Hariman – Page 79 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

What Does Peace Look Like?

(“New York City celebrating the surrender of Japan. They threw anything and kissed anybody in Times Square.” Lt. Victor Jorgensen, August 14, 1945. National Archives, 80-G-377094.)

War continues to be a major topic of photojournalism and will be one of the topics of continuing interest on this blog, at least until the arrival of perpetual peace. While there are a number of fine studies of war imagery, I happened to ask myself today whether there are, or can be, photographs of peace. Obviously, art history archives are full of images–say, of the lion lying down with the lamb–that signify peace figuratively. Although photographs can acquire figurative and even allegorical meaning, I think that the realism, fragmentation, and other elements of the medium make it more difficult to represent peace. War is force, action, violence, destruction, pain–all things that can be communicated photographically. Peace involves the absence of war and the freedom to experience and enjoy other things, which then become the object of visual interest. If you define peace as necessarily involving sustainability and therefore justice, the problem gets even more complicated.

If you go to the Pictures of World War II at the National Archives Web site, you’ll see that one of the categories is “Victory and Peace.” There are ten photographs available there, and were a space alien to access them, it would have a hard time figuring out what either “victory” or “peace” mean. But those of us on Earth don’t do much better, do we?

This representational problem might be why the Times Square Kiss is an iconic photograph. (The public domain version is shown above.) John and I have much to say about it in No Caption Needed, although it now occurs to me that more could be added about how the image mediates the idea of peace. What I find more interesting, however, is another photo from the same collection, one that you probably haven’t seen before:

“Jubilant American soldier hugs motherly English woman and victory smiles light the faces of happy service men and civilians at Piccadilly Circus, London, celebrating Germany’s unconditional surrender.” Pfc. Melvin Weiss, England, May 7, 1945. National Archives, 111-SC-205398.

I find this to be a poignant image, particularly when compared with the Kiss. (Let’s leave the jokes about American and English eroticism aside for the moment.) Each photo is of a victory celebration in the public square of a great city, with spectators smiling at the camera to cue viewer participation in the scene. But instead of two sexually hot adults clenched in a powerful kiss, in this image we see mom getting a hug from one of the kids. And that’s the point that tears at me: they really are kids. I’m reminded of (and paraphrasing from distant memory) a scene at the beginning of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: angry about the self-satisfied reminiscing by the narrator and his war buddy, the narrator’s wife spits out that they were just kids, children, when they were sent to fight and die. That’s what this photograph reveals so clearly (no caption needed). And so this really is a war photo after all.

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Smile!

Awhile ago I posted an image that suggested how the burqa is not only strange but also distinctively disturbing when encountered in Western public spaces. The idea was that it challenges liberal norms of public transparency; understanding also is complicated by the way it can twist liberal ideas about personal autonomy and gender equality (there are feminist arguments for going under the veil). If these tensions are in play, then we also can expect to see attempts to mange them, say, through images created for comic effect. I think this is such an image:

I doubt much needs to be said. At first glance, it just doesn’t make sense or will seem silly to many outside the Islamic world. Why would the women want a picture when they are hidden from view? How can anyone who looks at it know who is there? Isn’t taking a photograph of individuals who can’t be seen self-defeating? Well, yes and no. Yes for some, but obviously not for those in the picture. They know who they are. And there are subtle inversions created just through the act of having the picture taken: The man taking the picture is squatting–and the rear view is not entirely flattering–while they stand. He is in the position of serving them, while they enjoy the privilege of enhanced visibility. He can be forgotten while they will be remembered.

If, that is, they asked for the picture. If this is his idea, all bets are off. Which is another reason I find such images so interesting, as they call into question many of the assumptions we bring to bear in our ordinary viewing. Were the women not veiled (as a women in the background is not), we could safely assume we know the story, particularly as we would be cued by any facial expressions. Of course, our assumptions would still be just that, but the odds would be pretty good. Here we quickly realize how much we depend on such assumptions and how they are culturally parochial.

Note also how the image may naturalize the burqa. The comic effect (which comes, I think from both the basic contradiction and the man’s pose) moderates the threat that visible invisibility can create in a public space. And after all, their invisibility is being undercut by the act of having the picture taken. Most important, the veiled women are being placed within a very familiar visual practice: snapshot photography, and there the habit of having our pictures taken (often by strangers, no less) while vacationing with family or friends. If the burqa can be incorporated into this common habit (so to speak), it can’t be too bad. And just as snapshots taken in public spaces suture private and public life, so does this photograph integrate liberal and non-liberal conceptions of public visibility.

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Is Katrina a Holocaust?

The front page of today’s New York Times has this photo dominating the space above the fold:

The caption reads: Gwendolyn Marie Allen lives in a Renaissance Village, a FEMA trailer near Baton Rouge, where she cares for with her son and her brother, right.

The story below the photo is titled “Road to New Life after Katrina Is Closed to Many.”

This photo may seem somewhat indeterminate and also innocuous. Gwendolyn’s facial expression suggests that she is dissatisfied, but you have to peer into the image to see that. Otherwise, she seems poised and capable, flyswatter in hand; or at least so in respect to the scene behind her, which is blurred. The trailer also looks like it’s in good shape. What’s the problem?

I’m guessing that if this photo has any moral force, it comes from an allusion to a Holocaust image. Look at the brother in the background, and look at this image:

The template has been reversed on the horizontal axis, but again we see one more capable figure (the one able or willing to stand) and others staring out from the sleeping racks of the concentration camp. The allusion works in the other direction, of course: we are disposed to see the brother in today’s photo as if he were stacked along with others (perhaps Gwendolyn’s son, who is not seen) in one of the camps. Thus, the Times photo has smuggled in the Holocaust analogy for the Katrina disaster.

There has been been heated debate about whether that analogy should ever be made, much less in respect to Katrina, and in this case I’m on the side of those who would say the comparison has gone too far. To support that point, let me note how the Times image has a different caption at the online paper: Gwendolyn Marie Allen lives in a FEMA trailer near Baton Rouge with her son, who has schizophrenia, and her severely retarded brother, right.

The additional information should increase our sympathy for Gwendolyn, but now her brother’s confinement can have very different implications than those of inhumane enclosure, government wastage of human lives, and other elements of the Holocaust analogy.

Update: BAGnewsNotes posted on the same photo, same day, each of us not knowing of the other post. There’s a thread running there as well.

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Virtual Bush and the Real Public

Openleft.com has a terrific parody of Bush speaking to the blogosphere; you can see it here. It’s funny, and chilling. Sometimes we need the parody to see what is really being said in public speech. To see how the Bush line is actually going down, look at the photos displayed in a terrific post at the BAG.

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Iconic Tattoos

Or tattoos of icons, anyway. We already have an image of an Iwo Jima flag raising tattoo on our images page, but this complementary portrait of World War II victory culture just turned up:

Tattoos are emblems of personal identity and of identification with collective symbols. They must mean a lot to some people, but what they mean remains a matter of interpretation, as the discussion here makes clear. The body in this photo obviously was born well after V-J Day, yet another example of how icons can be carried across generations.

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Hillary's Feet Get Some Legs

As John posts both here and at BAGnewNotes, I’ll occasionally cite his work there so that folks here can follow it if they wish. A recent post on head, foot, and hand shots of Bill and Hillary can be read here. That story then got picked up by Reuters, which suggests that someone there thought that there might be more general interest. From the comments at BagnewsNotes, its clear that there’s more to feet than meets the eye. In my case, for example, they seem to generate bad metaphors and cliched writing. Comments also demonstrate that there can be a basic split between looking at shot selection and at the content of the photo. The first orientation takes one down the road of media criticism; the second, into the practice of everyday life (e.g., the negotiation between comfort and fashion in selecting shoes, especially for women). Each path can lead back to the other. Both kinds of knowledge are important for participation in democratic politics. And while one may despair that contemporary politics might turn on the nuances of fashion, keep in mind that such attentiveness has been one part of insiders’ knowledge since at least classical Athens, and was made into a virtue in the Roman Republic.

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Photography Conference

Locating Photography
Durham University, UK
20-22 September 2007

Following the success of its inaugural conference ‘Thinking Photography – Again’ (July 2005), the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies (www.dur.ac.uk/dcaps) is hosting a second conference in September 2007 entitled ‘Locating Photography’. . . .
‘Locating Photography’ seeks to investigate the relationship between national paradigms and the apparently universal nature of the medium. What is at stake in insisting on or resisting the national paradigm? Why has it been so persistent, and can it continue to provide an adequate framework for understanding the history of the photographic medium in a global, digital age?

Full description, conference program, and registration information are available here.

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Probing the Body Politic

John started a discussion at BagnewsNotes yesterday about how images of hands can be used to signify political traits. Think of the clenched fist of resolve or the democratic wave of the hand. The images of Obama and Clinton are just a tiny part of the archive, however. John and I have begun collecting images of both hands and feet/shoes/boots, which, it turns out, appear in the news media every day. Why, we don’t know, but we’d like to know, which is one reason we’ll be posting examples here from time to time. One indication that these images are means of persuasion is that they are used by savvy designers. Note, for example, this poster for Michael Moore’s new movie:

It’s a visual joke, of course, and one that depends on the audience both recognizing the gloved hand as part of a specific medical practice (getting a vaginal or rectal exam) and understanding that Moore is going to perform the equivalent examination of his subject, the medical insurance complex. And if he does it with the sensitivity we have come to expect of an HMO, they have little basis for complaint. The idea that he’s going to do to them what they do to us depends on the metaphor of the body politic, which is carried by the metonym of the hand. When you think of it, the relationship between the heavy-handed insurance industry and the people is neatly captured by the visible hand and the invisible body it implies.

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Photosynth

For a glimpse of the future, click here to see an 8 minute video on digital composition software that can combine many thousands of photographs to create composite images. That’s a very rough description, of course. The slam dunk example is an image of Notre Dame made up of many snapshots and other images, each of which can be accessed through a zoom technology. As the designer points out, this is not just a slick piece of software but rather a medium for developing collective experience. I found it to be a beautiful example of how images record intersubjective reality. What is true of the Photosynth composite also applies to individual images and can be brought to the surface through interpretation: the image is a composite of collective experience, which is the result of many overlapping interactions though which we establish what is real. Marcel Henaff and Tracy Strong have made the point succinctly: “The Internet makes real the virtual, not the reverse” (Public Space and Democracy, p. 224.).

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Iwo Jima: fact or fiction

A letter to the editor of this month’s Journal of American History is the most recent example of a typical debate about how to interpret iconic photographs. The author, Robert W. Gabrick, writes:

The recent release of Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) caused me to revisit Paul C. Rosier’s article, “‘They Are Ancestral Homelands,'” in the March 2006 JAH, which featured Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the Iwo Jima flag raising. The caption in the article declares, “Ira Hayes (a Pima) is not quite reaching the flag, his pose an unintended symbol of his inability to secure basic rights after returning home to New Mexico” (p. 1304).
The person Rosier identifies as Pfc. Ira Hayes is, according to an Associated Press print, Pfc. Franklin R. Sousley. Hayes is not the last person on the left, but the second figure on the left. Hayes has both hands firmly on the flag’s staff. As a result, the photograph does not offer Hayes’s “pose” as a “symbol of his inability to secure basic rights after returning home to New Mexico.” . . .

Unfortunately, there is reason to believe that the fact-checker is wrong. If I recall correctly, Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers makes a good case, right down to pointing out that the blanket hanging from the last figure’s belt was an adaptation of traditional Pima dress.

The letter goes on:

It is also important to keep in mind that at one point all of the men in the photograph had their hands on the flag’s staff and that eventually the hands of all of the men would not be “reaching the flag.”. . .

A good point, but a small one. Any symbolism depends on what is in the picture, and what was there or not there moments before or afterwards can in fact carry very different implications. But, of course, the image is used because of what it signifies. Earlier and later images were available on the same roll of film, but they were not chosen.

The next point focuses on a persistent myth about the Iwo Jima photograph:

The caption states: “The presence of Hayes in this staged event also came to symbolize ethnic integration” (ibid.). The characterization of the action depicted in the photograph as a “staged event” offers an interpretation equally problematic. That it was “staged” suggests that the entire episode was mere propaganda. My research suggests the photograph was more the result of fortunate circumstances. Lou Lowery, a Marine photographer, had photographed an earlier flag raising. The opportunity for Rosenthal developed because Lt. Col. Chandler Johnson wanted a larger flag on top of Mt. Suribachi. He gave the flag to Pfc. Rene Gagnon, barely visible behind Pharmicist’s Mate Second Class John Bradley, second from the right. Rosenthal took a series of photographs of this second flag raising. He sent the film to Guam for developing, and the photograph was already widely published before he ever saw it.

That’s the correct account as Bradley and others have documented it, but the idea that the iconic image was staged will not go away. There will be several reasons for its persistence, but one of them may be that the term “staged” inadvertently touches a deep truth about iconic images, which is that they are performative. So it is that people can talk past one another: if you see a photo only as a representation, then you want to know if it is accurate; if you understand that the photo (and not the event depicted) also is a performance in a public space, then you need to appreciate how it works artistically, emotionally, symbolically . So it is, perhaps, that the author of the original article was disposed to use the term “staged,” and why Gabrick would not want to see it that way. He concludes:

Rosier’s use of the photograph to link Hayes to the larger issues he raises is faulty. The use of photographs to advance a particular point of view is acceptable only if the factual basis for the interpretation is established.

Well, yes and no. Iconic images are used to advance many points of view, most of which can’t be dismissed solely be reference to a factual basis of interpretation. More to the point, publics use photographs as both fact and fiction, documentary witness and parables for interpretation. Both are important. Both need to be true, but truth does not follow a single set of criteria, even when it seems to be something that you can see.

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