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Mar 11, 2012

China National Day: The Flower Detail

Before concluding that the mass public is mesmerized by political spectacles, it might help to note that photojournalism includes a fair share of backstage shots.  And some can be taken in broad daylight.

This image verges on the visual joke–just think of how you might caption it using the word “butt” or “ass” or otherwise going down that path.  Jokes aren’t serious, by definition, but some very good photographers have not been above them, with Elliott Erwitt being the master of the genre.  Erwitt’s example suggests that the photo above isn’t merely a joke, but something related to that: not quite a parody, but mildly comedic comment on a more conventional form.

But what is it that is being cut down to size?  I think at least two stock images lie behind this photo.  One is the image of goosestepping troops that symbolizes authoritarian regimes.  (I’ve posted here and here on how these images are faring in the 21st century.)  In the photo above, the conventional boots, arced legs, pointed toes, and uniformed entrainment are all present, but firmly planted on the ground and immobile instead of striding forward as disciplined menace-in-motion.  And instead of seeing right arms swinging in unison while the left hold weapons (“arms”) upright, we see only legs and asses.  Worse yet, instead of all heads cocked in the same tense direction, all eyes on the great leader at the reviewing stand, these guys are headless.  Decapitated obedient bodies still symbolize the mass man and mechanized slavery of anti-communist demonology, but the image now is a long way from threatening.  After all, we’re looking at the flower detail.

National Day provides plenty of more impressive images of troops marching in formation, heavy military equipment on display, and all the features once found in the Western press after every May Day.  Those concerned about global security would rightly point out that the troops and weapons on display are real and receiving more funding every year, and that the event was held at Tiananmen Square, and perhaps any bemusement should be tempered accordingly.  But militarization is a global problem in another sense as well, as it sucks up ever more resources despite the fact that war has becoming ever more unnecessary and stupid.  Thus, spectators East and West need to be reminded that it’s one thing to enjoy the show and another to buy the whole package, and that those images of goosestepping troops help sell the package on both sides of the street.

So it is that the political spectacle itself may be another object of commentary in the photograph above.  Instead of seeing only the staged performance, we are taken backstage to be reminded that it is just a show.  Instead of seeing a display of power, we are reminded that the performance depends on ordinary people who are vulnerable in spite of their uniforms.  It will still be a good show, but now we can keep it in perspective instead of seeing a National Security Threat in every parade and Escalation in every salute.

And just to gild the lily, I’ll put up one more photograph from the same role.  This one seems the more direct parody, and a more direct put-down, but let’s wait a moment on that.

Now the goose step is revealed.  Are you terrified?  Of course not.  The stride is limited by the soldier’s load, but more than that, they are carrying flowers, gigantic bouquets of flowers.  On a carpet, no less.  OK, Defense Department, can you match that?  Do you have the latest intelligence on garlands?  Are you prepared to fight a two garden war?

This is another version of a backstage shot in a public space: the photo positions the viewer as if in the wings while watching the actors march out onto the stage.  The double vision of seeing them both backstage and on stage creates a slightly comical, skeptical frame for the event.  And once again the joke turns serious.  The better political vision in this image comes precisely from how the soldiers appear ridiculous.  Would that all soldiers were so: that is, that all the troops were doing nothing but competitive displays for peaceful onlookers.  Not great material for the video games, but one of the keys to the 21st century is figuring out how to turn military expenditures, and cultures, toward less lethal forms of service.  So is is that marching in parades, at least if you are in the flower detail, might be an important military exercise after all.

Photographs by Andy Wong/Associated Press.

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Peter Turnley, “La Condition Humaine”

Chelyabinsk, Russia, 1991

Marines in basic training taking part in an exercise known as the “Crucible.” Camp Pendelton, Oceanside California, 2002.

La Semana Santa. Seville, Spain, 2010

War in Iraq, near Basra, 2003.

“La Condition Humaine,” an exhibition of sixty photographs by Peter Turnley, has opened at the Galerie Agathe Gaillard in Paris.  The show provides a retrospective on Turnley’s work over several decades.  If you can’t get to Paris, you can see some of the work at websites that also offer an interview or commentary on the show.

The exhibition closes on November 3, 2012.

Photographs courtesy of Peter Turnley.

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Free Market Football

It’s not a particularly good photograph, but it’s spot on as a metaphor for Republican ideology.

The caption could read, “Scab referees blow the biggest call of the Seattle-Green Bay game.”  One of these replacement workers is signalling a touchdown, as if the Seattle Seahawk receiver had caught the ball, while the other one is signaling a touchback, as if the Green Bay Packer defender had caught the ball, which he did.  Earlier in the play, the receiver had committed offensive interference, which was not called.  I probably don’t need to mention that this was the final play of the game and that it decided the outcome.

The reason competent referees are on the field is that the NFL owners have locked them out.  Anyone can do their job, right?  Well, no, not even close.  The lack of competence and the corresponding deterioration of the game has been evident from the start, and it has gotten worse, not better, as the weeks have gone by and the stakes have gotten higher.  Monday night’s incident may break the stalemate, as now Everyone is incensed and saying so.  I hope the pros are let back onto the field, but once that happens a teachable moment will be over.

What the referee lockout demonstrates is nothing less than the stupidity of excessive deregulation.  Referees are regulators, after all: nothing more and nothing less.  And their work is very important: if the players (and coaches, are you listening New Orleans?) don’t follow the rules, you don’t have a more aggressive or competitive or entrepreneurial game–you don’t have a game at all.  More to the point, those who are watching the game–people like spectators and investors–lose confidence in it and go elsewhere.

So, the refs need to be there, and they need to be competent and have sufficient enforcement power and have adequate resources such as good salaries and pensions so that they can work effectively and without corruption.  When they work well, you largely don’t see them, although someone is always a bit aggrieved because they got caught, and everyone can prosper.  When they don’t work well, just about everybody loses.

Business culture loves to compare business to sports.  The CEO is the quarterback, we’re all on the team, discipline and hard work and uniforms are expected, . . . you know the score.  But the comparison disappears the minute government regulation comes up.  Then we are to pretend that no rules are necessary, that any regulators should be underfunded lest they become tyrants, and that rules benefit only the weak and not the strong.  Tell that to the Packer who actually caught the ball.

As a friend likes to remark, we need fair markets, not free markets, because there is no such thing as a free market.  The choice is between fair markets and unfair markets, good referees or putzes.  Only then is the better athlete likely to win, and only then can other people trust the game.

Which brings us back to the photograph.  It might seem to be a bad photo, and certainly so by the standards of sports photography.  The focus isn’t on the players, who are clumped awkwardly after the play has ended.  The refs call for attention, but because one is looking at the other whose face is obscured, the focus is diffused there as well.  And then there is everything and everyone else: the background is packed with other figures, tiered masses of spectators, stadium decor and signage, and even a stray hand waving in the upper left.  Contrast this with the daily output of high definition, close-cropped, freeze-framed dramatic clashes and balletic action shots, and there’s no contest.

Nonetheless, it’s a good photograph. As we’ve noted elsewhere, photographing economic realities may require giving up other aesthetic conventions to get inside banal, ordinary, everyday experience.  That’s where the work is, and that’s where the damage is done when the Lords of Finance and their ideologues rig the game.  By capturing how the decisive competitive moment actually depends on competent application of a set of rules, and how not just the few players but the general welfare benefits from fairness, the photograph provides a lesson in how a modern society should be governed if it is to have sustainable prosperity.

And so maybe life is like sports.  If you want to enjoy the game, there have to be rules and people paid to enforce them.  If you’re not adult enough to understand that, fine, take your ball and go home.  But don’t spoil it for the rest of us.

Photograph by Joshua Trujillo/seattlepi.com, via Associated Press.  You can read more about the incident here.

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Lying: The Essential Republican Strategy

No matter how wealthy, no matter how handsome, any American presidential candidate is still out there on a smile and a shoeshine.

He has to be a pitchman, a crowd-pleaser, the guy who can sell snowballs at the North Pole.  Anyone with any experience in electoral campaigns knows that, and we all ought to cut the candidates some slack when it comes to stretching the truth or getting tripped up by an open mic.  Even so, whatever the concessions made to wrapping oneself in the flag and playing the role of Someone for Everyone, there are limits.  At some point, you are supposed to be talking about real problems and workable policies, and you are supposed to be making sense, not talking nonsense.

And eventually there is a tipping point.  It seems that point was crossed this week by the Romney/Ryan campaign, and what had been a long series of increasingly implausible or disturbing or offensive campaign statements has become a cascade of distortions, false insinuations, and outright lies.  The latest news in this regard–but soon to be outdated, I’m sure–is that the claims of massive campaign donations far in excess of Obama’s were, well, just a tad inflated: OK, actually five times greater than what Romney could actually use on his own race, with the rest committed to other Republican campaigns.

And I’m shocked, shocked to hear this.  Just as the Bush administration was not going to be fettered by the “reality-based community,” the Romney/Ryan campaign, in the immortal words of their chief pollster, Neil Newhouse, is not going to “be dictated by fact-checkers“?  Google “Romney lies” or “Ryan lies” or “Tea Party lies” and you’ll see that there is a cottage industry developing just to keep track of the deceit.

At some point, however, you have to ask: why are these guys lying so much? The short answer is always the same: because they have to pander to the far right, Tea Party, Young Guns, Jacobin core of the contemporary Republican Party.  Those are the people who controlled the nomination and are the activist base for the election, and they seem to thrive on delusion.  OK, fair enough, but the general election is all about the swing voters in swing states, and by definition they don’t qualify as right-wingers.  So, why do Romney and Ryan have to lie so much?

The answer is simple: they are caught in the contradiction of running for office in a democracy, but in order to govern on behalf of the wealthy.  They need mass support to get elected, but their policies benefit only the few and the very few.  Those policies involve the abandonment of public institutions and infrastructure, and destruction of the ideals and the social contract that have been the basis of America’s promise and its prosperity, and only to continue the massive transfer of wealth upward that began in the Reagan administration.  They would make most Americans poorer and social mobility ever more difficult, so that those who have the most could get most of the rest.

And who would vote for that?  As a result, the campaign for a feudal America has to lie.  You might say we need a new word in the language: a word for policies so far removed from reality or decency that they cannot be advocated without lying.

We don’t really need a label, however, but rather better, more centrist Republican policy proposals–the kind that don’t have to depend on deceit–and a similar return to more sensible public discourse.  Indeed, I remain open to the idea that Republican candidates can tell the truth.  And if they want to prove the point, they can start any time.  If that means that they have to adjust their promises, alter their policies, return to bipartisanship, and make a good faith effort to help the American people thrive in difficult times, so much the better.

Photograph of Romney on the stump in Omaha, Nebraska, May 10, by Jae C. Hong/Associated Press.

Bonus link: Don’t miss “A Conservative History of the United States” at The New Yorker.

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Someone New is Working the Edges of a Post-Racial Society

Now that the Chicago teachers strike has been resolved, the Monday morning quarterbacking can begin.  One question of likely interest to readers of this blog is whether the Chicago Tribune should have refused to publish this ad:

The interesting thing here is that the Tribune did refuse to publish the ad.  Given that the paper has not exactly been known to be either a supporter of unions or a bastion of unbiased journalism, or in such sound financial shape that they can kiss off full page ads, they must have believed that something important was at stake.  Supporters of the ad say that the reason given was the ad’s “‘racial overtones,'” but that “‘the message of the ad has nothing to do with race.'”

And it is even more interesting to consider that they may both be right.  It seems that both sides agree that the photograph of The Stand at the Schoolhouse Door was all about race.  Alabama Governor George Wallace may not have liked unions either, but he was standing to stop racial integration–first, last, and always.  But a photo of injustice and intransigence in one domain such as race relations certainly could be appropriate to use in another domain–for example, progressives would not be likely object to the image being used to oppose gender discrimination.  And enough change has occurred socially and demographically that one can imagine that a group once oppressed now could themselves be part of an organization that is blocking reform.

Indeed, some progressives have argued unions are obstructing progress. Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer set out this conundrum in two sentences: “Unions are a crucially important part of our economy and society.  Unions have become overly protectionist and are in need of enormous amounts of reform” (The Gardens of Democracy, p. 7).  So, one could conceivably use a racially charged photograph with a post-racial intention.  And one might believe that the message of the ad had nothing to do about race, because “message” would mean what those making the ad intended to say.

But as we all learn, it is easy to say more than one intends, not least because the meaning of what is said (and shown) also depends on how it is interpreted.  It could well be that the Chicago Tribune was connected closely enough to its readership and its community to believe, perhaps correctly, that this photo from the civil rights era could be incendiary or at least distort and damage the negotiations and public discussion by making race more of a factor than was right.  More to the point, some might have felt that its use was a slap in the face for African-Americans: indeed, how could the ad not be insulting when it equated union negotiations over working conditions with white resistance on behalf of a society that was profoundly unjust, inhumane, vicious, and destructive, and suggested that poor schooling was not the legacy of racism and poverty but rather the work of a multiracial union.

To which the reply would be, again: “But that’s not what we meant.”  And it might not have been; if you look at the other ads put out by The Center for Union Facts, they do not look like a Tea Party organization.  I mention the Tea Party for good reason, as it has provided many–way too many–examples of people making patently racist jokes, drawings, Photoshopped photographs, and other vile statements about Barack Obama and then claiming that they were not being racist.  And maybe they really did believe that about themselves: to lack that much sensitivity requires staggering deficits in both knowledge and empathy, but ya know. . . .

But I digress.  Some scholars of rhetoric argue that persuasion, and particularly the ethical dimension of persuasion, comes down to our assessment of the speaker’s character.  (See, for example, For the Sake of Argument, by Eugene Garver.)  Thus, once you get enough evidence of a person’s character, you can start making judgments about whether to trust what they say, and what they say about what they say.  Some of that evidence is provided in the saying, but sometimes you simply can’t tell.  In the case before us, one photograph intentionally taken out of its original context may not provide enough evidence to judge.  Or once again, where you stand may depend on where you sit.

In any case, we might want to avoid becoming too wrapped up in one photograph and one ad.  On the one hand, it is but one example of many, many cases of how people–particularly conservatives, but some progressives as well–are working the edges of the idea that the old identitarian politics no longer apply since Obama has moved beyond them.  On the other hand, there are many photographs that suggest that something beautiful already has happened: that a multiracial society really is emerging in the US.  If that is so, it doesn’t resolve the controversy about the ad, or about how to best improve urban schools.  It is interesting, however, that to see that change you need look no farther than the Chicago Tribune slide show on the teachers strike.

 

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Watching Men About to Die in Aleppo

We typically forget that photography–and life itself–happens faster than the blink of an eye.  And death, too.

The camera caught these Syrian rebels at the instant that they were bathed in fire from a tank blast.  The moment is uncanny: they stand exactly as they were a a split second before, and yet the fire and shock wave is already unleashed upon them.  Before, they had been picking up their weapons in anticipation of the tank that had been reported coming into the vicinity.  Now, they are caught in the fraction of a fraction of a second before being killed.  It’s as if the camera has isolated the invisible crack in time between cause and effect.  And between life and death.

The men caught in the light died from the blast, while the one darkened to a silhouette escaped with minor injuries (if we don’t count the psychological damage).  The camera uses both light and darkness, but there as elsewhere we depend most upon the light.  Yet here the flames both reveal and kill, while the dark clouds of dust and debris in the next image obscure the rest of the dying while sparing the lone survivor.  (The sequence of still images and a video are  here.)  As with war more generally, things are inside out or backwards, defying our ordinary sense of moral order.  Being in the right and dedicated and prepared didn’t help one bit, and men who seem to be living in the fire without harm are about to die.

I won’t pretend to account for all of this incredible photograph, much less the remarkable sequence of images that comprise the visual story.  Discussion is already underway–for example, at Michael Shaw’s prompting at BAGnewsNotes–and there are a number of issues in play.  For the record, I don’t think there need be any moral failing in showing or marveling at or being moved by the image.  The men and the moment are treated with respect, nothing disturbing beyond the inescapable fact of their being killed is shown, and that fact is so salient that there is little room to aestheticize the violence.  In any case, one set of moral qualms can displace other resources for understanding and judgment.

To that end, let me make two quick points.  The first is simply that the image is a perfect example of what Barbie Zelizer has identified as the genre of the About-to-Die photograph.  I won’t summarize her extensive analysis of the genre, which you can read for yourself in her excellent book, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Suffice it to say, however, that there have been many images that confront the public with this unique moment, and that they can offer the spectator an opportunity to reflect on the event itself, and on how it is or is not tied to the narratives and other interpretive contexts that surround it, and how our knowledge and reactions depend on the camera and the larger apparatus of the news, whether for good or ill.

One can ask these questions any time, of course, but some moments seem more fraught with significance than others.  One reason the about-to-die photo matters is that it reveals how any moment can be incredibly significant regardless of how it fits into a larger narrative, geopolitical conflict, or moral order.  There is no other moment left for those in the photograph above, and by ignoring it one would demean life itself.

My second point is that the image above has both literal and metaphorical value, not least because of how it exposes a moment of unexpected rupture.  I’m writing in the immediate aftermath of the attack on American consulate in Libya, and so it is easy to think of a flash point, and of the world changing in an instant, and of specific individuals going from life to death senselessly.  With each of the four Americans who were killed at the consulate, there will have been a moment and then another and another where things went from bad to worse, until each got to the last, thin crack in time.  With each attack, wherever it occurs, nations around the globe pass through a moment when hidden causes explode violently, and the idea that we can live within the flames is exposed as sheer illusion.

Photograph by Tracey Shelton/Global Post.

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Shards of Memory After 9/11

Yesterday most of the world didn’t stop to commemorate the loss of life at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  That’s OK: it’s a big world, and there is suffering enough to go around.  Perhaps that’s why I found many of the images from New York to be somewhat garish: crowded, busy, cluttered with symbolism, and ultimately self-absorbed, they were awkward photos of a scene that already is more about the present than the past.  So let me offer another image in their place.

This isn’t New York, but rather a street in Kabul.  That’s one way that 9/11 is still a global event, and one where the loss of American lives and treasure continues.  The splintered glass is from a school that was lacerated by a suicide blast next door. The blood—well, that didn’t come from the masonry.  Those shards will have flown like shrapnel.  Terrorism, like torture, like any war in a civilian environment can traumatize not only with the weapons themselves but also by turning the furniture of everyday life into instruments of horror.

For the same reason, scenes such as this can lead absurdly in the other direction to normalize violence.  Step back (figuratively) just a bit, and the image looks like a plate prepared at some tony restaurant: the small entree, a detritus of smaller pieces strewn casually as if nature’s work, and then the delicate drizzle of sauce to give it that aesthetic touch, framing the composition as a serene moment of transitory elegance in the art of living.  “Lovely presentation, isn’t it?”  (No way that is going to fill me up.)  “One can see the Japanese influence.”  (Perhaps I can grab a burger on the way home.)

The joke is lame, but it points toward something better.  The abstraction in this composition provides important elements for serious remembrance and reflection.  Lives were shattered and can never be put back together again.  Rich, red blood continues to be spilled, many times over the death toll of eleven years ago.  The closely cropped image reminds us that just about everything else is outside the frame, part of a much bigger world where life goes on regardless of what happened to you and yours, or to those who died this past week, month, or year because the root causes of terrorism still haven’t been addressed adequately and the unintended consequences of US military actions still haven’t been remedied.  The image is both elemental in its concentration on the ground-level facts of violence and comprehensive in its suggestion of how much goes unseen, misunderstood, and mishandled.

The abstraction works in another way as well.  Glass is an optical instrument, like the camera taking the photograph. Perhaps the lens supplies a missing wholeness, a restoration of order in the aftermath of its destruction.  One can indeed trace lines, a vector, an organic outline in the array from lower left to rear center, but that is a small consolation.  Better, I think, to see each sliver of glass as a fragment of perception or experience or memory.  Violence attacks not only individuals, but also our collective resources for remembering and empathizing and understanding, that is, for seeing a good life held in common.

Each piece of glass stands for some small part of a larger understanding of the events of that day and of the long decade behind us.  Every time a bomb goes off, more lives are broken.  Every time violence expands, the bonds of community are damaged.  Every day the blood-letting continues, the world’s collective capacity for peace is diminished.

Photograph by Johannes Eisele/AFP-Getty Images.

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Petrochemical America: Exhibition and Book

Petrochemical America
Photographs by Richard Misrach
Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff

Exhibition: August 25 – October 6, 2012, Aperture Foundation 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor, New York, N.Y. 10001

Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “speculative drawings” developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region.

This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of specific environmental abuses in the region, and expands into an extensively researched study of the way in which petrochemicals have permeated every facet of contemporary life in America.

What is revealed over the course of the book is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole. Misrach and Orff’s collaborative examination of Cancer Alley points to the past and into the future, implicating neighborhoods and corporate states. It also aims to participate in new thinking about how we can best divest ourselves of our addiction to petrochemicals, and to sketch the outlines of a more hopeful future.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his latest published monograph, shows a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, which garnered Aperture a nomination for a 2010 Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the Year, and won the award for Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Another standout success was his 2007 large-format Aperture book On the Beach, a sublime visual meditation on the relationship between humankind and the environment, which is as spectacular as it is unsettling. Earlier, Aperture published Violent Legacies, which addressed, in part, the contamination of the desert due to nuclear testing. Richard Misrach’s other books include Golden Gate, released by Aperture in spring 2012, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iconic bridge.

Kate Orff (born in Maryland, 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity, and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.

The book can be purchased here.

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Real Democracy in Charlotte, North Carolina

It looks like the Democratic National Convention is going to really push those who like to think that there are no real differences between the two parties.  For one, the Democrats won’t have to make stuff up to make their case.  For another, instead of seeing one, very narrow slice of the American demographic, this week you can see everyone else.  And you also can see this wonderful photograph.

 

Three men are sharing a laugh at a shoe shine stand.  The one up high is George Davis, who is married to a delegate from Georgia.  George from Georgia probably has got nothing to do this week but have fun, and it looks like he’s making a good start.  His shoes are being shined by William Robinson, while Isaiah Jones is free to wholeheartedly enjoy the joke.

The electrical connection looks a bit shaky, but otherwise the place is in nice shape.  No one is rich, but no one is starving, either.  The guy on top probably makes a fair amount more than the others, but not enough to make anyone uncomfortable.  The three gentlemen have had different lives, but they have a lot in common as well.  And one of the things they have in common is having lived in America as it was transformed from a Jim Crow society to a nation where Barack Obama is president.  No wonder the American flag is proudly displayed across George’s shirt.

This is a beautiful photo, because it captures the beauty of a democratic society: one in which simple association among equals can happen anywhere, because no one has to pretend that they are inferior to those who happen to have more wealth or status or authority.  Preachers of prejudice and exclusion love to say that progressive ideals of equality, social justice, and the general welfare would nullify differences in achievement.  That is nonsense, of course, but it is dangerous nonsense.  The men in the photograph aren’t pretending that they all make the same amount of money or have the same connections to political power.  They don’t have to, as they already share something far more valuable: the joy of civic friendship, which is the capacity to trust one another enough to enjoy life lived in common.  That’s not a uniform way of living directed from above, but very much the opposite: a life of small differences, shared suffering, and the human comedy as it can be seen and enjoyed in everyday life.

And that is why this photograph from outside the convention hall is all about the speeches being delivered inside.  And about other speeches as well, not least the vicious screeds by Hank Williams, Jr. and Chuck Norris, who claim that the “Muslim president” will bring “a 1000 years of darkness.”  (And have you noticed how bad these guys look?  Hatred and vicious idiocy must really wear on a man.)  Against a politics of fear, exclusion, and expropriation, the Democratic party is, for all its problems, at least moving forward toward the full realization of the American dream.  We should not forget that some would destroy that dream, but it is even more important to recognize how it is already here.  Not everywhere, but here and there, North, South, East, and West, down the street and around the corner, whenever two or three people can enjoy a common life secured by freedom and equality.

Photograph by Linda Davidson/Washington Post.

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Conference/Workshop on Photography, Nature, Human Rights

Capture 2012: Photography, Nature, Human Rights

Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop at Yale

October 12-13

CALL FOR PAPERS

Photographic documentation has become a key tool in the fight for human rights and against political violence, mediating responses to global zones of distress.  Photography is often thought of as a way of disseminating evidence of human rights violations in order to call for immediate action.  Capture 2012 proposes to divert attention to another aspect of these broadly circulated images:  Human rights violations are never captured independently of their harmed environments.  At the same time, violations reported around the world are directly related to the devastation of natural resources like air, light and water, whether interpreted as catastrophic events or gradual declines.  Communities on the move after the Fukushima Daiichi explosion, or North African migrants landing in the Italian island of Lampedusa, were only tenuously represented in the media in connection to the ecological crises in the background of their flight.  However, those visual representations suggest new understandings of the conditions of visibility, the environment and the relationships among them.

From another perspective, photography can be perceived as subjected to parallel environmental transformations, as in the case of smog darkening the photographic images coming from places like Linfen, China.  We hope that by linking photography to the environment and to environmental critiques, we could start a discussion that enriches the discourse on human rights as a way of sharing the world and sustaining it.  We wish to bring together challenges to the claims of human rights and critical analyses of photography.  Therefore, we intend to include images and ideas in our conversation as a way of connecting theory and practice, scholarship and art, activism and writing.

Capture 2012 invites contributions and interventions from various fields and practices such as: international law, journalism, history of art, photography, political science, geography, literature, sociology and cultural studies.

Topics of visual and/or textual presentations may include, but are not limited to:

–          Human rights and contemporary visual culture

–          Cameras and activism: theoretical and practical perspectives

–          Human rights and animal rights in dialogue

–          Nature photography and the meaning of disaster

–          The politics of earthquakes, floods, and droughts

–          Environmental sensibilities in visual communication

–          Visual representation of uclear power in contemporary media

We seek short papers (10-12 pages) or visual presentations that will advance the conversation around the issues that Capture2012 embraces.  If you wish to present your work at the conference, please send a 300 word abstract (Word format only) and a short bio no later than September 15, 2012 to capture2012.conference@gmail.com

Keynote speakers: Anne McClintock, the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW-Madison, and Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University and Director of Photo-Lexic International Research Group, Minerva Center, Tel Aviv University.

Capture 2012 is supported by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights, the Yale Law School, and the Yale Photographic Memory Workshop.

 

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