Hariman – Page 44 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Waiting Your Turn in the Machinery of Death

June 13, 2010December 6, 2013
Hariman
visualizing war
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This photograph from Kabul, Afghanistan could have been captioned “Return of the Body Snatchers.”

Gallows humor is pretty cheap, but it may be as sane a response as any other to another suicide bombing. The attack last week killed 18 people, wounded at least 47 others, and generally made a mess of things in the center of the capital. And somebody has to clean up. I could be snide and say “Your tax dollars at work,” but the US occupation of the country is one reason the bombings occur, and US troops are as logical a choice as any for the clean-up detail. Even so, there is something unnerving about this image.

The caption said that the body was being loaded onto a truck, but it also looks as if it is being loaded into a shredder. Or worse, some mobile rendering vat–everything processed, nothing wasted. One neatly wrapped body is being conveyed up and into the machine, while another lies on a gurney waiting its turn to be fed into the industrial maw. In fact, they will be transported and unloaded while respectfully wrapped against additional harm, but nonetheless one senses that something awful has been revealed. Something about how life and death alike are being captured by the routinized violence of military occupation.

Whatever the motives of the suicide bomber and whatever the intentions of the clean-up crew, this photograph has captured the anonymity, repetitiveness, and pointlessness of 21st century warfare. Death and destruction are spreading like global plagues–as I write this, ethnic violence has erupted again in Kyrgyzstan–and entire societies are transformed into that strange late-modern hybrid of new technologies and demolished infrastructure. In rubble world, you can see cell phones and twisted rebar, digital cameras and gashed streets. And in place of thriving marketplaces, we see soldiers and other state functionaries going about the business of restoring the city, not to what it was before the blast, but to what remains after the worst of the damage has been carted away.

This dual character of being both modern and degraded is evident in the photographs themselves. The photo above depicts both an efficient funereal detail and the degradation of seeing bodies being treated like they were being recycled. It documents a modern military machine–not only the truck itself, but the entire military organization that so effectively manages violence and chaos–and also the waste and wreckage spread by war. And the image itself is a marvel of digital reproduction that will become lost among many other images much like it, each another fragment in the growing detritus of seemingly endless conflict.

One way or another, violence in the 21st century is a story of modern technology strangely implicated in the production of ruins. So it is that photographs of the machinery of death are both factual and allegorical. The facts are tied to the present; the allegory extends into the future.

Photograph by Ahmad Masood/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Dude! Extreme Sport in Afghanistan

June 11, 2010December 6, 2013
Hariman
visualizing war
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Sometimes a photograph seems to focus on something incidental but actually captures the deep structure of a situation.

Marine in Marja

Nice back, isn’t it? And the tattoos look pretty sharp, although it’s hard to appreciate the detail from here. And that would seem to be about it: an anonymous Marine is physically fit and tattooed. Interesting, but hardly news and surely not the key to ending the war in Afghanistan.

The photographer’s skill begins to emerge when one reads the caption for the photograph in The Washington Post: “A Marine tries to talk to residents of southern Marja, who gathered in front of a small outpost to voice complaints to the troops stationed there.” I assume that the caption is referring to the guy in the blue trunks, as he’s the one doing the talking. But perhaps he’s an interpreter instead of a Marine. The text refers to one Marine, after all. If so, the Marine “talking” is in fact waiting, lost in translation, you might say. Things are getting complex, aren’t they? The visual composition emphatically features the Marine in the center of the photograph, while the text seems to refer to the other foregrounded figure and to the villagers while leaving someone unmentioned.

And so the photo may not be showing communication at all. The more I look at the picture, the more it seems like something out of an extreme sports event. The dude in the center looks like he could be a surfer, mountain biker, base jumper, or some other high-risk, outside the box athlete. The rest of the scene can lock into that theme. Dude is waiting out the preliminaries, maybe even getting into his zone, while his agent or some media flack briefs the locals about their part in the event. Dude is cool, focused, totally able to get it done; just don’t ask him to talk and you’ll be fine.

The intermediary carries his share of derivative cool–check out those shorts–but he definitely is working in a more familiar mode. And the villagers? Oh, yeah, the extras in the scene: distant, fuzzy, a vaguely illegible mini-mob there to be pacified, they are only today’s background while the show goes around the globe.

Of course, this analogy is unfair to the actual people in the photograph, but photojournalism is not about its literal referent. Young men in arms are going to dig getting big, sporting tattoos, wearing sunglasses, listening to metal, and otherwise acting their age, and the dude actually could be a captain listening astutely on behalf of effective negotiations, and the villagers are in fact being pro-active by voicing complaints. What the photograph captures, however, goes well beyond those facts. If the central figure is the one “talking,” then it is through an interpreter with people whose interests are barely in the picture. If he is not the one talking, then talk is being backed up by force that waits to be unleashed with little regard for whatever was being said.

And whatever the story, one can’t help but think that a basic tendency in American culture is being revealed. Whitman celebrated democratic athleticism, but we are further down the line now. Vernacular grace has been harnessed for powerfully focused, high-adrenaline competition. Whatever the complexity of the world, Americans are turning war into an extreme sport.

Photograph by Andrea Bruce/Washington Post.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Drawing Lines in the Dark

border patrol vehicle by night

Don’t ask what it is, just enjoy it for a moment. Earth and stars, a soft layer of cloud and a bright river of light–the scene is both timeless and transitory. The stars wheel across the sky as night turns toward day, and the mountains will keep their deep geological time while that strip of illumination flares for an instant and then is gone. Perhaps it’s a line of fire, more likely something human and so even more impermanent. One can imagine the stars slowly fading out and the universe sinking into final darkness, yet planet and sky would still be part of the same unity.

But if your fate were tied to that light snaking through the darkness, you might wonder just what it is. The answer is, a US border patrol vehicle travelling near Otay Mountain, on the outskirts of San Diego, California. I don’t know enough about the area to say whether the vehicle is following the border exactly, but the time-lapse photograph nonetheless becomes an image of how the state draws a line in an otherwise inchoate reality. In place of the deep regularities of nature, here we see a division that could just as well be drawn a thousand different ways.

That assertion of sovereignty seems mighty puny against the galaxies passing overhead, but it is closer to human scale, for better or worse. It also is not inconsistent with the world around it: the trail will be following the contours of the landscape, and its light and shape mirror the landform and firmament in the background. What is inescapable, however, is that the patrol can only be a momentary traversing of a much bigger reality.

Chandeleur-Sound-oil booms

Like this, for example. Now you are looking at shrimp boats dragging booms to collect oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Like the border patrol, they, too, are drawing lines in the dark. The effort to capture some of the oil has to be undertaken, but any attempt to capture all of it is surely futile. This is not a brief against the state, however. The boats probably are working for British Petroleum, but it is not likely they would be working at all if the US government wasn’t able and willing to enforce some corporate compliance with environmental protection. Modern societies need to have states, and states are defined by borders, so what is the point?

These photographs are not images of trucks or boats or even of their visible traces in the darkness of a desert night or the deep waters of the Gulf. These images are hieroglyphs of human limitation. They mark the enormous difference between human–and, yes, modern–activity and the natural world encompassing it. They remind us that large scale collective enterprises–states and corporations–are nonetheless very partial, incomplete attempts to manage a world that remains too often inchoate and beyond control. In short, these images declare that we are overmatched–and not only by natural forces but by our own attempts to live well at all.

And for all that, they are beautiful. Some would say that is a liability, but I think it’s a clue. Even when working through the stupidities that define US immigration policy (too much policing) and regulation of the oil industry (too little), the hints of more harmonious relationships are there to be seen. The societies that need to be developed will always involve drawing lines in the dark, but perhaps they will make more sense if they are undertaken with a sense of humility, and with the idea that beauty need not be accidental.

Photographs by Jorge Duenes/Reuters and Eric Gay/Associated Press.

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Seeing that Nature Can't Be Fooled

The physicist Richard Feynman has famously remarked that “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” Those of us familiar with both the clean, green British Petroleum logo and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have good reason to savor the remark. More than irony is needed to get to a better world, however, not least for those of us who spend much time on technologies, such as computers and the Web, that are wholly dependent on the electrical grid and the large-scale energy production that fuels it. If visual culture is to be more than part of the problem (think of that BP logo), then there is need to look at more than oil-soaked birds or those hypnotic video images of robots at the well head. In fact, thinking about better approaches to resource management might benefit from more ordinary images of events that are still dramatic but less than horrific.

Guatemala sinkhole aerial view

The walls of the sunken cylinder are so uniformly even that it could be another feat of engineering–perhaps the footprint for a missile silo. No one expects to see an underground silo along a city street, however, so something is amiss. Seriously amiss, as it happens: you are looking at an enormous sinkhole in Guatemala City, Guatemala. The hole opened suddenly following Tropical Storm Agatha, devouring a factory that had closed for the day only an hour before. No harm, no foul, perhaps, but this is not what you want to see happening in your neighborhood.

The illusion that it could be engineered is indicative of the larger tension exposed by the photo. The built environment all around the hole is engineered, which means that it is the result of carefully working with nature rather than trying to fool it, manipulate it through magic, or otherwise live at its mercy. Nature has no mercy, and engineering either provides or protects a great deal of what is necessary for a good life in the modern world. But the more successful and extensive the engineering, the greater the consequences when nature does expose errors in calculation.

landslide Taiwan

Oops! This photo of a landslide across Highway 3 in Taiwan is somewhat of an inverted image of the one above. Here the earth rises above the street instead of having disappeared below, but in each case the built environment is drastically disrupted by the earth moving as it will and without any respect for the plans of those who build upon it. The photo is more comic than catastrophic, however: perhaps it will inspire a B movie, say, “Revolt of the Hill Creatures.” If done well, we’ll learn that all they really want is to be left alone–that, and love, of course.

I’m featuring these photos in order to point out not only that nature can’t be fooled, but that humans will continue to fool themselves. That highway is an impressive piece of engineering, but not one that could have anticipated every change in topography. The sinkhole in Guatemala is not the first in that area, but few would expect everyone living there to pack up and leave (and then what–move to San Francisco?) At some level, the illusion that it can’t happen here may be essential for human life. That does NOT excuse hubris, however, and BP and other global-scale offenders should be penalized and regulated to the hilt. Even so, the innovation needed to develop a sustainable society has to come at all levels, and especially in respect to the humble but still difficult tasks of restoring local communities.

Perhaps one reason why I like these photos is that they are relatively humble. The record distinctive events, but the images themselves are rather straightforward. They show disasters but relatively small scale disasters, and they are more instructive than dazzling. The perspective afforded is not the engrossing close-up but rather the relatively detached aerial view. Indeed, it is that calculated distance from the scene, that long view and the comic willingness to admit to one’s own faults that may be a critical part of seeing our way to a sustainable society.

Photographs by Reuters/Casa Presidencial and Reuters. The Feynman quote is from the report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Volume 2: Appendix F – Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle by R.P. Feynman. And despite my crack about oil-soaked birds, I have to applaud The Big Picture for breaking through the fourth wall with these photos.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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State-Sponsored Stupidity, and Why Dissent Still Has To Be Chaotic

Anti-Israel protest, Athens, Greece

This photograph of a protester being dragged by police in Athens, Greece appears to be a small study in mayhem. The action seems to be going in two different ways at once: two cops are facing right and one is moving left, with the civilian body being drawn as if to be quartered between them. There are signs of action everywhere–tear gas hissing from a canister on the left, a motorcycle ready to speed off on the right, and the four figures struggling across the frame–and yet the moment is paralyzed by the fact that everything is at odds with everything else.

The more you look at it, the less sense it makes. The uniformed police are supposed to be agents of state order, but their movements and lines of sight are vectoring off in different directions. The protester supposedly is a threat that has to be subdued by three armored men, but he is waring shorts and a t-shirt, as if a tourist, and his vulnerable, bared body is only capable of being hurt as it is dragged violently through the gas across the concrete. He is being auditioned for martyrdom, not revolution.

And why would he subject himself to this madness? He is protesting the Israeli government’s seizure of a humanitarian aid flotilla that was heading toward Gaza. Let’s get this straight: he is protesting against the Israeli government, in Athens. He is putting his body on the line against a government that is accustomed to withstanding international criticism, and he is doing it in the capital of a weak EU country, not in Israel or in the US, its most powerful and reliable ally. A rationale can be found, of course: protests against the violent seizure of the ships are occurring throughout the world and thereby activating a global public sphere, and Greece does provide the major Mediterranean port for US Navy, but I think there is more to it.

I don’t know about the specific individual, but I do know that similar scenes were photographed elsewhere in Athens and around the globe, and that they are part of a larger struggle over what can be known and admitted and acted on in the world today. To put it bluntly, dissent still requires that people get beaten up in public in order to force governments to confront their own stupidity, and to demand that the press confront their complicity with stupidity.

Let me give examples of what I mean by stupidity and complicity. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that at least one member of the inner circle of the Israeli government, “Einat Wilf . . . said that she had warned Mr. Barak and others well in advance that the flotilla was a public relations issue and should not be dealt with by military means. ‘This had nothing to do with security,’ she said in an interview. ‘The armament for Hamas were not coming from this flotilla.'” The more you know about the flotilla, the more obvious its plan to challenge the blockade and garner world press attention, but guess which opinion prevailed in Israel? (One thinks of BP executives mulling over the decision of whether to take an extra day or two to close the Deepwater Horizon oil well properly; Israel has not cornered the market on stupidity.)

But surely the Times is holding their feet to the fire, right? Perhaps, until one reads later in the article that “The blockade was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007.” That “takeover” refers to the fighting between Hamas and the PLO that followed the elections in 2006, and the implication is that Hamas obtained power through some sort of coup d’etat. What it does not say is that the fighting broke out after the PLO, US, EU, and Israel refused to accept the outcome of the 2006 democratic election won by Hamas. So why would the Israeli government rely on a military response that lead directly into a public relations trap? Because it had a long history of using force–e.g., the blockade–knowing that press coverage would be negligible. (How many of you knew that Gaza had been blockaded by sea for several years?)

This time the story broke big, however, because this time there was video coverage to contest the print story. Although the conventional wisdom is that visual images sensationalize while print reportage remains the mainstay of responsible journalism, it often is the case that print is the preferred medium of both stupidity and complicity.

To counter the institutions of state-sponsored stupidity, there need to be photographs that enact the senselessness of the state. And to get those images, ordinary people still need to get beaten in public. We should be grateful that some are willing to do so. Surely, however, more needs to be done if we are to see sustainable resolutions of political conflict.

Photograph by Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP-Getty. Those who think I’m being too harsh or imprecise when speaking of stupidity should note that the concept is being used in the debate in the Israeli press regarding the commando raid, e.g, here and here.

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After the Disaster: Why Not Get Back to Better?

The image below is a not very good photograph of a tar ball on the beach at Dauphin Island, Alabama. Despite the many more dramatic shots of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, this low-grade photo of a mundane object might be the better image of things to come.

tar ball Dauphin Island

Tar balls from this big spill will be washing up for years, but that’s only part of the story. What I envision is that the beaches will be cleaned and booms strategically placed and signs put up for the kids–“playing with the tar balls may be hazardous to your health”–and generally the Gulf will get back to normal. That is, to a new normal that is a somewhat degraded version of what was there before. Boats will still launch for both commercial and sport fishing, although now they will be working more tightly zoned catch basins (or not, and risk the fines that will be part of loosely enforced regulations). The oil companies will continue to place drilling platforms throughout the Gulf, although now with two blowout preventers instead of one. The damage suits and insurance claims will keep a legion of white collar workers driving to work in cars having everything but good gas mileage, and life will go on.

This new normal is already evident in photos of vacationers and clean-up crews on the same beach. What was the couple on the blanket supposed to do, cancel their plane reservations? This continuity is hardly limited to the beach: New Orleans is still struggling to recover from the Katrina disaster, but, hey, the Saints won the Super Bowl, and so the city puts on a good face while quietly adjusting to a smaller population and neighborhoods still a long way from recovery.

One reason I fear for my country is that there seems to be so little commitment to replacing damaged infrastructure with state-of-the-art public works. The stimulus money was largely used for patch jobs; that may be expected when you have to spend money quickly, but there was little talk of what might have been: a grand program of civic renewal. So much of the US currently is just being maintained–and now vast swaths of the suburbs have to be added to that list as they, too, are aging.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal wasn’t used to return the country to 1928. After World War II, the Marshall plan wasn’t used to recreate the Europe of 1939. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 didn’t merely repave existing roads but went on to create the Interstate Highway System. In each case, the money was used to get back to better. The same needs to be done in the US today.

The most obvious cases are in response to disasters such as the big oil spills, but that is only part of the challenge. There also are the slow moving economic disasters that have been destroying the cities and towns in the industrial Midwest and elsewhere. (Detroit wasn’t hit by a hurricane, but it’s in worse shape than New Orleans.) The same holds even in relatively prosperous sections of the country: bridges, rail lines, subways, parks, pools, beaches, boulevards–there is so much in the US that could look a lot better. Add to that the need for redesign and serious negotiation of complicated structural problems (say, such as supporting recreation, fishing, and extraction industries in the same ecosystem), and there is more than enough work to be done.

What is missing, however, is political will and a genuine commitment to the future. Both deficits can be traced to the Republican hegemony since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan rebranded government as the problem while proclaiming that the marketplace would provide nothing but solutions, and now several generations have become habituated to the degraded environments that are the result of that ideology.

And so here we go again. The usual response will be to clean up the worst of the mess and then make do with a bit less than you had before. But why settle for that? I’d like to think that the time is coming when, instead of getting back to not very good, the country can get back to better.

Photograph from The Huntington Post.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Elena Kagan's Sexual Orientation Certificate

We might as well admit that American politics is insane. Where else could selection for the nation’s highest court involve debate over a photograph of the nominee playing softball:

Elena Kagan playing softball

Really incriminating, isn’t it? Do we really want a Justice who bats right? But wait: if justices, in the immortal words of Chief Justice Roberts, are supposed to call the balls and strikes, then Elena Kagan’s experience at the plate might prove to be an important–dare we say empathic?–resource when on the federal bench. Jokes aside, this snapshot is being used to raise the question of Kagan’s sexual orientation. Softball + short hair = lesbian; didn’t you know that?

The use of this image is indicative of how easily photographs can be coded strategically. Were it a photo of a male nominee, for example, it could be a sign of his being an ordinary guy who has not lost touch with the common life. Were Kagan married, it might have been used to show that she is a team player. And keep in mind that millions of American women have participated in pickup softball games, often as part of teams organized at the office or at church picnics; in short, it really shouldn’t mean much at all. Instead, and thanks to the Wall Street Journal, the picture has become the excuse for public discussion of Kagan’s sexuality. A topic, one might add, that has about as much relevance as baseball to the job description of a Supreme Court Justice.

What strikes me about the controversy, however, is how it is part of a larger pattern of denial. Consider how Kagan’s having to declare her sexual preferences is similar to demanding proof of President Obama’s citizenship. A gay justice is almost as unthinkable as a black president, and so the question lurks. Is she? And it gets repeated regardless of the answer she has provided. And the discussion of whether she looks gay is about as intelligent as asking whether Hawaii is a state, but there it is.

Regardless of Barack Obama’s manifest qualifications for the presidency, his election continues to be traumatic for those who want to insist that the first citizen has to be white. (Since they can’t deny he is black–although that was tried–they have to deny that he is a citizen.) Likewise, the selection to the Supreme Court of someone who might be gay is part of the sea change in American life that will never make sense to those who believe that heterosexuality is a principle of American national identity. And so, despite her superb qualifications for the job, Elena Kagan is being asked to supply her sexual orientation certificate.

The good news is that, whatever is the case regarding Kagan’s private life–or that of the Senators who will be questioning her–America already has changed for the better. (For example, a majority would support a gay nominee.) The attempt to out Kagan or discredit her or continue to keep others outside the charmed circle of citizenship is becoming another lost cause. To appreciate what that means, I’d recommend another photograph of the nominee.

Elana Kagan high school picture

We don’t know her batting stance, but this is an image of youth at its best: bright, joyful, and full of promise, ambition, and hope. Thus, it also is an image of the American Dream.

Photographs by the University of Chicago and Hunter High School/Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Seminar on Walter Benjamin and Media Theory

Walter Benjamin and Media Theory: Images, Optics, Modernity

Walter Benjamin

A one-week interdisciplinary seminar for graduate students will be offered at Northwestern University, July 19-23, 2010. The University will provide partial travel support (up to $250.00), lodging, and most meals for student participants. The seminar, directed by Professors Dilip Gaonkar and Robert Hariman, will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by leading scholars on the work of Walter Benjamin. In this year’s seminar, we will pay particular attention to Benjamin’s work on visual media and modern society. The faculty will include Michael Jennings (Princeton), Gerhard Richter (UC Davis) and Peter Fenves (Northwestern). Sessions consist of morning seminar discussions of selected readings assigned in advance, afternoon lectures by the faculty, and group lunches and dinners throughout the week. There also may be some opportunities for student presentations. The format enables participants to develop extended scholarly conversations that can continue well beyond the formal conclusion of the institute.

Although Benjamin is a standard citation within the literature on visual culture, there is need for more sustained attention to the character and critical potential of his work. More than any other cultural theorist, Benjamin made visual experience the key to understanding modern life, and subjected not only media technologies and social practices but also fundamental conceptions of critical thought to reexamination on those terms. This seminar will discuss Benjamin’s work on visual media, environments, and practices while also addressing questions of history, theory, and critical method.

Selection for funded participation is selective. Students from all disciplines are welcome to apply by June 1, 2010. Applicants should send a letter of nomination from an academic advisor, along with a one-page rationale for their participation, to Jesse Baldwin-Philippi (j.baldwin.philippi@u.northwestern.edu). Inquiries can be directed there as well.

Klee Angelus Novus

The seminar is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication and the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.

Photograph of Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque Nationale, 1937, by Gisèle Freud; reproduced in Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography (Verso, 1996), p. 234. Photograph of Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, India ink, colored chalk, and brown wash on paper, 1920 (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem).

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Bombs Away in Times Square and Afghanistan

The bomb scare in Times Square the other day was a close call, otherwise known as dumb luck. And despite the embarrassment of the would-be bomber coming from Pakistan rather than Iraq or Afghanistan, one can assume that the scare only helped to continue the American war effort. Whatever happens in the US, the bombing is sure to continue over there. Rather than make light of the association between actual terrorism and US military campaigns, it might help to ask if coverage of the two might have more in common than has been noticed.

Times Square clean up crew

The New York Times slide show was labeled “Bomb Scare in Times Square,” and the caption for this photo said, “A crew cleaned up at the scene.” As if: I don’t see either a crew or Times Square, but rather a lone functionary in a back alley scene out of some sci-fi movie. Body Snatchers II, perhaps. In fact, the photo is a study in disconnects. Instead of the spectacle of Times Square, we see stacks of garbage, shipping flats, and other odds and ends. Instead of workers, there is one figure in an entry-level moon suit, and rather than cleaning up he seems to be merely rearranging the shards of glass with that ridiculously small broom. In place of terror and mobilization, there is this strangely esoteric ritual. Rather than war, there is a choreography of forensic sanitation (note his mask, gloves, and slippers). While some speak of the defense of civilization, this scene is vaguely surreal, and in lieu of the destructiveness of a powerful explosion, there is only broken glass on an empty street.

But there wasn’t a powerful explosion, so what’s the point? What I want to suggest is that the disruption produced by the non-explosion reveals some of the blindness that now regularly accompanies US attitudes toward war. The first problem is a failure to recognize the vast difference between the rhetoric of the war on terror and the banal realities of how it actually operates. Civilization comes down to picking up the garbage, and its defense usually depends more on a well-functioning civil society and basic police work than on the projection of military power across the globe.

A second problem is that we don’t see the either the bomb or the likely retaliation, but only a trace of destructiveness and an innocuous figure of state action. In this case, the lucky break of non-detonation excuses what is a regular practice of omission. Despite some outstanding documentation of the effects of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US public an never see more than a a small fraction of the destructiveness caused by American military bombing, and then only from a distance. (Assessments of total direct and indirect civilian deaths in Afghanistan due to US military action range from 8,768 to 28,360.) Let me be clear: powerful documentary photographs are published in a few outlets, but not enough and without the full reportage needed to really make a dent in public opinion.

And what documentation of military destructiveness is available is balanced by images such as this one:

Harrier jet Afghanistan

This image of a Marine Harrier jet would seem to be the opposite of the one above: a member of the ground crew has just finished fueling the sleek, powerful machine, which stands at ready on a clean runway against a backdrop of efficiently arrayed support buildings. This is a picture of preparedness, and of the awesome capability of the American military. There is nothing hapless about it, and we seem on the verge of action, not stuck in the dismal aftermath of having been attacked. That is the message, of course, and so the one image counters the other: they may have car bombs, but we have this. They may be able to pull off an attack, but there is no doubt that this machine is built for serious payback.

That said, I also think that the two images are both part of the same pattern of willful obliviousness. Look again at the second photo: once again, there is only the trace of the bomb’s destructiveness. (If you look carefully under the wings, you can see some of the weaponry.) Although now seeing what comes before an attack rather than what remains afterward, the attack itself is not to be seen. Even the style of the image, with its modernist aesthetic of sheer surfaces, clean lines, empty space, and other design features of modern technology admits of nothing messy, bloody, or deeply hurtful. There is no sense of how the bomb will disrupt Afghan society–or, for that matter, how the expense of maintaining the jet and all that goes with it is disrupting American society.

The authorities rightly whisked away the SUV that was supposed to detonate in Time Square, and surely this Harrier jet will have flown another mission since the photograph was taken. In each case the photographer has documented one scene in a global war that is all about bombing and being bombed. But in these photos, as with so many others, the bomb, one way or another, isn’t there. About that one might ironically remark, “bombs away”; or, perhaps, “out of sight is out of mind.”

Photographs by the New York Times and Tim Wimborne/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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365 Ways to Look at a Self-Portrait

The 365 Days project is a group of people dedicated to making one photographic self-portrait every day for a year. Although I usually don’t pay attention to snapshot photography, the photos are posted at Flickr and now comprise an archive of 980,819 photos by roughly 18,000 people. One way or another, this trove is a resource for thinking about how ordinary people use photography as a way of developing their own capacity of self-expression. The photographs often are both personal and public, artistic and conventional, evocative and alienating, and otherwise both thoroughly familiar and yet uncanny. And for better or worse, each has something to say about what it means to be a person.

David Sutton face

This self-portrait was taken by David Sutton, a friend whose daily pics brought the project to my attention. David is a professional photographer and so perhaps not the best example of the group for that. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see how much his images exposed dimensions of his inner world that weren’t obvious amidst the banter of our conversations in an Evanston coffee shop. The camera becomes a confidante, and then puts the public into not that role but something like it.

David Sutton eye

And so one might learn more than one wishes to know, particularly as the days go by and the photographer is pushed to experiment. This image may reveal much more about David’s aesthetic background than his personality–although we can’t be sure about that–and thus the shift into the more artistic mode reveals another dimension of portraiture, which is an exploration of both social types and the realm of the inchoate that necessarily accompanies categorization without and within.

That possibility of seeing what lurks within and between the many mundane images of everyday people may be the surest appeal, and value, of 365 Days. So it is that when looking for the image of a person, it may not matter at all who is in the picture.

latent image face

David Sutton is a working photographer with a studio in Evanston, Il. The third photograph is from latent_image at Flickr.

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