Hariman – Page 53 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Interchangeable Women: East and West

One of the questions one might raise about coverage of the Middle East is how much to feature women under the veil. Despite the range of positions in the region about body covering, the tendency in the US is to feature burqas (of whatever kind or name) when emphasizing deficits of rights and modernization. But, of course, the matter is not so simple.

three-burqas-snapshot

For the record, these women are wearing the Afghan chadiri. If you look closely at this photo, you can see that it might confound several assumptions about living under the veil. Instead of uniformity, each outfit is individually decorated. Instead of a primitive society, the women are standing in a pleasantly modern setting. Most peculiar, perhaps, is that they are standing to be photographed. How, one might think, can a photograph matter when their faces can’t be seen? (To see how mistaken this question can be, go here.) They may expect to be recognized by what can be seen, or they may be indulging the request for a photo precisely because they are protected from public scrutiny.

These subtleties may be obvious inside their culture, whereas to the Western gaze the women are interchangeable: anonymous, uniform, and uniformly subjugated. Given their confinement to private life, in public they are not citizens but merely women, interchangeable women.

Before anyone gets too righteous about the Western alternative, we should take a look at this:

These Florida State fans are definitely not under the veil. They are, however, another example of cosmetic cloning. (Let’s set the little girl aside, although notice that she is a Florida State woman in training, right down to the bracelet.) Sure, we can identify them as separate individuals: one belly has a navel stud, one doesn’t, and the third has a tattoo, what more do you want? But they are more closely entrained than the three women in the first photograph: bare midriffs, identical shirts, hats, buttons, bracelets, hairstyles, makeup, and gestures. Even their faces look like close copies of each other.

We could point out that they are free to choose how they display themselves in public, but this doesn’t seem to be a great example of independent decision making. My point is that they might as well be in burqas–they are interchangeable women, as much under the sway of gender-specific norms for appearing in public as anyone else. Their aggressive femininity is little different than the gender segregation of the burqa; both might be labeled variant forms of cosmetic fundamentalism.

None of this need be complicated: many people rightly oppose any gender rules that confine women to subordinate status. But if images of women are to be used to subordinate East to West on the grounds that a denial of visibility is a denial of rights, then it’s only fair to raise equivalent questions about how rights are being used to keep women locked into limited gender roles closer to home.

Photographs by Margaret Orwig and Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel.

13 Comments

Images of Obama's Audience

The coverage of Obama’s speech in Cairo continued this weekend with a slide show at the New York Times. The slides essentially were all the same, with each showing Obama’s televised image in one locale or another. The set of slides included photographs from India, Africa, and LA, but the majority were from the Middle East. The point, I assume, was to represent both a global audience and the likelihood of varied responses in diverse settings. Too many of them, however, might as well have been Orientalist illustrations.

obama-on-screen-cairo

This photo from Cairo was the first in the set and thus capable of setting the frame. Obama is on the TV placed above a Coke machine–the only two electrical machines evident without close study of the photo–while the scene is dominated by the hookahs and Arabic script on the worn wall. The US is aligned with modern technology, all the better for global distribution of our products and ideas, while those watching in the Middle East are still living in a bygone world of mysterious inscriptions and exotic customs.

The young man in the center of the frame is a particularly nice touch. Lithe boys were one element of Orientalist iconography, although this kid is fully clothed for the contemporary US audience. Indeed, he might pass for a young Obama. Thus, he is the central object of struggle in the drama being constructed. Will he be influenced by the parochial Arab culture that surrounds him, or by the American president? Will the TV and Coke machine, which are on the border of this scene, be able to break the spell of the culture represented by the drug paraphernalia surrounding him? Obviously, we are to hope that he will grow up to become a good citizen like his newly available role model, Barack Obama. The fact that he will grow up in a dictatorship propped up by billions of dollars in US aid is not mentioned.

Were a Black Panther around, it might be mentioned. The image of that kind of African-American community organizer has been conspicuously absent from the Obama haigiography, but the following image can bring the Panthers to mind.

obama-on-glasses-in-riyadh

This photo was not part of the Times slide show, perhaps because it complicates both sides of the rhetorical transaction. Now Obama is projected onto the sunglasses of what could be a stony auditor, someone quite different from the supposedly impressionable young man shown above. And Obama becomes a small yet garish image of himself, someone distant from the kind of politics represented by black men wearing dark glasses and hard faces. Perhaps the image still contains a fantasy of media influence, as if the TV image were being projected from the screen through the glasses directly into the eye and brain. (Note how equipment figures significantly in each photograph.) But we see instead how an image can be reflected back toward the sender. Instead of persuasion, we are shown resistance.

The second photo is from Riyadh, and so we should note that he probably is not black and if there is resistance it could be on behalf of privilege and dogmatism. Both images are studies in some of the problems of persuasion, however, and they provide a basis for thinking about how to think about global audiences. The first photograph presents an all too comfortable conception of the Middle East; the second suggests a critical counterpoint. Each is but one account, and far too many others remain ignored.

Amr Nabil/Associated Press and Hassan Ammar/Associated Press.

3 Comments

Cosmetic Cloning and Body Art

June 5, 2009December 3, 2013
Hariman
fashion/fiction
4 Comments

Pop Quiz: One woman or two?

Or was it a trick question? There obviously are two women there, even if one is a copy of the other. And if you look closely, you can see small differences in hair or the accessories in the background or whatever else you want to pore over. But, of course, there also is only one woman there: a blond archetype of American femininity that is the model for each of these two Miami Dolphins cheerleaders.

The two bodies could almost be clones. And, of course, they are: not because they share a fair amount of genetic material, but because each is an near perfect copy of a social form. Each is identically styled to that conventional model, from physical training to gestural habits to costumes and make-up. Each will stand out because she so completely conforms to one set of social norms. Together they mirror not only each other but their society’s demand for conformity.

But don’t think that style is to blame. Or at least consider the other end of the spectrum:

There is only one of this guy, right? He is a model at the annual Face and Body Art International Convention. Who else could possibly look like this? (The style is the man.) But, of course, he is not so unique. He fits right into the body art subculture, and the artist is drawing on familiar conventions of mythic iconography and popular design. Just in case that context isn’t clear, notice the Mona Lisa figure in the left background. And, like the cheerleaders, his well-toned body is a standard typification of gender.

The cheerleaders train for hours to have a few minutes of spectacular performance, all at considerable cost to themselves and other women. Mr. Body Art is a model of self-fashioning, but only for a few hours in a convention center that tomorrow will be hosting Rotarians while he becomes just another guy on the street. Fashion alternates between conformity and unique self-assertion, and each depends on the other. Most of us spend our time between these two extremes, but we shouldn’t feel too smug about that. Among human beings, there are only differences of degree, never of kind.

Photographs by Abbey Drucker/VMAN Magazine (October 2008) and the Orlando Sentinel, and Vince Hobbs/Orlando Sentinel (2009).

4 Comments

Flight 447: When Disaster Can't Be Seen

Sometime during the day I picked up the news that an Air France airliner had disappeared in the mid-Atlantic. Dropping from 35,0000 feet, hope for a heroic water landing seemed remote. As I checked periodically, the lack of news became increasingly ominous. Along with that, another form of unease began to make itself felt. Where was the plane–or at least the wreckage? Had it completely disappeared without a trace? Would there be nothing to mark the loss? No twisted fuselage, or crumpled wing–of course not, they sink–but not even objects floating on the water? A pillow, a suitcase, something, anything that could provide a sense of personal connection, of continuity between before and after, some cushion against complete annihilation?

If such a photograph can be taken, I’m sure it will be circulated widely. Until then, the press is having to make do with images of officials, machines, maps, and relatives or friends facing the news. This one is the best so far:

The caption at the New York Times says that “a woman . . . reacted while being taken to a private room at Tom Jobim Airport in Rio de Janeiro.” That doesn’t tell you much, and in fact the photograph doesn’t tell you much. Without the context of the disaster and the information and emotional cuing provided by the caption, the photo could be completely banal. They could be tourists on a bus.

My first reaction was that this photo, like all the initial photos, were merely place holders–images temporarily standing in for the images of the crash that were not available. The disaster could not yet be seen–no one even knew where the plane went down–but it was too disquieting to allow a complete absence of images. That absence would have been an apt representation of the gaping loss created by a catastrophic disappearance, but who wants that?

As I let the photo assert its own quiet presence, however, something happened. It seems to know how difficult it is to comprehend the event of which it is a small part. The darkness dominating the interior space suggests how all are enveloped in ignorance and foreboding. The hazy bright space (water and sky?) outside suggests the vast emptiness into which the plane has vanished. The photo provides a portrait of not knowing, of not being able to see what really matters.

Like the passengers on Flight 447 before them, the two people in this photograph don’t know what is out there. They can’t see the disaster that is engulfing them. Nor can we.

Photograph by Ricardo Moraes/Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

1 Comment

Symposium: The Aesthetics of Catastrophe

Northwestern University
Friday, June 5, 2009
Annie May Swift Hall Auditorium

This symposium addresses questions of visual representation and public advocacy as they are evident in contemporary economic, environmental, and political disasters. Events such as floods, fires, terrorism, and genocide generate heightened media coverage, compelling images, and questions about the limits of photographic representation of events that involve massive disruption and loss. In the US, a series of disasters including 9/11, Katrina, and the economic crash have pushed photojournalists and media scholars alike to ask whether the available conventions for documentary witness need to be extended or reworked. This symposium provides images and arguments dedicated to provoking and guiding extended discussion of topics such as the violent image, visual fragmentation and political distribution, emergency status and citizenship, and the iconography of a “catastrophile” society.

Schedule:

9:00 – Coffee

9:30 – Ann Larabee, Michigan State University, “Brownfields, Ghostboxes, and Orange Xs: Reading Disaster and Catastrophe in the Urban Landscape”

10:45 – Robert Lyons, Photographer, “Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide”

1:00 – David Campbell, Durham University, UK, “Constructed Visibility: Photographing the Catastrophe of Gaza”

2:15 – Aric Mayer, Photographer, “Representing the Unrepresentable: Disaster, Suffering, and Locating the Political in the Viewer-Image Exchange”

3:30 – Lane Relyea, Northwestern University, “From Spectacle to Database: On the Changed Status of Debris and Fragmented Subjectivity in Recent Art Culture”

4:45 – Reception

Free and open to the public. Organized by Robert Hariman. Sponsored by the Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the School of Communication, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University. For more information, please contact Patrick Wade at wpatrickwade@gmail.com.

2 Comments

The Half-Life of Cold War Images

To the untrained eye, including many of us who grew up seeing annual photos of Soviet military hardware being paraded in Red Square, this could be an image from the 1960s.

The planes are flying over Red Square for the annual photo-op that the Soviet–oops, Russian–government provides each year to commemorate the end of WW II. A slide show at The Big Picture provides this and other photographs, many of which are picture-perfect renditions of typical images from the Cold War: massed soldiers tightly entrained as they pass the reviewing stand, and huge missile launchers, tanks, and other lethal vehicles passing in front of ornate, 19th century buildings. Russian might is on display–as the massive, industrialized concentration of disciplined masses serving an ancient authoritarian state.

That is one Russia, and perhaps one that still should be taken seriously, but other images provide evidence that the world is changing around the government’s stage. One photograph features a young couple kissing as they walk in parallel to the parade, indifferent to the public show providing a backdrop for their personal relationship. In another, the photo of the weaponry includes a TV crew, suggesting that the military is becoming relegated to a sideshow in the information age. In another, a young boy runs past a memorial, his brand-name athletic clothing and free spirit an obvious contrast to the stolid monumentalism of the national security state. The photographers seem to be saying that the parade comes out of the past, while the spectators are the future.

It would be easy to conclude at this point, as if the Russian government were the only remaining source of Cold War culture, as if they alone remain mired in the past while more liberal democracies were creating a global civil society of free markets, continuous media, and consumerism. But then I came across this image:

This photo offers a peek into Digilab at the Open University in the UK. The Guardian’s caption mentioned that the individual shown was working at a computer–as if that were something very special. To cut to the chase, this is another example of Cold War image culture. The public is given a glimpse of a technocratic elite who work in highly modern workplaces that are carefully guarded against more intrusive public access. The image itself is of an interface: the small, circular, specially sealed windows could almost double as gauges, or lights, or conduits for optical beams, or ports for flexible hoses. The flat, monochrome surface with its odd, supposedly pleasant color completes the composition. This is a world of uniformly managed surfaces to maintain a supposedly rational distribution of skills and risks.

In other words, Cold War imagery continues to be produced on both sides of the former iron curtain. And in each case the images can continue to legitimate different versions of the old dispensations. It wasn’t all bad, but I certainly hope that we can move on to better things. With that in mind, I find this last image particularly poignant.

Missile launchers are waiting their cue to enter the Square for a rehearsal for the Victory Day parade. The golden cannisters could be something completely different than weapons, and they could be to any scale–say, a child’s toys. The domed cathedral in the background looms Oz-like in the fog. The vehicles and the buildings each seem to have their own source of light, and their own secret purpose. The entire scene is dream-like.

As if the whole era had been a dream, a fantastical dream of beauty and terror, and one that you can’t quite get out of your head.

Photographs by Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP-Getty Images, Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images, Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press.

0 Comments

Embedded in Afghanistan

By guest correspondent David Campbell

Embedding photojournalists with combat units was one of the military’s greatest victories in the Iraq war. By narrowing the focus in time and space to the unit they were with, the images produced put brave soldiers front and center, with both context and victims out of range. Now, with the Obama administration’s “Af-Pak” strategy being questioned, we are being offered similar visual cues from Afghanistan.

Three soldiers peering into a remote valley, rifles at the ready, the enemy seemingly elusive. High tech weaponry is readied against the elements. This is a war machine looking for a reason, certain a threat is out there but unsure of its form. There’s even a moment of pathos, with the man on the left in his pink boxers and exposed legs lining up with his comrades. Then there is the second photo, shot from behind in the same place, but showing a strongman taking time out for a gym session. One shows a vulnerable body, the other a muscular physique, but in each case the American soldier is the subject of the photograph.

What unites these pictures is their location – the Korengal Valley in northeastern Afghanistan. The embedding process is taking photographers and reporters to this location above all others, and photographers have been prominent in the coverage of US operations there. Balazs Gardi and Tim Hetherington travelled there in 2007, John Moore spent time there in November 2008, producing both stills and a multimedia piece, and Adam Dean and Tyler Hicks have filed stories from an April 2009 embed. (See background to the Hicks’ story here.)

Although the visual skills of these practitioners are not in doubt, the stories they have produced are remarkably similar in both content and approach. US forces are the locus of the narrative and combat scenes are repeatedly pictured. The local community is lalrgely unseen, except for when they encounter the Americans, and never heard. They are rendered as part of an inhospitable environment in which civilians are hard to distinguish from ‘the enemy’.

The effect of concentrating on one location and one side has been to badly limit our understanding of the strategic dilemma that is Afghanistan. The photographers might want to do otherwise but the embedding process is designed to produce this constraint. Its success can be judged by the way these stories effectively structure the visibility of the war in a way that foregrounds American military interests.

How we judge the photographers’ responsibility here is difficult. Logistically, being embedded is the only feasible way to cover some frontline locations. Without it we might not see anything. But the consequence of embedding is the production of a visual landscape that too easily fits with the idea that more troops or heavier fighting could lead to victory. This political effect was part of Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s critique of Tim Hetherington’s 2007 World Press Photo-winning image of an American soldier in the Korengal. (Hetherington responded with a statement about photojournalism’s continuing political significance, which I have considered here).

Picturing the Af-Pak war comprehensively and in context is a major photographic challenge. It cannot be easily disentangled from the politics of the war. We are stuck with the consequences of the Bush-Blair military intervention, but there is no simple military solution in Afghanistan that will guarantee security. Yet, as much as it might be wished, withdrawing international forces from Afghanistan is unlikely to be helpful in the short-term.

In this context, photography has its work cut out for it. The stories most effective at addressing the broader issues to date have been multimedia presentations (see John D McHugh’s series Six Months in Afghanistan, especially the film “Combat Post”), and more work of this kind is urgently needed if the human and political dimensions of the struggle for security in Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be better understood.

Photograph by David Guttenfelder/Associated Press.

10 Comments

To: Bush Administration; Re: Wrath of God

Yesterday GQ broke the latest story about the alternate universe known as the Bush administration. It seems that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld didn’t think that getting the latest intelligence on the war in Iraq was good enough for the president. So the Secretary tricked up the daily top-secret reports on the invasion with photographs of US military personnel or weaponry–and captioned the photos with Biblical quotes selected to strike the proper note of self-righteous moral superiority. (You can see the photographs in the GQ slide show here.) To take one example, imagine a battle tank bathed in the red rays of the setting sun, along with the injunction from Ephesians 6:13 to “put on the full armor of God.” In Rumsfeld’s Bible, it seems, “armor” is not a metaphor. And for the daily briefing in the Bush war room, neither was “crusade.”

And a trillion dollars and roughly 100,000 civilian deaths later, we have images like this.

The scene has shifted to Pakistan, where oil tankers that were to supply the US military are burning following an attack. I like to think of Rumsfeld out of work and spending his days captioning photographs by the hundreds, pouring through his shiny Bible–not worn from years of use–for quotes to spin the images. But he no longer has to persuade a born-again president, and the current president probably knows that the US government is not supposed to be fighting religious wars.

So, what’s left? How about a game: Can you caption this image? With a Biblical quote, of course. How about “he has poured out his fury like fire” (Lamentations 2:4)? Or perhaps “I will let loose my anger upon you; I will judge you according to your ways, I will punish you for all your abominations” (Ezekiel 7:3)?

Obviously, one of the problems with using the Bible is that it can be, well, a two-edged sword (Proverbs 5:4). (The Biblical phrase only meant sharp, but the Bible does cut both ways.) For all the flaws in Rumsfeld’s political judgment, his scriptural references raise several important issues regarding use of the Bible. For one, there may be no better source for finding sacred sanction for war. The seamless fusion of God’s righteousness with secular conquest and a willingness to sacrifice others in God’s name may be a serious problem within the Abrahamic religions. Closer to home, the use of the Bible often reflects serious errors in application–whether in understanding the point of the passage being quoted, or in the assumptions made about one’s claim on God’s favor. Most important, the Biblical God never wants to stay with war, or to glorify war.

The Biblical God wants justice, mercy, and peace. And so we can end with another game. I’ll supply the quotation, and you supply a photograph. Here’s the text:

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness; and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah, 6: 8).

Photograph by Adil Kahn/Reuters. All translations are New Revised Standard Version.

1 Comment

Active Archive: The 50 States Project

Photographer Stuart Pilkington brings word of The 50 States Project, a special archive that 50 photographers are building this year. Each of the participants, one from each of the fifty states in the US, will produce six images during the year to represent some aspect of their state. Photographs like this one from North Dakota:

Each of the six images is on a common theme–the first three have been People, Habitat, and Landscape, with three more to be announced later in the year. Each photographer is given two months to complete the assignment, and the images are available online by theme and state. The archive is up and growing, and twitter, Flickr, and email links are available as well.

Do the math, and there will be 300 dedicated images there by the end of the year. You can see what already is up and watch the archive grow here.

Photograph of “Ice Fishing Hut on Devils Lake, North Dakota” by Dan Koeck.

1 Comment

Alert: Swine Flu Products Rapidly Replicating

It’s easy to make fun of the media panic over the outbreak of swine flu, and to laugh again when other marketers jump on the bandwagon. This photo shows how an enterprising supermarket in Taipei quickly put together an “Anti-Flu Section.”

Maybe they can use that pig again for the Summer Barbecue Section. And in the meantime, there can be additional media alarms about children swallowing the disinfectants now being stacked in kitchens and bathrooms. And then there can be an “Anti-Poisoning Section,” and maybe the economy will begin to rebound after all.

I told you it was easy, didn’t I? There is more to the story, of course. The media and marketing systems help contain the spread of disease, and activating the network now may hone capabilities that can save additional lives should a more virulent pathogen develop later. But we know that, just as we know the story of the boy who cried wolf. Rather than ask what is an appropriate response, I’d like to consider how the photo is making a larger point as well.

I am often amazed when I survey the seemingly endless abundance of goods in the supermarket. Look again at the display in the foreground of the photograph: the boxes, bottles, spray bottles, spray cans, and jugs are perfect copies of each specific product, just like hundreds of thousands of other identical items, and all have been produced and distributed with machined efficiency. As have the rows of products on the shelves in the background of the photo, leading off to the right and the left to take up aisle after aisle in nearly identical stores all over the world. And behind them, the trucks, roads, ships, factories, and labs that continue to produce and distribute the 100,000+ products that typically are available in any one of those stores.

This is a replication system that any virus would kill for. And isn’t that the truth of the photograph? Any virus can spread quickly because the modern world has become linked together by distribution systems of astonishing scale and efficiency. Airports are just one small part of it, and a high quality of life for billions of people (though not nearly enough people) depends on the continual, constant mechanical reproduction of products, information, and services.

Photography, as Walter Benjamin noted, is one of the technologies of mechanical reproduction that has given the modern world its distinctive character, powers, and vulnerabilities. The photo above is part of the process it documents. (How else do you keep a pig in the air?) And viruses that are continually developing also are part of the modern world system, ready to replicate themselves throughout global networks that can no longer be dismantled without dismantling modern society itself.

The hastily assembled “Anti-Flu Section” of products is a miniature version of the anti-flu response more generally. The same practices that create the flu can be turned against it, perhaps to good effect, but they also are the conditions in which the next virus is already developing. The epidemic is not a modern thing, but only modernity makes a virtue of replication.

Photograph by Pichi Chuang/Reuters. Additional photos on the swine flu outbreak are available at The Big Picture.

1 Comment