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First Birthday: What's Needed at No Caption Needed?

It’s been a year since we began this blog. We had no idea what we were getting into. The initial idea was to put up an ad for the book. Not a great idea, but then we thought that we could write a few posts to thicken the ad. After all, neither one of us had the time to do this on a regular basis. One thing lead to another, and soon we had created a monster: we loved writing the posts and seeing the audience grow, but we still didn’t have the time, so we told ourselves that we’d do it for a year and then quit. It’s been a year and we don’t want to quit, but we need to make some changes.

We have a number of options: quiting, mothballing it for the summer (when readership drops a bit), posting regularly but less often (say, two substantive posts instead of four each week), providing more varied content with less commentary, bringing in more writers, and merging with a bigger blog (we have a standing offer).

Before we make any decisions, we’d like to hear from our readers. There are several thousand of you, most from the US but others from around the globe. We assume that most of you won’t see the need to weigh in on this, but please feel welcome to comment, either here or via private email to either of us (robert.hariman@comcast.net, lucaites@indiana.edu).

We’d like to know what you like about the blog, what you don’t like, and any suggestions you might have for how it should continue. We seem to have a niche, but we’re not quite sure what that is. We’d like to provide material that is thought-provoking and otherwise valued, but we’re not sure who wants what how often. In short, we hope to refine our work so that it can be distinctive, useful, and sustainable.

We’ll hope to hear from you.

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Observing Nature's Way

The coverage of the flooding throughout the Midwest this month will have brought more than one reader to wonder why people just don’t move to where they can stay high and dry. Easy to say when you are high and dry, and before the mud slide or water shortage or hurricane or wildfire or other so-called natural disaster occurs closer to home. It’s not easy to move a city, of course, nor can home owners pack up the neighborhood en masse without losing their shirts. More important, people live where they do because it once was beneficial to put the city where it is, and because it often is beneficial to continue to live close to nature. Getting too close is one problem, but we should remember that becoming too insulated from our environment is equally dangerous, physically and spiritually.

Rather than feel superior or even fortunate for being above the floods, let’s take a minute to simply marvel at nature.

This photograph gives us both the awesome power of natural forces and the beauty of the earth, the incredible gift of new growth and the fury of destruction. That thunderhead can appear out of nowhere, gather together wind, water, and fire, and wreak havoc on the work of a year or a lifetime. Yet that crop can come up seemingly by magic, teased out of the ground by the sun and rain which feed it and without which none of us would live. No one wants to be battered by the storm, but why would anyone want to get too far away from this?

Or this:

This shot from the San Juan Islands near Seattle is a picture in serenity. But the islands were created by the same massive, impersonal forces that were visible over the wheat field. And that water is no safer than the Mississippi, colder, in fact, with deadly currents should you capsize. But we don’t worry about that when looking from such a privileged place as that provided by this photograph. And it is beautiful. We should ponder why it is so beautiful, for that is another gift: our human ability to see it as more than forage or shelter or simply what it is. Instead, we see the beauty of forms, whether undulating shapes or shimmering shades of luminescence. And form is the trace of prior activity, the natural forces molding the land and channeling the waters.

Photographs by Steve Hausler/Associated Press and Bruce Dike/The Daily Dozen at nationalgeographic.com

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Only Connect

The war in Iraq seems to be entering a surreal phase. The surge is working, we are told, and violence is down, and other things are improving, but, of course, the US death toll ticks right along this month at one per day and sectarian bombings continue and none of the avowed political objectives are remotely in sight. Likewise, the likely Democratic victory in November bodes well for a substantial draw-down of our forces, but in the current negotiations with the Iraqi government about our long-term military presence there, the US requested 58 bases, control of the airspace to 30,000 feet, continued immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law of all US personnel and private contractors, and other amenities such as protocols for offensive operations. Given that we currently have 30 bases in Iraq, 58 is an interesting number. And the exemption of roughly 132,000 troops and 154,000 contractors from prosecution for whatever crimes they might commit, well, that is business as usual. “’More than 90 percent of this will be a pretty standard status-of-forces agreement,’ said one senior official involved in drafting the American proposal.”

And that’s the problem: we could be drifting into the usual indifference of Empire. Something called “stability” will be restored while the rest of us will forget that lives were torn apart. So it is that we need to be reminded.

This now famous photo of a coffin being prepared for delivery captures all too well the terrible disconnect between US civilian experience and the costs of this war. The honor guard are doing everything they can to pay proper respect to their fellow Marine, but nothing can change the fact that the dead are consigned to the cargo hold while not far above them the living go about their business. It’s not that those peering out of the windows of the plane are uncaring, but how can they know what is happening in the hold? And unlike the carefully coordinated efforts of the uniformed guard, those above are isolated into individual reality compartments, each firmly separated from the others. The structure of the plane reflects the structure of ordinary life in a liberal society: those things held in common are like baggage, thrown together in the hold, while each of us pursue our separate destinations, free to choose and not likely to even know what is shared.

But, of course, the grief is not shared. The photograph came to my attention again when the New York Times used it to feature a review of the book Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives, by Jim Sheeler, which is based on his Pulitzer Prize winning series in The Rocky Mountain News. The Times slide show accompanying the review documents just how isolated the families of the fallen are in their grief. The honor guards do what they can, but then they leave; after all, they have more work to do.

This photo is one that I find particularly poignant:

Katherine Cathey had asked if she could sleep next to the body of her husband for one last time. Illuminated by the glow of her laptop, she is listening to songs that reminded her of her beloved. She listens if to connect again, somehow, through the ether, through memory. She lies between the hard reality of the shrouded casket and the glow of a virtual world. These are all that remain. She at least knows that. The rest of us sit, like passengers on a plane, unaware of how close we might be to the terrible losses wrought by this war. Or we look into the media portal, like looking out of the window of the plane, staring blankly at the suffering unfolding elsewhere. Like Katherine Cathey, we, too, need to connect.

Photographs by Todd Heisler/Rocky Mountain News. Michael Shaw wrote a fine post on Heisler’s photographs when the Pulitzer was awarded. John and I have written a number of posts on mourning in the US and Iraq, too many to cite here. We’re rather not repeat ourselves, but the war is not over. For some it will never be over. How many are in that category depends on the rest of us.

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When is a Flag Not a Prop?

One of the more successful cases of symbol capture in my lifetime is the Republican Party’s wrapping itself in the flag. Of course, the Left gave it away and then had to seethe in frustration while watching it used to set records in hypocrisy. But what credibility did they have when it came to the flag itself? That monopoly is fading however, down to Fox News and MSNBC sputtering about whether Barack Obama is wearing a flag pin. (He is. Feel better?) This decline in faux patriotism may be another side-effect of the Bush years, not that they have caught on:

There are thousands of these shots, but this one seems particularly offensive. This is the guy who had “other priorities” than serving in the Vietnam War but no qualms about sending other young men to die in the sequel of his own making. The arrogant sneer seems just right, a moment of truth revealing this administration’s cynical use of the flag–and the troops–as props. They are props in two senses of the word: devices for staging a show, and supports for something that would collapse of its own bad weight otherwise.

The image caught my attention because it demonstrates a principle of symbolic action. The basic idea is that when you see excessive display, it often is compensating for some lack. When we raise our voice, it often is not because we have the better argument. Excessive make-up can be a response to a lack of skill in a preteen or a lack of self-esteem at any age. If we go on too long, it may be because we have so little to say. Getting back to the photograph, if the administration displays not one flag but seven (and counting), it may be not because they have a surplus of patriotism and demonstrated commitment to the common good, but because there is so little evidence of those civic virtues in their policies.

For a sense of contrast, consider this image:

This flag is flying near Belle Fourche, South Dakota. The town has the distinction of being the geographical center of the nation. We see one flag, not seven, and it is a worn flag, not the imperial banners behind Cheney. Most important, it wasn’t put up there to prop up anyone. Think of it more as an act of homage, something done because it felt right, not because it would play well. The frayed edges tell us that it’s been there awhile, taking a beating from the wind but still standing as someone’s testament to their love of country. And so the principle works in both directions: when an act of display shows signs of being ragged and worn, it can be a sign of some larger fullness. What looks like a simple gesture in an all but empty place may be something much bigger. Not just the center, but the heart of the nation.

FYI to our readers: I posted on Belle Fourche recently, and this second post is something of an atonement for a mistake made at that time. If you read to comments to that post, you’ll see what I mean. Thus, this second post is another demonstration of the relationship between excess and deficiency, a dynamic that endlessly fuels language and culture.

Photographs by Seth Wenig/Associated Press and Angel Franco/New York Times.

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Punctuated Equilibrium in the Photographic Record

Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory of evolutionary change that accounts for both the overall stability of large populations across time and the process–or periods–of significant change–e.g., in the species, if studying biology, or the social practice, if studying human organization. Generally, species maintain themselves as species by not changing, which happens because most local adaptations are diluted by more comprehensively functional features, but adaptations that develop at the margins of the population, where the species is less likely to match environmental conditions, can acquire selective advantages that subsequently can spread quickly across the population. So why am I telling you this?

The question came to mind of what image of the world is being maintained by photojournalism, and particularly coverage of world politics. Were we to examine the photographic record as if it were a fossil record, would we see a history of punctuated equilibrium? More to the point, when we look at the images in the news, do we see a world of general stability punctuated by moments of rapidly spreading change? Or do we see another model of collective behavior: for example, nearly uniform stability occasionally disturbed but always restored? Or relatively stable civilizations that once in a long while are destroyed or fundamentally transformed by some catastrophic upheaval? Or perhaps a continual improvement regrettably but inevitably accompanied by “creative destruction”? Or, if we do see a stable order that is occasionally subject to rapid change, what is the norm and what is developing in the margins? And might we see these larger patterns across images or inside of individual images?

Let’s look at two photographs to consider how this line of thinking might develop.

This photograph depicts the aftermath of a car bombing in Baghdad. It is one of hundreds of images that I could have grabbed from the last month’s slide shows: images of bombing, rioting, shooting, clubbing, and similar forms of violence. These are images of disruption. For example, we see the mise-en-scene of ordinary life–and the blast. Street with truck, curb with light pole, functional building and people going about their business–and looming up where there should be light and perspective, a dark cloud, miasmic, bearing bad news on an ill wind. But the cloud will disperse, the truck start up again, the people break away to get back to a semblance of routine, right?

One might see the bombing as a minor disruption of an otherwise stable social order, or as something more ominous, like the dark cloud of smoke in the photograph. Generally, the concrete street and steel structures, along with the smoke of the blast, imply that social order is the norm and violence the disruption, but one might not be too sure. Perhaps the frame is tipped one way rather than the other by images such as this one:

This photograph also features an ordinary scene–cultivated fields greening in the springtime–and a dark shape, but one that is not threatening. The balloon’s shadow is but an extension of the sunlight illuminating the balloon and feeding the crops below. Instead of being faced with a loss of control, the elongated shape can stand for the magnified sense of freedom and personal extension that one might feel while floating above the earth. Whether thinking of the special experience of being aloft in a hot air balloon or the collective good in verdant fields stretching to the horizon, life is good.

And so it goes. The newspapers, magazines, and slide shows feature a steady stream of both images. On the one hand, hard news images of continual disruption (whether political or natural disasters), and, on the other hand, soft news images of peace and harmony (both natural and political). It might be that journalism in a democratic society is inclined to present a dystopian world–by contrast to the obligatory good news of an authoritarian press–but that the need to hold on to readers also motivates the signs of reassurance provided by the soft news.

The question remains of which view is correct. Which tendency is more characteristic of the species, and which might be a marginal adaptation? Is civilization the norm, with violence a marginal adaptation, or is violence the general characteristic of the population, punctuated occasionally by selective adaptations toward peace? Look again at the photographs. Which is more indicative of what is breeding at the margins today? is it light technologies and sustainable cultivation that can bring some degree of prosperity and peace across a planet riven by conflict? Or is it anarchy and war that can spread contagiously in a global order built upon the competition for non-renewable resources?

Photographs by Ahmad Al-Rubaya?AFP-Getty Images and Viktkor Veres/AFP-Getty Images.

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Sight Gag: The Crucial Moron Vote

Photo Credit:  Unknown

Our primary goal with this blog is to talk about the ways in which photojournalism contributes to a vital democratic public culture. Much of the time that means we are focusing on what purport to be more or less serious matters. But as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert often remind us, democracy needs irony, parody, and pure silliness as much as it needs serious contemplation. For our part, we will dedicate our Sunday posts to putting such moments on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the ironic and/or the carnivalesque. Sometimes we will post pictures we’ve taken, or that have been contributed by others, or that we just happen to stumble across as we navigate our very visual public culture. Sometimes the images will be pure silliness, but sometimes they will point to ironies, poignant and otherwise. And we won’t just be limited to photography, as a robust democratic visual culture consists of much more. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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Harlem, the Landscape

ArIc Mayer is an exceptionally thoughtful photographer whose work has been featured before at this blog. He has a new series of images that, like so much of his work, encourage contemplation of a subject that is otherwise trapped in stock images articulating a standard narrative. We know all about Katrina, right? Or the beauty of the American West. Or Harlem. We may have never been there, but we know the story. Aric never denies what is really there in the story, nor does he provoke the viewer to see things from some odd angle. Instead, he carefully works you into his line of vision until you start to think about what you are seeing. After that, you’re on your own, but that is enough.

The new set of photographs are from Harlem. You know, the streets teeming with bodies, sound, and signage. The once magnificent buildings now dilapidated, the streets lined with litter and grafitti, the iron grates on the storefronts and the lurid murals on the walls. Like this:

Oh, to be able to describe the beauty, the intelligence of trees. Beauty too rarely seen, for how often do we stop and simply look up? How often on a cloudy spring day, and in the city? What is more important, however, is not that he looked up, but that this is given to us without any sense of contrast. The message is not that a world of beauty and potential lies just above the concrete, nor the ugly insinuation that beauty is everywhere–i.e., even in Harlem. This is a photograph of nature, but not to denigrate urban life. There is no myth, no transcendence, no need to escape. Instead, a different resonance: wisdom, ancient ways, endurance, another dimension waiting to be heard.

Perhaps even serenity:

But “serenity” is too simple. As with the first image, there is something poignant, even haunting about this photograph. A drain can conjure up images of water and of floods, or of blood and of too much being drained away, or of waste and the ultimate return to the earth. And yet this spot is so clean, and so well worn, as if rubbed smooth by many generations of spring rains. The bird-like shape of the lighter patch could be a totemic animal, or the drain some kind of communication device. If the stones could speak, would we listen? Were we to see the city anew, like a spring landscape, what would we see?

You can see the full set of Aric Mayer’s Harlem photographs here.

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Olympic Training and the Nation

We almost never write about sport at this blog, yet I’m putting two posts up this week on the run-up to the Olympics. Maybe it’s because the war in Iraq is all but won–based on recent coverage, anyway–so I need something new to talk about. More likely the increase in coverage is producing a fresh crop of images. Here’s another one that caught my eye:

The New York Times story featured China’s heavy investment in rowing as part of its push to win the medals competition. The enormous investment is very real, but the whole idea seems quaint–just the thing you’d expect from a somewhat socially backward newcomer. Does anyone really care if medal total goes to China, the US, or the USSR–whoops! I mean Russia? The whole game is a relic of the Cold War. Aren’t such symbolic measures meaningless next to the real competition for oil, markets, and global economic dominance?

The short answer is yes, and the photo above illustrates just how the game is changing. Two things immediately define the image: the athlete’s magnificent physique and the high-end modernist decor. He is a superbly trained athlete walking through the functionally designed training facility. Both have all the marks of smart and lavish investment. Any difference between his individual person and the impersonal setting is covered over by their uniform simplicity and shared engineering.

The signage on his shirt and the wall also are part of the image. CHINA marks him as member of the national team, but this is not the flag-waving patriotism of a public ceremony. That shirt could just as well say NIKE or any other logo–you are looking at the new international style, another iteration of the high modernist culture of scientific training, standardized competition, and expert performance that links the top-tier athletes across the globe. By contrast, the Olympic rings and number on the wall look like crafts project from the local school–clearly a temporary addition. Cute, but hardly essential. After all, the Olympics are only the next event in an unending push for optimization.

In short, we can see the nation-state becoming a platform for economic and organizational power. This arrangement has enormous productive capacity and clearly can benefit some individuals. As it happens, however, much of what used to distinguish both the nation and interaction across national borders is changing, perhaps withering away. The contrast is even more evident when looking at another photo:

A boxer is being wrapped in a Brazilian flag prior to a qualifying bout for the Olympics. Boxing, which had a good run in the twentieth century as one of the premier sports nationally and internationally, is all but extinct. The setting in this photo does not suggest strong financial support. The flag is the only lavish thing there–colorful, rich material with plenty of drape to cover his body. Needless to say, it will come off very soon. The image is touching, really: this poor kid about to get beat on is putting on the national flag to become something larger than himself. It will be done to get the crowd on his side and intimidate his opponent, but not only for that. He wants to look good in that flag, and he’s proud to wear it. And that flag probably is about the extent of the support he will get from the state. Brazil has a lot going for it, but it’s still content to be a collective, not a platform.

That boxer probably could do a lot with Chinese training. But don’t feel sorry for him, for there is one more thing to see. It’s a coincidental effect in each case, but nonetheless food for thought. Standing amidst not much of nothing, the boxer is looking up, head held high. His face already looks cut, but he is unbowed. Now look again at the Chinese athlete. He is strong, perhaps thoughtful–going over the training routine one more time–but his head is down, as if habitually, submissively so. As if accustomed to the yoke. He is beautiful, but he is not free. Whether due to the state or the discipline, he is not free.

Photographs by Doug Kanter/New York Times and Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press.

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Emptiness at the Center of the Nation

The New York Times ran a story yesterday entitled “In the Middle of Nowhere, a Nation’s Center.” The subject was the geographical center of the U.S., which is a windswept prairie in Butte County, South Dakota.

There is a monument, of course, but it’s in the nearby town of Belle Fourche. Most visitors–yes, there are visitors–are content to take their pictures there rather than trek out to the actual spot. The reporter’s sense of irony is light, in keeping with his respectful attitude toward the folks actually living there. The story even includes a feel-good ending. “But then, in this remote, still place, there comes a strange sense of reassurance: that in this time of uncertain war and near-certain recession, of home foreclosures and gas at $4 a gallon, at least somewhere in this nation a center holds.”

But does it hold? Or, more to the point, why would it not hold when no one wants a piece of it? And isn’t the scene pathetic? The abandoned landscape reduced to flee market status by the hand-scrawled sign? The Times story provides an inadvertent chronicle of how rural America, once vying for its place in the nation’s prosperity, has been bypassed for roads leading elsewhere. And let me add that $4 a gallon gas hurts them a lot more than it hurts you. But you already are accustomed to not seeing them, and there are no pictures of people in the slide show accompanying the story. All you have to do to complete efface the unpleasant fact that people still live there is remove the sign.

This is another photo from the slide show, and the last of the set. Now we have a classic shot of America the Beautiful, the mythic landscape of the American West and its message of endless possibility. That image was already in the first photo, but there it sets up the irony of the ragged sign, which in turn changes the magnificent vista into a desolate “moonscape.” Ironically, the sign declaring a center highlights its emptiness. When that emptiness is not marked by the visual excess of a verbal text obviously added to the scene, a tawdry bit of culture marring nature’s grandeur, then one can see fullness, a richly symbolic affirmation of national potential. Like the wind, endless, waiting to be harvested.

Or, like the sign, symbolic in another sense. With his assurance that “at least somewhere in this nation a center holds” the reporter offers a refutation of W.B. Yeat’s famous indictment of modernity in “The Second Coming.” But the center in question is not holding, not in South Dakota, anyway. Agribusiness, agricultural policies, transportation policies, and other very real historical forces are draining the land of people, soil, water, you name it. America has invested heavily in centrifugal processes, and seems to have little time to be centered, much less balanced, reflective, or attentive to its own.

Photographs by Angel Franco/New York Times. For another perspective on the Great Plains and what one can learn there about being centered, see the wonderful book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris.


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