March 2008 – Page 3 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Photographers Showcase: Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot

March 7, 2008
Lucaites
no caption needed photographer's showcase
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This week’s showcase photographer is Ashley Gilbertson. He will need no introduction for many NCN readers. Gilbertson is an internationally recognized photojournalist whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, and the NYT and many other national and international publication outlets as well. Deeply concerned with the problem of social conflict he has photographed everything from Kosovar refugees to heroin addicts in Melbourne to the gun trade in Papua to the accelerated disappearance and destruction of the Uyghur culture to Aids patients in China. In 2004 he won the prestigious Robert Capa Award for his work in Fallujah and was also named the National Photographer of the Year.

Gilbertson is perhaps best known for his recent work on the American experience in Iraq and his 2007 book of photographs and reflections titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War. We are very pleased to showcase a small bit of that work here at NCN.

Click on the photograph below for a brief Quicktime movie slide show of Ashley Gilberson’s work from Iraq.

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Welcome to Rubble World

One of the important features of public culture today is that globalization has become a social fact. For example, economic historians can document that the world has had a global economy for centuries, but now people know that they live in a global economy, and many people know this, and they know it not only in New York and London but also in Peoria and Bangladesh. At the same time, it would be a mistake to conclude that this shared social knowledge carries with it a common map of the world. To the contrary, another interesting facet of the 21st century is the emergence of multiple geographies. One still acquires a geography of nation states, but amidst that there are diasporic communities, media capitols, free trade zones, black markets, clashing civilizations, greater Kurdistan, the New Caliphate, and perhaps someday the fabled Northwest Passage.

This melange of borders, flows, and visions is not yet a social fact, but it is not merely academic speculation either. One sign that the maps are changing is that the terms First World/Second World/Third World are becoming increasingly outdated, although not because hierarchies are being leveled. Let me suggest that something else is being leveled, and offer one suggestion for a more up to date map. What matters today for a significant number of people is whether you live in Rubble World:

This photograph is from Baghdad. But it also could have been in Beirut, like this one:

Or, most recently, Gaza:

These are without a doubt among the leaders in the field, but let’s not forget Grozny and Sarejevo, among others. And then there are the periodic terrorist bombings in Kashmir, New Delhi, Sri Lanki, or wherever, not to mention Ground Zero in New York. Nor should we limit ourselves to the devastation of war, as the combination of poverty and political failure allows quakes, typhoons, and plain old shoddy construction due to corruption to add to the pile. Type “rubble” into Google Image and you can begin your guided tour of Rubble World.

If you take that tour you might notice that many of the images look very similar to the three here. Rubble World doesn’t start from scratch: there has to be something to wreck first. Like war itself, it is parasitic. The curious thing is that it seems as if everything still is pretty much as before–say, as if only the facade of the building has been blown off, or the wallboards and mattresses rearranged. The blast exposes building infrastructure or leaves people gathered together on the ground as if they were in a house, but you might think that everything important remains in place. That is a lie, of course. The buildings have to be condemned, and rebuilding can’t even begin until the all the work and expense of clearing the site has been completed. We are looking at skeletons, not at disruption; not a setback but ruin.

And so we get to the people–those still alive, that is. Rubble World is not uninhabited. As in many of its images, the people here are reduced to being spectators to their own desolation. There are many such scenes, whether of a few people in the urban ravine or of a small gathering of neighbors trying out their new status as squatters on their own property. Each might be a sign of hope. The urban space can be rebuilt only if citizens survey the damage and begin to talk about how to to organize. The local community can only survive if people remain attentive to one another amidst danger. Even so, these people have all been idled. The loss is not limited to an apartment building or a house, but spreads like a blast pattern across the entire economy. Rubble World includes some stories of renewal, but the total losses of productivity, prosperity, and hope itself are staggering. By documenting architectural wreakage, these images reveal how civil society is being laid bare, torn apart, damaged, and dispersed. As that happens, the rubble is sure to spread.

Photographs by Associated Press; Getty Images; Abid Katib/Getty Images.

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Who's Afraid of Pink and Blue?

In the late 1940s and throughout the next decade Life magazine would regularly put private individuals and and their nuclear families on display with their accumulated property: consumer goods. One of many visual convention for doing this was to have the family surrounded by their prized possessions, collected en masse and organized in a careful and orderly fashion, a visual metaphor perhaps for their ordered and conformist lives (and much more as well).

I was reminded of this visual trope when I came across a NYT slide show reporting on “The Pink and Blue Project,” a photographic installation by JeongMee Yoon that will soon be on display in Chelsea at Manhattan’s Jenkins Johnson Gallery.

One is struck immediately by the sheer mass of consumer goods accumulated “by” five year old children – consumers in training – but it is the stereotypical and gendered color schemes which appear to convert the images into something bordering on a spectacle. The title for the slide show announces a “Wonderful World of Color” – a phrase that no doubt resonates for those of us old enough to remember watching “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” on Sunday evenings in the late 1950s and early 1960s – and it would seem to be the coordinated concentration of bright color that animates the author of the accompanying article, Bonnie Yochelson, to note that the project delights “the eye” while “coercing a smile.” Color, it would seem, trumps gender segregation and “compulsive shopping.” And while the smile she remarks upon is “coerced,” it is nevertheless an approving smile.

What Yochelson misses is the way in which the “wonderful world of color” diverts our attention from an even more pronounced (and arguably troubling) element of the spectacle: not simply the sheer mass of similarly colored consumer goods, or even the ways in which color simultaneously marks and masks a narrow and conventional set of gender stereotypes, but the way in which everything within the scene is carefully ordered and organized, literally schematized as if by a structural anthropologist. Like the convention from Life that it seems to mimic, the project thus becomes something of a cipher for the underlying assumptions of bourgeois life, and not least the commitment to a rigid sense of order and regimentation disciplined by cultural demands for the accumulation and conspicuous display of wealth and possession. And in this context it should be noted that one has to look to pick the children out amidst the exhibit of consumer goods, a sure sign that like everything else in the hyper-ordered scene, they too are possessions; and like the glittering commercial trinkets that “coerce” our smile, they are put on public display by and for the benefit of cultural and economic interests that exceed their easy control.

In some ways we have not come far from Life’s America of the 1950s and 60s.

Photo Credit: JeeongMee More

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Miss Landmine Angola 2008

I kid you not.

I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to the intersections of aesthetics and politics, but I was struck dumb by the Miss Landmine project.

Others will react with much more clarity. At the least, the issues regarding gender and commodification are, well, explosive. They even have a T-shirt bearing the logo:

Still a princess, and perhaps Hallmark will want to get into the act. Hell, there already may be sections for Landmine Survivors in the card shops in Angola. Or around Army bases in the US. And who am I to tell them how to get past their trauma?

After reading the manifesto, turning on the theme song (yes, the theme song), and looking at the contestants, I started to get the point. But I’d still be interested in what others think about this weird, Angolan-Norwegian attempt to confront the continuing toll of war in our time.

And if you are interested, voting remains open until April 3.

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Ben Bernanke: Report from the Castle

I doubt that many photography class assignments include problems like this: “Imagine that you are going to photograph the chairman of the Federal Reserve; what angle should you take?” The New York Times had an interesting answer:

There are obvious reasons for choosing such an unusual approach to the chairman. Now that photo editors can choose from among 10,000 slides per day, photographers will resort to anything out of the ordinary to catch the editor’s eye. Nor was the the House Financial Services Committee hearing likely to provide much visual interest if left to its own droning routine. But neither of these considerations suggest that the photograph should have been in full color front page above the fold. So what is going on?

I can’t account for the intentions of those involved in production, but I can speculate about how the photograph can influence understanding of the hearing. Two things are notable: how little we see of chairman Ben Bernanke, and what we else see instead. Although just a few feet (so to speak) away from the camera, the chairman appears distant, somehow in his own space that is not directly accessible to us. The dark lines of table edge and pant leg form a V that, when framed by the top of the photograph, form a narrow aperture. It is as if we are looking through a keyhole, which is how K sees the great and mysterious Klamm in Franz Kafka’s The Castle.

Behind Klamm/Bernanke is a bare, blue-white space, as if he is on a promontory and there is no higher authority over him. He must be far from those sitting across from him as well: The caption says that he “signaled his readiness to further reduce interest rates.” We talk, but he signals, for surely his intentions are too great or mysterious to be communicated in full. As he sits alone at the heavy wood table, he is wholly indifferent to those looking up at him. He doesn’t look down on us as if to dominate us, no, that would be too much to hope for, because then we would know, or at least have some assurance, that he was aware of us and might want to, if not actually talk with us, at least contemplate the distance between us. And that distance is very great indeed.

My apologies to Franz Kafka, but the analogy still holds when we turn to the rest of the picture. K yearned for an audience with Klamm but instead had to contend with far less auspicious bureaucrats. Those standing between K and Klamm were of course the surest testament to the power of the one and the hopelessness of the other. And so we see the feet of unnamed minions from the Federal Reserve. These are the men in the gray flannel suits. Uniformity, austerity, discipline, seriousness–bureaucratic character is being performed, and woe to those who would attempt to step over these officials. And how could we, who are literally at the place where one can lick their shoes, how could we do anything but look up and beg, like a dog for a bone? Like a dog.

Photograph by Doug Mills for the New York Times. Shameless plug: If interested a further discussion of the bureaucratic style, readers might want to look at chapter five of my Political Style: The Artistry of Power.

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Sight Gag: Presidential Booty Call

Mr. President Goes to Africa

Photo Credit: Charles Ommanney/Getty and Newsweek

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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