Best wishes for a peaceful holiday.  We’ll return to our regular schedule on January 9.

Photograph from Yellowstone National Park by Anita Erdmann/National Geographic Photo Contest.

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Slide shows of the Best Photographs of 2011 are beginning to appear.  They contain some great images, some eye candy, and another opportunity to think about the public world.  One thing you won’t see much of this year, unless it’s in ruins, is infrastructure.

This photo of prosthetic eyeballs is not going to appear in any of the “Best of” shows, nor should it.  And technological mimicry on behalf of cosmetics doesn’t quite qualify as old-school infrastructure, either.  Once images of factories, bridges, and other examples of industrialization were an important genre of photography–for example, the cover of the first issue of Life Magazine featured a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of  Fort Peck Dam.  Modernism articulated a strong affinity between the design arts, the machine age, and photography, and all three elements are fused in the Life cover with a good dose of national pride on behalf of progress and the American Century thrown in.  That’s a lot harder to come by these days, and so one might settle for a case of machined eyeballs.

But perhaps the photographer isn’t settling.  The image of mechanical eyes refers simultaneously to the human organ of sight and the camera, a visual prosthetic.  The eyes in the photograph appear somewhat uncanny: one intuitively senses that they can’t see and yet one can’t help thinking that they can see–that they might even be little orbs of sight at this moment.  They might be each looking in only one direction to see only one thing, but intelligent in at least that way.  Although not really.  Like a camera, one might say.  These  won’t in fact see anything, but a cyborg future awaits the civilization that mass produces eyes and other body parts, while the present world is already one in which we see virtually everything virtually, so much so that we forget that seeing itself requires its own organic, technological, social, and cultural infrastructure.

Once you start tracing the complex intersections that create photography’s ongoing contribution to the shared seeing that sustains modern societies, it’s not clear where to stop.  Certainly not before you consider the role of the city and all that makes it work.

This is another photo that probably won’t win any contests but is nonetheless distinctive, and in this case eerily beautiful.  The rectilinear grid pattern is etched in silver across the warm-toned base material, and it seems at once serenely ordered and yet strung with potential surges of energy.  But what is it?  A circuit board, or a laboratory apparatus, or an industrial park seen from above, or a work of art?  The metal pieces actually are train tracks in Chicago.  It’s an image of relatively low-tech infrastructure that is essential to life of the city and, with that, the economic health and cultural development of the nation.

But how often do we see that, much less look at it?  Obviously, an image such as this one isn’t going to be sufficient for deliberating about transportation policy, any more than an image of plastic eyes is going to provide all that is needed to think about how we see.  But each image is more than merely striking.  They ask us to consider how much we depend on things that are taken for granted, and how those things might be not only necessary and in need of care but also strange and provocative and beautiful in their own right.  Indeed, they are examples of how photography itself is part of the infrastructure of social thought.

Photographs by Lucas Jackson/Reuters and Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune.

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It’s odd that we don’t have a word for the visual equivalent of the figure of speech.  You can’t get through high school English without learning about alliteration, metaphor, personification, and a few other verbal techniques for styling up your prose.  In art class you might learn a few basic design principles, and there or in music or a lit class someone might identify a motif or two, but that’s not quite the same.  There are a number of words to aid pattern recognition–form, schema, template, outline, ring construction, and others–but they apply across media and often are used to give a visual inflection (or, to apply one’s visual intelligence) to verbal interpretation.  Of course, the design arts have highly developed technical vocabularies and many shared terms or concepts, but few if any of those are in general circulation.  “Entabulature” and “foreshorten” can be found in a Saturday crossword puzzle but not in the rest of the paper.  There just isn’t anything quite like “alliteration” for common visual techniques–say, like this:

The photograph of a double image is a stock technique that regularly produces arresting photos.  The most common example probably is capturing a natural figure and its reflection, as with this photo of a spoonbill.  There isn’t a common term for it, however:”double image” refers more broadly, including both natural mirages and material doubles such as two photos side by side.  Nonetheless, the visual figure is both instantly recognizable and yet compelling.  As it should be, for the photograph of a near-perfect reflection captures both the surface appeal and philosophical depth of photography.  You might say it is one of photography’s most reflective moments: the photograph of a reflection asks us to consider how photography itself is a copy of nature: a point-to-point reproduction, an inverted duplication, an optical illusion, something as flimsy as the surface of a pool of water.

Photography has from the start been plagued by doubts about its authenticity.  How can a copy share in the nature of the original, when it is but a thin sheen of molecules and something that would never exist but for the object it mimes?  I won’t rehearse the arguments here, but by looking again at the double image one can consider how the question can be reframed more helpfully.  Rather than asking what something is–say, is it a copy or the thing copied–we might ask what we can learn from each.  There are some things that you can learn only by looking at the real spoonbill: how it moves, for example, or upon dissection, the exact size of its organs.  But other information can be more available in the copy.

More to the point, you can learn from the copy precisely because it is not exact.  Look closely at the two birds above, and you’ll see that the differences can be illuminating.  The reflection allows us to see more of the undercarriage, and with that its vulnerabilities, while the angle of the face and its softening by the water allows more emotional identification with the animal.  As one’s imagination awakes, one can begin to see the lower bird as the bird’s mortality enacted: about to vanish, it is closer to death, while the inverted suspension and subtle mottling of the feathers places it closer to a specimen than a living organism.  Without the copy, our understanding of and relationship to the bird would be diminished.  That is all the more true when you realize that the only way most of us are likely to see a spoonbill any time soon is through a photograph.

And so of course we get to politics.

Presidential candidates are not quite so rare, but they, too, are largely seen as images.  So it is that the double image of the politician is another example of how the visual figure is both familiar yet compelling.  The technique has been available at least since Garry Winogrand’s brilliant photo of JFK and his televised image speaking at the Democratic National Convention in 1960.  Rick Perry is no JFK, but this photograph from his “Response” prayer meeting at Reliant Stadium in Houston does some of the same work as Winogrand’s photo.  For example, each photograph shows both the speaker and some of the media apparatus to suggest how the candidate operates as both person and image.  It is interesting that in the 1960 photo, the image in a portable TV was much smaller than the candidate, while in 2011 it has come to loom over him.  By staying the same, stylistic conventions record social change.  (Note the alliteration.)

The ascendency of a politics of the image almost goes without saying today.  The question remains of what else this double image might teach us. Because the larger Perry looks almost like an illustration rather than a photograph, it seems to offer something a bit more traditional than the slickness of the real thing.  Could the double actually reveal a good intention otherwise lost in the obviously strategic calculations of this latest play on the faith-family-flag motif?  Or does it suggest that the persuasive techniques of that old time religion have been repackaged in the glitsy media spectacle of the modern electoral campaign?  And shouldn’t it remind us that the “real” Perry in the lower front is actually a photograph, and that most voters have no exposure to the candidate himself?

In any case, if we have to put up with the original, there is good reason to examine its image.

Photographs by Jim Damaska/St. Petersburg Times and Richard Carlson/Reuters.

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Instead of last spring’s inspiring images of democratic solidarity, the images now coming out of Cairo are becoming increasingly surreal.

This one is getting a lot of play–the guy is so distinctive that you can even see another photographer in the picture trying to get his shot.  And what’s not to like?  The bizarre gas mask is hardly standard issue (where did he find that?), and its white rubber both contrasts with his dark clothing and matches the white smoke pouring out of the tear gas canister.  The smoke streams back along his path as he is running forward, for this is definitely an action shot.  (Think of how many demonstration photos feature relatively passive postures: sitting, standing, or milling about, with raised hands, signs, and banners displayed for the media having to stand in for more extended or dramatic action.  Look, for example, at the rest of the people in this photo.)  Revolutionary action wearing an alien, almost unintelligible mask, the photo captures key features of a popular revolt defined, like so many demonstrations today, much more by its opposition to a corrupt establishment than by a clear idea of what an alternative future might bring.

And that’s where I get a bit worried, as the photo may be fitting too well with the anti-democratic meme of late that progressive movements are incoherent.  (Back in the day, the left was tarred with being a rigid, centralized, international organization adhering strictly to the explicit ideological doctrines of Soviet communism; now that the Cold War is over, I guess it makes sense that the left, sans directives from Moscow, would have to be disorganized and inarticulate.  As long as you’re outside of the reality-based community, that is.)  Unlike many other images of painted faces and massed bodies, the masked man doesn’t seem to link with any political aspiration or populist movement.  Because his pending action of throwing the canister mirrors the original assault, he seems equally prone to violence while this false equivalence cancels out any sense of political difference.

Worse, he looks grotesquely simian, as if political demonstrations were a form of devolution.  Worse yet, this falling backward is also a cyborg projection where organic and mechanical natures have been horribly fused.  The close fitting headpiece reveals a human skull in all its distinctiveness and fragility, yet the mechanical mask destroys any hope of wholly human sympathies.  The bare hands make the dark clothing seem like a pelt, while the loping limbs suggest a life alternating between predation and flight.  The bag hanging below his waist looks like another limb and thus another example of organic life distorted, whether by bad science or the pressures of a harsh environment. Five-limbed with a machined face, there is little basis for identification.  It seems that only violence is legible, and can calls for restoring order be far behind?

And yet, the more strange he appears, the more likely another interpretation also applies.  I’ve posted a number of times about how photojournalism is revealing the often surreal nature of violence in our time.  In addition, I’ve suggested in several posts that a corresponding political aesthetic is emerging as well, one in which the modern apparatus of power can look increasingly medieval.  Admittedly, sometimes costumes are just that, and the surface rarely expresses what lies below unerringly, but I believe that these changes in style can reflect far more troubling changes in political relationships.

To take a page from science fiction–indeed, one of its most insistent and important lessons–technological progress can proceed with and contribute to regression along every other dimension of human experience: social organization, economics, politics, culture, you name it.  Thus, rather than merely supporting or undercutting the demonstrations, photos such as the one above might be working more prophetically to identify how a harmful future is emerging in the present.  More to the point, they are showing not who is causing what, but how ordinary people are already coping with deprivations and more explicit forms of systemic violence, not least by adapting to those harsh conditions at the very moment that they are fighting against them.

Welcome to the future.

Photographs by Tara Todras-Whitehill/Associated Press and Mahmud Hams/AFP-Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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There are many reasons for the profound economic and political problems currently plaguing the US.  Sure, a lot of them follow a direct line back to Ronald Reagan, and more recently the story is one of elite capture of the government to accelerate even further the massive transfer of wealth upward.  American society is becoming painfully inequitable and comprehensively unhealthy, and nothing I say should detract from that assessment or from demanding accountability on behalf of the general welfare.  I will say, however, that there may be additional reasons why the American public seems so passive.  Why is it that “the people” are so lacking in the intelligence, solidarity, organization, and energy needed to take back their country?  One answer might be, because they have never seen and can’t even really imagine this:

You are looking at the Omnilife Stadium in Guadalajara, Mexico during opening ceremonies for the 2011 Pan American Games.  Quite a sight, isn’t it?  Let’s say it, that’s one hell of a show in a fabulous stadium that can match or beat anything you will see on a Sunday afternoon in the US.  And let’s also say that it’s not a stadium filled with illegal immigrants who will risk anything to leave an impoverished country to get to the promised land.  (Mexico has serious poverty, of course, but so does the US.)  Finally, let’s note that Guadalajara is not that far away from the US, but for most US citizens it might as well be on the far side of the moon.

I am suggesting that one reason Americans remain so passive in the face of economic and political predation is that they continue to believe that they are better off than the rest of the world.  And not just better off, but divinely so: a nation predestined by God to become the “shining city on a hill,” as Reagan intoned, channeling the words but not the sense of John Winthrop’s 1630 speech, A Model of Christian Charity.”  As many scholars have documented, America’s ideology began with the definition of the nation as a New American Adam in the New World Garden.  That idea of having a special place in God’s plan and otherwise outside of the laws and vicissitudes of history has been carried forward through the doctrine of Manifest Destiny to the Lone Superpower to jokes about “Freedom Fries” and the current complacency.  Carried forward, one might say, ever more unreflectively and undeservedly.

James Howard Kunstler has made a related point in Home from Nowhere, which is that American’s put up with such lousy design standards because they haven’t traveled to where higher standards are taken for granted.  Americans think a city street is “nice” if it’s relatively free of litter, never mind that the few plantings are half-dead and the sidewalks too narrow for anything but funneling people between buildings.  Until you’ve traveled enough, you just can’t imagine that large areas of the industrialized world look better and have amenities from free wi-fi in the airports to good trains to you name it–and we’re not even talking about health care.  As Kunstler noted, when Disney World is seen as an upgrade from your normal environment, you have a problem.

And the problem only gets worse when your mind can be turned off by anyone who says that that the US is one nation under God, the greatest country on earth, with the highest standard of living in the world.  If you have the facts, you can back that up a bit, but the facts will never be enough.  And perhaps spectacles and monuments and city plans are not the best measure of a nation’s wealth or quality of life.  I’ll grant that, but not the rest of the argument, which is one reason I like this photo.

Again, it’s visually stunning, but also something you might have seen close to home.  Someone is sluicing down a waterslide in Mogyorod, a town near Budapest, Hungary.  Small town, cheap entertainment, simple pleasures of a summer day–it could be anywhere, and that’s the point.  What many Americans would assume is something only to be found in the US, now is a part of life for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.  And if you want to push the point, the facility, structure, or infrastructure elsewhere is likely to be newer and more up to date than what’s at the end of Strip Mall Road in Middle America.

Hence, the irony: a nation long characterized by its mobility needs to get out more.  Of course, geography works against it, and it’s hard to do in any case when your economic resources are going south.  That’s where photography can help.  The American public should come for the view, marvel at the image, and enjoy the spectacle, but they also should learn something from the experience.  It appears that God’s plan is more capacious than had been thought.  And if Americans don’t demand that government and the economy serve their common interests, one day they may wake up to discover that, compared to much of the developed world, they really are the exception.

Photographs by Jorge Saenz/Associated Press and Laszlo Balogh/Reuters.

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