Regarding the question of income inequality, JFK famously remarked that all boats rise with the tide.  But that was then.  In the global economy of the 21st century, it seems that low tide is the best some will ever see.

These workers are hauling a 10,000-pound cable to a beached ship at one shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh.   The photograph is part of a story at National Geographic on The Shipbreakers, which documents the dangerous working conditions and high profit margins that are business as usual in Bangladesh’s maritime demolition industry.

These shipyards are not exactly case studies in either worker safety or environmental protection, but they are marvels of recycling.  Enormous cargo vessels are striped of everything that can be carted off, and then cut to pieces so that the steel can be rerolled.  You’ve got to admire the extent to which the market can motivate additional use of industrial waste, and generate income all along the redistribution chain as it does so.  At some point perhaps the margins are such that demolition would not be profitable, but obviously we are not there yet as business is booming.  And workers are getting poisoned, maimed, and killed.  Even if the country is better off having these jobs, it also remains poor enough that unionization is not a likely option.  Obvious questions arise about just how amoral capitalism should be.  Are we really supposed to believe that these men–and boys–couldn’t be treated better?  Data presented in the article suggest that the industry can succeed in other countries with better regulation, but for the most part the prevailing international attitude remains the same: let the worker beware.

Up to this point, this post has been following the line of the National Geographic story, and particularly its logic of documentary photography on behalf of social reform.  The photograph is their signature image for the story, and it serves the documentary purpose admirably.  But it caught my eye for other reasons as well.  It is more than another image of substandard working conditions.  The image documents something else as well: the shift in modernism from a utopian to a dystopian trajectory.

To see what I mean, think back to the many images we have seen of ships, buildings, and other marvels of modern technology.  There are at least three characteristics of most of those images that are pertinent here: the technological marvels are displayed when they are new, and as  engines of progress, and as if they are controlled by their designers and operators.  There are exceptions to this optic, of course, but these are examples of the occasional mishap–the ship that ran aground or the plane covered with fire retardant foam because it went off the runway–not metaphors of a global distribution of wealth and poverty.

Now look at the photograph again.  The ships are old, beached, and yet looming over the workers below.  Even in their decrepitude, they seem to be the masters, and the men on the chain gang their slaves.  That would be a mystification, of course, but it points toward another form of invisibility: the owners of the yard, who are the masters, are not seen here (or in any of the photographs in the story, which were taken despite the company’s ban on photography.)  Enough is being revealed, however: the muck that mires and tires the men, the long expanse showing the many ships and the sea that will bring many more (not the rare exception, but the new normal), and above all the sheer magnitude of the steel hulks, which clearly are worth more and objects of greater interest than the men below.

Ironically, the demolition business may be a triumph of sorts for modern economics, but the photograph reveals a larger problem.  Modern technologies and economic development are as powerful as ever, but the idea that progress will bring prosperity to all may now be only a myth.  An idea that is being dismantled day by day–and if not in your neighborhood, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Photograph by Mike Hettwer/National Geographic.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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The slide shows now contain photographs of cherry blossoms, crocuses poking through the snow, and other Scenes of Spring.  The images are as predictable as the return of the season.  And perhaps just as welcome to many people.  (It snowed where I live yesterday, so I’m more than ready to see things bloom again.)  You won’t see many of those images being held up as models of Engaged Photography, however.  And that may be, if not a mistake, at least a missed opportunity.

This photograph is a wonderful image of spring, and we could just leave it there.  Let me use it as a case in point, however.  On the one hand, it is easy to disparage the image: It is merely pretty and so caters to “aesthetic consumerism”; it is a brief glance at a distant place seen without commitment, and so a form of “tourism” that sets up “a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world”; instead of bringing us closer to the world, it “anesthetizes” us to the real feelings of direct experience and contributes to “a depleted sense of reality”; instead of prompting artistic engagement or thoughtful reflection, it makes “distinctive and vivid artifacts out of cliches” and is “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”  (If you guessed that all of the quotations came from Susan Sontag, you would be right.)

On the other hand, that’s not exactly a generous attitude toward either the medium of photography or the world it depicts.  Frankly, those are not the first trees or flowers that I’ve seen, so claims about a glancing encounter need to be recalibrated against the shared experience of a common world that is part of the context–and contribution–of photography.  And the fact that a stock image is being recycled needs to be put in the context of the cycles of nature: photographs, like flowers, may be following deep patterns of repetition but are no less remarkable or welcome for that.  And so it goes: the arguments can be dismantled, but sadly the attitude too often remains–and, we should add, is recycled as much as any other cliche.

So why don’t we take a breath and look at the photograph again?  You are looking at Bluebells carpeting a forest near Halle, south of Brussels, Belgium.  Doesn’t it elicit a sense of wonder: say, that natural beauty could be at once so delicate and so profuse?  (Philosophy begins in wonder, according to Plato.)  I think it offers something more as well: a sense of immanence, that is, of how the world is suffused with an abundant indwelling of energy, divinity, call-it-what-you-will: something that is beautiful and sustaining, a presence beyond understanding, beyond representation, that nonetheless suffuses all of reality.

Photography always can be faulted for mediating experience that could otherwise be apprehended directly.  (Philosophical arguments remain, but let the point stand in terms of relative levels of everyday experience.)  But it also can make us aware of what eludes attention precisely because it is so much a part of our experience of the world.  A sense of presence, for example.  Something that is offered to us every spring, and every time we look at a photograph.

Photograph by Yves Logghe/Associated Press.

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Imagine that there had been no Eiffel Tower, and then one day we woke up and there it was, an alien structure planted on the banks of the Seine.  Had that happened, it might have looked like this:

The Tower has been up for 125 years as of this March, and it surely is one of the iconic structures of the modern world.  This can be faint praise, of course, because it also marks the fact that the structure has become one of the high water marks for kitschy knock-offs, from the tiny (and not so tiny) replicas that are hawked by street vendors every ten feet at the site, to the post cards, earrings, T-shirts, ceramic plates, and other merchandise you can find all over the world, to the giant replica (with hotel and restaurant!) in Las Vegas, to–not least–the billions of photographs that have been taken of what arguably is one of the most photographed monuments in the universe.

How, then, might one take a photograph that could somehow avoid being just another copy of the image that everyone already knows all too well?  The Tower is now always already a copy of itself, something that you can never see for the first time, an image of an image of an image that extends in every direction through media space, never to return to being a unique experience.  This was the problem that photographer Lauren Fleishman faced when she set out to commemorate the monument for Time.

Well, I think that with at least this one shot, she pulled it off.  (You can see the slide show here.)  In doing so, she may have gone beyond her own intention, which was “to show what the tower means to people, both Parisians and tourists alike.”  Now, let me be clear: that is exactly the right intention, as both icons and photographs are artifacts that acquire their meaning through use, that is, through the many ways that many different people use them to make sense of their world, enjoy their free time, or do whatever else needs to be done to get through the day or the era.  The Tower means what it means to people, and if that involves wearing it on your bracelet or embracing your lover in a gush of romantic sentimentality, I won’t be the one to say it’s been done before.

But that’s not what we have been given with the photograph above.  The Tower is too distant to be romantic, too imposing to be just another copy, too self-contained to be welcoming, and altogether too strange to be a familiar landmark in the cultural landscape.  Indeed, it has almost become somewhat illegible again, which really would get you back to the moment of origin, when people saw it being erected and then completed and were by turns astonished, enraptured, or appalled.  The strange achievement of lace-like ironwork, the fearful symmetry and incredible sweep from massive structure to sheer ascension as if into flight, the sense that it somehow represents modern, industrialized civilization but without any specific reference, message, or ideal being communicated, the uncanny lack of functionality in a structure that seems the perfect synthesis of form and function. . . . These and other features of the artwork will infuse in some small degree every encounter with the Tower, no matter how cliched, but here they are brought to the fore again, as if we were seeing it for the first time.

What is most important here, I think, is that “seeing it for the first time” requires seeing how it eludes comprehension, how its purpose is not obvious, how this most obviously constructed thing nonetheless appears to not be the work of human enterprise.  As much as modern culture elevates artistic creativity about mere functional values, we don’t like to think of ourselves as erecting monuments to meaninglessness.  And yet that is the beauty of this photograph: the city has all but disappeared, the monument towers above the few boats moored along the riverbank, and that gorgeous sky extends outward, as if for another civilization to arrive and inspect the ruins.

Icons provide familiar beacons for navigating the human world.  I suspect that one reason familiarity is so important is that we want to forget that we are the alien species.  That the human world is a built environment which is essentially meaningless on any other terms but our own.  That we make things meaningful both through invention and through endless copying.  That to understand humanity, we need to become strange to ourselves.  Such are the lessons that might be learned when a copy makes us see anew.

Photograph by Lauren Fleishman/Time.

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Well, cows, of course.  And cats and puppy dogs and little kids with ice cream cones.  And did I mention cows?

These beauties are crowding up to get a taste of that sweet, green grass, which smells soooo good.  OK, the photo probably was posed; that grass may have just been there, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  And is Cute really photography’s subject?  The short answer is no, despite the millions of cutesie images in family albums, on company bulletin boards, on Facebook pages, and elsewhere around the home, office, and Web.

And this blog stays away from Cute (OK, not entirely, there are exceptions, they can be explained. . . . ), so what’s with posting up these cows from a farm near Kirkjubæjarklaustur in south Iceland?   The not so short answer is that the image was selected because it’s a stretch from what I want to say about photography; if the argument can stick here, it will apply many other places as well.

So what’s the argument?  First, some context.  From its inception photography has been understood to be characteristically modern.  The photograph was a technological innovation, unknown to all prior civilizations, and it was experienced initially amidst “vast changes in society and in culture” created by startling advances in science, technology, industrialization, and urbanization (Alan Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, ix).  Nor has this representative aura diminished as modern life became saturated with images: successive developments from the hand-held camera to color photography to digitization have been symbols of progress and lightening rods for anxiety about change.  Where early commentators lauded its likely value to the sciences while debating whether it would help or harm the arts, today the scope of its influence is summed up in the claim that Photography Changes Everything.  In the supposedly innocent act of objectively recording the world, photography has changed the way people in modern societies see everything, and with that, it has changed how they think, feel, relate to one another, and otherwise share a common world, that is, a culture.

Such comprehensive change is what it means to become modern: the common world of photography is the world as it is observed and imagined within a modern society.  That culture is, by definition, ambivalent in respect to questions of value, for modernization has always been experienced as both creative and destructive, marked by both gain and loss, producing winners and losers, as these are inevitable outcomes of continuous and often radical change.  Famine disappears, but so does tradition.  Prosperity increases, but so does loneliness.  One can “see the world,” and watch jobs migrate to other countries.  So it is that photography bears responsibility for another burden, the weight of modernity itself as it presses down on society.  Both effect and cause of modernization, agency of both enlightenment and alienation, instrument of both civilizational progress and the deadening uniformity of a machine age, photography is in the curious position of being an inexpensive medium having very high stakes.

The quality of the discourse on photography probably turns on how it handles the medium’s relationship to modernity.  One reason the critical discourse authored by Susan Sontag, Alan Sekula, John Berger, and others has become so important is that it took photography’s relationship with modernity very seriously. What was equally important, however, was that the emphasis was on the negative consequences.  Whatever positive benefits had accrued were taken for granted, while the task of critique logically focused attention of what had gone wrong.  And apparently a lot had gone wrong:  As Sontag announced: “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.  Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution” (On Photography, p. 24.)

If that sounds a tad harsh, well, it is a tad harsh.  The authors of this blog believe the time has come for a paradigm shift, that is, for a more sophisticated discourse on photography that can better account for the full range of photographic experiences and effects, as well as the complexity of the relationship between photography and modernity.  It would take too long to do that in small steps, so let me set out a different proposition, one that doesn’t refute Sontag directly, but instead offers a different point of departure, different questions, and a different approach toward how those questions might be answered.  (Needless to say, that’s what this blog has been trying to do for several years, but perhaps success is just around the corner.)

And so we get to the argument: What is most important about photography is not that it requires machine age and now computer age technologies, or that its products can be reproduced cheaply (and now ever more cheaply) and widely (and now ever more widely).  Though shaped by these attributes, the single most important characteristic of photography is that its distinctive content is modernity itself.

Literature, painting, film and any other art are not locked in to the depiction of the present, and they are free to take up any topic or theme one might wish.  They are produced in the present and will inevitably reflect the conditions of their time, but they have the freedom to go where they will.  Their significance comes from being works of art, and only then from concerns about relevance.  Photography, however, is nothing if it is not about something, and about something that is happening now or that influenced the present or should be faced in the present.  Likewise, a literary or plastic art is defined primarily by its relationship to the history of that art.  Photography’s history, by contrast, is a very weak force.  Because the reality principle is primary, the aesthetic form has to cohere with that principle rather than bend the image too much along the lines of an artistic tradition.  More conventionally, most arts are valued as their work can become “timeless,” a transcendent status reflecting their mastery of artistic technique to fully realize a mode of perception or express an essential truth about human nature.  Photography is never timeless.  Instead, it is defined by its relation to the conditions of its making and always caught in the dilemma of recording a continually disappearing present.

These formal considerations are the least of it, however.  The relationship to modernity may be contingent, an accident of birth or development that bonded the medium to the self-awareness of its historical epoch.  It now is set, however: photography is the archive of vernacular life, displayed to allow reflection on how everyone is being affected by the ongoing changes that define modern societies.

Photography thus is a representative practice of modern life to a greater extent than Sontag and other critics imagined.  It not only carries all the defining features and troubling effects of modernization and democratization, but also casts all of modern life into a reflective space.  Photography doesn’t merely record modern society, it provides a performative re-enactment of how that society gets through the day, how it is made up of multiple ways of seeing from a stolen glance to satellite images of cities aglow at night, and whether it is moving into a future of continued progress or impending catastrophe.

Thus, photography puts the world on parade, and let’s hear it for parades, but its most important function is to mirror modern society.  Its subject matter is whatever is of enough interest to become framed by a viewfinder, but its content is the continuing and somewhat indirect discovery and questioning of what it means to be modern.

Which is why I decided to go with the cows. The photography may be Cute, or a sympathetic glimpse into a culture of animal husbandry, or an uncanny encounter with the idea that cows can be closer to pets than many people realize, or a direct contrast with the brutal feedlots of modern agribusiness, but it is something else as well.  It is another small part of the ongoing chronicle of modernity.  Of how modern civilization still includes living near large animals, and still has some space (albeit in Iceland) for them to be raised humanely, and yet clearly sees them as apart, more a part of nature to be managed for human use rather than participants within our social world, and (as alluded above) of how we know–but prefer not to think about–that most of them are used much more callously–and so forth and so on.  One could say it’s not really about cows at all, but about how modern society is disposed to think about and treat cows, right down to using the Cute Pet hook to get an audience in the first place.

In addition, the photo could be another, very small example of how photography changes everything, that is, how it is part of modern technological, economic, and cultural processes that continually destroy or transform the traditional world and then do the same to modern societies as well.  And an example of how those changes need not all be negative.  For example, we might consider how by becoming photographed the cows acquire a provisional equality of some sort with the species taking the photograph.  If so, perhaps a more advanced version of modernity, one of greater dignity for more species, is also suggested here, albeit as the exception during one of the great die-offs in natural history, a cataclysm caused by the unfettered expansion of modern civilization.

Like I said, the argument may come down to the cows after all.

Photograph by Erlendur Gudmundsson from the National Geographic Daily Dozen, March 11, 2014.

 

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We’re traveling this week and may even get some down time, so the next new post will be on March 24.  See you then.

Photograph by Daniel Karmann/AFP-Getty Images.

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