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Sight Gag: The Pulpit Bully

Credit: John Sherffius

 Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  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 might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look.

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Interactive Exhibition: What Happens Now?

What Happens Now?  Proposals for a New Front Page

What should we be looking at? The extraordinary number of photographs taken on September 11 made it the most photographed event in history and may have signaled the birth of citizen journalism. However in our impulse to record, we have not formulated new strategies to gain a better understanding of today’s pressing issues of a globalized world.

Ten years post-9/11, at a time when we are more overloaded with information than ever but cannot access it in a coherent manner, Aperture will create a visual café for collective social engagement with the question: What Matter’s Now? and turn it into an evolving exhibition space. During a two-week period Aperture will turn itself “inside out,” letting participants engage in the editorial process of weighing questions, ideas, and images, and proposing conceptual and curatorial solutions. Both invited guests and gallery visitors will be asked to participate.

The exhibition What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page will combine the crowd sourcing of images and ideas with the curatorial engagement of six experienced individuals, each hosting a table and a conversation within the space, where on corresponding walls each group will present its proposals for the contents of a ‘New Front Page’.  Hosts include a variety of visual image specialists: Wafaa Bilal, Melissa Harris, Stephen Mayes, Joel Meyerowitz, Fred Ritchin (who conceptualized this project) andDeborah Willis.

Contributions will be solicited from people around the world who are not able to visit in person. By sending files to dedicated email addresses set up for each table, as well as a general account, remote participants will be able to add their suggestions of imagery, multimedia projects and websites as part of the exhibition in-process.

Exhibition in progress: September 7–September 17, 2011; Monday-Saturday, 10:00 am-6:00 pm.  The exhibition is sponsored by the Aperture Foundation with support from Canon.  More information will be available soon at the Aperture website.

Photograph by Lorie Novak.

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London Rioting and the Descent into Feudalism

Riots happen more often than you might think around the globe, but when they happen in London the shocked response is always the same: how could that happen here?  This is the West, for Christ’s sake: civilization, democracy, and continual progress are supposed to be the order of the day.  Why would the people riot against representative government, and why destroy the businesses lifting up your own neighborhood?  The combination of a European locale and the seeming lack of reason have lead some to label the violence a peasants’ revolt.  The modern world is not supposed to contain peasants, and thus irrational behavior by the urban masses can be dismissed as a senseless throwback to more primitive impulses.

But what if the same analogy holds for the state?

These warriors could be time travelers from the past, transported in their armor, helmets, and shields to stand before Big Ben in some Gothic fantasy movie.  The photo has been sitting on my desktop for months–yes, that’s right, it is not from the most recent riots, and it, too, was taken in London.  I’ve kept the photo because it so perfectly captures a dark tendency that is spreading across the globe: what might be called a new feudalism.  In place of the egalitarian principles and shared prosperity of the twentieth-century social contract, we see a savage reassertion of economic power backed by ever greater investments in security forces.  And, whether accidentally or otherwise, those forces increasingly look like the private armies of the late medieval period.

And it’s not just London.  These knights are patrolling amidst the destruction last year in Vancouver.  Again, the one on the right could be riding out of the 14th century.  And we can still feel the effect that cavalry have when seen from ground level by relatively unarmed opponents.  As working people have been driven down in the economic order, they also have been driven down in the political process; taking to the streets becomes the only remaining option when the government has been captured by the same elites that are grabbing and hoarding the society’s wealth, common resources, and its future.

Riots always play to the worst elements in a society, but those are not their causes.  The late-medieval uprisings were the result of conditions that sound all too contemporary: expansion of the income gap between the rich and the rest, corrupt government serving elite greed, massive deficits caused by expensive wars, and environmental changes that degraded everyday life.  Yet it remains all too easy, even among those who recognize the underlying lesson of the analogy, to deny its full implication: the riots and the police response are merely matching symptoms of the same disease.  As the social order is transformed from a modern to a neo-feudal system, riots will become all the more common while money that could address the causes of the unrest will be poured instead into security.  Perhaps it should be no surprise that those security forces are looking more and more like something seen in a distant mirror.

So take a look at the look of the future.

I’ve lost the citation for the first photo, and Tin Eye can’t find it either; any help would be appreciated.  The second photo is by Rich Lam/Getty Images, and the third is by Stefan Wermuth/Reuters.
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On Vacation: In the Mosquito’s Gaze

Like a fair number of our readers, we’ll be on vacation for the first two weeks of August.  Travels include some time in Minnesota, where one becomes the subject of the mosquito’s gaze–surely an under-theorized facet of visual culture.  Thanks to the FEI Image Gallery, however, we can see the apparatus itself.

This electron microscope image is described as a frontal view of the compound eyes of a mosquito.  They actually don’t see very well, but that hardly matters as their antennae can sniff out your blood every time.  Perhaps the vacation can be used to think about incorporating other species and other senses into the study of visual culture.  Yeah, we’ll get right on that. . . . .

Posting will resume on August 17.

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Sight Gag: Sadly, This is No Joke

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  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 might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look.

 0 Comments

Casualties of War: The Toys

Remember the war?  Sure you do, but have you seen much of it lately?  With the worst threat to the country in the House of Representatives, inattention to the wars in the Middle East might seem understandable, but the casualties continue to mount.  So it is that we need artists who can help us both see anew and reflect on how much remains unseen.

Perhaps this plastic toy soldier will seem merely odd or offensive to some.  For those of us who spent countless hours of our childhood playing with World War II combat figurines, this molded amputee is a shock to the memory system.  I was at once transported back to childhood’s idyll and confronted with the harsh reality of the present.  What seemed harmless becomes patterned denial of the human costs of war, and real damage done today seems already on the way to oblivion.  The miniature scale, cheap industrial material, and obvious naivete of a classic war toy have been reworked artistically to capture how easily people can get used to the suffering of others.  If we imagine these toys being moved around on the carpet, we begin to grasp how war is insinuated into the small spaces and formative experiences of ordinary life–and with that, easily forgotten once preoccupied with the more pressing business of adulthood.

Unless you’ve served in a combat zone, of course.  Then you might have seen and done things that are hard to forget.  Were you designing the toys, the typical idealization might be reversed.  Instead of the usual figures of rifleman, machine gunner, and the like–straight shooters, never wounded, incapable of PTSD–you might think of what happened to the women, or your buddy’s suicide.  And if that isn’t something anyone should dwell on, it does need to be recognized, as these are casualties, too, and not ones that show up so neatly in the government body counts.

Most of the time, however, the heavy “collateral damage” is hidden away behind more reassuring images; images that work like toy soldiers, you might say.  And to get a sense of how common that is, all you have to do is look at these disturbing alternatives.

That’s the idea of this work from Dorothy, a design group not above making people think.  You can read more about the set here.  Fortunately, they are not for sale.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Citizen Action When Systems Fail

This photograph won’t win any awards, but it tells an important story.  A story within a story, to be exact.

The larger story is that a terrorist attacked both a government center and a civics camp in Norway, killing at least 72 people.  That story includes all the madness you might expect.  The attacker wanted to protect Europeans, so he murdered Europeans.  To oppose Islamic groups advocating authoritarian rule to enforce cultural conservatism, he called for an authoritarian takeover of European governments to enforce cultural conservatism.  He got as far as he did by exploiting the freedom and social trust that he deplored.

Sadly, we know that story all too well.  It also is a story of how ordinary precautions didn’t work, how the state does not maintain a monopoly on violence, and how even advanced societies are sure to fail.  Which is why the smaller story is so important.  The photograph captures what can happen in the aftermath of system failure.  One person is comforting another who has been wounded by the blast in Oslo.  She appears to have a head wound, and he is responding appropriately by applying a compress while keeping her head elevated.  His posture can’t be comfortable, as he is on his knees while supporting and steadying her body.  Equally important, he is comforting her: holding her closely, talking and listening, being deeply attentive to her person despite all the mayhem surrounding them.

The scene is a moment of civic intimacy.  They are framed by the ordinary decor of the city street: pavement, a metal and glass door, the signage, chair, and trash bin of a cafe, yet they are closely attuned to one another.  Nor is this a merely personal incident, as we can see from the shattered glass strewn across the sidewalk.  She hasn’t simply fainted or had a seizure, and the person helping her may not have known her at all–the caption identified him as a “passer-by.”  They were strangers who have been thrown together by the blast–and his kindness.

His action is underscored by their ambiguous ethnicity.  Is he Norwegian?  Is she?  Could he be one of those dreaded Islamic immigrants?  Fascist ethnic typing is scrambled by this act of compassionate citizenship.  For whatever passports they might have, he has made both of them citizens: strangers having obligations of equality and assistance regardless of other differences.  As Ariela Azoulay argues, any photograph implies that relationship; here the citizenship conferred by the camera reinforces what is already evident on the street.

The Chicago Tribune’s report on the attack was on page 26 of the Sunday edition.  I can’t believe that the story of a fundamentalist killing 72 people in a European country would have been buried had the attacker not been Christian and blond.  (Don’t like the Christian label?  Then stop labeling Middle Eastern terrorists “Muslim.”)  The Tribune is another example of system failure–in this case, the way the story will be underplayed in most of the American media.

Fortunately, as important as institutions are, we don’t have to rely on them alone.  Disasters demonstrate again and again that, amidst large-scale disruption, small-scale action by ordinary citizens is vitally important to limiting damage and restoring order.  The photograph above is one example of true citizenship.  More will be needed, and in response to disasters ranging from terrorist attacks to economic catastrophes.

Photograph by Scanpix/Reuters.

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The “Advance of Civilization”

I had the opportunity this past week to visit the Museum of Westward Expansion which is part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and is housed underground beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.  According to the museum’s website it  “preserves some of the rarest artifacts from the days of Lewis and Clark” and allows visitors to “explore the world of American Indians and the 19th-century pioneers who helped shape the history of the American West.”  Imagine my surprise then when I came across the floor to ceiling photograph shown below in the middle of the first exhibit room dedicated to a timeline of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

You will of course recognize it as the iconic image of the “mushroom cloud” explosion over Nagasaki, the second of two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August, 1945.  Since this event has no obvious connection to the Louis and Clark Expedition, I expressed my surprise to one of the museum’s docents who responded by noting, “… the museum is [also] about the advance of civilization as part of the nation’s movement westward and we want to show some of the key moments from the twentieth century.”  And indeed, not far from this display one finds a comparable floor to ceiling photograph of Neil Armstrong saluting the U.S. flag on the moon.

In as much as the space program was originally framed as an extension of the American frontier—marked here by the stage coach—the photograph of the moon landing makes a modicum of sense, but the explosion of a bomb that obliterated a city killing nearly forty thousand people and set off what became known as the Cold War’s “arms race” does not sit easily with the theme of the “advance of civilization,” and its connection to the notion of “westward expansion” is even more difficult to fathom.

Upon more careful inspection, however, I noticed that the photograph of the mushroom cloud, which otherwise lacked any caption or explanation, is inscribed with a quotation from Alfred Einstein in 1939 that reads: “… in the course of the last four months it has been made probable … that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium elements would be generated … This new phenomenon … would lead to the production of bombs and it is conceivable, though much less certain, that extremely powerful bombs of a new type constructed.”  The quotation stands in odd opposition to the photograph itself inasmuch as it frames the bomb as a less than certain outcome of a scientific advance in nuclear technology.  The bomb may have been “much less certain,” but sure enough here it is as a documented, photographic reality.

One might want to read this as a ham handed expression of  America’s “manifest destiny,” and I don’t want to ignore the implications of that possibility.  But I think there is another and more subtle point to be made.  Einstein’s words precede the explosion by six years.  And as such they caption the image in terms of what Hariman and I have described elsewhere as “modernity’s gamble,” the wager that the long-term dangers (and anxieties) of a technology-intensive society will be avoided (or managed) by continued progress.  Yes, the ability to “set up a nuclear chain reaction” is a mark of scientific and technological progress, but of course it comes with a risk—the possibility of the production of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” That in this case the possibility became a catastrophic reality is mitigated by the necessities of the gamble itself, i.e.,  such risk is the cost of progress in an advanced technological society.  And as the second photograph purports to show, sometimes the gamble pays off.  The problem, of course, is that those who paid the costs of such gambles with their lives are nowhere to be seen in either photograph.

In short, the exhibit articulates our history of westward expansion with our cultural vow to technological progress, and as such it reinforces our commitment to the rationale of modernity’s gamble.  More specifically, it contributes to the domestication of our memory and understanding of the explosion of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki by casting them as simple “advances in civilization.”  And that should give us pause.

Photo Credit: John Louis Lucaites

 

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Sight Gag: Branding

Credit: John Sherffius

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  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 might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look.

 

 0 Comments

Reading the Ruins of an Ephemeral State

Guest Post by Bryan Walsh

While ruin gnaws at the promises of American democracy, photography serves as an invaluable technology for visualizing our increasing vulnerability to social and political abandonment—and just maybe for defending against it.  Consider the above image of a classroom in Detroit’s St. Margaret Mary School: empty desks are scattered throughout, littered course papers amass on a burnt and charred floor, lectures and exam dates are faintly scribbled on a chalkboard, closets are stripped of their possessions, windows are broken and boarded-up, lighting fixtures dangle from a moist and moldy ceiling, and what appears to be a broken ruler lies on top of a desk in the bottom right of the frame.  Despite being reduced to rubble and debris, the objects are nonetheless glaringly clear.  The wide-angle offers a perspective to the viewer that encompasses the totality of the classroom while the deep focus enhances the details and intricacies of the landscape and its objects.  The composition of the photograph effectively brings the space to life, offering all its complexity to the careful contemplation of the viewer.

But what does this photograph want us to contemplate?  Note the spatial layout of the remnants of the school: the chalkboards, windows, papers, closets, and most of the desks are relegated to the periphery of the room.  Complimented by the circular formation of the desks and the directionality of the lines on the windowsills and chalkboards, the fallout of the classroom orbits around an invisible but nonetheless noticeable center.  Indeed, there is something missing here and the photograph renders  it a ghostly presence that glares back eerily at the viewer.

Put bluntly, St. Margaret Mary School is haunted by the everyday activities that once animated it.  Even if you didn’t live in northwest Detroit, or attend Sunday services at the St. Margaret Mary parish, or endure lessons taught by an Order of Sisters, the landscape and its remnants are identifiable for most Americans: I once sat at those awkward desks and wrote childish nonsense on those papers; I gazed in reverie through those windows; my teacher scribbled on those chalkboards and demanded my attention with that ruler.  In short, this photograph displays a powerful paradox: what is so overwhelmingly visible within these spaces is also what is so painfully absent–the everyday activities that sustain and are sustained by a flourishing and hopeful city.

Despite its collapse, this  photograph of an abandoned classroom in the St. Margaret Mary School  calls forth the memories of a more promising past.  Such is the topic of concern for Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photographic project “The Ruins of Detroit.”  Depicting Detroit’s dilapidated metro-stations, schools, theaters, banks, industrial facilities and other civic spaces, Marchand and Meffre’s photographs invite a range of interpretations that put past and present in tension with one another: they could evidence the extent of Detroit’s civic and infrastructural abandon, or that of a weathered and beaten civilization, or for that matter they could even foreshadow the impending doom of American Empire.  Invoked by the images, such memories are nostalgic and mournful, at least insofar as they eulogize a flourishing cityscape buzzing with prosperity and modern mass production.

Detroit now stands (leans?) as a veritable wreckage of infrastructural and social disaster: not only have a quarter of its population fled the city in a desperate search for employment, but city officials and enforcement agencies have displaced families from their homes and boarded-up entire neighborhoods, leaving it in nothing less than a thorough state of collapse.  Just last spring, roughly 5,500 teachers and 250 administrators received pink slips, while seven public schools have been shutdown, and 45 others have been packaged to charter school developers, 18 of which will be closed if they don’t find a buyer.  This photograph of  a single classroom in the St. Margaret Mary School does not tell this part of the story, but it does provide resources with which communities can make sense of—and intervene in—the perpetuation of personal injury, social inequity, and political abandonment.  The image, then, does not  “exploit a city’s misery” through a “decontextualized aesthetics of ruin”; rather, it tangles the past with the urgency of the present, reminding viewers to acknowledge both the vulnerability of the people of Detroit as well as the imperative to do something about it.

Photo Credit: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit

Bryan Walsh is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University. He can be contacted at btwalsh@umail.iu.edu.

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