Peter Turnley is a good friend of NCN, but more important, he was on the front line of photographers who refused the invitation to be embedded in Iraq and brought us some of the most powerful and compelling images of from both the first (1991) and second (2003) Gulf Wars. A small portfolio of his images can be seen here on the 10th anniversary of the most recent conflagration: Lest we forget.
The run up to the coronation of Pope Francis this past week was a sight to see. And I mean that in the most literal of terms. For once we get past the litany of “firsts” – first non-European Pope, first Latin American (much, no doubt, to the chagrin of Fox News, who was surely betting on an American Pope, not a Pope from the “Americas”), first Jesuit, and so on – what becomes pretty clear is that what we are witnessing is the ritualized, modernist spectacle of the medieval appointment of a divine rights monarch.
Neither rituals nor spectacles are inherently problematic as a general matter. But what is perhaps important to note in the hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs leading up to the puff of white smoke and then the new Pope’s first public appearance beneath the carefully prepared red curtain that shrouds the Loggia of the Blessings of St. Peter’s Basillica are the ways in which the ritual is colonized by modern mass media technologies to move backwards in time towards the re-feudalization of religious and political power and an era when the public had no visual presence at all. It is a spectacle of absolute sovereignty.
The photograph below is telling in this regard, as it is shot from the Pope’s eye view looking out upon the masses from his balcony. Well above the people below and at some distance the Pope emerges deus ex machina, as through a proscenium arch; God’s lieutenant on earth, he simply appears as if from behind a curtain to be seen and little more. Indeed, there is even the sense in which he need not be seen at all, as the ritual itself guarantees his divine appearance, material or not.
For all of its appeals to social justice, the modern Church remains a secretive, hierarchical, medieval institution, its political machinations hidden from public view, and so there is probably nothing all that strange about this. It is not as if the Catholic Church has ever endorsed or contributed to the emergence of what Jüergen Habermas referred to as the “bourgeois public sphere” or the ensuing late modern politics that recognize the popular sovereignty of multiple publics. What is odd, however, is how the contemporary western mass media have played along, emphasizing—and in its way, valorizing and endorsing— the ritualized spectacle of what has to be among the least democratic, western institutions to wield legitimate social and political power.
But for all that, the occasional photograph slips through to resist the dominant narrative and remind us that an active visual public persists and that such spectacles are often fictions contrived for our edification. As an example, consider this photograph of a Roman Centurion, surely amongst the fiercest warriors of the ancient world, now consigned to hawking bottled water and roasted pork sandwiches made to your specifications in Rome’s Piazza di Pietra.
Rome and the Vatican are not identical, of course, but that this image has made its way into international circulation at the same time that the carefully calculated ritual and spectacle of Pope Francis’s impending enthronement are taking place and it should surely give us pause to consider what we have been seeing—at least on the public side of the curtain—and how we are implicated in it as spectators.
Photo Credit: Eric Gaillard/Reuters; Alessia Paradis/ABACAUSA; Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Credit: Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press
Sight Gag is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture. These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.
Guest Correspondent: Emily Dianne Cram
A fair skinned white woman pivots casually in the middle of a crowded urban sidewalk, her hands tucked away inside mint green shorts. Her thumbs steadily line the top of her hips, as she casts a flat look somewhere beyond the frame of the photograph. And even though she occupies the center of the image, adorned with vibrant colors and tight fitting summer chic, her body is not necessarily the curious object of the photograph. We might keep our focus on her as we imagine what circumstances created this moment of pause—perhaps she’s a tourist taking in the sites or maybe even a fashion model. After all, her pose in this moving public space breaks with the uniform walking of the crowd behind her, dressed in black business suits and other muted tones. Yet, even though the camera invites our attention to her body, it also calls attention to the grimaced look on the face of the spectator to her right who fixates her disapproving gaze on the woman’s body. It is difficult to identify the valence of her expression. Perhaps she disapproves of such a bold aesthetic on a female body that violates norms of slender and seamlessness. Or perhaps it is a look of disgust generated by a body’s excess and its inability to be properly contained by standardized clothing.
I encountered Hailey Morris-Cafiero ‘s photograph series “Wait Watchers” after a Facebook friend shared a blog link describing her project. “Wait Watchers” relies on the photographic potential of everyday life, and documents the encounters Morris-Cafiero’s body has with strangers in public spaces. After staging a camera in crowded public scenes, Morris-Cafiero waits to be looked at as the camera documents policing glances like the one above. As I scrolled through a number of photographs, I felt a stunning sense of familiarity in each scene, as a fat woman who also often catches the looks of others in public policing my muffin top.* The photos created a strong sense of identification with the experience of being looked at in such a way, and encouraged me to share the photos with my own Facebook network. Others “liked” and shared the blog as well, drawing comments from others ranging from the need to reflect on their own practices of public looking to the ethics of such an artistic project. But more, I was caught by repetition in the claim that the stranger in each image could be looking at something else, not necessarily directly at Morris-Cafiero’s body, and thus, not engaging in an act of ridicule with certainty.
The desire for certainty of the alignment between relations of looking and being looked-at evokes what Ariella Azoulay terms a professional way of engaging with photography. The professional gaze seeks little more than to identify and categorize. However, even though Morris-Cafiero’s photo series asks for public witness to her experiences, to say the photos simply seek to shame the particular individuals caught looking on camera misses the project’s power.
In this photo, one not featured in the initial blog, we gain a different sense of the stakes of the project. Here, the camera’s presence is manifest: two young teens moving through what seems to be a tourist space stare directly at the camera witnessing a crowded sidewalk. Here, their movements are as much on display as Morris-Cafiero, who seems to be adjusting the lens of her camera or bending her body towards the ground below her. Meanwhile, another young tourist looks in the direction of Morris-Cafiero, covering a smirk and an emerging laugh with her sleeve covered hand. The gesture demonstrates the limits of performing bourgeois propriety, as she attempts to contain and privatize what is likely to be an act of publicly shaming Morris-Cafiero.
Both photos featured here draw attention to habits of looking that make bodies appear strange in public. More broadly, the project lends focus to encounters with bodies constituted as out of place because they violate aesthetic norms or because they violate dominant logics of how bodies should properly occupy public spaces. Morris-Cafiero’s body interrupts the efficient flow and movement of others on sidewalks or in alleyways as much as she violates fashionable gender regimes.
And so even as the question of certainty animated by the professional gaze might motivate us to contemplate the motive of onlookers (is she really being mocked?), those questions matter less than how the photographic spectator is asked to intervene in the problem that the photo series suggests: how does one engage with the social relation of looking and lookism? Morris-Cafiero’s project illustrates how relations of looking can operate as both sites of surveillance of strange bodies for their laughable deviance and as a mode of looking back, making these disciplining gestures the object on display. By making relations of looking visible to photographic spectators, Morris-Cafiero’s is both spectator and actor. How one intervene in these two fields depends on the spectator. Because the photographic spectator is also witness to these acts, the question is, what is our obligation? The professional gaze is a possibility, yet it diminishes the potential of the civic as a mode of transforming the social conditions that make these looking relations possible. And so do we pity Morris-Cafiero? Empathize with the sheer banality of these moments? Shame the watchers? Seek compassion?
We will have to wait and watch.
*NOTE: “Fat” and “fatness” are often evoked as derogatory ways of describing bodies in gendered, raced, and classed terms. My use of these categories operates in tandem with writers, thinkers, and activists working to understand fat embodiments beyond the registers of medicalization and aesthetic norms.
Emily Dianne Cram is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. She can be contacted at emcram@indiana.edu.
I have been reading a good bit about “big data” lately (e.g., here). The basic assumption is that when you expand the scale large enough last century’s concern with sampling as the basis for prediction becomes irrelevant, the value of accuracy or “rigid exactitude” is mitigated by the overall messiness of large data sets, and correlation becomes more important than causation. The result is a capacity to see things we could never see before, such that algorithms based upon 45 carefully calculated search terms arrived at after processing 450 million mathematical models and based upon what individuals were searching related to “coughs,” “fevers” and the like allowed Google to pinpoint the path of a flu epidemic much more effectively than all the doctors in the world with tongue depressors and mouth swabs or the CDC with its wide ranging national networks of information. We have always relied upon data, but “scale” it seems is the operative principle of the brave new world of judgment and decision making.
Scale, of course, has always been one of the things that photography marks particularly well. Animated by a technology that presumes a realist aesthetic, the photograph can call our attention to the relationship between large and small through the presentation of provocative comparisons and contrasts. Consider the photograph above. The caption notes that we are viewing the silhouette of a small jet cast against the background of a rising moon in Arizona. The contrast in scale—the enormity of the moon and tiny speck of a jet—invites the viewer to consider the hubris in claims like “man is the measure of all things,” or at the least it encourages us to recognize the irony in such claims. But the photograph enables other considerations of scale as well. As large as we know the moon to be, and as small as we know even the largest jet to be, the moon here might be seen to pale in the comparison; large, yes, but not so large that we can’t imagine blocking it out its view completely with relatively small number of jets. And the point is, of course, that the value of scale is riven by the usages to which we put it and the questions we seek to answer. This seems to be an attribute of the emphasis on scale that is always put on display by the particularity of the photograph, but is somehow too often ignored or forgotten in the more abstract, quantitative representation of data.
And there is more, as the photograph below indicates:
Once again scale is the operative principle as large and small are juxtaposed with one another, as the large, former NBA basketball player dwarfs the little prince. Or is it the other way around? Does North Korea’s Supreme Leader dwarf the fading sports celebrity? In the end, both readings of the image operate simultaneously such that the photograph challenges the particular meaning of scale by calling attention to the carnivelesque relationship between two public figures in ways that suggest that the stature of neither is very considerable.
Scale is important, to be sure, but it is best not to lose sight of the ways in which it always operates as an optic of critical judgment and in that register the data—big or small—is always subordinate to a more complex register of interpretation and usage.
Photo Credit: Charlie Riedel/AP; North Korean Central News Agency via European Pressphoto Agency
Photo Credit: Michelle Siu/AP
Sight Gag is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture. These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.
The International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) has announced its call for its 2013 conference dedicated to “The Public Image” with a focus on the ways in which visual sociology can meet the challenge to bring a sociological understanding of social life to a vibrant, active and diverse public, emphasizing an open dialogue with audiences beyond the academy. Themes covered this year includ
The conference will be held from July 8-10, 2013 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Abstracts of no more than 250 words can be submitted directly to panel chairs (listed here) via email writing “IVSA 2013 – Paper Submission” in the subject line. The deadline for abstract submissions is March 31, 2013. For general information please enquiries please contact ivsacucr@gold.ac.uk.
Photo Credit: Gabriella Demczuk
Underlying the debate over sequestration is the question of whether or not we should have “big government.” By some accounts big government does very little for us and we would be better served by allowing smaller, local governments to regulate and address our collective needs. Those who make this argument, such as, say, the Governors of Texas and Louisiana, miss the irony of seeking and accepting federal aid in the wake of disasters of one sort or another, but the photograph above makes a somewhat different point.
I came across the above image as part of an exhibit that is about to go on display at the National Archives (March 8-September 8, 2013) and which recalls “Documerica.” Sponsored by the EPA in the 1970s, Documerica was modeled after Roy Stryker’s 1930s “photography unit,” which was housed in the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) and charged with the task of photographing the effects of the depression on rural America. The FSA photographs were shot mostly in black and white and the results are considered to be one of the treasures of American documentary photography—the vast archive of 170,000 negatives are now housed in the Library of Congress. The EPA images are in vibrant color rather than black and white, and so they contrast with most of the work of the FSA photographers, but they too are an important historical resource as they stand in as a visual reminder of the state of the U.S. environment at the point at which the country was first becoming conscious of the effects of consumer and industrial waste on the national ecology.
This photograph foregrounds abandoned automobiles and other rubbish rusting in a five acre pond filled with acid water and oil. In the background we see the big sky blend into a majestic mountain range. The contrast between dark and light which distinguishes the foreground and the background is too pronounced to ignore, and framed as a landscape it is clear that while the mountains are too far away to identify in any exact way, they are nevertheless close enough to know that the distance can be traversed without too much trouble. Nature and culture are in disharmony, and it is clear where the threat resides. The photograph was shot near Ogden, Utah in April of 1974, and the pond is close enough to both the Great Salt Lake and a wildlife refuge that, if left unattended, it would have contaminated both in relatively short order. As luck would have it, the EPA interceded and supervised its clean up. But of course it had nothing to do with “luck”! It had to do with a big government agency attending to matters with a landscape eye’s view of the common good—seeing, as it were, not just the trees but the forest.
Big government might not always be the best way to handle all domestic social and political issues, but to argue against it as a simple matter of principle would leave us with little more than the image above. And that would surely be a tragedy … in the long run, if not sooner.
Credit: Bruce McAllister/National Archives/Records of the EPA
Credit: Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press
Sight Gag is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture. These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.
With sequestration staring us in the face and all of the teeth gnashing concerning the possibility that the Department of Defense will be confronted with $500 billion dollars in budget cuts over the next ten years—no small chunk of change, but nevertheless a relatively small part of the overall DOD budget—I was intrigued by the photographs, such as the one above, coming out of Syria that show the primitive and makeshift weaponry employed by the Free Syrian Army.
The slingshot or catapult can be traced to ancient and medieval times, but in the contemporary era it is usually associated with rebel or guerilla warriors (think of all of the images we regularly see of Palestinian youth using slingshots to hurl rocks at Israelis), in large measure because it requires so little in resources to make it work. State sponsored armies have budgets that can be cut, rebels and guerillas … not so much. And so the later cobble together whatever is available, converting the objects of ordinary life into weapons of war.
It is this last fact that bears some attention. Elsewhere we have talked about how war has been normalized by being made more or less invisible in the United States, such that the accouterments of warfare have been converted into everyday objects that appear to have no connection to war (think of Jeeps and Humvees, or the way in which camouflage has become something of a fashion statement, not to mention the AKC-47 assault rifle cast as a hunting rifle), but here we see everyday objects employed to the ends of death and destruction. This too is an act of normalization, but one that runs in the opposite direction, putting war on display as quotidian, making it visible as a normal part of the everyday experience.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this inversion, but I am reminded of Elaine Scarry’s characterization of torture as “world unmaking,” converting the objects of everyday life into instruments of pain. Doctors become administrators of pain, refrigerators and filing cabinets become bludgeons, bathtubs becomes miniature torture chambers, etc. Watching someone creating weapons out of everyday objects for their own use is not exactly the same thing, since there is no clear identification of torturer and tortured; then again it is arguably all the more torturous inasmuch as those producing and using such weapons seem to have little real choice in the matter as they become the active agents in unmaking the world around them. It is, in its way, the most perfect and efficient form of torture; a perversion of a perversion in which the torturer and the tortured are one in the same person.
I was struck by the broad implications of this thought when looking at the picture below:
Once again the photograph is of members of the Free Syrian Army. And once again the soldiers we see are involved in producing a homemade weapon of war. Here, however, there is no pretense of primitive weaponry; characterized in the caption as an “anti-aircraft weapon,” it is thoroughly modern, even if it does not display the most sophisticated and up-to-the-minute technology. Indeed the bright colors of this image suggest a degree of contemporaneity that is muted by the drab shadows and colors of the photograph of the catapult. But what is most striking is the use of a smart phone to arm and guide the missile. Here we have an everyday object—and an item that virtually everyone reading this post has in their pocket—that has made it possible to create community across time and space, allowing us, as Ma Bell used to say, “to reach out and touch someone.” It does that here as well, of course, but only after perverting the normal and ordinary usage of an otherwise salutary and everyday instrument of communication.
The United States is a far distance from Syria in just about everyway that one can imagine, economically, politically, culturally, and so on. And yet, looking at these images—almost as if through Alice’s looking glass— has to give us pause as we recognize our own pretenses and patterns of acclimating ourselves to the visual everdayness of a culture of war.
Credits: Asmaa Wagulh/ Reuters; Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters. Elaine Scarry’s provocative discussion of the relationship between torture and war appears in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
