, and the environment.  Both abundance and scarcity need to be understood apart from contemporary extremes, not least if we are to see how often those extremes are artificial rather than natural conditions.

Whatever has been said, I doubt that it begins to articulate how much we could learn, and how well we could live, if we were to really look at what landscapes can reveal.

Photographs by  Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media and Elmar Akhmetov/Sony World Photography 2013  award.

Tweet

Photographers are finding it harder and harder to make a living while print journalism is being pulled deeper and deeper into the undertow of history, but photography is experiencing a renaissance.

I don’t have the time today to say much at all, but consider two related examples of how photography is thriving as a public art: the rise in highly accessible distribution and in high quality curatorial work, all of which is coming to be taken for granted.

The distribution is amazing.  Life and Look are long gone, but the slide shows at In Focus, The Big Picture, and many other online newspapers and magazines are becoming increasingly prominent and sophisticated, and the images are relayed and given added value through the commentary and discussion at any number of photography blogs, all of which of course then flows through social media as well, which also is circulating billions of vernacular images while sending some of them up the media chain, and so it goes on day after day.

This media swirl could be a maelstrom, but in the midst of it all major media are investing in photo editors who are doing amazing work.  Sure, cliches still abound, as we are talking about mainstream media in mass societies, thank you very much.  People want some of that, and the press has to make a living, and frankly every day isn’t so unique as the Hallmark card might want you to believe.  (Speaking of cliches. . . . )  Even so there is plenty of curatorial work, not least by Alan Taylor at In Focus as well as other sources alluded to above, that is remarkably good.

And there is one source that may be an index of the changes that have occurred.  Time was never the gold standard in photojournalism (the division of labor with Life probably accounted for a lot of that).  But Time’s online LightBox just keeps getting better and better.  I used to go to Time for examples of what not to do, and now I kick myself for what I’ve been missing.

The addition of Mikko Takkunen is the most recent example of how Time is making a strong investment in photojournalism.  But there is much more going on as well.  Just today, I noticed their 365: The Year in Photographs, which I hadn’t seen yet for 2012.  The concept is as cliched as it gets, and yet the selection is outstanding: one that reflects a rich aesthetic sensibility that still serves reporting and reflecting on the news.

They aren’t perfect, of course, but the trend is definitely in the right direction.  And you can’t say that about a lot of the news business these days.  Let’s hope that investing in quality can become part of the business model again, and not just for photography.

Photograph by Narciso Contreras/Associated Press.  Dec. 1, 2012. Smoke rises from buildings due to heavy fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government forces in Aleppo, Syria.

Tweet

There have been many tears shed this past week, like every week.  Somehow those of a woman in China seem especially evocative.

She is siting outside of a house that was damaged by the earthquake last Saturday in Sichuan province, China.  Her family’s house, we can assume.  You can guess that someone has moved the couch into the courtyard and parked her there, while other items are also being salvaged so that they can have water and perhaps a meal.

A much younger woman is caught mid-motion, and it is easy to imagine her going back and forth, in and out, attending to the many new problems all around her, but always with the unconscious energy of those not yet old.  She doesn’t need a heavier coat for the same reason, as she will be continuously active throughout the day.  The damage and disruption will be causing her a lot of trouble, but she can be engaged in dealing with that, and the quake already will be moving into the past while she has plenty of future in front of her.

By contrast, the older woman can only sit and absorb the fear and loss still reverberating like aftershocks through her small world.  She is bundled up for the cold and seems vulnerable, even precarious, holding on to the armrest as if she might fall, even though her body seems too heavy to move on its own.  The bright floral cushions and her stylish hat and coat seem almost a mockery of her predicament: instead of an abundant life, she seems on the verge of abandonment.

And she is crying.  Perhaps it’s a delayed physiological reaction to the earlier trauma, or fear of the unknown or of her own vulnerability, or distress at not being able to be helpful, or grief over possessions that have been lost or loved ones who are unaccounted for or have been harmed.  Or, or, or. . . .  There are many reasons to cry.

Critics of photography often fault the medium for a supposed propensity to emotional excess and to evoking the wrong emotions–not least those self-serving, power-laden, condescending, bourgeois emotions such as pity.  This photo could be seen that way, but I don’t think that is really what is being offered.  Frankly, there is every indication that the women is going to be OK.  So what are we being shown, or asked to do?

One might imagine that she actually is being useful in the scene, that she has a job to do.  Her job is to experience the emotional wreckage that is the invisible consequence of the quake or any other disaster.  I’m making this up, of course, but to make a point.  The quake will have spurred many people to high levels of activity, and activity often is used to manage–that is, defer and deny–intensely negative emotions such as fear, sorrow, and helplessness.  That emotional management is necessary to contend with and recover from disaster, and perhaps not entirely a bad thing anyway (let’s not make an art of feeling miserable), but it also is a lost opportunity.  What is lost is an ability to know oneself, connect with others, and actually think about the risk that lead to the disaster–a risk that already is being forgotten.

Even when the disaster is far away, the spectators elsewhere may spend more time watching and then find the rest of their day busier for that.  And they may volunteer, send money, give blood, and so forth  (The photo was used at the New York Times to accompany a story on changes in Chinese philanthropy when responding to disasters.)  Disaster coverage can put powerful emotions into circulation, but it also can energize practices of emotional management.  Amidst all the activity, there could be no one left to cry.

So let me suggest one answer to the question in the title to the post.  When we see tears, we might see an opportunity for knowledge, solidarity, and change that we otherwise would have missed.

Photograph by a stringer for Reuters.

Tweet

The anguish displayed in this photograph is palpable. And if one takes time with the image it is hard not to feel this woman’s grief.  But of course the image is not so unlike so many similar representations of pain and sorrow—both foreign and domestic—and it is not surprising that we would be unlikely to linger over the image.  And truth to tell, while I did come across it in a slide show at a mainstream regional newspaper, it has not achieved a great deal of national circulation. Therein lies its importance.

The woman is the mother of a twenty four year old male who was found, with three others, shot to death “execution style” in an Akron, OH, townhouse.  Numbers here are hard to know with exactitude, but according to the interactive website at Slate, he is the 3,788^th person to be killed by gun shot since the tragedy in Newtown, CT.   That is approximately twenty five people per day.  Or to take a different measure of the magnitude, that is 811 more than the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks.  This mother’s grief is no doubt personal, but it is not solitary.  It is shared by the parents and loved ones of at least 3,787 others in the past four months, and who knows how many in the months ahead.   The problem is that there is no way for us to see them in their collectivity, to host or witness vernacular memorials to their loss of the sort that cropped up spontaneously around Ground Zero, or to publically memorialize their loss in the whole.  All we have are fragmented, individual images of the private grief of their closest loved ones.  And because that grief is private—even if made public in images such as the one above—we are inclined to look away or ignore it.  One important dimension of the significance of events like Sandy Hook is that they animate a profound public presence to problems that otherwise remain private and hidden from the public eye.

Those who opposed the recent effort to legislate even modest federal gun controls laws were fond of arguing that we should not politicize the horrific event that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School; the situation there, they argued, was so fraught with emotion that it would be irrational to respond to this one incident as if in kneejerk fashion.  Admittedly, kneejerk responses are almost never productive, and I am inclined to resist purely affective responses to social and political crises, but to ignore the public emotional force of a near constant, sustained and growing problem is, well, thoroughly irrational. But of course, this is exactly what forty six members of the U.S. Senate did this past week when they chose—in the most cowardly of fashion—to vote against a modest, bipartisan plan supported by 90% of the American people to require background checks for online and gun show sales.  The senatorial opposition supposedly was based on an absolutist interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment—a standard that we have never maintained for any other constitutional amendment, including the vaunted 1^st Amendment.

The photograph above is not the last one of its genre that we will see in the days, weeks and months ahead.  And each time we encounter such an image we need to force ourselves to avoid the impulse to look  away as if to honor and respect the privacy of personal loss and grief being experienced; rather, we need to see and witness in such images the public tragedy that is accumulating, one death at a time.  And if we can force our legislators to witness and respond to the images each time one occurs, well, all the better.

Photo Credit: Ed Suba, Jr./AP Photo

Tweet

One of the many things that photographs do is to function as mirrors, reflecting ordinary and everyday human behavior.  And because they have the capacity to stop action, they invite us to contemplate what we regularly take for granted.  Sometimes, however, they capture the exotic, or the down right bizarre, inviting us to meditate on the ordinary as it is “reflected” by the  extraordinary. Nonhuman animals, whether wild or domesticated, often stand in for humans, embodying and performing all manner of emotions (like compassion), affects (like raw fear), and norms that invite a more complex or revealing understanding of the “human condition” than we might get by looking at humans alone.  The photograph above is a minor case in point.  The scene is in Kuala Lumpur; the monkey, who is the focus of the image and wears the flag of the People’s Justice Party, rests on a motorcycle and attends to a speech by Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Malaysian opposition.  The monkey wears the flag of the opposition party, so we can assume he (?) is a supporter, but more to the point, is that he is altogether other-directed, respectful of and attentive to the speaker.  A somewhat rare thing in this day and age.   And not just attentive, but contemplative, as he appears to listen with care, weighing each and every word spoken. While only a domesticated animal he nevertheless seems to be a mature model of civic decorum.

By contrast, the photograph below tells a different story.

Here we have Aaron Schock, the representative from Illinois’ 18^th District and the youngest member of the House of Representatives.  He is intently reading the April issue of Washington Life magazine, which advertises itself as “D.C. Metro area’s premiere guide to luxury, power, philanthropy, and style.” There is no way to tell what in particular has captured his attention, but one of the featured articles this month discusses how to beat the stress of tax day and perhaps that is what has him so entranced.  Or maybe it is the fashion report on “Barbie’s new Swag.”  Whatever it might be, it must be pretty important given that just outside of the frame of the picture Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is testifying to the House Ways and Means Committee on Medicare spending.  Given that Schock serves on the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security one would think that he would be concerned about issues related to health care spending for the aged—particularly given the prevailing attitude of House Republicans towards budgeted funding for social welfare programs—and thus would attend carefully to the testimony before engaging the Secretary in dialogue; or at the least we might think that he would show some respect for the speaker as a matter of civic decorum in the most important legislative assembly in the nation.  But apparently we would be wrong in making either assumption, or at least that is what the photograph would invite us to consider. What the mirror here reflects is a self-indulgent and rude individual who appears to show no concern for the gravity of his office or those he serves.

Placed side-by-side the two photographs mirror the extraordinary and the ordinary. Upon reflection it is not clear which is which.  But the only real question is: with which are we willing to identify?

Photo Credit:  Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images; J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Tweet

Photography can’t represent everything, or many things, or perhaps even any one thing.  It is profoundly emotional and relational, but that leaves a lot of thinking unaccounted for.  If you want to know what it is like to work through a long set of logical problems, or go back and forth about a difficult decision, or understand the subtext in a negotiation, you should go elsewhere.  When it comes to depicting mental complexity, one page of a Henry James novel does more than any hundred slide shows.

Even so, this binary between emotion and cognition also misses something, or many things, and perhaps even something important.

“A woman practices tai chi” in Shenyang, China.  A human being is shown in a moment of controlled movement.  Against a background of winter stillness, she creates an intentional act of repose.  Feet apart, knees bent, arms lifted, hands cocked, head turned, every part of her stance was created through movement that has been momentarily stopped.  She is a portrait of concentration, as she exhibits both mental focus and a gathering of energy.

This fine photograph is relatively unusual in that it takes us close to a moment of sheer consciousness.  She is doing something, but in the absence of action and social context it seems close to doing nothing.  Just as the winter scene of inert trees and snow around her seems to be doing nothing, although it actually is doing something as part of the wheel of the seasons.  The difference between doing nothing and doing something in the landscape is filled in by our knowledge of natural processes.  The difference between her lack of movement and her doing something is filled in by our recognition that her pose is intentional, deliberate, practiced, and all-absorbing.

Photographs can show so much about social relations, material conditions, and much else in the human world, but few get as close as this one to pointing directly toward consciousness itself.  Although consciousness–that incredible, profound, yet evanescent subjective awareness–can never be seen as such, but it can be communicated, and sometimes even by an image.

And by considering how this photo may be unlike many others, we also can recognize how the many others are nonetheless like it.  For if the photograph only points toward or takes us to the outer edge of consciousness, it also does something much more important, which is show us that mind (and mindfulness) is also embodied.  The idea of pure thought or sheer awareness is itself largely a fiction–or shall we say an extension of one part of us at the expense of the rest.  By acknowledging that the photograph above shows us embodied consciousness, thinking as it is realized in the controlled use of the body in an actual place with specific props, we can recognize that photography is doing that all the time.  In fact, that is what it does exceptionally well: the traces and textures evident on the surface of things can be remarkable signs of how we are aware of ourselves and the world as we are living in and moving through it.

And for that reason, photography also can raise questions about what is happening to human awareness.

This image trades on the cliche that the eye is the window of the soul, but for good effect.  “An employee at a foreign exchange trading company looks at monitors” in Tokyo, Japan.  The photograph also is showing seeing (and for more on that concept see W.J.T. Mitchell’s book, What do Pictures Want?); thus, as above, we are cued to the intentional mental activity that can’t be seen directly.  This, too, is a photograph of consciousness, and of embodied consciousness, although now the body is reduced to an eye.  An eye, moreover, that sees through a lens while looking at several machines.  Whereas the first image places the whole (albeit clothed) body in a garden, here we have the cyborg self–a scrap of face enclosed in a carapace of optical equipment.  Consciousness, like seeing, is still the focal human experience, yet it also has been enhanced and dispersed through an apparatus of instrumentation.

But we were already there, of course.  That’s what photography had already accomplished: placing each one of us within powerful technologies of vision and communication.  Consciousness is embodied and machined, in the flesh and prosthetic.  These are different states and significant tensions, to be sure, but perhaps it can be reassuring that photography is part of each, and that it can help us become more aware of our complexity.

And of how consciousness can be understood, extended, shared, and perhaps even found where we might not expect it.  To that end, take another look.

Photographs by Sheng Li/Reuters and Toru Hanai/Reuters.

Tweet