Hariman – Page 74 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Kids "R" Props

A recent New York Times report on the Korean summit meeting was captioned with this photograph:

We are seeing the South Korean president returning home. For a moment, I thought it was taken in North Korea, where the Glorious Leader is regularly surrounded by the conventions of visual propaganda that you see above. Then again, it also could have been taken in the US:

As Michael Shaw pointed out at BagnewsNotes, these carefully posed images become even more incredible now that Bush has vetoed legislation to extend health insurance for children. Unfortunately, we know all too well that this president knows no shame. It might also be interesting to note how his use of kids as props puts him in interesting company. Guys like this, for example:

For all I know, Lenin may have done more for school children than Bush ever will, although that’s not saying much. It is clear that they both had the time to pose with kids for propaganda photos that were used to cover draconian policies. (This one is from a magazine accompanying the occupation of Latvia.) What remains to be shown, however, is where the template probably comes from, which is this iconic tableau:

The image of Jesus with the children refers to a story told in Mathew, Mark, and Luke (Mat. 19:14, Mark 10:14, Luke 18:16). When his disciples had stopped those who were trying to bring children forward for a blessing, Jesus rebuked his self-appointed campaign managers. The scene has been reproduced in various images countless times in many art forms, high and low. It will have been put to many uses, including church propaganda and social hegemony. (For the record, Jesus will not have been blond.)

There is much that could be said about the relationship between the religious icon and secular image-management. Let me just note two things: First, there is no indication in the story that Jesus posed with the children. As Mathew tells it, “he laid his hands on the children, and went his way.” Second, the point of the story is not that Jesus liked kids or that they liked him. No, the story is about gatekeeping. To say that “the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these” meant that no one was barred from that Kingdom because they lacked status or power. In welcoming the children–and rebuking those who would keep the weak, dependent, or socially inferior out of sight–Jesus was upending the hierarchies that structured that society. That idea has been forgotten when kids can become props for sham displays of compassion by cynical rulers.

Photographs: pool photo; Charles Dharapak/Associated Press; back cover of ”Darba sieviete” magazine, # 1, 1940. Stained Glass window from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Church. My reading of the Biblical text is indebted to Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity. The quoted text is from the New English Bible.

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Sputnik: The 50-Year-Old Dream

Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite:

The launch is still seen as the official beginning of the Space Age. Doesn’t that term sound quaint today? “Grandpa, what was the Space Age?” Even so, the anniversary is an occasion for news stories, commemorative events, a documentary film, special (promotional) reports, retail products, and surely a joke or two.

NASA’s home page features presentations on the “50th anniversary of the space age” and on the history of NASA. Perhaps I’m over-reading, but I can’t help but think that the agency is a bit ambivalent about the occasion. Why, when it is their moment of origin? Because they have invested so heavily in “manned” space travel, rather than in the much less dangerous and much more cost effective “unmanned” technologies. Now that the space race is over and the shuttle program has become something like a children’s museum in the sky, that investment seems increasingly mistaken. Even the myth itself is shopworn: space is not the “final frontier,” astronauts are not explorers, science and technology are transforming life on earth rather than transporting it into space.

Dreams die hard, however, and I don’t like to be a cynic. So it is that this photograph caught my eye a few days ago:

You are watching spectators looking up at the launch of the Dawn spacecraft, which is beginning an eight-year trip to the asteroid Vesta. There are no teachers on board.

This strikes me as a poignant photograph. It is an image shaped by alignments and contrasts. The craft named Dawn launches at dawn, nature and culture perfectly aligned to carry us forward into a bright future. As it escapes “the surly bonds of earth,” the contrail becomes ever more bright and pure–and distant. As the trajectory bisects the pictorial space on the diagonal, it likewise seems to ride the edge between sunlight energy and the cold blackness of outer space. As the craft arcs cleanly outward, it seems to leave cares, fears, conflicts, all forms of gravity behind.

And we are left behind. That, too, is represented in the picture. Against the bright escape of the machine, a group of human beings look up in awe. They are silhouetted, cast in darkness, as if made of the dark earth. We don’t see individuals but rather something like a group of hunter-gatherers, or perhaps Druids or some religious cult. We are reminded that they are moderns from the cameras being lifted up as if an offering. We see not a premodern cult but rather a camera culture hoping to snare an image. And that image is itself such a tenuous connection to the craft soaring out of sight. One machine surges away into a place we will never go, while a smaller machine only serves to accentuate how we far removed we remain from one kind of heaven.

The rocket launch begins in a darkened swirl of exhaust and soars to light. Those who have come to marvel at the technocratic sublime are left with little patches of light. Data flows back to NASA, and this is real science, also thoroughly human and likely to advance knowledge that can benefit life on earth. We don’t need to be on Vesta, and the machine will do the job. But it can do nothing to stop the yearning, while the camera can remind us that even as we dream of escape, we do so while living as human beings have always lived–sharing a common fate, bound to gravity and darkness, yet capable of joining together in a common life. All are bound by the same limits, members of the same tribe.

I like the photograph for another reason as well, one that comes from comparing it to the file photo of Sputnik. In that image, we see only the machine, its metallic surface enhanced further by sharp black and white contrasts. It is a machine for a hard environment of energy and void, where neither death nor life have any meaning, only thrust, structure, data. The satellite looks self-sufficient, the epitome of modern design that in turn represents a technocratic future. Perhaps the commitment to lifting up astronauts was, in that context, a kind of humanism. If so, that moment also has passed. Now we stand as if in the second photograph. Our machines go not in advance of us, but in place of us, whether into space or into the ocean and the bloodstream. But they go for us, not as an end in themselves. After all, we are back in the picture.

Sputnik photograph from a NASA commemorative photo gallery; launch photograph by John Raoux/ Associated Press.

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Shared Suffering in Iraq and America

In November, 2000, President Clinton traveled to Hanoi and stated in a speech there that “This shared suffering has given our countries a relationship unlike any other.” The statement need not be literally true to be an achievement. To the extent that it became true that day, it was something that reflected not only the war but also the healing and growing together that had ensued in the followed decades. Let us hope that some day the same can be said for the US and Iraq. It surely would take time, but the reason for doing so is already all evident in photojournalism’s coverage of this war.

Two examples brought this thought to mind. One was the post at BAGnewsNotes yesterday about a new book by photographer Andrew Lichtenstein entitled Never Coming Home. Lichtenstein chronicles eight of the funerals occurring across America for those killed in the war. You can see some of these heartrending images in a photo essay at Alternet. One of a father collapsing in grief on someone’s shoulder is undoubtedly a portrait of suffering:

And for every loved one lost here, there are many more destroyed over there. This image from yesterday’s New York Times is one example of how grief knows no boundaries:

The caption of this page 10 story says that “An Iraqi woman wept next to her husband’s body yesterday in Baquba. Violent civilian deaths in Iraq declined last month.” That mixed message is typical of Times coverage of late (some would say, all the time). We can be certain, however, that the statistical decline means little to this woman. What remains to be seen is whether we can make an emotional connection across the barriers of war, geography, and culture.

Unfortunately, while the visual image may be the best means to establish empathy on the scale required, the archive presents its own obstacles to emotional understanding. While the photographs of American grief are now available in an elegiac photo essay and a beautiful book, those of Iraqi parents are not getting quite the same packaging. This photo appeared as a black and white image in the print edition, and then as a thumbnail image online. I was grateful that it was there, but the thumbnail sizing seems almost obscene, as if a deliberate strategy to minimize the depth of her loss. And while the American dead are respectfully interred in closed caskets, her husband’s body is laid out as if on a slab at the city morgue or as a cadaver suitable for an anatomy class. And instead of seeing the father’s face contorted in grief, hers is obscured by a handkerchief. Instead of seeing an individual, we see an anonymous figure draped in the burqa that signals, to the Western gaze, the less than full personhood of those confined within traditional cultures. The only means of communication are her hands. A message may be there, but we see only the gesture of loss, experienced by a social type, the Iraqi woman. That is a long way from sharing suffering.

And yet she does touch me. There is so little left in that room, and the light coming in like a breeze flowing through the window hints at a transfiguration, as if his spirit has already ascended. That may be, but she stands there like a pillar of grief. If only she had a shoulder to cry on. One of ours, perhaps.

Photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein; Ali Mohammed/European Pressphoto Agency.

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The Photographic Oracle

The September 23rd Sunday Times Magazine (London) contained a story on this year’s winners of the International Photography Awards. I have to say that I found the collection very strange because so many of the images seemed soooo dated: two head shots of auteurs, two female nudes, a posed scene of the bourgeois family cracking apart in an elegant restaurant. Where have the judges been for the past fifty years? As I flipped through the pages, I was reminded yet again of why fine art photography is such a small thing among the fine arts, and why photography’s artistic vitality usually is found not there but in photojournalism. That was the set-up for this image:

Ok, now we are in the 21st century. Again, I see a possible future world of post-human species where androids dream of electric sheep. By contrast, the Magazine’s caption tries to pull it back into a familiar humanism: “Bagg’s 2006 self-portrait features shiny lips and ‘plumes of red smoke.'” Not to worry: this is an individual person engaged in an act of self-expression, and the only manipulations are a bit of lip gloss and some red dye no. 5.

I don’t think so. This is the image of a facial mask, a mouth, a species, a thing from another order of being, an oracle. What they call smoke may be some post-industrial fluid, blood, breath, bio-informatic desire, or visual speech carrying the one true Word of a new revelation.

What is most revealing, however, is that this is not something from a vat in the 22nd century. This is one part of human nature, now. It may be how we would look to anyone, artist or victim or alien or machine, who saw us as we are and not as we think we are. We might wonder what they would say.

Photograph by Farren Bagg.

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Death Camp: The Second Time as Irony

I have been troubled by this photograph since it appeared recently:

The photograph was taken December 20, 2006, during the final stages of a training march in southern Israel. It was circulated the week of September 17, 2007 to accompany stories about a commission report recommending that Israel’s military should allow women into front-line combat positions, including special forces.

This topic is a minefield, and I doubt I can say anything without offending some readers. The question of policy activates commitments to gender equality and the defense of Israel, as well as criticism of Israel’s security strategy and of militarism more generally. Equally important, each of these issues carries arguments about who has more or less authority to speak at all on the matter.

I have typically progressive positions on these issues, but I doubt that alone explains why I was stopped short by the photograph. I don’t just see the image alone, but two others that lie beneath it like a palimpsest. It draws its rhetorical power from one of these images, while the other raises a horrific specter that should be stated in the hope of critical reflection.

The first image to which the photo alludes is the typical shot of military troops, often special forces, deploying in full combat gear including the camouflage face paint applied for battle. We see these images in newspaper photographs, recruiting ads (Army Rangers, Navy Seals), movies and movie posters, and video games. In like manner, the woman in the front of the frame and the tall woman in the middle both are streaked with the black paint. That, along with the canteen and the caption push the viewer to see the women as combat troops in the making: trained, tough, and ready to go. If you look at the second and third women, they almost already have the thousand yard stare.

And maybe that’s what reminded me of the second image that lies latent within the photo: the image of Jewish women standing in line in a concentration camp. There actually are a number of such images; you can see one set here at the Yad Vashem web site. Look again at the photo above. Maybe you see only the gear and strong women. I see that and I also see Jewish women standing in a line, captives of the national security state.

What makes judgment so difficult in this case is that both images can be true at the same time. Israeli women are and will be everything one could ask of a special forces commando. And these women could be killed because of self-destructive state policies that are the issue not only of concerns about security but also of militarism and paranoia.

I have to add that all this is still far better than anything Hamas would do. Israel is not the reason the IDF needs women on the front lines. Israel is not where we need to worry about women being confined and denied basic civil and human rights. And as my friends who are hawks love to remind me, Israel is a vibrant democracy. This last point is exactly why I have to say what I saw in the photograph. There is reason to speak because Israel is a democracy and therefore open to public opinion, not to mention the financial, military, and political support that is provided by the US government and thus the legitimate concern of every US citizen. Perhaps I’m mad to be haunted by the image, but I believe that at times Israel, like the US, like many powerful states historically, can be dangerous to others and to its own people. Should the women in the photograph have to die in the defense of Israel, I see no basis for criticism of the report’s policy recommendation. But that defense may not be necessary, or, most important, may be more likely to occur precisely because of state policies that rely too much on military superiority and the normalization of war. Perhaps the question of Israel’s defense has nothing to do with my reaction to a photograph. It may be, however, that a photo shows more than we would like to admit about how people can become enslaved by force, even when it is of their own making.

Photograph by Oded Balilty/Associated Press.

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Why They Hate Us

September 25, 2007January 10, 2014
Hariman
visualizing war
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I don’t like to belabor a point, but as long as a few Republican senators stonewall any serious attempt to withdraw from the war in Iraq, the press and the rest of us will have to keep up the drumbeat for change. So we have yet another set of images from Iraq, these in conjunction with a special series in the Chicago Tribune that followed a troop of soldiers Inside the Surge. The photo essay shows the troops in camp, on the move, playing with kids in the street, and the like. The usual stuff of embedded coverage. And as happens often enough, they catch something of the other side of the myth of GIs handing out candy bars. Like this:

The caption reads, “The sister and nephew of a suspected insurgent cry during a nighttime raid of a house by soldiers in Bonecrusher Troop.” Hey, someone might say, it could all be an act. Ok, it could, although we are told later in the story that the suspect was released. And even if mom is acting, or perhaps trying to be reasonable, look closely at the boy. He is terrified. Hunching down into himself, close to crumpling, his face a mask of fear and shame and pain; he will not forget this night.

I’m also struck by several other elements in the photo. One is the standard of living. These are not the wretched poor of the “Arab street.” It is much more likely that they are middle class, exactly the people who were least likely to object to the changes promised by the Bush administration. Their usual preoccupation of the evening probably would be not building bombs but rather keeping the boy at his homework. I also notice that the room is so clean and spare. The emptiness of the room might be an indirect sign of the boredom and general social deprivation that is the common experience of so many civilians trapped in the war zone. In order to avoid the danger of life outside, they are confined to a few rooms and left with each other and the TV, if the power is on.

And then there is the gun in the right foreground. (That gun has appeared more than once in American photojournalism, as John noted here.) Sure, it’s pointed down, but were it to be raised boy and mother would be right in the immediate line of fire. No wonder the boy is afraid. Cordoned by soldiers on each side, mother and child beseech one who turns his back to them while the other holds them under the gun.

And they are not the only soldiers in the house. Here is another photo:

The caption reads, “Staff Sgt. Stephen Yacapin of Bonecrusher Troop’s 3rd Platoon searches a bedroom for weapons or other evidence of insurgent activity during a raid in Baghdad.” Like the mythical WMDs, he will not find weapons here either. We can see what does turn up, including a purple comforter, a hairbrush and comb, hair gels or something of that sort, snapshots of family or friends, a magazine or folder in English, a purse–not exactly the raw materials of a terrorist cell. We also can see that he’s tearing the room apart. Maybe he’s going to put everything back in place, but it is going to be hard to stack the drawers again and put square corners on the bedsheets while outfitted like a storm trooper from Star Wars. I do not question his need to be outfitted for combat, but what is the Bonecrusher Troop doing in anyone’s bedroom?

And from the look of it, it could be anyone’s bedroom. I’ll bet I could get everything there from Target. Putting that room back together may not be hard to do, and the mess may be be a great harm, but surely they will feel that this raid was a violation of their intimate space, for that is what has happened.

These photos are not the whole story, nor are they any more true literally that those that show soldiers being friendly. But they should remind us that the Iraqi citizens’ experience of the US occupation is deeply personal. Pundits who pretend to ponder the great question of Why They Hate Us need look no farther then these images. This is not about the clash of civilizations, the supposed oxymoron of Islamic democracy, or any other Big Idea. This is about being terrified in one’s own home.

You would think Americans could empathize: Recall these words from the Declaration of Independence:

He [the King of Great Britain] has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us . . .

Of course, many Americans do understand, in part because they have seen photographs like these. The general public is not the problem.

Photographs by Kuni Takahesi for the Chicago Tribune.

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Heads Up in River World

I pulled this photo out of the Images in the News at the Chicago Tribune online a month or so ago:

Unfortunately, I’ve lost the photo citation, but maybe that will turn up. I’ve decided that the picture is too striking to be buried for want of a footnote. The paper knew as much, for the photograph certainly isn’t “News.” You are looking at four river otters swimming, something they do every day.

The image captures much more than four otters in the water. The silver sheen fuses light, water, and animals into a single, perfectly unified event. The otters are completely at home in the water, moving together with the flow of the river, the flow of all of nature’s energies. And yet they also look like they are made of molten metal, crafted forms emerging out of a bath of silver alloy. Caption it “Metal World” and you have a movie still. More seriously, the photograph alludes to the art and history of photography, as if a silver gelatin substrate has been beautifully brought to the surface of the image.

Whether you see the aesthetic unity of the image as the eloquence of nature or art, the question remains of what it has to say. And the otters aren’t so much at home as on the move. They seem to push purposively through the water, tightly coordinated, like a team or other work group. The four are entrained, and entrainment is both an important feature of social life and an artistic technique in photojournalism. Entrainment also can be suggested by mechanical reproduction of the same image, so once again the image channels the art, in this case, the aesthetic element and cultural anxiety marked by Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This photograph provides the multiplied image within the frame rather than through reproduction of the photograph itself (as I’ve done), but it is the more fitting for that.

The photograph fundamentally isn’t about itself, however. I think the uncanny quality comes from the combination of the light, the entrainment, and the implicit analogy between one species and another. They are coordinated very much as humans can be: working together while each still exhibiting individuality. Although each is looking in a different direction, these four animals may look much more uniform than individuated, but that may be due to our inability to see them from inside their own social experience. Is the difference between humans and otters that they are much the same while we are each an individual person, or is that belief merely the mistaken result of our ignorance, our inability to enter their world? The photograph, which may have been selected for merely “aesthetic” reasons, poses significant questions about who we are and what we value.

Such comparisons may be more than academic exercises. The river otters are among the many species endangered with extinction. Seeing them as if they were artificial otters in some liquid metal bath of the future, perfect reproductions of the extinct species, makes me realize that they then could just as well be a team of specialized workers finely engineered for the industrial environment of that world. Looking at the picture again, I see the complexity and beauty of nature, and also a possible future that includes not only the otter’s extinction but ours.

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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

John and I will be traveling from the 18th-26th.

We hope to maintain our schedule of six or seven posts a week, but, well, don’t hold your breath. Between jet lag, conferencing, and perhaps spotty wireless coverage, some posts may stay up longer than usual.

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John-John Kidnapped!

September 17, 2007
Hariman
afterimages
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The Public Editor at the Sunday New York Times had a lengthy column yesterday, and for good reason: he had a lot of explaining to do. The Times, along with many others, was taken in by photographer Joe O’Donnell’s fraudulent claim that he had taken the iconic photo of John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s caisson:

The problem was that the Times obituary for Mr. O’Donnell had featured the iconic image as his signature photo. As the paper soon learned–and reported–the photo had been taken by Stan Stearns, not O’Donnell. In fact, a second photo shown also had been taken by someone else, and soon a string of deceptions came to light.

Those who love to hate the Times will enjoy their evident mortification, but I’m not among that crowd. They were working at the demanding pace at which they nonetheless produce detailed and reliable stories day after day after day. More important, they were taken in by someone who apparently spent years crafting elaborate deceptions. It’s easy to be fooled by someone who already has fooled many of the people you trust.

The several stories provide an interesting glimpse into both the work of a con artist and the way stories are put together at the Times. They also reveal a thing or two about visual culture today. For one, the fascination with iconic images continues. In an earlier post I asked “Is there an icon for everything?” Well, it seems there has to be for noteworthy photographers. As quoted by the Public Editor, the night photo editor at the Times set aside his reservations about O’Donnell’s claim about the photo because “That the Times was writing the obituary made it ‘a done deal as far as I was concerned,’ he said. ‘I assumed that Joe O’Donnell, famous photographer, had already been verified, and my job was to find iconic images to illustrate his career.'” There you have it: famous photographers, like the great events they cover, must each have their iconic shots. Unfortunately, O’Donnell had taken other images that also deserved to be seen. Instead of yet another Kodak Moment with dead Kennedys, the Times missed an opportunity to show its readers something of the Cold War. Icons are important, but they should not be used to paper over the rest of the visual archive.

A second point allows me to grind another ax. One way or another many people in academia, the press, and more generally have picked up Susan Sontag’s critique of photography. Fortunately, nodding along to Sontag doesn’t inhibit their actual viewing practices–let’s hear it for hypocrisy–but they nonetheless parrot her arguments when talking about photography. Thus, we are re-exposed to her anxiety about the power of the visual image to counterfeit reality, to be manipulated, to deceive, and generally to corrupt our ability to know the world and be ethical. Images can do all of that, of course, but no medium or art is innocent of these charges. And that’s what I love about this episode with John-John. O’Donnell deceived a lot of people about the photograph–but not with the photograph. No, to fabricate reality he used another technology, one that also has a very good track record for deception: words.

Photograph by Stan Stearns/Corbis.

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One Planet, Many Worlds

Americans like to think that the world revolves around the U.S. For vivid demonstration of a different perspective, look at this photo, which is dated September 11, 2007:

The caption said, “German herders guide a decorated cow and other cattle Tuesday on the move from high alpine summer pastures to lower altitudes in the mountains near Bad Hindelang, in southern Germany.”

Even without the 9/11 date, this picture strikes me as uncanny. The bucolic scene could be from centuries ago, except for the state-of-the-art hiking boots, perfectly machined clothing, and farmers who obviously have never wanted for food, good health care, and all the other benefits of late-modern European civilization. The cow’s ornate decoration is equally incongruous, like something found in a tourist boutique Christmas Store rather than on modern livestock who are blessed (as these probably are) if they can stay out of a wretched feedlot. Above all, these are German herders, and the idea that they are part of the labor force of a modern, high-tech nation just doesn’t mesh with the incredibly relaxed, ambulatory slowness of the scene. They obviously are walking at a cow’s pace–for those of you who don’t know, that is really s l o w–and they are doing so easily, comfortably. While I was getting edgy waiting impatiently for a traffic light to turn green, these guys were ambling through a verdant alpine valley. And what little work they were doing by walking downhill was being made into ritualized play.

Whether acting out an invented tradition or authentic examples of the German volk, the incongruity is extended further by the boy in the foreground. While mountain people should be hardy, wild, and reclusive, he looks so open and gentle. Though likely to grow up like the physically impressive men behind him, he appears vulnerable, still formed in the soft clay of childhood. He is presented directly to the viewer as if we ought to take him in, and so the photograph suggests that this pastoral scene might become part of our world. The herders are walking into our space, perhaps to bring their green harmony with them.

That sense of peace seems a long way from 9/11 and the urban canyons of New York or Chicago, but there are sharper contrasts beyond that. This photograph appeared in the New York Times on September 13:

The story featured a sense of incongruity: “In Southern Sudan, Peace Alters a Way of Life.” Peace can do that, particularly when contrasted with rape, murder, starvation, forced migration, and other forms of terror that are never mentioned by the Times reporter. This picture isn’t about war, however, but about third world deprivation. The point of the story is that the Dinka way of life is becoming harder to sustain as young people are lured to the city. This boy is on the cusp: he herds the cattle, yet wears modern clothes. His indeterminate age symbolizes his indeterminate position: the caption informs us that his parents don’t know his age but guess he is about 11 or 12, i.e., about to enter the transition to adulthood. There are no adults in the picture, and the Western reader will conclude from the parent’s ignorance that they are either primitive or negligent, neither of which bodes well for a child caught between two worlds.

The photograph pushes this point. We are looking up at the boy as if he were in a position of power. But it is the wrong kind of power: he is a boy doing adult labor. This mismatch is reinforced by seeing his clothes come up short, by his sullen expression, and by the contrast with the open vista behind him. He is a capable herder but yoked to the cattle. His herding stick suggests the yoke and is matched by another stick protruding upwards to create an artificial border within the picture. The boy is already hardened by child labor in the desert and confined by the boundaries of his primitive society. (The benefits of living in this traditional society are no part of the story or the photograph.) Though revealing some of the incongruities of contemporary Dinka life, this photograph is not uncanny but rather one that makes reality seem hardened, depressing, and perhaps hopeless.

Two photographs, two boys herding cattle, two very different worlds on the same planet.

Photographs by Christof Stache/Associated Press, Evelyn Hockstein/New York Times.

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