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Visual Histories Framing the Obama Presidency

The presidential inauguration is a time of new beginnings, but it cannot avoid comparisons with the past. Indeed, a time of transition places a special premium on the past. Speech writers, pundits, retailers, and ordinary citizens have been trying out various comparisons and narratives to place the historic event in its proper perspective. This attempt to make sense of collective life includes notable images as well. Images such as this one:

As dad sits at the president’s desk in this faux Oval Office, his daughter pops out of the door in the front, neatly reprising the famous image of John-John Kennedy doing the same in 1963.

Dad forgot to pretend to be reading, but then he is on vacation–all the way from Italy, in fact. The Kennedy image apparently has global appeal, and the Oval Office replica probably is doing a brisk business in the run-up to the inauguration. The cardboard cutout of Obama standing behind the desk will be there to help sell the photo-op as a fitting part of the inaugural festivities, but it does more as well. The future president is already there in spirit, as if waiting to sit down and get to work once the public has had its fun. The image makes it easy to believe that the administrative transition between past and present will be as seamless as shifting one’s attention from the replica to the real thing.

The insertion of Obama into one of the stock scenes of the visual history of the Kennedy presidency has other implications as well. Many a commentator has been pushing the Camelot analogy, and there are indeed many similarities between JFK and Obama, including both eloquent oratory and skill at manipulating the media. Kennedy’s photo-op with John-John for Look magazine was no accident, and Obama has not been innocent of selective encouragement of the comparison with his classy predecessor. At the end of the day, however, I think that the Obama-Kennedy comparison is largely kitsch. That’s why the first photo above is perfect, as it captures the analogy exactly as it is–a cheap form of popular entertainment that should be played for laughs rather than taken seriously.

To put it bluntly, I can think of one very good reason why I don’t want to see that analogy become significant, and others as well. Oval Office replicas are not going to shape history, of course, but historical analogies can shape the way we understand the world and evaluate leadership. Images of the presidency can have historical resonance which in turn can guide collective efforts at renewal. That’s why I like this image:

This photograph of Obama at the back of his inaugural train is hardly innocent of strategic design on his part. The train ride is a trip down memory lane to influence public understanding of what lies ahead. The conjunction of the slogan on the seal–Renewing America’s Promise–with the largely abandoned technology of passenger rail travel speaks volumes. Individual comparisons with Lincoln or Roosevelt or Truman are the least of this image of a gleaming railroad car decked with patriotic bunting. This renewal will include restoration of traditional values such as personal discipline and public service, decision-making conducted in a deliberative manner, and government programs addressing collective needs.

Renewing America’s Promise at the back of a railroad car is nothing less than a commitment to using whatever works to sustain American democracy. All this is possible, of course, because the black man at the back of the train will be the president, not the porter. Now that the oppression that also was part of that old order can be discarded, renewal through restoration can begin.

Thus, we have two images and two senses of a usable past: With the one, kitsch and the undertow of tragedy. With the other, the possibility that what was best about the past can, finally, be restored now that so many prior failings can at last be left to history.

Photographs by Nancy Stone/Chicago Tribune; Stanley Tretick/Look Magazine; Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press.

Update: Thanks for the cross-post at BAGnewsNotes.  To see an earlier NCN post on another Oval Office replica, go here.

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Sight Gag: Bye Bye Bush

Photo Credit:  Bulent Kilic-AFP/Getty Images

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.

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Obama's People


Click here to see the full gallery of  “Obama’s People.”

“In December and early January, the photographer Nadav Kander shot 52 portraits of Barack Obama’s top advisers, aides and members of his incoming administraiton.  Kander and the Times Magazine’s directory of photography, Kathy Ryan, discuss putting those portrait sessions together and what happened behind the scenes.”

For a reflection on how such portraiture is reminiscent of Richard Avedon’s work, including his “The Family” project published in Rolling Stone in 1976, (and lest we forget, Mathew Brady’s “Gallery of Illustrious Men” from the antebellum period), see Gerald Marzorati’s editorial letter in the NYT here.

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Winter Elegy

Winter brings snow, cold, blizzards–and photographs of everything from cars in the ditch to crowded airports to rural landscapes blanketed in solitude. Each of these images has its purpose, but even so they can quickly become as conventional as a Christmas card. Although the image below isn’t unique, I think it gives us more than the usual seasonal sentiments.

The influence of Ansel Adams is obvious, but the photographer has achieved something by avoiding Adams’ monumental scale. These trees along Lake Michigan have instead a ghostly quality to them, as if along the shore of the underworld. Their white canopies have pulled what light remains close to them, although only to give relative warmth. Snow is where leaves might be, and grass, while the sky and water that should be full of light and reflected light are dark. Although not a warm world, it remains beautiful, one where essential forms still can be traced–until they, too, dissolve back into nothingness.

Photography has been accused of corrupting experience by beautifying reality. One might ask if that aesthetic impulse always deserves censure, but let me take a different path today. I don’t know of similar critiques of the verbal genre of the elegy–“a mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, especially a lament for the dead”–despite its aesthetic distinction. Consider how this photograph can be elegiac: It marks, with subtlety and beauty, all that we can experience as cooling, loss, and mortality. The beauty of what remains in this winter scene testifies to how much lies dead or dormant, unable to thrive until there is another turn of the great wheel.

Perhaps we should dwell in this attitude for a moment. Aside from the weather, we seem to be living in an overheated world. Whether caught up in the drama of war or gushing about the new administration heading to Washington, the news rushes along with little pause for reflection. Despite anguish over the war dead in the Middle East, the pain is by turns either localized or abstracted but never cause for meditating on our common humanity. Despite heated arguments about the economy or the latest entertainment awards or the playoffs or whatever, no one seems able to take a deep breath, calm down, and listen.

The story is told that when General Stonewall Jackson was in his death throes, he was at first wildly giving commands for battle, but then paused, smiled, and said, “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” Jackson may have been imagining lush magnolias, but surely the trees above would do as well.

Photograph by Jakub Bomba from the Daily Dozen for January 12, 2009 at NationalGeographic.com.

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The Portrait of a Future Citizen as a Young Boy

The image of Palestinian children (as well as Iraqi children) with “toy guns” has become such a cliché in recent times that I’ve almost stopped paying attention to them when they show up in journalistic slideshows.  But the photograph below, which appeared  recently on the Washington Post website, warrants a close look despite what might seem initially as a weary stereotype.

What distinguishes this image from the many others in the “toy gun” genre is that the young boy is not with other children playing with his fake weapon, nor is he being watched over by a small group of approving adults.  Rather, he is part of what appears to be a fairly large crowd of men raising their hands in protest, and notwithstanding the gaze of the camera, he does not receive any special attention from his fellow Palestinians.  He is simply one among many. And from this perspective, it is not so much the toy gun that stands out in the picture (a marker of his childhood), but rather his left hand raised in protest and civic solidarity (a harbinger of his impending adulthood). 

What we are witnessing, in short, is the process of political socialization. There is nothing all that surprising about the young boy’s gesture as he imitates his elders, nor would it be all that troubling but for the historical and  geo-political contexts in which it occurs.  But therein lies the rub.  For what the image depicts is not just the coming of age of a new citizen—Palestinian or Israeli, it really doesn’t matter—but the guaranteed perpetuation of the current crisis as each subsequent generation is sucked up within an extended, perverse, and inexorable vortex of hatred and fear that has become normative. 

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on for so long, and there have been so many dips and turns, that I truly don’t know where the blame resides, though my strong suspicion is that there is plenty to go around and that there are few parties—if any—who are altogether blameless.  And I don’t know what the solution is as long as each of the many sides remains stubbornly entrenched in its positions and oppositions.  But the photograph above makes me want to weep as I imagine the many future generations consigned to the same culture of violence and suffering animated ultimately by their own diplomatic incompetencies.  Surely there is a better way.

Photo Credit:  Eliana Aponte/Reuters

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Sight Gag: Presidential Portrait

Credit:  Mr. Fish, LA Times, January 8, 2009

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.

 1 Comment

What if God Counts?

So Hamas and Israel both wanted war and each got their wish. The war was no surprise when it came and the outcomes are predictable as well. Israel will use its overwhelming military superiority to smash enemy infrastructure while also killing many civilians, which will allow Hamas, broken but not destroyed, to claim moral and political victory. The international community will broker another truce, the band-aid of humanitarian aid will be restored, rocket attacks on Israel will diminish for awhile, and the occupation policies that have turned the West Bank and Gaza into prisons will continue. A rejuvenated IDF will claim that it did indeed, as the Defense Minister promised, restore “peace and tranquility,” a phrase notable for not including the word “justice.” Then the rocket attacks or suicide attacks will resume, Israel will again be given the worthless admonition that it should allow itself only a proportionate response–which, technically, would be firing rockets at civilians–and so it goes. It is tempting to simply say, “a pox on both your houses.” But then there is this:

A child’s arm protrudes from the rubble of a building destroyed by an air strike. This is one death among many–500+ civilians and counting–including perhaps the woman whose half sandal also is in the picture. It is one picture among many, and one of of the least dramatic, but I can find no other that so eloquently communicates the crushing sorrow of war’s devastation. The mass of concrete crushing the child also completely crushes any hope. This is not a scene of rescuers digging frantically in a race against time. Instead, the several adults simply stand there, helpless. It’s as if they are granting the child a last moment of dignity before they have to tear the broken body out of one grave only to return it to another.

This is why we shouldn’t turn away or throw up our hands in disgust. Each death is a separate tragedy, not merely another datum to be aggregated into the geopolitical assessment. But it is not enough to mourn the individual loss of life if that does not also include a commitment to facing the deep causes of this war and the other wars now underway–most of them killing far more people than will die in Gaza. Precisely because each death is so wasteful, unnecessary, and immoral, it should be counted in another sense: as a measure of collective political failure.

Let me put it this way. What if God counts? (I realize that belief in God is rather difficult these days, but let’s at least consider the idea a useful fiction.) What if, that is, God judges not so much by weighing reasons but simply by how many are harmed? It makes sense, if you think about it. God (for example, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, just to name a few religions) is supposed to see through our social identities, our many rankings and all the aggrievements they involve. God calls on us to transcend social ascription and avoid false pieties and idolatries, all on behalf of living in justice and compassion with one another. Nor has divine judgment ever given points for wealth or firepower, or for sacrificing children for one’s cause. The more I think about it, the more clear it seems: God would put great weight on how many were harmed, and what was done on all sides to prevent harm, while being much less concerned about who had the better rationale on any particular day.

Think about it: not what you intended, and not whether you were right, but simply how much damage you caused. Relentlessly counting while turning a deaf ear to our many arguments, no wonder God’s judgment is said to be so terrible.

In the short run, it would seem that God’s judgment should fall on Israel: a handful of deaths on one side and hundreds on the other, not to mention the continuing toll taken by the occupation. But that may be too simple. Surely God also follows the money, which goes back to the U.S. on one side and sources throughout the Arab world on the other side. And this is a small war by comparison with the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even more so compared to the wars raging across central Africa. Again, war is a collective failure, and ultimately the judgment rests on us all.

Photograph by Mohammed Abed/AFP-Getty Images.

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Captioning the New Year

The new year has started very much like the old year: renewed war in the Middle East, exceedingly uncivil civil wars in Africa, spasms of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Asia, drug wars in Latin America, and economic decline everywhere. That’s not the whole story, of course, but it is a continuing story.

Faced with another year of violence, journalists and citizens alike have to make choices about how to depict and understand what is happening, and how to do so without becoming cynical or otherwise numbed to the obligations and possibilities for change. One place to begin is by looking at this photograph.

Recently I got somewhat lyrical about two images of “Hands of Death.” Now we are looking at the foot of a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Rather than speak about the photograph directly, let me ask you how it might be captioned.

That’s a real question. What are we to make of this awful, pathetic, powerful image? How should we label it to use it well–that is, to provide material for public thought?

I’ll suggest several captions that occurred to me, along with their implications for framing events to come. First, “Picking up the Pieces.” Cute, isn’t it? But that is what has to be done. After the dramatic cataclysm of the blast and perhaps heroic efforts to save the wounded, someone has to pick up the shards of material, bone, and flesh that remain. At the same time and for much longer, someone has to pick up the pieces of shattered families, broken communities, a damaged society. The violence that has occurred is still occurring, not only in the continuation of political struggles, cycles of violence, martial habits, and the arms trade, but because the harm already done lasts for decades among the living. Whatever will come to pass, surely one of the tasks facing governments and individuals today is to pick up the pieces still strewn about, the sorry fragments of past destructiveness that have to be gathered up and put to rest as part of moving forward.

I also thought of labeling the photograph as “The Human Remnant.” Although we don’t typically look at the soles of our feet, much less think of them as emblems of humanity, that foot now becomes expressive. It looks capable, vulnerable, well cared for, and generally a sign of how humans are a distinctive species. The top of the foot has been seared by the blast, leaving the soft, fleshy underside as the only trace of the human being who existed before ideology, socialization, self-immolation. Perhaps that foot could have walked down another path; indeed, isn’t that true of everyone? Thus, the image reminds us of how war wastes human potential. But let’s not get too sentimental. He killed three other people, and the soldiers, munitions makers, and strategists also are human, as are the torturers and those who authorize torture. It is not enough for humanity to endure.

Other captions include: “Putting Your Best Foot Forward” and “Adding Insult to Injury.” The first ranges from contempt to cynicism, while the second plays off of the cultural significance in the Middle East of showing the soles of one’s feet. I could go on, but you get the point. One question we face in the new year is how to represent, understand, and react to a world riven by violence. This is not an academic question.

Photograph by Ahmad Masood/Reuters via The Big Picture.

Update: Thanks to the double post at BAGnewsNotes, you can read additional comments there.

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