Hariman – Page 75 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Islamic TV: A Two-Headed Monster?

This image from the Washington Post Day in Photos lies right across the line between soft news and hard news.

On the one hand, it’s a visual joke. The incongruity of a woman from a traditional society carrying a TV rather than water or the wash on her head at once upends and reconfirms Western assumptions about the Arab world. She’s not completely not modern, and modern civilization is what she desires. See: the woman values that TV so much that she will carry it instead of more traditional necessities. Imagine: she’s all wrapped up and yet gets to see the world through the wonder of modern technology. On the other hand, the woman is engaged in the difficult task of carrying her household possessions through a war zone while probably leaving much behind. The caption adds that “about 2,000 Iraqis leave their homes every day due to violence and economic uncertainty resulting from the four-year conflict.”

Although cast as a representative of displaced Iraqis, I doubt the woman will elicit much sympathy. Indeed, the image calls the bluff of the serious captioning: the photo is striking but not for the reason given. As noted several times before in this blog, the burqa troubles the Western gaze whenever it is is placed in modern context. (Within the traditional setting, it confirms ideological assumptions instead of challenging modern norms of transparency.) By walking with the TV balanced on her head, the burqa-clad woman becomes a cyborg, both human and machine, organic and artificial, traditional and modern. She now has two heads, one veiled, turbaned, and a platform for the other, which is a blank screen capable of channeling the vast information flows of the modern media. Despite the visual joke, the latent fascination of the image is that she has become monstrous. Not terrifying, but more akin to a freak show. The fact that the photo is half soft news and half hard news reinforces this sense of an unnatural though not too dangerous mixture.

Of course, it’s not news at all. We know all about Al-Jazeera, and scholars, not least Martin Marty’s Fundamentalism Project, have documented that fundamentalists of all religions have no problem rejecting modernity’s values while becoming cutting-edge producers and avid consumers of modern media. It turns out that modern liberals are the ones who have a hard time managing that contradiction. Which is why the photograph above, which could be seen in a very ordinary way, instead implies that the two civilizations can never be blended but must instead be joined only precariously, amidst violence.

Photograph by Alaa al-Marjani/Associated Press.

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Footwork at Reed College

We could post about the war in Vietnam–oops, I mean Iraq–every day, but since continuing the quagmire depends on a loss of perspective, we should turn to other things as well. Like feet. Next week John and I will be giving a paper at a photography conference, where we will discuss why photojournalism features hands and feet when one could show more of the individual pictured. Like this:

This example may be somewhat more artistic than others we could show, and it has more of a pretext as it was part of a New York Times “Trendspotting” story on the custom at Reed College of going barefoot just about anywhere and any time. Even so, it’s not a typical news photo, which suggests that something else is going on.

Most of the images in the Trendspotting photo essay were mildly informative and less evocative. They showed students standing in line, standing in groups, and so forth. In each case we saw young people much as we often see them, and they happened to be without shoes. This much more distinctive photograph removes the student body (sorry, I couldn’t resist), but for the sharp focus on a pair of bare feet resting on a desk between books (front) and computer (middle). In the back of the photo we see the blurred top of a student’s head. He is wearing earphones, and the effect of the image comes in part from the contrast between the student’s heavily mediated experience–books, computer, digital music, even the food is processed–and the unmediated, elemental experience of resting his bare feet in the air. Whereas the other images showed more of the local culture through stock scenes such as standing in the lunch line, this one joins the special experience of higher education at an elite school with a seemingly universal symbol of youth.

Most people have neither occasion nor inclination to go around barefoot, or to study as much as is the norm at Reed. The photo does double duty at making the story significant: by foregrounding books, computer, and the obviously habitual posture of the student reading, the seeming frivolity of going barefoot–rather than working for a living–acquires a serious cast. The student isn’t working, but he is in training. Likewise, Reed’s foot fad stands in for the peculiar subculture of good higher education and makes it appealing through an iconography that channels the barefoot boy of American myth. Huckleberry Finn now goes to school, and leisure time is spent not on the river but drifting through the liberal arts.

Reed’s reputation includes both intensive study and liberal politics. Note the student’s longish hair. And so this post is about Iraq after all. Those feet are the feet of privilege and are not likely to wear combat boots. But there are places where privilege is used to learn, to discipline judgment, and prepare for both innovation and good stewardship. The press now provides many images of boots on the ground, and while honoring the sacrifice of working class youth it becomes too easy to forget their betrayal by those who benefited from the privileges of wealth without bothering to learn from history, deliberate carefully, and act with regard for others. We need boots on the ground, but we also need good education and good government. And not just for the few.

Photograph by Molly Gingras <gingrasm@reed.edu>.

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9/11, the Continuing Tragedy

September 11, 2007October 19, 2012
Hariman
visual memory
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US 9/11 deaths. US military deaths. Iraqi civilian deaths.

And Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. . . .

Photographs by Spencer Platt/Getty, Denis Poroy/AP, James Nachtwey/National Geographic, Khalid Mohammed/AP, Kim Komenich/Chronicle.

Update: For educational resources, Hannah Edwards offers this site.

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Thin-Skinned about the Veil

This week and last a number of newspapers, including The Washington Post, censored publication of the Sunday comic strip Opus by Berkeley Breathed.

Why? According to Fox News, the Post was concerned about depicting a Muslim as an Islamist, and also about the sexual innuendo in the strip. (Obviously, the Post has not been reading its own strip that often.) The good news is that the Post’s stupidity now has Fox on record in opposition to censorship, but that is cold comfort from the network yet to discover irony.

The incident caught my attention because it provides another example of how the veil disturbs Western norms of public order. (Previous posts on this theme are archived under The Visual Public Sphere.) Although the Post may have been caught in a different trap, the strip itself gets its laughs from playing with what is–in the Western gaze, at least–something terribly serious. In the mind’s eye, we have a vision of radical Islam shrouding the world in theocratic darkness. In the comic strip, Lola Granola’s flower power veil is the perfect symbol of her faux counterculture fashionista spirituality, which is as stable as a butterfly and surely incapable of jihad. Perhaps the strip expresses the wish that Muslims would take their religion less seriously, although there is no doubt that just about any attitude is better than the cravenly egocentric and self-interested cynicism of Lola’s boyfriend, Steve. He, too, is too serious, and it is left to the reader to have a good laugh at how bent out of shape people can get about religion (Lola), sex (Steve), and keeping up appearances (all of us).

As it happens, another story that works a similar vein was brought to my attention this week.

You are looking at a protest at the Rancho Palos Verdes (CA) City Council. When the council selected member Doug Stern as mayor pro tem rather than member Barbara Ferraro, who had been expected to be granted the position through rotation, five women entered the meeting covered in burqas. Needless to say, it appears that this did not go over well on the council or in some quarters of the surrounding community. (Several local news reports are collected at Doug Stern’s web page. Stern is not exactly an objective source, but he’s what I’ve got.)

Once again, I think we need to lighten up a bit. If you want to, you can look at the opposed symbols of flag and burqa and see the clash of civilizations. The protest draws on that framework to imply that instead of opposing the Taliban abroad we are imitating them at home. Likewise, you can look at the contrast between the faces of the council members (including Barbara Ferraro) and the burqa-clad figure with her back to the camera, and you can see a choice between, on the one hand, Western transparency and individualism and, on the other hand, Middle Eastern illegibility and oppression. Again, the protest implies that the one has been substituted for the other. But I can’t help but see something else: Lola Granola.

My point, if I have one, is not that the demonstrators are flakes. Their detractors have already said as much, but I don’t want that kind of seriousness either. Rather, I’d like to see everyone become a bit less tense about the veil, and perhaps even a bit more open to discussion about cultural difference, and most of all, able to laugh at ourselves as we make a mess of things in our own backyard. The burqa-clad demonstrators made their point, but they are a better example of unintended silliness than democracy as it is practiced up close and personal. On the other side, the ever so conventional council members seem to make a virtue of being self-important–and, really, do they need to be backed by two flags, one of which is the size of my garage?

We don’t need either institutional censorship or small town gossip to police public expression, and we always need a laugh. Thanks to Opus, I got one twice today.

The full cartoons are here and here.

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Why a Hummer isn't a Humvee

Hummer owners are proud owners; why else would you own one? It’s easy to single them out for criticism: the vehicles obstruct other drivers, waste fuel, and punish the environment while signaling dominance. That’s unfair in one sense, however, for such wretched excess is true of many SUVs and other vehicles as well. (If you do want to slam a Hummer, you might enjoy going here or here.) And some Hummer owners really do know how to have fun behind the wheel. This shot from the photo gallery at GMHummer.com says “Took me three hours to clean this!!!”

Was worth every minute, we can assume, and there are worse ways to get dirty. As the new Jeep SUV ad campaign says, “Have Fun Out There.” So what’s the problem?

I want to suggest that Hummers are one small–ok, not so small–part of a larger problem, which is the domestication of war. The more that the equipment of war is packaged for retail consumption, from fatigues to Hummers, the easier it is to think that war is not much different that tearing around the desert for an afternoon. The Hummer is exhibit A because it is a civilian version of the military Humvee (technically a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle) which got its boost in the domestic market following the first Gulf war. Since then, SUVs have militarized the streets–industry research discovered early on that a primary motive for buying them was to purchase a sense of security. As a result, it becomes easier to assume not only that our streets are dangerous, but that other dangerous streets are not much different from ours. The process can work in the other direction as well: when we see soldiers in Iraq drinking bottled water while staring into laptops, it can seem that they’re at school or work like anyone else.

The terrible lie beneath this superficial continuity was brought home to me when I saw this photograph in the Sunday New York Times Magazine:

This Humvee had driven over an I.E.D. (improvised explosive device). As it was carrying a colonel who survived the blast, it probably was pretty well armored. Even so, a fair amount of luck was involved: the bomb wasn’t too big, the blast caught the back of the vehicle, and no one was riding there at the time. This is just another day in Iraq–the story reports that every time this unit leaves their base they have “contact” with the enemy. In the real war, the road really is a very dangerous place. And it’s going to take more than three hours to clean his one up.

New York Times photograph by Benjamin Lowy.

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Central Casting in Iraq

Karl Rove may have left the White House, but they have lost little of his magic when it comes to staging a photo-op. I can’t help but gawk at the combination of pandering and denial in this one:

Have you ever seen a better bunch of kids? Happy, wholesome, good-looking, fresh-faced, smiling–they look like they’ve had a great time at a neighborhood charity clean-up. And what a line-up: from the right, we see a black female, Hispanic male, white male, Bush, indeterminate female. The rows in the back do much the same. They could have stepped right out of a Disney movie. The raised hands from the back confirm what we already know, which is that this photo is posed and taken on cue, but that cynical fact is swamped by their good-natured, exuberant innocence.

It looks as though there is a cluster of white men around Bush, covering his back, perhaps, but I wouldn’t make too much of that. More important is that the group forms a triangle pointed toward the vanishing point of the picture, with Bush smack in the center. The photo is all about him, with everyone else there as a prop. He stands at the center of a miniature society of egalitarian citizen-soldiers who are there primarily to frame him. And who is that man in black at the center? He looks like the beloved uncle or model civic volunteer: gentle and ever-helpful but also wise, the perfect scout leader being recognized for his many years of service.

And not for the first time. Bush has been setting records for his use of military personal as props. And the troops are stand-ins for those he was using before 9/11:

This image is from November 28, 2000, when the election was still on the line. Note the same mix of ethnicities and genders, the same happy faces, the same innocence, the same focus on the man in the middle.

I’m tempted to follow with an image of a maimed soldier, but that shouldn’t be necessary. The point is that we already can see the stagecraft, and we know how much is being denied. Whether propping up a stolen election or a failed invasion, Bush knows where to turn.

Photographs by Jason Reed/Reuters and Jeff Mitchell/Reuters. The first accompanied this story in the New York Times.

Update: Occasionally our posts cover the same images as those posted by Michael Shaw at his excellent blog, BAGnewsNotes. These may be on the same day or, in this case, a day apart due to the writing schedule on one side or the other. (Sometimes, as is the case this week, John or I write several posts in a row that then can be put up each day before we run off to meetings and the other demands of our day jobs.) So, if you want to read Michael’s take on the same photograph, go here. Michael was one of the inspirations for this blog, and it is gratifying when we see things alike while learning from each other’s point of view.

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Labor Day

To the American worker:

Photographs by Charles C. Ebbets/Bettmann Corbis; Lowell’s Restaurant and Bar, Seattle, WA; Daily News, Los Angeles, CA (Dept of Special Collections/UCLA Library, A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library); Gordon Parks; unknown.

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Censorship is |||||||||||||

Brenda at The Photography Pages is giving away a great button challenging censorship.

Better yet, she is encouraging viral distribution. As she says at her post about the badges: “These were made by Brilliant Badges in the UK, but please feel free to copy the artwork royalty-free, and make and distribute your own.”

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Body Bag in the Bronx

This is a hard photo of a bad day at the workplace:

At about 8 in the morning a former employee of the RiverBay Corporation gunned down a supervisor, then shot two other employees before taking the bus to a courthouse where he turned himself in. (Where would we be without good mass transit?) The photograph with the story shows the body of Audley Bent being brought out of the building at 12:50 p.m.

This is about as harsh an image of death as I want to see. The full body, including the head, wrapped up in that heavy tarp and strapped down tightly–right where the mouth and neck would be–well, there is no doubt that he is cold stone dead. The dramatic effect is heightened by the gurney and the technician’s gloves, which often are seen with a living victim who is being treated by med-techs while being ferried to an ambulance. Indeed, the brisk professionalism of the one, along with the casual attentiveness of the cop in the right foreground, make it seem as if this is just another accident.

Perhaps we’d like to think there might be some hope, but that huge, hulking, inert bag, stuffed with what is unmistakably a human body, crushes hope. Worse, look at how it matches up with the dumpster behind it: bag and trash bin appear to be the same dark green color and almost the same length. It’s as though the dumpsters are a row of coffins and the latest load from the apartment building is being taken to the next open bin. And what a cemetery: metal and concrete, everything rectilinear, featureless, and hard. The two living men could be prison guards. This industrialized back alley is no place to die, or to live.

The Bronx is better than that, of course, and you don’t take a dead body out the front door if you can avoid it. But the photograph does raise the perennial question about what images should or should not be published. Here one has little cause to complain about not being shown the dead.

The photo also raises a question about how violence is framed. Had Audley Bent been gunned down in Iraq, he would have been “processed” in much the same way, but no image of the body bag would be in the newspaper. During wartime, the soldier’s death is rightly treated with respect, although that respect can include visual practices that also hide the nature of industrialized warfare while sacralizing war itself. Likewise, the fact that we are shown the body bag of a murder victim suggests that .38-caliber violence is somewhat taken for granted on the home front–as if it were another not-so-hidden cost of modern civilization like pollution or traffic congestion.

Or maybe I’m wrong about that. I hope so.

Photograph by Uli Seit for The New York Times.

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GI Joe and Barney Fife in Iraq

This photo from the Chicago Tribune inadvertently says a lot about what’s wrong with the “Stand up/Stand down” strategy (dare we say myth) in Iraq.

It is in many ways a bad photo: an ordinary street scene made to look off-kilter from the oddly tilted camera; the focus is divided to both left and the right, which allows the eye to wander aimlessly through the distant, featureless background; not much is happening. This seems to be an amateur snapshot of a nonevent.

One reason it made it into the Chicago paper is suggested by the caption: “On patrol. Army Sgt. Ezequiel Mora of DeKalb patrols a police checkpoint Sunday in Baghdad.” Ok, he’s a local boy. And sure enough, the picture looks posed. Foot up, body turned toward the viewer, gun fully displayed, looking intently beyond the lens–this is what he might be told to do in a portrait studio. And now the context makes more sense: as in a studio, there should be nothing happening, and the actual street scene is merely a backdrop like a fake row of books. Unlike some of the more realistic photographs of soldiers caked with dirt, sweat, and fear as they inch along a wall while under fire, this guy is a perfectly uniformed action figure. Like GI Joe, his mission is to look the part.

If he were the only guy in the picture, that might be the end of it. But look at the other guy. He is one of the cops at the police checkpoint. And what a cop. In contrast to the heavily armored hoplite in front of him, this guy is wearing the thin cotton/polyester shirt you’d see on the street in Maybury. He’s also lightly armed. Most important, he really looks like a small town cop: hand on the back of the neck–got a crick there, maybe–puzzling about some exceedingly local dilemma. He’s built not for action but for talking, cajoling, compromising, and moving things along, all the while not quite up to the job and better suited for it for that. We’re looking at Barney Fife in Baghdad.

The comic contrast between the two figures might be the end of it, except that the rest of the caption places the photograph within a strategic context: “Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said U.S. commanders must work harder to avoid civilian casualties.” So, those patrolling the checkpoints have been a little rough, and now the choice is between two bad options: ineffectual police work such that U.S. troops have to patrol the police checkpoints (shouldn’t the police be able to do that, so that the troops could be used elsewhere?) and the use of excessive force by those troops.

The photograph goes further still: it shows us, first, that the relationship between the police and the troops is backwards, and, second, that the whole operation has gone tilt. In a modern civil society, citizens should encounter not military troops but the police. The troops should be way in the background as the major part of the state’s monopoly on force and used only for extraordinary threats such as invasions and natural disasters. Equally important, most of the time police should be a lot like the cop in the photograph: not paramilitary swat teams but ordinary guys who know the people in the neighborhood and are there to solve small problems. In Iraq, however, it looks like nothing can be done to scale. Citizens encounter troops who can’t help but be dangerous, while the troops are more likely to be trigger happy because they have the problem of having the none-too-reliable Iraqi police covering their backs. And I don’t see Andy Griffith anywhere in the picture.

Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty, August 26, 2007.

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