I’ve posted before about the heroism of the Pakistani middle class as they confront terror to create a modern, liberal-democratic civil society. That post featured an image of waiting and the prospect that things could get worse. They did get worse:

This photograph is centered on a man wounded in the fatal attack on Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. It shows much more than that, however. I see the pathos of civil society in an era of violence, a scene that can be understood as both a series of small choices and the brutal logic of historical fatality.

The photo features the man in the middle of the frame, and he is a peculiar figure: at once a picture of bourgeois composure and someone blasted into stunned incongruity. His pants have been shredded by the blast of the suicide bomber, yet his suit is still buttoned and his tie knotted neatly. One sleeve is disheveled but only to reveal a crisp shirt with white French cuffs. He checks his head for damage yet his hair is still parted. Those around him have been leveled by shrapnel, but he is sitting upright with his legs crossed at the ankles; he could just as well be sitting in a barber’s chair.

The emotional appeal of the image may derive from this tension between the raw violence of the scene and the habitual routines of ordinary life. This tension might be concentrated in the contrast between his orderly demeanor and exposed flesh. He acts as if the only problem is whether his hair is mussed, while we see that his pants have been flayed by violence. Much is revealed: he is not just a “suit,” and a “stable” society is not one where anyone can be torn apart by others who are no respecter of persons. More to the point, his habits of dress, posture, gesture, and thought are both touching and out of place in a world blown apart. They are so far from the harsh realities of civil war, so foreign to the production of violence. His habits are nothing more or less than than consolidated choices that both assume and reproduce a decent civil society. They are isolated by the destruction around him, and the implication is that they may be useless.

Although his suit didn’t protect him, he is alive. And that sets up the second emotional vector in the image. As the street spreads out behind him, we see the carnage wrought by the bomb. You might not want to look too closely. Those lying behind him are dead, and the further into the background, the more broken the bodies. Again, the scene is marked by little signs of normalcy gone awry: strips of paper, items of clothing, it could be the aftermath of a tornado except that it doesn’t stop there. The sitting man, the prone body, the crumpled bodies, the body parts present a declension of violence: to wound, to kill, to kill and mutilate, to dismember, to blow to bits. Thus, the distance from the man in the foreground to whose scattered on the ground behind him can double as a series of steps as a society devolves into anarchy. Those who are committed to civic order are threatened, then attacked, then killed as everything associated with them also is shredded and scattered. Small choices and everyday habits that are the fabric of peace cannot withstand the weapons of those committed to destruction.

John and I have posted periodically about the normalization of violence, but that rarely occurs in the immediate presence of actual destruction. This photograph documents that violence itself is about anything but the taken for granted routines of ordinary life. We now seem to be in a season of violence–Iraq, Pakistan, Kenya, and others are suffering the destruction of social order. It seems that the process is irreversible: once the detonator is set off, waves of destruction spread ever outward. But look at the photograph one last time. There are others in the picture. In the rear, another of the wounded also has risen to a sitting position. On the side, there are onlookers. These figures suggest that fatality has limits. The swath of destruction went only so far this time, each time. Those watching still have choices to make. Who to side with. How to help. With what weapons.

Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images.

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Yesterday the news in the art world included a New York Times story on “A Big Gift for the Met: The Arbus Archives.” The paper reproduced two of her photographs, the deeply affective “Russian Midget Friends in a Living Room on 100th Street, N.Y.C.,” and the more often reproduced “Woman with a Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C.” (The later is doubly jarring today, when “veil” is taken to refer to something quite different than an affluent white woman on Fifth Avenue.)

If you follow a link provided by the Times, you can see several photos that were revealed at a major retrospective of a few years ago. They are pure Arbus, and all the more stunning for that. This is art, and I won’t presume to add to what has been said to celebrate her achievement. It is enough to look:

He is no freak and the more exposed for that. Although composed for and confidently presenting himself to the camera, we see a profound vulnerability. Dressed for going out in public or to the office, he seems almost naked. Covered, even layered, he seems thin, at best a thinking reed. And can anything that gentle not be mowed down? It seems that the wind could cut through him like a bullet, and won’t the many snubs, rejections, and disappointments to come do the same?

That may be too morbid, however, an homage more to the Arbus aura than to the art itself. Perhaps he already is well armored. Look at the formal perfection that she captures: the arced lines of his eyelids are paralleled by his eyebrows and the brim, band, and top of his hat. The long oval of the face is mirrored by the ears, their protuberance now an aesthetic virtue. Likewise, the arcs of the lower lids, lower lip, and chin are mirrored by the V-lines of the collar, coat, and his arms. Eyes, mouth, hands; ears, lapels, hands–the incredible candor and goodness in his direct gaze at the camera is buttressed by these symmetries of composure. What should be a confrontational stance is instead a moment of pure openness. He, not just the photograph, is a work of art.

Except for the cigarette. That’s the punctum for me. The term was coined by Roland Barthes to describe the part of an image that punctuates or punctures interpretation to create a more intense or troubling emotional effect. The cigarette puts this young man back into time. He is living in a particular time and place and social world, and time is passing as surely as that cigarette is going up in smoke. Thus, the photograph brings him, and us, back to all the desires and vicissitudes and erosion of real life. He doesn’t have it all together; he’s imitating a movie star. He isn’t composed and armored and capable; he’s playing a part for which he is ill cast and cheaply costumed. He’s not open to a life of possibility; he’s already caught in an epidemic. The wind won’t blow through him, but he could end up thinner yet as cancer wastes him to the end. He’s really one of us.

Young Man in a Trench Coat, N.Y.C., 1971, by Diane Arbus/The New York Times, “Unveiled (September 14, 2003),” and Diane Arbus: Revelations.

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This blog keeps to the straight and narrow much of the time, by which I mean we cover photojournalism with the occasional art photo or advertisement thrown in. We don’t range across Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and the rest of the digital spectrum, much less put up snapshots from our own social networks. But one of the characteristics of media (and not just in the digital age) is that they all flow into one another. So it is that the Chicago Tribune website is inviting people to send in their snapshots of kids who are scared of Santa. And people do:

Cute, huh? Actually, I don’t think so. This photo probably is a good example of how one’s emotional response to images depends on context. The parents can chuckle because they know that this behavior was momentary and aberrant—the kid was fine in a minute and had lots of fun with the Santa myth otherwise.

It’s also a good example of why there should be some distinction between private and public media. Snapshots do many things, and photojournalism does many things, and they often can overlap and at times each do the work of the other. But you don’t have to look at many snaps to be relieved that they are not in the paper every day.

What interests me about these Santa images is that something does happen when they are collected for public viewing. Not one or two, but over a hundred and counting. Images like this:

And this:

And that’s more than enough, isn’t it?

The question arises, what does the series of images show that might be overlooked in any one? The answer is, the social form–that is, the custom, and who it serves, and what it costs. The visit to Santa is revealed to be something done not so much for the kids as for the adults. Frankly, the kids would never miss it, don’t need it, and in some cases would be better off without it. And isn’t this a lesson in the tyranny of social forms? A very, very minor example, of course, but an example nonetheless of how people can be pushed into fixed scenarios before they are ready for what social goods might be conferred there. You might say that the visit to Santa is the first step toward middle school.

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It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.

These words by William Carlos Williams stand as a critique of the news media and a challenge to the reading public. Even if the mainstream media cannot change, the question remains of what one should be reading and how one should read. Williams suggests that we are either reading the wrong things or reading the right things obtusely. Certainly the wars go on and men die for not knowing what they should know.

That said, I have never trusted the distinction between poems and news, political deception and artistic truth. You can find both artistry and bad behavior on both sides, and no democratic society can live on poetry alone. One place where art and news intersect is photojournalism. Applied there, Williams question acquires more precise reference: Are we getting the news–the real news–from the photograph? To do that, it would seem, we have to learn to recognize its poetry. And the difficult task would still remain: to see what can be found there that is not available in the photo’s reportage.

This is the ideal to which this blog strives, however fitfully. It should be applicable to any photograph. Today, I’m taking one that has been sitting on the desktop for two months. I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but one answer is that I was waiting for what has happened: amnesia. The photograph was featured item in a New Yorker report on the demonstrations against the brutal dictatorship in Burma.

Certainly there is ordinary news here. Monks really were killed, whatever the government might say to the contrary. But what lies deeper than that? The New Yorker commentary provides one answer: the image “shows totalitarianism in its most physical form: the elimination not just of an individual’s life but of his value.” This observation followed a vague comparison to other atrocity photos. I think there is another, more patently artistic comparison that reveals a second truth.

The force of the photograph comes in part from comparison with standard images of Buddhist serenity. All the elements are there: the still pond, isolated reeds, monk in repose, all composed in simple aesthetic harmony reflecting alignment with the cosmic order. Surely this monk is undisturbed by desire, surely he is in harmony with his natural surroundings. Although his stillness is foreign to us, there is no doubt that he is close to God.

But, of course, the photo depicts not that image but rather its terrible perversion. The pond is still but filthy; the monk is serene because dead; his union with the cosmic order has begun via the body swelling with putrefaction. In place of the harmonious life, he has died miserably.

Cynics could say that he died because he did not understand the poems he had been reading. Would Buddha have taken to the streets? Well, Buddha did take to the streets, in Burma, and now the question is what we are to learn from that. I think the news of this photograph is that Burma has been turned into an ugly, brutalized semblance of what it was. The totalitarian society is one in which everything is the same and yet brutally perverted, violated and then recomposed as if the same as before. The news goes further. This process of violent, destructive, brutalization is going on across the globe. Not everywhere, but in too many places. As with totalitarianism in the 20th century, it happens when modern technologies are placed in the service of a primitive will to power, and when the rest of the world stands by and watches or forgets.

And so there really is no news here after all. And that may have been Williams’ point.

The photograph is a video still taken by a reporter for Democratic Voice of Burma; the epigram is from Williams’ “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”

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In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a muckraking novel that alerted the American public to the horrors of the meatpacking industry of the time. Millions of workers and all American consumers have lived longer and better lives as a result. Conditions have improved drastically since then, but safety remains a continuing problem in industrialized meat processing. The slaughterhouse is still a dangerous place to work, and meat periodically becomes contaminated. The latest threat is from a toxic strain of e coli. This despite surprisingly clean plants, acid baths, steam vacuums, and sophisticated testing. Needless to say, when it comes to survival, the bacteria have the edge. To give you a view of the steps being taken, the Times published this photo:

It’s not often that photographs from the business page merit comment, much less awards. This one is typical. The focus is split between the objects in the foreground and the person in the background. Neither is the point of the picture, which is to show an industrial process. The diffusion is emotional as well. The photo communicates above all a sense of routine, ordinary, another-day-another-dollar activity; nothing to write a novel about. The conveyor belt moves things along, the worker directs a spray of water here or there, all against an unexceptionable background of white wall and grey pipes. You might be interested in how your meat is handled, but not to worry.

This ideological framing of viewer response is what is most typical about this business page photograph. What most interests me is the photograph’s distinctiveness, which is the brute presence of the carcasses. These amputated trunks are no longer animals, yet they are not yet slabs, much less cuts of meat. They are huge, visceral, bulging with muscle, bones, organs, everything that was alive but now is raw weight.

There is something scandalous about this image. One sees a packing plant and the anonymity of death; an industrial process, and the humiliation of being reduced completely to a condition of utility. Above all, there is again the massive reality of the carcasses. They are once living things now reduced to things, and yet they still resist somehow. Against the inevitable processing by both factory and camera, they remain massively, unintelligibly real. This is a scandal in the 21st century: against all attempts to transform everything into a virtual world of effortless consumption and digitized representation, some things refuse to surrender their reality.

Of course, those carcasses no longer exist, but the e coli do. The photograph of the carcasses can be a simple reminder that production is hidden during consumption; that is true of every form of production, including writing. Or it can be a scandal–literally, something that snares, in this case, that snares our attention. The hulking things in the photograph should snare our attention, they should offend the sensibility being constructed by the photograph, they should give offense to the idea that everything in our industrialized food production is doing fine as long as it is running smoothly.

Photograph by Kent Sievers/New York Times.

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