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Sight Gag: Class Warfare Hustle

Credit: connect the dots usa

Sight Gags” 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.

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The Public Mirror

The camera, we say, shows us the world it is pointed at.  A mechanical representation of the world, it nevertheless presumes a degree of agency in the assumption that the camera lens fragments and frames the world, and someone has done the pointing.  In this sense, it is an art.  The mirror, however, presumes an enhanced degree of objectivity and a  relative degree of passivity inasmuch as it literally reflects back everything within its purview. Lacking any obvious agency it is assumed to be fundamentally inartistic and thus arguably more “authentic.”   Or at least that’s one theory of the relationship between the gazes of the camera’s lens and the mirror.  But what happens when we photograph the mirror’s gaze?

Photographs of the mirror’s gaze are not uncommon and they are offer provocative examples of what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “showing seeing,” a pedagogical strategy for challenging the boundaries between nature and art, or what we might call the “real” and the “image.”  The two photographs below are a case in point.

This first image is of Palestinians “reflected in mirrors as they sat outside a store in Gaza City.”

The mirrors have been affixed to a wall, one set within an octagonal frame, the other a simple shard of glass.  Importantly, they are triangulated and connected to one another by what appears to be a broken picture frame, its matted image slipping out of sight.  The difference between mirror and photograph are thus accented; mirrors can be framed, just like photographs, but even when the mirror’s frame is broken or missing, as with the shard of glass, it continues to relentlessly reflect its gaze back to the viewer.  But even as the difference is underscored it is effaced, for what the photograph we are looking at shows is how the mirror is a medium for representing social relationality, framed by its very placement on a wall in a public place.  Put differently, mirrors—like photographs—are an artifice by which we take account of our self presentation to the world, and that abides whether the mirror is mounted in our private hallway or in the agora of public relations.

The point is made somewhat differently in this second image of people “reflected at a shopping center in downtown Tokyo.”

Here, the photograph displays the mirrors reflections of a shopping center as a fragmented panorama of people coming and going in every which way.  Because the glass is cut in a variety of geometric forms that are then welded together at odd different angles, the reflection is simultaneously real and imaginary.  Each fragment (or shard?) is accurate in its representation, but the articulation of those fragments leaves us with a scene that is chaotic if not altogether incoherent.  And so, once again, the viewer is confronted with the artificial—and hence artistic—representation of the mirror’s gaze.  And once again, the very public location of the mirrors puts us in position to take account of ourselves as social beings.

That social self in these two images seems to be very different, and there is no doubt that that difference bears careful consideration.  But the bigger point here is how these photographs of the mirror’s gaze remind us of the similarities between cameras and mirrors and the ways in which they function as artistic, reflexive spaces for monitoring ourselves, whether in private or in public.

Photo Credits: Mohammed Salem/Reuters; Koji Sashahara/AP

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Sight Gag: European Geography 101

Credit: Punditkitchen.com

Sight Gags” 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.

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The In/visible Costs of War

Among the most tragic costs of war are surely the suicides of veterans who appear to have returned home safely from the battle front, often without any visible injuries, only to be haunted by ghosts that make life unlivable.  We have commented on the problem in the past, but the magnitude of the problem was underscored yesterday by Nicholas Kristoff who noted that “[for] every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying of their own hands.”  You have to linger over that last sentence to let it sink in.

The sheer numbers are simply stunning:  one veteran suicide every 80 minutes, more than 6,500 per year or 24.1 per 100,000 (a ratio that is larger by more than a multiple of two for the general population which hovers around 11 per 100,000).  As Kristoff reminds us, the annual rate of veteran suicides is larger than the total number of U.S. military killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.  The tragedy, of course, is not just the loss of life, though that is tragic enough, but that so much of such loss could be avoided with therapy that is simply not available or forthcoming.  But even demands for access to more and adequate medical and psychological treatment, as true as they are, miss an important point:  the problem is in large measure a function of its in/visibility.

To mark a problem as in/visible is to notice the sense in which a phenomenon is simultaneously (and paradoxically) visible and invisible, available to sight but unseeable.  Sometimes it is a function of how the extraordinary is normalized, and sometimes it is a function of how the conventions of vision—of seeing and being seen—direct (or misdirect) our attention. The Ashley Gilbertson photograph that accompanied Kristoff’s editorial is much to the point.  The image is of a mother who lost a son to suicide, though it is not officially recognized as such by Veteran services, who treat the death as an accidental drug overdose.  That they could not see—or chose not to see—the death as a suicide is unclear.  What is clear is the mother’s grief as she struggles to maintain physical contact with her absent son by connecting with his things, including his shirt which retains his scent.  Her grief is tangible, made all the more so by the stark contrast of black and white tones of the image and the oblique  angle that simultaneously marks the viewer as a spectator even as it pulls him/her into the scene, and it is impossible not to empathize with this mother’s pain.  But of course, there is nothing in the photograph that distinguishes her pain from that of any other mother who has lost a child to war, whether from a sniper’s bullet or an IED.  And yet her grief and agony are different, which is not to say that it is more or less than that of others; but that difference, however intuitive, however palpable, however visible, cannot be seen.  And therein lies the problem.

Veteran suicides are not something that we don’t know about.  The numbers have been reported in the past.  And individual cases have been remarked upon from time to time.  And yet the problem itself lingers in a nether world of the in/visible, a region of consciousness that makes it difficult to recognize it as a cost of war that requires not just our empathy, but our active attention.

Photo Credit: Ashley Gilbertson/VII

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Sight Gag: If Only It Were Funny

Sight Gags” 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.

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The New Normal

Perhaps one of the most famous photographs to come out of World War II—or any war—is the image of a nurse and sailor kissing in New York’s Times Square.  The “Times Square Kiss” is notable for many reasons and not least for the way in which it models the egalitarianism of the war effort (both sailor and nurse are in uniform), as well as for way in which it channels the public celebration of the end of the war (it was VJ day) through the spontaneous, heterosexual kiss of two anonymous individuals as they return to the “normalcy” of public life.  If war marks the enforced separation of the sexes and uniformed repression of the yearnings of private life, the subordination of Eros to Thanatos, the “Times Square Kiss” signifies the release of long suppressed passions.

Photographs of returning sailors, soldiers, and marines kissing their loved ones upon return from overseas duty have become a photojournalistic convention and it is difficult to look at the many such images and not see their tribute to the image of the sailor and nurse in Times Square.  Most such photos are full-bodied shots; the image above, however, taken recently in Washington, D.C. at the return of the 4th Civil Affairs Group, 2nd Marine Division from a 7 month deployment in Afghanistan, focuses only on a pair of feet, and in that fact the photograph seems to tell something of a different story.

There is no way to know for sure that they are kissing, of course, but the fact that her right foot rises above the floor and her weight seems to be firmly on her left foot suggests that she is leaning up and into a taller lover as if in an embrace.  The contrast between heels and combat boots implies that this is a heterosexual kiss, just as with the original “Times Square Kiss,’ but nevertheless ambiguity reigns as even female Marines would surely wear combat boots.  And more, photographs of public homosexual kisses between returning veterans and their loved ones is no longer a taboo (see here and here).  If nothing else, then, the photograph gestures to the possibility of shifting mores within the public culture, or at the least to the uncertainty of otherwise longstanding stereotypes of cultural normalcy.

The primary difference between this photograph and the “Times Square Kiss,” and here there is no ambiguity, is the privacy of the scene being represented.  And that privacy is marked in multiple ways.  To begin, and most obviously, there is nothing in the image that would indicate that this is a public space.  The flooring appears to be some kind of tile designed to look like marble, but it also has an indistinct, institutional quality about it that suggests that this could be just about anywhere—and nowhere in particular.  More to the point, there is no indication of a viewing or witnessing public of any kind.  The caption to the photograph notes that 35 Marines from this unit returned on this day, but of course there is no evidence of them whatsoever in the image.  In all likelihood they too are engaged in kisses and embraces with loved ones, but if this photograph is to be an index of the event they too are in all likelihood involved in personal, individuated celebrations.  The point is accentuated by the contrast between the combat boots and the high heels, both showing the scuff marks of normal, everyday wear that mitigates the distinction between military and civilian life.  While the anonymity of the full-bodied kissers in the original photograph underscored their status as individuals standing in for the public at-large, here the solitary focus on their shoes identifies them as private individuals representing only themselves in a closed and private universe.  Nor perhaps should this surprise us all that much.  After all, the war in Afghanistan is the longest war in the nation’s history, and given that there is neither public consensus as to what our mission there is nor clarity regarding when it will actually end—promised schedules notwithstanding—it should come as no surprise that there is no public witnessing or celebration of such returns.

The original “Times Square Kiss” was often captioned “The Return to Normalcy” and here we might be witnessing something like the “The New Normalcy.”  Whether we want to read that as a salutary world of changing mores concerning gender relations or as an increasingly frail, privatized world in which the public exercises no voice at all in such matters is a matter of what we choose to see.

Photo Credit: Staff Sgt. Brittany E. Jones/USMC

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Sight Gag: All Hail the Independent Judiciary


Credit: Darryl Cagle

Sight Gags” 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.

 

 

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The “True” Colors of War

Photographs of child combatants in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have become so common as to be almost a convention of war photography, and as such it is all too easy to see past them with little more than a tired nod of recognition (if even that). Richard Mosse’s Infra project, which focuses on nomadic rebels in the jungles of the Congo, challenges such nonchalance by disrupting our normal patterns of looking.

Mosse achieves this effect by using Aerochrome, a now discontinued infrared film that was originally produced by Kodak in 1942.  Aerochrome is a false-color reversal film designed, according to Kodak, “for various aerial photographic applications, such as vegetation and forestry surveys … monitoring where infrared discriminations may yield practical results.”  More to the point, it was intended for military purposes and in particular camouflage detection as it rendered the reflections of infrared and green typical of healthy foliage in strong red tones, making it stand out against the façade of dead and dying leaves—often seen in diluted magenta tones—used to conceal the enemy. In short, its purpose was to make the invisible visible.

The camera is generally understood to be an objective technology, recording only what is presented before its lens.  But of course that doesn’t mean that it always shows all that there is to see, even within its limited focus.  Infrared, for example, is invisible to the human eye and, indeed, it is also invisible to the camera unless it is filtered by an appropriate medium like infrared film.  When such film is used, however, the ordinarily invisible becomes visible, and as the photograph above indicates, it does so in pronounced ways that force us to look again at what we are seeing—to acknowledge what our normal capacity for seeing fails to recognize.  In this case, the shift from “real” colors to infrared casts the scene as surreal and thus encourages us to reconsider what it is that we are looking at.  Notice here how the muted, purple tint of the boy’s hat and pants blend with both his brown skin and with the magenta foliage in the background. The Sponge Bob t-shirt, which otherwise might have been the primary focus of our attention, now fades slightly from view as the jarring relationship between the boy and the environment is enhanced.  And as he becomes more closely identified with the “natural” palette of the apparently borderline healthy foliage, the stresses and strains of the war on him become more pronounced as well. Note too how the infrared reflections contrast with and underscore the black metal of his weapon, an object which now stands out as visually discordant and warrants more attention.

Mosse characterizes his photographs as something of a return to a pre-realist romanticism, but inasmuch as he relies on the mechanical technology of the camera to record everything that it can see, he is actually remaining consistent to a fault with the photojournalist’s commitment to an objective, realist aesthetic.  At the same time, however, by pushing the camera to to the full extent of its objective and realist capabilities he highlights simultaneously the technological limitations and the artistry of every photograph.  And more, he reminds us that while war’s true colors are not always easily visible to the naked eye that fact does not render them insignificant or inconsequential; and more, it does not absolve us of the responsibility to see what might otherwise appear to be invisible.

Photo Credit: Richard Mosse (North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2011)

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The Invisibility of Slow Violence

With global demand on oil at an all time high and with the current volatility in the Middle East it is not hard to understand why oil is understood as the natural resource most likely to lead to increasingly pronounced international instabilities, including war and terrorist activities, in the coming years. And yet there is an equal if not more serious global scarcity facing us: a shortage of fresh water. The problem seems to exist primarily outside of the U.S., as indicated in the photograph of a cow carcas from Mexico which is suffering its worst drought in 70 years, though the Drought Mitigation Center reports that 12% of the U.S. experienced “exceptional drought conditions” in the summer of 2011 and more than 40% of all states faced abnormal dryness or drought.

Photographs of carcasses are something of a visual trope for drought conditions, and images like the one above are numerous.  Collectively, they function as a spectacle that directs attention to the sense that drought is the major problem that faces us with respect to water shortages, and given the effects of recent global warming patterns it is not an altogether unreasonable concern.  But equally problematic—and maybe more so—is the more invisible, and thus less spectacular, “slow violence” produced by usage patterns that place stress upon both ecosystems and socio-economic relations.  It is notable, for example, that the average U.S. citizen is responsible for the consumption of 2,000 gallons of water a day, twice the amount of most citizens in other parts of the world, and that a pound of beef—a staple of U.S. diets—requires close to 1,800 gallons of water, while a pound of chicken requires approximately 460 gallons of water to produce and a pound of soy beans requires only 216 gallons of water.  The effects of such dietary choices on both the ecosystem and worldwide social economies are notable, but of course they defy easy visual representation let alone the spectacle of dead carcasses and dried up and cracked river beds.

Of equal concern are the pollution effects produced by neoliberal economies.  Hydraulic fracking is a process used to extract natural gas from reservoir rock formations and shale.  It is an effective method for tapping deep natural gas reserves, but it comes at the cost of injecting millions of gallons of chemical-laced water under high pressure into the earth. Notwithstanding the pressure that this places on demand, there is the question of polluting the aquifer and in particular of contaminating private wells and reservoirs with high levels of benzene, a known carcinogen.  The issue is currently being contested by the natural gas industry and the EPA but clearly part of the problem is how does one know the problem when one sees it?

Perhaps the answer is to just look!  Take for example the photograph above of a woman in western Pennsylvania who fears that her water has been contaminated by a nearby natural gas drilling operation.  State officials report that tests show the water to be safe, and the local gas company which had been delivering drinking water to local households has indicated that they will no longer be making such deliveries.  And perhaps they are right, though judging from what we can see coming out of the tap I’d be inclined to invite them over one afternoon for a tall cool drink of tap water to discuss it.  The resulting photo op might not prove to be spectacular in the manner of a dead carcass, but it might nevertheless make the point.

Photo Credit:  Stringer/Reuters; Keith Srakocic/AP

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The Modern Condition

It has been a full year since Japan was overwhelmed by an earthquake and tsunami and like clockwork the major media slideshows have responded with a series of “then” and “now” photographs (e.g., here, here, and here) marking the slow but steady progress of an advanced society—in many regards a society much like our own—as it returns from utter devastation to a bustling, self-sustaining economy.  It has not fully returned, but it is on the path to recovery and the comparisons surely invite our sympathy and admiration.  In January we saw a similar set of visual comparisons (e.g., here) on the one year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, but with this difference: while it appears that Haiti has recovered some from the disaster, it continues to be an impovrished, utterly dependent, “other world” nation that invites neither our identification nor our sympathy so much as our pity.

The differences between Japan and Haiti are signified in a multiplicity of ways, not least in how the devastation in Japan seems to have been largely structural, effecting roads, bridges, buildings, and other forms of physical property, whereas the devastation in Haiti has been more social and economic, exacerbating an already starving, unemployed, uneducated, and generally impecunious population.  The above photograph is telling in this regard.  It is a photograph of lost photographs collected in a local school gymnasium in Natori, Japan, waiting for their owners to seek them out and recover them.  Some are quite obviously old, perhaps even antique, and thus mark a sense of historical continuity that spans generations and thus mitigates the impact of the more recent and comparatively minor “then”/”now” dialectic that commemorates no more than a span of twelve months.  But perhaps more importantly, these photographs are obviously cherished items, their value signified not just by the fact that they are framed and were thus objects of display in the home, but because they were patiently and laboriously culled from the detritus left behind by the earthquake and tsunami and collected with the hope that they would be found by their respective owners.

Collection centers such as the one above can be found throughout Japan, and some are down right enormous as in the photograph below which identifies a site that contains more than 250,000 photographs .  And the point should be clear: more than lost property, these lost photographs are quite clearly significant momento mori, cultural artifacts that identify the society that takes them and preserves them as a modern, technologically sophisticated, bourgeois civilization (not that one has to be bourgeois to take and keep photographs, and the practice of snapshot photography cuts across all economic classes where it is an established cultural convention, but it rarely occurs in societies that lack an established middle-class).

And so it is that when we turn to retrospectives of Haiti we don’t find the preservation of family photographs at all.  That is not to say that photographs are unimportant, but as with the image below, they signify not an established, modern cultural practice, but rather a modernist intervention of sorts.

Here a Haitian woman shows a photograph of herself as she was pulled from the rubble of a house that had fallen upon her. The photograph was taken by an AP photographer and then given to her.  It is clear that she values it, but importantly it is more a curiosity—or perhaps a marker of humanitarian aid—than a conventional cultural artifact, and as such it designates the society in which she lives as pre-technological if not in fact premodern.  One finds a similar curiosity and intrigue displayed and accented in photographs that show Haitian children (here and here) being introduced to cameras and photography by the Art in All of Us project.

The simple point would be to notice how two societies are distinguished by their attitudes towards photographic technology: one modern and mature, the other premodern and either immature or innocent, but in any case defined as childlike and needy.  But perhaps more important is the way in which the photographs above function in each instance as media that model social relations, inviting us to see and be seen as members of a social order driven by the differences that simultaneously separate us and connect us. That, perhaps more than anything, defines the modern condition.

Photo Credits:  Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images; Toru Hanai/Reuters; Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo

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