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May 03, 2013

Romney, Santorum Form Joint Ticket

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum turned the political world upside down today by announcing that they had formed a joint ticket for the Republican presidential campaign.  The former antagonists declared that the bruising primary contests of the past several months were behind them, and their new-found solidarity was evident in everything from their smiles to their repartee with a stunned press corps.  “As long as Mitt doesn’t fire me, we’ll be fine,” joshed Santorum, while Romney laughingly added, “I guess I passed the religious test.”

More seriously, the two candidates assured their supporters that they see eye to eye on key principles of the Republican campaign: ending the class war and making America strong by transferring wealth upwards and overseas; cutting big government by reducing public education and ending public insurance programs such as “Obamacare,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security,” and restoring American values by returning to the comprehensive subordination of women.

Some differences were still evident, however.  For example, it seems clear that Santorum would prefer Christian theocratic rule at the federal level, whereas Romney believes that it should only be allowable in the states and private corporations.  The two men preferred to see such disagreements as a strength of the ticket.  “It’s good to have these discussions in the executive office,” Romney said.  Santorum agreed, as “that way the full range of opinion is represented before the President makes a decision.”

The White House declined comment on such short notice, but an anonymous staffer acknowledged that the two GOP candidates appeared to be a very attractive couple.

Photograph by Jae C. Hong/Associated Press.

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‘Now! Visual Culture’ at NYU

Now! Visual Culture

A conference at New York University

May 31-June 2, 2012

Featuring:

One Dozen Lightning Talks on the future of the field
Workshops on multi-media software and film
Open discussions on debt, academic publishing, and interdisciplinarity
Graduate student forum and a general assembly
Practice, performance, and diasporic art

Participants include: Safet Ahmeti, Giuliana Bruno, Wafaa Bilal, Jill Casid, Patsy Chang, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beth Coleman, Jennifer Gonzalez, Raiford Guins, Gary Hall, Max Liljefors, Mark Little, Tara McPherson, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lisa Nakamura, Paul Pfeiffer, Amanda du Preez, Martha Rosler, Joan Saab, Marquard Smith, Sina Najafi, Øyvind Vågnes, McKenzie Wark, Jason Wing, Joanna Zylinska, and many more.

There can only be a relatively limited number of delegates both for space reasons (only certain spaces can be used cost-free at NYU) and to create a strongly interactive conference experience. These sessions will take place at 20 Cooper Square, New York, 10003 in the Humanities Initiative space, a beautifully designed space overlooking the architectural drama of the Bowery.

On the website you will find a registration form: please consider registering!

Full event details are at http://www.visualculturenow.org.

Photo by Michael Pierce.

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Apertures into Mortal Time

The news was largely theatrical yesterday–the Pope in Cuba, protest and prayer outside the Supreme Court, a new Madonna album–but not much to get excited about.  And speaking of aging, there was this image, which poignantly evokes a different kind of drama.

An old man looks though a crack in a door.  The door is in a nursing home, the nursing home is in China, and he is going to die.  Until then, however, he has a beautiful combination of good humor, intelligence, and gentleness.  His eye may be dimming, but he still absorbs, considers, and responds rather than merely see.  The door of perception may be narrower than it once was, but the slender space, like the eye itself, remains an aperture through which light and thought can travel.

The humanism of the image may be helped by much of his genetic and cultural inheritance not being visible.  What strikes me, however, is how he looks simian.  Rather than reverting to childhood, he seems to be aging into the prehistory of his species.  Photography recapitulates phylogeny, you might say, and like a mirror image reversing the evolutionary process.  We can see not a single individual but the human being as it is a thinking primate.  But no more immortal for that.

This is another photograph that takes us back in time.  The ultraviolet image of Cygnus Loop Nebula captures the remaining gases of an explosion that occurred about 5000 years ago.  It, too, is poignant.  Although nothing but inanimate matter, the beautiful tracery becomes a mirror image, inviting recognition as if it were the remnants of a mind, an intelligence still somewhat structured even as it fades into nothingness.  Such allegories are not science, of course, but why then create the image, itself a work of artifice, and why give the galaxy the name of a swan?  Myth and science need not be far apart, and so the astral form suggests a life form, and in any case, the pattern is an aperture into the history of the star system.  Stars are neither mortal nor immortal, but they, too, are subject to the relentless passage of time.

Which is why I like the rest of the photograph as well.  It’s easy to satirically intone Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions of stars,” but there are billions and billions of galaxies.  Each one is a field of light that will some day be extinguished.  But until then, perhaps a source of perspective on the minor dramas of the news cycle, and maybe even something that might make an old man smile.

Photographs by a stringer for Reuters and by NASA.

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Spring Break at the Blog

We’ll be taking a break to get away from and get caught up at our day jobs.  Regular posts will resume on Monday, March 26.  For those many readers who will be wandering around despondently until our return, spend some time with the artwork below and ask yourself what it might add–justly, misleadingly, or insightfully–to the idea that photojournalism is a public art.

If you get it worked out, do let us know.

John Baldessari, “An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer . . .,” 1966–68. Photoemulsion, varnish, and gesso on canvas, 59 1/8 × 45 1/8 in. (150.2 × 114.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and gift of an anonymous donor  92.21.

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Labor Among the Ruins

It can be quite a revelation when the veneer of ordinary life is suddenly ripped away.   Instead of the banal brick and mortar surfaces of a middle American high school, this:

Twisted metal, shredded drywall, crumpled ventilation ducts, broken cables–what was a solid, efficient building has become a rat’s nest of light industrial trash.  That’s what a tornado can do.

The car that once was parked outside is now wearing the building, but it might be salvageable.  Or the insurance company might just “write it off”–as if it could be moved out of there with a dash of a pen or a few keystrokes.  But someone will have to lift that beam, just as others will have to move the chairs, the brickwork, the sheeting, and everything else that is strewn across the parking lot.  And they’ll have to tear that shattered wall down and cart it away, and then begin to rebuild.

None of this work will involve standing in front of a TV camera or giving a campaign speech or writing a blog post.  It’s called manual labor, something that has become all but invisible in a nation that carted up too many of its factories and shipped them overseas.  Marx identified how capital benefits from hiding labor, but even he might be amazed at how much of modern culture has been pitched toward abstractions, sleek designs, smooth surfaces, frictionless interfaces, and other techniques for forgetting about the work involved in making a product.

Until the storm rips your world apart.  When the surface is shredded, then you can see just how much structure there is in a building–that is, just how many different mechanical, electrical, and construction systems were artfully worked into a building, and how much workmanship goes into making use of the building so free of difficulty.  You complain when the copier breaks–but how often does your ceiling collapse?  Skilled labor and government regulation combine to make it easy to take gigantic skyscrapers for granted, as well as the many small structures and hundreds of thousands of products that we use everyday without ever having to make them or fix them ourselves.

Given this society’s investment in smooth surfaces, the texture of things all but completely hides the labor it took to make them.  And that is part of a much larger indifference.  A friend who consults on construction projects commented that it’s hard to generate public support for good wages for working people, “because it’s ingrained that labor isn’t respectable.  Actually, it’s not disrespect….it’s less than that…….it’s  non-recognition.  Folks that don’t do labor don’t get just how thoroughly ignored labor is.  You would be surprised by the number of people that, after having me carefully walk them through the steps of a complicated job, explain to me how ‘it shouldn’t be that hard.'”  As if they would know.  And all too often, they are the same people who expect “$125 per hour minimum to have a shot at a decent life, but can’t see why a mechanic would need the same amount.”

If you are skilled in abstraction, why would you know or care about how tough it can be to get a conduit to fit around a tight corner?  But this discussion isn’t about the value of labor or the labor theory of value or anything more complicated than having a shot at a decent life.

Because that, too, is what the storm reveals when it tears through a town.

Photographs from Henryville, Indiana by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

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London Festival of Photography 2012 Prize

The London Festival of Photography has announced a new prize for photography on this year’s festival theme of “Insideout: Reflections of the Public and the Private.”

This theme intends to explore the changing boundaries between the public and the private, as both physical and metaphorical concepts, and the social consequences of these shifts. Considering the role of photography as a tool for documentation, expression and collaboration, the festival is looking for work responding to the theme in its broadest interpretation.  Possible topics include but are not limited to such issues as:

  • photography as a means to reflect not only the external world but also the inner self of the image maker
  • the social media revolution and how it has overturned our ideas of personal privacy
  • the changing boundaries of public and private land, what this means for personal freedom and the ways in which people inhabit these opposing spaces
  • the effects and ethics of putting a very private photographic image on public display
  • censorship of images
  • the democratisation of visual journalism and how the public have become mass purveyors of information

Categories, rules, and additional information is available here.  The deadline for entry is March 29, 2012.

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Poles Apart: Elites and Masses After the Disaster

I joked about this photo when I first it, perhaps because my wife showed it to me.  “I sure feel sorry for that kid.  Picking a fight with a middle-aged man, what was he thinking?”

But the truth is, it really is a mismatch in just that way.  Even if you notice the shiv in the protestor’s hand, the odds are against him.  If caught, he’ll be charged with breaking and entering, assault, mayhem, you name it.  If he gets away, it’s just to return to the austerity, vanishing opportunities, and grim future being forced on Spain by the European bankers’ neoliberal policies.  As for the fight itself, frankly, the guy on the right has the bigger weapon, good heft, and no fear, and he’s aggressively going for the gut or lower yet.

Just what you’d expect from a banker, come to think of it.  Like once sound economies around the globe, Spain is in trouble because of unchecked greed and recklessness by big banks and other financial institutions–a binge of aggressive mismanagement that was promoted by the same neoliberal ideology that now justifies transferring all of the losses downward.  Sure, there’s more to the story and each country is different, but as Cassandra–that is, Paul Krugman–has been warning for a long time now, there is no sound economic analysis that justifies the austerity policies being enforced in Europe and trumpted by Republicans in the US.  The bottom line is that many who did nothing wrong are being sacrificed to protect an elite that behaved very badly.  In Spain, students were demonstrating because the heat was being cut off in their classrooms, and you can bet that isn’t happening on the 45th floor.

If you take a better look at what is happening on the ground, you can see more of the texture of the political situation.  The bank lobby is a scene of conflict–but the demonstrators will get no farther than that.  The shattered glass suggests that the opulent decor is at least superficially vulnerable, but look at how casually the other banker walks through the mayhem: chaos at the edges is just business as usual, another day in the life of creative destruction.  And however lithe the masked demonstrator might be, his clothes aren’t worth the cost of a tie worn by anyone on the other side.  Draconian policies push the masses to confront the elite, but that’s a rigged game from the start.  And at the finish, if democratic government doesn’t do its job.

Which is how we get to this photo of another pole in a very different place.

A man strains to raise a flagpole in Crittenden, Kentucky, after the devastating storm that swept through the town last Saturday.  Perhaps the photo alludes to Joe Rosenthal’s iconic image of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.  If so, both the similarities to and differences from the original photograph are notable.  On the one hand, a common man labors to plant the national symbol amidst devastation, which suggests that he and his fellow citizens have the same patriotism, determination, willingness to sacrifice for the common good, and similar virtues of those that won the battle at Iwo.  On the other hand, times may have changed: the flag is shredded, the pole is bent and spindly, he is all alone, and now even the wind is blowing against him.

Families, friends, and neighbors are pulling together in the heartland, God bless ’em, and they have to.  As you look through the slideshows on the storm’s aftermath, it becomes clear that these are people who already had been abandoned to economic decline.  Unlike the banker in the the photograph above, for this guy there are few resources at hand, no powerful corporations, connections in high places, or governments that believe in putting your priorities first, last, and always.  Republican governors will call for disaster aid, but try get them to invest in the jobs, education, health care, social services, environmental protection, financial regulation, and other public goods that these people need to live reasonably secure lives.  So it is that a storm has been blowing across the nation for years, wreaking the lives of ordinary people.

Two photographs, both of disasters in the making, neither of which has anything to do with the weather.  The are united by an element of visual composition, but otherwise you might say they are poles apart.

Photographs by Albert Gea/Reuters and Liz Dufour/The Cincinnati Enquirer.

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The Historian’s Eye: Archiving for a Better Future

Matthew Frye Jacobson is a professor at Yale, which would be excuse enough to keep on writing books for other scholars.  Instead of staying in that comfort zone, he has created a website dedicated to enriching public discussion by gathering images and interviews that reflect history in the making.

As he says, “Beginning as a modest effort in early 2009 to capture the historic moment of our first black president’s inauguration in photographs and interviews, the “Our Better History” project and the Historian’s Eye website have evolved into an expansive collection of some 1000+ photographs and an audio archive addressing Obama’s first term in office, the ’08 economic collapse and its fallout, two wars, the raucous politics of healthcare reform, the emergence of a new right-wing formation in opposition to Obama, the politics of immigration, Wall Street reform, street protests of every stripe, the BP oil spill, and the seeming escalation of anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide.  Interviewees narrate and reflect upon their own personal histories as well, a dimension of the archive that now spans many decades and touches five continents.”

You can look, listen, and otherwise get inside the project here.  And don’t forget to check out the “Participate” link.

Photograph from Occupy Baltimore, October 22, 2011.

 

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The Texture of Political Action: Democracy and Dictatorship

Last night millions of people were watching the Academy Awards ceremonies, which might be thought of as Hollywood’s prom.  You might expect that this next sentence would remark that at the same time millions of other people were suffering and fighting for something more important. But let’s not be too quick to separate society and politics.

This photo of Egyptian twenty-somethings uploading video from Tahrir Square is a portrait of political action–and a study in youth culture.  They could get beaten, imprisoned, and tortured for what they are doing–and they are wearing just the right kind of student fashions and working on what is the cool computer for anyone who gets anywhere near a university.  We particularly like how the color of the hard drive matches the laptop, which also gets picked up on the Coke cans and the floral pattern on the tablecloth (we probably can thank mom for that).  But nothing is too neatly coordinated, for that would nullify the wonderful informality and messiness that most characterizes the tableau.  They don’t have to wait for an election: this already is a portrait of democratic life.

Of course, the image also plays on sentimental memories, for those who have them, of student days–the ashtray and toilet paper are near-perfect touches–and these revolutionaries also are middle class (or better), Westernized, and otherwise liberal-democratic elites in the making.  They do not look like those demonstrators who were poorer or embodying more traditional customs and Islamist commitments, and less privileged viewers might be quick to see and resent those who don’t have to go to work as soon as they are able.  No one should conclude that these students are or ought to be the face of the revolution or that democracy can’t include wearing galabiyyahs or that every viewer should warm to the glow of the Macbook Pro laptop.

Still, sometimes you can just see the difference.

This is the interior of a nondescript building somewhere in Damascus.  The New York Times caption had nothing to do with the photo as such: “The escalation in Syria, where Mr. Assad has vowed to end a 10-month-old uprising that he has characterized as the work of foreign-backed terrorists, came within a few miles of the epicenter of his power in the capital on Sunday.”  So, what is the photo doing?  We don’t see a recognizable building or evidence of warfare or anything specific to the day-to-day struggle being reported in the text.  But perhaps it’s there to communicate something about the nature of the regime.

Institutional buildings can be dull, unadorned, vaguely depressing places; that, too, is part of the look.  “See how your money is not being wasted, and how functional and egalitarian your government is, and how the rule of law is applied uniformly?”  Even so, the large photograph of Our Leader is the stock image of authoritarian regimes, matched only by the elimination of most other images and their implications of pluralism.  This photo captures that and more, including a sense of social impoverishment, as if the energy is being leached out of everything.  Even Assad’s portrait is fading into a ghostliness.  Perhaps he’s on his way out (I wouldn’t bet on it), but this photo says that the authoritarian regime has already reduced its society to a kind of lifelessness.  Those flags could be in a mausoleum, whether one run by the state or one used for the state’s internment.  Empty surfaces, listless symbols, and a fire extinguisher: welcome to the Syrian government.

Egypt is doing better that Syria but is still a long way from becoming a democracy, so easy contrasts are not the point here.  But one can consider how politics is textured: that is, how the social context and consequences of political action are evident on the surface of things.  By paying attention to the social surface, we can understand how both individual experience and collective action might be shaped by many different factors coming together in a particular place and time.  And we can see how different political practices can make the world more richly interwoven and vibrant, or more relentlessly ordered and depressing.

The genius of the camera is that it captures everything that is there on the surface, whether we intended to see it or not.  Photographers are taking considerable risks to photograph the political events of our time.  To better understand what is happening, one might want to pay more attention to the surface of things, and to how life is being textured.

Photographs by Ed Ou and Tomas Munita for The New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Ruben Salvadori’s Photojournalism Behind the Scenes

Ruben Salvadori is a young Italian photographer with a BA in Anthropology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  While covering the ritualized clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli security forces, he became interested in the gap between the practice of photojournalism and the images that were shown to the public.

His video, Photojournalism Behind the Scenes, turns an ethnographic eye on the photographers’ relationship with their subjects, and on how that part of the photographic encounter is edited out of the picture.

Salvadori does a fine job of exposing this tacit dimension of conflict photography.  Unlike some critics, the point is not simply to trash visual media on behalf of some supposedly innocent alternative.  In fact, none of us are innocent, and one might well ask how these and other representational conventions contribute to the stalemated catastrophe in Palestine.  Would that we could stand back a bit further and see, not only the photographers, but how many others are all too habituated to crafting illusions of dramatic conflict, rather than achieving an equitable resolution to a political tragedy.

For additional commentary, see the discussion at Planext.

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