2009 – Page 10 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

The Third Crusade

The “Summer Surge” has begun in Afghanistan, though more with a whimper than a bang if we measure it in terms of media attention. The death toll creeps higher each day, but one has to search hard to find any mention of it. The stories that do appear on a war that is now eight years old (and counting) tend not to be headline fare in most U.S. news outlets, and those stories that do appear exude something of an everyday, taken-for-granted quality about the whole matter.

While news stories seem lacking, there have nevertheless been a small number of slide shows cropping up at various news outlets (here and here, for example) over the past several weeks. What marks these slide shows is their almost singular banality as they repeat over and again the same, tired, visual clichés for representing war that we have become accustomed to in recent times: tight close-ups of marines—in many cases young boys trying to appear like hardened veterans—expressing intense and stern determination; images of U.S. troops preparing to do battle or returning from battle or approaching and searching what appear to be empty villages or fighting the boredom of war or playing games with local children; photographs that feature the advanced technology of U.S. warfare, including weaponry, night vision capabilities, and so on. Rarely and only occasionally do we see some actual fighting—and perhaps for good reasons—but on the whole what we are shown are stock pictures we have seen before and but for the fact that they emphasize a desert locale, there is nothing particularly distinctive about them. In short, there would appear to be no news here.

And yet, for all that, it would be imprudent to ignore what such visual displays show us and how such “seeing” contributes to normalizing our understanding and attitudes about the war. The photograph above led off a recent slide show of forty seven images at the Denver Post website titled “Marines Pour Into Afghanistan.” One might imagine such a slide show beginning with photographs of marines parachuting from planes or embarking from helicopters, literally “pouring into” the Afghani countryside, but instead of emphasizing the activity of the headline caption we encounter an anonymous and relatively passive soldier. That the image crops out the face and head of the soldier does more than just accent his anonymity as a cipher for the U.S. military, for the photograph is shot as if literally from his point of view. Notice how the camera locates the viewer in the physical space of the soldiers’ head and eyes. We see what he sees—or what we might imagine that he sees if he were to hold his gaze—and thus the photograph coaxes our identification with his very being by suturing our vision with his.

And what he/we see, of course, is the Holy Bible, which sits at the very center of the image. And more, along with the hand that holds it, it is photographed as if in a portrait, where the face is in sharp focus and all that surrounds it is softened so as to direct and hold our attention on the main object. One might think of the photograph in this respect as one more cliché of war rhetoric, an aestheticized visualization of the old saw that “there are no atheists in foxholes.” But of course the conflict in Afghanistan is at least in some measure a religious war, and as such representations of the Holy Bible take on a much larger significance. Here, it is not just a symbol of comfort for those in harms way—though it may certainly be that—but poised at the beginning of the slide show as it is, it frames the meaning of all that follows.

But what is that meaning? We get something of a clue by attending to the brief narrative paragraph that precedes the above image where it quotes the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines as he speaks to his troops as they are about to embark on their military mission: “You’re going to change this world this summer and it starts this morning.” The name of that mission is “Operation Khanjar, or Strike of the Sword.” Now look at the photograph one more time and notice that the Bible holds the place where one might otherwise imagine a weapon—a rifle, or in an earlier epoch, perhaps a sword—particularly in the hands of a Marine about to occupy hostile terrain. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …

There are other ways to interpret the photograph, to be sure, but the point here is that the photograph needs to be interpreted. And this is all the more so when the images shown by such photographs appear to be all too normal and ordinary, or when they beckon our identification all too seamlessly.

Photo Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

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America the Empty

Recently USA Today ran a photo contest to answer the question, “Can a single image capture the essence of America?” Of the 1,035 entries, this one was judged to be the best:

usa-today-photo-winner

It’s a fine image, and one can easily concur with the judges’ statement that it has “gorgeous color, beautiful light and a killer reflection. The visual surprise makes the eye move back and forth, and the subject is emblematic of the American West.”

But wait a minute. There is a difference between the first half of that judgment and the second. Color, light, and the reflection are one thing, while surprise and emblematic representation are another. In fact, water reflections are standard stuff in nature photography, so there would be little surprise there (nor would viewers be likely to be confused about which horses are real). And what about the idea that the landscape is the definitive image of the American West–and therefore of America? Can you get more conventional than that?

My unease wasn’t helped by the paper’s claim that the contest photos “capture America the beautiful beyond obvious landmarks to its glorious landscape and spacious skies.” OK, no Statue of Liberty, but the Western landscape is an equally obvious visual figure, and it is clear from the text that our perception is supposed to be shaped by the iconography of “America the Beautiful.” Sure enough, the second and third place photographs are from Antelope Canyon, Arizona and Arches National Park, Utah: in other words, they are beautiful examples of familiar scenes in the photographic archive of Arizona Highways, National Geographic, and similar house organs of travel photography.

The fourth place photo is of an ocean sunset, and so it goes. Most tellingly, of the top ten photos, only two–numbers 6 and 10–include people. In the first of these, we see children practicing with lariats at a “cowboy training camp” representing “family fun vacations in the American West”; in the second, there are tiny figures in the background of a photo of kites at a beach.

Don’t get me wrong–some of the contest entries are fine photographs. But what about the big question: do they picture America? If so, we may have a problem, because then America is in some important sense essentially empty.

If you look at the rest of the submissions, it seems evident that America is the West, which is largely void of people. As Richard Avedon, Michael Shapiro, and others have stated before, this is not an innocent idea. The photo operates ideologically, whether by hiding the workers, implying that natural resoures are boundless, or reinforcing assumptions about American exceptionalism and providentialism (as if Central Asia didn’t have similar vistas, or lacked God’s grace).

To be fair, however, we also have to note that these photos also are negotiating other problems of political representation: by not featuring people, no one ethnic or social group is given the privilege of being the “face” of America, and showing natural scenes through conventional iconography does supply the typical places and common objects that are necessary for the shared seeing that is a vital element of democratic public culture.

That said, it seems to me that we could do better. The dedication and skill of the amateur photographers in the contest needs to be augmented by critical discussion of how one might represent “the essence of America.” One argument is that there is no such thing to represent; another is that no one representation could do so. On the other side, the US is not simply a neutral aggregation of autonomous individuals having nothing in common, and collective living requires common images and ongoing judgments about what is more or less representative.

And let me say it as clearly as possible: America is not empty. Nor is the natural order of things walking serenely in single file. Nor can photographs represent a political community as neatly as still water reflects horses. Public life needs many images–these and others as well. America is beautiful, but not because the people are invisible.

Photograph by Joanne Panizzera/USA Today.

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Second Birthday for Nocaptionneeded.com

Today nocaptionneeded.com celebrates its second birthday.

second-birthday-part-deux

There is a lot to be said for the Web, but virtual parties are not likely to be high on the list. Even so, we’re still here and somewhat amazed about that, and still growing and somewhat amazed about that.

As we did last year, this is a time to say “Thanks” and to take stock. Thanks to all our readers, and not least to those who take the time to comment. We don’t always like what you say, but you don’t always like what we say, and that’s what we should expect from an honest and engaged discussion.

We also want to pause a moment and take stock. If you would like to give us any advice, now is a good time to do it. What works and what could be improved? What might be added? Where should we be headed? Advice might not be heeded, especially given our limited resources, but it always is appreciated. You can comment below or email us at rhariman@gmail.com and lucaites@indiana.edu.

We’ll be taking two weeks off from posting—first, to lead a week-long seminar at the Rhetoric Society of America’s summer institute for scholars, and then to get of out of Dodge for awhile. Both should provide additional context for our assessing what we do here, and we’ll continue to read our mail. . . .

See you July 6, as we start another year at NCN.

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Sight Gag: Digital Liberty

Photo Credit: Matson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. 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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When Dissent Lacks Drama, It's Still Dissent

The riveting images and real time coverage of the events in Iran this week are about as good as it gets for those who celebrate public demonstrations on behalf of progressive social and political change. The power of the people is there to see, as are the democratizing effects of modern media technologies when they are used to organize and amplify what is happening on the street. The interlocking institutions of authority and corruption begin to look like the walls of Jericho, cracking as they are about to come tumbling down.

May it be so, but let’s not forget that the media also features one story at a time. There always are other protests, other causes, other appeals to the international community that are, have been, or will be overlooked. Equally important, perhaps, is the recognition that most protests are frail things that seem pathetic at the time and inconsequential thereafter. Most important, we should celebrate the fact that people protest anyway.

When it rains, for example.

hand-in-rain-dissent

This photograph from a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia captures so much of the dismal side of dissent. A single hand strives to hold plastic sheeting together to keep out the rain that is ruining the demonstration. It’s hard to make your case in the public square when you can’t be seen and no one is going to be there anyway. The hand is all that remains of the citizen, who is reduced to a small act of self-preservation. So much for the will of the people. The sheer vulnerability of the protester is emphasized further by the white sheet, which could as well be a burial shroud. And yet he lives, and waits for another chance to stand for his cause.

As does this demonstrator in Jakarta.

whitened-dissenter

This might be titled the activist’s very bad day. He has gone to considerable trouble to make a statement–body paint, a performance that will have been scripted and rehearsed, all to be presented before an audience who probably couldn’t care less. Yet he, too, is a study in fatality: white as a corpse, looking as if beaten, nakedly vulnerable, and alone but for his fatigue and discouragement while the public looks elsewhere. It was Earth Day in Indonesia, which has a terrible environmental record including 70% deforestation and some of Asia’s worst air pollution. Let’s hope that next year things go better.

Heroism can’t be the staple of democratic dissent. I won’t for a minute belittle those who are standing up to brutality today, but let’s not forget the many others who have been keeping up the struggle in other settings. They, too, keep the spirit of democracy alive, and they do it by withstanding humiliation and failure. Heroism is a rare and beautiful thing, but for those bad days, a different kind of courage may be required.

Photographs by Shakh Aivazov/AP and Mast Irham/EPA.

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Showing Political Action: Images in the Iranian Protests

Commentators on photography frequently claim that the image is a counterfeit of reality. Beware the image, we’re told, as it is not the real thing. But it you look at what people do with images, you can see far more than people being mislead. What I find particularly notable is how ordinary people are enlisting images as foot soldiers in public demonstrations. Instead of displacing reality, images are being used to increase the scale and impact of democratic advocacy.

You could see it as Chinese parents held photographs of children killed when their schools collapsed during an earthquake, and you can see it now as Iranians protest their government’s attempt to fix the presidential election.

protest-photo-in-protest

Here a protester is not only marching in the street but displaying a photo of another protester who was shot by a government thug in an earlier demonstration. For an example using an earlier photo of state violence, look at the bottom of this post, and see others in photograph 9 at The Big Picture. That’s only part of the repertoire, however.

photograph-mask-iran

I doubt anyone thinks this guy actually is Mir Moussavi, so the protectors of reality can stand down for a moment. He is doing something much more significant than imitation, anyway: by making the photograph a mask for this political theater, he puts the political leader’s face on the body politic that is the multitude of people in the street. The leader, who actually is living on the edge of house arrest, is given the force of the people, whose identification with his cause and their right to a fair election is given specific statement.

There may be more going on as well. This carnivalesque mashup may also be a response to the State’s attempt to mobilize the same means of persuasion on behalf of their theocratic regime, as they do here:

photo-in-protest-pro-gov-iran

These women are holding photos in a demonstration on behalf of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The stock portrait of Leaders with the Flag and corresponding production values are in sharp contrast to the dynamic documentary witness in the first image above. If you want to communicate Order and Stability instead of change, however, this state-sponsored image will do.

It’s tempting to leave it at that: a contest between competing images that reflects the two sides of the polarized confrontation in the street. The disenfranchised people, their candidate, and a dynamic visual culture on one side, and traditionalist social orders, clerical leaders, and propaganda on the other. But I want to tip the scales further on behalf of democratic public art, which, after all, should be too brash and ungainly to be easily categorized. For that and other reasons as well, you really ought to get a look at this:

che-tatto-iran

The photographs are from the slide show at the Huffington Post. Photographs 1-3 are Getty images; I don’t have an ID on 4.

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Twittering Past the Bloodbath

The new media have been giddy with their up-to-the-minute coverage of the events in Iran this weekend. Direct comparison, compliments of Twitter, with CNN’s poor showing made the contrast all too obvious: The new media reports coming out of Tehran were equivalent to CNN coverage of the 1991 bombing of Baghdad. Better yet, the “revolution” unfolding today had erupted because Mousavi supporters had been able to text around state censorship of major media networks. Add to this the early photographs of hip, attractive students showing V signs and you might think that the whole thing was one big Obama rally. Except for this:

injured-iranian

This guy got nailed. Broken nose, for sure, and maybe some teeth. His protest is over for the day. You can see how the injury has refocused his attention down to a single zone of pain and perception, the single preoccupation of holding his body together, the single act of getting himself to a safe place. The cloth that he is using to staunch the blood does additional work for us, as it can imply that he might want to weep, not for himself but for his cause, or that he might want to hide his face in shame, not from the blood but from the larger stain created by his government as it makes a sham of a democratic election.

But this is not the time for symbolism. As the government and its vigilantes are becoming increasingly violent, images (and videos) like this probably will become more prominent in the next day or two. With that, viewers are going to have to adjust the frame that was created by the initial news coverage online. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been devouring reports by bloggers, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages, all via various online aggregators. Even if some may be caught up a bit too much in promoting their own role in making history, the new media definitely are a part of the story. But the heart of the matter is that people have been putting their bodies on the line.

And let’s not forget that history still is being made the old fashioned way–by brutally beating people. Note this report on anti-Mousavi thugs from Samson Desta, a reporter for CNN (!), as printed at the Huffington Post: “They were plain clothes, carrying baseball bats. They were carrying metal pipes, and they were just beating up anyone that was that was in that area. Today, I went to a second protest…probably the most violent that I’ve seen, that we have seen. . . . No uniforms but they had weapons such as metal pipes, and they were actually just driving around, intimidating people, beating up people, anyone that was in the street, anyone that was in the road, anyone that dared to chant “Mousavi, Mousavi,” they were beating them senseless.”

Baseball bats, metal pipes, and blood. All we see here is the blood, which is but a trace of the violence. But it is a vital sign. Let’s not support the protesters because they are young and beautiful and connected; they should be supported because they are willing to risk all that for democracy.

Photograph from Getty Images/Huffington Post. Currently 41 photos of the demonstrations and reprisals are available at The Big Picture. Unfortunately, the point I’m trying to make here is vividly evident in the arc from the first image to #41. The list also includes another photograph (#16) of the man shown above. NCN readers may remember other posts on showing blood, including this one.

UPDATE:

bloodied-iranian-photo-poster

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Sight Gag: Judicial Temperament

Credit: Knickerbocker

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Interchangeable Women: East and West

One of the questions one might raise about coverage of the Middle East is how much to feature women under the veil. Despite the range of positions in the region about body covering, the tendency in the US is to feature burqas (of whatever kind or name) when emphasizing deficits of rights and modernization. But, of course, the matter is not so simple.

three-burqas-snapshot

For the record, these women are wearing the Afghan chadiri. If you look closely at this photo, you can see that it might confound several assumptions about living under the veil. Instead of uniformity, each outfit is individually decorated. Instead of a primitive society, the women are standing in a pleasantly modern setting. Most peculiar, perhaps, is that they are standing to be photographed. How, one might think, can a photograph matter when their faces can’t be seen? (To see how mistaken this question can be, go here.) They may expect to be recognized by what can be seen, or they may be indulging the request for a photo precisely because they are protected from public scrutiny.

These subtleties may be obvious inside their culture, whereas to the Western gaze the women are interchangeable: anonymous, uniform, and uniformly subjugated. Given their confinement to private life, in public they are not citizens but merely women, interchangeable women.

Before anyone gets too righteous about the Western alternative, we should take a look at this:

These Florida State fans are definitely not under the veil. They are, however, another example of cosmetic cloning. (Let’s set the little girl aside, although notice that she is a Florida State woman in training, right down to the bracelet.) Sure, we can identify them as separate individuals: one belly has a navel stud, one doesn’t, and the third has a tattoo, what more do you want? But they are more closely entrained than the three women in the first photograph: bare midriffs, identical shirts, hats, buttons, bracelets, hairstyles, makeup, and gestures. Even their faces look like close copies of each other.

We could point out that they are free to choose how they display themselves in public, but this doesn’t seem to be a great example of independent decision making. My point is that they might as well be in burqas–they are interchangeable women, as much under the sway of gender-specific norms for appearing in public as anyone else. Their aggressive femininity is little different than the gender segregation of the burqa; both might be labeled variant forms of cosmetic fundamentalism.

None of this need be complicated: many people rightly oppose any gender rules that confine women to subordinate status. But if images of women are to be used to subordinate East to West on the grounds that a denial of visibility is a denial of rights, then it’s only fair to raise equivalent questions about how rights are being used to keep women locked into limited gender roles closer to home.

Photographs by Margaret Orwig and Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel.

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Then and Now

Can you name the location of this photograph? If you need a hint click on the image.

Even those who actually recognize the scene probably misidentify it. Most westerners would be inclined to say that it is Tiananmen Square, though it is actually Changan Avenue, which is a bit east of the square. On its face that small detail of misnaming would seem to be relatively unimportant, after all, what really matters was the event, right? And the iconic photograph nails that as a lone individual stands down a row of tanks. Of course, when we say “iconic photograph” we have a bit of a problem too since there are at least four different photographs that are commonly referred to as “the” photograph. But again, perhaps that too is just a trivial matter as each image is really quite similar and collectively they appear to confirm the relevant facts—a man, a row of tanks, a public thoroughfare, etc. So what if the four images are not identical to one another—if in some you have a close-up and in others you can see the wide street and bus, or if in some the man is carrying a bag in each hand, but in at least one he no longer has a bag in his right hand? What difference does it make? Maybe nothing.

Then again, perhaps it calls our attention to the ways in which photographs become reductive representations of places and events that can (and often do) direct (or misdirect) our attention and, subsequently, our memory. What was the dance between the man and the tank all about? Was it about a lone, heroic individual standing up against incalculable odds in a scene that might have been played out in the mythic American west with Gary Cooper cast as the man holding the bags? Or was it one small part of a mass, collective demonstration, a radically democratic (and potentially dangerous), grass roots revolution? Did that photograph inflect a liberal or a democratic moment? Perhaps the photograph above coaches an answer.

It is not hard to see this photograph as a visual quotation of the iconic image of the man and the tank. Taken from almost the identical vantage of the iconic photograph(s), it shares many of the high modernist aesthetic conventions of the original that make it easily identifiable to western audiences: It is universal rather than parochial (it could be anywhere in the world), it is geometric rather than organic (notice how the scene and all that it contains are disciplined by rigid angles and vectors), it is functional rather than customary (the street is designed to “move” masses of people from one place to another rather than to accommodate social interaction), and so on. But more, it is shot from on high and at some distance. The viewer thus looks down upon the scene with a degree of objective detachment that James C. Scott affiliates with “seeing like a state,” a panoptic vantage “that is typical of all institutional settings where command and control of complex human activities is paramount.” That the iconic photograph has circulated mostly (and almost exclusively) in the west is a clear indication of who is viewing whom, and who presumes cultural hegemony. But what is being naturalized here?

The template is framed in a figural dialectic defined by the relationship between “then” and “now.” And from this chronotopic perspective, what is different are the particular figures within the scene. In 1989 we had a showdown between the heroic individual and the authoritarian state, in 2009 we have the traffic and commerce symptomatic of a busy thoroughfare in any city in the world. What is important to notice is that in each photograph the anonymity of the actors remains intact, with this crucial difference: then they were defined as political agents caught in a struggle between good and evil, now they are seen as global consumers defined (as so often in the U.S.) by their cars. What was thus then cast for western eyes as a liberal-democratic revolution is now cast as a liberalized, global economy of undifferentiated, mass consumption. Liberalism, it would seem, is the trump card. Their present is our past … again.

That could be useful framing of the social order, as it animates the possibilities for trans-global identification, or it could reduce our sense of the possibilities for a global civil society to a neo-liberal economic hegemony disciplined by the narrow and limited conventions of late modern design. Its all a matter of what we choose to see and remember.

Photo Credit: David Gray/Reuters (For more on our consideration of the original “tank man” image and its various iterations and appropations see chapter five in No Caption Needed (the book) and posts here and here.)

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