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ICONIC PHOTOGRAPHS, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Fashion Week will be with us for months.  The Milan show starts out low key by featuring the men. Even on the runway, menswear is far more restrained than the over-the-top experimentation that is typical at the women’s shows.  Like each of the big shows, however, some of the designers provide more than a glimpse of next year’s styles; instead, they project a vision of what society could become.  What’s interesting about the Milan show this winter is that apparently the future is going to look a lot like the 19th century.

Welcome to the Congress of Berlin. I’d say that aristocrats never looked so good, except that looking good is one of the few things that aristocrats actually do.  Here we have fashion models and–are you ready for a bold, even stunning innovation?–movie actors dressed in Prada’s costumes.  Gary Oldman leads the procession, as if having a real celebrity somehow lent some cachet to the historical fantasy.  The substitution of actor for model makes sense, in a way, as celebrities as a class are the late modern world’s aristocrats, and have the morals to prove it.

Bourgeois morality would not merit a sneer in this crowd, which looks like a melange of grand eminences, minor nobles, and retainers, all of them bound by deeply intertwined habits of calculation, deference, hauteur, indebtedness, and entitlement, with perhaps a dose of inbreeding thrown in.  Other models stand in the wings like servants let in for the show, while the focus is on Oldman’s rigorous control of his performance as he approaches some unseen ceremonial encounter.

Thus, one class would dominate the public space, legitimized by lavish performance while hoarding the society’s resources behind the scenes.  Not quite where the West is today, but not very far from where it was either.  The issue is not simply the distribution of wealth upward while making class mobility ever more unlikely, although that is happening, but also a shift in mentalities.  When respect for the social contract of democratic society is displaced by neoliberalism’s promotion of harsh inequalities that become permanent advantages, the 21st century will come to look more and more like the 19th.

On the runway, it’s just a fantasy, here for a few days and then forgotten.  But it is because the fashion shows are so explicitly aesthetic and so obviously set apart from the practical world that they can at times leap across the barrier between past and future.  What results, if we are willing to take the leap, is an act of political imagination.  And the potential future is not always one you would discuss in a political science class.

Nor is it entirely imaginative.  After looking at fashion or art or photography to discern potential worlds, the next step is to see how those alternatives may already be available in the present.  So, if you can’t be an aristocrat, you might think about what you could do to get by in their world.

Jobs may be opening up sooner than we think.

Photographs by Giuseppe Aresu/Associated Press and Erik De Castro/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.  The New York Times used the lead photo with this report on the show, which confirms that my read is not off the mark, unfortunately.

Credit: Nedverse

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.

Considering Vietnam

Imperial War Museum

17 February 2012 – 18 February 2012

The Vietnam War is evolving from contemporary memory into history. This two day conference, held at IWM London, explores how the media and popular culture have shaped our understanding of the Vietnam War.

Day One of the conference will focus on how the Vietnam War was represented in the media with particular reference to photography, documentary film and television.  Day Two will focus on the representation of the Vietnam War through popular culture, with particular reference to feature films and popular music.

Speakers will include veteran journalists Don McCullin, Michael Nicholson and Philip Knightley. Additional information including a link to the conference program is here.

The conference is produced in association with the University of the Arts Photography and Archive Research Centre (PARC) and the London College of Communication

Photograph by Don McCullin, Hue, Vietnam, February 1968.

We appreciate rituals at NCN.  And surely the run up to a statewide, presidential primary election is nothing if it is not ritualistic.  And one need only look at the many slideshows on the recent Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to take a measure of the homespun, hand shaking, baby kissing, “impromptu” barbershop/hardware store/local diner visiting, town hall meeting rituals that are repeated ad nauseum, state by state, party by party, and year after year.

Given that the current primary election season begin nearly a year ago and has been running virtually nonstop ever since, one might expect that we would have something to say about the way in which it has been documented photographically within the public, visual culture. But the truth of the matter is that the various campaigns have been something of an embarrassment, more a caricature of themselves than anything else.  If someone like Mel Brooks were to spoof the current contest for the Republican nomination it is impossible to imagine how he could cast it better than to have the candidates play themselves or how he could script it better than to have them repeat their own lines on cue.  We simply have not been able to bring ourselves to speak to the issue because, for the most part, the photographic record has followed the pattern of a timeworn template of visual tropes that have represented this campaign and the various pretenders to the title of “the not Romney” as if it was like any other. It isn’t, of course, but photographers have had a difficult time documenting the differences.

The photograph above may be a good star at challenging the norms, in its own way a perfect parody for the present primary campaign season.  One of the goals of a primary political campaign is to give the candidates an opportunity to metaphorically “iron out the wrinkles” in their positions and policies. That hasn’t happened, of course, as just about every candidate has taken his or her turn rising to the top only to fall all over themselves in slapstick fashion, their wrinkles intact and in most cases all the worse for the wear.   But in the end there is Governor Romney, his hair carefully coifed and even his American flag—captioned and signed—carefully (one might say “obsessively”) steam ironed so that none of its wrinkles will show. What began as a metaphor to explain the political process in the language of everyday life has returned, in all of its banality, as a literal practice.  As such, the photograph suggests, the stage is empty, as is the campaign itself writ large … little more than a vacant podium, a flag that is being prepared by a stagehand to give the illusion of being perfect, and an empty platitude.  It is hard to believe that this is any way to elect a candidate for the presidency.

Photo Credit: Jim Wilson/NYT

At least one of the figures in this photograph from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is a sculpture, but how many?

Jim Dine‘s “Walking to Boras” occupies the center of the display space.  The pedestal and the four short poles for the ropes to prevent contact assure us that it is an objet d’art, just in case you had any doubt about a seven foot boy in lederhosen.  But what about the two figures on the left?

They are so perfectly caught in time, and so gracefully posed in a moment of dynamic equilibrium, and so absolutely isolated in visual space, where they are at once almost together and yet completely separate, and both specific individuals and social types. . . . The composition seems too good to have happened naturally, while it could be the real point of a larger composite grouping.  We look for the statue contrasted with the people around it, only to discover that the artist has tricked us into seeing statues as people.

Perhaps in the next millisecond the couple leaned into one another to confer or confide or otherwise get closer together, or perhaps a brief word or glance was enough to break the pause and they vectored off along the paths each was on, going in opposite directions in more ways than one.  Or perhaps they are still there, perfectly posed in a moment of aesthetic perfection, but of course inert.  But if they have moved on, what about the two figures on the right?

They certainly could qualify at statues, as their all too ordinary clothes and postures echo the sculptures of George Segal. And it would be a good joke, not to mention a moment for genuine reflection, for a museum in the Ozarks to feature its most local visitors as works of art.  And what if everyone in the room was a thing, a statue rather than a person passing through the aesthetic space?  Would the space become less welcoming or more stimulating?  More an occasion for reflection on art and life, or a disturbing walk through an uncanny valley of simulation?

Questions such as these are prompted by the photographer’s superb ability to recreate the deep experience of the aesthetic encounter as it is available in any well-designed art museum. Stated more simply, a good museum, like the art it holds, brings the spectator not only to see the artworks as they are, but also to see everything else aesthetically.  Nor need there be one definition or purpose for this kind of perception.  However it works, the result can be to see more of what is there to be seen, and with more clarity, insight, objectivity, empathy, humor, desire, and respect.  We can see how others are at once alien and human, typified and unique, needy and mindful, beautiful and doomed, achingly desirable and hopelessly out of reach, inhabitants of alternate worlds and caught in our shared catastrophe, exposed by the surface of things and forever unknown.

A good museum does that.  Photographs can do the same.  Photographic space can work like museum space: tuning the senses to see the artistry in ordinary life.  Admittedly, “museum” can be a ponderous word, heavily institutional and easily denigrated: “The real art is in the streets, not hanging on museum walls!”  But photographic space can seem too small by itself, and the artistry of the photographic encounter is in fact nothing less than entering a dedicated space for seeing anew.  And besides, much of the time photography already is in the streets.

The relationship between photography and the fine arts has a rich history, including early modernist avant-garde movements such as surrealism and Dada, use as a muse by major painters such as Francis Bacon and as more than that by photo-realists such as Chuck Close and Cindy Sherman, late modern avant-garde movements such as pop art, and work by contemporary hyperrealists (and keep in mind that all such labels are only partially accurate).  The photograph above was taken to accompany a New York Times review of the museum, and it serves that purpose well.  It surpasses that assignment, however, to capture something profound about photography itself.  Every photo of someone turns them temporarily into a statue.  Doing so doesn’t kill them, but it can bring the rest of us to life.

Photograph by Steve Hebert/New York Times.

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday.  We’ll return to our regular schedule on January 9.

Photograph from Yellowstone National Park by Anita Erdmann/National Geographic Photo Contest.

The point is a simple one, and perhaps not all that new, but hopefully no less profound for all that.  The camera offers us a way of seeing, and with it a reminder that for all its realist  pretensions, the cliché that “seeing is believing” must always be measured against the register or scale from which sight itself always begins.  And so it is that the photographers’ lens can take the simple and make it appear complex (or visa versa), just as it can render the ordinary altogether exotic (and the reverse).  The photographs below of last week’s lunar eclipse, which have been featured at a number of slide shows (here, here, and here), do both while also underscoring magnitude, indicating how what otherwise appears large is truly small, and how the small can be truly gargantuan (or maybe it is the other way around).

It will certainly not solve the world’s problems in realizing how small it is (or alternately, how small we are in it), but then again, as a new year is soon upon us it would not be a bad place to start.

(In order, the photos were shot from New Delhi, Sydney, Amman, Jerusalem,  Rome, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, and Seoul.)

Photo Credits:  Saurabh Das/AP; Tim Winbourne/Reuters; Ronen Zvulun/Reuters; Ali Jareki/Reuters; Tony Gentle/Reuters; Beck Diefenbach/Reuters; Bazukl Muhammad/Reuters; David Gray/Reuters; Jo Yong-Kak/Reuters

Slide shows of the Best Photographs of 2011 are beginning to appear.  They contain some great images, some eye candy, and another opportunity to think about the public world.  One thing you won’t see much of this year, unless it’s in ruins, is infrastructure.

This photo of prosthetic eyeballs is not going to appear in any of the “Best of” shows, nor should it.  And technological mimicry on behalf of cosmetics doesn’t quite qualify as old-school infrastructure, either.  Once images of factories, bridges, and other examples of industrialization were an important genre of photography–for example, the cover of the first issue of Life Magazine featured a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of  Fort Peck Dam.  Modernism articulated a strong affinity between the design arts, the machine age, and photography, and all three elements are fused in the Life cover with a good dose of national pride on behalf of progress and the American Century thrown in.  That’s a lot harder to come by these days, and so one might settle for a case of machined eyeballs.

But perhaps the photographer isn’t settling.  The image of mechanical eyes refers simultaneously to the human organ of sight and the camera, a visual prosthetic.  The eyes in the photograph appear somewhat uncanny: one intuitively senses that they can’t see and yet one can’t help thinking that they can see–that they might even be little orbs of sight at this moment.  They might be each looking in only one direction to see only one thing, but intelligent in at least that way.  Although not really.  Like a camera, one might say.  These  won’t in fact see anything, but a cyborg future awaits the civilization that mass produces eyes and other body parts, while the present world is already one in which we see virtually everything virtually, so much so that we forget that seeing itself requires its own organic, technological, social, and cultural infrastructure.

Once you start tracing the complex intersections that create photography’s ongoing contribution to the shared seeing that sustains modern societies, it’s not clear where to stop.  Certainly not before you consider the role of the city and all that makes it work.

This is another photo that probably won’t win any contests but is nonetheless distinctive, and in this case eerily beautiful.  The rectilinear grid pattern is etched in silver across the warm-toned base material, and it seems at once serenely ordered and yet strung with potential surges of energy.  But what is it?  A circuit board, or a laboratory apparatus, or an industrial park seen from above, or a work of art?  The metal pieces actually are train tracks in Chicago.  It’s an image of relatively low-tech infrastructure that is essential to life of the city and, with that, the economic health and cultural development of the nation.

But how often do we see that, much less look at it?  Obviously, an image such as this one isn’t going to be sufficient for deliberating about transportation policy, any more than an image of plastic eyes is going to provide all that is needed to think about how we see.  But each image is more than merely striking.  They ask us to consider how much we depend on things that are taken for granted, and how those things might be not only necessary and in need of care but also strange and provocative and beautiful in their own right.  Indeed, they are examples of how photography itself is part of the infrastructure of social thought.

Photographs by Lucas Jackson/Reuters and Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune.

 Credit: Jeff Danziger

“The rich … are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants; and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”  – Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, Part IV, Chap.1, p. 264.

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years

Philadelphia Museum of Art

January 14, 2012-April 22, 2012

“Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is a mid-career retrospective of the acclaimed photographer’s work and the first critical assessment of her ten-year project to exhibit her photographs annually in a space beneath a section of Interstate-95 (I-95) in South Philadelphia. Strauss’s subjects are broad but her primary focus is on working-class experience, including the most disenfranchised people and places. Her photographs offer a poignant, troubling portrait of contemporary America.”

We’ve been proud to feature Zoe’s work previously and to plug her terrific book, America.  You can learn more at her blog.

“Woman with Red Hair,” photograph by Zoe Strauss.