Apr 23, 2008
Apr 28, 2013
Jan 24, 2011
Mar 14, 2014
Oct 09, 2013
Feb 12, 2008

Portraits of that Alien Thing: The Human Being

You may not have noticed, but part of the current renaissance of photojournalism is the continuing development of the slide shows offered by online newspapers and magazines.  Before waxing nostalgic about the glory days of Life and Look, spend some time at the Boston Globe‘s The Big Picture, the Atlantic‘s In Focus, and similar sites.  You will see that the editors are doing more than slapping together the news of the day or putting up human interest eye candy.  I won’t say they are immune to those tendencies, but most of the time they are going one better to help create a richer and more visually literate public culture. And speaking of culture, when Alan Taylor at In Focus put together a set of photos under that label in response to reader requests, he included this portrait of Mitt Romney.  Taylor will have had many requests, but he had a stroke of brilliance in selecting this subject for a show on culture and this photo for what would otherwise be the most conventional of images: the candidate profile.

Taylor reports that he looked for a photo “that let you see him [Romney] as more of a person, less a politician.”  So he was trying to get us to see through the usual framing of the political candidate–you might say, to actually see him as he is, rather than to simply see the stock character in the standard pose.  Although Romney hasn’t stepped out of role–he’s still carefully groomed, tactically controlled, precisely calculative, and even a bit wary–the portrait creates a sense of something like intimacy.  Indeed, he seems exposed rather than scripted, and despite the fact that his shirt, haircut, and tan are thoroughly conventional, he is inescapably a single, specific person.  This is the image of someone who has a history, personality, and mortality all his own.  Being cast into the glare of the public stage clearly frames, envelopes, and may consume him, but he is who he is nonetheless.

But is this culture?  Aren’t we told that culture is art and artists and other things that, whatever else they might be, are more unusual, unconventional, and even otherworldly than a mainstream presidential candidate.  Something like this, for example:

This photo from a Comic Con event (which would draw fantasy, sci-fi, and gaming enthusiasts) would seem to fit the bill for “culture.”  A woman has costumed herself as a character from the “Portal” computer game, and whatever she is, she is not yet another politician.  No wonder that she was the lead image for the slide show: her ghostly hair and skin, space-age clothing, and cyborg eyes create an uncanny effect: she is both human and not human, image and reality, organic material and living artifact.  In other words, the conjunction of 21st century folk art and good photojournalism has given us a different kind of exposure: we can see how the human being could become alien to itself.  That is, we can imagine how human and alien are in fact kin, like image and reality, perhaps.  Nor does this recognition scene have to be set in a fantasy world.  Right here and how you can look at this alien thing and realize that she is human.  And thus that what is human is from another vantage also alien.

Just like the first image.  The best reason they both belong under the “culture” label is that they are the same image.  Each one reveals how human being depends on self-representation that is inherently uncanny, were we but to step back and notice.  So it is that I want to push back a bit against the caption provided at In Focus, for the verbal text puts a familiar face on what otherwise can be a troubling image.  Romney is a real person, of course, so this is not a question about veracity.  But it is reassuring to be told that someone who is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to present his image to hundreds of millions of people is in fact still an individual human being, one of us.  I think that deep artistry of the photography is this: at the same time that it is presenting the individual person, it also is showing us how much we don’t know about Mitt Romney, and how much we rely on a very few stock features to feel comfortable with him, and how much the public’s relationship with him will remain a relationship with a skillfully crafted image.

If you don’t buy it, reverse the order of looking at the images; then look carefully at her to see how she is in fact a specific individual, and then do the same amount of work to see him as an artful composition, as someone acting like a person.  This is not done to claim that Romney or any politician is somehow more phoney and less substantial than the rest of us.  Degrees of performance still exist, but my point is precisely that he and you and I could not do otherwise than to exist as both actor and character, familiar and strange, human and alien.

So it is that he perfectly mirrors her, and she perfectly mirrors you.

Photographs by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press and Leon Neal/AFP-Getty Images.

 0 Comments

Greece and the Two Faces of Austerity

It seems that Greece has become the poster child for social democracy–except that the posters are being made by those who want to dismantle it.  We Must Not Become Like Greece, conservative papers say as they preach the virtues of austerity.  Of course, they don’t mean that we should beware profligate private sector investments and other dangers of global finance.   No, no, the problems all stem from large public sector commitments backed by the foolish belief that government’s first priority should be providing for the general welfare.  Instead, the road to prosperity should be one that separates winners and losers. Thus, Greece is being pushed to get on the right path, and it seems that the whole world is watching.

He walks along the street in Athens dutifully, a picture of anxious, unhappy resolution.  The rumpled clothes don’t quite match the hard briefcase, as if he’s going back to the office on what should be his day off.  He looks like austerity in motion: “I will work harder, damn it, I will work harder, and I will spend less.”  Or is it, “If I work harder for fewer benefits, I might keep my job”?  Or “If I try again, I might get a job, any job, maybe”?  In any case, he is just passing through while the great, green eye stares impassively.  Two public arts have fused perfectly here: the mural remains unchanged on the urban wall while the camera can capture how the space changes moment by moment.  A man who might have seemed self-contained now appears to be small and vulnerable and perhaps disposable.  An image that might have seemed idiosyncratic now can symbolize the terrible gaze of godlike global institutions.

A man tries to get through the day but now is weighted with an additional burden: he has become an object to be viewed, scrutinized, and judged.  In that context, the mural’s Escape key is particularly troubling, as the otherwise human visage becomes at best a cyborg and more likely a soft illusion masking a hard technocratic regime.  One might hit the button, perhaps even as an act of defiance, but all that does is reset the system, not destroy it, and it will blink on again just as relentlessly and devoid of compassion as before.

One eye mirrors another, just as camera mirrors computer, and so the viewer reproduces the gaze emanating from the wall.   All eyes are on Greece.  Caught in the glare of transparency, it is exposed to the full force of market logics.   Enlisted as part of a neoliberal public demanding economization over all other values, the spectator is unwittingly complicit in an act of ritual humiliation at the alter of profit.

This is the first face of austerity: the face of the global financial system that stares and judges and punishes.  It is all eye, a single instrument of enormous power, and one that can stare unblinking at the storm that we call progress.  But there is another face as well.

This one is in Kalamatta.  It is a face of pain and rage.  These emotions have no one home, and so this image could be of the man’s enemy as it is about to devour him, or it could be ventriloquizing all that is pent up within him ready to explode as he is being beaten down by economic hardship.  He could be merely thinking idle thoughts on a cigarette break, and unaware of how close he is to destruction; or he could be finally and willingly sinking down into that dark bright place where everything changes because there is nothing more to lose.  Crouched as if waiting for the assault, his hoodie partially shrouding his face, he could be prey or predator.   Either way, we are seeing the other face of austerity: the face of the suffering and violence that is its gift to the world.

Of course, Greece had problems enough of its own making–stagnation and cronyism not least among them–and some reform certainly is needed.  But the artificial demands and phoney lessons now being promoted are more than simply mistaken and dangerous models for working out of the global recession.  By demanding austerity, one can literally lose sight of what constitutes prosperity. As The Economist recently reported when surveying five decades of economic convergence: “In fact, most countries that were middle income in 1960 remained so in 2008 . . . Only 13 countries escaped this middle-income trap, becoming high-income economies in 2008 . . . One of these success stories, it should not be forgotten, was Greece.”

Whatever the face of austerity, it remains a very open question whether anyone is really seeing Greece: what it is, where it is, how it got there, and how it can continue to prosper.  In fact, those questions could well be applied to any country.  Unless economic policies are crafted with an eye to specific histories of successful public and private sector cooperation, and with concern for both global markets and local consequences, too many countries might end up wishing they were like Greece.

Photographs by Cathal McNaughton/Reuters and Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP-Getty Images.

 1 Comment

Exhibition: World War II Veterans

Jonathan Alpeyrie
World War II Veterans

Anastasia Photo

166 Orchard St.
New York, NY 10002
212-677-9725

April 11–May 12, 2012

Anastasia Photo is pleased to present World War II Veterans, featuring photographs by Jonathan Alpeyrie.  The exhibition features 210 rich portraits of veterans from 61 nations.

Anastasia-Photo specializes in documentary photography and photojournalism. The gallery also serves as a center for discussion and portfolio review. To connect these photographic images and the events they depict, Anastasia Photo endows each exhibition with a related, on-site, philanthropic organization. This exhibition supports Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America <http://www.iava.org/>.

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday–Sunday, 11:00 a.m.-7:00 p.m.

 0 Comments

The Day After Earth Day

Sunday was Earth Day 2012, and I spent part of the day in my garden.  If I had to live off of that garden, I’d die.  Fortunately, environmentalism is well past the back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s (or was it the 70s?).  Everyone recognizes that environmentally sound practices depend on complex networks of social interaction and economic interdependence.  Of course, unsustainable use of the planet also depends on vast networks of production and distribution, so negotiations can be complicated.  One way that humans deal with complicated realities is to turn to myth; a related option is to turn to art.  Garry Winogrand did both at once in this photograph:

It was taken in 1964, and it is not your typical Earth Day image.  Those who know the 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, might wonder whether the photo inspired the desert scenes on the plant Anthea, which was suffering from a catastrophic drought.  Perhaps not, but the sci-fi reference seems apt anyway.  Winogrand has brilliantly captured American cultural modernism at one of its most unworldly moments.  Nor is the catastrophic implication entirely absent, as the photo was taken at the White Sands National Monument, which is not far from the White Sands missile range.

But I digress.  Of all that is remarkable about this image, I am most captivated by the contrast between the comprehensively barren landscape and the sense of sublime possibility extending over the horizon.  Instead of seeing the white desolation as the last place, the end of the line, a dead zone in which they could not possibly live, it has become instead a launch pad to another world.  Everything is pointed or aligned toward the vanishing point, while mother and son are already walking forward as if entranced, caught up in something like the narcosis of the deep.  The structure on the right could be a second vehicle, ready to hover and then glide through the desert air into the beckoning atmosphere.  The image captures how modernism is always about the future–a mythic current that can carry people to the ends of the earth and beyond, but also one that can make any environment no more or less than a place for moving on.  No matter how empty the place, no matter that one day a car will use up the last drop of gas on earth, the belief persists that humanity will keep moving forward, and that fuel-intensive technologies will have done no worse than to bring us to the point of transcendence.

Winogrand need not have thought of any of that when he took the photo, but his artistry nonetheless reveals how modernism is suffused with its own mythic yearning, an attitude that both motivates and rationalizes driving well past sustainable resource use.  Of course, one must give complexity its due, as well as acknowledge how many benefits have come from moving beyond perceived limitations–benefits ranging from this computer to lifting millions out of perennial poverty.  But other attitudes are needed as well, for prudential use of the planet will only come from balancing different perspectives.

Another artist is at work here.  Andres Amador creates giant sand sculptures on beaches.  Although it looks inked, he uses only a rake.  The beautiful designs suggest a deep correspondence of art and nature, technique and flow united in the universal movements of earth, air, water, fire, planets and stars, seashells and galaxies.  Not unlike scientific modernism, one might say, but with a difference.  The painstakingly crafted design that you see was intentionally created during low tide.  The artist labored knowing all the while that everything would be washed away, returning to the natural ebb and flow of the planet itself without human intervention.

There is Earth Day with all its good intentions and images of a better, greener life, and then there is the day after, when most people return to largely unabated, unsustainable consumption of non-renewable resources accompanied by toxic byproducts.  The question is not how are we going to stop doing that today–our current practices were determined some time ago and we have next to no choice otherwise.  No, the question is what is going to be done today and tomorrow that will shape what people are doing years from now.  The answer may depend on facing what artists in varied media have revealed.  One option is to see the arid plains and polluted waters as just another stepping off place to a dazzling future somewhere over the horizon.  Another is to realize that everything will revert to nature eventually no matter what, such that beauty and longevity alike depend on what we do in the meantime.

Photographs by Garry Winogrand (Estate of Garry Winogrand and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco) and Andres Amador, Ocean Beach, San Fransisco.

 0 Comments

Exhibition on the Political Image

Lüski | Azoulay | Efrat & Brutmann

STUK kunstencentrum, Naamsestraat 96, Leuven, Belgium
April 17 > June 3 2012
An exhibition featuring work by
Aïm Deüelle Lüski
Ariella Azoulay
Eitan Efrat & Sirah Foighel Brutmann

This exhibition brings together works by Israeli artists and a curator of different generations. They all reflect on the state of photography and the political image.

Since the mid-1970s, Aïm Deüelle Lüski has invented a variety of cameras, each conceived especially for a particular phenomenon or event to be photographed at a specific historical moment. His work is aimed at deconstructing the vertical structure of photography and generating different ways of thinking about the photographic encounter. Ariella Azoulay presents Potential History, a series of photos, texts and a video on the history of Israel/Palestine. This work articulates a new way to relate to history through what Azoulay calls “potential history”. These parts of te exhibition are curated by Ariella Azoulay. STUK also presents Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmanns Printed Matter, a film that displays the conflation of private lives and contemporary geopolitics. Brutmann’s father André was a freelance press photographer who captured images of his wife and children on the same film rolls he used to document the Israel-Palestine conflict.

opening | Tu 17 Apr • 20:00
open | We & Th 14:00-21:00, Fr – Su 14:00-18:00
closed on Sa 26 & Su 27 May

On Tuesday April 17, 18h30, STUK and the Departments of Arts Sciences and Philosophy of KU Leuven present a lecture by Ariella Azoulay and Aïm Deüelle Lüski. Participants can also join in for the opening reception afterwards.  For more information contact the STUK Arts Center, info@stuk.be.

 0 Comments

Never One Photo, Never-Ending War

All art relies on conventions and public arts especially so.  Shared assumptions and known patterns are necessary for artists and audiences to connect at all, while they also provide a basis both for more nuanced communication and for innovation.  Mass audiences are particularly dependent on conventional forms for the obvious reason that they have to span enormous differences in education, experience, and perspective.  Whether watching TV, going to the movies, reading a who done it, or looking at the photographs in the newspaper, you can expect to see things you’ve already seen many times before.  This character, that plot, another government official or another demonstrator.  Been there, done that, but what else is there to do?  Even so, those writing the stories and taking the pictures find a way to capture the event–and the audience–to articulate some important idea or emotion that can draw people together.

A soldier and his wife share a last tender moment before he ships out for a year long deployment in Afghanistan.  I don’t have to do a close analysis of this photo: you know what it means.  Heartbreakingly tender, her caress will not be felt again for a long time–if ever.  Her hands have to slip away, as if gravity itself were working against them, and she will know only emptiness in their place.  The delicate, intelligent tracery of her fingers can’t protect the head and neck that already seem exposed, vulnerable, all too susceptible to the unexpected.  As private life gives way to public service, coupling can be undone.  Thus, the image is both ideological and critical: citizenship is militarized and heteronormative while family and state mutually care for one another, but everything shared might be sundered and happiness lost to another sacrifice for a purpose that, like their faces, remains unknown.

The departure of the troops is a stock event within the conventional narrative of military service.  (That narrative runs visually from the recruiting poster to the war memorial, but that’s a topic for another day.)  Likewise, the kiss is a familiar part of private life, from the first kiss to the wedding kiss and beyond.  Here the photographer has artfully captured the pathos of a private moment in a necessarily public space, and the scene is both instantly recognizable and yet resonant with emotion.  Just like this photograph from 2007:

Let me be very clear: I am not criticizing either photographer.  The later photo very likely was taken with no knowledge of the first, and both are beautiful works of public art.  Each evokes the same pathos, relays the same obligations and ideologies, exposes the same conflicts and contradictions, and invites the viewer to a range of responses from direct identification to critical reflection.  A few differences remain, but that is not my point.  Instead, the pairing reveals two facts of public life: There is never only one photo, and this war has gone on too damn long.

The first point is simple, but bears repeating (one might say).  There is never one photo, because any photo is in part a repetition of prior images.  That’s why you can recognize it and respond to it reliably.  Despite the ability of the photograph to record a unique conjunction of time and space, photojournalism remains performative: that is, it displays patterned behavior and engages people in social relationships.  Its purpose is not singularity or even artistic uniqueness, but rather communication, which will have to rely on things taken for granted and held in common.  Indeed, to appreciate the photographer’s skill, one has to first understand how difficult it is to even reproduce the convention well, much less find some variation on a theme to achieve a distinctive capacity for thought, feeling, and connection.  Photography is repetitive because life itself is repetitive, and any cultural or political work has to begin there.

But not all patterns are the same.  There is a kiss, and then there might be a lifetime together.  There is war, and then there is endless war.  One photo is like another five years later because one deployment is like another five years later.  Five years of lives shattered and treasure lost forever, and for what?   Some things, it seems, never change.

Photographs by Bill Tiernan/The Virginian-Pilot/Associated Press and Mike Morones/Associated Press.  For another variant, see this post.

 0 Comments

Lost and Found: Exhibition of Photographs from Tohoku

LOST & FOUND: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku

Monday, April 2–Friday, April 27, 2012
Aperture Foundation
547 W. 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001

Aperture Foundation presents LOST & FOUND: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku, a profoundly moving exhibition of photographs recovered from the devastation following the two epic natural disasters and the subsequent nuclear catastrophe that took place in the Tohoku region of Japan a year ago, last March.

This exhibition offers us an opportunity to think about the relationship people have with their photographs, and also to consider the significance of photographs themselves. LOST & FOUND: 3.11 Photographs from Tohuku reflects the transitive nature of existence, the power of nature over humankind, and the reconstruction of a hopeful future.

The Lost & Found Project began as a volunteer activity called “Salvage Memory,”  which aimed to recover the photographs that were damaged by the tsunami and return them to their owners, by sweeping the dirt off, rinsing them with water, and taking pictures of the photographs to create digital data. More than 500 people volunteered for this project, and 2,176 photo albums and 29,808 photographs were returned to their owners.

Unfortunately, more than 30,000 photos were too badly damaged and could not be returned. These are the photographs that comprise the exhibition, in order to give people an opportunity to see them, in the belief that they carry powerful messages. More information about Lost & Found is available here.

LOST & FOUND: 3.11 Photographs from Tohoku was previously shown at Hiroshi Watanabe’s Studio-Gallery in Los Angeles, and parts of it will travel to London, Paris, and Milan, with different installations in each location, making each exhibition a unique and personal experience.

 0 Comments

Chaos Unfolding (Documenting Small but Insidious Acts of Violence)

One of the interesting elements in the myth of Pandora’s Box is that all the evils of the world could be contained in a single jar.  One can imagine any small thing containing a world in miniature–for example, the Greek word kosmos could mean both universe and ornament, and William Blake spoke of seeing a world in a grain of sand–but usually the shift from microcosm to macrocosm is in the direction of order and the revelation of something divine.  But why should Evil not work the same route?  That, anyway, is one thought that comes to mind when I look at photographs such as this one, where a process of disruption, disorder, ragged violence, and pandemonium sees to be slowly unfolding from what was not long before a relatively benign urban space.

There was the street surrounded by its buildings, then the normal routines of commerce and civic life, then the choreographed standoff of political protesters and riot police in Jerusalem during Palestine’s Land Day, and then a provocation (whether from one side or another) and then another and a response and the escalation continues and then minor mayhem begins–nothing too dramatic but unfurling discord, insult, and injury and then what you see above: bodies flying, a kick being delivered to someone whose back is turned, horses hooves clattering dangerously toward someone rolling on the ground. . . . .

Not all the evils of the world, of course, but something bad coming out of what was otherwise just a container, a space that could include peace or domination, prosperous cooperation or a cycle of violence.  It all depends on who controls the box and what they put into it, I suppose.  And that’s the irony, for the result is not control, but rather chaos.  Small scale chaos may not seem too dangerous, but it spreads all the more insidiously for that.  The person being kicked will not forget the blow, those who praise themselves for their restraint will never understand what it feels like to be driven to the pavement, nothing in the scene itself will be altered to make it less likely to crack open again to release still more trouble.

Capturing this sense of the slow unfolding of disorder is an achievement and one that is purchased at the cost of giving up many other elements of a “good” photograph.  One’s gaze is pulled this way and that as if part of the action, and yet everything is far away and thus distant emotionally as well; the scene as a whole is messy and one’s attention is drawn to incidental details (the brown shoes, for example) rather than a decisive action within a coherent narrative.  But these deficits are an important part of the image.  The violence, disorder, and slow wreaking of the world that is going here and in many other sites of “low-intensity” conflict today exists in part because it has become so woven into the fabric of ordinary life, because it persists largely without direction toward resolution, and because it can retract back into civic containers rather than become too persistent and visible to be ignored.  By forgoing the dramatic action shot to document a small, stupid, street fight, the photographer has actually captured a much more extensive process of spreading disorder and civic decline.

There is an aesthetic here, one that gives up on formal values of artistic excellence to capture how violence is being unloosed in ordinary life.  And with that, one also can see how the capacity to act is reduced to coping within environments that are degraded in more ways than one.

Again, a somewhat distant view of a messy scene, but then as you look more closely, horror.  A man is carrying the body of a suicide bombing victim in Afghanistan.  He looks like a body snatcher, but more likely a working man is just doing his job.  Dead weight, rough ground, a maze of partial barriers and military vehicles–it can’t be easy, even if you’re used to it.

This image also might be capturing the process in reverse: the way everything (well, almost everything) gets put back into the box for awhile.  Bodies to the grave, hostiles rounded up and imprisoned, streets swept and buildings repaired, the surface will look much the same in a day or two, but for the traces of the bombing around the edges.  Once again, one might be able to imagine living in an orderly world–a world where little things can unfold toward something larger and more beautiful.  Until, that is, the next blast or the next confrontation on the street, when ordinary places can once again be undone to release the evils stored within, as if by malevolent gods.

Photographs by Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press and AFP/Getty.

 0 Comments

Conference on the In/Visibility of War

The In/Visibility of America’s 21st Century Wars

The 2012 Annual Cultural Studies Conference at Indiana University

Bloomington, Indiana, April 12-13, 2012

Thursday: Keynote by James Der Derian, “‘Up Close and Dirty’: Uncloaking the New War Machine,” Theatre Arts building, BLTH A201, 7:00 pm

Friday: Film Screening of Human Terrain, BLTH A201, 7:00 pm

Saturday: panel sessions by Robert Hariman, John Lucaites, Michael Shaw, Claudia Breger, Lara Kriegel, Valerie Wiesdamp, Jody Madeira, Jon Simons, and Jeremy Gordon; the University Club in the Indiana Memorial Union, 10:00 am – 5:15 pm.  The conference is free and open to the public.

A campus map is here.

Photograph by Nina Berman.

 0 Comments

Remnants of a Lost Civilization

There a a lot of photos from Afghanistan, which is not known for a wide variety of landscapes–or cityscapes, for that matter–and so one can understand why a photographer would look for the odd angle or unusual object.

This is not a photograph likely to win an award, but it speaks volumes.  The only thing in focus is a cheap plywood door and its improvised door knob.  That’s the tail end of a rocket, one of many stray parts likely to be strewn around a working combat outpost.  In WWII this detail might have come with a narrative of Yankee ingenuity and the egalitarian ethos of a Bill Mauldin cartoon, but that war hadn’t lasted ten years.

The line of sight loses focus as it extends down the wall, where it picks up the inert soldier in his camp chair and then runs into that grey fabric cover on some undefined storage space.  Beyond that is more grey, including the stony ground, storage silos, and a wall, all harshly lit or left in dull shadows.  Not exactly an image that you will see in an Armed Forces ad.  This is your back lot, Dogpatch, lost world army, stuck in time in some place that, if not forgotten by God, has been forgotten by just about everyone else.

Which is why one might think about the things they will leave behind, and what that says about why and how they are there.  However successful the mission, I don’t think the 13th Cavalry is going to crate up that outpost and ship it back home.  And when they leave it behind, it’s not going to last long.  Already slap-dash and not made to last, this is not evidence of nation building.  The fact that the rocket is inert adds a lame joke, but it wouldn’t take much to tear through that shed.  Not to worry, though, it is more likely to be abandoned than attacked, while the real danger is waiting to maim and kill the minute anyone starts walking outside the perimeter.  No wonder a soldier might want to stay put in that chair.

Or, if wanting to pass the time more enjoyably, take a few swings with a golf club.  Yes, that is the second odd metal object in the photo.  I’m not sure which is more implausible: that a golf club would be casually leaning against the wall, or that the fully equipped soldier would be working on his game, or that anyone would be hitting golf balls off that rock strewn field into the impossible fairways of Laghman province.  But the implausible we do today, because the insane is already second nature.

These are golf clubs that were left behind when the US pulled out of one of its bases in Iraq.  The walls of the building are marble, but the scene nonetheless is shabby, sad, and forlorn.  A study in excess–why one club would be there is strange enough, much less dozens–it becomes a small monument to misspent resources, misplaced priorities, and the futility of this imperial project.

The camera has a special relationship with objects: capturing their quiet but persistent eloquence amidst the welter of events.  When objects are left behind, they acquire the special resonance of ruins, and with that an allegorical voice that can speak of the decline and fall of civilizations.  America isn’t gone yet, but it may be losing its way.  And if it is to be known by what it leaves behind, those in Iraq and Afghanistan surely could ask whether it ever really knew where it was.

Photographs by Erik De Castro/Reuters and Andrea Bruce/The New York Times.

 0 Comments