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Public Images of the Clinical Eye

The eye can see a great deal, but it rarely sees itself, and never directly.  Perhaps that is one reason why photographs such as this one remain somewhat scandalous.

eye-examine-indonesia

This close-up of an eye exam in Indonesia exposes the eye as an object of sight.  We see a soft, wet organ, an aperature that ironically looks camera-like, and coloration that we know isn’t normal.  The orange and red could be a sign of disease or only a diagnostic dye, but in any case the organ’s vulnerability is highlighted.  The blunt thumb holding up the eyebrow is there to help, but it could just as easily blind the man, whose fragment of a face is tense with the strain of holding his eye unprotected before a bright light.  His mute fear becomes even more animal-like when contrasted with the optical instrument in the left foreground.  We are seeing an eye, but one that is trapped, first in disease and then in the clinical apparatus.  His eye has been made an object of the clinical gaze, which comes from outside the frame.

This staging becomes even more intense in the next photograph.

eye-surgery-indonesia

Once again, we see an eye isolated as an object of clinical manipulation guided by an instrumental gaze signified by medical instruments.  All the dramatic values have been enhanced: the eye is more fully decontextualized, with even the face now absent; the instruments now are inside the eye cavity during surgery; the light on the eye is harsher while the eye itself is immobilized (and sure to be harmed if it moves). This is a moment of extreme vulnerability, but if any emotion is to be supplied it has to happen without any cue from the patient, who in fact could be anaesthetised.  The emotional vector, if any, will follow another feature common to both images: the presentation of this clinical intervention to a third viewpoint, that of the spectator.

Every photograph can be thought of as being reflexive, that is, as showing not only some part of the world but also the act of seeing.  That seeing can be further refined as seeing photographically, and as seeing individually, or publicly, or in many other senses as well.  The two images above operate somewhat like popular science writing: they put the viewer alongside a medical intervention as if you could be part of the scene on the basis of your interest rather than actual expertise.  Thus, one watches as if an attending physician or as if in an operating theater, but actually from a third position of the public spectator who becomes aligned with the structure of expertise.

It probably is significant that both the expert and public viewers are not visible.  The eye being seen is completely subordinated to being an object of sight rather than a perspective on those watching, and one should note that the embodied eye is poor in the first case and blacked out in the second.  So, it might seem that these images are not reflexive: the clinical eye is the eye examined, not that of the examiner, and the public is not represented in any form but the photograph itself.  But as I’ve tried to suggest, the images can reveal quite a bit about two intertwined ways of seeing.

Photographs by Beawiharta/Reuters,

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Visual History and the Times of Crisis

Reuters and MediaStorm have collaborated on a multimedia history of the current financial crisis.  The online project is entitled Times of Crisis.  In their own words, “The project has two parts – a short web documentary and an in-depth visual timeline. The latter contains hundreds of entries woven together into a visual stream of information to show how the crisis has touched lives everywhere.”

reuters-broken-green-bull

It’s a savvy project, and the interactive time line is a good example of how photoj0urnalism has become woven deeply into public communication.  The images are not the whole story, but they clearly provide resources for thought, association, and action.  The project also provides a case study in perspective: if you hang back and look at the thumbnails, you remain disengaged from a radically fragmented world; if you enter the individual panels and move from place to place, you begin to recognize both the many different injuries suffered around the globe and the deep continuities in need, anxiety, and adaptation.

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Third World Hands and the Denial of History

In Western culture and particularly in its visual arts there are strong conventions that place peasant life close to nature, in a realm of slow time that is largely impervious to historical change, and limited to the core functions of human subsistence.  Obviously, none of this precludes being the subject of a striking artistic image.

potters-hand-india

This photograph from Mumbai of a potter’s hand working the wet clay is a stunning composition.  The odd yet graceful configuration of the hand, the exceptional tonality of the light on the grey mud, the tension between the immobility signified by the drying mud on his hand and the continuous motion of the spinning artifact–these combine to create a richly textured image.  It remains an image of a primitive world, however: we see a human body caked in the primal mud from which it came and to which all return; that hand is engaged in artisanal labor to fashion a simple object (a lamp for a religious festival); and it even hints at affinity with the animal kingdom, as the dried clay looks like elephant hide as the extended finger then becomes a prehensile trunk, sensitive but still confined within brute nature.

I hate to reduce a fine photograph to a finger puppet (even if it is there to be seen).  And I could have said more–in fact, I have said more in a post on a similar image (see the second photo in the post) in October 2007.  As today, that image was taken during preparations for the Hindi festival of lights.  (Primitive life is thought to be cyclical but is more than that; journalism is thought to be continuously new but actually is cyclical.)  I’m featuring the current photograph because it is one of several images this week (and a steady stream of such images throughout the year) that feature fragmentary images of hands from the third world.

hand-west-bank-woman

If you showed an image of a poor old woman today and captioned it “crone,” you would rightly catch hell.  But this photo is close to that.  We see the old woman’s hand scratching across the dirt for the pistachios, as if to furtively grasp her widow’s mite.  She might actually be a person of considerable status and wisdom, as the caption merely said that the nuts had been spilled, but the photograph alone presents a social type, not a person.  As above, there is a hint of culture (jewelry, like the pottery, is the basic stuff of museum collections), but this is an image of bare life.

Note the same elements predominate in this image:

afghan-hand-prayer-beads

Again, a rudimentary sign of culture (the prayer beads) serves to emphasize the dirty hands and rough clothing of someone living in a world of manual labor.  The worn nail is particularly harsh–like the first hand, some wearing process pushes the viewer back into nature, into a visceral, painful, inevitable mortality.  Religion seems an obvious consolation, and so, once again, a person and his society are denominated as essentially simple, pre-modern, and located within conditions and cultures that are changeless.

All three photographs appeared in slide shows at major newspapers this week.  None of them were taken with the intention to demean their subjects.  Nor do they, by themselves.  But surely one cumulative effect is to further consolidate a cultural geography that places some people in a modern world of continuous change while keeping others in a timeless realm where survival for another year is thought to be enough.

This fragmenting vision is wrong, of course, but more than that, it is a morally flawed pattern of denial.  Instead of reproducing images that make poverty seem timeless, there is need to recognize that everyone lives in history.  Only then can one fully understand how all are connected in a web of obligation, and why continued suffering is a collective failure, not least by those most capable of being agents of change.

Photographs by Arko Datta/Reuters, Ahmad Gharabli/AFP-Getty Images, Ahmad Masood/Reuters.

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Seeing Second Nature at the Gymnastics Championships

Many of the more popular spectator sports involve athletes excelling at games the fans play not as well.  Only a very few can go pro, but lots of people can shoot a basket, throw a football, catch a baseball, defend the goal, or sink a putt.  And then there is gymnastics.

gymnast-headless

Not only is this athlete doing what you see here, but she is doing it while leaping on a balance beam.  Maybe you might try to jump high into the air and land again on a hard surface that is four inches wide and four feet off the floor, but not me.   Nor am I likely to do a poor back flip with a full twist vault, or a not so good iron cross.   Without years of highly disciplined training, the level of difficulty is way beyond anything to be attempted by a weekend warrior.

But I digress.  Perhaps by now the shock of the photograph above is being to wear off.  There is something horrifying about decapitation, even when we know that the severing is an illusion.  A trick of the camera, an accident of angle, we know intuitively that the head is merely out of our line of sight.  And yet.  The body works so well without it, the musculature is so perfectly developed and disciplined, it could almost double as a science fiction athlete in a future where everything has been genetically engineered for optimal performance, with all other aesthetic and moral values cut away as well.

The photograph may be showing us a glimpse of the future, but it also reveals thing or two about the present.  Genetics aside, the athlete has been engineered for optimal performance, and so the image reveals the extraordinary specialization that goes into the higher echelons of modern sport–and other sectors of modern society.  It also might hint at some of the costs for the individual athlete, who often sacrifices educational opportunities and much else in the short term while enduring chronic physical discomfort or worse later in life.

I think it also reveals a deeper condition that is intertwined with our visual experience.  The obvious distortion in the visual image (the fictive decapitation) exposes the actual distortion of the body that occurs in many forms of training.  Although images of athletes have been used since Greek antiquity to portray the Body Beautiful as a perfect expression of the natural physique, in fact, sport, like art of any sort, involves doing things that are not simply natural.  Excellence in any cultural activity involves making the unusual so ingrained that it seems to be second nature.  The athlete or artist or other performer takes what is arbitrary, contingent, artificial, and otherwise a matter of of choice and effort, and fashions it into an seemingly effortless act.

Our sense of beauty can beguile us on this point, and many photographs of gymnasts and other athletes may serve that denial of how strange, contorted, and otherwise artificial our use of our bodies can be as people dance, paint, do surgery, build houses, or sit at a computer and write.  Nothing we do can be contrary to the laws of nature or our body’s inherent incapacities, but as we live in cultures of bodily discipline we learn to function as bodies without heads, heads without bodies, and many other equally odd designs.

What people don’t do, however, is develop a sense of their bodies as plastic material waiting to be formed and reformed under pressure.  In fact, one use of both images and mirrors seems to be to maintain a sense of a proportionate bodily integrity.  Which is why I am closing with this photograph:

gymnast-compressed

The intact body is visible, but there still is something wrong.  Now it seems that the athlete has become compressed by the powerful gravitational forces built up when torquing around the bar.  The body is still  trained and controlled, and one once again knows intuitively that the foreshortening is a visual trick and not the actual crushing of the body to produce the world’s shortest woman, and yet. . . . Second nature is again exposed: the body’s innate capabilities have been transformed into s specific and astonishing art, one that dazzles the mind.  If you think about what is being revealed, however, you might realize that artistic excellence depends upon deformation, and that because it is a product of culture, the human being has no fixed form.

Photographs by Carl de Souza/AFP-Getty Images and Toby Melville/Reuters from the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships 2009 in London.

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Kitchen Debate Redux

By guest correspondent Elisabeth Ross

A little while ago, the New York Times ran a story about the so-called “family dinner” predicament, which in this latest commentary was anchored by yet another study suggesting an association between frequency of family dinners and adolescent substance abuse rates.

The photograph accompanying the article on the front page of the Style section forecasts the nostalgic, eternal return to that staple of the modern visual lexicon: the mid-century kitchen, complete with iconic 1950s housewife emerging to present a casserole to her adoring family seated at the table.

guilty_casserole

The faded pastels, washed out background, and dinner table floating in a cloud of whiteness suggest an ethereal quality, interrupted only by the father’s black suit.  He sits slightly off balance, imitated by his son, but not quite able to project full parental authority.  The smile is a little too forced.  Is he nervous?  Maybe he and his wife have just had a fight.  Maybe he’s wondering if that casserole is about to hit him in the head.  Maybe she’s looking at it, gauging just how much she’d have to clean up afterward and if it’s even worth it.

Of course, that’s not what we’re supposed to be thinking.  But we have seen this sanitized domesticity performed so many times, that we should know better than to confuse the ideal with the real.  The image of the dressed-up housewife in her otherworldly kitchen can be considered today in terms of underlying doubt, anxiety, and potential for transgression.  In this way, the image speaks to another photograph from the same article:

dinner-in-the-van

In this 21st century family tableau, the mother is similarly turned inward, that is, facing her family and facing away from the viewer.  Comparison with the first image is supposed to be damming: look, for example, at how the four individuals are eating junk food while strapped into seats that keep them separated from one another.  But that’s not the only way to see it.  The space is private but mobile, comfortable, and with modern amenities at hand.  The mother–nothing suggests she is a housewife: no apron, no casserole, no husband, no house–is firmly planted in the driver’s seat.  The pink apron is replaced by business-casual black.  Mom’s in charge.  At least, of dinner.

And that’s part of the problem.

After presenting the inverse ratio of family dinner frequency to teen drug use, the article parenthetically notes that 80% of family dinners are prepared by women (while still holding 50% of all jobs) and then features interviews with 8 women, who describe their commitment to or reluctant abandonment of the family dinner (one woman would only admit to the latter on the condition of anonymity).

Every year for the last decade or so, we hear the same statistics linking family meals to an assortment of psycho-developmental benefits for children.  The data does not show causation, researchers admit, rather, simply an association.  Which means that any number of variables on both sides of the equation would change the actual cause and effect outcomes dramatically.

So what is really going on here?  The Columbia University authors of this latest study are also the folks who created “Family Day, ” designed to promote family dinners.  (This year, it was September 28, in case you missed it).  The website has a “sponsors and partners” link which, when clicked, display giant logos; among others are Stouffers, Coca-Cola, and Smuckers.  And anyone who has visited a supermarket recently will have noticed a revival of food products marketed as quick and easy ways to get the Family Dinner ready.

Keeping in mind that the iconic images of 1950s housewives and their kitchens were strategically deployed to promote an entire postwar aesthetic tied to consumer spending, one should ask what such images really show and what does that have to do with reality, then or now, not to mention quality time with the kids. “I don’t think we really know what a good family dinner is,” one psychologist notes in the article. And apparently we don’t know what one looks like either.

Conjuring up 1950s iconography may work for some, but for others it is an invitation to shifting interpretations and resistance.  The housewife and her kitchen should invite interrogation, not surrender.  And one question to begin with might be why, in 2009, we are even suggesting that kids might be turned into drug addicts unless women conform to a model of family life that never really happened.

Photographs by Getty Images and Scott Dalton/New York Times.

Elisabeth Ross, a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, has no idea what her kids will have for dinner this evening.  She would like to salute Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University on this week becoming the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Dr. Ostrom was not permitted to take advanced math in high school because women were routinely advised at the time that they did not need trigonometry or calculus, “if they were going to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” (NPR interview, 10/12/09).  You can contact Elisabeth at e-ross@northwestern.edu.

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Abandoning America

“Falling through the cracks” is a common expression for something being neglected, forgotten, or otherwise subject to errors of omission in organizational life.  The same can happen in journalism.  We might even consider how a “news crack” develops: a series of events in several areas of interest will lead to a succession of stories that seem to cover a lot of ground, but one result will be that a genuine subject of concern will be forgotten, not least because a similar concern has been taken up elsewhere.  Thus, the news might cover the recession, health care, the war in Afghanistan, a sex scandal (or two), the rising stock market, and the war again, and one might think that leading issues of the day are being reported much as they actually happen.  In fact, if the public is told that the economy is rebounding and more people likely to be covered by health care, then they could be excused, perhaps, for thinking that the major question remaining is whether we are going to “abandon” Afghanistan.  So it apparently seems to recent proponents of military escalation in that country (note for the younger reader: “escalation” is a word that was used a lot in the Vietnam War).

Let me suggest, as long as we are talking about abandonment, that something is missing.

abandoned_house-michigan

This is one of the photographs from Kevin Bauman’s collection of 100 abandoned houses.  I didn’t choose it because it was more striking or sad or poignant or provocative than the others in the collection.  The house is one of many such homes–thousands upon thousands in Michigan, Florida, California, and all around the country.  We are still in the midst of the most damaging foreclosure crisis in US history, and the news still could get worse before it gets better.  In any case, it has been surreal in some areas: At one point the Chicago Tribune reported that the median home price in Detroit was $7500.  Now it has rebounded to a remarkable $15,000.  I guess it’s good news when houses once again cost more than the cheapest new car (maybe), but I’d say we still have a ways to go.

And then there is the house in the photograph.  Spectators often resonate to a genuine pathos in these images of abandonment.  We never knew who was there and it is obvious that there is no one to relate to now, and yet the structure seems haunted with the ghosts of forgotten lives.  Houses have stories, and they are full of stories. Each of us can remember some house–it need not even have been our own–where we were running through the doors, gazing out the windows, and gasping with delight or shock while experiencing the many twists and turns of family life.  in place of that, the boarded up house offers only a shabby mausoleum.

There also may be another, less familiar reason for feeling the sadness in this photograph.  America is the most thoroughly liberal nation–in the original, Lockean sense of liberalism that, to put it baldly, has “liberty” deeply entangled with “property.” What is less often recognized is that John Locke (and others) defined property not merely by possession but also according to use.  So it was, they claimed, that the original inhabitants of the Americas didn’t really own the land as they had done so little to maximize its productivity.  I wonder if the sense of failure that pervades images of desolate houses doesn’t tap into that subterranean current of ideology?  If a house–or apartment complex or office building or factory–is shuttered, it isn’t being used productively; and, to Americans, at least, it then follows somehow that the place is returning to the wild.  And if an empty building can suggest that nature is encroaching due to an absence of productive labor, one might sense that the economy and the entire social order–and, with that, the ground of liberty–is being eroded.

Curiously, the photographs of abandoned houses demonstrate that the property is still there, right in front of your eyes, in the sense that the thing to be possessed exists.  But that is not enough, it seems.  Instead, a sense of failure looms, and not merely the failure of someone to pay a mortgage.  Frankly, I think this odd sense of collective danger, despite being based on a dubious idea of rightful use, may be, well, useful.  The house is not just the record of an autonomous individual’s loss in a rational, albeit heartless marketplace.  These houses are empty because they had been abandoned many times over a period of many years: by the banks, the corporations, Congress, various elites, and the press, to name a few.  There is no need to intervene in another country when so much of this one is being abandoned.

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Face/Paint

The full title of this post could be Face/Paint Kitsch/Art Look/See Now/Then Pleasure/Pain Again.  If that isn’t perfectly clear, I’m not surprised.  The story starts here:

painted-face-soccer-fan-ghana

The photograph is of a soccer fan from Ghana painted for a World Cup qualifying match.  We see the bright colors and his intense expression simultaneously.  The image is vivid, striking, both festive and elemental, and it reverberates with shock, surprise, and dismay without registering any one of those reactions with any certainty.  Whatever he actually was feeling, there is no doubt that this was a moment of intensity.  You can see why it would jump out of the thousands of thunbnail images on a photo-editor’s desktop.

For all that, the photo also is thoroughly conventional. The slide shows at the major papers are full of such images throughout the various carnival seasons–and if the news is slow otherwise, there always seems to be a carnival somewhere.  Hindu holy men, Russian street performers, Brazilian revelers, American kids at a state fair–wherever vernacular life meets art, someone’s face is going to be painted.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and journalism and art and all of culture are at bottom repetitive.  This photograph is good of kind, and I would have left it there but for one problem: Not long after I saw it, I came across this photograph:

warhold-in-drag-polaroid

This self-portrait of Andy Warhol in drag presents another painted face, and the difference between kitsch and art. I generally avoid that distinction, which I see as one of modernism’s least impressive and most overused ideas, and I don’t want to demean the first photograph, which suffers by being put into this unusual comparison. But, my God, what a difference between the two images.

As before, we see the expressive face and the artificial colors simultaneously.  Instead of the momentary frenzy of a sporting event, however, we see a lifetime of pain.  Instead of intensity (alone), here the paint (and wig) ironically evoke the powerful imprint of duration.  As in, I’ve always been this way, always had to carry this inside, always. Although still a striking incongruity, the juxtaposition of male face and female makeup fuses into something that is at once the facial mask of a social type and the naked revelation of an individual soul.

But who’s soul?  The power of Warhol’s photograph comes in part from the realization that you could be seeing one of the many gay men who have been crushed in the closet, or one of the many transgender individuals who feel trapped in their body, or one of the  many women who also have become fused to a mask of silver hair and red lips that promised happiness but is good only to put a face on their suffering.  Because the photo was taken with a Polaroid, there is a hint of pleasure betrayed (just as in the first image above), and a blurring of the line between high and low media (and so of art and kitsch) in order to evoke a common experience.  Although a remarkable work of art, the image is still a photograph, and so it reminds us that what it shows does not happen only once.  Whether the image portrays the individual artist or a social type, we are seeing pain that has occurred again and again.

Photographs by Julian Finney/FIFA-Getty and Andy Warhol/The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.  The photograph is on display as part of the exhibition Polaroid: Exp. 09.10.09 at the Atlas Gallery, London.

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China: Marching into the Twentieth Century

Like the recent Olympics, the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China has supplied spectacular images of brightly colored, state-sponsored performance art on a grand scale.  Many of the photographs are of military troops marching on parade.

chinese-woman-entrained-60th-anniversary

Something seems to be lost in translation, however, as what we see here is a far cry from the amateurism and informality of a typical Fourth of July parade in the U.S.  A better comparison would be with an Army drill team–if the U.S. Army drill teams had 10,000 troops.

These massive formations of perfectly entrained, tightly choreographed, visually striking troops embody design principles seen throughout Chinese public arts–again, think of the many displays of common movement at the Olympics.  Given the work that goes into it, the performers must take great pride in what they do, and from comments at photo blogs it seems that Chinese spectators around the world really like what they see.

But what do you see if you are not Chinese?  I confess to being somewhat baffled by these images, not least because I can’t help but see them as the latest iteration of the Victory Day parades in Moscow during the Soviet era.  That is, I have the ideological reaction that I was supposed to have when being shown these images in the U.S. press at the time: I see the totalitarian state revealing itself all too clearly in its supposed show of force.  Where the Soviets or the Chinese want us to see massed might, we see the state using enforced conformity to crush freedom and individual expression.

LIFE, Time, and other media outlets loved to shoot the Victory Day/May Day parades, and no wonder.

soviet-may-day-marching

Today, it looks shabby, perhaps even comical, but at the time it was seen as the work of a state using all its resources to mold Mass Man. The USSR is gone, but the Cold War interpretive framework is maintained by shots of marching troops in North Korea and elsewhere.  (Russia continues the tradition as well, but coverage now is more varied.)  And if that isn’t enough, there still are movies of goose-stepping Nazis, which probably is where the visual convention started.

But are the Chinese formations living monuments to conformity?  Is the authoritarian reality behind Chinese capitalism being revealed–worse, is it being made appealing through their production of the visual spectacle?

60th-anniversary-parade-women-entrained

I think the answer probably is, in a word, “no.”  Public art does not have one style, different nations share some conventions but also draw on unique cultural traditions, and in any case times change.  The ideological categories of the cold war are not completely out of date, but they are about as good as cars from the same era.  Rather than hazard a reading, I’d rather ask others what they see, whether they like the images, and  why.  Even so, I can’t shake my basic reaction and think that, for all the progress that China is making economically, they still are experiencing something like culture lag when it comes to fashioning civic performances to articulate their version of modern development.

Of course, one of the characteristics of the new China is that they can set their own fashions, thank you very much.

Photographs by Joe Chan/Reuters, Howard Sochurek/Life, Sipa Press/Rex Features.

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Behind the Scenes at the G20 Street Theater

WTO, G8, G20, the Democratic National Convention, the Republican National Convention, these and other events provide ritual occasions for grassroots protests against the establishment.  And we all know the script.  Kids and cops, colorful street theater and uniformed violence, sensational coverage and claims of de facto censorship.  Last week it was the G20 in Pittsburgh: a massive police presence, storefronts boarded up along the route, not too many protesters, trouble anyway, and the usual photographs walking us through it all. Photographer Jason Andrew is there as well, and his photos provide an opportunity to reflect on how such demonstrations are routinized, and how they are all the more revealing for that.

jasonandrew_g20-cops-waiting

Many of Jason’s photographs show us what’s happening off stage.  Here three cops in full riot gear apparently are waiting to be deployed.  One can see all the menace that is there, of course, but I also see three players sitting on the sidelines of a football game.  Violence may be as American as cherry pie, but it also can be completely normalized, so much so that it’s hard to muster more than a feeble “go team” on either side.  Or they could be workers on break (as they are), and one is reminded how capital always turns working people against one another.  In any case, they sit in an empty, abstract space and look out of place even there, alienated.

Jason’s photographs often have this alternative tonality from the visual cliches governing so much of the coverage.  Instead of the usual street theater, you see what goes on but often isn’t shown as part of the show: shopkeepers taking precautions, media personnel setting up or otherwise doing their jobs, people waiting for the next act.  Instead of drama, routine; instead of politics becoming intensified, economic practices diffusing dissent; instead of the power of the people, it comes down to money and organization.  Perhaps the protests are a lot like the establishment after all.

You can see that and more in this photo:

jasonandrew_g20-photographers-coke

This shot of other photographers is something you see in conventional coverage, but there you are not so likely to also see a sign of global capital.  Thus, another disquieting element emerges: the photos each capture an imbalanced intersection of the local and the global.  Cops pose as if football players at a Friday night game, but they’re decked out in the riot gear that is now used by police around the globe.  Photographers gather on a spit of land by a roadway, but when they leave the multinational company will still be broadcasting its message.  Such images capture the pathos–some would say the futility–of taking to the streets in a few blocks of one city when fighting against global actors.

But these images are not about action.  Instead, the photos communicate a basic stillness, a sense of immobility.  This may be thought of as another attempt to avoid the conventional focus on physical confrontation, but it also might be another way of suggesting that, at bottom, the whole show remains all-too-familiar and that nothing will really change.

My point is not to blame the protesters, other photographers, the papers, anyone. Rituals are used to maintain the established order, however, and so we’d do well to think about what these images reveal.  And about how the arc of justice may need to move from the streets to the Web, and to boycotts, micro-loans, urban gardens, labor unions (dare we speak the name) and more.  And to photographs showing us what else might be possible once people stop following the old script.

Photographs by Jason Andrew.  Jason has been covering the G20 protests in Pittsburgh for BAGnewsNotes, and we appreciate his sharing his work with NCN as well.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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