Feb 10, 2014
May 30, 2011
Aug 04, 2007
Jul 18, 2007
Apr 09, 2010
Nov 10, 2013

The Corporate Come-On

Business is all about the bottom line, right? While the rest of us might drift along in a miasma of desire and fantasy, business executives are making their decisions on the basis of hard facts, cold calculations, and careful strategic assessments. After all, would you decide to invest millions of dollars on the basis of a whim in the heat of the moment? Well, you might, but surely they would know better.

The Federation of German Industry, in conjunction with the German government, is betting otherwise:

schiffer-grand-ctrl-05.JPG

For the record, you are looking at fashion model and actress Claudia Schiffer wrapped in a dress–or towel–in the colors of the German flag. From the look of it, she can’t be wearing much else. I don’t know about you, but this is not the image that would have come to my mind if you had asked me to visualize “Germany–Land of Ideas.” It does, however, give new meaning to investing.

I doubt the ad actually will cause some CEO to hang around the stage door of the Federal Republic, but it does reveal a thing or two about the “serious relationship” between capital and the nation-state today. Germany is completely feminized, needing to attract a man to be economically viable over the long term. He might like what he sees, but he always can go elsewhere. She might not like waiting, but he will decide whether to put his money into her or some other woman–maybe that slut, Italy. The state is in the role of seducing capital–and not, for example, regulating it.

Of course, the guy who buys this is in for a surprise or two. The German labor force is not as uniformly Aryan as Claudia, and German labor laws might seem like a cold shower to the American CEO. The ad itself may be not so much contradictory as tongue-in-cheek clever. It’s a fantasy, but we know it’s fantasy and can chuckle along. Fair enough, but look at two more in the series, which make the erotic framing increasingly bizarre:

schiffer-grand-ctrl-13.JPG

schiffer-grand-ctrl-14.JPG

What started as a soft sell has become something between a gang bang and a challenge. Come on, boys, have you got what it takes? There’s still the irony–the second ad says that “roughly half of Europe’s nanotechnology companies are based in Germany”–but the text is going one way and the image another. One might debate whether Germany is the Land of Ideas, but the idea here comes from that great German advertising executive, Sigmund Freud: the German nation needs the phallus of capital, and the bigger the better.

I learned of these ads due to a fine presentation at my recent conference by Melissa Aronczyk, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Melissa’s research focuses on the phenomenon of nation branding and its implications for national identity, state policy and citizenship. She can be reached at melissa.aronczyk@nyu.edu.


Digg!

 0 Comments

"… the Shadow Knows"

bush-shadow.png

 

Last week over at BAGnewsNotes Michael Shaw featured a picture of President Bush leaving the oval office in preparation for a trip to Southern California to “view the damage done by the wildfires in Southern California.” Difficult to see in the predawn shadows cast on the West Wing of the White House, but nevertheless physically present, the president is pictured in sharp contrast to the brightly lit window of the Oval Office through which we see Vice President Cheney who apparently has stayed behind to handle whatever everyday business might need tending to – say the war in Iraq. The photograph was a poignant comment on who might actually be running “the show” in Washington, D.C. these days. There was a time when the president would stay close to the Oval Office during times of crisis, and the vice president would function as the official emissary of the White House, but in this image the roles are clearly reversed.

I was reminded of that image when I saw the above photograph posted at the New York Times this past week. Once again the president is leaving the White House, this time on a trip to campaign for a Republican senate candidate and to visit troops graduating from boot camp at Fort Jackson, SC. And once again he leaves via the west portico of the White House in almost the exact location as in the previous picture. But there are important differences that deserve comment.

First, of course, this later image is taken not in the early morning hours when darkness still shrouds the White House and when one would hardly expect to see a great deal of pomp and circumstance as the president moves about. Rather, it is shot in the light of day, sometime in the early afternoon judging from the length of the shadows. And yet the president is completely alone – no entourage, no secret service, no military honor guard. Indeed, he appears to be slinking off in broad daylight – which may in fact be what he is doing given the gravity of national problems and the partisan, photo-op purposes of his trip. In this instance there are no lights on in the Oval Office—it is completely dark— and so it is hard to know if anyone is attending to business at all. The key difference between the two photographs, of course, is that here we don’t actually see the president, but rather his silhouette, a gossamer-like presence that recalls the flickering images in Plato’s cave. And notice too that his spectral stature, relative to the door he has just passed, suggests that the man casting the silhouette is a mere shadow of his appointed, presidential self, certainly not someone who is apparently up to rigors of his high office. No longer even just an emissary for the White House, here he is reduced to a shadowy existence that borders on political nothingness.

The salience of this most recent rendition of Lil’ Bush is emphasized by contrasting it with a photograph of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, which appeared on the Washington Post website on the same day.

pelosi-shadow.png

Shot at an oblique and low angle, the image catches the hint of an LED screen in the lower right corner, thus foregrounding the political theater being performed. Normally we might imagine this as a somewhat critical move, but notice how it distinguishes this image from the picture of the president. The image of the president is shot straight on and without any attention to the camera capturing the scene; it thus implies an ironic realism to the image that underscores the fact that this is not George Bush playing the role of being president, here he is off-stage, and … what you see is what you get. A mere shadow.

But there is more. For while the Speaker is the focal point of the image, her presence looms large relative to the ceremonially adorned rostrum at which she stands—and notice that she is speaking, literally acting out her role for the American people, and as the caption tells us, in defiance of the president’s threat to veto a revised version of the SCHIP —her physical body actually occupies only the left third of the screen. Behind her, and dominating the remaining two-thirds of the image is a bank of six American flags. The pomp and circumstance altogether absent in the Bush image (thus again emphasizing the realism of the image) is here in spades. And just left of center is the shadow of the Speaker cast on the screen of flags. Her shadow is smaller than she is (just like Lil’ Bush), but here it appears with economy and force, situating her visually where she might prefer to stand politically – acting in the name of the American people, in the full light of day (or at least in view of the media), and in a decisive but moderate stance, again, just left of center.

There are numerous points that could be made here, not least the extent to which those of us on the progressive Left should feel more or less uncomfortable with the second image and the ways in which it blends speaker and nation, visually understating the row of flags (which really do seem excessive) displayed as the source of national identification and authority. But for now I want to call attention to how the “shadow” can function differently as a conventional, visual marker of power and presence, at once minimizing or maximizing one’s stature, inviting either alienation or identification.

Photo Credits: Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency; Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg News


Digg!

 1 Comment

Sight Gags: Voting with Your Backside?

vote.png

Photo Credit: Diane Bondareff/AP, “Models Display the Word ‘Vote’ as part of the Betsey Johnson 2008 spring/summer collection show at Fashion Week in New York on September 11, 2007,” Washington Post Day in Photos, September 12, 2007.

Our primary goal with this blog is to talk about the ways in which photojournalism contributes to a vital democratic public culture. Much of the time that means we are focusing on what purport to be more or less serious matters. But as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert often remind us, democracy needs irony, parody, and pure silliness as much as it needs serious contemplation. For our part, we will dedicate our Sunday posts to putting some of that silliness on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the carnivalesque. Sometimes we will post pictures we’ve taken, or that have been contributed by others, or that we just happen to stumble across as we navigate our very visual public culture. And we won’t just be limited to photography, as a robust democratic visual culture consists of much more. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

 0 Comments

Conference Paper Call: New Media Worlds

Exploring New Media Worlds:

Changing Technologies, Industries, Cultures, and Audiences in Global and Historical Context

An international conference hosted by Texas A&M University, February 29 to March 2, 2008

Integrating fields of study in a time of change; setting a new agenda for media studies.

Papers and proposals are invited on any aspect of the conference themes, offering reports of new research, position-taking conceptual essays, discussions of media and telecommunication policy, and both international and historical comparisons on changing technologies, industries, cultures, and audiences.

The program will include keynote speakers, roundtable discussions, thematic panels, prominent scholars as respondents, and time for interaction. A wide selection of papers from the conference will be published. Travel grants are available for student members of the National Communication Association (see our webpage for more information).

Send papers or proposals (abstracts or annotated outlines) with a 50 word professional biography by email attachment to mediaworlds@tamu.edu. Panel proposals are also acceptable. Deadline: November 20, 2007.

For more information see http://comm.tamu.edu/mediaworlds; email mediaworlds@libarts.tamu.edu or Rothenbuhler@tamu.edu.

Keynote speakers: Larry Grossberg; Steve Jones; Vinny Mosco; and Ellen Seiter.

Confirmed participants: Carole Blair, Sandra Braman, Celeste Condit, Bruce Gronbeck, Andrea Press, Ronald Rice, Paddy Scannell, Joseph Turow, Angharad Valdivia.


Digg!

 0 Comments

Fashion Zombies and Social Energy

It’s been Fashion Week in the papers more than once this fall. Milan, Paris, London, New York, and even Chicago had shows providing a ready supply of exotic creations, otherworldly spectacles, and wretched excess. And then there were the clothes.

You don’t have to look too long to see that most of the images fall into a very few genres, and that photojournalism is providing free publicity for the industry. For example, Elle on line features Runway, Detail, and Backstage photos–all equally posed–and news coverage often will give you one or more of each.

That doesn’t mean that the photojournalists don’t inflect what they see. It isn’t hard to do, but they nonetheless should be given some credit for emphasizing the incredible lifelessness of the models. This is done in several ways, including showing a line of models that look like clones, and showing backstage shots suggesting that the completely passivity and vacuousness seen on the runway is not a pose. I’m sorry that I’ve misplaced some of the better images to make the point, but look at this triptych from the New York Times:

fashion-tryphtic.png

The two outer panels show us the clones. Despite different hair color and dresses, the two models have equally blank expressions and nearly identical bodies and walks. One can look very closely and identify many small differences, of course, but the effect of the pairing is to push the viewer in the opposite direction: they could just as well be the same model. That, of course, is the point of the exhibition, which is to feature the dress and not the person inside.

The middle panel provides the backstage shot. It could be used for a party quiz: is the women in the foreground alive or a mannequin, or perhaps one of the next generation of Stepford Wives? Again, you might be able to peer into her face and see great depth; readers of Russian literature are welcome to the challenge. It is more likely that the image, like those on either side of it, suggests that the vacuum-like isolation surrounding each model is matched by a vast interior silence.

I think these portraits of the models may be a gender-comprehensive protective mechanism: Just as most of us aren’t going to wear high-fashion apparel most of the time, if at all, we really wouldn’t want to be one of those anorexic dopeheads, or marry one. That fantasy comes at a cost, however, for it carries with it the idea that fashion is but the inert material that we use to drape our bodies and decorate an impersonal world. That’s true enough some of the time–and a good thing, too–but it can lead to highly misleading conclusions about what it means to be normal, reasonable, or human.

To get a sense of what is missing, look at this image:

fashion-week.png

Taken by Patrick Andrade, it’s only caption is “Fashion Week.” Another backstage shot, this one is anything but posed. The image is pulsating with social energy. Those in the picture are crowded together yet gesticulating and talking avidly. The brunette on the left seems to be exclaiming about someone off camera while the guy with his hands on her shoulders seems to be trying, not very well, to calm her down. The blond on the right talks not only to those around her but into her miked headset. This scene features the handlers who are frenetically managing the show and perhaps for that more like you and me. But it’s really not about this or that occupational role. Those in the scene crowd up against the viewer as if we were at a party. The background could be any office or apartment, and the off-kilter angle and lurid lighting reminds me of more than one great night out.

What makes the image even richer is that it still includes the conventional model, in this case the brunette with the bone structure, exotic hair, and glazed look in the background. Again, she could be what you’d expect at good party: is that a wig? Is she a he in drag? What’s he on? She does seem to be pretty stoned, and the gesture of her hand looks more like the involuntary tic of serious coke habit. We still get to dish on the models, but now they’re just one part of the social scene and well in the background.

The point is not who gets the fashion world right. This photo has captured something much deeper: how fashion is one expression of the ferocious energies unleashed by our being social animals.

Photographs by Hiroko Masuike, Erin Balano, Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times; Patrick Andrade, http://www.patrickandrade.com/


Digg!

 1 Comment

"Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered"

bewitch1.png

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.


Digg!

 0 Comments

The Post-Human Peasant

The following two images each merit their own post, but I also want to point out how they suggest a larger pattern. First, there is this shot from a morgue in Pakistan following the attack on Benazir Bhutto’s arrival in Karachi.

paki-feet-dead.png

I noticed the photograph because it was another instance of photographing only feet rather than the upper body or entire body. Readers of this blog may have noticed that “boots and hands” is one of our archival categories, as John and I are interested in why these truncated images appear frequently in mainstream photojournalism.

The feet featured here are bare, brown, worn (look at the back of the heel), and charred. They may have belonged to a middle class accountant, but it is difficult not to see them as peasant feet. The burns look like dirt, and feet have symbolized peasantry in the discourse of the body politic from antiquity to today.

Above all, these feet are dead. The awkward angle suggests a broken body, and the caption cues us to see the stiffness of rigor mortis. Most important, life itself seems to have been thrown away as the blood spilled on the floor forms a hopelessly large, ugly stain on the tile floor. It is as if the body had been drained prior to being preserved, and the feet do look like a specimen. More to the point, the photograph makes this stiff, dismembered, emptied, anonymous body into a specimen, as if it were something awaiting taxonomic classification before being filed away in a natural history museum.

It is easy to claim that the photographic gaze objectifies human being, and I usually avoid that critique. Surely it is not the camera but rather a bomb that turned this living person into a thing. Indeed, perhaps the photograph is doing something else: not objectifying but creating a visual allusion to the Holocaust, that is, to the images taken there of bodies stacked like cordwood. If so, that again points to those using weapons, not journalists using cameras.

Fair enough, but let’s look at the second photograph.

hands-in-bowl.jpg

This is a beautiful image. Edward Weston once remarked that color photography should be taken seriously when the photographer could see “colour as form” rather than a decorative addition to the black and white image. (There’s more to color than that, of course.) The artistic intensity of this image comes directly from the formal power of its dense richness and subtle variations of brown and bronze, all captured through the silver light that seems to have been painted by a Renaissance master. Likewise, the circle of the bowl is repeated in miniature by the circles in the solution and the half-circle in the lower right of the frame, and so the formal completeness of the circle is fused by color and light with the brachiated pattern of the arms and hands, which converge and then branch out again.

And yet, something is missing. The body, for example. Once again, we have a dismembered, anonymous peasant, in this case a man painting “earthen lamps at his workshop for the Hindu festival of Diwali.” The “painting” is crude, simply immersing objects in the paint, and the lamps are “earthen,” the sort of thing that comes from a workshop rather than a factory.  Even that humanizes, however, for the image itself gives us something beautiful but also alien, almost arachnidal as those hands spider across the surface, breathing paint and light.

What is most interesting to me is how, again, life is being separated from the body. In this case, the inanimate nature of bowl and paint seem to have already recast his hands and are moving up his arms. It’s as if his primitive workshop is the early form of some later fusion of human and nonhuman processes in a Blade Runner shanty town. The lamps are being changed by his labor, but he is being changed by the metallic solution coating his hands. As it is, the paint may kill him, but the image suggests a post-human worker who won’t have that problem, as life already will have been altered to become part of a process of production.

Each photograph is a distinctive portrait of a specific event, yet together they suggest a third thing: the idea that the peasant is disposable because not really alive. After all, there aren’t supposed to be peasants in a modern world. The good news is that other, more Romantic concerns are well off the table: You see no noble savage here. But you also see common people as either specimens of natural history, or as artistic premonitions of the post-human. In neither case are they alive—in history, in the present, or in the political imagination.

Photographs by Paule Bronstein/Getty Images and Parth Senya/Reuters. Weston’s remark is cited in Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment, pp. 190-191.


Digg!

 5 Comments

Seeing Torture

Saturday’s New York Times included these stories: First, the confirmation of Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general had hit a “rough patch” because Democrats were suggesting that they might oppose confirmation if the nominee “did not make clear that he opposed waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques that have been used against terrorism suspects.”  Second, a review of the movie “Saw IV” advised viewers to “Imagine every conceivable form of torture, then add the inconceivable.”   Third, a report on the photographs, and photographer, used by the Khmer Rouge to document the arrival of those who had been brought to the Toul Sleng prison to be tortured and killed.  You might see a pattern. . . .

Do you also see a sliding scale?  Say, from the torture we do, which the administration would like to think is a matter of semantics, to the torture we imagine for cheap thrills, which receives the stern rebuke of an R rating while remaining business as usual at the cineplex, to the torture done by others, which is the subject of documentary reportage.  Even so, the Times story on the prison photographs is a service.  The problem they, and we, face is how to confront torture without inadvertently contributing to its normalization.  News media should be faulted at times for not showing the harm done by those acting in our name, but we don’t want the news to become “Saw XXX” in real time.  It should be said, however, that surely it becomes too easy to minimize torture when both Gonzales and Mukasey have said they oppose torture while condoning its practice, and when audiences watch torture scenes on film and TV that they know involve no real pain.  That is why we need to see this:

cambodia-torture.png

This is one of the images at the Tuol Sleng Museum website.   It should be said that the Times did not include this photo in its story.  Perhaps they should be faulted for that.  I don’t think so, because what they did show was even more horrific:

cambodian-girl-nyt-2.png

She is another “unidentified prisoner.”  She also is a young girl who subsequently will have been tortured and killed.   I can’t imagine. . . .  And if anyone says that at least the US government doesn’t torture little girls, we already have slipped too far into the abyss.

Photographs from the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, http://www.tuolsleng.com/.

 4 Comments

Sight Gag:Doctor Madison Avenue

camel-ad.jpg

Our primary goal with this blog is to talk about the ways in which photojournalism contributes to a vital democratic public culture. Much of the time that means we are focusing on what purport to be more or less serious matters. But as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert often remind us, democracy needs irony, parody, and pure silliness as much as it needs serious contemplation. For our part, we will dedicate our Sunday posts to putting some of that silliness on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the carnivalesque. Sometimes we will post pictures we’ve taken, or that have been contributed by others, or that we just happen to stumble across as we navigate our very visual public culture. And we won’t just be limited to photography, as a robust democratic visual culture consists of much more. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

 2 Comments

The Anthropological Moment

There is a type of visual experience that we might dub The Anthropological Moment. Most people haven’t taken a class in cultural anthropology, but they have paged through National Geographic, watched this or that documentary on the cable channels, or looked at a newspaper photograph such as this one:

hand-face-cross.jpg

As with much popular anthropology (and some would add, much anthropology until recently), one effect this image is able to reinforce the cultural presuppositions of the viewer. The caption certainly goes well down that road: “Act of faith
. A man kisses a cross in the hand of a spiritual guide immersed in a small body of water that is believed to be miraculous, during the commemoration of the spiritual birth and physical death of the man known as El Nino Fidencio, in Espinazo, Mexico, Thursday. El Nino Fidencio or “The Child Fidencio,” the faith healer who lived in this dusty northern Mexican town in the 1930’s, is believed by the faithful to have worked miracles.”

You’d think the caption was written to cover the image with a blanket of words.  A description of what we can see–a man kissing a cross in another’s hand–carries a second description of what we can’t see–the cultural meaning of the ceremony. And it is a ceremony: we don’t see people walking, conversing, working, or doing any of the activities of everyday life. Instead, the man is immersed within ritual, which in turn carries fantastic beliefs, which are at once foreign (been to Espinzao lately?) and exotic (seen a faith healer?). The key verb is “believed”: the water is “believed to be miraculous,” and the faith healer is “believed by the faithful to have worked miracles.” Such things are not what they are believed to be, of course, and so the “act of faith” is safely cordoned off by being placed in a ritual present that refers to a remote place and time where, then as now, people were deluded to the extent that they were encultured. So it is that a modern, secular, rational worldview is constituted through implicit contrast with folk customs that are marked as primitive, religious, and irrational.

It is not difficult to see how the photograph can work this way. (For example see Reading National Geographic by Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins. And, by the way, don’t conclude that National Geographic today is the same magazine they describe; in has changed remarkably, quite likely in a good faith response to their critique.) The mud-caked face and chalky finger coloring allude to thousands of images of African and other traditional cultures, and it is only on close inspection that one can discern that the man is clothed.

I’d like to think that there is something else there to be seen. For all that the caption does to shape comprehension, the photograph is a compelling depiction of emotional intensity. The image is one of great compression: the cropping concentrates our vision on the intensely evocative human face which is intensified further by the symbolic power of the cross, the communicative power of hands at once open and clasped, and the intimacy of a kiss. Not only are two bodies being brought together, but they are enacting a powerful moment of public intimacy. The one hand is open and yet needing to be taken up; when taken it confers a blessing that is both accepted, as if in prayer, and returned as he lovingly cradles the hand holding the cross. The man’s closed eyes suggest a vital interior life, as if he were drinking deep from water that sustains the soul.

Just as the close cropping can enhance the idea that this is a ritual practice, it also can suggest something quite different: the individualism and human dignity of Renaissance portraiture. (Thus, I can link the anthropological moment to one variation on a photographic Renaissance.) It that is too much of a stretch, it’s enough for me to believe (note the verb) that photographs can create an important tension between maintaining the public sphere and extending it, not only to include others but to challenge those within a modern mentality. If it is easy to see “culture” as the mark of the Other, an eloquent image also can remind us that the modern world can become spiritually and emotionally impoverished.

Culture both limits and connects. That is equally true in a “dusty northern Mexican town” and in a newspaper being read in a North American metropolis.

Consider in this context the German word for moment: Augenblick, or literally a blink of the eye. Like the aperture of a camera in reverse, the eye closes and opens. A moment is a hinged thing, containing an instance of blindness and of sight. Photojournalism’s anthropological moment is an invitation to both see nothing but our own self-conception confirmed, or to see others anew.

Academic disclaimer: These remarks don’t begin to account for the influence of anthropology on the visual arts, not least modern painting (Picasso’s masks became iconographic, for example) and film (Nanook of the North, Mondo Cane, and periodic takes on the Third World). Nor am I talking about the development of the subdisciplines of visual anthropology and visual sociology. Both are now Wikipedia entries, and suffice it to say that each field involves extensive discussion of the epistemological, political, and moral problems of representation. By contrast, the anthropological moment is something that most people encounter outside of the context of scholarly argument. They see the image without safeguards against ideological manipulation, but still having an opportunity for wonder and identification.

Photograph by Alexandre Meneghini/Associated Press.


Digg!

 1 Comment