The Big Picture has put together an awesome display of images that show how Beijing is preparing to secure the Olympics against terrorism while using the latest technology.  

But, of course, with terrorists we know that the problem is you can’t always recognize them … and that is no small problem in China these days, as this daytime photograph of one of Beijing’s main avenues from the Guardian reveals:

Photo Credits:  Xinhua/Fan Changguo/AP Photo; Reinhard Krause/Reuters

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I used to think that claims of a “slow” summer news cycle were something of a myth. But the past several weeks have had me rethinking that position as I search for interesting and engaging news stories and photographs. Apparently the NYT is having a similar problem. Consider, for example, this photograph, which was featured on the front page of the NYT website for a short period of time yesterday afternoon:

What could the topic be? If you look close enough you might be able to tell that it is Invesco Field, the home of the Denver Broncos. But professional football is still several months away, and why would the NYT be featuring the Broncos in any event? Perhaps it has something to do with the high cost of sport tickets making it difficult for average Americans to attend professional sporting events. Or maybe it concerns the environmental impact of releasing thousands of balloons into the crisp, clean atmosphere of Mile High, Colorado.

All of these guesses would be wrong. Instead the article that this photograph anchors concerns the story—“rumored for days”—that the Democratic National Committee has announced that Senator Barrack Obama will accept his party’s nomination for the presidency at Invesco Field rather than at the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver. The reason, apparently, is that Invesco Field is a bigger “stage” that can host 75,000 people, whereas the Pepsi Center can only host 21,000. In short, moving the coronation of the party’s leader enables a much larger public spectacle—something, say, on the order of the Super Bowl … only one where “regular” Americans get to attend.

One might think that such a move would be welcomed by the networks who are always looking for ways to dramatize news events by making them larger than life, but in this case the network executives seem to be upset because they will have to “reconfigure plans long in the making,” changing venues and working outside. After all, and notwithstanding all of the sports metaphors used to describe the presidential campaigns, this isn’t really the Super Bowl; and besides, how can we expect the major news networks to adapt to the constraints of reporting on an event taking place in an NFL arena … it would be unheard of. (Maybe they should bring in ESPN to cover the acceptance speech.)

I really have to admit that my first thought upon reading this article was that someone from the Onion had hacked the NYT website and inserted one of their brilliant political parodies. The photograph, then, would be a sardonic comment on the political ritual of convention spectacles as little more than bread and circuses, or perhaps the journalistic impulse to anchor stories with photographs that only bear the most general and passing relevance to the facts being reported. But this is the NYT, right? And surely the “paper of record” has safeguards against such security breaches, right? And yet, truth to tell, after reading the last line of the NYT story I’m not so sure: “For its part, the Republican National Convention Committee released a statement dismissing the venue change as favoring style over substance. ‘Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats are more focused on stagecraft and theatrics than providing real solutions to the challenges facing our nation,’ the statement said.” And in case you don’t get the joke, click here.

Photo Credits: Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

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Digital technologies have changed both color and “black and white” photography, not least by leveling the hierarchy between the two modes. Color now can be both the norm for popular photography and a rich resource for photographic depiction; likewise, black and white has been demoted from being the artistic standard but can mark a subject for thoughtful reflection. So it is that the New York Times has been featuring ordinary life in Afghanistan by showing it without color.

This image is the titular photo from the latest in a series of photo essays. The lack of color defines the scene comprehensively. That absence is the dominant feature of these images, rather than the sharp definition and subtle contrasts that once were the raison d’etre of black and white photography. This is not black and white so much as it is gray, and with that, “dark, dismal, gloomy,” and “dull dreary or monotonous,” or “indeterminate and intermediate in character,” as my dictionary defines the term. It is easy to conclude that life in Afghanistan, a desert country ruined by decades of war, oppression, and more war, has become unrelentingly bleak.

This is not the place to suggest that there are pockets of bright colored happiness even in Afghanistan. Indeed, color is no defense against the misery of a poor woman reduced to begging for her child. One might ask, however, if we are brought closer to the truth by the obvious manipulation of the gray image shown above. Frankly, I don’t think the scene needs that kind of help. (See, for example, the photograph here.) That said, I have to admit that this image has a metaphoric resonance that might be missed if we could see what color was there. The term “shades of gray” comes strongly to mind: as if the child were about to become a “shade,” that is, a ghost. As if the mother were already reduced to the status of a shadow, a wraith-like being that exists only for the task of keeping the child alive, or accompanying him to the underworld. The scene could be from an upper circle of hell.

And that’s the problem. As we look down into their bleak underworld, they are close enough to be seen but still in another world forever without color and life. There seems to be no chance that we could reach down and pull them back among the living. And so, we, like the “neutral hue” of the image itself, are left in a space without values, with little basis for doing anything other than looking and reflecting on human misery.

The suggestion of a spirit world is evident in another photograph taken in gray recently. This image portrays a religious student praying in Islamabad:

I first thought that this photo was a color shot of gray clothing, and it may be, but it has the look of digital gray–that is, of the image after the color has been removed. Here the gray again is being used to frame the object for reflection. We are to dwell on how she is completely covered. Head, face, even her hands–this is not the typical burqa; indeed, the student may be male for all I know. What strikes me is how the hands are touching the hooded eyes. She cannot see and yet is creating some inner circuit of the senses. The gray tone now suggests a similar coordination of her apparel and so of the entire ritual act: she is completely shrouded from the outside world in order to turn toward her spiritual center. Again, the gray shroud makes her somewhat otherworldly, a spiritual medium rather than someone who might communicate with us. And again, she seems closed off from this world by the photograph itself.

Photojournalism need not be a trigger for immediate action. It is enough sometimes to take us out of our familiar sense of of the world. Gray imagery is one way to do that, not least when we are likely to see distant war zones through the rose colored glasses of commercial media and consumerism. More important, the absence of color in the photograph can not only set the tone for thinking about a subject but also reveal our own deficiencies. If there is a lack of either compassion or charity in response to the first photograph, or a lack of empathy in response to the second, the problem may not lie in the image. It may be because those capacities are not there as they should be in the viewer. There may be more gray in the world than we realize.

Photographs by Tyler Hicks/New York Times and Farooq Naeem/AFP-Getty Images.

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Red Cross Volunteer, 1919

 

Flag Day was officially established in 1914.

 

The Fourth of July became a legal holiday in 1941. Ariel Skelley/Corbis

 

Rocky wins the Cold War in 1985.

 

Robert Gates testifies at his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee on December 5, 2006. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

 

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.’ Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

 

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The charge that Senator Barack Obama is “unpatriotic” is so preposterous that it is hard to imagine any sane person not driven by partisan extremism actually taking it seriously.  And so I found it somewhat disheartening that the Senator himself would succumb to such charges to the extent of posing before a bevy of U.S. flags while wearing a red, white, and blue tie (against the backdrop of a white shirt and dark blue suit) as well as a flag pin, or for that matter that the NYT would feature a photograph of it on it’s website this past weekend.

The picture is altogether conventional, of course, and we have seen such images of Senator John McCain (and many other politicians from points all along the political spectrum) in comparable poses all too frequently.  Such photographs show up with clocklike regularity to the point of being barely noticeable except for their absence.  But one might have hoped for something a little less ordinary, if not less excessive (and a lot less ersatz), from the candidate for change.  Indeed, and it pains me to write it, but there is a sense in which the photograph and the mode of patriotism it performs profanes Obama’s otherwise eloquent and compelling plea to locate American patriotism in something a bit more substantial than a “political sword or a political shield.”

This is not to say that one should not honor the flag (nor that politicians should not be sensitive to their public image), but it is to question quite seriously the point of excess at which public displays of flag-waving patriotism by our leaders turn Old Glory into a nationalistic fetish that trivializes both the flag’s political significance and the value of a reflexive patriotism. The symptom of such excess is captured rather eloquently in this photograph of four U.S. flags as they are inverted by their reflection in a puddle on Wall Street:

The building to which the flags are attached is the New York Stock Exchange.  The image thus captures the rich ironies of the identification of the United States with the street often characterized as the “economic capital of the world” as each seems to have stumbled from grace and economic power on the global stage in recent times. It is literally a world turned upside down as the flags are now displayed both with the stripes above the shield and backwards; no longer furling on high, something to which we might look up to, they seem to reach upward to the ground (or is it to consciousness?) as if buried deep below (or should we say repressed?), virtually begging for attention; indeed, rather than something to be revered, the flag—or all four of them to be exact—are barely noticeable at all by passersby as pedestrian feet seem not even to break stride in their presence.

During a week dedicated to celebrating the nation’s birth it should give us pause to reflect on the effects of an ersatz patriotism.

Photo Credits:  Jae C. Hong/AP; Justin Lane/EPA

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