2009 – Page 8 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Photographs of Afghanistan: Orientalism or Critical Reflection?

Photographs can show us not only what was in front of the camera but also ways of seeing. Two recent photos from Afghanistan each present a scene and at least two different perspectives on what is seen. Although not representative of all the images being taken there, they can illustrate a dilemma confounding attempts to understand that distant country.

ahghan-police-silhouette

The caption at the New York Times stated that “An Afghan police officer stood guard Thursday in Kabul during a campaign stop by Ashraf Ghani, a presidential candidate.” But is it the policeman or his silhouette? Are we seeing his shadow cast on a wall, or is it him with everything but his outline obscured by the intense contrast between darkness and light? One can’t be sure whether we are seeing reality or a mirage.

This illegibility that comes from casting the Afghanis in darkness can be taken in at least two ways. We may be seeing the continuing projection, as if a movie on the wall, of a colonial world. The local (client) militia are there in our stead, complete with colonial cap and weapons supplied by the West, but they remain shadows rather than people, much less a force to be reckoned with. Dark, ephermeral, and mere cutouts of the Western military they are imitating, they represent only the outline of civilization against a barren backdrop close to the state of nature. Their culture is likewise located in darkness, signified here only by the enigmatic figure in traditional garb on the right–is he being guarded or merely a spectator? Mystery and danger are mingled together in the darkness that hides those who, for whatever reason, avoid the light–and enlightenment.

The darkness will be cooler than the sun-blasted street, however, and the photographer could be showing us not only what was there but also how little we can know about it at a glance. (The image will have been selected for its visual distinctiveness, of course, but that doesn’t solve the interpretive problem.) In fact, the silhouettes (whether actual or apparent) present a more accurate corollary to the caption: we are seeing exactly that–an officer standing guard–and nothing more. For the rest, you have to not only see more but know more. Stated otherwise, you know almost nothing about “Ashraf Ghani, a presidential candidate” from this photo, or about anything else of the event it depicts. Thus, the photograph does the neat trick of not only documenting what is there–which may include traces of colonial relationships still present today–but also highlighting our ignorance about what we are seeing.

In sum, the photograph presents one scene but two mentalities: Someone can see it through the lens of orientalism, where the exotic other is not quite real and so a blend of fact and fiction, mystery and danger, an object of fear or desire but never an equal; or one can see it with an awareness of the ignorance that comes from not being there, not knowing the language, and having to depend on this small fragment of an image to add to what meager knowledge we might have. Nor does one have to choose which interpretation is most real–that would be like trying to determine whether one is seeing a person or his silhouette. And, of course, if you have to ask. . . .

With that tension in mind, take a look at this photograph:

afghanis-in-kabul-cemetary

The Times caption identifies these figures as Afghans at a cemetary in Kabul. And so they are. And, as above, the adults (those wholly socialized into their culture) are black figures, unidentifiable save as types. Like the seated figure above, they have their backs to the viewer. Are they shrouded in their culture and still oriented toward the past, or are we being reminded of how little we know about this place and the people who love, grieve, live, and die there?

Photographs by Tyler Hicks/New York Times and Massoud Hossaini/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images.

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Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The recession has been bad for just about everyone, but it has been much worse for some than others. And surely among those hurt the hardest have been the homeless who have become both the frequent target of hate crimes as well as the aim of criminalization laws in 273 cities nationwide making it making it illegal to eat, sit, or sleep in public places. It is difficulty to fathom the fear that animates such violent reactions against those we might imagine are forlorn and hopeless—what is about such fellow citizens that evokes such animus? what makes them appear to be so undeserving of our charity?— but since it comes from both vigilantes (the rock) and the state (the hard place) we can only assume that it is driven by deeply seeded anxieties.

A photograph featured by the New York Times in a story on efforts to enact hate crime statutes against those who perpetrate violence against the homeless perhaps offers the hint of an answer.

The photograph is of a couple who live in an underground flood channel beneath the Las Vegas strip. The image is shot at eye level, the vertical angle neither high nor low, and thus nullifying any sense of a power differential between the viewer and the subjects even as it suggests some degree of identification; at the same time, however, the horizontal angle is slightly oblique, detaching the viewer from the scene, perhaps even casting him or her as an outside observer. The image is thus framed formally by a tension between identification and dissociation.

The social tension that simultaneously separates and connects viewers and the viewed is marked in other respects as well. The faces of the people are not recognizable, cast in shadows and blurred by movement, and yet they appear to be a normative heterosexual couple—perhaps even a family—as they share their neatly made bed with one another and their dog. It is clearly not a normal house or apartment. Distinguished by its low ceiling it has something of a cellar-like atmosphere, dark and damp. The unrecognizable graffiti strewn across the wall and ceiling makes even that an unlikely location however, suggesting something of a public space. And yet for all of that it does appear to be organized as a private “room” that bears many of the artifacts of modern living, including what looks to be a bulletin board that features colorful photographs—a reminder of or perhaps a hope for better times—and something like a desk. And note too the book that sits next to the man’s leg as he apparently has tired of reading in bed. Maybe he is listening to the boom box that sits behind the dog.

The most telling feature of the photograph is surely the clothing neatly hanging on a rod in the background. This sign of orderliness—here, a clear marker of civility—does not fit with our stereotype of the homeless as crazed, drunken or lazy vagabonds. These are not social outcasts who tote their worldly goods bundled together in a trash bag or orphan grocery cart or who mumble to themselves while walking down the street. They clearly know what it means to have a home. Indeed, these people could be us, the viewers, you and me. And therein, no doubt, lies at least part of the answer to the cause of our intense fear and loathing of the homeless, for as much as scenes like this lead us to utter the mantra “there but for the grace of God,” so too do they heighten the need for dissociation. And as history has shown, time and again, there is no more powerful mode of dissociation than casting about for scapegoats. But that, of course, has not been history’s only lesson with respect to the practice of scapegoating.

Perhaps we too as viewers are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Photo Credit: Isaac Brekken/New York Times

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SIght Gag: Can You Find the Obama "Birther"?

Credit: Benson/Arizona Republic

“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 the People Point and Shoot, What Do They See?

By guest correspondent Daniel Kim

elliott_erwitt-_obamas_magnum

Peer into the small, circular opening of just about any camera’s viewfinder, and you’ll see the familiar, rectangular frame through which the photographer composes her image. There exists, however, within contemporary point-and-shoot cameras, another frame that is often relegated to the background—quite literally. This LCD frame is positioned behind the camera and it provides the photographer with an instant relay, or feedback, of what unfolds in front of her.

Photojournalists employ a pejorative term called ‘chimping,’ which denotes the act of admiring one’s own photo directly after each shot. The term is meant as a critique of the photographer who may otherwise miss an important shot within the course of his self-admiration. I do not share in this criticism, but I do want to discuss the chimping that is now ubiquitous in snapshot photography. My concern—or hope, rather—is that we can transform how we think about, and therefore, how we go about the process of looking at one another.

If we are to consider how photography can act as democratic speech—as a practice adding to the richness of citizenship—then the snapshot photographer should be capable of a degree of reflection, during the act of taking the photograph, that we have yet to witness with any regularity within the culture of everyday life.

The photo above can be read as part of a continuing critique on photography’s affair with the spectacle. But the predictability with which this phenomenon now occurs, be it at government inaugural or rock concert, reveals just how entrenched the habit of seeing through a screen becomes to those determined to capture rather than look. Taking a step back, Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt contemplates the sight in front of him, and freezes the moment—on film. The image registers both the banality of capture and perhaps the attempt by a photographer to push the other way.

The LCD frame shares several features with the camera’s viewfinder, particularly the display of representation in real-time. But the rear-facing frame has an unmistakable resemblance to the familiar, rectangular borders enclosing what had counted as western art for centuries (i.e., that which was worthy of framing). The molded, raised plastic on the back of the camera forms a physical border, a tactile frame that cues us toward what it is that we should shoot. The framing convention of the past is now resurrected on the back of today’s common camera.

This repeated ‘shooting-and-looking’ at the ephemeral, frozen image is a two-step process that first addresses the photographic subject, and then immediately investigates the LCD frame for evidence of the photographer’s success. The photographer is now the viewer, and the viewer, the photographer. And because of the whiplash caused by chimping, the photographer now participates in a rash, malformed process—a process more interested in the ownership, or capture, of the camera’s subject than a meaningful study of another within his community.

Chimping, and the technology that enables this practice, strips away a photographer’s ritual of the past: an emerging likeness that magically appears under the red darkroom light bathed in chemically-diluted water (courtesy of Rochester). And this is not simply nostalgia. Nor is it a concession that the older craft is a better craft. Rather, the various technologies of photography can cause us to rethink, more thoughtfully, the ways in which the photographer participates in a measured exchange with not just friends and family, but also strangers we might get to know through the act of photographing. We need not cover up our LCD screens with gaffer’s tape (as some have apparently done), but we can ask how technology leads us to look in certain ways, ways that resist contemplation and limit relationships. And we might consider how to use the same technology to see each other anew rather than as objects to be consumed.

Perhaps, we should celebrate a different kind of ubiquity–the prospect of affordable technology for the purposes of capturing loved ones, strangers, and the details of everyday life. And significantly, as argued here, we should celebrate that the shared viewing of a small LCD screen to show off images to others, enacts and instigates a sense of community. The larger point is this: accessibility need not be at odds with a reconsideration of our photographic practice. Such rethinking can work toward the democratization of attentive, measured ways of photographing each other—looking at each other—for amateurs, enthusiasts, and professionals alike.

Photograph by Elliott Erwitt/Magnum

Daniel Kim is a former photojournalist and recently completed his first year of Ph.D. study in rhetoric in the Department of Communication, University of Colorado. He can be reached at daniel.h.kim@colorado.edu.

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Monster Mash During the Dog Days

The news on a slow news day is not like slow food–it’s often more like junk food. But there is better and worse in junk food, and the same holds for what the press serves up during the summer doldrums. Time Magazine recently put up a slide show about the zombie walks and related zombie festivals in various cities around the globe. (There have been several events this summer, along with auditions for the London Bridge Experience staged for tourists, while some of the photos document choice displays in previous years.) But I’m getting ahead of the show, which started with this beauty:

zombie-frankfurt

And he is gorgeous, isn’t he? As much as I like The Night of the Living Dead, there definitely has been a fashion upgrade in the ensuing decades. Purists might point out that there is little in the way of genuine corruption evident in this dude: the hair, piercings, beard, and bone structure are stylish in any case, while the make-up only highlights those bedroom eyes. Romance or Romanticism, he’s got it down.

But why look at a walking corpse, or act like one? As with the movie, these zombies might be providing a ghastly simulacrum of the “normal” society seen walking about during the day. The undead can display bodily cravings that otherwise are kept under wraps, and the reactions of those still not buried can reveal social norms that mutilate and kill. If so, this guy really is a model, because he suggests that fashion dominates modern life and that art is not enough to overcome the distance between one soul and another.

Unless, of course, you have the good sense to not take any of this too seriously. And so my admiration for the first image was topped by the good laugh I had when I saw this photograph:

zombies-london

These zombies are waiting in a cafe before their auditions in London. God, I love this tableau. Even the zombie life can come to this, another day of deadening routine. Worse, you have to believe they could be ordinary customers not in costume. He’s shell shocked by another day in a job that is sucking the life out of him; she’s already so bored with the relationship that she could croak. The living dead, indeed.

The moral of the second photo is that we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that ordinary activity is a sign of life, or that the living aren’t already succumbing to mindlessness. The moral of the first might be that artistic attentiveness, which is the opposite of mindlessness, can both liberate and isolate. Alive or undead, there are no easy answers in how to live your life.

Photographs by Johannes Eisele/Reuters and Stephen Hird/Reuters.their auditions.

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President Obama's Teachable Moment

My first impulse on seeing various iterations of this photograph—this is the official White House version—was to take a pass on commenting on it. After all, I surmised, it is such an obviously orchestrated photo-op that there is very little that needs saying—a point seemingly underscored by the fact that many of the numerous newspapers that showcased the photograph on their front page chose not to include any front page commentary beyond a simple caption (including the New York Times). And perhaps this was with good cause as most articles written about the event emphasized such key facts as the clothes being worn, the type of glassware being used, and the variety of beer being consumed (it turns out that the president is a “Bud Lite” man). But then I watched the Colbert Report and was reminded that the point of this meeting had something to do with what President Obama had called “a teachable moment.” And the more I looked at the photograph the more I wondered, what exactly is being taught?

The photograph shows four men sitting at a round table having a beer and engaging in private conversation. We know it is a private conversation in part because the four men have their attention directed towards one another and seem oblivious of the fact that they are being observed by a row of photographers some fifty feet away. But note too, that the very setting underscores the sense of privacy as the table is conspicuously set apart from the rest of the yard in what middle class homeowners might recognize as a patio carefully shielded from public view by trees and planters. The sense that this is a private meeting is further accented by the photograph as it is shot from afar with what appears to be a standard 50 mm lens that locates the viewer in public space at some distance from the event, and most importantly, clearly outside of hearing range. Indeed, there is a quality to the photograph that suggests that the viewer is something of a voyeur, intruding where they don’t belong.

Put simply, everything about this photograph signals that the event is a private moment, albeit one that was carefully orchestrated as a spectacle for the passive consumption of the national public. And, indeed, when someone in the media dubbed the meeting a “beer summit” the president was very quick to point out that this was not an official or even political event. Rather, he emphasized, “This is three folks (sic) having a drink at the end of the day and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to one another.” The point to note here, of course, is who got “to listen” — and who was consigned to view the event from a distance and without sound.

The lesson to be learned then, it would seem, is that racial tensions of the sort that animated this meeting are best handled as private matters, issues to be resolved by adults (not citizens) between and amongst themselves and outside of the public eye. And if the outcome is little more than to “agree to disagree,” well, what’s wrong with that? Perhaps this is what it means to live in a so-called “post-racial society.” The difficulty is that such an approach grossly simplifies the nature of the problem of race in contemporary society, and especially in instances where racial matters are implicated by the use of state violence to manage the citizenry. Following the meeting Professor Gates was quoted as saying, “When he’s not arresting you Sgt. Crowley is a really likable guy.” I assume that the comment was made with tongue planted very deeply in cheek, but in any case the irony is profound and very much to the point, for what is at issue is precisely how Sgt. Crowley behaves when he is enacting his role as an officer of the state, wielding badge and gun. And whether he was right or wrong in arresting Professor Gates, surely that should never be a private matter shielded from the public view.

Photo Credit: Lawrence Jackson/Official White House Photo

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Sight Gag: Mr. Gandhi's Neighborhood

Credit: Anonymous Post Card

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Conference: Feeling Photography

Feeling Photography
University of Toronto
October 16-17, 2009

“Feeling Photography” is an international, interdisciplinary conference that will bring together scholars working in a range of interpretive and theoretical approaches to interrogate the relationship between the affect, emotion, and/or feeling and the photograph. The conference will be held at the University of Toronto and is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of the United State and the Toronto Photography Seminar.

The conference features plenary addresses from the following scholars: Lisa Cartwright (UCSD); Ann Cvetkovich (UT Austin); David Eng (Penn); Marianne Hirsch (Columbia) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth); Christopher Pinney (University College, London); Shawn Michelle Smith (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); and Diana Taylor (NYU). We have assembled fifty-two papers from our fall CFP into sixteen panels featuring scholarly work from across the globe and the disciplines. Panel topics include Children and the Political Management of Affect; Feeling Together: Publics and Counterpublics; Emotional Geographies; Marketing Emotions: Loss, Fear and (Comic) Loathing; Racial Affects; Emotional States: Citizenship and Photography; Instrumental Images: Bodies, Cities and Empires, 1903-1918; Digital Affects; Public Intimacies; Touching Photo; Visual Witnessing: Photography and World War II; Feeling First: Documentary and Left Internationalism; Photography, Trauma, and the Ethics of Witnessing; Queer Affect(s); Affective Economies; Facial Tics – Faciality.

Early registration deadline for the conference is September 1st. To Register, and for further information, see www.torontophotoseminar.org. Our email contact is Feeling Photo.

Conference organizers are Prof. Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto; Prof. Thy Phu, University of Western Ontario; and Prof. Matt Brower, University of Toronto with the assistance of David Sworn, graduate student in History at the University of Toronto and Nina Boric, Munk Centre. For the Toronto Photography Seminar, see www.torontophotoseminar.org; for the Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Toronto, see http://www.utoronto.ca/csus/.

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What We Dare to See

A total eclipse of the sun is a rare phenomenon. In ancient times it was understood to be an omen or portent. Herodutus reports that an eclipse halted a battle between the Lydians and Medes, noting that “when they saw the onset of night during the day …[t]hey stopped fighting, and both sides became eager to have peace.” Would that it had the same effect in contemporary times. Superstitions of one sort or another continue, of course, particularly in tribal and polytheistic cultures, but from the perspective of the so-called “modern” world an eclipse is a natural event that manifests what we might call the “sublime,” an awe-inspiring spectacle, simultaneously beautiful and foreboding; as a sublime object a total eclipse commands our attention even as we know that looking at it directly is forbidden lest we risk losing our sight altogether. And more to the point, we almost always take the dare.

There was a total eclipse of the sun that crossed nearly half of the earth last week, cutting across most of East Asia from India to China and lasting for nearly seven minutes And we looked. Not directly, of course, but through various media that filtered our vision. Those in the direct path of the eclipse relied on indirect projection, smoked glass, exposed slide film or x-rays, and all other variety of solar filters. The rest of us have had to rely on photographic representations such as those available at The Big Picture to satisfy the desire to look at the forbidden object.

Viewing an eclipse through a camera’s lens or a view finder can be no less dangerous than unmediated observation (and maybe more so to the extent that it telescopes and magnifies the view), but that doesn’t seem to have deterred the various photographers who alternately took pictures of people viewing the eclipse and pictures of the eclipse itself. Interestingly enough, pictures of the eclipse are divided into two categories, those that feature various stages of the eclipse itself without any external reference points (as with the photograph above) and those that locate the eclipse against the silhouette of various cultural backgrounds, such as in a statue of Chairman Mao in Hubei Province.

Such photographs are interesting allegories for the naturalizing mystique of photography itself: a technology that presumes to separate the viewer from the thing viewed at a safe distance, even as it creates the illusion of being there. So we can presume to view (and in viewing to experience the “beauty” and “pleasure” of) a solar eclipse—or other manifestations of the sublime such as wars and catastrophes—without the risk of wound or demise. Of course here the silhouette of culture against nature emphasizes the illusion and thus reminds us of the real distance from the thing we are viewing, both physically and technologically. What we need to remember is that photographs don’t always foreground their artifice, and therein lies the true risk in what we dare to see.

Photo Credits: Saurabh Das/AP Photo; Stringer/Reuters

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Mandalas of the Secular World

Whether traveling or just hanging out at the beach or barbeque, summer is thought of as a time to actually look at the world. You might be watching an ant working at a giant crumb, or boats bobbing in the harbor, or accidental patterns in the crowd at the ball park, but you are looking at something instead of merely scanning as you would when going about your business.

Photography can do the same: not merely record the world but bring one to see it anew, if only because one is looking for more than a few milliseconds and without a specific objective in mind. So it is that we might value the image of a water droplet on a leaf or of ice cream clouds in a blue summer sky. But there is more than one way to open the doors of perception. Like this:

european-balloon-festival

This big, vibrant image is of a hot air balloon being inflated at the 13th European balloon festival at Igualada, Spain. But is it a photograph of a hot air balloon or of a mandala? Both, of course, and for some viewers other analogies may come to mind, say of an enormous Japanese umbrella. Part of seeing slowly is letting one’s imagination come into play. Even so, the mandala struck my mind as surely as the photo struck my eye.

But what kind of mandala is this? It would seem to be an accidental pattern more than a sacred object. Taken from another angle, the balloon would have looked much more deflated or conical or uninteresting, yet here the perfectly symmetrical form is perfectly centered to focus perception. The mandala is created not so much by the balloon but by the photographer.

That said, the photograph does nothing to draw attention to itself. The focus in entirely on the archetypal design. That form is not quite complete but, better yet, emerging smoothly from the ground into its own space. The ascension into an all-encompassing form is marked further by its relation to the figure in the center, who is dwarfed but not harmed by the larger power that he serves.

Come to think of it–and to look again–he could almost double for a priest performing a ritual. Perhaps there is a sacred dimension to this image of cosmological coherence after all? Art and nature are unified in a single design that induces serenity while offering an aperture to the inner light of a transcendent reality. The response to the photograph would be just what could be induced by ritual use of a mandala: a more contemplative state of mind.

Which you might need when looking at this:

cern-tob

This is from a photo-essay at The Big Picture on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under consruction by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The caption read: “View of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment Tracker Outer Barrel (TOB) in the cleaning room. The CMS is one of two general-purpose LHC experiments designed to explore the physics of the Terascale, the energy region where physicists believe they will find answers to the central questions at the heart of 21st-century particle physics.” True enough, but it’s still a mandala.

I would not say it is a particularly serene mandala, however. The machine looks angry–as if it were some cybernetic monster from a sci-fi flick, its tentacles lashing to and fro, all garish colors of a vital but alien biology, a gaping maw, and somehow I also sense both fire and frenetic ants. If it were a deity, it would be one representing voracious nastiness and other unsanctioned pleasures. But, of course, it is not that, and this is not the place to allude to Frankenstein and moralize about scientific overreaching. Instead, look again, longer, and see the unity of art and nature. Consider how the photographer has created another mandala for you, and other that may be a bit more challenging than some of the others. Or, one that can allow us to think about the not so serene parts of who we are, individually and as a civilization.

Two mandalas, each unique and yet the same, for you to use as much or little as you wish. As if on a summer’s day, with all the time in the world. . . .

Photographs by Susi Saez/EPA and Maximillien Brice/CERN.

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