As the California wildfires burned this week, online papers put up dozens of photographs to document the who, what, where, and when of the disaster. (They said less about why; can you guess what might be a factor?) Stock images soon emerged: firefighters standing amidst the blaze or sagging from exhaustion; homeowners fighting back with garden hoses or staring in numbed disbelief at the extent of their loss; buildings exploding into flames and charred cars lying aslant in the streets like ad hoc tombstones. Then there were a few that somehow caught sight of something deeper. This one, for example:

If nothing else, this image highlights one cause of the blaze: the wind that can make embers from a burning brand stream wildly across the open country. But the image is more elemental than that. We almost could be looking at a physics experiment. What is in fact fire also appears as electrical currents arcing outwards, crackling and flowing with the same chaotic necessity found in the atom or in the sun. The transmutation of nature’s surging energies is suggested by both the light of the full moon above, reflected from the sun, and the seething intensity of the little fire pits burning into the earth.

I had moved on from this image, thinking it merely unique, until I saw this:

Again, the wind whips the fire forward. Again, along the course of the firestream we can see nature’s underlying structure. The fire races through the tree the same way it arcs through the air. The bright tracery of limbs and branches reveals how water, wind, and fire flow. Nature’s order is but a snapshot of energy’s relentless surge and spread.

And so we get to this:

The caption said, “A picture released by the European Space Agency shows fierce desert winds blowing smoke from wildfires Monday in Southern California.” Another imaging technology, another view, but one with the same capacity for insight. The harsh energy of the fires now is seen as smoke being carried along by winds capable of circling the earth. The scene is at once gentler and yet all the more conclusive: natural processes are ever present, enveloping, and flaunted only at our peril.

And there is something else in this photo that might be a sign of hope: the blue, blue water. Now the tableau is complete. Hot, arid land, as if bleached by the fires on its surface, produces the white ash of the smoke, which flows across the cool waters that soothe the planet. There is irony, too, as the land burns with all that water nearby, but the conclusion should not be that we need bigger helicopters for water bombing the canyons.

I see a beautiful, beautiful planet. How sad it would be look back someday as we stare in numbed disbelief at the extent of our loss.

Photographs by Brian Vander Brug/Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2007; Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2007; AFP/Getty Images, October 23, 2007.

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“Protecting the Environment.” That’s one of the rotating headlines used at the White House website to announce this photograph, taken at a photo-op last week to promote the education war environmental presidency at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel Maryland. The occasion was for the president to sign an executive order protecting striped bass and red drum fish populations, as well as to announce tax incentives designed to protect migratory birds like the screech owl seen here posing with the president.

It’s hard to know who seems more out of place and uncomfortable in the photograph, but a good bet is that it is our feathered friend. And probably with good cause. One only has to recall the president posing with children in the weeks running up to his veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to understand why — if children can be used unceremoniously as props against their own best interests, we can only imagine what is in store for lesser beings.

On the face of things, of course, the situation here appears to be quite different. After all, the president really does seem to be looking out for the interests of migratory birds, proposing a “conservation tax incentive” to reward private landowners who will provide much needed “stopover habitats” for the birds on their annual treks south and north. But look again, this time not at the picture, which presumes to show a compassionate conservative conservationist, but at the words used to situate the policy in the larger context of U.S. environmental policy.

According to the White House, the proposed tax credit is part of an effort to practice “cooperative conservation beyond the boundaries of our national parks and wildlife refuges.” The implication is clear: We already practice “cooperative conservationism” inside those boundaries. And so the question must be, what exactly does this normative practice look like? What will we see when we view our national parks and wildlife refuges in a future world animated by “cooperative conservativism”? Perhaps this picture from the Alaskan arctic gives us an idea of what the White House has in mind:

Administration efforts to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were (temporarily?) thwarted by the Senate in 2005. Still, it is hard not to be cynical as we imagine “cooperative conservationism” as a euphemism for “cooperating” with the private interests of the oil, natural gas, logging, and mining industries. But, of course, it is not really cynicism, because we know that this is exactly what is being promoted. And too, we know that however factually accurate, the picture of the owl and the president is a lie designed to misdirect our attention from a larger truth. We’ve seen it all before.

I have a bumper sticker in my office that reads “To Hell with the environment. Vote for George Bush.” It is from the late 1980s and refers to the father, but in retrospect it marks an attitude far more appropriate to the son. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Photo Credit: Eric Draper/White House, and Deepblade. And with thanks to Phaedra Pezzullo for providing background information and web links on current U.S. environmental policy. Be sure to see her books Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution and Environmental Justice (U. of Alabama, 2007) and Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement, co-edited with Ronald Sandler (MIT Press, 2007).

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The cover of the New York Times Magazine often is the image of uptown style and one place to look for the latest trend. That’s one reason the photograph on this Sunday’s cover was a bit harsh:

You are looking at an abandoned boat near Lake Mead Marina in Nevada. It looks like an odd place to put a marina, doesn’t it? The report, The Perfect Drought, states that Lake Mead has dropped to 49 percent of capacity, a decline consistent with the vanishing snowpack, shrinking rivers, and reduced aquifers throughout the American West. The persistent water loss is an effect of global warming that could have catastrophic consequences. If present trends are not stopped, one can easily imagine a reverse migration from that of the Okies and others who streamed west during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

That migration started with a drought and became known across the world due to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Equally important was the work of documentary photographers working for the Farm Security Administration. When looking at the Magazine cover, I recalled one of those photographs:

This image from South Dakota was taken by Arthur Rothstein in May 1936. It remains in circulation as one of the classic images of the era. The similarities are obvious: In each we see the cracked ground from which all moisture has evaporated, and only bones remaining where once there had been something vital. There are formal similarities as well: the back-to-front line of the boat and the line across the horns of the skull and its shadow are on the left to right diagonal, and they even start and end at about the same points on each side. Each is a solid structure that also is hollowed out, and the boat’s stripped engine and controls reproduce the machinery of the skull’s eye sockets and sinuses. Although there are tufts of green in the contemporary image, it seems clear in both that as far as large animal life is concerned, we are in a dead zone.

The grass sprouting in the lake bed is not the only difference. Instead of the remnant of an animal, the recent photo shows a dead machine. There is another one in the background, as if in an elephant graveyard. Note two other differences as well: the sublime horizon that is so much a part of the visual understanding of the West, and the rubber tire stuck upright. The wisps of cloud may even hint at rain, but the tire reminds us that it would fall on a society defined by waste, resource depletion, and global warming from excessive use of fossil fuels.

There is one more reason I wanted to compare the two photographs. Rothstein caught hell when it was discovered that the skull photograph was posed: He had dragged it about ten feet to get the contrast between a cracked alkali bed and the shadow of the skull. Republicans pilloried him for deception and tried to make the image into a representative case of New Deal excessiveness. See, the picture’s a fraud, and things can’t be so bad, so why get the government involved?

Of course, It wasn’t deceptive, and the country was deep into a terrible depression compounded in the Great Plains by drought. If you think that the New Deal was not needed, you might as well believe that Rothstein could have ended the Depression by moving the skull back to its original spot. And the same nonsense is going on today: while scientific research and photographic evidence document the rapid acceleration and inevitable peril of global warming, there is a steady stream of chatter on the right about how it’s all alarmism and fraud. If you believe that, I have a marina I’d like to sell you.

Photographs by Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures for the New York Times; Arthur Rothstein/Farm Security Administration. For a scholarly study of Rothstein’s photograph, see Cara A. Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the ‘Skull Controversy’,” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (Winter 2001): 133-149.

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[Note: Michael Shaw wrote about this photograph at BAGnewsNotes over the weekend. We too have been thinking about the image since it first appeared late last week and offer our allegorical reading of it as a complement to Michael’s analysis.]

Virtues are dispositions to action that guide moral and intellectual choices. In the political world they are attitudes that mark one’s character, and their performance becomes a public sign of trustworthiness or duplicity. Writing from a Christian perspective in the 4th Century CE, St. Augustine, one of the early Church Fathers and a source of just war theory, noted that “Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.” I was reminded of this passage when I saw this photograph of Condoleezza Rice this past week in the Washington Post. She is entering the Church of the Nativity through the “Door of Humility” while visiting Bethlehem in an effort to prepare the way for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The Door of Humility is the only entrance into the Church. It was created in Ottoman times as a defensive barrier designed to keep marauding barbarians and looters from entering the basilica on horseback. But there should be little doubt of its additional symbolic significance as it requires anyone—kings, noblemen, beggars, thieves—to perform their humility by bending over as they enter the church, thus forcing even the most powerful among the secular world to acknowledge their human frailties by crouching in humble obeisance to the sacred.

The ironies in the image are just too rich to ignore. Rice’s visit to the Church of the Nativity was an obvious photo-op designed to promote American diplomacy as the (easy) solution to the deeply rooted cultural and religious differences that divide this part of the world. It may well be that a political resolution is the only way to solve this problem, but the notion that the U.S. can be a neutral arbiter in such negotiations is not only arrogant, but surely seen by all involved as a modern day fairy tale ineptly performed by contemporary marauders and looters—and no less surely doomed to failure.

This contrast between the fantasy of US virtue and the behavior of the administration is underscored by the photograph. Rice, the face of the U.S. in the Middle East, a woman who describes herself as “deeply religious” and who, upon leaving the Church, linked herself directly to the mission of the “Prince of Peace,” nevertheless needs the help of two handlers to shuttle her into and through the “Door of Humility.” And look at how much effort Rice is putting into balancing herself as she stoops to enter the church. Clearly this is not a familiar attitude for the Secretary of State.

One can hardly find a more emblematic representation of the Bush administration. They have touted their Christian piety and commitment to freedom and world peace, only to express disdain for world opinion while unleashing the dogs of war. We should not be surprised that they are utterly incapable of persuasively performing anything like pious humility. It is little wonder that few in this part of the world treat the altruism of American claims to peace and freedom as little more than “mere appearance.”

Photo Credit: David Furst/AP

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Maybe I’ve been distracted or perhaps it’s been slim pickings on the photojournalism beat lately. Time to bottom feed, as with yesterday’s New York Times story about Rudy G. on the campaign trail. The front page report included this photo:

If nothing else, this is a variant on Kids “R” Props, with the American Worker as the stand-in. I can only hope that he picked Rudy’s pocket, but it’s not likely.

What interests me is how the photograph displays some of the basic roles of the American political campaign in miniature. I’m having to guess about the people in the scene, but I do know the characters they appear to be playing. First, of course, is The Candidate. Usually the center of the picture, here he shares it with The Voter (a.k.a. The Common Man), who would not be there otherwise. White shirt and tie on the left, t-shirt and ball cap on the right: can you guess which is which? Their happy hug does double duty as it symbolizes both Rudy’s wish that the electorate will cleave to him, and the collective myth that in America elites and masses work side-by-side to form one body politic.

Usually we only notice the major roles. I like this photo because it also shows the other players on the stage. The two suits on the right look like Handlers; I’d guess that the one on the far right is Campaign Staff and the guy muscling in is Security. The suit in the left rear probably is the Local Politico. The woman on the left and the tall guy in the blue shirt, who each are wearing the same strap for their ID tag, could be Local Staffers. The Press is left rear, and in the deep background we see the Public milling about, well out of the picture but craning to get a peek or a snapshot.

Rudy is posing, probably for another camera. He will meet a lot of people, shake a lot of hands, and smile and smile and smile. Then he’ll do it again and again and again. Most people have no idea how physically and psychologically demanding campaigns have become. Everything and everyone becomes a prop to maintain a 24/7 road show.

All politics is performative, but that doesn’t make every performance good politics. Rudy is looking good in this photo, but it also suggests that he is completely scripted. The chances that he will learn anything of value from his good buddy in the ball cap are about nil. About the same odds that a grey-haired worker would benefit from Rudy’s economic policies. The truth of this Democratic Moment is that Rudy might as well be kissing a baby.

Photograph by Erik S. Lesser for the New York Times.

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