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Photographer's Showcase: Touching Strangers

“Bumping into strangers in the dark is a figure for democratic citizenship.”

— Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers, 2004

When crowded onto an elevator we strain to fix our attention straight ahead and to avoid touching one another; when we can’t avoid the touching we try to find ways to ignore that it is happening. These are habits of civic life in late modern society. Richard Renaldi’s “Touching Strangers” exhibit challenges these habits by asking us to reflect upon them within the broader citizenship of photography. The premise of his project is simple: Renaldi stops strangers on the street – strangers both to him and to one another – and asks them if they will consent to being photographed together while touching one another. His catalog of photographs helps us to see how “notions of trust, love, social conventions and taboos are expressed through body language” and thus implicate the stranger relationality fundamental to life in late modern democratic public culture.

Those in the New York area can view his exhibit at The Gallery at Hermes through May 28, 2010. For the rest you can see a selection of the exhibit here. An interview with Rinaldi is available at Conscientious Extended.

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A Show of Hands

We tend to think of oil as having relatively low viscosity, largely because most of us encounter it once it has been refined and readied for consumption. But here we see it as the sludge that it becomes after floating about in the gulf for several days – a gloppy, brown, glutinous mess that resembles nothing so much as tar. Notice how it clings to the protective rubber gloves and when it drips off it does so in globs that will attach to anything solid – rocks, sand, reefs, water reeds, marine life … what have you. And there are plenty of other pictures that make the point.

What I find most striking about this photograph, however, are the hands. These hands belong to a Greenpeace marine biologist testing the waters at the mouth of the Mississippi River where it meets the Gulf of Mexico, but of course we can’t tell any of that that from the picture itself. Rather, what we can tell is that it will be impossible for any of us to keep our hands clean as we deal with the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon accident.

The image stands in stark contrast to another photograph that appeared this past week of the Presidents and chief spokesmen for BP American, Transocean Limited, and Haliburton.

The smug expressions on their faces belie their efforts, against all credulity, to “deflect blame and responsibility for their respective companies.” But notice their hands. Folded or resting on what is probably the transcript of their prepared statements, they suggest a uniformity of indifference, perhaps even a degree of nonchalance. And note too that they are as clean as the white colors on their dress shirts. The metaphor, of course, is rich and altogether ironic. Or at least we can only hope so. If the photograph at the top of the page is correct, the sludge from Deepwater Horizon will stick to everything it touches. It would be a crime if Congress doesn’t make sure that these three all get their fair share of greasy hands.

Photo Credit: Hans Deryk/Reuters; Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Sight Gag: The Reagan Legacy

Credit: Stuart Carlson/Carlsontoons.com

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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Law and Order (in a Culture of Zero Tolerance)

At first blush, the scene is actually kind of funny, almost like something of out a Keystone Cops movie: Six security guards chasing a young man in a Philadelphia Phillies t-shirt around the outfield of Citizen’s Bank Park, incapable of corralling him. And then it happens. A slightly overweight police officer (above) aims his taser and brings him down in a flash, the young man’s arms contorted, his body thoroughly incapacitated. The fans, who were apparently chanting “Tase him, tase him!” were delighted. Players shook their heads with a bemused look that seemed to say, “what an idiot.” The body was removed and the game went on. The event, captured on U-tube, went viral and became the subject of jokes by everyone from Jay Leno to Charles Barkley to the local reporters on Fox News.

Fans running onto the field at sporting events is really nothing new. Indeed, it has become something of a ritual in a culture that continues to honor fifteen minutes (or even forty-five seconds) of celebrity and fame. These diversions are an inconvenience for those assigned to maintain order at such public gatherings and, perhaps, more so for the broadcast networks who are caught between the desire to present the sideshow to their viewers—who, after all, really want to see it—and to avoid encouraging such transgressions. The question, however, has to be, does such an inconvenience warrant the use of 50,000 volts of electricity to maintain law and order? In the City of Brotherly Love the answer appears to be yes, as the caption to the above photograph reports that the Police Commissioner concluded that “the officer acted within department guidelines, which allows officers to use tasers to arrest fleeing suspects.” But even a quick search on google makes it clear that the use of tasers hss become a regular part of a growing police state, employed not only to detain violent criminals, but also to force compliance from individuals asking unwelcome questions at political rallies and, in one instance, a 72 year old great grandmother who refused to sign her speeding ticket.

Clearly, the police need to be able to protect both the public and themselves against dangerous criminals, and just as clearly, non-lethal weapons are generally to be preferred to more lethal alternatives (although we need to be mindful of the fact that the characterization of the taser as “non-lethal” might be something of an overstatement). But as this photograph shows, the standards for affecting such “protection” have been normalized in disturbingly Orwellian terms. The young man doesn’t seem to be a threat to anyone, a point made all the more clear in the U-tube video of the spectacle. And to identify him as a “suspect” certainly stretches the meaning of that term to the outer limits of use or recognition. A more accurate term to characterize him might be “scofflaw,” but then that would hardly warrant the brutal usage of what the police now euphemistically refer to as “pain compliance.” Tasers, make not mistake, are weapons of torture, emitting as much as 120,000 volts of electricity in the name of achieving “compliance.” And what we are witnessing here is the gradual descent into a world in which “law and order” is routinized as a culture of “zero tolerance” for any and all discretions. It really ought to give us pause.

Photo Credit: Matt Slocum/AP

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Sight Gag: Corporate Responsibility in a Free Market

Credit: Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

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"Hearts and Minds" Forty Years Later

The photograph above shows a news story that doesn’t appear to have been told in the national media, notwithstanding a “sobering,” but little noted Pentagon report last week that indicated an active and growing insurgency and an Afghan government with “limited credibility.”

The line of trucks belong to NATO forces in Afghanistan. The caption for the story tells two different tales. On the one hand, it notes that the trucks were attacked and set afire “hours after NATO forces killed several insurgents and captured a Taliban sub-commander.” On the other hand, it also notes that the trucks were burned “after hundreds of people blocked a main road and set them on fire to protest what they said were civilian deaths in Logar Province.” Whether those who set the trucks on fire were part of the “growing insurgency” or simply local Afghani citizens rising up in protest against unnecessary “citizen deaths” is not clear. And that, of course, is the problem.

It is wholly possible that both tales are in some measure true, but even still the point has to be that a war fought in the name of capturing the “hearts and minds” of the people of Afghanistan seems slated for failure so long as we continue to kill Afghani citizens in the name of their own freedom and liberation. The photograph thus functions as an allegory of the frustrations of such an ill-conceived war as perceived from both sides: an intrusive formation of foreign, mobile vehicles stretching as far as the eye can see (to the limits of spatial and temporal infinity) and yet caught in a sea of flames that makes it permanently immobile. As with the rusted out refuse of previous attempts to colonize Afghanistan, the burned out trucks will no doubt sit in place for many years as visual monuments to the most recent such effort (and failure).

The war in Vietnam was also fought primarily as a battle to capture the “hearts and minds” of a national people presumably at risk of being tyrannized by an oppressive political opposition. Enacted by turns as a fiasco and a catastrophe, the Vietnam War was by all accounts an abysmal failure. One might think that we would have learned our lesson—in George Santayana’s terms, “to remember the past” lest we be forced to “repeat it”—but that would seem not to be the case as the current war in Afghanistan, now the longest war in U.S. history, is being fought with little more than the same goal in mind. It should come as little surprise that we seem destined to a similar end.

No wonder that the story this photograph shows has received so little attention.

Photo Credit: Mohammed Obaid Ormur/AP.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Sight Gag: Domus Aurea

Photo Credit: Cam Cardow/Ottawa Citizen

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Variations on the Visual Trope of Totalitarianism

The scene here is Ramallah, February 2002. The tank is Israeli and the people blocking its path with their hands raised as if under arrest are Palestinians. The photograph is part of a NYT slideshow featuring the work of the recently wheel chair bound Palestinian photojournalist Osama Silwadi, who continues to photograph Palestinian life, albeit from a “new vantage.” His work, both prior to being crippled in 2006 by two bullets that shattered his spine and subsequently, is a testament to the power of photography to document the ever present tension between the tragedy and soulfulness of human life. The image that caught my attention, however, was the one above, which features the visual trope of the tank as the symbol of the totalitarian state.

Developed by the British during WWI, the tactical and strategic capacity of the tank was revolutionized by the Germans during WW II, where it became a central element of the military strategy of “lighting warfare” known as the blitzkrieg. Known for the combination of offensive and defensive mobility, as well as its strong fire power, the tank was understood to be a formidable, if not altogether unassailable, weapon of modern warfare, and its technological development was a key feature of the Cold War “arms race.” More important to the purpose here, it was during the Cold War that the “tank” took on symbolic significance as something more than just a military weapon as it was regularly featured as an emblem of state power, typically by eastern bloc nations.

The symbolic connection of the tank to totalitarian regimes in particular was marked visually not only by its size, but more importantly, by its panoptic quality: thoroughly enclosed and sealed off from any outside observation or unwanted intrusion, the arbiters of state authority residing inside of the tank are nevertheless in position to monitor and control the outside world with near invincible power. But, of course, as powerful as they are, tanks are not invincible, just as totalitarianism is not unconquerable, and so the visual trope of the tank has developed across time to call attention to the power and capacity of unarmed (and armor less) humans to challenge and even overcome totalitarian regimes, generally in the name of human rights. The first such image to make the point might well be the photograph of revolutionaries standing atop a Soviet tank in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, though no doubt the most famous of such images would have to be of the lone individual standing down a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Silwadi’s photograph draws upon the visual trope of the tank as the signifier of totalitarianism in powerful ways, but it does it in a manner that make it importantly distinct from the famous Tiananmen Square image. Shot at a low angle, as if from the perspective of the humans beings being assaulted, Silwadi’s tank looms large, dominating both the frame and the scene it purports to represent. No faces are evident, as the tank functions as the mask of the totalitarian state, and those being imposed upon have directed their gaze away from the camera to the immediate power that challenges and confronts them. At the same time, the gun barrel is directed at the viewer in the manner of a visual demand that encourages identification with the crowd and in opposition to the authority of the tank.

By contrast, the Tiananmen Square photograph is shot from on high and at a distance, invoking an optical consciousness that James C. Scott dubs “seeing like a state.” The viewer is here insinuated as a distant observer of the scene and not an immediate participant in the drama that is unfolding. But more, note that it is a lone individual who challenges the authority of the state, and not a collectivity, and so in a sense the viewer of the image is encouraged to identify with the scene as a liberal individual. As we have argued elsewhere and extensively, the Tiananmen Square photograph activates a cultural modernism that displaces democratic forms of political display and opposition (remember that the protests in Tiananmen Square included thousands of students and nearly a million protesters in all who had organized in various groups) and plays to western conceptions of individualism and apolitical social organization. Thus, while the photograph of a man challenging a tank can function as a progressive celebration of human rights, it also risks limiting the political imagination to narrowly liberal versions of a global society.

Silwadi’s photograph confronts this logic by reinterpreting the visual trope of the totalitarian tank and reminding us that what is at stake here is not just a challenge to universal and liberalized human rights that can be observed and contested from afar, but that indeed we are all implicated in and by the presence of totalitarianism wherever it occurs … and not just as individuals but as citizens in a democratized, global public culture.

Photo Credits: Osama Silwadi/Apollo Images; Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

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Sight Gag: Tea, Anyone?

Photo Credit: All Hat No Cattle

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A Second Look: The Warrior Child

The above photograph is of a group of “young supporters of the Islamic Jihad movement” marching at a rally in Gaza City. When I posted on it earlier this month I called attention to the expression on the young boys face, noting that his expression teetered between being vacant and deadly serious, but in either case “dissociated from our expectations of an otherwise idealized world of youthful innocence.” One commenter noted, “How many of his relatives are dead, how many in prison …? Why do you ignore the context? Why do you expect an ‘idealized world of youthful experience,’ where this experience clearly has no chance?” It is a good question as it calls attention to a complexity of the photograph that my original posting assumed but failed adequately to interrogate: the sense in which the image simultaneously activates and resists the trope of “youthful innocence.”

The original point I was trying to make was that “the idealized world of youthful innocence” is a taken for granted assumption for western audiences. That assumption is conventionally animated by the visual trope of children playing as if adults. Ordinarily, the key to the effectiveness of the trope is the additional assumption that the viewer recognizes that the child has a very basic understanding of the sense in which s/he is “playing” at being an adult and is thus operating in an idealized world—a world that is free of all that would undermine or mitigate youthful innocence. The telling marker in such images is the signification of carefree joy being acted out by the playful child. In the above photograph the children are clearly playing at being adults—note the toy guns, which activate the trope for western audiences—but their facial expressions lack any sense of carefree joy, and hence the image concurrently resists the trope. And the implication, at least for western audiences, is that these aren’t so much children as warriors, thus triggering yet a different common visual trope used to distinguish the Islamic, middle eastern world from the Christian, western world: “the warrior child.”

The tension connecting the tropes of “youthful innocence” and “the warrior child” is articulated in a somewhat different fashion in this photograph from Craig F. Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo-essay, “Ian Fisher: American Soldier.”

The similarities between the two images are palpable, but it is their differences that are notable. The guns are no longer toys, as indicated by the safety plugs inserted in their barrels; and note too that the disposition of the weapons is more aggressive as they are being aimed rather than held at ease. These aren’t children playing at being soldiers, they are the real thing, however young. Attend, in this regard, to the different facial expressions depicted in each photograph. In the earlier image the lead child appears to be working hard to maintain his countenance, to appear like a serious adult, almost as if he knows he is being observed, but there is no question that he is a child; here, however, the expression on the face of the American soldier, while no less intense, nevertheless seems less affected. The eyes are cold and calculating; carefully and intently focused, they are machinelike, almost as if an extension of the weapon being aimed. It would not be hard to imagine him as a cyborg rather than a human, let alone a child. And yet the face of this teenage soldier is nevertheless childlike; both slender and smooth, it belies a physical immaturity that activates the trope of “youthful innocence” even as the photograph as a whole resists it.

In one photograph we end up with the warrior child, in the other we see a childlike warrior. The question is, what difference does the difference make?

Photo Credit: Ali Ali/EPA/WSJ; Craig F. Walker/Denver Post

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