Discussion of a recent post raised an important question about visual thinking. In commenting on a murder suspect’s strategic manipulation of press coverage, I concluded that he still looked guilty.

Of course, I wouldn’t convict on that, and an astute reader noted that “the appearance of ‘innocence’ can only be another act,” and so it seems that there is no point whatsoever to looking for either guilt or innocence in how a person appears in public. And that’s before considering the role of racial, ethnic, and other forms of social bias in perception.

The focus of the earlier post was on the use of appearances rather than their accuracy. But what about their accuracy? I think most people would agree that you shouldn’t judge guilt or innocence on the basis of how a person looks. When that happens–and it does happen–the results include both false convictions and a free pass for con artists. But if that is true, why do we think we can see character?

And we do think we can see character. Scientists report that infants already are paying close attention to facial cues. People are constantly and often accurately discerning that others are in this or that mood. As we get to know people, we sometimes can read much deeper elements of personality on the basis of a glance. Photographs are used the same way, not least to communicate emotions. John and I have been reading social experience, attitudes, and ideas off of photographs for five months now and we rarely are called on this point. As long as the photographs are dealing with known individuals such as Bush, representative figures such as the latest casualty in Iraq, stock social types such as students, or common experiences such as shopping, there is little to be worried about. Whether right or wrong about the individual in the frame, the image provides a basis for conversation about those things that define collective life. And the court of public opinion is not a court of law.

All of this is a long introduction to another photograph:

You are looking at Pakistan’s President General Pervez Musharraf reviewing an honor guard with his hand-picked successor, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani. There was this little problem of being a “President General”; fortunately, that term still embarrasses Musharraf’s patron, the US. So Musharraf has turned over direct control of the military, the better to maintain US support for his dictatorship. The transition involved a series of rituals, including a tearful speech. The tears may have been heartfelt; again, that is not the important question.

I’ll cut to the chase: I think we can see character here, and these guys are thugs. If that is too harsh, how about “hardened autocrats.” Of course, they will look otherwise in family photos, just as they will have behaved otherwise when playing with their kids. They may not be thugs all the time: just when in power or maneuvering to stay in power. So what? Any dictator can have a good side. The question is what side will be in charge when power is at stake. I think we can see the answer in this photograph. Musharraf may be a dedicated warrior against Islamic fanaticism, but he is no more a democrat than is Gen. Kayani.

And now for the quiz. What do you see in this photo: the appearance of innocence, or the character of an autocrat?

Perhaps the question should be, if we can see character, why can’t we see guilt? One answer is that guilt is an assessment of past conduct involving a violation of a law, and these things are not to be seen in the present. There also is the complication of distinguishing between legal and psychological guilt, not least because some people need not hide guilt because they don’t feel it, while others can feel guilty for crimes they never committed. But perhaps there is another answer: the guilt is there to be seen, were we but able to see it. I would never convict on such evidence, but I can’t help but think that there is more to be seen than we realize, and that seeing it might get us closer to justice.

Photographs by Anjum Naveed/Associated Press; Digg screen grab of the You Tube video of Musharaff’s interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

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You might as well know that recently it’s been getting harder by the day to post at this blog. As far as I can tell, the press is rolling over to accommodate the neocon line that the surge has worked. According to that argument, any bad news now demonstrates that the liberal media refuse to change their script. Since violence is down, there must be a turn for the better, and so the president was right, and the press had better put up or shut up. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but now we are getting little beyond but photo-op images of officials at press conferences, leaders walking together, soccer games in Iraq, and the like. And this is before we get to the soft news fare for the holidays. . . .That’s why it is heartening to see this image from the Art & Design section:

This is one of a series of prints by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese entitled “Line Up.” Each diptych presents a Bush administration official as if being booked for lying about Iraq; you can hear the vocal recording of the lie while you look at the print. They are on display as part of an exhibition of contemporary prints at the New York Public Library. According the the New York Times, “Line Up” has “prompted protests from some library patrons, attracted coverage by The Daily News, Fox News and USA Today, and has stirred the blogosphere.” It’s not often and probably a bad sign that the action is on the third floor of a library, but I’ll take it.

Of course, the Times doesn’t say that Bush administration lied, only that one can hear each “statement of questionable veracity.” And maybe it really doesn’t matter: the disaster is so comprehensive, the carnage so devastating, the loss of American lives and wealth ($3.5 trillion, according to the latest estimate) so permanent, it’s not worth arguing over this or that fragment of administrative speech. Better perhaps to look at the artwork and see what it has to tell us.

The joke comes from putting a high official in a mug shot. The humor actually runs rather deep: it can suggest that the offense could go beyond false statements; or that these officials are no better the the leader they deposed, Saddam Hussein, who also suffered the indignity of a mug shot; or that in a better world the Arlington police would arrest war criminals the same way they arrest common criminals.

But I think the joke is only the vehicle for a more interesting point, which is made by the fact that the photographs are of portrait quality. Sans the ID sign, the work could double as a heavily framed painting to be hung on the walls of the halls of power. When framed that way it becomes a character study. Forget the lie, but look at the habitual squint of a calculating man, and the assertive posture of a verbal warrior. The man on the left readily adopts a defensive position as he assesses, tests, counters, and feints while planning his rhetorical offensive. The man on the right is on the assault, a model of both composure and intensity as he rains words down relentlessly on those before him. Think of how easily these same portraits–these same characteristics–could be celebrated had the disaster been anything less than one of historical proportions.

Just as the neocon pundits are cowing the press, they will try to do the same with the history of the war. Willful blindness will become decisiveness, rigidity will be the courage of one’s convictions, immorality will be accepting the burden of leadership. (To understand the cause and consequences of this attitude, see Thucydides’ History 3.82-84.) They will spin the pictures the same way they spin the words. But thanks to two printmakers and the New York Public Library, it now will be a bit easier to see what was wrong.

Photograph by Jim Kempner/Fine Art.

Update: Michael Shaw of BAGnewsNotes posted today on another work from the “Line Up” series, one featuring a somewhat clownish Cheney. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was odd about that piece, but Michael nails it.

To buy postcards of some of the images, go here. From the ad at Pure Products USA, it seems evident that Michael and I each saw one of the two faces of the exhibit. It involves parodic portraiture, and some images (e.g., of Cheney) emphasize the parody and others (e.g., Rumsfeld) the portrait. You can see the very powerful video installation here. A t-shirt is available here.

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She doesn’t really have cancer. Nor does she die. The emphysema patient in this photograph is now walking without oxygen, enjoying her renewed appetite, and “‘very, very happy.” Thus, the title of this post, like the photograph itself, tells a lie.

Or does it? Let’s first identify what’s misleading about the photograph. We see an OR/intensive care patient looking as if she has been left to die. Head and hand reveal her pale skin that is otherwise shrouded in layers of white, as if already prepared for burial or fading into some gauzy realm of the spirit. The turn of the head and lifeless droop of the hand suggest that she has no energy left. All but one of the staff in the room has turned their backs to her, and he is intently focused on something else. It’s as if she isn’t there or is already inanimate. Hooked to machines at each end of her body, their currents seem to flow through her uninterrupted on to the monitor hanging overhead that shows only a test pattern. The metal table could be used in a morgue. She is placed in the vanishing point of the picture.

Louis P. Masur deftly summarized a standard criticism of photography in a recent review: “‘The devious lie of a snapshot’ is a marvelous phrase. It is not the photographer who is devious, but the snapshot itself, which isolates and freezes action, disconnecting it from context and sequence.” (Masur is quoting photographer Thomas Hoepker.) This cautionary note would seem to apply directly to the photograph above: what looks like a death scene is in fact a woman beginning her recovery from disease to life.

I think there is more to be said, however. The image accompanies two stories, one about an operation used to treat emphysema sufferers by removing sections of their damaged lungs, and another, much longer front page story about how a past smoking boom among woman is now a major killer. As deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are rising like smoke in an updraft, and medical costs scaling upward along with them, considerable attention is being focused on the various techniques being mobilized to manage the disease. One strong theme of the story is that we must avoid blaming the victims. OK, but why was nothing said about blaming the tobacco companies, who are not mentioned in the article? We are to not blame individual patients, but we also are supposed to focus entirely on individuals. The disease is an “epidemic” but apparently not a public health problem having a common cause.

So there is something right about the photograph, in that it reproduces the newspaper’s framework for the story, which in turn is not merely a compositional strategy but one that reflects key features of how American health care is organized. When disease appears, the medical patient is the center of our attention, and she will live or die according to how well the society mobilizes high-tech, capital-intensive medical treatments for each individual.

The photograph can lie, but it also reveals.  This photo depicts three forms of inattention built in to our health care system: First, the photo depicts how medical staffers in the room are completely indifferent to her because she already has received their expert care; they know that there is little to worry about as they debrief, clean up, and make the transition to the next case. Second, because they are on the job, we don’t have to pay attention unless we’re likely to end up on the OR table. Epidemic? Not to worry. Third, by focusing on the effects and not the causes of the epidemic, the image models an artificial blindness regarding the causes of a serious public health problem: we are to not see the tobacco companies that work relentlessly to addict people to their carcinogenic drug.

I think the truth of the photo goes beyond its inadvertent performance of a form of blindness. Some of the bad news is seeping out of the frame. Look again at the scene, particularly at the swirl of wires and the rat’s nest of electronic gear. We are looking at a real place of work, but also a society that is held together by a snarl of gerry-rigged connections always on the verge of being jostled, bumped, or broken. It works because there is a lot of expensive equipment combined with serious, no-frills professionalism, but it also is a messy assemblage without any means for doing anything other than responding to disasters seemly not of its own making.

The room is functional but closed off from thinking about public health. The work done there is miraculous but very costly. The operations interrupt suffering but do nothing to prevent it. When her care is structured by the American health care system, the patient is in good hands, but she may be in a cancer ward after all. The question is not whether there is hope for her, but whether there is hope that the system can be changed. In the photograph, the patient is completely without the ability to do anything, and so is the public audience. She will live, but we may be dying.

Photograph by Damon Winter/New York Times. Masur’s review: “How the Truth Gets Framed by the Camera,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2007, B6-B8. (Full disclosure: No Caption Needed is discussed elsewhere in the review.)

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Recently the Chicago Tribune ran a special report on one of the lesser known consequences of war: an increase in mental illness among civilians. The story is set in Somalia and includes a slide show of scenes from the only mental health clinic in Mogadishu. Some of the patients will be dangerous to themselves or others, and so the problem arises of how to restrain them. In the West, this is done with drugs, locked wards, and other disciplinary technologies. In Somalia, the means are simple, though effective:

This young man is chained to a tree. Viewers in the US shouldn’t get too judgmental, as here he could be “free” but homeless, sleeping in the ground, and less likely to be fed regularly. Better resources are needed in Somalia and in the US. My question is, what can photojournalists do to motivate public action on behalf of the mentally ill wherever they are? The press can be damned either way: one always will be faulted if not documenting a social problem, while visual documentation is subject to charges of creating an atrocity aesthetic and compassion fatigue. How, then, should we assess this image?

We can begin by asking how it seems unique, and then how it might nonetheless iterate prior images and assumptions. The photograph is distinctive because of how it places the young man prostrate, legs splayed and body core exposed, and because the girl huddled behind him suggests an unending series of damaged souls, and because the viewer towers above the scene. Indeed, the angle joins the viewer with the trunk of the tree: strong but immobile, anchoring a system of benign restraint but not responsible for the fetters. This is not a position of action.

One reason the photo above caught my eye is that I’d seen it before.

This is the signature shot from the March 19, 2007 edition of Newsweek. (The image was brought to my attention last spring by Beth Iams, who wrote a fine paper on the magazine’s photo essay for my graduate seminar on visual rhetoric.) The story, “Star Power,” chronicled Angelina Jolie’s attempt to focus attention on the suffering in Darfur. Jolie states that “‘If I can draw you in because I am familiar, that’s great because I know that at the end you’re not looking at me, you’re looking at them.'”

Of course, the image is all about Angelina, and there are very few correspondences with the first photograph. I think the few that are there are important, however. The boy is restrained for the same reason in each, and perhaps the tether is becoming a visual convention. (There are other examples of this tether and other forms of shackling by the two photographers.) If so, we might consider how it not only depicts limited means but also implies more fundamental deficiencies. As long as the tether remains identified exclusively with mental illness, poverty, and Africa, it ties understanding to a host of assumptions about premodern medicine and social organization. Never mind that the restraints shown above are age-appropriate and keep the patient within the daily round of community life. Such considerations fall outside the modern disciplinary matrix.

Thee might be a second set of implications. We see not only restraint but also a black body, male, barelegged, tethered to a pole. I can’t help but wonder whether these images allude to lynching photos: whether hanging barelegged from a tree, as in the famous photograph from Marion, Indiana, or chained to one in order to be blow-torched, as in Without Sanctuary. Whatever the source, the association is horrific, and completely mistaken. It could be there, however, in the hope that the public would be motivated to act if they intuitively sensed that they were witnessing a similar descent into brutality.

If there is a chain of visual allusions binding African victims of war to American victims of terror, it surely is unconscious. One should ask whether it might also be influential, and to what end. Are the photos merely imitative of those before them, or are they artistic attempts to mark yet another breakdown in humane social order? Are we becoming complicit in normalizing violence, or is some potential for public action being suggested? Are they hypocritical reconstructions of a tragedy on familiar terms, which certainly is part of the Angelina Jolie story, or do they reflect some peculiar progress regarding public understanding of the suffering of others?

You tell me.

Photographs by Kuni Takahashi/Chicago Tribune and Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images. Newsweek gave a documentary tone to the second image by reproducing it in black and white; you can see it in color here. Note also the recently published Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain. Thanks again to Beth Iams, who can be contacted at elizabethiams@yahoo.com.

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On an admittedly slow news weekend, there was something about this photograph that tugged at me.

The picture was front page above fold for a story entitled “An Icy Rescue As Seas Claim A Cruise Ship.” An iceberg punched a hole below the waterline, those aboard spent a few hours in lifeboats before being rescued, and the ship eventually went to the bottom of the Antarctic Ocean.

The story is sappy from start to finish. The Explorer was “fondly known in the maritime world as ‘the little red ship,'” as in The Little Engine that Could, perhaps. It closes with a staffer playing the role of the Old Salt who says, “‘She doesn’t want to give up, I can tell you. I still believe that perhaps it is not the last time that we see her.'” Well, maybe someone will try to salvage a 40-year-old single-hulled craft at the bottom of the world, but don’t bet on it.

If you don’t like the yarn, you won’t like the facts. Although named Explorer, the ship is a cruise ship, carrying “modern adventure travelers” for $7,000-$16,000 a pop. To put it bluntly, those on the ship don’t explore anything. Instead, they go on a set route to have preprogrammed experiences. No wonder they were in such “good spirits”after the rescue: the disaster was a genuine novelty, and one that proved to be just as safe as the trip to Shackleton’s grave. I have no doubt that the episode will be good for business.

Given the reasons to be cynical about this soft news story, why does the image take me down a different path? Perhaps because it looks like one of the toy boats powered by baking soda that I played with in the tub long ago. Or it could be the color: lying on its side on the cold ice flow, it resembles an animal bleeding to death in some lonely winter field. Or the name might matter after all: not just this explorer, but exploration is over, and the challenge now is not discovering some new region but rather living amidst natural scarcity. The ship is disappearing, and so are the ice flows around it. Although they are far more important, no one in the story romanticizes their loss.

Let me add something more to the allegory. Roland Barthes once remarked somewhere that the attraction of a cruise ship, which everyone knows is an antique technology, was that it created the sense of living in an autarky, that is, a self-contained, self-sufficient place. That sense of being a world onto itself is an illusion, of course, one similar to the notion that “modern adventure travelers” are exploring the unknown.

Both myths die hard. If the photo is poignant, it may be because we can imagine not just a ship but a civilization going under. That is, if modern civilization is to avoid disaster, it needs more than a double hull or other technological backups. Instead, we have to give up the idea that we are a law onto ourselves, that we can provide adequately and sustain indefinitely without regard to the natural limits and complex dynamics of the rest of the planet.

Photograph from Fuerza Aerea de Chile [Chilean Air Force] via European Presssphoto Agency.

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