March 2008

The Lone Red Shoe

It is hard to look at the images of the “riots” in Tibet and the Chinese provinces and not be reminded of our own history of human rights repressions, and especially the violence that erupted across the South in the early 1960s. Just as then, those animated by a commitment to non-violent protest and resistance are being accused of causing the disturbance. And just as then, the visual evidence seems to give the lie to the claims by those defending the repressive regime—or at least it did until the Chinese government began to censor internet sites and to expel foreign journalists. And perhaps with good reason …

The Chinese government maintains that the police and military have used “restraint,” refusing to “open fire” on the crowds. That might be true enough (though there are conflicting—albeit unconfirmed—reports of nearly 30 Tibetan Monks being shot by the police in Aba, Sichuan), but the photograph above from Nepal and others like it would seem to give new meaning to the word “restraint,” at least as it is used by governments in the area. The lone individual laying in the middle of the street seems to be helpless, and even if he had previously been “riotous,” here he certainly isn’t much of a threat to anyone or anything, least of all a squad of riot troops who could easily detain and arrest him if that was their goal. And yet the soldier about to beat him with a baton has his legs spread and weight back to bring the full force of his weapon to bear upon the face and head of his target, a victim who can only feebly attempt to ward off the blow.

What makes the photograph all the more difficult to look at—and yet also somehow hard to look away from—is the red shoe left sitting in the middle of the street. We can only assume that whoever lost the shoe literally ran out of it in a frantic effort to escape the oncoming mayhem. But more than that, it is only a flimsy canvas shoe, a stylized covering for the foot that offers the merest of protection. Notice how it sits in stark contrast to the heavy leather boots worn by the approaching troops. And thus, the photographer has revealed the sense in which the supposed physical threat posed by the protestors is no threat at all. What we have here, then, is an image not of restraint but of brutality. The difference between the shoe and the boot marks the fundamental inhumanity that all too easily results when established regimes set out to suppress ethnic and sectarian differences. We’ve seen the inhumanity before, and not just in foreign lands.

But there is more, for the image of the lone shoe also invites comparison with another photograph taken during the Burmese government’s brutal suppression of protests challenging its violation of human rights. That crackdown occurred in Myanmar this past September:

The obvious difference is that here we have hundreds of shoes and sandals, not just one, and so the magnitude of the situation is somewhat more pronounced. But now, the street, virtually empty with the exception of a single individual lurking in the margin, is being guarded by troops as if democracy will arise spontaneously from the shoes and sandals left lying around. And it might, for that is the mythic promise of the democratic movements that the Chinese and Burmese governments fear. My fear is that it will take more than simple faith for sandals and flimsy shoes, however numerous, to challenge jackboots in any effective way. This is not to say that it cannot happen, but it will surely take more than lone individuals to forge the battle, whether lurking in the shadows or standing up against tanks in a public thoroughfare.

Photo Credits: Euan Deenholm/Bloomberg News; Mandalay Gazette-AFP/Ghetty Images

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The Political Mask

Everybody knows that politicians are two-faced. They say one thing and mean another, or promise something to one audience and promise the opposite to someone else. They smile and smile and smile and we know that nobody can feel that happy. We know that they are supposed to put up a good front but have to be someone else inside, and so we don’t trust them. And then we go and vote according to how we like them or how we judge their “character.”

So it is that the politician’s face deserves some attention. And gets it. The photograph below is one of several that have featured the candidates up close and personal. Too close, perhaps:

You are looking at Barack Obama through a television camera viewfinder. Surely this is one example of the lengths to which photojournalists will go to create a distinctive image that might be picked out of the thousands sent to photo editors each day. This is distinctive and more. Some might say it’s a hatchet job–cutting Obama’s head away to make him look grotesque. Could be, but it also captures some of the elements of the presidential campaign as it is almost completely embedded in and defined by the media.

We could caption the photo “Moon Man.” The visual allusion is at once to the man in the moon and to an astronaut (think of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey). In either case he is far away, distant, almost alien. He also appears to be behind heavy glass, as if on the other side of an air lock. In fact he looks trapped in there, encased in the media apparatus of the campaign, ready for launch but also in danger of running out of oxygen.

The more you look, the worse it gets. The dark framing on the bushy brows, direct gaze, and exposed teeth might appear menacing to some, but look closer. I see someone assuming the look not of a predator, but of someone’s prey. The cross-hairs are just about dead center while he seems immobilized, caught in the hunter’s scope, stunned by the glare of a sudden flash, almost imploring us to help him. All we can do is stare and in staring note the moles, the pores, the creased skin–all evidence that here, in this twice mediated, highly distorted image, here we are actually seeing a real face.

But not the only one:

Again, it may have been taken for its novelty value, but it succeeds as a work of art. I won’t say this is Everywoman, but she is one very tired woman. She also is someone whose long experience with fatigue is matched by deep reserves of strength. Most of the American public have not a clue about how grueling the presidential campaign is, but you get a glimpse of it here.

I’m not backing Hillary in the campaign for the nomination, but I’m touched by this photograph. Perhaps it’s the contrast with the conventional shots of candidates smiling (much less the manic, bug-eyed shots the press likes to serve up about Hillary). Likewise, the closed eyes offer her to the viewer, as opposed to the demand placed by eye contact and the campaign generally. That’s only part of it, however. As with Obama’s image above, the dark framing isolates the face and all it stands for. But where Obama looks trapped, she has been exposed. We see her make-up and a tracery of wrinkles in spite of that. This, too, is an image of vulnerability. And look closer: it could be a death mask.

It certainly is a mask–and this is the photographer’s achievement. We are shown the candidate in an unguarded moment, one in which she is doing nothing to please anyone, and, sure enough, she is wearing a mask: the make-up, the disciplined concentration, the facial mask itself. And it is for precisely that reason that we can be sure we are seeing a real person.

Photographs by Damon Winter/New York Times; Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.

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St. Patrick's Day 2008

Neither John nor I give a damn about St. Patrick’s Day, but it did seem odd that it would be moved to protect Holy Monday from contamination. Is nothing sacred?

So it is that we offer this retrospective:

In Chicago, they dye the river green. They do so by adding orange. Question: what + orange = green? Second question: Do we really want to know?

As you can see, he has a special hat for the parade.

OK, the Church may have a point after all.

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SIght Gag: Redistricting

Credit: Cardcow.com

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 Jon 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 such moments on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the ironic and/or 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. Sometimes the images will be pure silliness, but sometimes they will point to ironies, poignant and otherwise. 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.

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Traces of a Vanishing World

In his magnificent book The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer includes a meditation on how different photographers’ styles are revealed by looking at how they have photographed hats. Dyer is a master at zeroing in on the distinctive genius of the individual artist, but attention to the distinctive object can lead down other interesting paths as well. John and I have been intrigued by how frequently isolated shots of hands or feet occur in the daily papers and slide shows. The feet can be bare but usually display footwear, and often the footware alone are featured. Like this:

Although actually taken in February (in North Carolina), this photo presents a typical end of summer shot. The winter light and muted colors imply a transition from summer to autumn and so from leisure to work. The lone sandal probably was lost as someone was playing in the waves and then washed up later. Someone else probably stuck it in the sand to help it be found again.I’d like to think that the motive was not so pragmatic. Perhaps someone saw the sandal and propped it up as a votive offering, a small memorial to the end of the season. Even better if it were taken off and stuck there, dooming its partner to the trash bin but becoming the more fitting gesture for saying goodbye. By leaving this fragment behind, you get to take a piece of the place with you. Leave a bit of your heart here, and you can have an inner beach when back in the daily grind. These thoughts make the photograph itself seem less contrived as well: what hints at being posed and a bit too neatly elegiac can be thought of instead as a small and beautiful act of homage.

Yesterday John commented on a pile of shoes in Baghdad that looked like they were from a lost and found bin. As he noted, the shoes were the remains of people who had disappeared due to a bombing. What little was present signified how much had been lost. This theme of loss doesn’t haunt every photograph of empty shoes, but it can mark a vanishing summer–and the disappearance of much more as well.

You are looking at a photograph of the Barrios de Luna reservoir in Northern Spain. The reservoir, which is dry due to a severe drought, is aptly named for it does look like a moonscape. As above, the image positions the viewer between earth and sky, nature and culture, and, once you’ve read the caption, between water and land, now ironically so. Just as the shoe is missing its owner, the lake bed is missing is reason for being. Again, the lighting and color tone suggest that the good times were in the past. And they were.I can’t help but see the shoe as a track, like a fossilized footprint. It’s as if we are looking back to a prehistoric riverbed, at the traces of a lost species, homo sapiens sapiens, who were not so wise after all. Someone lost a shoe, probably when playing in the water long ago. Now it becomes an accidental memorial, the trace of a vanishing world.

Photographs by Josh Kruzich/National Geographic Daily Dozen; Eloy Alonso/Reuters.

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"Lost and Found" in a Baghdad Marketplace

March 13, 2008
Lucaites
boots and hands no caption needed visualizing war
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Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad early this week, the deadliest single day for Americans troops since the “surge” this past summer. But, of course, it would be hard to know this by reading the national newspapers. On the NYT website it barely received notice at all, cast in tiny type and posted below the bar on the home page, subordinated to the carnival of reports on the sexual peccadilloes of “Client #9,” as well as stories on efforts by the Federal Reserve to jump start the economy, and the travails of college and university soccer, track, and softball coaches who simply don’t have the resources dedicated to “revenue earning” sports like basketball and football. The story of the bombing faired only slightly better at the WP, where it was front and center on the home page, but again set in small type and subordinated to a much larger headline announcing “Coupon Cutters Help Military,” a human interest story about senior citizens at an American Legion Post who do “their part in the war on terror” by clipping coupons and sending them to military families overseas.

As for pictures of the bombings, well, nada. Nothing. A visual void. It is always hard to know how to judge the absence of evidence, visual or otherwise, but in this case it would seem that the lack of pictures is evidence of the very presence of absence; or put differently, we have become so inured to the continuing presence of the war, it has become such an ordinary, everyday event, that reports such as this don’t even rise to the level of awareness. “Eight soldiers died in Baghdad yesterday, and in basketball the Celtics beat the Bulls …”

One month ago today we reported on what was then considered to be the “worst attack in months.” It was a suicide bombing in a Baghdad marketplace, not unlike the event that took place this week. No U.S. troops were killed in this earlier bombing, though 65 Iraqis died and twice that many were injured. But there were pictures of the after-effects of the attack, and perhaps we can learn something by looking at one of those photographs published at the time in a NYT slide show.

It is an altogether curious image. The caption reads “Iraqi soldiers and civilians examining a pile of shoes left in Ghazil market.” That might at first seem obvious, but if you bother to trace the line of sight of just about everyone in the photograph you quickly realize that no one is actually looking at the pile; indeed, they seem to be looking almost everywhere but at the shoes. It is almost as if the shoes are hidden in plain sight—rather like news reports of the more recent bombings. And there are other oddities as well. For one, the shoes themselves are massed together as if a “lost and found” collection. The passive construction of the caption—“a pile of shoes left in Ghail market”—is telling in this regard, suggesting the image of articles of clothing either misplaced or forgotten by irresponsible school children, not the remains of the dead and injured that have been purposefully collected. For another, the scene is thinly populated, certainly not what we would expect to see in a vibrant marketplace; but note too that the people that are there are spaced in a pattern that invites a sense of complete and utter disconnection. Ironically, then, we have a public marketplace in which people are present, but any sense of the public communion essential to a productive and robust civil society is altogether absent.

In one register, then, the photograph is a visual study of the trope of presence and absence. The shoes of the people who should be populating the public space are present, but the people themselves are absent; the state (“Iraqi soldiers”) and private individuals (note the more general characterization “civilians” and not the more politically affected “citizens” ) are minimally present, but the civil society that might connect them as part of a common culture in communion with one another is absent. But more than this, the representations of presence and absence function as an allegory for the effects of war and collective violence on civil society more generally, framing the photograph itself as something of a metaphoric “lost and found box”: the visual display of a scene in which a thoroughly fragmented polity searches in vain for what for what it can never quite seem to find (or what it desperately needs), even as it implicitly harbors the hope that what is lost is safely waiting to be found hidden away somewhere.

The oft told myth, of course, is that wars unite communities in common cause—and in some ways they surely do that—but such is also a romantic notion that sublimates the larger sense in which wars tear civil society asunder, making it unrecognizable even when all of the elements seem to be in place. This is one of war’s most profound tragedies and it is often hard to see.

Photo Credit: Eros Hoagland/NYT

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The Olympics of the Street

The photographs below are interchangeable with thousands of others, each of which captures something usually overlooked. I am referring to the athleticism required to get through a street demonstration that is being attacked by “police” or other military force. The image below gives one example.

This guy is having to outrun tear gas through an obstacle course of barbed wire. He is hurling himself forward, full out, while staying focused on each step as he also looks ahead to shift direction yet again. He could be a halfback running through a drill at the NFL combine. But he’s too small for that, of course, and too old and not completely in control of his body. No surprise, as he is a lawyer in Pakistan. Although demonstrating much greater physical ability than he needs in his day job, he is strictly amateur.But the tear gas run is an international event, and so we can see younger and more agile competitors:

This is am image Whitman could love: we see a young man beautifully active. He looks like an athlete–well muscled, balanced, gracefully coordinated–and he moves through the obstacles and the gas with speed and agility while still able to direct others. In the US, he could play quarterback; he’s from Panama, however, and so settles for the Olympics of the street.

But which event to enter? Instead of the tear gas run, many are drawn to the rock throw.

Again, this photograph shows a fine athlete in top form. You can guess that he will do well in each part of the event: the run from the crowd into the dangerous open space before the troops, the throw itself, and the run to safety from the counter-attacking swarm. This particular competitor is in Germany and exhibits the superb skill we expect of the German team. At the same time, some doubt whether he can make the adjustment from contending with the relatively civil German police to the much rougher conditions of the Middle East and elsewhere.

And so we get to the injuries. As with any Olympics, success depends on both training and luck. You probably have seen photos of Olympic runners falling or crashing into hurdles and grimacing in shock and pain. It’s the same–well, worse, actually–in the street.

The caption for this photo from the West Bank states that the man on the ground was “kicked in a confrontation with Israeli soldiers.” From the look of it, the caption should have read “kicked in the groin.” It’s tough out there.

In some parts of the world, athletes gravitate to organized sports programs. From there, the best are then trained, challenged, and rewarded toward ever greater refinement of their ability. Their lives may become dominated by one thing while years of preparation can end in a career-ending injury, but there are worse problems to have. In other parts of the world, however, that talent–like so much talent–is largely undevloped. Walled into systems of domination, trapped in cycles of violence, and denied jobs, a civil society, and any prospect of a better future, they are left with the rag-tag activities of life in the street. In spite of that we can see moments of physical grace. That can be admired for a moment, and then we should recognize how much is being wasted.

Photographs by Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press; Arnulfo Franco/Associated Press; Michael Probst/Associated Press; Abbas Momani/Agence France-Presse, Getty Images.

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Second Look: Silda Spitzer, The Political Wife

I was among those who were shocked and thoroughly dismayed by the report that Eliot Spitzer had been busted for frequenting a prostitution service. I also should admit that dismay can turn to laughter very quickly when you start following the story in the blogosphere, not least at the Wonkette. If you go there, you can peruse some of the advertisements from the Guv’s high end whore house, otherwise known as The Emperor’s Club. (Did someone forget to tell Eliot that he’s a governor, not an emperor?) Spitzer deserves to be the the butt of every single joke that is made in the next year, but that’s not why I’m writing today.

As usual, some bystanders will have been hurt as well. If Hillary Clinton is one of them, you can understand why she might be really, really tired of this kind of news. Tired of, but not as sad as Silda Spitzer.

Photojournalism provides a record of the art, rituals, and performances of political theater. This photo is one of many that we can classify as portraits of the political wife. I saw the image for the first time yesterday afternoon and it stayed with me through the rest of the day and into the evening. Whenever I thought of some aspect of the scandal, I soon would be back to her standing there, taking the hit. Eyes down, hands behind her back, face and neck exposed to the camera’s glare, she is a picture of vulnerability. The contrast with him is all too telling: his stance remains combative, and although caught in the glare of publicity he’s still maneuvering, still fending off his opponents while protected by a lecturn that bears the great seal like a shield.

Although close beside him, she appears to be a study in isolation. She could be a statue, and one that surely would be able to represent not only loss and grief but also duty and loyalty. That probably should be admired for what it is; I also look forward to the day when the ritual changes and the emperor has to stand there alone. But that is not this day. She has chosen to stand beside him, however far away she may wish to be. Her response is not to fight back but to reflect, perhaps to think about how she got here, or what she still can hold on to, or just to remember better days. Perhaps she might be remembering a day like this:

She’s even wearing the same pearls.

Photographs by Patrick Andrade/New York Times; Jim McKnight/Associated Press.

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The Difference Between Water and Waterboarding

What we have here is an apparently innocuous photograph of Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saluting President Bush as he leaves the Pentagon on Friday, March 7, 2008. It is raining–hence the umbrella–although it doesn’t seem to be coming down all that hard. But of course even the smallest amount of mist or precipitation could stain the President’s tailored suit or effect its drape; at the least it might make it somewhat uncomfortable to wear. And who needs that. The photograph was used by the WP the following day, Saturday March 8th, in conjunction with a report that President Bush had just vetoed an intelligence authorization bill that would have banned the use of “waterboarding” as a CIA interrogation technique.

The President continues to insist that waterboarding is not an act of torture—after all, Americans don’t use torture!—though it is hard to imagine how having water forced into one’s mouth, nose and sinus cavity so as to create the sensation of drowning would be anything less. And in point of fact, we have brought U.S. soldiers who have used the practice to justice before military tribunals in both the Phillipines in 1901 and in Vietnam in 1968. In 1947 Japanese officers who employed the technique against American soldiers in World War II were found guilty of the use of torture by the Tokyo War Crimes Trials and sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor.

The photograph is marked by irony, of course, but there is more. For what this photograph puts on display is the image of an administration that is habitually shielded from the world that exists outside the halls of power that here surround and protect it, as well as from the effects that its actions have in that world. Torture may “work” in the fictional universe of TV shows like 24, or in the sadistic imaginations of neoconservative chicken hawks, but elsewhere its record of usage is a consistent and abysmal failure in every regard except as a profound violation of human rights.

But don’t expect the President to understand that. For him, unwanted water is an inconvenience. For the American people it is has become an element of shame.

NO CAPTION NEEDED

PHOTOJOURNALISM, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

The Lone Red Shoe

The Political Mask

St. Patrick's Day 2008

SIght Gag: Redistricting

Traces of a Vanishing World

"Lost and Found" in a Baghdad Marketplace

The Olympics of the Street

Second Look: Silda Spitzer, The Political Wife

The Difference Between Water and Waterboarding

Sight Gag: "The Wasteland"