Oct 14, 2013
Jan 30, 2011
Mar 04, 2009
Apr 14, 2008
Mar 16, 2009
Aug 08, 2007

Exhibition: Coal + Ice

COAL + ICE

Curated by Susan Meiselas and Jeroen de Vries

Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, No. 155A Caochangdi, Beijing, China

September 24 – November 28, 2011

Coal + Ice is a documentary photography exhibition featuring the work of 30 photographers from China, the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Russia, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, whose work, brought together here, visually narrates the hidden chain of actions triggered by mankind’s use of coal.

This photographic arc moves from deep within the coal mines to the glaciers of the greater Himalaya where greenhouse gasses are warming the high altitude climate.  As these mighty glaciers melt at an accelerated pace, the great rivers of Asia that flow from the Tibetan Plateau into the oceans are disturbed, and the lives of billions of people downstream are disrupted.

A video about the show is here (it loads a bit slowly).  A gallery of images is here.

Photograph by Jimmy Chin.

 0 Comments

Signs of the Times

Wall Street has always been defined by its signage.

Simple and effective and perhaps a bit unsettling: the iconic phrase actually is a street sign.  But what a street.  Hang a huge flag on the New York Stock Exchange and you have it all.  (You can see that at Wall Street Flag.)  Perhaps people should not be so surprised that more recent occupants have also been doing something about what you see there.

If we know anything about the Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s that signs are everywhere.  More to the point, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the coverage of a protest movement so focused on featuring the handmade signs.  Go to Google Image and type in Occupy Wall Street; one of the first prompts will be Occupy Wall Street Signs.  You will see signs galore, plenty of them from web sites that have collected them by the dozen.  In any case, they are being relayed throughout the media.  There will be some obvious reasons for this visual emphasis, not least that literate demonstrators have plenty of time on their hands, which they can use to compensate for their relatively small numbers and lack of a signature event such as a march, and which then can be uploaded and relayed quickly via digital technologies.

Sure, the Tea Party had its signs which got a fair amount of play, but usually to result only in disclaimers–“Oh, no, they’re not racist!”–and the real fun was with the costumes.  Other comparisons aside–and the movement in Oakland may take things in a very different direction–but it seems clear that Occupy Wall Street is about getting the message out to a public audience.  If so, there are two things one might want to consider.  The first, which I’ll only mention, is that one might want to ask why it is that the media ran with the right wing meme that the protests were illegitimate because they had no clear demands, agenda, or objectives.  (I’ve said a bit more about this point here and here.)  But that question largely answers itself.

The more interest point is one that Ashley Gilbertson brought to my attention in one of his photo essays on the recession.

The point is that the signs have always been there.  The signs of economic decline, the sad traces of personal and societal pain, symbols of betrayal and abandonment–they’ve always been there.  But if someone isn’t holding it up in front of a TV camera, most of the media don’t notice.  And the rest of us do no better.  Why should we, for many of the changes happen gradually as part of the ordinary routines of life.  If it’s a sign at a mall that’s slowly emptying or at a construction site that’s been mothballed or at an unemployment office that’s overcrowded, well, it’s just one more sign.  What could just be ebb and flow only later proves to be start of a flood.

Occupy Wall Street has already done the US a lot of good.  You don’t even need a political program if you can simply make people start to pay attention.  After all, that’s what good photographers do.  In fact, we don’t need to look at the demonstrators or their signs if we will just look around and see what is there to be seen: the signs of a troubled time.

Photographs from the Wikipedia Commons and by Ashley Gilbertson, After the Fall.

 1 Comment

Exhibition: The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951

An exhibition by The Jewish Museum, New York and The Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio

In 1936 a group of young, idealistic photographers, most of them Jewish, first-generation Americans, formed an organization in Manhattan called the Photo League. Their solidarity centered on a belief in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and on a progressive alliance in the 1930s of socialist ideas and art. The Radical Camera presents the contested path of the documentary photograph during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

The exhibition features more than 140 works by some of the most noted 20th-century photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Sid Grossman, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, Paul Strand, and Weegee.

The exhibition will be housed at the The Jewish Museum, 1109 5th Ave at 92nd St, New York, NY from November 04, 2011 – March 25, 2012; at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Oh, from April 19 – September 9, 2012; at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA, from October 11, 2012 – January 21, 2013; and at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fl from February 9 – April 21, 2013.

More information is here.

Photograph by Sid Grossman, Coney Island, c. 1947.

 1 Comment

Can We See Through Symbols?

 

Sometimes there are no words, nor need there be.  When I came across this image, I was instantly no longer reading a newspaper.  A moment before, I had been habitually scanning for information, considering arguments, making judgments, and otherwise getting orientated for the day.  And then I was in another place entirely: a place of suffering and consolation, and of both mortality and the possibility of something eternal.

I had entered a featureless room of earth tones and shadows, as if the anteroom to the underworld, only to see two sides of the human condition: one terribly exposed, and the other disturbingly dark.  It seems an intensely personal moment and yet profoundly universal.  One looks in vain for some way to reduce the terror lurking in the image, to learn enough so that it can be placed back into a sense of order, movement, resolution.  But no face can be seen, and the light illuminating his body is absorbed completely by her black cowl.

The news was still there to be had by way of the caption: “A woman took care of a wounded relative on Saturday inside a mosque being used as a hospital by demonstrators against the government in the Yemeni capital.”  The accompanying report added more.  But I hadn’t seen merely a woman or a wounded relative.  I had seen man’s naked, vulnerable flesh and his throat exposed as if for the slaughter.  And I had seen a figure veiled in black holding the victim firmly, almost possessively, as if there were nothing else that could be done.  And, of course, I had seen a pieta, the classic image in Christian iconography of Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding his broken body after it has been taken down from the cross.

The pieta is more Roman Catholic than Protestant, but though not Catholic I had no trouble seeing that artistic form as it is part of my cultural heritage.  Whatever the unknown photographer may have intended, the comparison is there to be made and to motivate a powerful emotional and ethical response to the image.  But should it matter that the two people in the photograph are almost certainly Muslim?  Although Islam defines itself as the heir of Judaism and Christianity, the artistic traditions could not be farther apart at this point, for the suggestion that we might be looking at the image of god would be blasphemous.  Worse yet, another reason the image is so powerful is that the black, hooded figure can also be seen as an angel of death claiming another soul.  This demonic vision not only must be far from the truth of the scene, but also sits well with deep-set prejudice.

Thus, the dilemma: On the one hand, seeing the two figures through the cultural lens of the pieta may frame response in a manner that is profoundly appropriate.  Doing so provides intense identification across cultural barriers to reach universal truths of human experience.  On the other hand, transposing their experience into another culture’s symbolism can seriously distort the actual relationship of those in the photograph, while also suggesting a false universality on Christian terms precisely when one ought to be laying down such presumptions about how well people can understand one another on sight.

Thus, we need to see through symbols, but in both senses of the verb: to use them to see more than we might see otherwise, and to recognize and look past their limitations to see what they would distort or occlude.  Nor is this double vision limited to matters theological.

“Libyan fighters regrouped Tuesday during the siege of Surt.”  (The story is here.)  Uh huh, and irregular troops taking a cigarette break is news?  Once again, we are being taken somewhere else, to a place where a death’s head and the peace symbol are part of the same identity.  Once again, darkness and light work together to feature two dimensions of human experience; if less complementary in principle, they are eased together by the global consumer economy.  Culture in the digital age is all about mash ups, but this also could be a study in either irony or illegibility.  You tell me.

Photographs by Samuel Aranda and Mauricio Lima for The New York Times.

 7 Comments

Photoworks on Protest Photography

 

Given the interest in the Occupy Wall Street protests and those that preceded them in the Middle East and Europe this past spring and summer, readers may want to see the recent issue of Photoworks, a photography magazine published in the UK.   “Issue 16 considers the ways in which photography has been used to document civil unrest, the roles available to photography as a vehicle for protest, and the political operations of photography in contemporary culture.  Through a series of folios, essays, interviews, book reviews and a round table discussion, it brings together a wide range of photographs, drawn from different moments and disparate contexts.  Contributors include Ariella Azoulay, Nina Berman, Iain Boal, Shami Chakrabati, Monica Haller, Geert van Kesteren and Martha Rosler.”

You can see the table of contents for Issue #16 here.  Texts for this issue will be available to download from 1 November 2011.  The Photoworks organization main page is here.

 0 Comments

Exchanging Prisoners Is Not Peace

I celebrate the release of Gilad Shalit from his five year imprisonment in Palestine.  Five years is a long time.  I don’t know him personally, but I can imagine that he has had enough of politics for awhile, and that he is looking forward to seeing his family and friends.

There should be no surprise that politics has not had enough of Gilad.  This photo nicely captures the subordination of private life to political grandstanding.  Gilad had his father embrace while being shouldered aside by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak.  The pols know a thing or two about grabbing the camera.  Gilad and his dad are turned toward each other, into their private bond, while together they seem to be trying to duck out of the public eye.  Bibi and Barak, not so much.

Perhaps the ministers shouldn’t be judged too harshly: the leaders on both sides are making the most of the photo-ops.  Indeed, the bargain has all the marks of the conflict as a whole: Israeli leaders can talk of how each life is precious while demonstrating their unremitting resolve to protecting their citizens.  Palestinians can talk of how thousands have been held in Israeli prisons while demonstrating their unremitting resolve to freeing their people.  And both sides have to like the bargain: some Palestinians have crowed about how 1 for 1000 prisoners is a great deal; some Israelis will silently presume that is about the right assessment of relative worth.

And by focusing on the dramatic event, the media continue to miss the story.

Gilad is home, but every day–every single day, year in and year out–thousands of Palestinians are delayed, harassed, detained, or turned away at checkpoints that impede and sometimes prohibit travel to and from their homes.  Travel to work, to hospitals, to schools, to their relatives, travel for any reason whatsoever.  Political prisoners have been released from jail, and that always is a good thing, but the occupied territories remain a large, open-air prison.  And 60 years is a long time.

If you look at the pictures, you can see that peace may be as far away as ever.

Photographs by the Israeli Defense Force and Musa Al-Shaer/AFP-Getty Images.  For documentation from the prison guards’ perspective: see Mikhael Manekin et al., eds, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000-2010 (Jeruselum, 2010), and Breaking the Silence:Israeli Soldiers Talk about the Occupied Territories.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

 0 Comments

Dueling Tumblrs: When the Personal is Visual

The Occupy Wall Street protests have entered the phase where they have the attention of the mainstream media but now have to struggle to get their message out.  The problem is twofold: the movement has more messages than organization, and the press can be astonishingly thick-headed about what happens outside of their usual ambit.  Even though they had a full-time propaganda machine in Fox News, the Tea Party had the same problem.  Now as then, the press is asking, “Just who are these people?  To answer that question, someone started a Tumblr site, “We are the 99 percent.”

 

Each entry consists of someone writing a personal statement and holding it up to the camera.  The paper comes from notepads, the photos are not in any way professional, and everything about the presentation underscores that these stories come directly from everyday life in an anxious time.  Economics gets personal, and the personal is political once again.  These citizens are making public statements to whoever will listen, in the hope that the government can begin to undo the damage it has caused by deregulation, regressive tax cuts, and unnecessary wars.

Public statement invite public debate, and it didn’t take long for a counter-site to emerge.

“We are the 53%” refers to the 53 percent of Americans who pay income taxes.  Ironically, as the deep tax cuts and public sector job losses created by Republican policies have taken wage earners off the tax rolls, the right wing feels even more aggrieved.  (Joe Klein sets out this point in more detail.)  Nor does the 53% include social security, property, or sales taxes, etc., but who’s counting?  In any case, the use of visual statements is interesting, and the debate is doing what democracies should do: get people to compare their experiences in order to work out some basis for agreement among conflicting viewpoints.

But when you get personal, you also had better be ready to take your lumps.  Here’s the guy who apparently started the 53% site:

As Brad Delong notes, the job count might involve some fuzzy math. And then there are the two houses.  Even when you don’t say a word, politics ain’t bean bag.

Photos are from the Tumblr sites.  Thanks to Pandagon for the fair and balanced leads.  A slide show of protest signs on the street is here.

 4 Comments

What Is a Revolutionary Idea?

Conservative reactions to the Wall Street protests have been hilarious, even if you don’t think of where they were with the Tea Party.  House majority Leader Eric Cantor called the demonstrations “mobs,” as if he were wearing spats.  Herman Cain said they shouldn’t blame the banks but only themselves, the losers who had failed–conveniently forgetting that it was the banks that failed, not the workers and students who are paying for the bailout.  David Brooks chided the movement for being “small thinkers” who lack big ideas.  Frankly, a just, equitable, sustainable democracy is a pretty big idea, but I’ll let that go, because a lack of ideas has nothing whatsoever to do with the current crisis.  Instead, perfectly adequate ideas are being blocked at every turn by a Republican party determined to defeat Obama, destroy financial and environmental safeguards, and otherwise continue to serve the lords of capital.  Small minds–and small hearts–are a problem, but it helps to get the names right.

And when all else fails, the pundits have insisted that the demonstrators are merely venting emotion, because they lack an agenda for getting out of the economic crisis.  That criticism is not only lame, but just wrong.  In fact, the New York Times had no trouble figuring out exactly what issues were on the table–and the Times is not exactly one of the hip new media sites.  But even so, the choice need not be between protest and policy or emotion and reason.  Maybe there is something else at stake.

There are many reasons to question whether the recent protests in the US–and, perhaps sadly, elsewhere–are revolutionary.  In fact, it’s easy to mock them on those terms.  More seriously (and as I’ve suggested before), there are good reasons to question whether those should be the terms for social and political change in the 21st century.  That’s one reason I like this sign: “the new paradigm” may not be a slogan to die for, but you get the idea that we are talking about something beyond policy fixes.  I’ll leave it to David Brooks to measure the size of the thinking (although see Novus Ordo Seclorum), but the idea is that if the principle of compassion were really taken seriously, we could have another refounding of American democracy to achieve a better, more decent society.  (One also thinks of Gandhi’s comment when asked what he thought of Western Civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”)  But why compassion?

Neo-conservatives have been bashing compassion and (most recently) “empathy” for a couple of decades, so that’s one clue.  (Their hostility to the ideal is a telling marker of their radical departure from the conservatism of Edmund Burke, and no less a figure than Adam Smith argued that compassion was the most important “moral sentiment” and essential if a capitalist society was to avoid descending into vicious self-destruction.)  I can’t cover all the philosophical and political issues here, but suffice it to say, in a society given over to greed and arrogance, compassion could be a revolutionary idea.


Photographs by Velcrow Ripper and Paul Stein.  Slides shows on the demonstrations are here,  here, here, and elsewhere, if you want to dig around.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

 5 Comments

Brian Ulrich: Copia—Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001–11

Copia—Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores, 2001–11

Cleveland Museum of Art

August 27, 2011–January 16, 2012

Nobody has captured the emptiness at the heart of American consumer culture better than Brian Ulrich.  For those fortunate enough to be in the area, his work will be on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art  from August 27, 2011 to January 16, 2012.  The exhibition features 50 color photographs from the artist’s Copia series (2001–10), a three-part project labeled Retail, Thrift, and Dark Stores.  Initially using a hand-held camera with the view finder at waist level, Ulrich remained anonymous while documenting shoppers engrossed in navigating the abundance of goods found in vast enclosed malls and big-box stores. The second phase focuses on thrift stores, the collecting places for discarded and unwanted consumer products, yet a primary destination for a growing segment of the United States’ population. The concluding group features haunting images of the impact of the 2008 financial crisis, highlighted by the exteriors and interiors of dark stores, ghost boxes, and dead malls.

And be sure to get the book: Is This Place Great or What.

 0 Comments

Symbols of Change When Nothing is Changing

A slide show at The Big Picture emphasizes that political demonstrations are breaking out all over the place.  And so they are: Argentina, Bolivia, Egypt, Greece, Haiti, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Syria, and many more countries are becoming defined by people taking to the streets to denounce ruling elites.   And the familiar iconography of raised fists, massed demonstrators, colorful banners, painted faces, and police violence suggest that all the protests are much the same.  As institutions fail and political leaders temporize, we can imagine a common revolutionary impulse surging through the streets around the globe.  The winds of change are blowing, and can the revolution be far behind?

Well, yes, there can be a bit of a delay.  Which is why I like this photo from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An organization named Rio de Peace planted hundreds of brooms “to symbolise the need to ‘sweep away’ corruption in the Brazilian National Congress.”  If all you care about is eye candy, this is the photo of the month for you.  If you want to make light of the recent demonstrations on Wall Street or anywhere else, this image could be your poster child.  Although it’s a genuinely novel and almost enchanting remake of a very tired cliche, it also seems to hover somewhere between art for art’s sake and a Disney animated movie.  More to the point, it could have been designed and funded by a corporate sponsor–“OK, people, we’ve got to do something creative about corruption.  How about brooms at the beach?”

In short, if demonstrations are to be more than mere symbolism, they have to be about putting your body on the line, and so the brooms seem to capture exactly the wrong kind of attention.  But that may be too harsh, even without knowing a thing about the situation in Brazil.  The important thing to recognize about most of the protests occurring this year is that they are not going to change much, and that they are going to continue anyway, and should.  Likewise, many of them will be misunderstood if they are seen as revolutionary actions, or even as steps toward a revolution.  Taking politics to the streets may have that potential, but it also is a hallmark of political systems defined by endemic divisions between mass and elite, rich and poor, the people and a ruling oligarchy.  Thus, the symbols of change can also be indications that things already have moved in exactly the wrong direction.  Instead of a return to social democracy, they can be symptoms of how much democratic institutions have been captured by capital.

And so maybe symbolism isn’t so incidental after all.  There is no better icon of capitalism than the Merrill Lynch bull on Wall Street.  (And note that there is no corresponding bear, so fair and balanced is no part of the story.)  These cops have to do without their doughnuts, but otherwise this isn’t exactly tough duty.  That bored banality while manning the state’s barricade is priceless.  The likelihood of revolution is slim to none, but even so police power will be spent on keeping the symbols intact.

The brooms can remind one that the global protests are not all alike: each will involve complex local conditions, constraints, and possibilities.  The barricaded bull can remind one that the symbols do matter–not least to those with the most to lose.  Both images suggest that “revolution” may be the wrong term for describing the need to change a system that has become highly adaptable at resisting systemic change, even as it becomes increasingly dysfunctional and unjust.

Photographs by Felipe Dana/Associated Press and David Shankbone/Flickr.

 3 Comments