John and I will be traveling from the 18th-26th.
We hope to maintain our schedule of six or seven posts a week, but, well, don’t hold your breath. Between jet lag, conferencing, and perhaps spotty wireless coverage, some posts may stay up longer than usual.
The Public Editor at the Sunday New York Times had a lengthy column yesterday, and for good reason: he had a lot of explaining to do. The Times, along with many others, was taken in by photographer Joe O’Donnell’s fraudulent claim that he had taken the iconic photo of John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s caisson:
The problem was that the Times obituary for Mr. O’Donnell had featured the iconic image as his signature photo. As the paper soon learned–and reported–the photo had been taken by Stan Stearns, not O’Donnell. In fact, a second photo shown also had been taken by someone else, and soon a string of deceptions came to light.
Those who love to hate the Times will enjoy their evident mortification, but I’m not among that crowd. They were working at the demanding pace at which they nonetheless produce detailed and reliable stories day after day after day. More important, they were taken in by someone who apparently spent years crafting elaborate deceptions. It’s easy to be fooled by someone who already has fooled many of the people you trust.
The several stories provide an interesting glimpse into both the work of a con artist and the way stories are put together at the Times. They also reveal a thing or two about visual culture today. For one, the fascination with iconic images continues. In an earlier post I asked “Is there an icon for everything?” Well, it seems there has to be for noteworthy photographers. As quoted by the Public Editor, the night photo editor at the Times set aside his reservations about O’Donnell’s claim about the photo because “That the Times was writing the obituary made it ‘a done deal as far as I was concerned,’ he said. ‘I assumed that Joe O’Donnell, famous photographer, had already been verified, and my job was to find iconic images to illustrate his career.'” There you have it: famous photographers, like the great events they cover, must each have their iconic shots. Unfortunately, O’Donnell had taken other images that also deserved to be seen. Instead of yet another Kodak Moment with dead Kennedys, the Times missed an opportunity to show its readers something of the Cold War. Icons are important, but they should not be used to paper over the rest of the visual archive.
A second point allows me to grind another ax. One way or another many people in academia, the press, and more generally have picked up Susan Sontag’s critique of photography. Fortunately, nodding along to Sontag doesn’t inhibit their actual viewing practices–let’s hear it for hypocrisy–but they nonetheless parrot her arguments when talking about photography. Thus, we are re-exposed to her anxiety about the power of the visual image to counterfeit reality, to be manipulated, to deceive, and generally to corrupt our ability to know the world and be ethical. Images can do all of that, of course, but no medium or art is innocent of these charges. And that’s what I love about this episode with John-John. O’Donnell deceived a lot of people about the photograph–but not with the photograph. No, to fabricate reality he used another technology, one that also has a very good track record for deception: words.
Photograph by Stan Stearns/Corbis.
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.
Photo Credit: © Michael Kientiz, all rights reserved. Post Card of Life Size Papier-Mache Replica of Statue of Liberty from the Eyes Up on Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin. For other versions see here.
Americans like to think that the world revolves around the U.S. For vivid demonstration of a different perspective, look at this photo, which is dated September 11, 2007:
The caption said, “German herders guide a decorated cow and other cattle Tuesday on the move from high alpine summer pastures to lower altitudes in the mountains near Bad Hindelang, in southern Germany.”
Even without the 9/11 date, this picture strikes me as uncanny. The bucolic scene could be from centuries ago, except for the state-of-the-art hiking boots, perfectly machined clothing, and farmers who obviously have never wanted for food, good health care, and all the other benefits of late-modern European civilization. The cow’s ornate decoration is equally incongruous, like something found in a tourist boutique Christmas Store rather than on modern livestock who are blessed (as these probably are) if they can stay out of a wretched feedlot. Above all, these are German herders, and the idea that they are part of the labor force of a modern, high-tech nation just doesn’t mesh with the incredibly relaxed, ambulatory slowness of the scene. They obviously are walking at a cow’s pace–for those of you who don’t know, that is really s l o w–and they are doing so easily, comfortably. While I was getting edgy waiting impatiently for a traffic light to turn green, these guys were ambling through a verdant alpine valley. And what little work they were doing by walking downhill was being made into ritualized play.
Whether acting out an invented tradition or authentic examples of the German volk, the incongruity is extended further by the boy in the foreground. While mountain people should be hardy, wild, and reclusive, he looks so open and gentle. Though likely to grow up like the physically impressive men behind him, he appears vulnerable, still formed in the soft clay of childhood. He is presented directly to the viewer as if we ought to take him in, and so the photograph suggests that this pastoral scene might become part of our world. The herders are walking into our space, perhaps to bring their green harmony with them.
That sense of peace seems a long way from 9/11 and the urban canyons of New York or Chicago, but there are sharper contrasts beyond that. This photograph appeared in the New York Times on September 13:
The story featured a sense of incongruity: “In Southern Sudan, Peace Alters a Way of Life.” Peace can do that, particularly when contrasted with rape, murder, starvation, forced migration, and other forms of terror that are never mentioned by the Times reporter. This picture isn’t about war, however, but about third world deprivation. The point of the story is that the Dinka way of life is becoming harder to sustain as young people are lured to the city. This boy is on the cusp: he herds the cattle, yet wears modern clothes. His indeterminate age symbolizes his indeterminate position: the caption informs us that his parents don’t know his age but guess he is about 11 or 12, i.e., about to enter the transition to adulthood. There are no adults in the picture, and the Western reader will conclude from the parent’s ignorance that they are either primitive or negligent, neither of which bodes well for a child caught between two worlds.
The photograph pushes this point. We are looking up at the boy as if he were in a position of power. But it is the wrong kind of power: he is a boy doing adult labor. This mismatch is reinforced by seeing his clothes come up short, by his sullen expression, and by the contrast with the open vista behind him. He is a capable herder but yoked to the cattle. His herding stick suggests the yoke and is matched by another stick protruding upwards to create an artificial border within the picture. The boy is already hardened by child labor in the desert and confined by the boundaries of his primitive society. (The benefits of living in this traditional society are no part of the story or the photograph.) Though revealing some of the incongruities of contemporary Dinka life, this photograph is not uncanny but rather one that makes reality seem hardened, depressing, and perhaps hopeless.
Two photographs, two boys herding cattle, two very different worlds on the same planet.
Photographs by Christof Stache/Associated Press, Evelyn Hockstein/New York Times.
This image from the Washington Post Day in Photos lies right across the line between soft news and hard news.
On the one hand, it’s a visual joke. The incongruity of a woman from a traditional society carrying a TV rather than water or the wash on her head at once upends and reconfirms Western assumptions about the Arab world. She’s not completely not modern, and modern civilization is what she desires. See: the woman values that TV so much that she will carry it instead of more traditional necessities. Imagine: she’s all wrapped up and yet gets to see the world through the wonder of modern technology. On the other hand, the woman is engaged in the difficult task of carrying her household possessions through a war zone while probably leaving much behind. The caption adds that “about 2,000 Iraqis leave their homes every day due to violence and economic uncertainty resulting from the four-year conflict.”
Although cast as a representative of displaced Iraqis, I doubt the woman will elicit much sympathy. Indeed, the image calls the bluff of the serious captioning: the photo is striking but not for the reason given. As noted several times before in this blog, the burqa troubles the Western gaze whenever it is is placed in modern context. (Within the traditional setting, it confirms ideological assumptions instead of challenging modern norms of transparency.) By walking with the TV balanced on her head, the burqa-clad woman becomes a cyborg, both human and machine, organic and artificial, traditional and modern. She now has two heads, one veiled, turbaned, and a platform for the other, which is a blank screen capable of channeling the vast information flows of the modern media. Despite the visual joke, the latent fascination of the image is that she has become monstrous. Not terrifying, but more akin to a freak show. The fact that the photo is half soft news and half hard news reinforces this sense of an unnatural though not too dangerous mixture.
Of course, it’s not news at all. We know all about Al-Jazeera, and scholars, not least Martin Marty’s Fundamentalism Project, have documented that fundamentalists of all religions have no problem rejecting modernity’s values while becoming cutting-edge producers and avid consumers of modern media. It turns out that modern liberals are the ones who have a hard time managing that contradiction. Which is why the photograph above, which could be seen in a very ordinary way, instead implies that the two civilizations can never be blended but must instead be joined only precariously, amidst violence.
Photograph by Alaa al-Marjani/Associated Press.
We could post about the war in Vietnam–oops, I mean Iraq–every day, but since continuing the quagmire depends on a loss of perspective, we should turn to other things as well. Like feet. Next week John and I will be giving a paper at a photography conference, where we will discuss why photojournalism features hands and feet when one could show more of the individual pictured. Like this:
This example may be somewhat more artistic than others we could show, and it has more of a pretext as it was part of a New York Times “Trendspotting” story on the custom at Reed College of going barefoot just about anywhere and any time. Even so, it’s not a typical news photo, which suggests that something else is going on.
Most of the images in the Trendspotting photo essay were mildly informative and less evocative. They showed students standing in line, standing in groups, and so forth. In each case we saw young people much as we often see them, and they happened to be without shoes. This much more distinctive photograph removes the student body (sorry, I couldn’t resist), but for the sharp focus on a pair of bare feet resting on a desk between books (front) and computer (middle). In the back of the photo we see the blurred top of a student’s head. He is wearing earphones, and the effect of the image comes in part from the contrast between the student’s heavily mediated experience–books, computer, digital music, even the food is processed–and the unmediated, elemental experience of resting his bare feet in the air. Whereas the other images showed more of the local culture through stock scenes such as standing in the lunch line, this one joins the special experience of higher education at an elite school with a seemingly universal symbol of youth.
Most people have neither occasion nor inclination to go around barefoot, or to study as much as is the norm at Reed. The photo does double duty at making the story significant: by foregrounding books, computer, and the obviously habitual posture of the student reading, the seeming frivolity of going barefoot–rather than working for a living–acquires a serious cast. The student isn’t working, but he is in training. Likewise, Reed’s foot fad stands in for the peculiar subculture of good higher education and makes it appealing through an iconography that channels the barefoot boy of American myth. Huckleberry Finn now goes to school, and leisure time is spent not on the river but drifting through the liberal arts.
Reed’s reputation includes both intensive study and liberal politics. Note the student’s longish hair. And so this post is about Iraq after all. Those feet are the feet of privilege and are not likely to wear combat boots. But there are places where privilege is used to learn, to discipline judgment, and prepare for both innovation and good stewardship. The press now provides many images of boots on the ground, and while honoring the sacrifice of working class youth it becomes too easy to forget their betrayal by those who benefited from the privileges of wealth without bothering to learn from history, deliberate carefully, and act with regard for others. We need boots on the ground, but we also need good education and good government. And not just for the few.
Photograph by Molly Gingras <gingrasm@reed.edu>.
The lemonade stand. It is as American as apple pie, a time-honored tradition deeply rooted in the American dream and its Horatio Alger ethos. All it takes is an old soapbox or small table; some lemons, sugar, and ice; a few paper cups; a hand scrawled sign and, of course, some good old American initiative. For many children it is their first encounter with the spirit of capitalism, and hey, even if there isn’t much monetary profit at .10¢ or even .25¢ a cup, there is the social capital gained by cooperating with friends and neighbors, and learning how to encounter the marketplace, both of which may be far more important civic lessons.
A safe and open marketplace is essential to a vital democratic public culture. What better way, one might then imagine, to demonstrate the success of our military surge in Iraq than to show a safe marketplace operating in the Al-Anbar Province, one of the most volatile and dangerous places in all of Iraq. And more, what better way to show that safety than with “a young Iraqi boy selling lemonade in the town of Ramadi …”
Prior to the surge, Al-Anbar Province had been the “hub of [the] Sunni insurgency.” But apparently not anymore, as over 6,000 U.S. troops walk the streets, along with a growing Iraqi police force and tribes of “provincial volunteers.” That the police force is beleaguered and the volunteers bear a striking resemblance to vigilante groups doesn’t seem to matter, for here in Ramadi, seventy miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, safety and commerce seem to rule as the marketplace is open for commerce and, as the caption tells us, a young boy sells lemonade. At least according to the caption, one might imagine themselves on a street corner in middle America.
Upon a second glance, however, it is not clear that all is well. The eye is drawn initially to the boy who we might expect to see smiling for the camera or making a sales pitch to a potential customer. But there is none of that. The tentative and concerned look on his face and the gestural attitude of his body suggest that he is far from at ease with the situation. And with good reason, for the soldier and his weapon pose an ominous presence as they simultaneously frame and obscure the scene—perhaps a metaphor for U.S. military presence in Iraq writ large. Indeed, one has to wonder how truly safe things can be if something on the order of international martial law is needed to insure the everyday routines of domestic commercial life.
The contrast between the two images points in some measure to the problem of the project of exporting liberal democracy. A liberal democratic public culture relies upon the sense of trust that is generated by the kind of social capital we see being invested in the photograph of the two young girls at the top (or in any of the hundreds of pictures that you will encounter if you google “lemonade stand”). Such images are tinged with nostalgia and too easily romanticize our bourgeois and middle class sensibilities, and we need to be very careful about being too proud of ourselves in this regard, but the sense of trust and cooperation that they depict is necessary to such a politics. It is not the only thing, of course—the opportunity for free and open dissent come to mind as no less important—but it is essential. And it is hardly the cultural or civic attitude that is generated by a massive and sustained foreign military presence or roving tribes of provincial volunteers. To accent the point, one need only visualize the scene of the two girls at the top—innocent, pure, and white—with the soldier and his weapon framing and overshadowing the scene. It is virtually unimaginable.
Photo Credits: Central Ohio Center For Education, Richard Mills/The Times
US 9/11 deaths. US military deaths. Iraqi civilian deaths.
And Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. . . .
Photographs by Spencer Platt/Getty, Denis Poroy/AP, James Nachtwey/National Geographic, Khalid Mohammed/AP, Kim Komenich/Chronicle.
Update: For educational resources, Hannah Edwards offers this site.
Ritualistic photographs of the first day of school operate in a number of different interpretive registers, some of which we discussed last week, but none is more pronounced in the public media than their function as visual tropes of a “fresh start.” With new clothes and new teachers everyone enters the schoolhouse door with a clean slate to make of the new year what they will—or so the myth of our merit-based, public educational system suggests. And the kids are rarely alone in such images, as adults are typically present to nurture and protect, as well as to legitimize the succession of authority as it passes from parents to teachers who serve both in loco parentis and as surrogates of the state :
The power of a trope is that it relies upon conventional understandings of meaning, but it is also a figuration subject to ironic manipulations that can be turned against convention to create what Kenneth Burke called “perspectives by incongruity.” When used as such, a trope positions and encourages us to see things from a new or different view designed to induce an “attitude” or disposition to action. A good example of such an ironic turning of the visual trope of the first day of school as a “fresh start” appeared in the paper version of the NYT on 9/5/07 in a full-page photo essay titled “With Start of a New Year, Excitement and Jitters” (p. C14). The photo essay included six photographs from around New York City and the nation, five of which easily met the conventions of the trope of “fresh starts,” as students displayed the “excitement and jitters” of a new school year in pairs and small groups, while parents calmed nerves and teachers greeted and protected their charges. The lone exception was this photograph:
Twice again as large as any other image in the photo essay, it appeared in the very middle of the page cutting across the fold. The caption directly beneath the image read, “A Fresh Start in New Orleans. A kindergartner at his school in the Lower Ninth Ward which reopened last month after Hurricane Katrina flooded it in 2005.” The image has appeared elsewhere on the web, and in bright and vivid color, but here it is in black and white (as were the other images in the photo essay). Instead of a blue sky and billowing white clouds that encourage the sunny optimism of a new day, we get the muted tones of a grey scale that flatten the image and mitigate the difference between the “in here” of the schoolyard and the “out there” of the rest of the 9th Ward. And what we find “out there” is quite literally a ghost town, replete with boarded up houses and unkempt lawns and shrubbery growing out of control. Notice too, that there are no people outside of the chain link fence. It is a public space without a palpable public. Indeed, it bears a striking similarity in this regard to many images we have seen recently of the barren streets of Iraq.
But there is more. For in every other picture in the photo essay the frame is filled with a distinct and manifest sociality: schoolmates are engaged with one another in groups and in pairs, while parents and teachers comfort and greet. And all are facing the camera, thus inviting some measure of communion with the viewer. The Bronx, Boise, San Antonio, it doesn’t matter, for these are common scenes from a national social imaginary that are acted out anew every fall in local communities throughout the land. But in the 9th Ward the conventions of sociality are either absent or subverted. The child is alone. Eerily so given that this is the first day of school. There are no reunions with friends or schoolmates, and parents and teachers are nowhere to be seen. Moreover, the student’s back is towards the camera, and thus there is no opportunity for eye contact or interaction between the child and the viewer. His only companion is his shadow, the spectral illusion of otherness that moves only as he does, and thus accentuates his sheer social isolation. Most noticeably, there is no adult presence that says “we care” or “you are safe here.” One might easily imagine it as a recipe for a social pathology.
And so the visual trope of the first day of school as a “fresh start” functions here ironically as an allegory for the fate of New Orleans. Just as the student, who should be with friends and teachers, is alone and isolated, so too is the 9th Ward in the larger scheme of things; and just as the student is left to his own designs to make his way without help or protection, so too, once again, is this New Orleans parish. “Sometimes,” a sidebar caption to the right of the photograph announces, the promise of a fresh start is “illusory.” And here we see the stark contrast between a national imaginary where fresh starts and renewal are taken for granted assumptions deeply rooted in the American dream, and a place where the pledge is a false promise … if not in fact a traumatic nightmare.
Photo Credit: James Estrin/New York Times, Mario Tama/Getty Images
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.
Photo Credit: John Lucaites
