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After the Revolution, What is Peace?

The Libyan rebels are close to victory, and the papers are already rolling out photographs of populist exuberance.  Let’s hope this revolution isn’t betrayed like so many others from Russia (pick your date) to Egypt (ditto).  Even if Libya achieves the unusual, however, too much of the rest of the world will continue to be trapped in cycles of violence.

Yes, that’s blood.  Residents are cleaning out a Sunni mosque in Ghundai, Pakistan after a suicide bombing.  Over 40 were killed and many others wounded.  Although the effect of the explosion on those within must have been amplified by the brick walls, the solid construction also saved many more lives.  And then the hoses and brooms were brought out and the clean-up begun.  More solidness–this time in the local community that can matter-of factly get on with the responsibility of living together.

There is much to admire in the practicality of ordinary people responding to the ongoing disasters that plague the early years of the 21st century.  And yet I can’t help but think, that is the hell of it. They, and we, and everyone seems trapped in damage control rather than in making some of the obvious, albeit large-scale changes needed to move beyond political violence.

The photograph captures this paradox.  On the one hand, it is a picture of functionality: a simple, well-built building and people working together to get the job done, no frills and no drama.  On the other hand, that horrible river of human blood–and the knowledge that innocent people have been reduced to sewage.  The scene appears too ordinary to be a picture of war, and yet I shudder to think this is what passes for peace.

Lest one want to dismiss the scene as something limited to a particular region or  religious antagonisms, consider that there are many more photographs that tell a similar story.

Here we go from the tragic to the ridiculous.  A member of a bomb squad in Kathmandu, Nepal is leaving the scene of a false alarm.  He’s carrying a pressure cooker, which apparently was the cause for alarm.  Silly, right?  Just like those announcements in the airport: “Do not leave your personal baggage unattended.  If you see an unattended bag, please report it to airport security.”

This photo captures how any society can become habituated to monstrous distortions within everyday life.  That overstuffed suit and massive headgear could be a metaphor for the national security state, and the photo an allegory of how cycles of violence have become routine disruptions within civil society.  Like the bystanders in the photo, we give the security apparatus momentary attention and then get on with the business of living, even though we have just seen something that appears alien and excessive.  And so we become habituated to local adaptation rather than systemic change, and to continuous war rather than a just and sustainable peace.

Photographs by A. Majeed/AFP-Getty Images and Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters.

 

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Interactive Exhibition: What Happens Now?

What Happens Now?  Proposals for a New Front Page

What should we be looking at? The extraordinary number of photographs taken on September 11 made it the most photographed event in history and may have signaled the birth of citizen journalism. However in our impulse to record, we have not formulated new strategies to gain a better understanding of today’s pressing issues of a globalized world.

Ten years post-9/11, at a time when we are more overloaded with information than ever but cannot access it in a coherent manner, Aperture will create a visual café for collective social engagement with the question: What Matter’s Now? and turn it into an evolving exhibition space. During a two-week period Aperture will turn itself “inside out,” letting participants engage in the editorial process of weighing questions, ideas, and images, and proposing conceptual and curatorial solutions. Both invited guests and gallery visitors will be asked to participate.

The exhibition What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page will combine the crowd sourcing of images and ideas with the curatorial engagement of six experienced individuals, each hosting a table and a conversation within the space, where on corresponding walls each group will present its proposals for the contents of a ‘New Front Page’.  Hosts include a variety of visual image specialists: Wafaa Bilal, Melissa Harris, Stephen Mayes, Joel Meyerowitz, Fred Ritchin (who conceptualized this project) andDeborah Willis.

Contributions will be solicited from people around the world who are not able to visit in person. By sending files to dedicated email addresses set up for each table, as well as a general account, remote participants will be able to add their suggestions of imagery, multimedia projects and websites as part of the exhibition in-process.

Exhibition in progress: September 7–September 17, 2011; Monday-Saturday, 10:00 am-6:00 pm.  The exhibition is sponsored by the Aperture Foundation with support from Canon.  More information will be available soon at the Aperture website.

Photograph by Lorie Novak.

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London Rioting and the Descent into Feudalism

Riots happen more often than you might think around the globe, but when they happen in London the shocked response is always the same: how could that happen here?  This is the West, for Christ’s sake: civilization, democracy, and continual progress are supposed to be the order of the day.  Why would the people riot against representative government, and why destroy the businesses lifting up your own neighborhood?  The combination of a European locale and the seeming lack of reason have lead some to label the violence a peasants’ revolt.  The modern world is not supposed to contain peasants, and thus irrational behavior by the urban masses can be dismissed as a senseless throwback to more primitive impulses.

But what if the same analogy holds for the state?

These warriors could be time travelers from the past, transported in their armor, helmets, and shields to stand before Big Ben in some Gothic fantasy movie.  The photo has been sitting on my desktop for months–yes, that’s right, it is not from the most recent riots, and it, too, was taken in London.  I’ve kept the photo because it so perfectly captures a dark tendency that is spreading across the globe: what might be called a new feudalism.  In place of the egalitarian principles and shared prosperity of the twentieth-century social contract, we see a savage reassertion of economic power backed by ever greater investments in security forces.  And, whether accidentally or otherwise, those forces increasingly look like the private armies of the late medieval period.

And it’s not just London.  These knights are patrolling amidst the destruction last year in Vancouver.  Again, the one on the right could be riding out of the 14th century.  And we can still feel the effect that cavalry have when seen from ground level by relatively unarmed opponents.  As working people have been driven down in the economic order, they also have been driven down in the political process; taking to the streets becomes the only remaining option when the government has been captured by the same elites that are grabbing and hoarding the society’s wealth, common resources, and its future.

Riots always play to the worst elements in a society, but those are not their causes.  The late-medieval uprisings were the result of conditions that sound all too contemporary: expansion of the income gap between the rich and the rest, corrupt government serving elite greed, massive deficits caused by expensive wars, and environmental changes that degraded everyday life.  Yet it remains all too easy, even among those who recognize the underlying lesson of the analogy, to deny its full implication: the riots and the police response are merely matching symptoms of the same disease.  As the social order is transformed from a modern to a neo-feudal system, riots will become all the more common while money that could address the causes of the unrest will be poured instead into security.  Perhaps it should be no surprise that those security forces are looking more and more like something seen in a distant mirror.

So take a look at the look of the future.

I’ve lost the citation for the first photo, and Tin Eye can’t find it either; any help would be appreciated.  The second photo is by Rich Lam/Getty Images, and the third is by Stefan Wermuth/Reuters.
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On Vacation: In the Mosquito’s Gaze

Like a fair number of our readers, we’ll be on vacation for the first two weeks of August.  Travels include some time in Minnesota, where one becomes the subject of the mosquito’s gaze–surely an under-theorized facet of visual culture.  Thanks to the FEI Image Gallery, however, we can see the apparatus itself.

This electron microscope image is described as a frontal view of the compound eyes of a mosquito.  They actually don’t see very well, but that hardly matters as their antennae can sniff out your blood every time.  Perhaps the vacation can be used to think about incorporating other species and other senses into the study of visual culture.  Yeah, we’ll get right on that. . . . .

Posting will resume on August 17.

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Casualties of War: The Toys

Remember the war?  Sure you do, but have you seen much of it lately?  With the worst threat to the country in the House of Representatives, inattention to the wars in the Middle East might seem understandable, but the casualties continue to mount.  So it is that we need artists who can help us both see anew and reflect on how much remains unseen.

Perhaps this plastic toy soldier will seem merely odd or offensive to some.  For those of us who spent countless hours of our childhood playing with World War II combat figurines, this molded amputee is a shock to the memory system.  I was at once transported back to childhood’s idyll and confronted with the harsh reality of the present.  What seemed harmless becomes patterned denial of the human costs of war, and real damage done today seems already on the way to oblivion.  The miniature scale, cheap industrial material, and obvious naivete of a classic war toy have been reworked artistically to capture how easily people can get used to the suffering of others.  If we imagine these toys being moved around on the carpet, we begin to grasp how war is insinuated into the small spaces and formative experiences of ordinary life–and with that, easily forgotten once preoccupied with the more pressing business of adulthood.

Unless you’ve served in a combat zone, of course.  Then you might have seen and done things that are hard to forget.  Were you designing the toys, the typical idealization might be reversed.  Instead of the usual figures of rifleman, machine gunner, and the like–straight shooters, never wounded, incapable of PTSD–you might think of what happened to the women, or your buddy’s suicide.  And if that isn’t something anyone should dwell on, it does need to be recognized, as these are casualties, too, and not ones that show up so neatly in the government body counts.

Most of the time, however, the heavy “collateral damage” is hidden away behind more reassuring images; images that work like toy soldiers, you might say.  And to get a sense of how common that is, all you have to do is look at these disturbing alternatives.

That’s the idea of this work from Dorothy, a design group not above making people think.  You can read more about the set here.  Fortunately, they are not for sale.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Citizen Action When Systems Fail

This photograph won’t win any awards, but it tells an important story.  A story within a story, to be exact.

The larger story is that a terrorist attacked both a government center and a civics camp in Norway, killing at least 72 people.  That story includes all the madness you might expect.  The attacker wanted to protect Europeans, so he murdered Europeans.  To oppose Islamic groups advocating authoritarian rule to enforce cultural conservatism, he called for an authoritarian takeover of European governments to enforce cultural conservatism.  He got as far as he did by exploiting the freedom and social trust that he deplored.

Sadly, we know that story all too well.  It also is a story of how ordinary precautions didn’t work, how the state does not maintain a monopoly on violence, and how even advanced societies are sure to fail.  Which is why the smaller story is so important.  The photograph captures what can happen in the aftermath of system failure.  One person is comforting another who has been wounded by the blast in Oslo.  She appears to have a head wound, and he is responding appropriately by applying a compress while keeping her head elevated.  His posture can’t be comfortable, as he is on his knees while supporting and steadying her body.  Equally important, he is comforting her: holding her closely, talking and listening, being deeply attentive to her person despite all the mayhem surrounding them.

The scene is a moment of civic intimacy.  They are framed by the ordinary decor of the city street: pavement, a metal and glass door, the signage, chair, and trash bin of a cafe, yet they are closely attuned to one another.  Nor is this a merely personal incident, as we can see from the shattered glass strewn across the sidewalk.  She hasn’t simply fainted or had a seizure, and the person helping her may not have known her at all–the caption identified him as a “passer-by.”  They were strangers who have been thrown together by the blast–and his kindness.

His action is underscored by their ambiguous ethnicity.  Is he Norwegian?  Is she?  Could he be one of those dreaded Islamic immigrants?  Fascist ethnic typing is scrambled by this act of compassionate citizenship.  For whatever passports they might have, he has made both of them citizens: strangers having obligations of equality and assistance regardless of other differences.  As Ariela Azoulay argues, any photograph implies that relationship; here the citizenship conferred by the camera reinforces what is already evident on the street.

The Chicago Tribune’s report on the attack was on page 26 of the Sunday edition.  I can’t believe that the story of a fundamentalist killing 72 people in a European country would have been buried had the attacker not been Christian and blond.  (Don’t like the Christian label?  Then stop labeling Middle Eastern terrorists “Muslim.”)  The Tribune is another example of system failure–in this case, the way the story will be underplayed in most of the American media.

Fortunately, as important as institutions are, we don’t have to rely on them alone.  Disasters demonstrate again and again that, amidst large-scale disruption, small-scale action by ordinary citizens is vitally important to limiting damage and restoring order.  The photograph above is one example of true citizenship.  More will be needed, and in response to disasters ranging from terrorist attacks to economic catastrophes.

Photograph by Scanpix/Reuters.

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The Real Urban Problem: Graffiti

I didn’t start out looking for graffiti.  I had bigger fish to fry: the bad economy getting worse, and outright catastrophe looming as the GOP prepares to wreck the county rather than anger Grover Norquist.  I can’t just write about national problems, however: there has to be a photograph.  Whether seen as documentary record or public artwork, the image provides writer and reader alike with a basis for thinking about things held in common.  But look around, from the print editions to the slide shows, and you would hardly know that the economy exists, much less that people might be out of work, underemployed, working harder for less, or otherwise worried about the future.  And maybe that’s why the New York Times decided to write about an upsurge in graffiti.

Yes, it’s true: graffiti is on the rise.  This image from LA captures the mood of the article: an empty, urban wasteland degraded further by anonymous vandalism, while all we should be seeing are blue skies.  Now the Times can write about whatever they want, but this story is worrisome for a number of reasons.  One is that it is frivolous, and the times are not.  Would that the paper of record had instead zeroed in on why kids all over the country are more than usually keen on tagging property.

Another problem is that the story repeats a very tired meme that the Times has been pushing for decades, which is that graffiti always is a sign of urban decay; this despite its development as a vernacular art that can just as easily improve a community as harm it.  Imagine if both porn and ballet were labeled “soft-core,” or if all risk taking from the casinos to Wall street were labeled “gambling.”  In each case the label would be true, but something would be lost in translation.  Graffiti can be a serious blight, but the examples in the Times own slide show indicate that there is more to the story.

My biggest gripe is with the way that the story attempts to present a balanced account.  In what may appear to be sophisticated coverage, the Times reports that “The upturn has prompted concern among city officials and renewed a debate about whether glorifying such displays–be it in museum exhibits, tattoos, or television advertisements–contributes to urban blight and economic decay.”  And there, in a stroke, we have it: The Times channeling Fox News.  The leading explanation faults culture, not economics or politics, and suggests that a culture war is underway and the rightful center of public debate, and that the real danger comes from curators and other liberals who promote transgression in the arts and refuse to stand up to media corruption–no doubt because they are relativists rather than values voters.

Of course, in the next line the Times provides the far more plausible explanation: “But it is also stirring a debate about what is causing this recent surge and whether it might be an early indicator that anxiety and alienation are growing in some struggling urban areas in the face of stubborn unemployment and the lingering effects of the recession.”  Oh, ya think?  In fact, even the best uses of graffiti are likely to be on the rise for the same reason, as neighborhoods pull together around the arts when nothing more substantial is forthcoming from their leaders.

The pairing of two explanations–one where culture harms the economy, and the other where the economy affects culture–is not journalistic objectivity; no, it’s a false equivalence, and one that encourages the reader to believe that state should be treating symptoms rather than causes.   The Times is schooling its readers in the same habits of delusion and denial that are at the core of the national decline.  One can easily imagine the likely response: more cops, not more jobs and summer programs.  More gated communities instead of more public investment.  More starving of the cities by state legislatures, rather than raising taxes to nurture economic development.

And the truth gets left in the gutter.  Graffiti can be a sign of decay, and cities large and small, like the suburbs and rural areas around them, are struggling with very serious problems.  Most of those problems have been created by men in suits, however, not by artists in tennis shoes.  Until the voters in this nation (and others) face that fact, there isn’t much one can do–except, perhaps, take a moment when no one is looking to make the best of a bad situation.

Photographs by Eric Thayer for the New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Best Photo Blogs (British Journal of Photography)

The current issue of the British Journal of Photography contains a review of “10 of the Best Photoblogs.”

We’re proud and very pleased that NCN is on the list.  The selection is particularly gratifying as it was done by Jorg Colberg, author of the terrific fine-art photography blog Conscientious.  (And that’s the only reason that Conscientious would not be on the list.)  The others listed are 5b4, aCurator blog, David Campbell’s blog, DLK Collection, Mrs. Deane, Prison Photography, Too Much Chocolate, Unless You Will blog, and Visual Culture blog.  Links to each are in the story at BJP and in our sidebar.

We are compelled to mention that this is not the only list out there.  Most notably, NCN was not included in the Life.com 2011 Photo Blog awards, but our good friend Michael Shaw’s BAGnewsNotes was included in that company, and so we’re that much happier to be cross-posted occasionally at the BAG.  As for getting with Life.com directly, there’s always next year.  In the meantime, thanks to Jorg and to all our readers.

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Gay Pride Exposes the Facial Mask

Homosexuality occurs across the rainbow of human cultures.  The same seems to be true of homophobia, except that the numbers are much larger.  Why are so many people troubled by this small constant in human variability?  There will be many sound answers accounting for a range of social structures and personality types, but sometimes an image comes along that reveals a deeper truth.

The real “threat” of gay life has nothing to do with sex, natural or otherwise.  The real problem is that it exposes just how much human nature is a contrivance–something that itself is not natural as other species are natural, but rather excessively given over to artifice, performance, and an often painful interplay of social display and self-consciousness.

And that’s why I love this photograph of two guys of a certain age at a gay pride parade in Bogota.  I assume they are wearing nurses’ hats, but I’m not going to speculate on that, although they should get some credit for the matching lipstick.  Gender trouble (alerting us to the fact that sexuality is performed rather than given), queering the standard categories otherwise in place with business suits and hospital uniforms, whatever might be the carnivalesque disruption of social categories underway here is only half of the story.  (An important half, as our management of the surface of things has enormous consequences in determining whether people will thrive or suffer, but not the point I want to dwell on today.)  The drama in this photo is all about the face.

Let’s spell it out: are they wearing masks?  They could be.  Especially the one on the right, as the smile looks somewhat frozen, as if sculpted in plastic.  And the headscarves could be hiding the rest of the trappings, whether Velcro straps or a loose fit at the back of the head.  But why the double mimicry of both age and a feminine profession–what kid would do that?  And the one on the left wears his face too well: the meaty heft to it, the tight creases of control between the eyes, and the delicious lift of the upper lip as if on the verge of a sneer–well, you can’t buy that.

The “naturalness” of the face is heightened by the way the black eyeglasses are perched awkwardly high up on the bridge of that considerable nose.  The rather large lenses seem small on that face, as if there only for vision but not really very good for that.  It starts to dawn that the make-up doesn’t extend only to the red lips and scarves, or to the silver ornament and the purple straps and the garish rose tint from the umbrella.

They are wearing masks–their faces.  Eyes look out from behind those facial masks just as they also look out from behind a pair of glasses.  Those faces, which almost could double as the conventional tragedy and comedy masks signifying the theater, suggest that these two individuals are old troupers in the play of life.  They have used their masks to fend off trouble, make their way in the world, express their thoughts and feelings, please, deceive, warn, and love.  Those faces carry scars and the knowledge gained, they are studied for intentions and more, and at last they will dissolve to black and become mere vessels emptied of consciousness.

Wonderful things, but in the end still masks.  And that’s the problem.  Human beings yearn to forget that they are creatures of their own making.  Too much responsibility, and not enough assurance.  Better, it seems, even for society to be ruled by nature, hardly a merciful sovereign, than to see it as a stage where one’s inner and outer selves will never line up exactly.

The gay pride parade may be a celebration of human rights, but it also is a reminder that everyone is queer.  That’s one more reason why we should be thankful there now are so many parades, and that everyone can attend.

Photograph by William Fernando Martinez/Associated Press; one of many in a slide show at The Big Picture on gay pride parades around the world.

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Do Space Scientists Dream of Cosmic Reproduction?

Individual scientists will dream of many things, but what are the collective fantasies that tie them to the stars, and us to them?  Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, and other popular series were all structured by the discourse of empire.  Whichever side you, or the emperor, were on, the template was political.  Expansion was a given, hubris the constant danger, and some combination of classical virtues such as prudence and courage the key to winning in the long term.   But for all the superficial similarities involved in “the conquest of space,” that really wasn’t NASA.

Perhaps only now, with the last mission about to lift off, can the final veil be lifted off the dream.  This image, taken through the window of a passenger jet, shows the space shuttle Endeavor climbing above the clouds this May.  It’s consistent with the many, many other images of NASA lift-offs: the single line arcing heavenward, leaving behind only a pillar of exhaust, monument to the enormous energies needed to push 4, 640,000 lbs  above the earth.  (That’s orbiter, rockets, and fuel tank, fully loaded.  Now try jump two feet into the air.)  And yet this is a very different image from the typical launch slide show. We don’t see the massive machinery of the launch pad, the roaring flames of the rockets’ ignition, the gleaming machinery rising godlike into the sky, the puny spectators gazing upward as the craft curves away from the “surly bonds of earth” to a final, bright spark of visibility before it passes into space, that place where you will never go.  No, this image is much closer to something else:

My point is not to make a joke. Nor is it to state the obvious, which is that there always has been an all-too-obvious phallic dimension to the whole rocket thing.  (Something to which this post obviously is not immune.)  Perhaps the amateurism of the photograph can help, for the glare of the window makes the image seem a bit like a specimen under glass.  The shift in the spectator’s standpoint also matters: for once we are looking down on the launch, which also is placed against the wide horizon of the planet rather than above those few able to stand and look upward at Cape Canaveral.  These and other features of the image combine to miniaturize what had been a long-running media spectacle.  That change in magnitude allows a hidden drive to become visible.

Whatever the idea behind the space program, the dream never was to get most of us up there.  The “space truck to nowhere” made that realization all too clear.  Gravity is our lot.  But reproduction is not about getting most of the adults through nature’s bottlenecks.  Instead of conquering the stars, perhaps the real drive is to seed them.  Still all too masculine and likely to be doomed for that reason, but now at least one can grant that the humans really weren’t serving the machines.  The dream, the image suggests, was to get just one pod through to some unknown egg.  Humanity wouldn’t conquer anything, but if it was found by the right host, some version of the species could spread across the galaxy.

This rumination is crazy, of course.  But then the space shuttle program was crazy: an unbelievable feat of engineering that had minimal scientific value for the enormous amount of money expended.  Rather than letting it become merely a museum piece, perhaps photographs such as the one above can buy a moment’s reflection.  Even though the smart thing is to focus on living long and well on this planet, the space program’s inversions of magnitude can reveal not only the smallness and fragility of human life, but also how our primitive urges can lead to dreams of almost infinite extension.

Photograph by Stefanie Gordon/Associated Press.  It accompanied this essay in the July 5th New York Times.  The sperm diagram is from a histology course.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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