There is no way that press coverage of the Mississippi river flooding can match the damage, discomfort, and discouragement that is spreading across the flood plain.  Maybe the coverage really doesn’t matter, but if it does, people are getting too little of it.  Nor is this surprising.  Big news from the Middle East continues to overshadow a story driven by the weather.  The news is drawn to dramatic events, while the flood has been spreading slowly.  Tragedies are supposed to be monumental, but the flood is about sandbags and soggy carpets.

You might say that this photograph says it all, precisely because it says so little.  A woman is carrying clothing out of a flooded house.  She is wading through the kitchen, which is standing in a couple inches of water.  The kitchen looks like many other kitchens across America and the world, right down to the magnetic decorations on the fridge.  The one difference is the water, which is not too deep but thick with mud and getting under everything.  Her expression is just right: this is an unexpected, unwanted chore, and one requiring concentration so that you don’t make it worse, but what can you do except wade through it?  Why waste time complaining?  Or making a big deal about it in the news?

The house has not burned to the ground, been devoured by an earthquake, or shattered by artillery shells; it’s just wet.  So it is that floods usually fall short of other disasters in terms of visual interest.  You can only look at so many photos of a boat being piloted down the street of a small town.  But something is being revealed, nonetheless.  The problem is not the nature of the disaster, but of a media system that is not suited to capturing conditions of general deprivation.  The news is drawn to emergencies, and to making emergency claims, but not to understanding how large groups of people may be on the edge of despair or at least having to get by with far less support than others take for granted.  Consider, for example, how the health care debate was hijacked by images of Tea Party protests, allowing millions of people to be shorted and billions of dollars squandered for want of being able or willing to depict systemic problems on behalf of the general welfare.  Also lost along the way was an appreciation for the fragility of human life and the social systems that we erect to protect ourselves from the forces of nature.

Another woman, another room of the house, another natural disaster.  This bedroom was exposed to the elements by a tornado that blew through Alabama not long ago.  (Remember?)  Once again, you see a demonstration of the coping skills that are so essential to everyday life.  The walls have been torn away, but what can you do except sort out the possessions that remain?

What strikes me the most about the scene is that the walls were so close to the bed.  We’ve all been in small bedrooms, but how often do we then feel that we are just on the other side of the outside?  Here we can see that, large or small, a house is but a thin shell between inside and outside, between the forces of nature in all their violent capriciousness and the shelter, security, warmth, and everything else we hold dear when in our own space.

Whether flooded or torn asunder or still intact, a house is a fragile thing.  More generally, housing has proved to be a fragile part of the national economy, one that, if poorly managed, can come crashing down to spread harm far and wide.  When deregulation allowed the housing market to be flooded with financial malfeasance, disaster struck, and ordinary people who had done no wrong were left to pick up the pieces.

We live in shells.  When they are well built and protected, we forget how fragile they are.  When disaster strikes, the thin barrier between ordinary life and catastrophe is exposed.  What remains to be seen is whether anyone else will notice or care.  And care not just about this house or that one, this town or that one, but enough to rebuild a society with the protections and support that ordinary people deserve and need.  It’s called government, by the way.

Photographs by Scott Olson/Getty Images and Butch Dill/Associated Press.

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A flood is a general thing.  Tornadoes are idiosyncratic, fires depend on their fuel, mudslides are site-specific, and so it goes.  Sure, not everyone is in the flood plain and the other natural disasters can cause a lot of damage, but somehow a flood seems the most comprehensive of them all.  Noah wasn’t asked to build a firebreak, and even today a flood can look as though it might cover the earth.

This photograph from a farm within reach of the Mississippi River shows how a flood brings everything under the singular dominion of water.  It’s not as if nothing is left, but everything is inundated, either covered or cut off and then suspended in the same elemental medium.  As you can see here, the structures may remain intact (for awhile, anyway), but everything else is swept away or drowned.

The dunning uniformity of a flood’s destructiveness is depicted perfectly by this photograph.  One result is that it becomes easy to see the disaster as a general problem, something that affects the whole community and is defined by collective action such as building dikes.  That’s not the full story, of course.  In fact, you are also looking at a personal disaster: this farmer is effectively wiped out for the year or worse.  House, place of business, equipment, everything has been ruined, and don’t even think about getting the crop planted in time.  Likewise, the waters that look so uniform from a distance will be a silent maelstrom of cross currents, fish, other animals, and debris, and the waters will reshape the land this way and that before they recede.  The particulars are not the story, however, nor should be.  The flood, both materially and symbolically, is one way that nature reminds us of how things that seem separate can share a common fate.

Which is why disaster relief will flow like waters from the federal government to the states.  Of course, it flows regardless: after the tornadoes that ripped through the South last month, and after the hurricanes and every other natural disaster.  The federal largess is particularly interesting this year, since–as often is the case–most of the damage is in so-called Red States.  That’s right, in the states where majorities pride themselves on their commitments to small government, low taxes, and deficit reduction.  And so the photograph above needs to be paired with the pictures that you won’t see: (1) Red State governors not applying for or accepting federal aid.  (2) Red State governors, senators, and representatives saying that they don’t want any aid if it would increase the deficit.  (3) The same crew saying that they will be willing to raise taxes or increase deficits to cover their own disaster needs, much less others’.  (4)  Anyone realizing that low taxes and deficit refusals are automatically denying aid to those who are experiencing disaster elsewhere–including economic disasters and social disasters such as bad schools and unsafe neighborhoods.  (6) Any suggestion that we should ask those citizens with low state taxes to rely on their tax savings to cover the costs of the disaster.  (7) Any suggestion that we should rely on market solutions: say, in line with health care revisionism, that the afflicted states should bid for the aid, with the lowest bidder winning while the other states are free to apply for help from other countries.

Hypocrisy is a necessary part of democratic politics, but there ought to be limits.  Unfortunately, the Red State politicians will ask for every penny that might be available and scream if they don’t get it, and do so without a thought to changing their relentless assault on federalism.  They should be helped, of course, but they also learn the lessons that disasters have to teach: lessons of reciprocity and other forms of cooperation on behalf of the general welfare.  That’s how human beings have been able to survive.  If you look at the photograph above, you might begin to understand how cooperation is the way that we can match nature’s comprehensiveness.

Photograph by David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

 

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Even without the recent nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, there would be good reason to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl, Ukraine.  Every source of centralized energy production has human costs, but only one can poison large swaths of territory while making some areas uninhabitable.

Chernobyl is now a ghost town, which is one reason this mural is so powerful.  The photographic record–including slide shows here, here, and here–documents one abandoned habitat after another: schools, hospitals, office buildings, homes, everything had to be abandoned.  Harder to capture are the many illnesses, deformities, and deaths caused by the radiation, but evidence is there to be seen.  The empty rooms seem haunted, and so they are: by those who will never live there again, and by those who lost the better part of their lives to sickness, and by those who died before their time.

Public art often is commemorative, and the photograph above is doubly so: it acknowledges both the dead city and the spirits who continue to haunt the place.  It does so by having photojournalism relay another public art, the vernacular mural.  The mural is tied to a single place, while the photograph is capable of global circulation; the two media together mimic the nature of a ghost: a spirit that can travel across all realms but remains tied to one place, ethereal yet trapped, and unable to let go while powerless to act.

The city can’t move, while the mural was made by someone who has left the scene; the space between immobility and mobility can be occupied, temporarily, by the spectator.  We are asked to stop for a while, to look and reflect: to ask, what do we see?  One thing I see is that the mural is channeling another art: the photographs of bald-headed children weak with cancer caused by the reactor’s radiation spill.  Thus, the two visual arts circulate through one another to call a public audience to witness the reality of the disaster, a disaster that is both material and spiritual.

Ghosts travel across space and through time.  I have come to realize how much photographs about the past are really about the present, and how photographs about the present are really about the future.  Damaged children are signs of a damaged future, and so it is that images of children are used to depict what is at risk if one nuclear catastrophe leads to another.  If each disaster becomes a normal accident leading only to marginal improvements of a system that is at bottom a devil’s bargain, then the future has been poisoned.

This image is another example of one public art relaying another.  The photographer captures some of the iconography of a demonstration against Tokyo Electric Power Company.  The artwork on the paper cup lantern mashes up the triangle symbol of radiation warning signs with an image of children put at risk.  What is particularly interesting–and perhaps quite Japanese–is the ambiguity in the child, who could also be a nuclear imp, say, the horrid issue of a contaminated population.  Images of sprites have been associated with both electrical power and nuclear weapons–think of Freddy Kilowatt and the “nuclear genie”–and fears of mutation caused by radiation exposure have a history in Japan.  So it is that both photography and the spirit world may be a source of messages about the future.  The question remains whether the messages will be heard.  The ghosts can’t act; it remains to be seen who will.

Photographs by Sergie Supinsky/AFP-Getty Images and Ji Chunpeng/Xinhua.

Cross-p0sted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Sometimes a mundane photograph can capture historical conditions that usually are obscured by powerful habits of denial.

This image of a doctor reading an X-ray certainly seems part of the mundane world: that is, a world of cinder-block walls, florescent lighting, bottled water, and people standing around waiting.  The trick of having the film replace the doctor’s face does add a touch of aesthetic flair, and the caption, which tells us that he is treating a rebel fighter in Libya, suggests that the scene is part of a larger historical drama, but all that is muted by the blue tone, the static figures, and the matter-of-fact demeanor of the orderly on the right.  Even in an emergency room, there can be business as usual.

Except for the blood on that white glove.  What could in fact also be a typical feature of medical practice here acts as a punctum, in the sense introduced by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.  It pierces our complacent response to touch us emotionally and awaken a more critical engagement with the photograph.  Is that blood fresh?  Even if not, why hasn’t he changed gloves?  How dire is the situation?  (It feels almost as if he has pulled that X-ray film out of the body cavity of the patient.)  And why is he reading it in the hallway?

The last question begins to peel back the familiar response to the photo to expose something else.  What kind of medical facility is this, where water has to come in bottles, where orderlies aren’t in uniform, where X-rays have to be read by the rude light of a corridor, and where the doctors are having to do diagnostic work amidst people milling about?

In The Civil Contract of Photography Ariella Azoulay uses the concept of being “on the verge of catastrophe” to describe the condition of a population that is deprived of resources and otherwise injured to the point where it is just above becoming a humanitarian disaster.  Azoulay argues that Israeli  governing techniques keep the Palestinians in the occupied territories and Gaza in this condition indefinitely.  (Corroborating evidence includes Wikileaks documents quoted here.)

Her argument need not be limited to that single case, however.  These controlled catastrophes appear banal enough that their visible harms fall short of the urgency and drama required for the intensive news coverage that might prompt outrage and action.  Consider Azoulay’s first example of how this works, which is a photograph of a doctor reading an X-ray in Me’in village: “bare, dusty walls, a dirty space, the use of the natural light coming from the door due to the lack of electricity, the absence of proper equipment for examing X-rays, the conspicuously detached encounter between doctor and patient, the improvised clinic in which medical examinations are made amid people who are having a makeshift picnic after waiting for hours at the checkpoints” (p. 69).  As you can see, it is not the same photograph and yet is it the same photograph as the one above, right down to what you can’t see here: the center of that photo dominated by a hand holding a blurry X-ray.

That film, at once opaque and yet capable of still being read by someone with suitable training and dedication, can stand for the photographs themselves.  The conditions for response are less than ideal, but we can see what is there if we will but make the effort in solidarity with those who have been injured.

These photos are being taken all around the globe: photos of situations that are not and yet are the same.  Libya may have a better future than the Palestinian past, but don’t count on it.  Africa is littered with broken villages, regions, and states from decades of warfare and anarchy, and the larger forces at work in the Libyan war have much of the Middle East locked into political and economic stagnation.  Libya may have been on the verge of catastrophe for decades, and it now may be trading one form of sustainable disaster for another.

What we can’t say, however, is that we never saw it coming.

Photograph by Odd Andersen/AFP-Getty Images.

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