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The Shrouds of Kiev

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The Battle for Kiev is over, at least for now.  The President has been duly ousted by the Parliament, Independence Square is slowly being cleared of the barricades, and shrines to the dead are beginning to appear.  How many dead is hard to know, but numbers range from 70 to more than 100, with at least 500+ serious injuries on top of that number—and that is just among the protestors of the Yanukovich administration, there were deaths and injuries amongst government police as well.

Photographs of blood stained streets and shrouded dead bodies are prominent, made all the more distressing by virtue of the fact that much of the violence was perpetrated by the police against the citizens of a democratic society who, presumably, it was their job to protect.  Before we get too sanctimonious, however, we should recall that this is not the first time that democratic governments have turned their power and force tyrannically against their own citizenry, and with disastrous results.  One need only recall the use of guard dogs and water cannon in attacks against nonviolent civil rights protestors in Birmingham, Alabama or the deaths of four students at the Kent State Massacre when student anti-war protestors were fired upon by the Ohio National Guard.

In many ways, the photograph above recalls the famous photograph of a young woman wailing in anger, pain, and grief in the in the midst of the Kent State killings.  But, of course, there are important differences.  In the Kent State photograph the woman is not only younger, but she is prominently situated at the middle of a public scene that recalls much of the action going on around her, and her expression is cast outward to others, as much a plea for help—or an expression of public outrage—as anything.  Here the photograph is closely cropped so that the woman fills the frame and her grief seems more inward, more personal than public.  Indeed, pain and grief seem to be the conspicuous emotions being invoked, not anger or outrage.  And more, she doesn’t seem to be calling out to anyone so much as absorbing and containing the pain within herself.  Notice how she covers her face in this regard, blocking out the scene that she cannot bring herself to witness.  And there is another difference as well.  The dead bodies that lie on the ground behind her are covered, barely recognizable as such; indeed, without being alerted by the caption one might fail to see  them altogether.   Contrast the veiling of bodies and emotions with the photograph of the Kent State Massacre where the young woman kneels next to the prostate body that lies prominent in front of her—and in front of us, always and forever an image of the costs and effects of a democracy turned tyrannous.

As one works their way through the many photographs of the dead in Kiev it is hard not to notice that almost all of the photographs of the dead are shrouded, with only small parts of their bodies exposed to view, a stomach here, a knee there.  In many ways this is as it should

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be as it indicates respect for the deceased and saves their families and friends from having to live forever with horrific images of their loved ones.   And yet, there is a cost here too, as it reifies the dead body, transforming it into an anonymous, collective entity that inadvertently denies all sense of personal identity and individual loss.  The image above is especially telling in this regard as the flag that drapes the bodies combines with the  helmet and flower to ritualize the deaths that are both signified and memorialized, revealing them as part of a national cause fought in the name of democracy—as they were—but at the same time veiling or erasing (or at the very least mitigating) the outrage that led to their individual sacrifice by covering the bodies.

There is perhaps no truly good way to represent such a situation, but that does not mean that we should ignore the implications of the choices of representation that we take, however conventional they might be.  The protestors who died in Independence Square were heroes, to be sure, but they were also individual citizens shot down and butchered by the very forces that should have been protecting them.  And that is not something that should ever get lost in the telling of—or seeing—the Battle of Kiev.

Credit:  Konstantin Chernichkin/Reuters; Darko Bandic/AP

 

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What Does Injustice Look Like?

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This past week marked the 50th anniversary of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama.  By many accounts it was the tipping point in generating national public support for the civil rights movement, and much of that effect is often attributed to the national news reports that showed Birmingham police officers using attack dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent protestors. Chief among the most famous of those images is Bill Hudson’s photograph of high school student Bill Gadsden being attacked by a police dog.  It appeared the next day, May 4th, above the fold in the New York Times and has been reprinted perhaps more than any other image affiliated with the civil rights movement.  The photograph was memorialized in a statue in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park in 1993, fixing the meaning of the civil rights movement as a response to repressive state action.

There is much that could be said about this photograph, but perhaps most important is the way in which it puts the relationship between dominance and acquiescence on public display. Prior to the Boycott in Birmingham one could find photographs that visualized the ways in which white citizens sought to enforce the codes of social and racial hierarchy through verbal and physical intimidation, the most prominent example being the photograph of Hazel Barnes “barking” at Elizabeth Eckrich in the streets of Little Rock.  But typically such images located the agency of such control in the hands of civil society, i.e., ordinary citizens.  Here the agents of action are duly authorized police officers armed with guns and in control of highly trained attack dogs.  And of course that marks a huge difference.  Indeed, it should be of little surprise to anyone that the scene above, cast in the full light of day and executed by officers of the state, was characterized as a “legal lynching.”

To see the image through the haze of memory and framed by the contemporary consensus that state sponsored racial segregation was a profound injustice destined to be eliminated by a truly egalitarian society is in some ways to dull the effective, functional power of the image at its point of production and dissemination–however powerful it remains today.  But imagine seeing the photograph in 1963 and in the context of reports made by the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” O’Connor, that the protestors were a serious threat to public security.

The young man in the photograph does not appear to be a threat to anybody.  Note in particular his somewhat passive stance.  Despite being viciously attacked by a police dog his right hand rests at his side, while his left hand is on the police officers arm in a manner that seems either to be steadying himself or pushing the police officer away.  We might imagine a much more defensive or even aggressive stance in response to such an attack, but here we have an almost textbook example of nonviolent resistance.

The lack of threat is manifest in other features of the image.  Notice, in particular the countenance of the two police officers.   One seems to be pulling the youth into the dog’s maw, not so much trying to subdue him as to hold him still while the dog attacks.  The other police officer, with a handgun prominently displayed in its holster, heels his dog while he observes the scene before him.  One might imagine that if the black youth were truly a threat, so much so as to warrant the use of a dog to attack him, that the second police officer would be more directly and actively engaged.  Surely he would have his dog assisting in subduing the suspect, or that he would have pulled his gun.  But nothing of the like happens.  And the reason is manifest, for the action in the center of the screen is not about public safety.  Rather it is a public spectacle put on display for the enjoyment of the second police officer (and who he represents) and for the intimidation of the black citizens in the background.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was challenged by reticent and fearful black religious leaders in Birmingham with the question, why are you here, he responded, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.”  Injustice can be a difficult concept to put into words, but once made palpably visible it is difficult to ignore. Sometimes we have to look closely to see it for what it is, sometimes it is there simply waiting to be seen.

Photo Credit:  Bill Hudson/AP

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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

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No soldier wants to be the last casualty in a war, but surely that designation pales in comparison to being the first fatal casualty in a combat mission that has already been declared “over.”  One week after “turning the page” on Operation Freedom, two unidentified U.S. soldiers were killed by Iraqi soldiers in a firefight inside an Iraqi Army base north of Baghdad. This would be the same Iraqi army that 50,000 U.S. military personnel were left behind (after the page was “turned”) to “advise and train.”  It would be comedic if it wasn’t so tragic, but even these theatrical characterizations fail to capture the sheer absurdity of the situation: soldiers fighting a war of foreign occupation/liberation that was initiated under false or grossly mistaken pretenses, and subsequently attacked and killed by the “security forces” they were assigned to help once the war was declared “over.”

The photograph above, which accompanied one of the early stories reporting on the incident, calls attention to the irrationality of the ordeal.  The soldiers here, of course, are alive, cast in silhouette against what is either a setting or a rising sun. The incongruity of featuring a photograph of two unidentifiable soldiers that live and breathe in a story about two unidentified fatalities marks the event being reported as somewhat farcical, almost as if to challenge the very possibility of representing soldiers dying in a war that has been declared over. But of course, all appearances and declarations aside, the war isn’t over, a point underscored by the ambiguous register of the blazing hot sun. It is important in this regard to notice that there is nothing in the photograph that clues us as to whether the sun is setting (on a day gone by) or rising (to a new day). The past and the future are utterly indistinguishable, each day apparently pretty much like the last with no discernable end in sight.  Indeed, the photograph could be a scene out of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Of course, the alternative to casting such a situation as utterly absurd is to try to make it fit within our ordinary conventions for representing war.  So it is that we find another news story on the incident accompanied by a very different photograph.

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The photograph here is altogether familiar; an image, the likes of which we have seen hundreds of times in recent years in newspapers all across the nation—national, regional, and local alike.  It is an appropriately solemn and reverent honoring of one who sacrificed his life for the nation. The difficulty is that the soldier being memorialized in this photograph actually died and was interred in 2005. That the photograph anchors a story about a different event without so much as an explanation would seem to challenge the logic of journalistic representation.  But the bigger point is recognizing the effect of an image that is so generic, so transportable, that it can be substituted for any military casualty so as to locate the meaning of any particular death under the cultural logic of heroism and sacrifice without any consideration of the attending circumstances.  There is no reason to believe that the soldiers that have died since we “turned the page” on Operation Freedom were anything but brave and heroic representatives of the nation.  At the same time, substituting an image like this to represent their deaths rationalizes their sacrifice at the expense of calling attention to the madness of the circumstances that led to it.

Photo Credit: AG/MGB; Albans/News.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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A Crime With No Name

Museum of Memory

We have all seen images like this before.  A photograph of photographs.  A wall of missing or deceased men, women, and children remembered by little more than their photographic residues.  Once they were here to be photographed, but now they are not.  All that remains are these images.  A visual aide-mémoire to what once was but is no more. The photographs here represent the thousands who were tortured, murdered, and imprisoned in Pinochet’s Chile, but it is no different in kind from the Holocaust Museum’s “Tower of Faces” and other such memorial installations.  One of the things that distinguishes such photographs (and the  installations that they represent) is the anonymity of the individuals being remembered.  And even when a name is available, it is little more than a verbal marker that designates the face portrayed, but tells us nothing of the person being memorialized, of who they were: their successes and failures, their joys and sorrows, their personal conceits and virtues, etc.  In an important and somewhat ironic way, that is precisely the point.  What makes photographs such as the one above notable is how they aggregate a mass of individuals as a collective, not by metonymic reduction of the many into the one, but by underscoring the sense in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts.  And the normative impact of that is palpable, all the more so since it marks a crime that has no name.

The torture and murder of any individual is unjust, to be sure, but here the injustice is magnified literally beyond comprehension.  To begin with, many of the images are simply beyond the range of ordinary human vision, both too high and at an oblique angle from the floor, making it very nearly impossible to register the visual representation of any individual with any  real precision.  And yet, even though many of the photographs cannot be easily registered there is no doubt that they are to be seen, just as those recorded in the images were once there to be seen.  But more, there is something of the quality of an optical illusion: Try to focus on an individual face and you are almost immediately lost in the collage of images that demarcate the sprawling but vaguely ordered mass, look to the whole so as to make sense of its collective order and your line of sight is drawn to individual faces, and then back again.  The overall effect is to underscore the sheer impossibility of taking in, let alone understanding, the magnitude of the crime imagined and being remembered.

And therein lies, at least in part,  the power of the photographic image: to help us show—and perhaps to see—when words are simply not up to the task.

Photo Credit:  Aliosha Marquez/AP

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Iconic Images, Lego Art, and the Limits of Imitation

One of the characteristics of iconic images is that they are reproduced across a wide range of media, genres, settings, and topics. Actually, that is true of media more generally–think of how songs, jokes, quotations, recipes, fashions, and many other other things circulate widely–but it usually is not so intentional or distinctive as when it is done with widely recognized and influential images. Iconic photographs have been reproduced as drawings, paintings, sculpture, murals, graffiti, embroidery, beadwork, silkscreens, figurines, stamps, plates, coins, tattoos–you name it. Oh, yes, and Lego art:

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This is one of a set of nine that are posted at a Flickr page. The set contains reconstructions of three canonical photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Charles Ebbets’ shot of iron workers sitting on a beam hanging in empty space, Robert Capa’s photo of a soldier being shot in the Spanish civil war, the Times Square kiss, two from the Vietnam war, and the lone protester standing before a tank in Tiananmen Square.

The question is whether there is anything to be learned from the Legos. One wouldn’t expect much beyond what we already know: with a few key features in place, we can recognize the iconic image in any medium, and people can be clever when they have time on their hands. The odd imitation is basically a joke, and we marvel–briefly–that someone could get so much out of Legos or ice cream (it’s been done: the flag-raising at Iwo Jima) or whatever else is getting the iconic upgrade.

I wonder, however, if there isn’t more to the Lego art. Let’s take two examples–briefly. First, the Times Square kiss:

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The Lego version captures both the strongest positive feature of the photo as well as one cause for criticism. The positive feature is the good vibe that so many people get from seeing a young couple passionately “kissing the war goodbye” on V-J Day. You get that feeling in the Lego work from the smile on the sailor’s face. In the photograph from Times Square, there is much more: youth casting off of wartime restrictions, Eros and regeneration triumphing over war and death, private and public life beautifully harmonized; what’s not to like? Well, there is one thing for some, and that’s how the woman may be a less that willing participant. He didn’t ask first, and so one form of domination could be giving way to another form of domination. And sure enough, the Lego art gets that as well: look at how awkwardly she is bent back, and how she is not returning his advance.

I could stop there, but let’s do one more:

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This is a reprise of the Eddie Adams photograph from the 1968 Tet offensive in during the Vietnam War.

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Adams believed that the officer was justified in executing the bound prisoner of war, and perhaps a case can be made. But the photo records more than a single incident, and it fit too well with many other acts that were both criminal and marked by the official indifference that is displayed here. So, much to Adams dismay, the photograph became memorialized as a statement against the war.

And something like that ambiguity is evident in the Lego art. The smiles of the two figures, and particularly the one being shot, are just not right. They’re wrong because not in the photograph, and because not fitting with the scene, and because not appropriate for cuing our reaction to a killing. As with the iconic photograph, what seems to be a simple image is in fact one that churns complicated responses, in part because it isn’t right with itself.

There are limits to imitation. Not everything can be said in any medium, and some media can’t say much at all, but there still can be more there than we might think. Next up, iconic images in cornfield mazes. Really, they’re out there.

Photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images; Eddie Adams/Associated Press.

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"Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered"

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The picture is of a life size statute of “Samantha Stevens,” portrayed by Elizabeth Montgomery in the 1960s television show Bewitched, and arguably America’s most famous witch. Witches are typically cast as ugly and scary beings, and hence their prominence on Halloween. But Samantha Stevens was a beautiful and loving witch (as well, we might note, as an excellent housekeeper and the perfect wife and mother). For my generation, “Sam” Stevens stood in stark contrast to Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the “The Wicked Witch of the East” in The Wizard of Oz, and even to this day she maintains a fairly large fan base supported by websites, collectibles, and the like.

As a photograph the picture is really quite unremarkable. An altogether ordinary, slightly off-center “snapshot” of a statute; precisely the kind of image we might find in a private photo album documenting a family vacation. What makes the photograph notable here is that it was shot by a NYT photographer and that it appears in a NYT travelogue feature that regularly promotes places to which members of the upper middle classes might “escape” the rigors of everyday life, such as Aruba, St. Lucia, and Jamaica. Titled “The Ghost’s of Salem’s Past,” this slideshow promotes the devil may care attitude of Salem, Massachusetts, a quaint and quiet New England town that is represented by the NYT as operating at the juncture of the sacred and the profane, part historical landmark and part theme park. These attributions may not be inaccurate, as Salem relies almost exclusively on tourist traffic for its economic survival. And so it not only has to trade on its history, but it has to make witchcraft desirable – literally a commodity that consumers are willing to buy. And therein lies the problem, for the truly important lesson of Salem’s “history” should be addressed to its visitors as citizens and not as consumers.

Salem, of course, is the home of the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, generally understood to be the most notorious (if not actually the first) “witch hunt” hysteria in the nation’s history. By the time the hysteria had ended over nineteen men and women had been hanged on Gallows Hill for allegedly practicing the dark arts, and another, octogenarian Giles Corey, was pressed to death under heavy stones, defying his executioners to his very end by taunting them to use “more weight!” The trials are regularly acknowledged as one of our darkest moments and are frequently pointed to as the first and most enduring challenge to what eventually emerged as the promises of civil liberty and social justice grounded in a commitment to religious toleration. Put differently, its legacy as a “usable past” is as a reminder to what can happen in the face of mass hysteria and the irrational fear of others within in our midst (which is not to say that all fears of the other are by definition necessarily irrational).

However much Salem attempts to retain a sense of its usable past, and thus to altercast its visitors as citizens with a responsibility to the sacred demands of civic democracy—and there are important efforts to do so, such as with the Salem Village Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial in neighboring Danvers—it nevertheless is confronted with powerful economic realities that animate its profane, consumerist, theme park sensibilities. So it is, that when the Samantha Stevens statute was dedicated in 2005, the television show being memorialized was described as “timeless” without even a hint of irony, let alone recognition for how its prominent placement in Salem risked overshadowing and domesticating the towns’ truly timeless and tragic history. It is as understandable as it is regrettable, at least for the residents of Salem.

But look at the picture one more time. Although shot by a professional photojournalist, it actually looks like it could have been taken by an amateur. Indeed, studiously so. The framing of the image—whether the statue or the man and child in the background—is off-center. Shot with a long lens but at a moderately wide angle, and with the shutter stopped down, the foreground and background are both in relatively sharp focus; the effect is thus to emphasize how cluttered the scene looks to be. And the exposure is all wrong as well, highlighting strong contrasts between the statue and the multiple backgrounds, and thus emphasizing shadows that make it very hard to know where one should direct their gaze. In short, it perfectly imitates what we might imagine to be an amateurish snapshot found in a personal photo album designed to document a family vacation. And as such, it invites the viewer to identify with it as a private consumer and not as a public citizen; come to Salem, it beckons, not to reflect upon your nation’s tragic past, but indeed, to “escape” that past by experiencing a “timeless” and happy fiction. What seems less clear are the stakes that the NYT has in all of this. Indeed, what is somewhat understandable, even bewitching, in Salem, MA, is both bothersome and bewildering when valorized by one of our leading institutions.

Photo Credit: Robert Spencer/New York Times; and with thanks to Stephen Olbrys Gencarella for introducing me to the carnivalesque atmosphere that pervades Salem, MA, and not just on Halloween, where it is the site of one of the largest public parties in the land, but to the ongoing struggle within Salem to negotiate the tension between economic survival and social justice.


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Back Lot Iwo Jima

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.

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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.


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Mourning in America

Memorializinig Iraq

As of this posting there have been 3,013 U.S. military casualties in Iraq since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That is three thousand and thirteen indistinguishable, flag-draped coffins. Three thousand and thirteen individual bodies. And the question is, how should we honor and mourn their sacrifice, as individuals or as faceless members of a collectivity? The issue came to a head at Fort Lewis, Washington this past week, where the base commander considered doing away with the practice of individual services for each death in lieu of a collective monthly memorial. The rationale was logistical, if not a little bit ironic: there are just too many deaths coming out of the war to honor and remember each individual. The protest from soldier’s families and veterans was palpable and pronounced. The policy was subsequently revised to hold weekly memorials, a compromise which surely satisfies no one.

The photograph above was featured with the original New York Times story – although it was subordinated after a few hours and replaced on the mast with a picture of an honor guard performing a rifle salute – and then repeated the next day in a story reporting the compromise. And as poignant as it is, it nonetheless underscores a very real problem: this is not WWII, where an entire generation sacrificed and fought and died, and thus could be memorialized in the collective – “the greatest generation.” Nor is it Vietnam, where those who fought and died became the scapegoats for the nation’s sins and could only be memorialized after great public controversy, and at that by splitting the difference between the collective and individual trauma of the war in a monument that honored both at once, with names inscribed in black granite. Rather, it is a war being fought in the shadow of our dueling memories of WWII and Vietnam, by men and women who are individuals first and soldiers second (and only incidentally so). We have yet to come to terms with this difference, or the symbolic register in which it is being experienced and enacted, and yet, as this image hints, it is a difference that will no doubt animate a unique mode of memorium, one that in the end, perhaps, will need to put the individual face in front of the flag.

Photo Credits: Kevin P. Casey/New York Times


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