This photograph is altogether commonplace.  A simple headshot of an altogether ordinary, middle-aged, white guy.  He looks healthy.  His face is washed, his hair and mustache neatly trimmed. He is what we might call “clean cut.”  If you passed him on a street corner you probably would not give him a second glance.  There is something of an irony to this last statement, but more on that later.

His name is Daniel Fore.  He is a resident of Oak Park Village, a quiet suburb on Chicago’s west side famous for the many houses and other structures built by its number one son Frank Lloyd Wright.  Oak Park Village considers itself to be a small and friendly community fully committed to social and political diversity.  Indeed, Oak Park Village is so committed to diversity that in 1973 it issued a “diversity statement” that is now prominently featured in a sidebar on its website. That statement reads, in part:

“The people of Oak Park choose this community, not just as a place to live, but as a way of life … Ours is a dynamic community that encourages the contributions of all citizens, regardless of race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion, economic status, political affiliation or any of the other distinguishing characteristics that all too often divide people in society. . . . Oak Park recognizes that a free, open, and inclusive community is achieved through full and broad participation of all its citizenry.  We believe the best decisions are made when everyone is represented in decision-making and power is shared collectively.  Oak Park is uniquely equipped to accomplish these objectives, because we affirm all people as members of the human family (emphasis added).”

But back to Daniel Fore, the ordinary guy in the picture above—the guy who doesn’t appear to warrant a second look.  He has been living in Oak Park Village for at least the past twelve years, where he has regularly attended Village board meetings and is recognizable around the town as a community activist.  All of that turns out to be irrelevant, however, as his recent petition to run for the Oak Park Village Board (signed by 800 members of the community) was challenged because he listed his residence as “homeless” and the only address he gave was an Oak Park PO Box.  The challenge was upheld by a Cook County judge because he did not list a “home address” on his nomination application.  (Aside: The irony here is much too rich to ignore given the tales—perhaps apocryphal—of the numerous deceased voters on the Cook County voting rolls who nevertheless cast ballots in elections throughout the 1960s; of course, one can only assume that these voters did have home addresses).

The Court’s ruling is under appeal, but the point to note is that the commitment to a “free, open, and inclusive community” where “the best decisions are made when everyone is represented in decision-making and power is shared collectively” apparently doesn’t extend to the homeless who have been summarily excluded from the “human family.”  And the exclusion is doubly ironic, for just as we (shamelessly) avert our eyes from the homeless we encounter sleeping in alleys or panhandling on street corners, refusing to give them a second glance, so too now have the courts and our laws looked away.  As the unemployment rolls rise and as the number of house foreclosures add to what seems to be a growing “class” of homeless people—many, if not most who will look and be no more or less ordinary than Daniel Fore—one wonders how long we can continue to do that and lay claim to being a truly democratic society.

Photo Credit:  M. Spencer Green/AP in the Washington Post

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President Obama’s declaration that we will remove all combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2010 is something of a moment for celebration (if leaving a country that we occupied and brought to its knees under false pretenses and is now caught in the throes of sectarian violence can be seen as a moment of joy), but the pleasure of that announcement has to be mitigated a good deal by the fact that he has also committed an additional 17,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan (on top of the 32,000 troops already there). Al Qaeda is ensconced in the caves and hills of the Afghanistan mountains and the Taliban does arguably pose a national security threat to the U.S., so this may be justified at some level, though whether it is a winnable war or not—or what a victory here would actually look like—are certainly open question (just ask the leaders of the former Soviet Union … if you can find any of them). But what is troubling is the way in which we seem to have convinced ourselves that the reason we having been fighting this war, at least in part, has been to save the women of Afghanistan.

To be sure, I have no doubt that the women of Afghanistan are treated in ways that are horribly inhumane and cannot possibly be justified in any way by appeals to cultural differences or long standing traditions. But there is a continuing and nagging cultural meme that presumes to justify U.S. military presence in Afghanistan as somehow connected to securing the human right of these women. It’s not part of the official rationale for our being there as far as I know, though I do recall Laura Bush making such a public appeal a few years back, but the concept nevertheless seems to float along within the public discourse in a network of vaguely connected narratives and cultural associations that functions as a sort of moral imperative for our presence there; and here’s the point: it does this in a way that distracts attention from the larger public debate we should be having about our national interests and concerns in this part of the world and how we should go about accomplishing them.

The presence of this meme was given visual prominence this past week on the front page of the NYT as part of a story (and a website slide show) dedicated to the idea that talk of women’s rights in Afghanistan is starting to take hold and with the clear implication that it is a direct effect of the U.S. defeat of the Taliban in 2001. The photograph is of a seventeen year old woman by the name of Mariam, who had been forced to marry a forty-one year old blind man at the age of eleven and was then beaten and otherwise abused because she failed to conceive. She eventually fled and found refuge in a woman’s shelter

The narrative is full of pathos, and one would have to be cold hearted not to be deeply affected by it, but what distinguishes it from numerous other such stories one can find on the internet is the image that anchors the report, a photograph that bears distinct resemblance to the photograph of the now famous “Afghan Girl” that graced the cover of National Geographic in 1985 and again in 2002, and has been a persistent sign of U.S. concern for the plight of women and war refugees caused by the Soviet aggression. And so instead of focusing attention on the fact that we will increase our military presence in Afghanistan to nearly 60,000 troops, we are encouraged to a state of self-satisfaction in the knowledge that we have somehow done better than the evil empire that preceded us in a war that seems never to end.

But there is more. For one week earlier the NYT reported on the plight of Iraq’s war widows. According to the United Nations 10 percent of all Iraqi women aged 15 to 80 are widowed—740,000 in all—and without the resources to sustain themselves, often forced to resort to begging, prostitution, or “temporary marriages” required to procure even a modicum of state support. Many if not most of these women were widowed by sectarian violence unleashed by the U.S. invaston and at least some—there is no way of knowing exactly how many—have lost their families to American gunfire and missile attacks, such as Nacham Jaleel Kadim, age 23, pictured below who lost both her twin sisters and her husband.

If we are truly concerned about the plight of women in the Islamic world perhaps we should start here.

Photo Credit: Lynsey Addano and Johan Spanner for the New York Times

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There may not be a reflective cue in every photograph, but some photos make up for that by reminding the spectator of how vision can be mechanized.

This photo goes in two directions at once, for the striking effect is created by combining modern technology (complete with plastics and calibration) and the colonial visual convention of the dark-hued peasant. The man can be seen as “native” and “primitive,” which makes the goggle-eyed apparatus seem even stranger than it might otherwise. The caption tells us that he is having his vision tested at an eyecare clinic in Mumbai, and so the narrative of modernization can draw down the initial shock of seeing a cyborg staring back at the camera. He isn’t seeing through us; no, he is being lifted up out of darkness.

And it that makes you feel better, you might want to take a look at this:

You are looking at another cyborg, one who is part of a system of surveillance that is projected back across his face. The half mask looks like something out of Star Wars. The military bearing makes him seem ready to be used without hesitation by the System that is mapping and monitoring the nation state. He looks proud of his role–and ready to launch the death ray on command. Some viewers might see this guy as One of Us, but few would want to be so intimately defined by technology.

In fact, this photograph of Captain Bob Edwards on duty at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado was taken after a US Airways jet landed in the Hudson River on Jan. 15. Amazingly, a 911 call in Queens could be linked to the Center, which probably provided help during the rescue. As with the first photo, the sinister aura that would be picked up by some viewers depends on the mind of the believer. Though likely to be relatively conservative in the first case and liberal in the second, the anxious viewer would be mistaken with each image.

Once that initial reaction is set aside, the opportunity arises to think about how we see mechanically. Sight in the first case, surveillance in the second: both are essential for collective life. (Yes, surveillance is a social good: read Jane Jacobs on urban design.) Modern engineering has provided immensely valuable technologies for improving both sight and surveillance. Both can be used abusively–from prying into private life to creating panopticonic work places–but they remain pervasive features of modern life that we usually take for granted. The question arises, what would we see if we looked at our cyborg selves without fear of what we might find?

Photographs by Arko Datta/Reuters and Kevin Moloney/The New York Times.

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