With the Pope’s visit to the US this week, some Protestants will be sorely tempted to fall into the sin of pride. Protestants like me, for example, when I look at photographs such as this one:

Just what American needs, a medieval monarch. Just what Christ had in mind: opulent robes, gold trim, courtiers, pageantry, all on behalf of hierarchy.

But that’s too easy. Irony and two bucks will get you a seat at the coffee shop, but it’s no more righteous than sitting in a pew. Rather than rehash differences, the more interesting question is, what might a non-Catholic learn from the Pope’s visit? While looking through the photo essays on his pending arrival, there seemed to be little there that I hadn’t seen before and that wasn’t playing out a familiar script in the courtly style. But then I saw this image:

The ornate robes and crown are gone, leaving the human person who temporarily inhabits the institutional role. The off-write robe or shawl could be a rough covering against the cold, or a shroud. The bare head, thin, white hair, and almost fearful expression suggest vulnerability, yet his eyes are resolutely open to what awaits him. He is illuminated from above, but the light bathing him seems not to confer a blessing but to call him toward the next realm. The shadows along his face and body cue the sense of pending mortality that suffuses the picture.

The first photograph allows ironic contrast between the majestically robed pope and the body of Christ on his scepter. No irony is intended, of course, but instead the suggestion of a common immortality: Christ in heaven and the universal church. In the second photograph, I see only one body: the mortal body, seen to be aging where not covered with common cloth signifying the grave. The scepter has changed as well: in place of the tortured Jesus, only a small cross. Most tellingly, in the center of the metallic halo, one sees a translucent circle. Note also how the light illuminates both the pope’s head and the center of the sceptered ornament. One can see a human being and the mechanism of the church. One can imagine that he will at the last see an aperture to heaven, or only emptiness, diffusion, nothingness.

There need be nothing parochial about that choice. Instead of the Grand Inquisitor, this pope, for one moment, bears witness to the human condition.

And there is more. My response to the second image did not occur by accident. The robe is called a humeral veil–from the Latin humus, or soil–and was once a burial shroud and then a baptismal vestment, thus signifying death and rebirth. Likewise, the scepter is called a Monstrance–from monstro, to show–and is used to display the consecrated sacrament (the body of Christ) to the congregation. Thus, although one need not follow the path all the way through death to eternal life, the liturgical ritual clearly had marked out a path. What it cannot do is mandate a single valid interpretation of what is shown: if one sees faith and the promise of salvation, another can see empty ritual and collective delusion. Regardless of what I believe, I see a signifying animal that persistently, perhaps even nobly confronts the void with its need to communicate and ability to imagine a better world.

Photographs by Darlo Pignatelli/Reuters; Pier Paolo Cito/Associated Press. Thanks to the Rev. Dr. Robert Clarke for technical support on church liturgy.

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Photographers occasionally shoot images of people reflected in windows, framed by windows, or looking through windows. Such images can be visually distinctive while also prompting more reflexive viewing: one sees both the image and some aspect of seeing. The two images below are examples of this visual thinking, while also reflecting other conventions that mediate global communication.

This photograph shows an Afghan schoolgirl. The good news is that she is in school–not a given in Afghanistan. The bad news is that the photographer has put her under the veil. The window screen stands in for the chadiri she is likely to wear as a woman, while the rip in the screen might be a trace of orientalist fantasy, one shaded further by the stain on her hand. The implication is that, despite being in school, she still needs to be liberated. She would welcome that, it seems, as she is looking not through the screen but through the tear. That gash in the screen could stand for poverty or accident, but it makes the screen appear the more inevitable. Although a close-up shot of a vibrant young girl, she remains on the other side of a barrier. That barrier dulls perception in both directions. She seems a lost soul, ghost-like, someone who can see and be seen but not someone we can touch or help, as she really is from another world.

There are others in that world.

This is actually only a temporary confinement, as they are passengers in a Chinese train delayed by heavy snow. But that news is the least of it. Surely this is a vision of the human condition of separation, of the transparent barrier that stands between any human being and another. One grips the rail and looks to the side, warily; he has learned to expect the worst. The younger man still can admit to his yearning to connect. He looks at us, reaches out and puts his hand to the glass, as if we might place ours against his, as if we could touch and not feel only the cold glass.

Each photo tells us that it is not enough to see; we also need to connect. The Biblical allusion in the title of this post is to the beautiful poem in 1 Corinthians 13. Now we see in a “glass” (in the oft-quoted King James translation, referring to a mirror) darkly, but when united with God we shall see face to face. This vision of heaven doubles as a vision of how humanity might live with itself. Indeed, it might be that one step to achieving heaven on earth is to see one another as if face to face. To do that, we have to not settle for merely being able to see through barriers that still dull empathy and divide one from another.

Photographs by Rafig Maqbool and Vincent Yu for the Associated Press.

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One of the basic ideas of this blog is that photographs can depict more than what was happening in front of the lens. This added value can include highlighting larger patterns and processes and also providing imaginative projections of current tendencies. This is what some artists try to do by writing, and science fiction is particularly keen on exploring possible technological and political consequences of present tendencies. This comparison came to mind when I saw this photograph from Afghanistan.

The caption confirms that these are cricket players in a sandstorm. It also adds that they are on a “playground,”but something seems lost in translation. The scene looks more like something out of Dune (the book, not the movie). Recreation on the desert planet Arrakis may not be a lot of fun, but we can marvel at how humans can adapt to anything. At the same time, the imperial influence seems to be alien and superficial rather than any genuine improvement of the place. The storm and much more may pass, but there is something poignant about this image of human beings defined by arbitrary rules and shared isolation on their desert planet.

With this photo sitting on my desktop, I wasn’t entirely surprised when a second appeared a few days later.

You are looking at the competitors begin the 150-mile Sand Marathon in Morroco. The race includes a full marathon, and a 50-mile day, and others as well across varying terrain. The race has to be run while carrying all their equipment on their backs and getting only 9 liters of water a day. Again, the old fort, the desert, and the peculiar, imported form of ritual play by hardy adapters could be from Dune. Where one would think survival would be enough, more is achieved, but always by staying close to the severe limits of nature.

My comparison may be fanciful, but I can’t help but think that these photos are displayed for reasons that go beyond being visually distinctive or documenting unusual forms of recreation. They might also be images of a possible future. That would be a future not on some distant planet, but on this one, should it become ruined by some combination of unrestrained emissions, deforestation, warfare, and other forms of ecological destruction.

Photographs by Ahmed Masood/Reuters; Pierre Verdy/AFP-Getty Images.

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The story of Hillary Clinton’s compulsive lying about being under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia is already slipping away, so much so that she now is referring to is as a minor mistake. Well, I guess we should forgive and forget, right? (Wrong.) Before that happens, however, let’s take one last look at Hillary dodging bullets as she sprints across the tarmac:

As one astute reader put it at another blog, it depends on what your definition of “sniper fire” is.

Cynics will be gloating over this egregious example of how “all politicians lie.” That sloppy thinking only helps cynics and liars. Not everyone is in Hillary’s league, and she, not her opponent, has asked that people judge her on her judgment and experience. Note that character is not on that list, and the lie about her reception upon landing in Tuzla reflects both bad judgment and a misuse of experience. But, truth be told, her claim may have been not so much a lie in her own sense of things as a fiction–something not true that is told to convey a truth. OK, the snipers weren’t there, and she had to know it since she brought her daughter along, but you’ve just got to know that she is soooo ready to be a “war-time president.”

I don’t think earnest yearning excuses much, but if we grant Hillary any slack, she had better be ready to concede that visual commentary might tell the story slant to get a better sense of the truth. Like this:

Editorial cartoonists love to use the Iwo Jima icon. This one may seem a tad unfair because of how the icon is gendered, but, again, it’s Hillary who has said she’s the only one who ought to answer the mythical National Security Phone. What is more telling is that she is facing the viewer. In contrast to the anonymity of the soldiers laboring together selflessly on behalf of the nation, she is jumping in unbidden to serve personal ambition. Of course, she wasn’t claiming to be a soldier, and there are no bullets in the iconic photograph of the flag-raising, but the cartoonist has revealed more than one problem with Clinton’s lie.

Hillary got caught telling a whopper; perhaps she ought to be given a dose of her own medicine. Some people wish it could be her Dukakis moment–that is, the equivalent of the 1988 Democratic candidate’s mistaken photo-op, when a shot of him riding in a tank became a defining moment of the campaign and one reason you don’t hear references to “President Dukakis.” That episode may be why you can see this image online today:

Really, really unfair. I’m just broken up about it.

Photograph by the Associated Press. Cartoon by Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette (March 31, 2008). Photoshopped image by registered@aol.com. For scholarly discussion and examples of the use of the Iwo Jima template in editorial cartooning, see Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997(: 269-89, and Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, at pp. 121-124 (on Iwo Jima) and elsewhere.

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