Polarized Visions of the Post-Human

February 1, 2010December 3, 2013
Hariman
fashion/fiction
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Polarization seems to be the flavor of the year in Washington, cable networks are cashing in on polarized gender roles, and so there should be little surprise when encountering extremes during Fashion Week, where they never go out of style.

fashion week red cyborg

“Fashion Week” lasts for months, like a perpetual party of fin de siecle decadence on a yacht floating around the globe. Two recent shows, one in Paris and the other in Hong Kong, provided polarized examples of where humans might be at the end of this century.

According to one caption, the first photograph presents “creations” by French fashion designer Romain Kremer as part of his Men’s Fall Winter 2010-2011 fashion collection. I guess in the summer this cyborg would switch to something in aquamarine. Or perhaps the weather will no longer matter, although not for this creature:

tree model Mountain Yam Hong Kong fashion show

This design by Mountain Yam at the Hong Kong show achieves one of the ends of art, which is to transform perception to see the potential in things. Here what we know to be part of the dress seems to be a natural part of the model herself, and so we can see one morphological possibility for a post-human species that has blended its genetic code with others. The first design did the same when it made the conjunction of human and machine (and within that, of the human body and the mechanical imitation of an insect eye) appear to be a perfect fit.

Side by side, the suggest two different paths: one toward a cyborg species where ordinary senses can be replaced by powerful electronic systems (or dispensed with for the same reason), and another where the human form returns to nature, part of a brachiated genetic ecosystem that intertwines species in organic harmony. If you think these two visions are merely my own strange extensions of the designer’s art, look at the background in each photo: in one, the dark tonality and structured designs of an industrialized urban scene; in the other, soft, pastel colors of a reorganized, blended spectrum of light.

By projecting forward, these creations also evoke ancient forms. The woman could be a Dryad, a tree nymph in Greek mythology, and the robotic figure in his institutional uniform evokes RoboCop, who channeled the Medieval armored knight whose faceplate reproduced the Greek helmet of antiquity. Even when trying to be highly unconventional, it is difficult to escape the pressure of cultural memory and symbolic form. Escape isn’t really the point, however, even when considering the post-human. Moving into that world will only reveal what was always available, both for good and for evil.

With that in mind, we might look again at the two faces above. They are merely models, of course, but both visions, however polarized they might be, seem to lead to the same docility. That could be a mere artifact of the fashion show, but it also might be thought of as one result, however ironic, of polarization.

Photographs by Jacques Brinon/Associated Press and Mike Clarke/AFP-Getty Images.

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Exhibition: In the Vernacular

In The Vernacular

Vernacular pump

Exhibition

Art Institute of Chicago

February 6–May 31, 2010

Vernacular photographs—those countless ordinary and utilitarian pictures made for souvenir postcards, government archives, police case files, pin-up posters, networking Web sites, and the pages of magazines, newspapers, or family albums—have been both the inspiration for and the antithesis of fine-art photography for over a century. In their struggle to gain legitimacy in the art world, fine-art photographers at the turn of the 20th century endeavored to distance their work from the amateur, commonplace, and practical photographs that had become so familiar in everyday experience.

This exhibition presents the work of artists who chose instead to strategically use photography’s everyday forms as a source of inspiration, consciously appropriating, reworking, and interrogating the aesthetics, content, and means of distribution associated with vernacular photography. Photographs by Walker Evans, Andy Warhol, Lee Friedlander, Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr, Nikki S. Lee, and others represented in the Art Institute’s permanent collection challenge us to reevaluate the impact, value, and status of the photographs we encounter in our daily lives. These images persuade us to consider the ways in which photographs function as significant bearers of complex meaning, rather than mere descriptions or reflections of the world, whether they grace the walls of a museum, the pages of a magazine, the files in a cabinet, or a living room mantel.

Please note: Some images may be inappropriate for younger visitors.

Photograph: Martin Parr, Fashion Magazine: Fashion Shoot, New York, 1999. Art Institute of Chicago, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Purchase Fund.

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Sleep, Denial, and Death in Afghanistan

The current Washington Post/ABC News poll reports that the war in Afghanistan is listed as a priority for the President and the Congress by two percent of the electorate. Don’t tell that to these guys.

foxholes-graves Afghanistan

For the record, they are sleeping, not dead. The photo is gruesome, nonetheless, as it reminds us that there is little difference between a foxhole and a grave. The long, shallow holes in the earth are too close to the shape and size of a coffin; the soldiers’ bodies are bent as though broken or stiff with rigor mortis, and they are wrapped in sheets that look all too much like shrouds. The bare face and feet of the figure in the center add to the sense of vulnerability the suffuses the scene, while the covering over the face of the one on the left implies death’s finality.

In this context, one of the blessings of sleep is that you can wake up; another is that before awakening you can forget about where you are. These Marines were in their holes because they could be attacked at any time. The deserve some escape from that reality, and sleep is the best they can do in that regard. The American public probably wants to forget about Afghanistan, too. There doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do about the situation at the moment, and God knows we have plenty of problems at home, right?

Sleep is one thing, denial another. The willful forgetting of the fighting in Afghanistan may be understandable, but it is not excusable. The press has largely retreated into feel-good stories about the war, and that, too, can be explained. (I had to reach back half a year to pull this photo up.) This normalization of war should be resisted, however, as it only abets collective denial of the suffering that is war’s eternal harvest.

Like the soldiers in the photograph, everyone needs to sleep, and denial may be universal as well. But these Marines were not left unguarded as they sleep, and, likewise, they should not be dropped to the bottom of the list of national concerns. Because as they are forgotten, the truth of the photo will be completely exposed: the difference between a foxhole and a grave–and between a sleeping Marine and a dead one–is only a matter of time.

Photograph by David Guttenfelder/Associated Press.

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WANTED in Times Square

By guest correspondent Rachel Hall

Times Square is an iconic point of arrival for aspiring actors, international tourists, and now criminals. Last week, the FBI announced that it would begin screening wanted fugitives on an electronic billboard donated by Clear Channel Outdoor. The police and the press have long collaborated on outlaw displays, but the FBI’s move is significant in terms of both scale and placement.

Compliments of The Today Show, you can see Belle Chen, Assistant Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s violent crime unit in New York, and Harry Coglin, President of Clear Channel’s Outdoor New York staged like two television personalities hosting the ball drop on New Year’s Eve.

Today Times Square

The FBI’s larger-than-life notices are reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men mural commissioned for the 1964 World’s Fair. In a characteristically cheeky moment in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the artist provided a caption for his mural: “Nowadays if you’re a crook, you’re still considered up there. You can write books, go on TV, give interviews—you’re a big celebrity and nobody even looks down on you because you’re a crook. You’re still really up there. This is because more than anything people just want stars.”

thirteenmen

The wanted poster’s authoritative tone inspires fear, moral indignation, and patriotic fervor for law and order. And yet as Warhol understood, the public’s desire for images of crime and punishment often exceed the bounds of patriotism in order to produce pleasures based in outlaw identifications, frontier nostalgia, or the desire for a dose of danger in everyday life. Like Times Square, the wanted poster simultaneously attracts and repels us. In his book, Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square, Daniel Makagon observes: “Times Square is a place, both real and imagined, where historical images of a vibrant public sphere collide with contemporary cultural practices triggered by a proliferating consumer society. It is a place where some long for increased security in public space while others gravitate towards its historical reputation for sex, sleaze, and the thrill of danger” (xiv-xv).

The FBI’s giant, electrified wanted poster participates in ongoing battles over public spaces increasingly claimed by the interests of multinational corporations. Clear Channel Outdoor promises to: “Reach the mobile consumer.” Currently, the company has a presence in 44 U.S. cities and 31 other countries, including China and Russia, as well as many countries in Europe, North and South America.

Artist Jenny Holzer protests the privatization of public space in cities around the world by installing screens on a scale like and in prominent locations characteristic of those currently managed by Clear Channel, from which she transmits critical provocations.

holzer-003

Holzer is trying to confront the media-security-advertising complex directly, but she is outgunned. Clear Channel’s joint venture with the FBI is modeled on an earlier partnership between Lamar Outdoor Advertising and Crimestoppers. Over the last decade or so, Lamar has been at the center of heated legal disputes in municipalities across the U.S. In each new market, Lamar finds itself locked in a struggle with local community members who fear the flashy signs will be a traffic hazard or resent having to bask in the glow of billboards each night. Over time, the company has become adept at branding its electronic billboards as part advertisement, part public service, stressing the fact that the company donates space and time to screening wanted fugitives and AMBER alerts. Likewise, in his report on the FBI’s “Broadway debut” for the Today Show Pete Williams told home viewers: “And these electronic billboards can also be used to spread AMBER alerts and seek help finding missing persons.”

The “public service” on offer from companies like Lamar and Clear Channel is ideologically loaded and leans heavily toward the privatization of public space. The wanted poster and missing notice symbolically mark the border between “home” and the external dangers that threaten its sanctity. In the context of Times Square, home is what the aspiring actor leaves behind on her journey to stardom. It is the rights of a particular configuration of family that renders homoeroticism suspect, if not criminal, in Warhol’s ironic mural. And it is the rights of the family on tour that Mayor Rudy Giuliani violently defended in street sweeping campaigns of the 1990s, which banished sex shops and paved the way for the Disneyfication of Times Square. Like Times Square, and the billboard for that matter, the wanted poster has a long history of animating the tension between private interests and public spaces.

Rachel Hall is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University and author of WANTED: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture. You may reach her at rchall@lsu.edu or visit her website. [Thanks to Chris Hardy for calling my attention to the Today Show piece.]

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Widening the Catastrophe

January 20, 2010
Hariman
catastrophe
2 Comments

There are now thousands of photographs of the disaster in Haiti available at the major online providers. The New York Times is even placing their slides in categories such as ruins, crime, aid, prayers, a return to normalcy. OK, so the last one might seem a bit premature, but how much devastation can anyone take? I find myself backing away from the media’s furious concentration on the collective wreckage, and perhaps that is why I was drawn to this photograph.

Haitian collapses

On the surface, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with Haiti. Nothing is collapsed or broken, and there is no blood, no open wounds or stumps instead of hands or feet, no burning bodies. The photo itself is banal: crowded, cropped, with the only identifiable person slumped in some kind of torpor, all in some vaguely institutional hallway–the image is too familiar in one sense and yet still not adequately informative. No wonder that it was tucked away in a slide show on the New York region.

But then you read the caption: “Alex Alexis collapsed when he learned that his wife and three children had died in the earthquake in Haiti.” His wife and three children. Dead. Now it is a different photograph, and informative: We are reminded that Haiti is not only a place but also the epicenter of a diasporic community. The catastrophe is being measured not only in the damage done at the original scene but also by the long strands of anxiety, pain, and desolation defining the losses felt by loved ones around the globe. And the coverage of the island’s troubles is revealed to contain a provisional quality, as if everything is somehow already tending back towards recovery. But there is no way this loss can ever be restored.

And that is why the decor troubles me. Even with its bland hues and the metal display case for the bureaucratic pamphlets, it still appears affluent, secure, and safe in contrast to the mess on the ground in Haiti. It reminds me that this is not only a world where many rush to aid those in need, but also a world where vast disparities in wealth are taken for granted. And why is the husband in New York if his wife and three kids are in Haiti? In this individual case the reasons could be purely personal or accidental–an estrangement, a business trip, whatever. The likely story, however, is that he, like many others, is separated from his family in order to support them.

In The Civil Contract of Photography, Ariella Azoulay identifies “threshold catastrophes”–situations where a community becomes trapped in chronic misery that is never allowed to become either completely genocidal or adequately alleviated. Palestine is one example, and Haiti may well be another. The catastrophe caused by the earthquake widens as its circle of suffering expands outward, but the fact remains that the world knows how to respond to spectacular events such as a natural disaster. What also is needed is to widen the understanding of catastrophe to include the insidious relationships and multiple failures that perpetuate the condition of poverty and other continuous political disasters.

Widening one’s understanding of catastrophe means looking beyond high-impact mobilization to see how many of the same agencies are complicit in keeping people at the threshold of destruction. It also means admitting how victims can be complicit in their own oppression, and how personal efforts to escape–say, to a good job in New York–are not going to be enough for systemic change. These are not easy truths, but they can point toward a common recognition that the catastrophe–any catastrophe–is happening here as well as there.

Photograph by Julie Glassberg/The New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Remembering Iraq

We are pleased to welcome Joel Preston Smith to our Photographer’s Showcase at NCN. These images from the early phase of the war in Iraq can be see as aides-memoire for a war already fading into oblivion, and as reminders that war ravages time–by filling it with terror, and creating vast stretches of boredom, and making lifetimes prisons, and giving all that happened the unreality of floating outside of ordinary experience. Let’s take a moment, then, to look back, as guided by this photographer.

Most of the images I took as a freelancer in Iraq in 2003 cover Iraqi social life, which I felt was overlooked (as it usually is) during the conflict. I hadn’t wanted to illustrate Iraqis as victims, exclusively, but it’s easy to get the impression from such images—that their lives are composed only of sorrow. The same might be said of U.S. troops, in that most images attempt to project them solely as heroes or villains, rather than as people living and working in extremely difficult circumstances.

Al Quds Militiawoman

An Al-Quds militiawoman pauses during an anti-American demonstration in Tikrit, Iraq. The military parade featured roughly 45,000 civilians in an exhibition of Iraqi resistance to U.S. forces. The annual Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Militia parade honors the Feb. 8 birthday of Sadaam Hussein, who was born in a hamlet just outside Tikrit.

Physicians at Medicine City Hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, attempt to revive gunshot victim Ammar Shackar, 26. Shackar had been shot in the left tibia 10 days earlier, according to his physicians. He subsequently developed sepsis (bacteria in his bloodstream), and became edemic as his kidneys failed.

Ammar Shakar's mother unconscious

Ammar Shackar’s mother lies unconscious at Medicine City Hospital in Baghdad, Iraq. Physicians had just informed her that her son, 26, had just died in the emergency room.

Daour Mathoub in fear, Baghdad

Daour Mathoub, 12, at the height of fear, while watching the American movie Letters from a Killer on television at her family’s apartment in Baghdad, Iraq. Mathoub is transfixed by a scene in the film in which a red-headed woman, in a New Oreleans apartment, pursues Patrick Swayze with a knife.

Stabbed by uncle, Baghdad

A patient, who said he’d been stabbed by his uncle, waits for treatment while being supported on a gurney by friends at Ali Amouck hospital (also transliterated as Al-Yarmouk Hospital), Baghdad, Iraq.

Soldier Swims Euphrates River, Ar Ramadi

A U.S. Army truck driver from Iowa swims in the Euphrates River, Ar Ramadi, Iraq. Sadaam Hussein’s captured Northern Palace lies in the distance.

Joel Preston Smith is the author of Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq (Nazraeli Press: 2006). He teaches photojournalism at Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Ore. His website is here. His book is available at Photo-Eye, here.

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Silhouettes of Abundance

One might expect a silhouette to signify some deficiency, at least of knowledge. Instead of detail, we see only darkness; instead of personality, anonymity. When life is reduced to simple cut-outs, we seem to be in the realm of craft projects, not the sensuous intelligence of art. Photography, however, can take us to a third place.

India Weather

This boy has been caught in a sliver of time, just enough to isolate his youthful figure before it returns to splash and flow, all movement and delight in the water. We can see exactly the odd proportions that characterize the child’s body, and the awkward awareness of that body in space–something that will be completely dissolved as he enters the water.

Reducing the individual boy to an outline seems to essentialize something–the human form, perhaps, and, more likely, Childhood. Thus the image reminds us that, whatever is there, is fleeting. Likewise, although the hard surface of the water will return to liquid, that igneous surface reveals another reality beneath his simple pleasure. Enjoy the moment, kid, because soon enough the world won’t be so giving. The mood is nostalgic, and with that, all too conventional.

No visual technique need have a single emotional effect, and adulthood is more than the loss of innocence. This second photograph suggests another, very different experience.

silhouette china

Visitors stroll around the National Grand Theatre in Bejiing. Here even silhouettes have silhouettes. The ground appears to be something like a fun-house mirror, and yet the shadows are as crisp as the standing figures. As above, motion as been arrested, but here many small details suggest continual movement as each individual projects a specific inclination. The various groupings tells us that we are in a public space, one where individuals go their varied ways, small groups congregate for varied purposes, and everyone is comfortable enough among strangers. Again, the silhouette reveals something fundamental about both a place and a time of life, or, perhaps, an historical period. The mood, which comes from both figures and ground, is at once peaceful and agitated, like the modern civil society that it mirrors. And whereas the first photograph made water appear like rock, this photo suggests that the ground itself can melt like ice cubes in a world where all that is solid melts into air.

Silhouettes depend on darkness, but these photographs are distinguished also by the play of light. Each can prompt meditation in either direction: toward a more pessimistic or a more optimistic end. I guess I’m feeling optimistic today. If the first image captures a state of nature and the joy of childhood, the second suggests that there is something luminous about adult life in a modern society as well. If that is so, the better images will be those that help us see, not the outline, but the form.

Photographs by Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press and Andy Wong/Associated Press. You can see other posts at NCN on silhouettes by using the search function in the right sidebar. The light in the images is today is silver, but the title of the post continues a theme also expressed with gold.

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What Gold Reveals

It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere and another snowstorm is descending across the Great Lakes. Traffic will snarl, walking will become a chore, and those staying home will come to feel like they are under house arrest. It seems inevitable, yet almost cruel, to then dream of summer’s golden reverie.

golden beach Cornwall

The surfers are almost incidental–tiny figurines or animate shadows whose puny shapes are there only to remind us how much the lavish, liquid sunlight dwarfs human scale. One has to labor to realize that the photograph shows only light, not pools of molten gold. And yet, even as that gold pools on a plane of sand and sea that also seems forged of the sun’s metal, there is a dark undertone. The day is long, and we know that this moment of sheer natural extravagance cannot last. A moment out of time is still tinged with mortality.

gold light Cape Town

Here the golden light is even more pronounced, and yet the drama of light and darkness is sharper still. The brilliant horizon, as if the sea were another sun, flows like lava into the city of Cape Town, but both sky and land are already under another dispensation.

golden mountains Afghanistan

But the light always returns. Indeed, it ennobles all that it touches. Here an arid land, fractured by mountains and riven by war, appears like Shangri La. The golden mountains of Afghanistan, one might imagine, looking like pure gold, set in the middle distance of God’s eye, surely a blessed place.

And surely not a blessed place, if you think of the suffering there, with more to come. And so gold can seem to be no more than a trick of light, just as it also is an obviously artificial commodity, a fictional standard, and the stuff only of distraction and fantasy. The eye is easily mislead, one might say, and so both photographic art and serious thought should stick to reality’s gray scale.

But these images reveal another truth, one that could have genuinely radical implications. The golden light is but one aspect of the sun’s unending flow across the earth, and with that, of humanity’s ever present wealth. No one–ever–accomplishes anything without this free gift of energy that could never be created otherwise. There is a metaphor here as well (another extravagance), for sunlight not only gives of itself but represents other forms of wealth. The lesson of these images is not that warmth or beauty or any human good is necessarily apportioned to certain times or places, but that the good life is constantly available for those who can learn to see.

As I’ve said before, the deeper challenge now facing politics, and so art, is not to manage scarcity but to realize the abundance already available in nature and culture. Abundance that often is not seen up close and that might be waiting where least expected, as if far out at sea or on distant mountains.

Photographs by Sarah Lay/Guardian, Mike Hutchingst/Reuters, Moises Saman/New York Times.

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The Avatars of War

Of all the photographs in the slide shows reviewing the last decade, this surely was one of the more perfect images.

British-soldier-oil

A British soldier is reflected in a pool of oil near Basra, Iraq. Because the individual soldier’s face is lost in shadow while his body is fused visually with the oil, the image seems made for allegorical reading. It was all about the oil, right? (If only that were true, for then the costs of extraction might have been considerably lower.) Political meaning certainly is embedded in the photograph, but there is much more there as well.

Most important, I think, is the sheer beauty and artistic quality of the image. The deep blue, which you can’t help but see as both sea and sky, and the brilliant crystals of sand that could be both islands and clouds, and then the terrible complication of the soldier emerging out of the blue liquid like an apparition, like some petrochemical genie awaiting a command. . . . The sense of the photograph is that these elements have coalesced for more than any instrumental reason: no, they reflect a much deeper and more powerful hold on the imagination.

Audiences in the US have been lining up throughout the holiday break to see the film Avatar, in which an indigenous people living close to nature defeat high-tech, mechanized, military contractors serving an extraction industry that will stop at nothing to maximize profits. Again, the allegory is all too obvious, and the fact that the beautiful people are blue doesn’t hurt either. For all the New Age styling of the Noble Savage myth, the film presents war as unquestionably the means by which both individuals and peoples achieve dignity and security. In the movie, as in other images such as the one above, war proves capable of aligning itself not only with rational self-interest, prudent adaptation, or any other virtue, but also with beauty and all it can represent. As Chris Hedges noted, war is a force that gives us meaning, and it will stop at nothing to do so.

The photograph above is an image of a reflection. “Avatar” refers to an incarnation of a Hindu god, a personification of a concept, principle, or attitude, or a virtual representation of a person. The soldier in the photograph can channel each sense of the term–particularly if you run the logic in the other order, as it actually does run from person to war to the deification of war as a force fused with the power of nature.

War, beauty, and photography are all forces that give life meaning. They are not the same force, however, and one challenge at this moment in the 21st century is to see how war is capable of capturing other dimensions of human experience that could be used to stop it.

Photograph by Dan Chung/Guardian, from Pictures of the Decade at Guardian.co.uk.

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