One of the interesting elements in the myth of Pandora’s Box is that all the evils of the world could be contained in a single jar.  One can imagine any small thing containing a world in miniature–for example, the Greek word kosmos could mean both universe and ornament, and William Blake spoke of seeing a world in a grain of sand–but usually the shift from microcosm to macrocosm is in the direction of order and the revelation of something divine.  But why should Evil not work the same route?  That, anyway, is one thought that comes to mind when I look at photographs such as this one, where a process of disruption, disorder, ragged violence, and pandemonium sees to be slowly unfolding from what was not long before a relatively benign urban space.

There was the street surrounded by its buildings, then the normal routines of commerce and civic life, then the choreographed standoff of political protesters and riot police in Jerusalem during Palestine’s Land Day, and then a provocation (whether from one side or another) and then another and a response and the escalation continues and then minor mayhem begins–nothing too dramatic but unfurling discord, insult, and injury and then what you see above: bodies flying, a kick being delivered to someone whose back is turned, horses hooves clattering dangerously toward someone rolling on the ground. . . . .

Not all the evils of the world, of course, but something bad coming out of what was otherwise just a container, a space that could include peace or domination, prosperous cooperation or a cycle of violence.  It all depends on who controls the box and what they put into it, I suppose.  And that’s the irony, for the result is not control, but rather chaos.  Small scale chaos may not seem too dangerous, but it spreads all the more insidiously for that.  The person being kicked will not forget the blow, those who praise themselves for their restraint will never understand what it feels like to be driven to the pavement, nothing in the scene itself will be altered to make it less likely to crack open again to release still more trouble.

Capturing this sense of the slow unfolding of disorder is an achievement and one that is purchased at the cost of giving up many other elements of a “good” photograph.  One’s gaze is pulled this way and that as if part of the action, and yet everything is far away and thus distant emotionally as well; the scene as a whole is messy and one’s attention is drawn to incidental details (the brown shoes, for example) rather than a decisive action within a coherent narrative.  But these deficits are an important part of the image.  The violence, disorder, and slow wreaking of the world that is going here and in many other sites of “low-intensity” conflict today exists in part because it has become so woven into the fabric of ordinary life, because it persists largely without direction toward resolution, and because it can retract back into civic containers rather than become too persistent and visible to be ignored.  By forgoing the dramatic action shot to document a small, stupid, street fight, the photographer has actually captured a much more extensive process of spreading disorder and civic decline.

There is an aesthetic here, one that gives up on formal values of artistic excellence to capture how violence is being unloosed in ordinary life.  And with that, one also can see how the capacity to act is reduced to coping within environments that are degraded in more ways than one.

Again, a somewhat distant view of a messy scene, but then as you look more closely, horror.  A man is carrying the body of a suicide bombing victim in Afghanistan.  He looks like a body snatcher, but more likely a working man is just doing his job.  Dead weight, rough ground, a maze of partial barriers and military vehicles–it can’t be easy, even if you’re used to it.

This image also might be capturing the process in reverse: the way everything (well, almost everything) gets put back into the box for awhile.  Bodies to the grave, hostiles rounded up and imprisoned, streets swept and buildings repaired, the surface will look much the same in a day or two, but for the traces of the bombing around the edges.  Once again, one might be able to imagine living in an orderly world–a world where little things can unfold toward something larger and more beautiful.  Until, that is, the next blast or the next confrontation on the street, when ordinary places can once again be undone to release the evils stored within, as if by malevolent gods.

Photographs by Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press and AFP/Getty.

Perhaps one of the most famous photographs to come out of World War II—or any war—is the image of a nurse and sailor kissing in New York’s Times Square.  The “Times Square Kiss” is notable for many reasons and not least for the way in which it models the egalitarianism of the war effort (both sailor and nurse are in uniform), as well as for way in which it channels the public celebration of the end of the war (it was VJ day) through the spontaneous, heterosexual kiss of two anonymous individuals as they return to the “normalcy” of public life.  If war marks the enforced separation of the sexes and uniformed repression of the yearnings of private life, the subordination of Eros to Thanatos, the “Times Square Kiss” signifies the release of long suppressed passions.

Photographs of returning sailors, soldiers, and marines kissing their loved ones upon return from overseas duty have become a photojournalistic convention and it is difficult to look at the many such images and not see their tribute to the image of the sailor and nurse in Times Square.  Most such photos are full-bodied shots; the image above, however, taken recently in Washington, D.C. at the return of the 4^th Civil Affairs Group, 2^nd Marine Division from a 7 month deployment in Afghanistan, focuses only on a pair of feet, and in that fact the photograph seems to tell something of a different story.

There is no way to know for sure that they are kissing, of course, but the fact that her right foot rises above the floor and her weight seems to be firmly on her left foot suggests that she is leaning up and into a taller lover as if in an embrace.  The contrast between heels and combat boots implies that this is a heterosexual kiss, just as with the original “Times Square Kiss,’ but nevertheless ambiguity reigns as even female Marines would surely wear combat boots.  And more, photographs of public homosexual kisses between returning veterans and their loved ones is no longer a taboo (see here and here).  If nothing else, then, the photograph gestures to the possibility of shifting mores within the public culture, or at the least to the uncertainty of otherwise longstanding stereotypes of cultural normalcy.

The primary difference between this photograph and the “Times Square Kiss,” and here there is no ambiguity, is the privacy of the scene being represented.  And that privacy is marked in multiple ways.  To begin, and most obviously, there is nothing in the image that would indicate that this is a public space.  The flooring appears to be some kind of tile designed to look like marble, but it also has an indistinct, institutional quality about it that suggests that this could be just about anywhere—and nowhere in particular.  More to the point, there is no indication of a viewing or witnessing public of any kind.  The caption to the photograph notes that 35 Marines from this unit returned on this day, but of course there is no evidence of them whatsoever in the image.  In all likelihood they too are engaged in kisses and embraces with loved ones, but if this photograph is to be an index of the event they too are in all likelihood involved in personal, individuated celebrations.  The point is accentuated by the contrast between the combat boots and the high heels, both showing the scuff marks of normal, everyday wear that mitigates the distinction between military and civilian life.  While the anonymity of the full-bodied kissers in the original photograph underscored their status as individuals standing in for the public at-large, here the solitary focus on their shoes identifies them as private individuals representing only themselves in a closed and private universe.  Nor perhaps should this surprise us all that much.  After all, the war in Afghanistan is the longest war in the nation’s history, and given that there is neither public consensus as to what our mission there is nor clarity regarding when it will actually end—promised schedules notwithstanding—it should come as no surprise that there is no public witnessing or celebration of such returns.

The original “Times Square Kiss” was often captioned “The Return to Normalcy” and here we might be witnessing something like the “The New Normalcy.”  Whether we want to read that as a salutary world of changing mores concerning gender relations or as an increasingly frail, privatized world in which the public exercises no voice at all in such matters is a matter of what we choose to see.

Photo Credit: Staff Sgt. Brittany E. Jones/USMC

Credit: Darryl Cagle

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.

The In/Visibility of America’s 21st Century Wars

The 2012 Annual Cultural Studies Conference at Indiana University

Bloomington, Indiana, April 12-13, 2012

Thursday: Keynote by James Der Derian, “‘Up Close and Dirty’: Uncloaking the New War Machine,” Theatre Arts building, BLTH A201, 7:00 pm

Friday: Film Screening of Human Terrain, BLTH A201, 7:00 pm

Saturday: panel sessions by Robert Hariman, John Lucaites, Michael Shaw, Claudia Breger, Lara Kriegel, Valerie Wiesdamp, Jody Madeira, Jon Simons, and Jeremy Gordon; the University Club in the Indiana Memorial Union, 10:00 am – 5:15 pm.  The conference is free and open to the public.

A campus map is here.

Photograph by Nina Berman.

There a a lot of photos from Afghanistan, which is not known for a wide variety of landscapes–or cityscapes, for that matter–and so one can understand why a photographer would look for the odd angle or unusual object.

This is not a photograph likely to win an award, but it speaks volumes.  The only thing in focus is a cheap plywood door and its improvised door knob.  That’s the tail end of a rocket, one of many stray parts likely to be strewn around a working combat outpost.  In WWII this detail might have come with a narrative of Yankee ingenuity and the egalitarian ethos of a Bill Mauldin cartoon, but that war hadn’t lasted ten years.

The line of sight loses focus as it extends down the wall, where it picks up the inert soldier in his camp chair and then runs into that grey fabric cover on some undefined storage space.  Beyond that is more grey, including the stony ground, storage silos, and a wall, all harshly lit or left in dull shadows.  Not exactly an image that you will see in an Armed Forces ad.  This is your back lot, Dogpatch, lost world army, stuck in time in some place that, if not forgotten by God, has been forgotten by just about everyone else.

Which is why one might think about the things they will leave behind, and what that says about why and how they are there.  However successful the mission, I don’t think the 13th Cavalry is going to crate up that outpost and ship it back home.  And when they leave it behind, it’s not going to last long.  Already slap-dash and not made to last, this is not evidence of nation building.  The fact that the rocket is inert adds a lame joke, but it wouldn’t take much to tear through that shed.  Not to worry, though, it is more likely to be abandoned than attacked, while the real danger is waiting to maim and kill the minute anyone starts walking outside the perimeter.  No wonder a soldier might want to stay put in that chair.

Or, if wanting to pass the time more enjoyably, take a few swings with a golf club.  Yes, that is the second odd metal object in the photo.  I’m not sure which is more implausible: that a golf club would be casually leaning against the wall, or that the fully equipped soldier would be working on his game, or that anyone would be hitting golf balls off that rock strewn field into the impossible fairways of Laghman province.  But the implausible we do today, because the insane is already second nature.

These are golf clubs that were left behind when the US pulled out of one of its bases in Iraq.  The walls of the building are marble, but the scene nonetheless is shabby, sad, and forlorn.  A study in excess–why one club would be there is strange enough, much less dozens–it becomes a small monument to misspent resources, misplaced priorities, and the futility of this imperial project.

The camera has a special relationship with objects: capturing their quiet but persistent eloquence amidst the welter of events.  When objects are left behind, they acquire the special resonance of ruins, and with that an allegorical voice that can speak of the decline and fall of civilizations.  America isn’t gone yet, but it may be losing its way.  And if it is to be known by what it leaves behind, those in Iraq and Afghanistan surely c0uld ask whether it ever really knew where it was.

Photographs by Erik De Castro/Reuters and Andrea Bruce/The New York Times.

Photographs of child combatants in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have become so common as to be almost a convention of war photography, and as such it is all too easy to see past them with little more than a tired nod of recognition (if even that). Richard Mosse’s Infra project, which focuses on nomadic rebels in the jungles of the Congo, challenges such nonchalance by disrupting our normal patterns of looking.

Mosse achieves this effect by using Aerochrome, a now discontinued infrared film that was originally produced by Kodak in 1942.  Aerochrome is a false-color reversal film designed, according to Kodak, “for various aerial photographic applications, such as vegetation and forestry surveys … monitoring where infrared discriminations may yield practical results.”  More to the point, it was intended for military purposes and in particular camouflage detection as it rendered the reflections of infrared and green typical of healthy foliage in strong red tones, making it stand out against the façade of dead and dying leaves—often seen in diluted magenta tones—used to conceal the enemy. In short, its purpose was to make the invisible visible.

The camera is generally understood to be an objective technology, recording only what is presented before its lens.  But of course that doesn’t mean that it always shows all that there is to see, even within its limited focus.  Infrared, for example, is invisible to the human eye and, indeed, it is also invisible to the camera unless it is filtered by an appropriate medium like infrared film.  When such film is used, however, the ordinarily invisible becomes visible, and as the photograph above indicates, it does so in pronounced ways that force us to look again at what we are seeing—to acknowledge what our normal capacity for seeing fails to recognize.  In this case, the shift from “real” colors to infrared casts the scene as surreal and thus encourages us to reconsider what it is that we are looking at.  Notice here how the muted, purple tint of the boy’s hat and pants blend with both his brown skin and with the magenta foliage in the background. The Sponge Bob t-shirt, which otherwise might have been the primary focus of our attention, now fades slightly from view as the jarring relationship between the boy and the environment is enhanced.  And as he becomes more closely identified with the “natural” palette of the apparently borderline healthy foliage, the stresses and strains of the war on him become more pronounced as well. Note too how the infrared reflections contrast with and underscore the black metal of his weapon, an object which now stands out as visually discordant and warrants more attention.

Mosse characterizes his photographs as something of a return to a pre-realist romanticism, but inasmuch as he relies on the mechanical technology of the camera to record everything that it can see, he is actually remaining consistent to a fault with the photojournalist’s commitment to an objective, realist aesthetic.  At the same time, however, by pushing the camera to to the full extent of its objective and realist capabilities he highlights simultaneously the technological limitations and the artistry of every photograph.  And more, he reminds us that while war’s true colors are not always easily visible to the naked eye that fact does not render them insignificant or inconsequential; and more, it does not absolve us of the responsibility to see what might otherwise appear to be invisible.

Photo Credit: Richard Mosse (North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011)

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum turned the political world upside down today by announcing that they had formed a joint ticket for the Republican presidential campaign.  The former antagonists declared that the bruising primary contests of the past several months were behind them, and their new-found solidarity was evident in everything from their smiles to their repartee with a stunned press corps.  “As long as Mitt doesn’t fire me, we’ll be fine,” joshed Santorum, while Romney laughingly added, “I guess I passed the religious test.”

More seriously, the two candidates assured their supporters that they see eye to eye on key principles of the Republican campaign: ending the class war and making America strong by transferring wealth upwards and overseas; cutting big government by reducing public education and ending public insurance programs such as “Obamacare,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security,” and restoring American values by returning to the comprehensive subordination of women.

Some differences were still evident, however.  For example, it seems clear that Santorum would prefer Christian theocratic rule at the federal level, whereas Romney believes that it should only be allowable in the states and private corporations.  The two men preferred to see such disagreements as a strength of the ticket.  “It’s good to have these discussions in the executive office,” Romney said.  Santorum agreed, as “that way the full range of opinion is represented before the President makes a decision.”

The White House declined comment on such short notice, but an anonymous staffer acknowledged that the two GOP candidates appeared to be a very attractive couple.

Photograph by Jae C. Hong/Associated Press.

Now! Visual Culture

A conference at New York University

May 31-June 2, 2012

Featuring:

One Dozen Lightning Talks on the future of the field
Workshops on multi-media software and film
Open discussions on debt, academic publishing, and interdisciplinarity
Graduate student forum and a general assembly
Practice, performance, and diasporic art

Participants include: Safet Ahmeti, Giuliana Bruno, Wafaa Bilal, Jill Casid, Patsy Chang, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beth Coleman, Jennifer Gonzalez, Raiford Guins, Gary Hall, Max Liljefors, Mark Little, Tara McPherson, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lisa Nakamura, Paul Pfeiffer, Amanda du Preez, Martha Rosler, Joan Saab, Marquard Smith, Sina Najafi, Øyvind Vågnes, McKenzie Wark, Jason Wing, Joanna Zylinska, and many more.

There can only be a relatively limited number of delegates both for space reasons (only certain spaces can be used cost-free at NYU) and to create a strongly interactive conference experience. These sessions will take place at 20 Cooper Square, New York, 10003 in the Humanities Initiative space, a beautifully designed space overlooking the architectural drama of the Bowery.

On the website you will find a registration form: please consider registering!

Full event details are at http://www.visualculturenow.org.

Photo by Michael Pierce.

The news was largely theatrical yesterday–the Pope in Cuba, protest and prayer outside the Supreme Court, a new Madonna album–but not much to get excited about.  And speaking of aging, there was this image, which poignantly evokes a different kind of drama.

An old man looks though a crack in a door.  The door is in a nursing home, the nursing home is in China, and he is going to die.  Until then, however, he has a beautiful combination of good humor, intelligence, and gentleness.  His eye may be dimming, but he still absorbs, considers, and responds rather than merely see.  The door of perception may be narrower than it once was, but the slender space, like the eye itself, remains an aperture through which light and thought can travel.

The humanism of the image may be helped by much of his genetic and cultural inheritance not being visible.  What strikes me, however, is how he looks simian.  Rather than reverting to childhood, he seems to be aging into the prehistory of his species.  Photography recapitulates phylogeny, you might say, and like a mirror image reversing the evolutionary process.  We can see not a single individual but the human being as it is a thinking primate.  But no more immortal for that.

This is another photograph that takes us back in time.  The ultraviolet image of Cygnus Loop Nebula captures the remaining gases of an explosion that occurred about 5000 years ago.  It, too, is poignant.  Although nothing but inanimate matter, the beautiful tracery becomes a mirror image, inviting recognition as if it were the remnants of a mind, an intelligence still somewhat structured even as it fades into nothingness.  Such allegories are not science, of course, but why then create the image, itself a work of artifice, and why give the galaxy the name of a swan?  Myth and science need not be far apart, and so the astral form suggests a life form, and in any case, the pattern is an aperture into the history of the star system.  Stars are neither mortal nor immortal, but they, too, are subject to the relentless passage of time.

Which is why I like the rest of the photograph as well.  It’s easy to satirically intone Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions of stars,” but there are billions and billions of galaxies.  Each one is a field of light that will some day be extinguished.  But until then, perhaps a source of perspective on the minor dramas of the news cycle, and maybe even something that might make an old man smile.

Photographs by a stringer for Reuters and by NASA.

With global demand on oil at an all time high and with the current volatility in the Middle East it is not hard to understand why oil is understood as the natural resource most likely to lead to increasingly pronounced international instabilities, including war and terrorist activities, in the coming years. And yet there is an equal if not more serious global scarcity facing us: a shortage of fresh water. The problem seems to exist primarily outside of the U.S., as indicated in the photograph of a cow carcas from Mexico which is suffering its worst drought in 70 years, though the Drought Mitigation Center reports that 12% of the U.S. experienced “exceptional drought conditions” in the summer of 2011 and more than 40% of all states faced abnormal dryness or drought.

Photographs of carcasses are something of a visual trope for drought conditions, and images like the one above are numerous.  Collectively, they function as a spectacle that directs attention to the sense that drought is the major problem that faces us with respect to water shortages, and given the effects of recent global warming patterns it is not an altogether unreasonable concern.  But equally problematic—and maybe more so—is the more invisible, and thus less spectacular, “slow violence” produced by usage patterns that place stress upon both ecosystems and socio-economic relations.  It is notable, for example, that the average U.S. citizen is responsible for the consumption of 2,000 gallons of water a day, twice the amount of most citizens in other parts of the world, and that a pound of beef—a staple of U.S. diets—requires close to 1,800 gallons of water, while a pound of chicken requires approximately 460 gallons of water to produce and a pound of soy beans requires only 216 gallons of water.  The effects of such dietary choices on both the ecosystem and worldwide social economies are notable, but of course they defy easy visual representation let alone the spectacle of dead carcasses and dried up and cracked river beds.

Of equal concern are the pollution effects produced by neoliberal economies.  Hydraulic fracking is a process used to extract natural gas from reservoir rock formations and shale.  It is an effective method for tapping deep natural gas reserves, but it comes at the cost of injecting millions of gallons of chemical-laced water under high pressure into the earth. Notwithstanding the pressure that this places on demand, there is the question of polluting the aquifer and in particular of contaminating private wells and reservoirs with high levels of benzene, a known carcinogen.  The issue is currently being contested by the natural gas industry and the EPA but clearly part of the problem is how does one know the problem when one sees it?

Perhaps the answer is to just look!  Take for example the photograph above of a woman in western Pennsylvania who fears that her water has been contaminated by a nearby natural gas drilling operation.  State officials report that tests show the water to be safe, and the local gas company which had been delivering drinking water to local households has indicated that they will no longer be making such deliveries.  And perhaps they are right, though judging from what we can see coming out of the tap I’d be inclined to invite them over one afternoon for a tall cool drink of tap water to discuss it.  The resulting photo op might not prove to be spectacular in the manner of a dead carcass, but it might nevertheless make the point.

Photo Credit:  Stringer/Reuters; Keith Srakocic/AP