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Conference Paper Call: Visual and Textual Worlds of Children

Call for Papers

Home, School, Play, Work: The Visual and Textual Worlds of Children
October 31 and November 1, 2008
Worcester, Massachusetts

The Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) and the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC) at the American Antiquarian Society seek papers that explore the visual and textual worlds of children in America from 1700 to 1900. We welcome proposals that address the creation, circulation, and reception of print, manuscript, and other materials produced for, by, or about children.

Submissions may address any aspect of eighteenth and nineteenth-century textual, visual, or material culture that relate to the experience or representation of childhood. Suggested topics include popular prints for or of children, board and card games, children’s book illustration, visual aspects of children’s books and magazines, early photography and children, performing children (theater, dance, the circus), dolls and puppets, child workers in art and printing industries, images of children and race, representations of childhood sexuality, the architecture of childhood spaces (schoolrooms, nurseries), children’s clothing, children’s appropriation of commodities, children’s handiwork (samplers, dolls, toys), and theories of visuality or textuality and childhood.

Please send a one-page proposal for a 20-minute paper and a brief CV by January 10, 2008, to:

Georgia Barnhill, Director of CHAViC
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, Massachusetts 01609-1634
gbarnhill@mwa.org

About the Conference Committee

The conference committee is chaired by Patricia Crain, professor of English at New York University. Other members include Joshua Brown, executive director of the American Social History Project at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Martin Bruckner, professor of English, University of Delaware; Andrea Immel, curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University Library; Paula Petrik, professor of history and art history at George Mason University; Laura Wasowicz, curator of children’s literature at AAS; Caroline Sloat, AAS director of scholarly publications; and Georgia Barnhill, curator of graphic arts and director of CHAViC.

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The Daily Victory: Ordinary Life in Iraq

This photograph from a hospital in Iraq has all the elements of comedy except the laughter.

A man and a boy–probably father and son–are awaiting treatment following a suicide truck bomb attack. They are the lucky ones.

I’ve posted before on the normalization of war, and recently on the importance of seeing and valuing the little things in life to resist war’s empire. This photo is both engaging and troubling precisely because it rests on the cusp between those two attitudes. On the one hand, it is a hard news photograph that documents the arbitrary, unjust violence of war. On the other hand, it is a soft news photograph that draws on the techniques of Life Magazine human interest portraiture.

The hard news photo shows civilians drenched in their own blood, having to make do with improvised bandages while waiting for care in an overburdened and decaying hospital. The soft news photo shows two social types in all too typical poses: the boy in t-shirt and blue jeans peeking out from the mess he’s made, as if sitting in the principal’s office at school. The adult holding a compress to his aching head as he wearily, dutifully accepts yet another of the responsibilities of parenting. The one furtively studies the adults around him while wondering if he’s going to catch it. The other makes the call cementing his complicity in the mess, and, oy, what a headache.

If this were the only photograph of the civil war, there would be much to fault. Why make light of violence; aren’t we denying their suffering and our own culpability? Surely we could be shown more of the horror of war and the arrogance, viciousness, allegiances, and betrayals that are its cause. This photo is part of a very large archive, however, and so it has a different role to play.

I don’t want to come down decisively on one side or the other regarding the photo’s ambiguity. I do want to feature something else, something that may be the reason the photo is ambiguous and why that itself can be a resource for photojournalism and public understanding. I think the humor in the photo–the comedy without laughter–is a testament to the humanity and dignity of the ordinary Iraqi citizen. Look again at the jeans, t-shirt, slouching posture, and expression of the boy, and the man’s sweater, watch, cellphone, and richly complicated look of responsibility: these are the habits of people not yet remade by war. That a man carefully buttoned his cuffs and put a sweater on, perhaps because nagged to do so, is a commitment to normalcy. That he can make the call as if after a car accident, exasperated but relieved–and not terrorized–that is an achievement.

Once again, the war against war can be seen in the details, and photography has to risk banalty and sentimentality to tell that story. What remains is for the rest of us to see it for what it is, and not simply conclude that war is a part of life and really not so bad after all. To do that would be another betrayal.

Photograph by Emad Matti/Associated Press and the Washington Post.

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The Problem with Veterans Day

November 14, 2007
Hariman
visual memory
1 Comment

For many of us, Veterans Day has come and gone. That was, let’s see, Monday, right? Working parents knew if their kids were out of school, and others missed getting the mail, but whatever the inconvenience, the day was just that–a day. Even among those few who attended the commemoration ceremonies, the time spent there will have been brief. And so it is that a well-intentioned civic ritual perpetuates a lie. For those who grieve, there is no Veterans Day. To understand this painful truth, we need look no farther than this photograph:

The caption read, “Terry Giannoni (right) found names of friends of the wall of dead at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in Chicago on Sunday.” (The official day of commemoration was Sunday, November 11, with Monday the 12th becoming the federal holiday.) I’m not sure which is more revealing, the simple statement that he found “the names of friends” or the heavy sadness in his grim expression and hunched, protective posture. Those soldiers have been dead for over thirty years, and yet they are still remembered as friends. Their deaths still weigh down the heart. Those who once were laughter and good times and the simple pleasure of being together, have lingered long after as loss, regret, and who knows what other difficult emotions. And if friends still grieve, imagine how parents and lovers have suffered. War never lasts a day; it lasts forever.

The photograph is eloquent because of how it draws together simple things to reveal the truth of war’s continuing harmfulness. This is a local memorial with ordinary people–no national site, color guard, or officials–and so the emotional tone is honest and direct. Those feelings are the more deeply sensed for not being highly expressive, and that mute recognition is reflected in the simple decor and design of the memorial. The numbing isolation of grief is communicated by the distances between the two men in the picture and between Giannoni and the panel of names, while the black/white divide on the wall reminds us of the terrible finality of death.

There is one more thing: the way that time saturates the image. Giannoni’s grey/white hair and craggy features mark the years since the Vietnam War. The man in the left rear reinforces this passage: long hair now comes with a bald spot, and the blue jeans and jacket now are worn on a middle-aged body. On the panel behind them we can see two dates: 1969 and 1970. These were the first two years of the Nixon administration, the first two years of the “secret plan” to bring us “peace with honor,” a plan that brought an additional 20,000+ American deaths and somewhere around a million Vietnamese deaths to secure disengagement on terms very similar to those available in 1968. Time was not on anyone’s side in Vietnam. Since then, it has carried grief and anger relentlessly through the years.

Photograph by Chuck Berman/Chicago Tribune.

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Homeboy at the Hilton

November 13, 2007February 28, 2013
Hariman
visualizing war
3 Comments

This image is at once unusual and deeply familiar, no matter where you imagine it taking place.

The incongruity comes, of course, from seeing a dude in gangsta attire going down a buffet line within what looks like the perfect example of the Generic Hotel banquet room. More to the point, this guy is out of place, whether the place is Libya, where he actually was, or Atlanta or Chicago or any other city center.

For all that, the scene will be all too familiar to many viewers. This is the generic modernity inhabited by the middle class whether they are at work or at a wedding or some other weekend event. If you’ve seen one room like this, you’ve seen them all. And for all the effort that goes into pretending that today’s buffet is better than the rest, it rarely is. This one doesn’t even make the effort. The tackiness of the scene becomes obvious because of how he looks–that cheap jacket makes the aluminum warmers and stacked plates all the more obvious–while the long view exposing the table legs and chair backs makes all the decor seem all too typical.

And this is where things get interesting. The New York Times story captioned by the picture was titled “Rebel Unity is Scarce at the Darfur Talks in Libya.” It seems that the big fish boycotted the peace conference, leaving only small fry like our man at the buffet line. No one was interested in talking with the lesser lords of the desert, who were left to kill time in the hotel. In fact, the story reported that those present usually descended on the buffets together, but the photographer obviously wanted to show something other than eating.

So, what is being shown? It could be that small tribal leaders are out of place in modern diplomatic settings. Since he doesn’t really belong there–as you can see just by looking at him–then he ought to go back to the Darfur “street” from whence he came. In short, he shouldn’t have presumed to be there at all. (Never mind that he will have come at personal inconvenience, expense, and risk, and that he probably is able to wreak havoc somewhere if so inclined.)

That interpretation might do, but I think the photograph deconstructs on precisely that point. For one, he is behaving exactly as he should; from the measured manner in which he is holding the serving tongs, it looks as though he’s been through a buffet line many times. More important, the tackiness of the rest of the scene speaks volumes. The problem isn’t that he’s there, but that the room is otherwise empty (save for the single waiter at the end of the table). The room itself looks like a mere shell, an artificial trompe l’oeil of modern life superimposed on the backdrop of the desert, clan politics, and constant cycles of violence. Perhaps the conference would have worked had the room been full of all the leaders and their entourages, but this photograph hints otherwise.

Maybe the problem isn’t the homeboy but the hotel. More precisely, perhaps the problem is that peace is no more to be brokered in the neutral space of Generic Modernity than it could be found in the dangerous places of the Darfur borderlands. Nor are the scenes themselves the problem. The hotel, like the desert, brings with it a particular conception of politics, negotiation, and peace. Each activates different modes of organization, modes of speech, and images of the future. My guess is that if peace is to come to Darfur, and to many other places around the world, those involved will have to find another place to meet that is neither the war zone nor the modern hotel. That is, they will have to find another way to talk and think together that is neither entirely outside of modernity nor within its most typical structures and assumptions.

Photograph by Jihad Nga for the New York Times.

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Waiting for Liberal Democracy in Pakistan

You will have seen the recent photographs of Pakistani lawyers demonstrating in the streets of Islamabad and then being punched, kicked, clubbed, and hauled off to jail. You won’t see what will happen to them in the Pakistani prisons, but that surely will include more brutality and probably torture. And what is incredible is that the demonstrators will have known that when they went into the streets. Their heroism is a rare and beautiful thing that has not been captured fully by any photo that I’ve seen.

But they are more than heroes–they are lawyers who have been working for years on behalf of the rule of law and liberal-democratic constitutional government. And they are less than heroes–ordinary people struggling to achieve something action heroes never see: the normal life of a modern civil society. That’s why I like this photo:

The New York Times caption said, ” Lawyers meeting on Monday at the bar association offices in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.” This image captures both the pervasive weight of oppression and the incredible ordinariness of life as it is when people are allowed to live and work together without fear.

The steep odds and dark prospect before them are evident in the expression of the man in the foreground as that is reinforced by the serious faces all around the room. His expression shows that there are no good options, and that all that they have could be slipping away, and that he knows this. He has not caved, however: his forward posture, cocked head, and intense look suggest a man still capable of action, and the crowded presence of his colleagues all around the room is mute testimony to that resolve.

Heroism is seen in broad strokes, and what I love about this photograph are the many small details. The two thumbs touching in the right foreground, a practiced gesture of waiting. The sliver of leg showing between sock and pants cuff; the coffee cup and water glasses abandoned on the table; the dark furniture and wood paneling seen in almost every lawyer’s office in the world. The clothes and decor are nice–Pakistan does have a middle class—but they are above all conventional, the ordinary background of modernity.

What unites these opposing attitudes of normalcy and oppression is the fact that those in the room are waiting. Images, like texts but often even more so, are condensed interactions. If nothing else, they structure a relationship between the subject of the picture and the viewer; often they depict patterns of interaction that can resonate outside the frame. The people in this photograph are waiting, and that can evoke many contexts: they could be in a doctor’s waiting room or a funeral parlor or a green room or a bomb shelter. They could be waiting because someone is late or because someone is missing. They could be hoping that late results would reverse the tide of electoral defeat, or for the verdict in a court case, or for the results of an exam or an interview. They could be at a consulate anywhere in the world. If there were no exit, they could be in Hell.

Thus, the photograph is above all else an image of waiting, and with that it evokes both terror and a promise. The terror is that they are already doing what they will be doing in prison: waiting for something much worse to come. The promise is like that sliver of bare leg: the hope that some day, if others would join their fight for a liberal democratic society, they would be able to enjoy a world where one is secure enough to suffer only boredom and the occasional fashion mistake.

We need to continue to see the familiar images of street demonstrations, but we need photographs like this one of the silent spaces of political life. Then perhaps the professional class in this country can see themselves in the picture. Over here, lawyers know they are not “hired guns” or “ambulance chasers.” I hope they can look at this picture and understand that their colleagues in Islamabad are not “extremists and radicals.” They are heroes, but we should stand by them because they are ordinary people who should not have to be heroic.

Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images.

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Making Nice on a Day of Shame

Yesterday was a terrible day in the history of the United States. I am referring to the decision of the Senate Judiciary Committee to endorse the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey for attorney general despite his refusal to state that waterboarding was torture. We should not declare that this is a point of no return–quite the opposite is required–but there is no doubt that American government has been stained.Not that you would know it from this photograph of the two Democratic Senators who voted for the nomination.

The photograph was taken after the vote. I can’t stand it. Feinstein (on the left) and Schumer (on the right) are so into the political schmooze, so full of themselves–having a great time, really. They’re allies on this one, political friends in the full glow of their complicity. Eye to eye, hand to hand, each turned to the other, enjoying the pleasure of their company. But for the difference in gender, they are almost identically arrayed: hair swept back, dark suitcoat, red tie/blouse, lighter pearls/shirt collar. . . it goes even further: they have the same wrinkles and smile lines, the same smile. They are each perfectly at home in the same mask, the same role.

And that’s the hell of it. This is just another vote, another moment of political frisson among those at the top, another day in the life of the successful pol. They have no idea of what they have done. How could they? They have no shame.

I am not bemoaning a loss of innocence, for much more than that was destroyed yesterday. The question is not whether US personnel have used, condoned, or supported torture; they have. Nor is it a question of whether this has happened only in Iraq or in other conflicts; it has happened before. In every case, however, those awful, ugly acts were done as part of the savagery of combat or the vicious calculations of Cold War terrorism, and they were hidden from view.

The Bush administration has gone much further: They have done nothing less than try to make torture an explicitly condoned, legitimate state practice. They have done so through several means: by expanding the practice of torture, including extraordinary rendition and prison interrogations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay; by crafting the legal and administrative measures to institutionalize this immoral and dangerous extension of executive power; and by using their propaganda machine to make their practices appear to be the normal exercise of power during a time of peril.

And until yesterday, one could say that this was happening only because they controlled the White House and didn’t have to secure the approval of the Congress. But when two leading Democrats voted with all nine Republicans on the panel to approve the nomination, the devil’s bargain could no longer be disguised. The Republicans should not be excused for one instant, for their votes counted just as much and they could no more claim ignorance of what was on the line, but surely the blame has to placed above all on Senators Feinstein and Schumer.

They will have arguments justifying their decisions, of course. We will hear about the exceptional integrity of the nominee and the need to have a figure of accountability at the head of the Justice Department. That is nonsense. The confirmation hearing had already exposed Mukasey’s lack of integrity on the most important matter he would face as attorney general, and the institutional concern should not be the administration of a department already made useless. This is more than a matter on which reasonable people can disagree. No, the deeper problem is that the two Democratic Senators have endorsed the habits of public distortion that hide torture and in doing so destroy a society’s capacity for collective moral action. This is why the nominee’s evasions had to be stopped rather than condoned: they are as important to the practice of torture as the thugs recruited to inflict pain.

The committee vote is another demonstration of the effect torture has on a society. It destroys not only those being tortured but also those who do it, condone it, or otherwise allow it to continue. The loss is not of innocence, but rather of our capacity for moral life. Michael Mukasey represents not personal integrity but rather the habitual distortion of public speech–distortion that is essential for immoral government.

This is not the first time a society has begun to lose its fundamental sense of right and wrong, and more than that, its capacity to understand suffering and act on behalf of justice and compassion. The Biblical prophets saw the same thing, and they appealed to what sense of shame might yet remain among the leaders and the people. To see what they meant, you need look no farther than the figure between Feinstein and Schumer: Russell Feingold clearly knows better. He not only voted against the nomination, you can see that he is feeling the unseen darkness spreading around him.

Photograph by Doug Mills for the New York Times.

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The Corporate Come-On

Business is all about the bottom line, right? While the rest of us might drift along in a miasma of desire and fantasy, business executives are making their decisions on the basis of hard facts, cold calculations, and careful strategic assessments. After all, would you decide to invest millions of dollars on the basis of a whim in the heat of the moment? Well, you might, but surely they would know better.

The Federation of German Industry, in conjunction with the German government, is betting otherwise:

For the record, you are looking at fashion model and actress Claudia Schiffer wrapped in a dress–or towel–in the colors of the German flag. From the look of it, she can’t be wearing much else. I don’t know about you, but this is not the image that would have come to my mind if you had asked me to visualize “Germany–Land of Ideas.” It does, however, give new meaning to investing.

I doubt the ad actually will cause some CEO to hang around the stage door of the Federal Republic, but it does reveal a thing or two about the “serious relationship” between capital and the nation-state today. Germany is completely feminized, needing to attract a man to be economically viable over the long term. He might like what he sees, but he always can go elsewhere. She might not like waiting, but he will decide whether to put his money into her or some other woman–maybe that slut, Italy. The state is in the role of seducing capital–and not, for example, regulating it.

Of course, the guy who buys this is in for a surprise or two. The German labor force is not as uniformly Aryan as Claudia, and German labor laws might seem like a cold shower to the American CEO. The ad itself may be not so much contradictory as tongue-in-cheek clever. It’s a fantasy, but we know it’s fantasy and can chuckle along. Fair enough, but look at two more in the series, which make the erotic framing increasingly bizarre:

What started as a soft sell has become something between a gang bang and a challenge. Come on, boys, have you got what it takes? There’s still the irony–the second ad says that “roughly half of Europe’s nanotechnology companies are based in Germany”–but the text is going one way and the image another. One might debate whether Germany is the Land of Ideas, but the idea here comes from that great German advertising executive, Sigmund Freud: the German nation needs the phallus of capital, and the bigger the better.

I learned of these ads due to a fine presentation at my recent conference by Melissa Aronczyk, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Melissa’s research focuses on the phenomenon of nation branding and its implications for national identity, state policy and citizenship. She can be reached at melissa.aronczyk@nyu.edu.

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Conference Paper Call: New Media Worlds

Exploring New Media Worlds:

Changing Technologies, Industries, Cultures, and Audiences in Global and Historical Context

An international conference hosted by Texas A&M University, February 29 to March 2, 2008

Integrating fields of study in a time of change; setting a new agenda for media studies.

Papers and proposals are invited on any aspect of the conference themes, offering reports of new research, position-taking conceptual essays, discussions of media and telecommunication policy, and both international and historical comparisons on changing technologies, industries, cultures, and audiences.

The program will include keynote speakers, roundtable discussions, thematic panels, prominent scholars as respondents, and time for interaction. A wide selection of papers from the conference will be published. Travel grants are available for student members of the National Communication Association (see our webpage for more information).

Send papers or proposals (abstracts or annotated outlines) with a 50 word professional biography by email attachment to mediaworlds@tamu.edu. Panel proposals are also acceptable. Deadline: November 20, 2007.

For more information see http://comm.tamu.edu/mediaworlds; email mediaworlds@libarts.tamu.edu or Rothenbuhler@tamu.edu.

Keynote speakers: Larry Grossberg; Steve Jones; Vinny Mosco; and Ellen Seiter.

Confirmed participants: Carole Blair, Sandra Braman, Celeste Condit, Bruce Gronbeck, Andrea Press, Ronald Rice, Paddy Scannell, Joseph Turow, Angharad Valdivia.

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Fashion Zombies and Social Energy

November 1, 2007December 3, 2013
Hariman
fashion/fiction
1 Comment

It’s been Fashion Week in the papers more than once this fall. Milan, Paris, London, New York, and even Chicago had shows providing a ready supply of exotic creations, otherworldly spectacles, and wretched excess. And then there were the clothes.

You don’t have to look too long to see that most of the images fall into a very few genres, and that photojournalism is providing free publicity for the industry. For example, Elle on line features Runway, Detail, and Backstage photos–all equally posed–and news coverage often will give you one or more of each.

That doesn’t mean that the photojournalists don’t inflect what they see. It isn’t hard to do, but they nonetheless should be given some credit for emphasizing the incredible lifelessness of the models. This is done in several ways, including showing a line of models that look like clones, and showing backstage shots suggesting that the completely passivity and vacuousness seen on the runway is not a pose. I’m sorry that I’ve misplaced some of the better images to make the point, but look at this triptych from the New York Times:

The two outer panels show us the clones. Despite different hair color and dresses, the two models have equally blank expressions and nearly identical bodies and walks. One can look very closely and identify many small differences, of course, but the effect of the pairing is to push the viewer in the opposite direction: they could just as well be the same model. That, of course, is the point of the exhibition, which is to feature the dress and not the person inside.

The middle panel provides the backstage shot. It could be used for a party quiz: is the women in the foreground alive or a mannequin, or perhaps one of the next generation of Stepford Wives? Again, you might be able to peer into her face and see great depth; readers of Russian literature are welcome to the challenge. It is more likely that the image, like those on either side of it, suggests that the vacuum-like isolation surrounding each model is matched by a vast interior silence.

I think these portraits of the models may be a gender-comprehensive protective mechanism: Just as most of us aren’t going to wear high-fashion apparel most of the time, if at all, we really wouldn’t want to be one of those anorexic dopeheads, or marry one. That fantasy comes at a cost, however, for it carries with it the idea that fashion is but the inert material that we use to drape our bodies and decorate an impersonal world. That’s true enough some of the time–and a good thing, too–but it can lead to highly misleading conclusions about what it means to be normal, reasonable, or human.

To get a sense of what is missing, look at this image:

Taken by Patrick Andrade, it’s only caption is “Fashion Week.” Another backstage shot, this one is anything but posed. The image is pulsating with social energy. Those in the picture are crowded together yet gesticulating and talking avidly. The brunette on the left seems to be exclaiming about someone off camera while the guy with his hands on her shoulders seems to be trying, not very well, to calm her down. The blond on the right talks not only to those around her but into her miked headset. This scene features the handlers who are frenetically managing the show and perhaps for that more like you and me. But it’s really not about this or that occupational role. Those in the scene crowd up against the viewer as if we were at a party. The background could be any office or apartment, and the off-kilter angle and lurid lighting reminds me of more than one great night out.

What makes the image even richer is that it still includes the conventional model, in this case the brunette with the bone structure, exotic hair, and glazed look in the background. Again, she could be what you’d expect at good party: is that a wig? Is she a he in drag? What’s he on? She does seem to be pretty stoned, and the gesture of her hand looks more like the involuntary tic of serious coke habit. We still get to dish on the models, but now they’re just one part of the social scene and well in the background.

The point is not who gets the fashion world right. This photo has captured something much deeper: how fashion is one expression of the ferocious energies unleashed by our being social animals.

Photographs by Hiroko Masuike, Erin Balano, Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times; Patrick Andrade, http://www.patrickandrade.com/

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The Post-Human Peasant

The following two images each merit their own post, but I also want to point out how they suggest a larger pattern. First, there is this shot from a morgue in Pakistan following the attack on Benazir Bhutto’s arrival in Karachi.

I noticed the photograph because it was another instance of photographing only feet rather than the upper body or entire body. Readers of this blog may have noticed that “boots and hands” is one of our archival categories, as John and I are interested in why these truncated images appear frequently in mainstream photojournalism.

The feet featured here are bare, brown, worn (look at the back of the heel), and charred. They may have belonged to a middle class accountant, but it is difficult not to see them as peasant feet. The burns look like dirt, and feet have symbolized peasantry in the discourse of the body politic from antiquity to today.

Above all, these feet are dead. The awkward angle suggests a broken body, and the caption cues us to see the stiffness of rigor mortis. Most important, life itself seems to have been thrown away as the blood spilled on the floor forms a hopelessly large, ugly stain on the tile floor. It is as if the body had been drained prior to being preserved, and the feet do look like a specimen. More to the point, the photograph makes this stiff, dismembered, emptied, anonymous body into a specimen, as if it were something awaiting taxonomic classification before being filed away in a natural history museum.

It is easy to claim that the photographic gaze objectifies human being, and I usually avoid that critique. Surely it is not the camera but rather a bomb that turned this living person into a thing. Indeed, perhaps the photograph is doing something else: not objectifying but creating a visual allusion to the Holocaust, that is, to the images taken there of bodies stacked like cordwood. If so, that again points to those using weapons, not journalists using cameras.

Fair enough, but let’s look at the second photograph.

This is a beautiful image. Edward Weston once remarked that color photography should be taken seriously when the photographer could see “colour as form” rather than a decorative addition to the black and white image. (There’s more to color than that, of course.) The artistic intensity of this image comes directly from the formal power of its dense richness and subtle variations of brown and bronze, all captured through the silver light that seems to have been painted by a Renaissance master. Likewise, the circle of the bowl is repeated in miniature by the circles in the solution and the half-circle in the lower right of the frame, and so the formal completeness of the circle is fused by color and light with the brachiated pattern of the arms and hands, which converge and then branch out again.

And yet, something is missing. The body, for example. Once again, we have a dismembered, anonymous peasant, in this case a man painting “earthen lamps at his workshop for the Hindu festival of Diwali.” The “painting” is crude, simply immersing objects in the paint, and the lamps are “earthen,” the sort of thing that comes from a workshop rather than a factory. Even that humanizes, however, for the image itself gives us something beautiful but also alien, almost arachnidal as those hands spider across the surface, breathing paint and light.

What is most interesting to me is how, again, life is being separated from the body. In this case, the inanimate nature of bowl and paint seem to have already recast his hands and are moving up his arms. It’s as if his primitive workshop is the early form of some later fusion of human and nonhuman processes in a Blade Runner shanty town. The lamps are being changed by his labor, but he is being changed by the metallic solution coating his hands. As it is, the paint may kill him, but the image suggests a post-human worker who won’t have that problem, as life already will have been altered to become part of a process of production.

Each photograph is a distinctive portrait of a specific event, yet together they suggest a third thing: the idea that the peasant is disposable because not really alive. After all, there aren’t supposed to be peasants in a modern world. The good news is that other, more Romantic concerns are well off the table: You see no noble savage here. But you also see common people as either specimens of natural history, or as artistic premonitions of the post-human. In neither case are they alive—in history, in the present, or in the political imagination.

Photographs by Paule Bronstein/Getty Images and Parth Senya/Reuters. Weston’s remark is cited in Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment, pp. 190-191.

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