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The Birds’ Eyes’ View

 

Earlier this week Hariman commented on how the camera aids our fundamental desire to anthropomorphize animals, to see them “as being like us,” by directing our attention to their eyes—the windows to the soul—which allow a special point of identification and contact between humans.  And the evidence is pretty compelling, made all the more so when we consider the obverse, i.e., photographs that underscore the zoomorphic representation of humans as if they were animals.

The photograph here is of “Michael Lantzy, 55, and some pigeons kept warm by spending the night on a steam grate in Denver.” According to the caption Lantzy has been homeless for four years, and identifying him by name would seem to distinguish his humanity from the pigeons with which he shares the limited space of public warmth, as does the very physical separation between the lone individual and the clustering flock of birds.  But there is a strong sense in which the image resists the humanizing impulse of the caption, making it hard to see Lantzy as a distinct individual, or quite possibly even as human.

 

Pigeons are an urban nuisance.  They are believed to carry communicable diseases and their nesting habits are squalid. Cleaning up after the mess they leave behind can be both costly and dangerous.  The homeless are often characterized in similar terms and the photograph here accents the point of identity.  Shot from a  slightly elevated angle, it directs the viewers attention downward to the ground where homeless and pigeons alike are obtrusively roosting at the intersection of a public thoroughfare.  The oblique angle from which the viewer observes the scene diminishes the difference in size between man and flock, while his gun-metal grey coat blends in almost perfectly with the colors of the birds’ plumage.  The overall effect is to accent sameness and to undermine difference, even as it denaturalizes the landscape.  This last point is important, for it is unlikely that the average pedestrian would view the scene portrayed here from this vantage as they walk by on their way from one place to the next.  The photograph thus frames a somewhat exotic view (as if in a zoo) of the urban landscape.

One might be inclined to view the photograph as an ironic comment on a public and communal immorality—treating humans as vermin—but to do so requires us to recognize and acknowledge a clear difference between human and non-human in the picture.  To this end, one might point to the lime-green blanket on which the man rests as a sign of a primitive, human instinct, but pigeons (like the homeless) are also notorious scavengers, and so what might function otherwise as a humanizing distinction is weighted down in this photograph by the more pronounced points of animalistic similarity. What is needed to disrupt the zoological analogy is something that gives direct and pronounced access to the man’s soul, a sense of his inner-being, his humanity, that would make it difficult or even impossible for another human to ignore his plight or presence. It is to my own shame that when I encounter a homeless person on the street I will often avert my gaze so as to avoid eye contact—the demand for human recognition—as if to make the “problem” before me disappear.  And in this photograph it is notable that we have no access to the man’s eyes (as we have no access to the birds’ eyes) and thus nothing that would demand that we recognize his unique humanity. Just as we anthropomorphize animals by accenting the human quality of their eyes, so we animalize (dehumanize) strangers by erasing (or otherwise “veiling”) the windows to their soul.

 

But there may yet be an important and productive irony animated by the photograph.  For while the man is identified with the pigeons he is also quite clearly separate from them.  Indeed, the pigeons seem to treat him with the same kind of benign and nonchalant neglect that tends to animate our public response to the homeless (when it doesn’t devolve into out-and-out violence). Like most of us, they choose not to see him, even as they hold him at some distance.  It gives new meaning to  the phrase “a bird’s eyes view.”

 Photo Credit: George Kochaniec Jr./AP

 

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Sight Gag: Assembly Required

This is the 2008 version of the photograph.  For the 2007 version click here.

Photo Credit:  Toby Talbot/AP Photo

The “Sight Gag” 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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An Act of Contrition

When the CEOs of the “big three” U.S. automakers came to Congress last month with hat in hand seeking a financial bailout they were admonished for their greed and arrogance—if not downright insensitivity—symbolized by the fact that they had arrived separately in private corporate jets.  When they returned this past week (via hybrid automobiles) they were a bit more contrite, as captured by the photograph below that appeared in a slideshow at the NYT website. They mark a pious stance, very much in keeping with the image of praying hands often associated with the “Act of Contrition”: “I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee … I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and  to amend my life.”

The public performance of contrition is a puritanical art form—think of Bill Clinton’s multiple attempts to seek public forgiveness—that demands careful attention to a subtle and nuanced civic republicanism that negotiates the tension between individual humility and the capacity and resolve to do better.  One has to be both abject and majestic; totally subject to sovereign forces and yet capable of forging a virtuous path into the wilderness of the future.  It is not yet clear that the heads of the auto industry have entirely mastered the role, though the warm color temperature of the above photograph, as well as the one that followed it in the NYT slide show seems to signal some hope.

Cast in a cascading portrait that emphasizes file and not rank, their lips tightly pursed, their eyes riveted in unison upon the source of power and absolution—the duly representative agents of a sovereign “people”—the photograph offers the viewer the statuesque countenance of humble, virtuous men—the elect Captains of Industry—who understand the gravity of their past human failings, and yet nevertheless are eager to take on the responsibility to get the job done right.  Robert Nardeli’s eyeglasses are especially notable in this regard.  Symbols of human frailty, they sit low on the Chrysler CEO’s nose, allowing him simultaneously to see through them (to the immediate economic problem that sits in front of him) and over them (to the arbiters of the public trust).  Surely no less will be needed if the crisis is to be averted and the public’s faith is to be sustained.

But even as the second photograph above inflects the first, framing the act of contrition in the context of a traditional and stylized civic virtue, so too the very next photograph to appear in the slide show seems to inflect the first two photographs.  

Here again we see the performance of an act of contrition, but the affect is altogether different: more farce than tragedy. The penitent is immediately recognizable, not just because his body is whole (in contrast to the fragmented bodies portrayed in the first two photographs), but also because of his celebrity and notoriety.  Having previously and arrogantly (if ambiguously) admitted to a dastardly crime for which he had been acquitted, here he seeks the mercy of the court by apologizing for his most recent “stupidity” by casting his crime as a “foolish mistake.”  The actual performance proved to be unconvincing to the judge, who sentenced the defendant to a minimum of nine years in prison with a 33 year maximum, but it is the photographic performance that bears special significance.

The success of public acts of contrition rely upon a modicum of belief that the “sinner” can rise above his or her human failings—or at the very least that a commitment to live up to the public’s faith will be treated with gravity and responsibility.  In this regard, there may be no greater crime than the arrogant disregard of the public trust.  And when such arrogance rears its head a second time, the warm tones that give the first two photographs their special cast and resonate with a hopeful future give way to the cold, harsh tones of reality evident in the last photograph.   Here, the body, no longer fragmented in terms of the mechanisms of human agency (hands and head) is intact, but more importantly, it also constrained and disciplined by both the instruments of the state (the shackles) and public opprobrium (evidenced by the expressions on the faces of the citizens sitting in the courtroom).  Scorned once, the photograph seems to caution, the people look on subsequent acts of contrition with profound skepticism.  And, we might add, as well they should.

Photo Credits:  Stephen Crowley/NYT; Isaac Bracken/Pool Photo  

 

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Sight Gag: "Fox News Update! Santa Claus Photographed Engaging in Terrorist Fist Bump!"

Credit: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post

The “Sight Gag” 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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On The Relationship Between Black Thursday and Black Friday

Much has been made recently of comparisons between the Great Depression of 1929 and the current economic crisis all the way to the point of framing President-elect Barack Obama as the twenty-first century’s FDR.  Only time will truly tell if the analogy will be borne out (no pun intended), but there are good reasons to be skeptical.

The photograph below is one of a number of similar images that appeared in on-line stories  and slide shows at a number of major newspapers this past weekend, reporting on “Black Friday”—the so-called “traditional” beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

This photograph shows hundreds of shoppers lining up at 4:30 a.m. at an Office Depot near a mall in the Washington D.C. area, though comparable scenes were more commonly displayed at places like Macy’s and Wal Mart.  And while the visual tableau depicts an orderly line of consumers (or are they “utility maximizing rational individuals”?), the opening of the doors at 5:00 a.m. here and elsewhere unleashed a rabid feeding frenzy of consumerist gluttony (and one more for good measure). At a Wal Mart in Long Island, a riotous mob of 2,000 shoppers broke down the doors to the store and trampled a worker to death, all in the interest of saving $20.00 on a 50″ HDTV. And to put it all in perspective, Wal Mart anticipated the problem by hiring extra security and directing the behavior of its shoppers with a posted sign:

Such behavior, whether that of rational calculating individuals or greedy and riotous consumers—or mindless and insensitive store managers—stands in marked contrast with the pictures most often affiliated with the Great Depression—the world that gave us “Black Thursday.”  

The difference, of course, is stark and pronounced. Then unemployed citizens lined up for free food (provided by civic organizations of one sort or another)  to satisfy their most basic physical hunger; today we line up as consumers to purchase mass produced items (provided by global capitalism) that satisfy a different, fundamentally psychic hunger. Then the government developed public works projects designed to enhance our national infrastructure and to provide employment for those most in need; today the government pumps hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy in order to “ease credit markets” (its own version of the “Blitz Line Starts Here” sign) and to encourage consumption.  And we are surprised when citizens accumulate debt by spending on credit rather than saving for a rainy day—or worse, trample and kill fellow citizens to purchase luxury items.  Indeed, we actually wonder how we got into the current economic crisis.

It may well be too late to turn back the clock to a time when being a good citizen and being a good consumer were separate identities, but if the soon-to-be President Obama is to live up to the comparison to FDR he is going to need to help Americans to understand the difference between the two, as well as the implications for our national character of the relationship between Black Thursday and Black Friday.

Photo Credits:  MIchael Williamson/Washington Post; Fariella/News; Unknown/National Archives

 

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Sight Gag: "And they say he is a lame duck president!"

Credit: Larry Downing/Reuters

The “Sight Gag” 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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The Family Photograph

Guest post by Aric Mayer.

Over the past three generations, the volume of images casually generated out of family life has increased exponentially. From the early 1900s when the Brownie camera made photography something that can be practiced easily, families have made records of important events and people, hoping perhaps to create traces and artifacts that can bind the past into the present, keeping time from marching away. There is also the strange paradox that occurs as we stage current events in order to photograph them so that we can look back at a future time and see them again. We perform for a future audience of our selves and our friends, rewriting history as we live it. As film and now digital technologies have developed, the ease and number of these types of images has gown. It is hard to know what the final impact of this flood of visual information will be on the next generation.

Exactly eighteen months ago my wife gave birth to our two children Laszlo and Chloe. In our short year and a half as a family there is already the sense that time and events are forever passing—the first tooth, the first steps, the first words … every week seems to bring another first, and with it comes loss. The temptation is there to record everything, to make an effort to translate life into a document that we can hold and thereby inoculate our selves from the losses that time brings.  That would be impossible, of course, but it doesn’t stop me from trying, as in the process I have accrued 20,000 photographs of our personal lives together.

I recognize that when I am photographing, I am not simply recording events, but rather am converting them into frozen dioramas that do not necessarily recall the moments that they come out of. It is entirely possible to make a beautiful picture in the middle of crying and chaos. Likewise visual chaos can be made out of the mundane.

The photograph above is one of my favorites. Laszlo is drawing on paper. Chloe is drawing on Laszlo. And I am converting the scene into an image that frames them in that moment, creating a drawing of my own. It speaks to the multiple ways that we as families leave un-erasable marks on each other at so many levels. 

The taking of family photographs is not simply a way of stopping time or recording the present for future consideration. It is also a way of organizing how we see ourselves. After a day with my children, I still on occasion set up a slideshow on my computer and watch my photographs from that day for half an hour or more. Even though I was with them in person for the day, the photographs bring something different than our relational interactions. These images are also about me. Not in a narcissistic sense, although we must be careful how heavy handed we are in shaping our children’s images of self. These pictures contribute to how I see them and to how I organize my understanding of their place in my life. Included are pictures of the crying, scrapes and bruises, bad days, the other half of the picture. It is an intensely personal body of photographs. And by the time my children are in their early twenties, they will inherit hundreds of thousands of these images. Along the way I will select a few thousand that stand out for me. Who knows what these will mean to them? What will we even do with such an amount?

Editors Note:  The National Gallery of Art hosted a show titled “The Art of the Snapshot” in 2007.

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"Shane! Come back!"

I have written previously about the regularity and profusion of photographs of children in the Middle East—Israeli, Pakistani, and Iraqi children in particular—playing with toy guns. Such images operate in a somewhat allegorical register as they invoke one or a number of ironic, dialectical incongruities between child and adult, innocence and maturity, play and reality, the pleasure and horror of war, plasticity and steel, “their” present and “our” past, and so on.  This photograph seems to capture all of that and something more.

The caption reads: “An Iraqi boy holds a toy gun during a joint American and Iraqi military security sweep in the neighborhood of Sariyah in Baghdad, Iraq.”  The key to the image, however, is in recognizing that the toy gun is incidental to the scene that that we are witnessing.  The boy holds a toy weapon, to be sure, but he does so awkwardly as if he doesn’t quite know how to use it, and in any case he does not hold it in a manner that might be thought of as threatening—or  even effective.  Nor is it the toy itself that draws the viewer’s attention—the caption to the contrary notwithstanding—but rather the young boy’s gaze.  But what could he be looking at?  What does he see?  And where have we seen this image before?

Of course, we cannot know for sure what he is looking at.  But the soldier standing behind him is Iraqi, and the boy is clearly not looking at the photographer, who is positioned at an oblique angle to the field of vision.  Given that the caption identifies this is a joint Iraqi-American “military security sweep” it stands to reason that the boy has fixed his gaze upon the American soldier—or at least that is what the interaction of image and text invites us to imagine. And what he sees there is clearly something that pleases and inspires him.  Indeed, it is the look of a child’s wonder, perhaps even hero worship, as if in the presence of a powerful and incorruptible majesty. One might discount it as the misdirected gaze of youthful innocence and naiveté but for the fact that the family members in the background giving their smiling approval to the scene that unfolds before their eyes as well.   

The young boy’s gaze is not new to us, at least not to those of us who were raised with the myth of the American west, where physical strength and a skill with six-guns (and the resolve to use both when necessary) served as individual virtues necessary to taming an otherwise dangerous frontier and to making the world safe and secure for democracy and domesticity.  Indeed, the boy’s gaze almost perfectly mirrors the look of Joey Starrett in the 1950s western Shane, the young boy (played by Brandon DeWilde) who worships the title character—a somewhat mysterious stranger with a gunslinger past that he is trying to forget nevertheless draws upon his strength of character to save the homesteading community from a brutish cattle baron—for precisely these virtues.  At the end of the movie, after having completed his work, Shane moves on, even as Joey cries “Shane! Come back!” for he knows that there is no place for him in the world that he helped to make safe.

It is highly unlikely that the photographer knew of or was modeling a sluice of U.S. popular culture circa 1950, but given the ways in which the Bush administration has framed the intervention in Iraq from the very beginning as an extension of our history as a gunfighter nation, the analogy—what biblical hermeneutical scholars might call an anagogical relationship or “in spirit” comparison—is apt.  And the current situation in Iraq makes the Shane myth all the more attractive as an interpretive frame for those who think of the U.S. military as the western hero carving out a path for civilization in the wilderness, leaving behind a feminized and domesticated community beholden to the those with the character and resolve to do the hard work at great personal expense.  As the U.S. allegedly prepares to leave one can hear this young boy’s plea to stay.  We can only hope that the incoming administration has the same good sense of Shane to realize that he has to move on

Photo Credit:   Hadi Mizban/AP

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The Beauty of War Through a Child's Eye

This past week we honored America’s veterans, but except for a few conventional news stories and ritualistic photo ops the day passed with little notice or fanfare, eclipsed in the national consciousness by trying to figure out who President-elect Obama will appoint in his new administration and political wrangling over how to address the so-called “financial crisis.”  And what has been missed (or is it repressed?) in all of this has been the 150,000 U.S. troops who continue to occupy Iraq (and who are likely to continue to occupy Iraq until at least 2011); the 278 U.S. military deaths and 1,500 + U.S. military casualties that have occurred in Iraq since January of 2008; or the astonishing admission by the Veteran Administration that on average a staggering 18 veterans commit suicide everyday.

It is against this background that I was stuck by this AP  photograph that showed up in a number of on-line newspaper slide shows this past weekend.

The image is of a young girl as she “looks at a life-size painting of  men from the Columbus-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division” that is part of the Lima Company Memorial at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Lima Company suffered some of the heaviest casualties of any unit fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including the death of 22 brave marines in a very short period of time in 2005.  There is no question but that their service and sacrifice needs to be sanctified in public memory and yet there is something altogether unsettling about this photograph. Part of this (dis)ease is no doubt a recognition of how an innocent child—and a young girl at that—serves as the cipher for orienting the model citizen towards the nation-state as a gendered and infantilized spectator.

Children, we are told, “should be seen and not heard.”  Notice here how the young girl silently directs the national gaze upon the marines even as she holds their attention.  The colors of her hair, sweatshirt, and pants coordinate perfectly with the red, white, and blue of the flag that she holds and thus cast her as the metonymic (and fetishistic) embodiment of the nation-state.  Her shadow marks the corporeal distance of the passive spectator from the painting no less than the candles, boots, and photographs that frame it.  There can thus be no mistaking that the young girl is a passive spectator clearly separated from the scene in the painting—seeing and not speaking or acting.  And so, we must wonder, is she a child citizen or the citizen-as-child?

There is no final answer to this question, of course, but the smiling and approving gaze of the marines seems to suggest a paternal protectiveness of the child/citizen/flag that resonates with normative assumptions of the public as an innocent and passive child and all of that is troubling for those who might imagine a vibrant democratic public culture.  But what if the child was not in the photograph? How else then might we understand the painting as part of a public memorial?

This life size canvas, it turns out, is one of  eight panels portraying all 22 marines from Lima Company painted by Anita Miller, a liturgical artist motivated  “to paint images that open the viewer’s eyes to the beauty of the world.”  In each of these eight panels we have portraits of two or three of the deceased marines and in each instance we are presented with a smiling and caring countenance.  And there can be no doubt that the images offer comfort to those who knew and loved these men as friends and family members within the contours of private life. But when cast as a  war memorial the appeal to the spiritual beauty of the individuals doing the fighting diverts attention from the sheer ugliness that is combat regardless of the cause. War’s “beauty”—if that is the right word—is terrible, and that is a lesson that we forget at our peril.

And so, once again back to the photograph and the young child who gazes upon the scene with what we can only imagine is beatific awe and admiration.  And the question here must be, is this the best way to transport the civic virtues of sacrifice and service from one generation to the next?  I am not so Pollyanna as to believe that wars will never be needed—though hope springs eternal— but I never want my children to think of war as “part of the beauty of the world” or that those who do the fighting do so with a “smile” upon their face.  We owe the men of Lima Company more than that.

Photo Credit:  Ernest Coleman, AP Photo/The Enquirer

 

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Sight Gag: Would Twer That It Were True

Credit: The Yes Men and Gawker

“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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