2008 – Page 25 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Eventide in Iraq

No one is moving, nothing is happening, and the scene is unexceptional, yet I find this photograph strangely poignant.

There is something serene here, yet not with the promise of safety. Although the men are sitting quietly, almost as if posed for portraits, they remain soldiers in full combat gear with weapons drawn. But somehow they are, for a moment, seemingly at peace, just sitting and content with that. They may be waiting for something to do, yet the coming of evening bathes the scene in quietude. They could be at Vespers.

The emotional resonance may be very simple: men sit calmly in the evening, self-contained, not asking for anything as the dark moves in. But other soldiers are hovering above them, and those sitting are in front of a house that belongs to others. So the emotional tone becomes complicated. The scene contains rural domesticity and military force, modern electrical lines and ancient designs in the brickwork, warm colors and deep isolation. The men seem at peace, but they each sit alone within a very small place that exists only for a moment, only until the war starts up again.

The photo accompanied a New York Times report on 9 U.S. deaths from a bomb that went off while the soldiers were searching a house. The photo’s caption said, “American soldiers briefly occupied a house in Diyala Province on Wednesday as American forces hunted for insurgents and bombs.” That’s the same province where the 9 were killed. These troops might be staying “briefly,” but not so little that they haven’t posted guards and a machine gun on the roof. This clearly is dangerous duty: they could be attacked or they could be sitting above a bomb about to be detonated. In that context, just to sit quietly might be a moment of grace.

Photograph by Jehad Nga/New York Times.

0 Comments

Sight Gag: Who's Next?

January 13, 2008
Lucaites
sight gags
1 Comment

And while it isn’t actually a part of the visual culture, the poster recalls this ditty from Tom Leher originally sung in the 1960s but apparently somewhat timeless.

Photo Credit: Global Security.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 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.

1 Comment

Post-Cold War Trash Talk

This could be a group of good ole boys out for an afternoon on the lake, drinking beer and “buzzing” those who come from out of town for the summer with their big yachts, fancy cars and lake front condos. But as it turns out it is one of five similar open-air speed boats commanded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in the Strait of Hormuz, taking what President Bush characterized as “provocative” action against the U.S.S. Hopper. The Hopper is an 8,000 ton guided-missile destroyer equipped with M240 machine guns that fire 10 armor-piercing projectiles per minute, and on this particular day it was accompanied by two other guided-missile ships, including the U.S.S. Port Royal, a 9,000 ton cruiser that is capable of firing Tomahawk Missiles. If you ask me it wouldn’t be much of a fight, even if, as the Pentagon reports, the speed boats can carry machine guns. But, of course, if you are the Captain of a U.S. vessel in the Persian Gulf you probably can’t be too careful. And so the question is, how did this event become an “incident”? And what do the pictures that have been used to report the incident tell us about it?

The photograph, released by the U.S. Navy and featured by nearly all of the national news outlets tells us almost nothing. It could be a snapshot taken anywhere in the world, and so its value as visual evidence is virtually nil. Hence, the U.S. Navy also released a four minute, 20- second videotape taken from the deck of the Hopper which purports to contextualize the image above and thus corroborate the claim of provocative action. That videotape, however, is shot at long distance and shows very little. And what it does show is jumpy, grainy, and tonally muted:

Indeed, much of the imagery in the videotape recalls the photographs we were shown of the three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats attacking the U.S.S. Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 and used as positive visual evidence to grant President Johnson the authority to deploy military forces in Vietnam. We now know that if there was a provocation in the Gulf of Tonkin that it was almost assuredly made by the Maddox, and so we have to be not only somewhat skeptical about the truth value of such photographs, but also about the ways in which they are used as visual arguments.

The Bush administration’s usage of the photographs from the Gulf of Hormuz to suggest that Iran is being provocative relies upon two optics or visual logics, one drawing upon a Cold War consciousness and the other drawing upon the logic of the “suicide bomber.” The Cold War optic recalls the ability of the modern, technologically sophisticated, military to observe the world from afar as a means of identifying and assessing threats to national security. Think here of Adlai Stevenson challenging Ambassador Zorin of the USSR with satellite photographs of missile silos in Cuba in 1962. Or more recently, of course, we have Colin Powell using similar photographic evidence to prove the existence of WMDs in Iraq. One case turned out to be true, the other false, but what is important is the underlying assumption of the positive truth content of such visual evidence which presumes to show what otherwise could not be seen. Of course, this is nonsense. Nevertheless, recent videotape from the Gulf of Hormuz operates in precisely this optic. Shot at great distance, we never actually see individuals, let alone incontrovertibly threatening behavior, but that actually works in the favor of the underlying optic of the Cold War logic, for in a sense it is what cannot ordinarily be seen that is the threat, and so the speed boats function as a cipher for a presumably hidden, greater menace.

In this instance, the threat that can’t be seen is animated by the more contemporary optic of the “suicide bomber.” Suicide bombers operate in the light of day, not the cloak of darkness (as was the myth of the Cold War spy). They can be anyone, and indeed, their very visibility makes them effectively invisible (hidden in plain sight), and thus all the more a threat. Add to this the discursive connection between “suicide bombers” and “Middle Eastern Islamic fanatics” and the picture of the speed boats takes on a somewhat different resonance. All the more so in the wake of the terrorist attack on the U.S.S. Cole perpetrated by Al-Qaeda, a self-professed terrorist organization, in 2000. And to accentuate the point the U.S. Navy added an audio recording to its version of the videotape that has someone threatening to bomb the Hopper. We are now told that the Navy doesn’t know where that voice came from and, indeed, cannot confirm that it came from the speedboats. And more recent videotape released by the Iranian government suggests that it is unlikely that it came from the speedboats. But, again, the point is that the photographs are framed within the optic of the suicide bomber that encourages the viewer to see the ordinary and everyday as threats.

The final question then, has to be, did the speedboats perpetrate a threatening and provocative action that would warrant treating this as an international incident – for that is clearly what the Bush administration seems to be trying to make out of it? The Iranian videotape seems to suggest that the speedboats were doing no more than seeking to ascertain the identity of the U.S. ships and to determine their intention. One might imagine the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard doing something similar in the waters between Cuba and Miami. The U.S. Navy reports that the ships had been questioned earlier in the day by the Iranians and that the U.S. ships were clearly marked, thus suggesting that the action had to be provocative in a warlike sense. An alternate possibility is that the Revolutionary Guard was simply trying to harass the U.S. armada occupying its home waters, itself no small threat to Iran. As a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry noted, “[This] is something normal that takes place now and then for each party.” And what is that normal behavior? Could it be, that what we were witnessing is something like the political version of trash talk? An international version of the masculine bravado designed to distract and annoy one’s opponent in a contest while beating one’s own chest? If that is what we mean by “provocative,” so be it, but it is hardly warlike behavior that might warrant military retaliation. And to be sure, the fact remains that no shots were fired and no one was hurt.

The bigger point here, of course, is to remember the sense in which making this a persuasive and compelling international incident seems to rely upon the visual evidence. But once we identify the underlying optics that animate an interpretation of these photographs and videos as provocative action, it is only too easy to see their particular enactments for the fallacies that they are.

Photo Credits: U.S. Navy/Defense Department

3 Comments

The Photographic Cosmos

January 10, 2008December 3, 2013
Hariman
fashion/fiction
2 Comments

The English word “cosmos” is defined by Websters/Random House as “the world or universe regarded as an orderly, harmonious system.” The word derives directly from the Greek kosmos, which could mean the world or universe, and also an ornament and the mode or fashion of a thing. The connection between the, well, macrocosmic dimensions of the universe and correspondingly microcosmic scale of an ornament–think of an minutely detailed earring–came in the Greek mind from a shared sense of order. That connection is lost in English usage, where “cosmic” and “universal” go in one direction and “ornamental” and “fashionable” in quite another. At times, however, it is still there to be seen. Let’s start with this image:

This is a photograph of a carefully prepared martini. The image first appeared in a Chicago Tribune Magazine photo-essay on “cool cocktails” and ended up as one of many images in an end-of-the-year review. This is a better fate than what awaits most photographs of food or drink, and for good reason. This image is a stunning example of modernist design at its best. It also is optically interesting, not least because of how the light in the glass, whether of the cocktail or camera or both, makes an X pattern in the conic section, and of how the colors in the drink are repeated as a spectrum on the perimeter. These designs suggest another structure underlying the aesthetic design of the cocktail, the natural ordering of the physical universe. Against such cosmic extension, the drink is but an ornament yet something differing from the universe only in scale, not in aesthetic significance.

Whatever their worth, I was brought to these thoughts not by the photograph itself but because it inadvertently made me think of another:

This is the now famous Photo 51 taken by Rosalind Franklin in Kings College London in 1952. You are looking at an X-ray diffraction image of DNA. And not just any image X-ray diffraction image of DNA, but the one that provided the key missing piece of information for Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. (Two of the three named above received the Nobel Prize for this discovery; want to guess which one was left out?) It’s a stretch to see the structure of life in a photograph of a martini; indeed, a physicist might point out that a more parsimonious explanation is available. But I love the aesthetic correspondence. Each can be ornament and each cosmos to the other. One can see structure within design, or design within structure. (And this without any religious implications, by the way.)

Universe or ornament, fashion or nature. You don’t have to be Greek to see that they can be the same. It does help to be open to allegory, however, and to chiasmus and, perhaps, to quote Wallace Stevens, to the Motive for Metaphor and “the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.”

Photographs by Bill Hogan/Chicago Tribune (February 2, 2007); Rosalind Franklin, Kings College London (1952).

2 Comments

Seeing We the People in New Hampshire

There will be a lot of photos in the papers today following the New Hampshire Primary. These will include professional photojournalism as well as the Polling Place Photo Project and other examples of vernacular photography. I’m going to add one from the recent past:

This is from the 2004 New Hampshire primary. I haven’t seen it reproduced anywhere.

I love this photograph, which could be labeled Poll Dancers. There is a lot going on, including the expressions of the poll workers, the color and texture of the setting–look at that beautiful table–and the formal relationships in the visual composition of the scene. The basic design is what was called a chiasmus in classical rhetoric. The formal pattern for chiasmus in a verbal text is ABBA: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” In a visual image, the equivalent figure would be a crossing pattern that carries a change in meaning or joins opposing concepts. In this photograph, this pattern is cued by the legs of the two poll workers: each are crossed, front foot toward the other. This unconsciousness entrainment is mimed by their arms and turned heads, and by the spontaneous entrainment of the two voters stepping out of the booths. The symmetrical alternation by gender links the two pairings, who together form a large X if you draw lines from head to toe, male to male and female to female. Each of the two couples has nearly identical expressions on their faces, and the seriousness of the citizens who are voters is complemented by the good vibe of the citizens who are tending the polling place.

The smiles cue emotional response to the rest of the scene, even though it is obvious that those smiling could not be reacting to those behind them. Likewise, it doesn’t matter that the viewer will never know the joke being shared by the two volunteers. Their smiles, along with the informal clothing of all four figures and the fact that all are acting as if no one is watching, make the scene a celebration of the beautiful egalitarianism of democratic elections. This more complex sentiment is shaped by the red, white, and blue cloth draping the voting booths. Wrapped in the national colors, the voters’ accidental choreography symbolizes that elections can aggregate private decisions by strangers to produce social harmony. The woman on the left and the man on the right are different individuals, but they unconsciously move in unison on election day.

Note also that the photograph has no news value. We know that thousands voted, that many voting stations and voters look very much like these, and so forth. Instead, the photograph crafts an emotionally rich performance of democratic life. The vernacular life of small town democracy temporarily is given national significance and emotional resonance; likewise, the social form of citizenship, which often is disembodied, standardized, and abstract, becomes more embodied, familiar, and particular. Aesthetic judgments have to be specific, particular judgments, just like voting, and so there is yet another continuity offered: the act of voting, which only a few were able to do yesterday, is extended to all who are able to view the photograph. One act of citizenship becomes multiplied many times by public spectatorship.

The cynic could point out the virtual citizenship is a long way from political power, and for that voting and viewing often are about equally useless. My attachment to the photograph is not nostalgic, as I see it as a still present reality, but it certainly is sentimental and idealistic. Just like voting.

Photograph from the New York Times.

1 Comment

The Political Season

Robert and I have not written very much about the current political season. Part of the reason is that our good friend over at the BAGnewsNotes, Michael Shaw, has been tireless in covering the campaign and we encourage our readers to check in there. But there is another reason as well, for while there was a time when the political campaign for president truly constituted a quadrennial season, something that political junkies like ourselves would look forward to, the current campaign seems to have transcended any sense of being seasonal; indeed, it has become altogether ordinary and everyday –- if not downright monotonous. I find myself checking in on the various candidates and their doings as a matter of mindless habit, much like the way I check in on the baseball box scores in mid-June (or the way in which some friends of mine watch the afternoon soap operas). And if I miss them for a day or two, or even a week, I can usually be confident that little of real or longstanding consequence will have changed.

The length and mundanity of the campaign seems to have taken its toll on photojournalists as well. If I see one more picture of the various candidates shaking hands with citizens, or speaking from the stump in a town square or in a quaint little café, or against flag draped backgrounds, or surrounded by spouses or celebrities with cheesy smiles … I think I might die from excessive exposure to visual cliché.* I realize that this seems like it is all that there is to capture visually in these contexts, that photojournalists are working on deadlines and the tried and true genres and conventions are easy to supply, and further that it is the media’s job to “report” what is actually happening (even if that turns out to be … well, nothing), but all of that may well be part of the problem. The campaigns have become so quotidian that it seems like there is nothing “new,” nothing really to see. Of course, one of the things that Robert and I have been suggesting all along is that it is precisely at such moments that we need to look all the more closely.

Consider this photograph from this week’s Sunday NYT:

At first blush, it could be a photograph of a singing group, say, Hillary and the Three Pips (sorry, I couldn’t resist). But in fact it anchors a story about how Senators Obama and Edwards joined forces to “go after” Senator Clinton in a televised debate in Manchester, NH. The attack turned out to be pretty mild stuff, with Obama and Edwards accusing Senator Clinton of being an advocate of the status quo after she had suggested that Obama had unfairly characterized Edwards’s positions on several issues. And one can only imagine what Governor Richardson (the third “Pip”) might have been thinking when he noted that he had been in “hostage negotiations” that were “more civil.” In any case, apart from the separation of Clinton and the three men, it seems to be a rather generic and ordinary campaign picture. In fact, we have seen it before. Look at this photograph that Robert posted on in August:

The first thing to notice, of course, is how little has really changed. The staging and background are effectively identical to one another, with each enveloping the candidates in a red, white, and blue color scheme. Clinton is clearly separated from her three rivals in each image, and more, she stands in almost the exact same spot and strikes the exact same pose, presumably making contact with someone in the audience. She may even be wearing the same suit. The male actors have changed, but more in name than anything else as they all represent the Democratic party and the Washington establishment.

But of course the differences are pronounced. In August the separation of the four people seemed to be a function of random movement, and the sense in which Senator Clinton was disconnected from her rivals was minimal at most. In the more recent picture the separation seems forced, or rather calculated – the relationship between Clinton and the others is one of disconnection and not just separation. Note in this regard that while Clinton still looks out to the audience, seeking (or at least seeking to appear) to make contact with one or another of the spectators, the other three are talking to one another, a closed group seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are on stage or in front of an audience, while nevertheless appearing to conspire about what to do with this woman. One can almost hear them figuring out who will play what roll in the drama that is about to unfold (or if this is an after moment, assessing what actually took place). While in the earlier image Clinton seems to be channeling the energy of the audience, in the later image she seems “defiant,” rather as the title of the article suggests, standing strong and independent in opposition to the men bonding together to attack her.

And so, perhaps the photojournalist here has captured not just another in the continuing and everyday moments of the campaign, but what the editors have recognized as an image that goes beyond what words can say easily or prove (or what it might be injudicious for a journalist to report), i.e., a male conspiracy against the candidacy of the New York senator. The story does not seem to have achieved very much traction, however, and one has to wonder why.

One reason might be that the whole issue of opposition between the candidates seems so much like political melodrama put on simply to accommodate the daily news cycle. So, for example, take note of this photograph that also appeared in the NYT on Sunday.

Here we have something close to the full slate of candidates for president kibitzing with one another in between the Democrat and Republican debates. No less staged than other pictures from the event – a picture of the performance of civility really – nevertheless it makes one wonder how the participants could be engaged in the incivility of hostage-like negotiations at one moment, and hand shaking and back slapping at another. Sure, Hillary is separated from the three Pips here, but it is hard to imagine that she has any more regard for those with whom she is socializing. The point, of course, is not to make light of public displays of civility, but to wonder what to make of them when they lack narrative fidelity with the stories being reported or seem to be altogether feigned, merely staged for the camera.

Then again, maybe it’s just another day in the never ending political season …

*UPDATE: Since writing this post I came across Alan Chin’s black and white photographs of the New Hampshire campaign. His work stands out as a stark exception to many of the claims made here. I will try to post on it in the near future, but in the meantime check it out at BAGnewsNotes.

Photo Credits: Doug Mills/NYT, Peter Wynn Thompson/NYT

3 Comments

The Aesthetic Animal

January 7, 2008December 3, 2013
Hariman
fashion/fiction
2 Comments

The photograph below doesn’t capture the full effect the image had when smeared across one page and part of another in a print edition of Sunday New York Times Magazine (12/23/07).

I’ll bet you get the idea even without the grainy feel of the overblown printed image. The photograph is by Delphine Kreuter, entitled “Le rouge a levres,” and part of the exhibition “J’embrasse pas” at collection Lambert in Avignon, France. The image was used to decorate a puff piece on the current fashion for red lipstick.

I’ve posted before about how fashion carries the enormous energies released by our being social animals. This image is a show stopper on its own, however. The human face is reduced to flesh and teeth. Those teeth are fashion model perfect but also vulnerable, isolated in the center foreground as if being targeted. The flesh is distended, distorted, manipulated; but for the social context of applying make-up, the angle of the head and its pallor would suggest something closer to a body undergoing surgery or being laid out for an autopsy. It’s easy to think that the hands don’t belong to the face which is being abused somehow, held down, twisted, smeared, exposed, marked.

And marked with red. The Magazine article mentions the usual sexual symbolism, but the image goes beyond that. Like fashion itself, the color exposes what it covers. In this image, we see the thick yet pliable tissues of the mouth, its minute seams and folds, its physical weakness. This mouth is not the typically invisible organ of human communication, but instead an orifice–like the others, a place where the body is folding in on itself but not quite sealed. It does not speak, but rather is a place for decoration, a thing that can bear a sign. The smear of red doesn’t quite cover the form of the lip, and so artistry itself is exposed, and with that the truth that style is imperfect, temporary, and completely artificial.

Artificial, but to die for. The image catches its subject and its audience so powerfully because we also know that what appears to be violent is also voluntary. The person photographed might have been male, but the image captures how women often are subjected to physical distortion and discomfort in the name of fashion. More to the point, fashion and violence spring from a common source.

This tension between the brutal animality underlying social life and its superficial articulation as mere fashion permeates the Magazine’s presentation of the story. It is there in the contrast between the text and image, and between title (“The Human Stain”) and subtitle (“Red lipstick continues to leave its indelible mark”) and within the story itself, which blends fashion twaddle (“red lipstick is having a moment”) with reports of vandalism and of artists who use it as “a tool of symbolic defacement.” One is quoted: “‘Red is primal and violent . . . It’s the universal gash.'”Against such celebrations of violence, the mere fashion statement might be a social achievement.

2 Comments

Sight Gag: The American Way

Credit: Wrapped-in-the-Flag.com

0 Comments

Paradigmatic Violence in Pakistan

I’ve posted before about the heroism of the Pakistani middle class as they confront terror to create a modern, liberal-democratic civil society. That post featured an image of waiting and the prospect that things could get worse. They did get worse:

This photograph is centered on a man wounded in the fatal attack on Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. It shows much more than that, however. I see the pathos of civil society in an era of violence, a scene that can be understood as both a series of small choices and the brutal logic of historical fatality.

The photo features the man in the middle of the frame, and he is a peculiar figure: at once a picture of bourgeois composure and someone blasted into stunned incongruity. His pants have been shredded by the blast of the suicide bomber, yet his suit is still buttoned and his tie knotted neatly. One sleeve is disheveled but only to reveal a crisp shirt with white French cuffs. He checks his head for damage yet his hair is still parted. Those around him have been leveled by shrapnel, but he is sitting upright with his legs crossed at the ankles; he could just as well be sitting in a barber’s chair.

The emotional appeal of the image may derive from this tension between the raw violence of the scene and the habitual routines of ordinary life. This tension might be concentrated in the contrast between his orderly demeanor and exposed flesh. He acts as if the only problem is whether his hair is mussed, while we see that his pants have been flayed by violence. Much is revealed: he is not just a “suit,” and a “stable” society is not one where anyone can be torn apart by others who are no respecter of persons. More to the point, his habits of dress, posture, gesture, and thought are both touching and out of place in a world blown apart. They are so far from the harsh realities of civil war, so foreign to the production of violence. His habits are nothing more or less than than consolidated choices that both assume and reproduce a decent civil society. They are isolated by the destruction around him, and the implication is that they may be useless.

Although his suit didn’t protect him, he is alive. And that sets up the second emotional vector in the image. As the street spreads out behind him, we see the carnage wrought by the bomb. You might not want to look too closely. Those lying behind him are dead, and the further into the background, the more broken the bodies. Again, the scene is marked by little signs of normalcy gone awry: strips of paper, items of clothing, it could be the aftermath of a tornado except that it doesn’t stop there. The sitting man, the prone body, the crumpled bodies, the body parts present a declension of violence: to wound, to kill, to kill and mutilate, to dismember, to blow to bits. Thus, the distance from the man in the foreground to whose scattered on the ground behind him can double as a series of steps as a society devolves into anarchy. Those who are committed to civic order are threatened, then attacked, then killed as everything associated with them also is shredded and scattered. Small choices and everyday habits that are the fabric of peace cannot withstand the weapons of those committed to destruction.

John and I have posted periodically about the normalization of violence, but that rarely occurs in the immediate presence of actual destruction. This photograph documents that violence itself is about anything but the taken for granted routines of ordinary life. We now seem to be in a season of violence–Iraq, Pakistan, Kenya, and others are suffering the destruction of social order. It seems that the process is irreversible: once the detonator is set off, waves of destruction spread ever outward. But look at the photograph one last time. There are others in the picture. In the rear, another of the wounded also has risen to a sitting position. On the side, there are onlookers. These figures suggest that fatality has limits. The swath of destruction went only so far this time, each time. Those watching still have choices to make. Who to side with. How to help. With what weapons.

Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images.

0 Comments

The Aesthetics of Freedom

Back in September I commented on the allegorical design of the new U.S. passports and focused attention in particular on the opening page, a cornucopia of signs and references to American hegemony. The visual tableau there begins with an image of Baltimore Harbor being “bombarded.” Subtly but noticeably blended into the background so as to encompass both the inside cover and the first page is the American flag. The “alien” force then was the British Army, but the reference to more recent alien bombardments and expressions of the indestructibility of the American banner are hardly veiled. I promised to continue to examine the visual design of the passport and was reminded of this while traveling recently in the U.K.

The last two pages of the new U.S. passport offer an interesting allegorical complement to the opening two pages, and complete a framework for engaging the intervening twenty-seven pages of image and text that activate a history of the American sublime rooted in the nation’s divinely ordained, adventuresome and inventional spirit.

Reading from left-to-right and from top-to-bottom, we first encounter an inscription from Ellison S. Onizuka, “Every generation has the obligation to free men’s minds for a look at new worlds … to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.” This is quickly followed by a notice, centered and in bold face–and at least twice as large as anything else on the page–indicating that “This document contains sensitive electronics.” The remainder of the page contains addresses “for information” on importation restrictions, customs and border protection, agriculture, U.S. taxes, and social security. All of this information is obscured, more or less like the legalese we ignore and yet are required to sign-off on when we install new software on our computers. Instead, our attention is directed to the connection between “new worlds,” “higher plateau[s],” and “sensitive electronics.” This connection is animated by the photographic illustration that occupies the right hand page and to which our attention is drawn by the formal articulation of the bold faced font of the notice, the reddish hue cast by the sun on the left hand page, and the dark sky of outer space. Here we encounter the earth, centered in the image and, on close inspection, featuring the North and South American land masses. In the foreground is what appears to be the moon. Situated above the two and in-between them, as if the tip of an triangle connecting all three objects, is a satellite. At the bottom of the page is a bar code that corresponds to the passport number.

There is much to comment on here, but what I want to focus on is how the inside back cover is something of a formal “mirror” of the inside front cover, albeit with a difference that coaches the viewer to treat the ideological implications of American exceptionalism as the result of a natural, technological determinism.

The passport begins with a painting and ends with a photograph, the two genres of visual representation framing the historical shift from early to later modernity. The implications of that shift are formalized by the contrast between the quill-and-ink script that sits atop the painting on the inside cover and the computer generated bar code indicating the passport holder’s identification number that rides across the bottom of the photograph on the inside back cover. The shift from “then” to “now”–from painting to photograph, from quill-and-ink to computer generated bar code–is thus marked as a sign of technological progress. Each operates within its own aesthetic register, but the almost perfect symmetry–from left to right, from top to bottom – encourages the viewer to acknowledge a transcendent beauty predicated on the concept of “orderliness.” Notice, for example, how the quill-and-ink script is perfectly measured (at least for its antique medium), and thus anticipates the even more perfectly measured, technologically enabled bar coding on the back page. The shift from “then” to “now” is thus coded aesthetically as a sign of ordered, technological progress.

This aesthetic coding underwrites a politics concerning the relationship between American-style democracy and technology. The key marker here is the reference to “sensitive electronics.” The specific referent is the “electronic chip” embedded in the passport and designed to record the movement of citizens (and others) across borders, but its visual juxtaposition with the satellite looming over the galaxy implies something more. One might expect that technological progress would enable greater latitudes of individual freedom, as is the promise of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” but here it offers not freedom of movement but panoptic oversight. Such control might be necessary in a world fraught with danger, but the point to notice here is how it is aesthetically domesticated and naturalized.

This post has gone on too long already, but two points are worth noting in this last regard. The first has to do with the way in which the passport is color coded from start to finish. As I indicated above, the inside front cover is encompassed by a washed out American flag that serves as the background to the painting and text, and it bleeds across the margins of the page on the right side, inviting us to turn the page. The color scheme carries its way throughout the passport to the back cover, where we see a tree looming over a land mass in the distance. It doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see that the color coding here might be analogous to the flag unfurled. The tree leans like a flag pole, the leaves recall the dark shield of starts, the red and white hues of the setting sun reminiscent of the alternating stripes. And so the banner originally sewn by a woman is here replicated by nature’s pallet, an almost perfect representation of America’s manifest destiny. But note too that the very last page is severe and abrupt in its difference. Virtually all color is lost as the world is now rendered in black and white; virtually, that is, but not entirely, for on close inspection we can see that the colors of nature/the flag bleed here too, though the threat that they will be washed away remains stark and foreboding. And so, of course, the need to mobilize technology, whatever risks it might invoke to freedom and liberty, seem warranted in the name of security.

But there is more, for we have yet to comment on the somewhat odd quotation from Ellison S. Onizuka that leads off the left hand page. The quotation is odd, less for what is said than for who is doing the talking. Few readers will easily identify Ellison Onizuka, nor could I until I researched it (even though I have previously written extensively about the key event for which Onizuka is known!). Ellison Onizuka was a mission specialist on NASA flight STS 5-L. You know it as the “Challenger” spacecraft. He died along with six other astronauts on January 28, 1986 when, in the famous words of President Reagan, the crew “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.” Onizuka’s words, locating the “obligation” of “free men” to “look out from a higher plateau” is thus not just an analogy for the spirit of progress—and the calculated risk that it always entails and yet we work so hard to repress—but operates in an anagogical regiser that puts man (and by implication the technologically advanced American, with his “sensitive electronics”) in proximity to the face of God. In this context the starkness of the black and white world on the facing page takes on an even more sinister, Manichean resonance.

Surely the dangers that the world poses have to be more complicated than this, and yet, here, it seems so natural … almost as if it is destined.

Welcome to 2008.

4 Comments