NO CAPTION NEEDED

ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

At first glance it might look like these troops are in the poppy fields of Colombia or possibly Mexico, “fighting” the so-called “war on drugs.” After all, the U.S. government has dedicated five billion dollars to Plan Colombia since 2000 and more recently another 1.4 billion dollars to the Meridia Project, all with the goal of defeating the illicit traffic in opium and heroin. And according to the DEA it has been effective, forcing a 44% increase in the street price of a gram of cocaine, as well as a 15% reduction in its purity. Indeed, it almost seems like it is worth the effort … almost, but not quite, since there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of a reduction in demand, which means the drug dealers are just getting richer. But in any case, I digress, for the photograph is not of a battle field in the war on drugs, but actually a battle field in the war on terror!

The picture is a taken of a poppy field in the Khost Province where the U.S. military—now 32,000 strong in Afghanistan vs. 160,000 strong in Iraq—has effected a “basic strategy shift” in its war on terror. No, those troops aren’t looking for Osama bin Laden (remember him? the one apparently responsible for 9/11, the one President Bush said was our “number one priority, we will not rest until we find him”) hiding among the plants. Rather, they are “destroy[ing] opium poppies while on patrol.”

There might actually be some sense to focusing on the drug trade in Afghanistan given the evidence that there is a connection between the illicit traffic in opium and various insurgent groups, including both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But, of course, the approach is all wrong. For one thing, the U.S. government has dedicated the majority of its resources to eradication, interdiction, and the prosecution of high-level drug traffickers, strategies which, as we’ve seen in virtually every instance that it has been employed, only makes the drug more valuable. And for another thing, it is stretching an already thin military cohort even thinner as, in the picture above, its efforts are being devoted to an odd form of “search and destroy” fixated on poppies and not the real enemy.

But there is a bigger point to be made. As I thought we learned in Vietnam, winning a war such as this requires capturing the “hearts and minds” of local populations, and here those populations—altogether absent from the photograph as if to mark their irrelevance to the basic “shift in strategy”—are the peasant farmers who subsist on their illicit poppy crops. When our policy is to target poor farmers through strategies of eradication and interdiction we not only alienate those who should (or at least could) be our allies in the war on terror, but we push them closer to the enemy with its grassroot ties and increase the likelihood of civil unrest if not actually civil war. And what is sad is that there are more effective approaches, such as those used to undermine the international drug traffic coming out of India and Turkey, including licensing farmers to produce crops to be used for legal pain medications and/or buying crops from the farmers and then destroying them.

But apparently John Walters, America’s drug czar, and the Department of State will hear none of it. After all, this is a war on terror. Either you are with us or you are against us. Why use the carrot when you can use a stick—even if it doesn’t work!

Photo Credit: Rafiq Maqbool/AP

Today we introduce a new feature at No Caption Needed that we call “A Second Look.” One of the lessons we have learned (and continue to learn again and again) is that the “meaning” of photographic images is dynamic and multidimensional. No matter how hard we try to situate the affect or idea-content of a photograph, the image rarely fully accommodates us. Part of the problem is that human perception can be annoyingly monocular and myopic. We fixate our attention on one aspect or dimension of an image and then stubbornly (if not intentionally) ignore other aspects and dimensions. Only days or weeks later do we realize our short sightedness. Another part of the problem is that one of our primary interpretive tools for discerning the meaning of images is “convention,” and the conventions of realist representation in particular have a powerful hold on both what we choose to see and what we choose not to see, even when we are sensitive to the need for reflexivity. And yet again, our interpretations of images are relentlessly culture- and time-bound, their meaning and usage subject to difference and change based on one’s social and political experiences, as well as location in time and space. Accordingly, from time to time we will dedicate our daily post to taking “a second look” at an image we have previously considered, sometimes to correct the errors of our ways, sometimes because “shit happens” (as the bumper sticker says) making it possible for more to be seen and said.

To inaugurate this feature we want to take a second look at two images that we recently compared and contrasted with one another:

The first is of two angelic young beauties in Anywhere, USA, encountering the joys of the marketplace, perhaps for the first time; the second is of a “young boy selling lemonade” in Ramadi. The point in juxtaposing these two photographs was to underscore the irony of locating the mythical American “lemonade stand” – a trope that marks the space of a safe and secure free marketplace – inside of a war zone being guarded by thousands of occupation forces and deputized insurgents. I’ll not repeat the analysis except to reprise the concluding line: “To accent the point one need only visualize the scene of the two girls at the top—innocent, pure, and white—with the soldier and his weapon framing and overshadowing the scene. It is virtually unimaginable.”

But on reflection, it may not be quite so unimaginable after all. Or at least for it to be unimaginable we have to concede a host of assumptions about the idyllic world represented in the first picture. One assumption, pointed out by a commentator to our first post, is that the state maintains an invisible presence in the image, ever at the ready to intercede if and when the safety and security of the marketplace is breached. And we do have photographs of where the state has interceded in such situations, such as images of six year old Ruby Bridges being escorted by federal marshals into a New Orleans elementary school, or the slightly older Little Rock Nine being escorted into Central High School by the Arkansas National Guard. But, of course, these were moments of national crisis and no one would mistake the photographs as representations of a normative or safe and secure public sphere.

This calls to attention a second assumption that seems necessary to make the transposition of images unimaginable: the viewer must be able to identify with the white, Anglo-Saxon world depicted in the photograph of the lemonade stand. While one obviously doesn’t have to be white to run a lemonade stand, the vast majority of images one finds in a google image search for the phrase “lemonade stand” are of white Caucasian children. There thus seems to be something like a cultural norm being marked by the trope, and one that clearly excludes those at the margins of racial difference. The question then has to be, what does someone who cannot identify with the “lemonade stand” mythos of the American dream see when they look at the photograph from Ramadi?

There is probably no one answer to this question, but one strong possibility has to be the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent pointing his MP5 submachine gun at six year old Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban refugee, hiding in a bedroom closet with a local fisherman trying to protect him.

The”arrest” and eventual deportation of Elian back to Cuba was highly controversial and it polarized the nation, leading to mass protests in Miami, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. And by many accounts the force of the reaction was affected by this photograph. Whether the image really fueled or otherwise animated the controversy is hard to say, but what is clear is that it has achieved iconic status and is widely recognized, especially amongst subaltern populations. And its connection to the photograph from Ramadi is pronounced. The two boys look similar enough at a distance to be blood relatives; and the weapons, while not identical, are similar enough and, more importantly, functionally dominate the scene. But what makes the picture in Ramadi especially powerful in this regard is not its similarity but its difference from the earlier photograph. There, the horror of the scene is a manifest function of the rifle being pointed at a clearly terrified child; in the later photograph the horror is more latent, a function of the child’s (dis)ease as he cautiously considers the soldier and his weapon and what he might do with it. Of course, the child in Ramadi selling lemonade probably doesn’t know the story of Elian Gonzalez, and thus while he might have his own reasons to distrust the soldiers it is unlikely that he is thinking of this picture; on the other hand, Americans, and especially non-white Americans are very familiar with the picture of Elian, and there is a strong possibility that when they see the picture of the child in Ramadi, what they see is not the safety and security of the marketplace but the threat that the state poses to subaltern populations. And that is not unimaginable at all.

It’s all a matter of how you look at it.

Photo Credits: Central Ohio Center For Education, Richard Mills/The Times, Alan Diaz/AP

Yesterday’s New York Times reports that “Iwo Jima Sculpture, Model for Marine War Memorial, Is Losing Its Home on Floating Museum.” The story is about a statue created as one of the models for the Marine Memorial at Arlington Cemetery. Since 1995 it has been part of the Sea, Air, and Space Museum on the aircraft carrier Intrepid. Museum officials have decided that the statue has no place in a renovation now underway. Other items have been shipped out to other museums, but there are no takers for the statue.

Is the Iwo Jima icon being consigned to the back lot of US public culture, or, worse, the scrap heap of history? Could happen, of course. Photographic icons are not immortal and many have strong generational resonance. Ken Burns has remarked that his forthcoming documentary on The War reflects his sense of urgency about recording soon-to-be-lost oral testimony. Perhaps he also sensed that his primary audience was slipping away as well.

The photo accompanying the story reflects some of these tensions.

The flagraising dominates the middle of the frame but also is set back as if receding into blue (heavenly) sky beyond and then into the vanishing point of the picture. The lighting, faux bronze hues of the men, and bright flag give the sculpture a heroic cast, but it also looks colorized in comparison with the rest of the picture and, more important, with the iconic photograph that was the inspiration for the statue. The effect seems contrived, as if to evoke reverence that already has faded, or to appeal to a younger audience that already has too many flashier distractions.

This sense of futility is reflected in the other figures in the picture. On the far right, we see a young man; if he isn’t old enough to be drafted, he soon will be. He is the natural successor to those memorialized by the statue, whose civic republican aesthetic carries with it the anxiety that the sacrifices of one generation will be squandered by those who follow. This is the visitor who should be gazing reverently up at the model of civic virtue. Instead, he isn’t looking at the statue, and he seems to be either fixated on the kilted bagpiper in front of him or hurrying by as if intent on getting to something more pressing such as the cafeteria. The piper, who is hard to pick out of the background figures, seems to be another contrivance, and his Scottish costume suggests that the whole tableau is one of pastiche. Other figures continuing leftward around the statue also are looking away. The only person looking at the flag raising is the woman in the wheelchair that dominates the left foreground. Indeed, she is the counterpoint to the statue: both sit in metal, and her umbrella points directly to the base of the flagpole. Thus, the one connection being made in the picture is between able-bodied men in the past and a disabled woman in the present. This does not bode well for the statue.

The full implication might be that times have changed and different people are dealing with different issues. We need national solidarity and heroic effort not on the battlefield but in health care reform. We need museums, too, of course, and we may still have good use of the Iwo Jima icon. What we don’t need, however, is to keep one of several poorly crafted statues in the public eye. Today, as in 1944, the public art that counts is photojournalism.

Photograph by Librado Romero/The New York Times.