In U.S. culture at least, the homestead is a valued possession, in many ways a marker of citizenship, but more perhaps an indication of one’s roots in a community.  And so it is, that when we face a wave of tornadoes, as we just did in the South and the Midwest, the conventional outpouring of photographs testify not just to the seemingly random and arational forces of nature or to the ways in which communities seem to emerge spontaneously to help one another,  but also to what counts as loss.  And at the top of that list is the home.

Some such pictures are horrifying, as when a house has been literally upended and sits on its roof, and others are simply stupefying, as when we see half of a house thoroughly obliterated and the remainder in pristine condition with books still sitting on the shelf or cupcakes carefully ordered in anticipation of a child’s birthday party.  But most poignant, I think, are the photographs that focus our attention on front stoops and foundations, the remnants of a domicile that are simultaneously absent and present.

The photograph above is an example of what I have in mind.  I have no idea what the house that sat there looked like.  It was no doubt small, but nevertheless substantial, and the cement stoop implies that whoever built it intended for it to last.  That the tornado could destroy everything but the stoop is an indication of its power, to be sure, but in its own way it is also an indication of its weakness and limitations. It could obliterate that which stood in its way, but it could not remove the foundations which remain perhaps to be built upon once again.  And because the foundation remains, one can imagine what the landscape might look like in another year or so when the debris has been removed and a new house has been erected

Photographs, of course, are a record of the past. In their own way they are an archive of death, of things that once were and are no more.  And this is so, no less of a happy family snapshot than of images of violence and disaster—whether natural or manmade.  And when we treat them as only markers of a dead past they can range from being be  richly painful to anesthetizing to melancholic.  But when we look at them closely, proactively, they can be a prod to imagine a different future, less markers of death than of the possibility of rejuvenation and rebirth.

I think maybe that is why I find the photograph below so enticing.  Perhaps not a stairway to heaven, but at least a reminder that however subject we are to the whims of nature and other forces beyond our control there is always at least the possibility of an optimistic future just beyond our sight.  And in any case, if we don’t look for it, if we don’t try to imagine it, it is likely that we will never achieve it.

Photo Credits:  Scott Olsen/Getty; Eric Thayer/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Still life photography, the photographic depiction of inanimate objects, is arguably the genre that provides the photographer with the most flexibility in controlling the conditions of his or her practice.  In the typical still life photograph the variables of light, space, and time are all subject to the photographer’s volition.  Even with its close kin, the portrait, the photographer is at the mercy of the cooperation of the subject being photographed.  But in a still life the object of attention lacks any will.  As such, and perhaps more than in any other photographic genre, the still life photograph underscores the epistemological tension—perhaps even a paradox—that rests at photography’s claim to be a medium of representation:  on the one hand, it relies upon the realist aesthetic that underwrites our faith in the transparency and truth of mechanical reproduction (however limited they might be), and on the other hand, it relies on the artistry of the photographer him or herself.

It is probably because the still life photograph embodies this tension so clearly that we rarely find such images in photojournalistic venues that tend to privilege the realist aesthetic over the artistry of the photographer.  But of course sometimes such photographs work their way past editorial gatekeepers.  And so we have the image above which recently appeared in a slide show titled “Syria’s Long, Bloody Uprising.”  The caption reads, “A slice of bread and a tomato sit next to a rocket at a position manned by Free Syrian Army Rebels in Idlib on February 22, 2012.”

As is conventional for still life photographs, the caption is altogether minimalist, purporting to tell us no more and no less than is patently obvious in the image itself.  And in this sense the caption reinforces the realist aesthetic of the image, for clearly we are looking at a rocket, a tomato and a slice of bread as they “sit” next to one another. But, of course, no sooner than we acknowledge the correspondence between caption and image that problems emerge.  The first and most obvious problems is that technically speaking objects don’t “sit,” they are placed; and whether the placement was effected by the photographer or someone else the point is that their proximity to one another has to be accounted for as something other than objective, self-determination.

The second problem is more interesting, for the caption actually gives the lie to thinking of this as a still life photograph at all, as it situates the three objects not just in in relationship to one another, but in relationship  to a particular place.  And more, that place is not just a geographical location (Idlib), but a subject position “manned by Free Syrian Army rebels.” And of course now the proximity of the three objects to one another becomes all the more significant, for it invites the viewer to consider not just the relationship between objects that give life (food) and objects that take life away (weapons of destruction), but also to sympathize with those who rely upon such simple (indeed, almost primitive) and natural objects.

The larger significance of the photograph and its caption has less to do with how it coaches a political identification with the Free Syrian Army, however much and however effectively it might do that, and more to do with reminding us that all photographs operate epistemologically at the tension between what is mechanically reproduced (what is actually there) and what the photographer artistically creates (how we are invited to view it).  In short, it is a notice that photojournalism is fundamentally a mode of public art and it behooves us to attend to its artistry even when the conventions of photographic representation might otherwise discourage us from doing so.

Photo Credit:  Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

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