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Human Waste Disposal

Both Patti Smith and Don DeLillo have said that something to the effect that the key to civilization may lie in the transformation of waste.  I assume they were talking about shit and bad food and everything else that might come under the label of garbage–except human beings.  But people are called garbage and treated worse.  Like this.

A drug cartel has dumped two truckloads of bodies on a road in Veracruz.  The New York Times emphasized that bystanders provided updates on Twitter during the traffic delay.  Really.  That kind of moral and emotional insulation isn’t free, but there is plenty available.  The unusually long distance between the bodies and the viewer helps as well.  Perhaps for that reason, I find a forensic mentality also seems appropriate.  Look closely and you can see that some of the men have their hands tied behind their backs, while all have been partially stripped.  Criminal executions are fodder for a brazen display of power against an ineffectual state, while the yellow curb stands in for the tape that will mark the crime scene when the authorities do arrive.

Like the police, the spectator may want to dote on literal details: Have the bodies been moved?  Was anything moved before the photo was taken?  These questions can be the key to successful prosecution, but for those of us not working in criminal justice, they also become another way of distancing oneself emotionally from the horror, loss, indecency, and threat to civil society that this image represents.

Others may not have the luxury of distance.

The caption at the Guardian said that “a rebel fighter looks at the charred remains of burnt bodies at the Khamis 32 military encampment” in Tripoli, Libya.  True enough, but the text is also a euphemism.  He is looking, and he also is gagging, and that is the more important gesture here.  He may be a young man, but it is more to the point to say that he is someone capable of an honest, humane reaction to the horror of war.  His soft, civilian clothes and shoes and lack of a helmet testify to his amateur status, and, frankly, he is lucky that he is not yet battle-hardened enough to be insensitive to human remains.  The question remains whether that has happened to us.  By not being able to smell the charred flesh or stare into the body cavities while still glancing at the photograph, it becomes easy to react without feeling.

Sure, war is hell, including drug wars, but what about the steady destruction of human beings because of larger political, social, and economic failures?  Think of the continuing violence in Mexico, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Congo, and many more areas where drug cartels, civil wars, mercenary armies, and the rest of anarchy’s legions are turning people into human waste.  If nothing else, disposal could become a problem.  Burnings don’t last long enough, mass graves can be dug up, drowned bodies wash ashore–you might as well let people live.

But they don’t let people live.  One of the challenges civilization faces today is not becoming habituated to the insidious, localized, but persistent and awful ways that human beings are being transformed into waste.  One could do worse than following the example provided by the ordinary individual in the second photograph: that is, to look at the carnage and choke on the close encounter with inhumanity.

Photographs by Veracruz en Red/European Pressphoto Agency and Louafi Larbi/Reuters.  You can see more of the Libyan photos, along with comments that support my point that literalism can be a means for moral and emotional denial, here.

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Photography and Ruptures in Time

Ezra Pound famously remarked in The Spirit of Romance that “All ages are contemporaneous.”  This was not the temporal equivalent of a flat earth claim, but rather his announcement of what was to become one of the great poetic doctrines of twentieth century modernism.  For most of us, however, the past is past.  Sure, Faulkner knew better, and there are vital cultures of memory, but modernity is about an endlessly expanding future.  Even as that dream has been steadily degraded of late, the incessant demands of ordinary life amidst a continual stream of news, weather, and sports continues to keep most of us living from day to day.  The timeline isn’t quite so narrow as that of an Alzheimer’s patient, but American society might be suffering from a similar loss of temporal bandwith.  Forced to live in a continually collapsing present, personality becomes brittle and fear can contaminate everything.  For that reason, then, there actually may be good reason to see something closer to what Pound had in mind.

A month ago I posted about the peculiar return to medieval clothing and weaponry in security forces.  I suggested that what may seem to be a superficial analogy could be documenting a regressive transformation of political power.  Globalization, excessive capital accumulation, and other structural changes may be leading not to the march of progress, but rather to the breakdown of modernity itself.  The photograph above supports that idea, except that now I’m looking at it while in a different mood.

The medieval horseman rides through the modern street, almost as if he were riding out of and then back into the past.  In the background, the signs of modernity are rather slim–primarily the diction in the graffiti.  The steel fixtures in the foreground provide the more reliable assurance, as they literally frame the horse and rider.  Fire seethes in the left of the frame, but it seems self-contained by the metalwork and lack of other material to burn.  The tableau could be an artist’s construction, perhaps by one who had been reading Pound.  Medieval past and modern present are contemporaneous: uncannily yet easily captured together in the artistic medium.  At the moment the medium is photography, the art that traps any moment–but 1/500 of a second–in an eternal present that can be seen as it was endlessly, anytime, out of time.

Art does mirror life, however.  The horseman really was there, and the photograph can remind us that time need not be linear, that the past need not be past, and that a medieval world may already be present among us.  Modernity may be riven with ruptures where what was thought to be safely superseded continues to lurk, resurface, or reassert its power.  These remnants of the past need not be the absolute opposite of modern time, as with the myth of eternal return, but rather something much more capable of displacing and redirecting the course of history.

But I’m getting grim again.  This post began, if that is the right term, with a commitment to enjoying contemporaneity, or at least appreciating how public arts could be restoring a sense of the past that is uncanny and provocative rather than conventional.  Like this:

The caption placed him at the Gay Pride parade in New Delhi on July 2, 2011.  I think he walked right out of Renaissance Italy.  Again, the slogan in the background reminds us of the present, but otherwise he could have fit right in at Florence.  And they would have understood that mask more than we can imagine.

Any photograph is another reproduction of modernity’s endlessly unfolding present, but this one also offers a glimpse into another time.  Thus, the photograph itself is a tear in the modern fabric of time.  And through that narrow aperture, we can see something eternal.

Photographs by Victor Ruiz Caballero/Reuters and Prakash Singh/AFP-Getty Images.

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Ingenues and Aliens at Fashion Week

First, let’s think of all those girls who’ve wondered, “Why can’t I look like that?”  We now can say, here’s why.

Sure, bone structure has something to do with it, but, jeez. . . .  Four attendants, all pros, working attentively to get her perfectly turned out–this is not something even the most dedicated 13-year-old can match.  And, of course, the kids are working off of magazine photos and we haven’t even talked about air-brushing.  Femininity is the work of many hands, not to mention rigorous training for intense competition in highly mediated arenas.  It’s no accident that there are two bottles of sport drink in the background.  It’s too bad that we can’t apply a warning label: don’t try this at home.

This month Fashion Week (or I should say, Fashion Week!) has moved through New York and London on its way to Milan and then Paris, and the modest knockoffs will be coming to a mall near you soon enough.  Everyone involved understands that the scene is intense, over the top, and pitched high, high above the budgets and day-to-day realities of ordinary women.  But it’s also anxious, ritualized, and a strange combination of visual imagination and pragmatic calculation, and so not so different after all.  What fascinates me is how this very limited theater can still reveal so much about how society itself is fashioned.

The ingenue is a stock figure of innocence, and the young woman above would seem to qualify.  Her candid willingness to cooperate so precisely with those who are shaping her for her public presentation is an endearing type of poise, and yet one that also exposes extreme vulnerability.  One who can be made up so willingly and well will surely become beautiful, but she also could be made into something else entirely, so much as to lose her soul.

Like this, perhaps.  A battle-hardened older woman?  Lady of the night?  Vampire?  Space alien?  You can take your pick (speaking of imagination . . .).  In any case there is something otherworldly about this scene, and whatever it is, it’s trouble.  Personally, I like the aliens angle.  She could be planted among us, a secret agent preparing the way, with the first of the ships arriving from above.  Or perhaps she is a leader, ready to start implementing The Plan.  There certainly could be fury behind those eyes, and there is no doubt that brutal calculation also will be involved.  Such conjectures are pure fiction, of course, but like films ranging from The Stepford Wives to Blade Runner, each fantasy points toward an unsettling truth.  As girls are made into models of femininity, they reveal how all social life is the product of human artistry.  And more to the point, they reveal yet another path by which our drives to please, to compete, and to perfect our creations can lead to self-destruction.

Photographs by Jonathan Short/Associated Press and Eric Thayer/Reuters.

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Vernacular Photographer Herman Krieger

This week we feature the photo essays of Herman Krieger, an independent photographer living in Eugene, Oregon.


There may be less irony in this photograph than you think.  Herman’s photo essays include everything from candid contrasts to captions that are as corny as anything you’d see in a flea market, but they are neither judgmental nor superficial.  Instead, he achieves an intimacy with and understanding of his subjects that is rarely found among other hobby photographers.

You can learn more about Herman by watching this brief PBS video, or by going here (including the link to the New York Times review) and here.  But I’m sure he would be the first to say that the photo essays are not about him, but rather about appreciating the small pleasures–one might even say “authentic delights”–of ordinary life.

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Rebuilding America: Will It Happen Here?

Commemoration Sunday is over, and America has resolved once again to never forget the terror attack of 9/11/01.  That terrible day should not be forgotten, but concerned citizens might ask whether 9/11 has much to do with the problems defining the US today.

Al Qaeda didn’t destroy this Fisher Body plant in Detroit, Michigan. Didn’t have to. Nor, as the comic Andy Borowitz has astutely pointed out, have foreign terrorists threatened to dismantle “some of the most essential functions of the US government, from Social Security to the Federal Reserve.”  You had to go to the recent Republican Party Presidential Debate at the Reagan Library to hear that.

To steal a phrase from Barbie Zelizer,  9/11 commemorations may be another example of “remembering to forget“: It is easy to remember the planes hitting the Twin Towers, but difficult to face the massive cost of 9/11–according to Sunday’s New York Times, $3.3 trillion and counting, with the greatest portion by far the result of an ill-advised and fraudulently justified rush to war.  And while that national treasure was being squandered, jobs were being lost by the thousands every month: 2.3 million between 2001 and 2007, and the hemorrhage hasn’t stopped since then.

This is how the US should look: a gleaming city. It need not even be a “city on a hill,” just a city that shows the signs of strong investment guided by government policies representing a dedicated and intelligent effort to lift the nation to new heights.  Unfortunately, the photograph is not from Milwaukee or Buffalo or New Orleans or Portland or any other American city.  Welcome to the Jinzhou New Area on the northern side of Dalian, China.  It’s what you can do if your national economic policy is dedicated to creating jobs, and if you aren’t spending a trillion dollars on an unnecessary war in Iraq, and if you are not held hostage to economic policies that now have a proven track record at benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of the middle and working classes.

Is the comparison unfairly selective?  Sure, and one could show pictures of poverty in China and gleaming office towers in the US.  But consider this: Detroit has been in trouble for a long time–the first Chrysler bailout was in 1979–while everything you see in the second photograph has been built since the establishment of the Dalian Economic and Technological Development Zone in September 1984.  Detroit is still waiting for its “market solution,” while Dalian exemplifies what capitalism can do when it is made to serve the national interest.

The US economy is experiencing serious structural problems due to government policies at home and abroad.  Terrorism has nothing to do with it, save as a distraction and an invitation to mismanagement of national resources.  For the record, American democracy isn’t broken beyond repair. It is is serious trouble, however, and not least because the Republican party is prepared to reduce the nation to Third World status in order to win elections.  And as Mike Lofgren has trenchantly argued, don’t think they don’t have the political will or the policies to do it.

Along with the memory of 9/11, it is imperative that Americans recall just how much has been lost in the last ten years.  And why.

Photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre/The Ruins of Detroit and Jim Ford/Evanston.

Cross-posted at BAGnewNotes.

 

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Prison Photography on the Road: And You Can Help

Pete Brook, author of the important blog Prison Photography, is taking his work on the road.

Pete will be interviewing three dozen photographers who have documented the rise of America’s prison industrial complex. He also will be talking with leading practitioners in prison arts, prison education, law and advocacy. All content will be made available free of charge, via Creative Commons, to the photo and prison reform communities.

You can read more about the project here.  You also can donate to help cover costs.  (I don’t think Fox News is going to bankroll this one.)  Donors also can pick up some serious prints.  Pete is going the extra mile here; I hope some of the NCN readership can lend him a hand.

Photograph by Bruce Jackson.

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Metropolis: City Life in the Urban Age

Metropolis: City Life in the Urban Age

September 11-October 9 2011

Noorderlicht Photography
Akerkhof 12, 9711 JB Groningen
The Netherlands

Since the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of the world’s population are living in cities. Metropolis:­ City Life in the Urban Age shows the many faces of the modern city.

In photography of diverse sorts – documentary and constructed – Metropolis literally leads you through a city of images. Metropolis exposes the soul of the city, the place where our future is being shaped.

Information about the exhibition, including satellite programs, is here.  Examples of work by each of the exhibition’s photographers are here.

Photograph by Michael Wolf.

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Staging Humanity

One of the most basic distinctions in human social consciousness is between being on stage or off stage.  We understand, for example, that staged performances might be somewhat larger than life or a bit over the top.

Not your typical get up for a job interview at the firm, is it?  This performer at the Notting Hill carnival in the UK might have a regular job–looks like he could be in finance, if you ask me–but here he’s way too gorgeous for the nine-to-five.  The elaborate, gender-bending theatricality screams play rather than work, not to mention carnival’s imaginative, ritualized inversion of the standard social order.  But the change is only temporary: it is understood that the play ends on time, that the performers take off their costumes, and that everyone returns to their usual routines.

But, of course, the usual routines are staged as well, and both the job interview and the job itself require being on stage, playing one’s role, following the script.  If your co-workers were on a continual carnival, the work wouldn’t get done and you’d all be out on the street, which is an even tougher act.  So it is that we come to treasure those places and times when we can be off stage–back in our apartment or out in the garden or walking along the beach or wherever it might be that we can take off the mask and “just be myself.”  But often it’s not that simple.

If I had to pick one image to represent the human condition, this might be it.    We are back stage, yet both in and out of role.  He still wears the mask that is so much a part of his performative self, but instead of the rest of the costume we see his soft, aging, vulnerable flesh.  This is the human being: at once irrevocably both natural and social, typified and unique, locked up in silence and yet profoundly communicative.

The photograph is from the Gay Not Gray fashion show in Berlin.  The point of the show is “that being gay and old can be fun and does not have to mean isolation.”  OK, and I’m all for that.  In fact, let me be clear: my point is not that we should feel sorry for this person or any group of people.  The individual may be happy or sad, but the photograph is not about the single person.  (He has the same expression in three other photos, one on stage and two backstage, so he may simply be staying in role for all of them.)  I see a real artist: one who has given us a moment of acute vulnerability and honesty that goes far beyond the theme of the fashion show.

Of course, the first photo is also a portrait of human being.  (I think he looks like he breathes chlorine, but it doesn’t hurt to see ourselves as aliens.)  Nor would I want to live in a world of relentless vulnerability and honesty, and fortunately life can include being young and healthy and enjoying our performative needs.  That’s the easy part, however, and so there is reason to be thankful when we are given a deeper look into our real selves.

Photographs by Toby Melville/Reuters and Thomas Peter/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Street Fashion and Casual Friday at the Revolution

It’s been there in plain sight, hardly worth mentioning: the Libyan rebel fighters include a lot of guys in street clothes.

Nothing new about that, of course.  Guerrilla fighters have been everywhere: Gaza, Iraq, Somalia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Peru, Chechnya–the list goes round the world.  Just like high-powered weapons, mercenary soldiers, and the CIA, one might add.  The media seem drawn to the informal look, however, even when the supposedly asymmetrical warfare is backed by round-the-clock NATO air support.

What really gets me are the shoes of the guy on the left.  Is that a fashion statement, or what?  The guy on the right is wearing unlaced combat boots and camouflage pants–perhaps he defected from the Libyan army–but that now looks so last year.  This year it’s high tops, baby, and you better be ready.

The photo above also could have come from any of a 1000 TV dramas or Hollywood movies.  At some point, it no longer matters whether art is imitating life or the reverse.  The common aesthetic is both masking and exposing something fundamental about the nature of modern war.  Thus, we can see the breakdown of the nation-state’s monopoly on violence, the mass distribution of weapons of personal destruction, the rise of militias and corresponding decline in military professionalism, the increasingly thin line between civil society and civil war, and more as well.  And since it all looks so cool and like something that anyone could do, it becomes all too easy to neither see nor think about who is funding the war and likely to lock up the economy and lock down democracy afterwards.

You can bet that this guy is ready to be one of the winners.  The caption at The Big Picture said, “A Libyan rebel fighter sits at a check point in Tripoli.”  Yeah, and you also can say that a Libyan rebel fighter sits in an office chair at a check point in Tripoli.”  Putting the chair in the street will be one small example of how any war can disrupt ordinary life, not least as troops adapt creatively to make do amidst the mayhem.  But somehow the symbol of business combined with the sharp blue jeans, gun, and attitude suggest casual Friday in some neoliberal, post-apocalyptic start-up.

The photograph provides another example of how war itself is changing.  On the one hand, major state conflict is being scaled down from conventional warfare under the threat of mutually assured destruction.  You wouldn’t know it from the US defense budget, but developed countries can’t afford to fight one another and there is no reason to anyway.  On the other hand, imperial occupations, border wars, genocide, and anarchy are consuming entire regions of the globe and civil violence is expanding insidiously everywhere.  One possible outcome is near total destruction of civil society, with the remains controlled by economic and military warlords.  Warlords who would be happy to hire this guy, who would be more than willing to work for them.

By looking at seemingly trivial things such as street fighter fashion, we might see just how close we are to living in the wrong movie.

Photographs by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters and Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.

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Conference Paper Call: Considering Vietnam

CONSIDERING VIETNAM: Call for Papers

17th-18th February 2012

Imperial War Museum, London

with Don McCullin, Philip Knightley and other guest speakers

The Vietnam War is evolving from contemporary memory into history. Fifty years on, it still serves as a benchmark in the history of war reporting and in the representation of conflict in popular culture and historical memory. This conference seeks to explore the legacy of the US involvement in South East Asia and the resonances it still has for the coverage of contemporary warfare. In particular, the conference will reassess the role of the media in covering the war and the implications this has had for the coverage of subsequent conflicts, the impact of the war on popular culture, the ways that wars and their aftermaths are experienced on the ‘home front,’ and issues around memorialisation and memory, particularly in museum culture. The conference will bring together practitioners, academics and curators in an interdisciplinary engagement with this complex but important issue.

This conference is organised by the Imperial War Museum and the University of the Arts Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) in support of IWM’s major exhibition SHAPED BY WAR:  PHOTOGRAPHS BY DON McCULLIN.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers discussing the representation of the Vietnam War across the following areas:

  • Photography
  • Film & television
  • Written journalism
  • ‘Mythologizing’ the Vietnam War in cultural memory

Please send a 250 word abstract and one-page c.v. to Dr. Jennifer Pollard at considering.vietnam@arts.ac.uk by September 30th 2011. Notifications will take place by October 28th 2011.

A special issue of the journal Photography and Culture is planned in response to the conference, including selected papers from the event.

 

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