Question: is an icon one or many? On the one hand, an icon is supposed to be unique, representing the singular achievement, the ne plus ultra of a field of human endeavor. Michael Jordan is an icon, not Scottie Pippen or many other top-tier players. Babe Ruth, not Hank Aaron or Sammy Steroid. Einstein and Picasso, not Bohr and Braque. The Mona Lisa, not . . . Well, that gets to the other hand, which is that the icon is iconic because it is widely distributed, something that may have become distinctive through constant reproduction regardless of individual merit. Thus, the icon appears to be both singular and the latest iteration of a series, both unique and the characteristic instance of a type. Nobody understands this better than Madonna:

Here she is posing with actress Holly Weston at a publicity shoot for their movie “Filth and Wisdom.” The combination of title and double image invites snide remarks, but that’s taking the cheap bait. I like the photo because of how it captures Madonna’s genius for making herself heir to all the blondes produced by the Hollywood dream factory. We have realized since Warhol’s Marilyn series that the blonde du jour is performing a type, but Madonna makes that a virtue rather than a dirty little secret.

This photograph captures the visual iteration beautifully. Madonna is in focus and set forward at the head of a series. The younger woman is somewhat fuzzy, as if still in the process of formation. They seem to be perfectly sequenced in space and time, the one rightly receiving the spotlight that eventually will be on her successor. Above all, each is one of a series that can extend indefinitely–and will, as all that is required is processes of reproduction that obviously are well in place. Image, publicity, bone structure are all a sure thing. The “mechanical reproduction” of the camera replicates the culture machine and genetic mechanism alike.

According to Walter Benjamin, mechanical reproduction destroyed the “aura” of the individual work of art as well as its relationship to tradition. Absent this anchoring in “ritual,” artistic production becomes politicized. For all his brilliance, Benjamin’s observations can get in the way of understanding how culture depends on constant iteration of visual forms. To see this, one might shift from fine art to vernacular practices and pagan rituals, like this one:

You are looking at a photo from this year’s annual convention of the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas. If there is a rival organization of Fake Bearded Santas, I haven’t heard of it. This group meets every year in Southern California, which no doubt it just the place for letting your hair down after the Christmas rush.

I get a kick out of this image for several reasons. Their easy association with ritual is mirrored in their behavior for the camera, where they all lean together and smile on cue for the group snapshot. The photographer may have asked for a big “Ho Ho,” but they probably smile easily. We also can smile at the few outliers in the group: the Lord of the Rings afficiando in the front right, and the wary ball cap guy in the left rear. The real comic effect, however, comes from the photo being a study in duplication. Santa Claus should be a single, iconic figure, and he is–but only because there are Santa Clones in every department store in the country.

And so we get to the dog show. To get some distance from Benjamin’s anxiety about the mass media, we might consider how it is that humans are continually reproducing images of visual iteration. Like this:

These are Old English Sheepdogs lined up for judging at the Westminster Dog Show. I won’t doubt that each of these dogs are individuals, but the photograph highlights their species identity and regimented styling. The most distinctive Old English Sheepdog will be the perfect iteration of the type, which stands behind that dog in a long series issuing from the twined processes of nature and culture.

Despite the attempt by these photographs to put a good face and good vibe on cloning, I’ll bet that the anxiety about mechanical reproduction remains. Celebrity culture, vernacular culture, subculture, all are exercises in the reproduction of the same. Cloning isn’t something that emerges unbidden from modern technology, but rather one more instantiation of something humans do all the time. If you don’t like it, there still is reason to blame the camera, which is both an apparatus of reproduction and a means for naturalizing cloning. But I wouldn’t, for these images and others offer more than apparatus and ideology. They are how we see ourselves as we are, seriatim.

Photographs by Markus Schreiber/Associated Press, Karen Tapia Andersen/Los Angeles Times, and Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images.

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There is a good deal of confusion about Presidents Day. Some see it as a celebration of the lives of two of our greatest presidents, while others see it as a commercial holiday, a break in the winter season and the occasion for a sale–a-bration. We think it is an interesting occasion because it features a president for whom we have no photographs, though no dearth of images, and the first president to recognize the publicity value of the photograph, sitting for over 100 portraits and being photographed in many different contexts including, most prominently, at the war front. (The first president actually photographed was John Quincey Adams, but it was many years after he was in office.  The first president actually photographed while in office was James K. Polk.) The question is, what’s the difference?

Gilbert Stuart, 1795

 

Harper’s Weekly, Feb. 22, 1732

 

Emanuel Leutze, 1851

 

Currier and Ives, 1860

 

Nicholas H. Shephard, Daguerotype, 1846

 

Mathew Brady, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 1860

 

Alexander Gardner, Lincoln with General McClellan at Antietam, October 3, 1862

 

Alexander Gardner, Silver Gelatin Print, February 1865

 

Alexander Gardner, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, 1865

Images Courtesy of Library of Congress, Philadelphia Print Shop, Ltd., Abraham Lincoln Art Gallery

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The last week’s online slide shows have been full of energetic images from the primary campaigns, striking images from Mardi Gras and the Brazilian Carnival, heartrending images of violence from around the world, and all too familiar images of ordinary people digging out from the latest snowstorm. None of these touched me quite like this one:

You are looking at a procession of mourners from a village in Kashmir. They are carrying the body of a man killed by an avalanche. Heavy snows have killed a number of villagers and driven hundreds from their homes. These are Muslim mourners living in that portion of Kashmir controlled by India, but the political geography seems irrelevant. The snow is no respecter of prejudices, while the thick white cover seems to nullify all boundaries.

The snow also is slowly burying the houses while making walking very difficult. The mourners are strung along the one narrow path the winds through the barren scene. Wrapped up against the cold, they seem to share a deep separateness as if each were lost in thought. The one bulge in the line comes in the middle, where you can see that several mourners are carrying the dark coffin. The yellow buildings in the background promise the warmth and comforts of village life, but death sets the tone for this winter day.

The poignancy of the image may come also from its resemblance to another winter’s scene:

This is a copy of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting, “Hunters in the Snow.” Completed in 1565, this masterpiece also features a somber procession of villagers within a drear winter landscape. The contrast between the vitality of the village and those in the procession is stronger than in the photograph, but tired hunters and their slow-moving dogs evoke a shared fatality where all species have to struggle against the inertia of nature to survive. They are lucky: even if the hunt was in vain, the are returning to a village that is doing well. Their little band will be warmed and fed as it is absorbed back into the community to rest and revive for another day.

There are other differences as well, but the two images share a vision of how the human community exists precariously within nature’s cold, impersonal, relentless mortality. The continuity of painting and photograph suggests something else as well. If the photo seems to look backwards, as if the Kashmiri villagers were still walking through a premodern tableau, the painting reminds us that the passage of time offers no escape from the human condition. In fact, one can image the photograph as a scene from a century to come, when humans regularly walk slowly through barren landscapes to bury their dead.

But that is getting ahead of the story. It’s been a hard winter for many people this year, and Christians are in the season of Lent, a dark, cold time defined by failure and loss. I find it fitting that a profoundly Lenten image is one of Muslim mourners, and strangely reassuring that an image of winter is one not of vexing inconvenience but rather of stillness and community.

Photograph by Farooq Khan/European Pressphoto Agency.

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Note: Click here to read eitherThe Idyossey or its companion piece,The Bushiad.

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.

Credit: Victor LittleBear

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