Sep 24, 2012
Jun 10, 2009
Jul 25, 2007
Oct 23, 2009
Nov 14, 2014
Dec 11, 2011

In the Interest of a Useable Past

There are only a very few dates in U.S. history that are instantly recognizable by most citizens:  July 4,  December 7,  June 6,  September 11; for baby boomers, maybe, November 22.  But beyond that, we tend to remember events more than dates; and when such events are no longer present to the collective mind’s eye they tend to fade into the dustbin of history—part of the academic historian’s palette, to be sure, but increasingly difficult to access as a usable past.  Few people recall the significance of May 3rd in U.S. history.  I didn’t, and I have studied and even published essays and books that speak to the momentous events of that day in 1963; or at least I didn’t recall the significance of the date until I literally stumbled upon the two photographs below while surfing the web and looking for something to write about yesterday morning.

The images were included in a slide show titled “This Week in History” and buried deep on the Camera Works page of the Washington Post beneath twenty three other slide shows on a potpourri of topics ranging from the swine flu crisis, the Chrysler bankruptcy, and President Obama’s first 100 days in office to the Kentucky Derby, a photo exhibit at the MOMA on the recent history of fashion, a retrospective on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the visit of an eight year old beaver to a veterinary dentist, images of animals from around the world, and  the top ten sports photos of the week.  As far as I can tell, nothing else in the WP commented on the events of May 3, 1963 in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, nor for that matter was the topic addressed by any of the major news outlets or agencies, including the local Birmingham News.  It is almost as if the events of that day have faded from collective memory, no longer necessary to a productive and usable understanding of our nation’s bloody racial past.

The point is accentuated some by the front page of Sunday’s NYT, which included two stories above the fold, one touting President Obama’s professorial pragmatism in thinking about the Supreme Court and the other titled “In Obama Era, Voices Reflect Rising Sense of Racial Optimism.”  Replete with photographs, the later story featured polling data indicating that 2/3s of Americans hold that “racial relations are good” and illustrates the point with anecdotal data of blacks and whites “communicating”  on the streets, at the gym, and so on.  The article concludes with the words of an African-American auditor from Tampa, FL, “I’m not saying that the playing field is even, but having elected a black president has done a lot.”  It would seem as if we have moved beyond the days of Bull Connor and the KKK; and if so, maybe it is time to let the images of water cannon and attack dogs fade into the recesses of our collective memory as the nation heals its wounds and moves forward.

Or maybe not … for buried within the NYT article is the report of  statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center indicating that there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of active hate groups in the U.S. since 2000. The Times barely recognizes the point, concerned more with the “sense of racial optimism,” but the significance of those numbers is underscored in last week’s edition of Newsweek, which repeated them as part of a feature story on the recent “rebranding” of white supremacist groups as “mainstream” political organizations.  The online version of the article was accompanied by a slide show of images such as these:

What is disturbing about these photographs is not just that they put hateful symbols on display, but that they are happily posed—and by young people, the next generation of Americans—without the hint of public shame.  Indeed, it is no stretch to imagine these individuals proudly posting these images on social networking sites like Facebook or You Tube with full expectation of their viral dissemination.

Walter Benjamin says that to “articulate the past historically” means to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” and thus to recollect the present (and one can only assume its implications for the future) in relationship to a prior moment in time.  To fail to do this, he suggests, is to take the risk that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”  I would like to think that the election of President Obama has put an end to the American Tragedy of racial discord and set the nation on a trajectory to an ever hopeful future.  I would like to believe that we could securely tuck away the photographs of May 3, 1963 or to recall them with the same simple curiosity that leads me to wonder about Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural genius or the dental problems of aging rodents.  I worry, however, that if we fail to articulate our image of President Obama’s election with our images of that fateful day that we do a grave disservice to ourselves and to the safety of future generations of Americans – and more,  to the many who gave their lives in the name of racial justice.

Photo Credits: Charles Moore/Getty; Bill Hudson/AP; Bruce Gilden/Magnum and Newsweek

 2 Comments

Sight Gag: Don't Forget to Wash Your Hands Frequently

Photo Credit:  Unknown e-mail.

The “Sight Gag” 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.

 2 Comments

Child Labor, The Sequel

By guest correspondent Megan Bernard

When I was seven I saw a picture of a little girl and a machine that I have never forgotten.

The vivid incongruity between her and her surroundings gave me an uneasy sense of disproportion and wrongness. She was a child like all others—like me—but something was not right. Her eyes and shoulders showed deep fatigue and her ragged, dirty dress sagged on her frail, brittle-looking little body. All that mysterious metal in front of her was menacing but she reached to touch it almost casually–it was clear that she was familiar with the thing. She was not alone— a blurred figure hovered in the background—but she was isolated, her downcast eyes turned away from the light and focused on the machinery. Although I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing, intuitively I recognized that I was a witness to a thing that should not have happened. The picture was a striking glimpse of a realm of routine hurt and unfairness; it revealed a chronically vulnerable kid in a place where she did not belong.

Lewis Hine took this photo and many others as he systematically documented exploited children in America from 1908-1912. Hine was an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee and his pictures circulated widely as part of the Progressive movement to ban child labor. Hine’s vivid photos contributed significantly to this cause by revealing American child laborers to the public, and his legacy as a prominent, active, socially conscious artist is secure.

That legacy includes the work of G. M. B. Akash, a photojournalist who is documenting living and laboring conditions for dispossessed people in India, Pakistan, and Nepal.

Like Hine’s images, Akash’s photographs foreground big, rigid machines against small, soft children. And as with Hine, a sense of disproportionate scale and incongruous textures emphasizes the wrongness of such scenes. That sense of irreducible impropriety is amplified when the century-old photographs reverberate through their modern echoes: the problem of child labor has not yet been solved.

Does this repetition of visual themes suggest that child exploitation cannot be eradicated? That the ills of industrialized labor will persist because of our human greed, thrift, need, and ignorance–and the mobility of capital? I take a more hopeful view. These pictures, photographers, subjects, and viewers are separated by continents and a century, but images in this style have not lost their power to establish connections across profound social, geographic, and temporal distance. Such exploitation thrives when it is hidden, so exposing it is a crucial step to fighting it, but the mode of exposure also matters. Not all pictures of child laborers are equally powerful, and Akash’s repetition of established masterworks is a strong strategy. Echoes of Hine’s photos visually spotlight similarities between casualties of the second Industrial Revolution in Vermont and the global economy in Bangladesh. Concerted progressive activism helped in the first case. Those same efforts are called for now.

Photographs by Lewis Hine, 1908-1909 (estimated) and G. M. B. Akash, 2009. Megan Bernard is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University. She can be contacted at megan@northwestern.edu.

 2 Comments

The Stain of War

Violence in Iraq is slowly rising again as US troops are being moved to Afghanistan, but many of the photographs being published continue the narrative of successful pacification that has been keeping the war off the front page for months. Against that backdrop, this photo struck me as all too evocative of the continuing violence in the Middle East.

The New York Times caption read, “A blood-stained bed at the hospital in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad after two suicide bombings on Friday.” The fine-grained detail in the caption–right down to “the Kadhimiya district,” should you want to put another pin on the map–contrasts with the refusal of intelligibility in the image itself. We see only an ugly smear, not the precise details of injury or death. Only the bloody aftermath, not even the event itself. Whatever drama played out in this ER, it’s over. Only the stain remains.

Perhaps because it looks like an inkblot from a Rorshach test, the drying blood invites the viewer to make sense of what is there. But what is there doesn’t make sense. Instead of meaning, narrative, purpose, or resolution, we are confronted with the inchoate. Instead of a body, only the bloody trace; instead of presence, absence; instead of the peace and repose of clean sheets and healing, only more of war’s bloodletting, waste, and loss.

Of course, even meaninglessness is a form of meaning, and stains invite further reflection. Sin is understood metaphorically as a stain in some cultures and one rather pertinent religious tradition, as Shakespeare knew when writing Macbeth. It is easy to imagine how the war in Iraq has stained America, and how the stain of war will persist there long after it has been forgotten by people elsewhere. Such thoughts are a legitimate use of imagery, as is true of the deeply metaphoric nature of language itself. But they also can carry one too far into the realm of thought and so of abstraction. It is more fitting sometimes to simply stare at the image and let it enter your soul–as a stain, a bloody stain.

Photograph by Christoph Bangert/New York Times.

American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are reported at icasualities.org. Civilian deaths in Iraq are reported at Iraq Body Count. Civilian deaths in Afghanistan are reported here.

 0 Comments

The Public Veil of Death

The photograph above is a haunting image of Sandra Cantu, an eight year old girl who was abducted, sexually molested, and brutally murdered, her lifeless body found stuffed inside of a suitcase in an irrigation pond near her home in Tracy, California.  The image is part of an eight foot poster that emerged in a spontaneous public memorial outside of the trailer park in which she lived, along with candles, stuffed animals, flowers, balloons, etc.  What makes the photograph so evocative is the way in which it underscores the function of the writing on the poster-sized photograph as something of a public shroud that veils the precious and innocent life so tragically cut short, even as it accents the vitality and penetrating demand of her eyes.

There was a time, not so terribly long ago, when post-mortem photographic portraits of loved ones—and especially children—were taken and cherished as private momento mori, reminders of the fragility of human life and of our own mortality.  Such images today are considered morbid.  Instead, now we remember deceased loved ones by photographs of them taken while they were still alive, and usually such images are the candid snapshots that fill our family photo albums, the nostalgic Kodak moments that seem to be the accoutrements of middle-class, private life.  Indeed, it is not rare to attend a private wake in which digital slides shows of such snapshots become the center of attention, as much if not more than the casket or urn.  In the photograph of Sandra Cantu, however, the private snapshot has been refashioned as a public image, albeit with a significant difference.

The snapshot in a private wake functions to invoke and reinforce the identification between the deceased and the bereaved in very personal terms.  Here, however, the point of identification is more public than personal—more a demand for protection (and perhaps a public reflection on that demand) than a simple reminder of innocence and happier times—and as such it invites our consideration as a symbol of our civic and political relationships.  Hence, what was once a candid snapshot has been reproduced as a larger than life portrait and fixed in a very public setting, its political voice announced and secured.  But there is more, for note too how the collective public signature weaves a scrim that separates the viewer from the girl, almost as if to protect her from the voyeurs’ gaze.  And yet, as in this case, such protection can only go so far.  The photograph thus takes on the quality of a civic momento mori, an allegorical reminder of both our civic responsibilities as well as how fragile public efforts to protect one another—and especially our children—can be.

Photo Credit:  Michael Mccollum/AP

 0 Comments

Sight Gag: Our Better Angels

To see the back of the t-shirt click here or on the image.

Credit:  Avenging Angels

The “Sight Gag” 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.

 0 Comments

Photographer's Showcase: Peter Turnley's "The Family of Man"

Peter Turnley is an occasional contributor to NCN and today we feature images from his version of “The Family of Man.”

To see the full show click here or on the image above.  If you are interested in the opportunity to work with Peter Turnley he hosts a number of highly acclaimed workshops.  For more information click here or contact Peter at peter@peterturnley.com.

 0 Comments

Lest We Forget

The third Monday of April is celebrated as Patriot’s Day in commemoration of the battle of Lexington and Concord.  Since 1998 it has coincided with In Memory Day, a memorial remembrance held at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for those who “died as a result of the Vietnam War, but whose deaths do not fit DOD criteria for inclusion upon the wall.”  It is hard to know just how many of the 3.5 million men and women who served in Vietnam fit in this category, but the In Memory Day Honor Roll now includes 1,800 names, most of them having died as a result of the effects of “Agent Orange exposure or emotional wounds that never healed.”

There are numerous photographs of the event but the one above of an anonymous veteran putting his hands on the Wall is perhaps the most visually provocative. Shot from behind and in medium close distance, the polished black surface of the granite blends almost perfectly with the black t-shirt and hat, inviting the momentary illusion that the veteran is literally one with the Wall.  Only the glare and shadows near the very top of the image disrupt the spell by just barely illuminating the names etched into the Memorial and thus invoking the linear perspective that enables a degree of visual separation between the two; at the same time, however, that very perspective complicates our understanding of the relationship between those who died in combat and those who presumably survived the conflict only to contribute to the “body count” in a different register.  That tension is further underscored visually by the way in which the orangish tint of his arms and hands draw our attention from the black Wall to the orange legend on the back of his t-shirt, a stark verbal reminder that the devastating human costs of the Vietnam War have extended—and continue to extend—long past the final battle and retreat.  The red, white, and blue matting that frames the photo he holds up to the wall is an equally poignant reminder of where the responsibility lies—not with individual soldiers, anonymous or etched in stone, but with the nation state that fostered the war in the first place.

If the photograph was simply a journalistic representation of a particular memorial event, or more, even an evocative representation of the continuing sufferance of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, it would easily deserve to be displayed throughout the land for citizens and leaders alike to see and contemplate.  But the context for interpreting the meaning of the image cannot be so easily contained, especially at our current moment in history as the war in Iraq morphs into the war in Afghanistan, and so the photograph speaks in more than a simple or literal voice.

By official estimates there have been 4,274 U.S. military deaths in Iraq since the beginning of the war in 2003 plus an additional 678 U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan.  But if our Vietnam experience has taught us anything it is that such literal “body counts” are only the beginning. By even the most conservative estimates 1 in 6 (or 16%) of all returning veterans from Iraq suffer from some form of PTSD (i.e., “emotional wounds that never heal”) that has been linked to excessive levels of obesity, alcoholism, and drug addiction, as well as “epidemic” levels of suicide—with far too few getting needed or effective treatment.  As in the past, it is often difficult to see such psychic wounds, or worse, it is all too easy to see past them; and yet, as the photograph above seems to suggest, the degrees of separation between combat deaths and other forms of the “body count” is often something of an illusion that we retain at our own peril.

And so the photograph takes on the quality of an allegory for the complexity of war’s costs; indeed, perhaps it is a visual analog to George Santayana’s warning that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty IMages

 0 Comments

Is Photography Too Human to be Holy?

Most of the photographs put up during Easter could double as an argument against religion–and for anthropology. Spiritual yearning is reduced to cultural performances characterized by pre-modern costumes, ritual processions, and other forms of excess. But then I saw this:

This photograph doesn’t break with the prevailing conventions for documenting religious spectacles, but it gets past them to touch some basic questions about both photography and religious experience.

You are looking at Despina, an 89-year-old Greek Orthodox nun in Northern Cyprus. You can’t see the candles she is lighting, but perhaps you can see their light reflected in her face. Or would, if you could get past looking at her face. Cowled in black, without visible hair and certainly without feminine makeup, her person is concentrated in her face. But you probably looked at her face, rather than into it, because you were scandalized by the wrinkles etched into her flesh like deep channels on a barren planet. Add the enlarged nose and blotched skin, and aging is staring you in the face.

Photography, Susan Sontag reminded us, has been keeping company with death from the beginning, and this photo seems a stark testament to the art’s insistent revelation of human mortality. Photography is being featured because of the contrast between the sharp clarity of her image with the painted icons stacked on the wall behind her. They are antique and at once hazy and luminescent, and so easily symbolize religion as an institution. Now think of Walter Benjamin’s insight that the aura of a work of art is deeply embedded in the fabric of tradition. In this photograph, the aura of religion is deeply embedded in the fabric of tradition. But the photograph itself does not have an aura, nor does Despina due to the stark clarity of her image.

Thus, the photograph contrasts two arts and two conceptions of religious experience: religion as the luminous representation of the divine, and faith as a personal encounter with mortality. One is set in the rear of the picture, painting rather than photography, and the past; the other is set in the front of the picture, in the photograph itself, and in the present. The first view of religion is a nostalgic image–literally bathing the icons in a warm glow as they recede in ascending order toward the vanishing point. The second view is critical–the icons will outlast her, and perhaps her vocation, and nothing she believes will change her mortality and perhaps the passing of all human things, including the church.

But it’s not quite that simple. By positioning the icons behind her head, they provide her with a faint aura. And the contrast between the two media can go a step further: each represents different ways of seeing and thinking. The religious icon is never one thing–it is both material and spiritual–and it is a pedagogy of immanence–of seeing God in all things. Those habituated to Western painting and a doctrine of transcendence learn to see differently, and that can include a sharper distinction between material and spiritual realities. Say, between the sharp image of an individual human face riven with aging, and a hazy image of God placed in a separate sacred space.

And so look at the photograph one more time. See how she is set in a series with the icons behind her. One might say, with the other icons. If we were to look at her as if she were a religious icon, that is, within the Greek Orthodox optic, we might see that she is much more than one thing.

Photograph by Murad Sezer /Reuters.

 7 Comments

Sight Gag: In Critical Condition

Credit:  Dusan Petricic; Gene Case & Stephen King/Avenging Angels

The “Sight Gag” 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.

 0 Comments