Dec 10, 2012
Nov 14, 2011
Jul 15, 2009
Mar 23, 2011
Feb 10, 2013
Oct 29, 2012

“Oh, The Humanity”: A Second Look at the Hindenburg Explosion

This past Sunday marked the 75th anniversary of the explosion of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, NJ.  As we have indicated elsewhere, when it occurred on May 6, 1936, the event, prominently depicted in the above photograph, was immediately and subsequently identified as a gothic image of a “brave new world” that invited a bleak and cautionary attitude towards the catastrophic risks of industrialization and technology—a dystopian icon of an emerging, universalized, technocratic modernity.  What is especially important to note is that the explosion of the Hindenburg, resulting in 36 fatalities, was neither the first nor the most deadly of such explosions—the explosion of Britain’s R-101 dirigible killing 46 passengers five years earlier on October 5, 1930.  The key difference was that in the case of the Hindenburg the media was present with live radio coverage and, of course, we have the above photograph, which quickly became the iconic representation of the disaster.

The last point is especially important, as it stands as a reminder of the centrality of the mass media in creating disasters.  I don’t mean, of course, that the mass media cause disasters in a direct cause-effect fashion, but rather that what is recognized as a disaster is largely a measure of its status as a discernible “event” and outside of local and immediate experience.  Such discernability is largely a function of the role that the media play in depicting and disseminating occurrences of one sort or another.  As Rob Nixon has recently demonstrated in his book Slow Violence, tragedies that defy easy representation as a discrete occurrences—say disease and death caused across generations of the members of a community by toxic waste—are very difficult to cast as disasters because we simply cannot visualize their longitudinal effects.  A graph marking deaths across time simply lacks the presence and verisimilitude of a photograph.

The anniversary commemoration of this event points to a different point as well.  The iconic photograph above  lacks any nationalistic markings of any kind.  Although the name “Hindenburg” clearly designates this as a German airship, the photograph effaces that fact.  It is impossible to say that this is the reason why this photograph quickly became identified as the icon for the event, but there are good reasons to believe that it didn’t hurt the cause, both because of the prevailing desire to downplay nationalist tensions between Nazi Germany and the United States, as well as the way in which such erasure made the photograph more about technology of a universalized modernity than about politics.  But, of course, the extant photographic record suggests a different story.  And so it is that the Atlantic frames its remembrance of the event not in terms of modernity’s gamble, but precisely in the context of international politics.  So, for example, they begin with an image that shows the Hindenburg in all of its grandeur and magnitude, hovering over Manhattan.  But what is most pronounced in the photograph is the swastika that sits on the tail of the vessel.

Several such images—few of which were originally seen, or at least prominently displayed in the media of the time—follow, carefully marking the national origins of the dirigible.  And then, after a series of images that move the viewer through the ritualistic, everyday banality and catastrophic fatality of the attendant technological innovation of transatlantic air travel, it reinforces the nationalist origins of the whole event with photographs of a funereal  scene.  These photographs, replete with multiple caskets draped in swastika clad flags and Nazi salutes (images #31 and #32), are chilling in their effects, even if our contemporary reaction is marked by a presentist understanding of the horrors of Nazism that most viewers would not have been in a position to acknowledge in 1936.

The point is a simple one, but nevertheless worth emphasizing: photographs are always involved in a dialectic of showing and veiling.  If we think of the iconic image in terms of how it is often captioned with reference to radio announcer Herb Morrison’s lament, “Oh, the humanity” it is easy to see how it fits within the logic of a dystopian, technological modernity.  In short, it is a catastrophe that resists and challenges the positive resonance of modernity’s gamble.  However, when we return the swastika to the tail of the dirigible in all of its prominence, and when we locate the event within the particular narrative of twentieth-century politics animated by Hitler’s Third Reich, the meaning of the icon is overshadowed by a much larger tragedy and its dystopian resistance to the positive affect of modernity’s gamble is mitigated if not altogether erased.  It truly is a matter of what we see … or perhaps more to the point, what we are shown.

Photo Credit: Sam Shere/MPTV; AP File Photo

 3 Comments

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

 0 Comments

Poles Apart: Elites and Masses After the Disaster

I joked about this photo when I first it, perhaps because my wife showed it to me.  “I sure feel sorry for that kid.  Picking a fight with a middle-aged man, what was he thinking?”

But the truth is, it really is a mismatch in just that way.  Even if you notice the shiv in the protestor’s hand, the odds are against him.  If caught, he’ll be charged with breaking and entering, assault, mayhem, you name it.  If he gets away, it’s just to return to the austerity, vanishing opportunities, and grim future being forced on Spain by the European bankers’ neoliberal policies.  As for the fight itself, frankly, the guy on the right has the bigger weapon, good heft, and no fear, and he’s aggressively going for the gut or lower yet.

Just what you’d expect from a banker, come to think of it.  Like once sound economies around the globe, Spain is in trouble because of unchecked greed and recklessness by big banks and other financial institutions–a binge of aggressive mismanagement that was promoted by the same neoliberal ideology that now justifies transferring all of the losses downward.  Sure, there’s more to the story and each country is different, but as Cassandra–that is, Paul Krugman–has been warning for a long time now, there is no sound economic analysis that justifies the austerity policies being enforced in Europe and trumpted by Republicans in the US.  The bottom line is that many who did nothing wrong are being sacrificed to protect an elite that behaved very badly.  In Spain, students were demonstrating because the heat was being cut off in their classrooms, and you can bet that isn’t happening on the 45th floor.

If you take a better look at what is happening on the ground, you can see more of the texture of the political situation.  The bank lobby is a scene of conflict–but the demonstrators will get no farther than that.  The shattered glass suggests that the opulent decor is at least superficially vulnerable, but look at how casually the other banker walks through the mayhem: chaos at the edges is just business as usual, another day in the life of creative destruction.  And however lithe the masked demonstrator might be, his clothes aren’t worth the cost of a tie worn by anyone on the other side.  Draconian policies push the masses to confront the elite, but that’s a rigged game from the start.  And at the finish, if democratic government doesn’t do its job.

Which is how we get to this photo of another pole in a very different place.

A man strains to raise a flagpole in Crittenden, Kentucky, after the devastating storm that swept through the town last Saturday.  Perhaps the photo alludes to Joe Rosenthal’s iconic image of the flag raising on Iwo Jima.  If so, both the similarities to and differences from the original photograph are notable.  On the one hand, a common man labors to plant the national symbol amidst devastation, which suggests that he and his fellow citizens have the same patriotism, determination, willingness to sacrifice for the common good, and similar virtues of those that won the battle at Iwo.  On the other hand, times may have changed: the flag is shredded, the pole is bent and spindly, he is all alone, and now even the wind is blowing against him.

Families, friends, and neighbors are pulling together in the heartland, God bless ’em, and they have to.  As you look through the slideshows on the storm’s aftermath, it becomes clear that these are people who already had been abandoned to economic decline.  Unlike the banker in the the photograph above, for this guy there are few resources at hand, no powerful corporations, connections in high places, or governments that believe in putting your priorities first, last, and always.  Republican governors will call for disaster aid, but try get them to invest in the jobs, education, health care, social services, environmental protection, financial regulation, and other public goods that these people need to live reasonably secure lives.  So it is that a storm has been blowing across the nation for years, wreaking the lives of ordinary people.

Two photographs, both of disasters in the making, neither of which has anything to do with the weather.  The are united by an element of visual composition, but otherwise you might say they are poles apart.

Photographs by Albert Gea/Reuters and Liz Dufour/The Cincinnati Enquirer.

 1 Comment

So What’s the Problem with Global Warming, Anyway?

Here it is the beginning of February and the temperature in Indiana has been hovering in the mid-40s and low-50s.  Last week one day it was in the mid-60s.  Walking around campus has been a sheer delight, and a far cry from the typical weather one experiences in Indiana in the winter months.  I don’t know what the temperature was when this picture was taken last week in New York’s Central Park, but this is surely not the picture of “love in bloom” we might expect to see at this time of the year with couples skating in Rockefeller Center or maybe making snow angels on the Central Park lawn—or snow plows trying to figure out how to navigate around parked cars on otherwise deserted Manhattan streets.  And so the question is, what’s the problem with global warming, anyway?

Of course, we might not be so sanguine if we lived in Europe where an otherwise mild winter has turned abruptly to historically aberrant and excessively frigid temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in many places.

The scene above is from Kiev where the temperature is 8 degrees Fahrenheit, but the blowing wind no doubt makes it much colder than that.  And here, of course, we see at least part of the problem, for while the weather can be the background for a romantic liaison, it can also accent the effects of social and economic distance.  The woman walking has perhaps been inconvenienced by the frigid temperatures, but not so much that it has kept her from making her way down the street in stylish, high-heeled leather boots.  And judging from her stride it doesn’t seem as if she has noticed the prostrate woman laying in the snow and begging for alms or that she plans on slowing down or stopping.  And when she finally gets home it is altogether likely that her flat or house will be appropriately warm. The woman on the ground, on the other hand, is bundled in mismatched clothing and protected from the snow beneath her by what appears to be a plastic bag.  In all likelihood she is homeless.   And like so many of the poor and homeless, wherever she sleeps this evening her “inconvenience” will be much more acute, resulting in debilitating frostbite or even death. The numbers are hard to calculate, but even the most conservative estimates indicate that over 300 Europeans have died in the past two weeks due to exposure.

None of this proves manmade global warming, of course, but the conditions documented by these photographs surely corroborate the growing consensus to that effect of virtually every scientific organization that has studied weather patterns and climate change, including the National Academy of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists.  And more, they gesture to at least one of the moral implications of our failure to preserve a sustainable environment, for surely it is the homeless and impoverished who will bear the initial brunt of the floods and draughts that are all but inevitable future effects of our current environmental practices and policies.

As I ponder these photographs it leaves me altogether amazed that serious candidates for the presidency can conclude that climate change is the result of “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects” or that  global warming is a “hoax.”  Then again, it was barely less than a year ago that the Republican members of the  U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee voted down an amendment to a bill that called for Congress to accept the scientific consensus that “climate change is occurring, it is caused in large part  by human activity and it is a threat to human health” on a 20-31 party-line vote.”

 And so, back to the question: What’s the problem with global warming, anyway?  And the answer has to be that the problem is that we seem determined to decide such matters on party line votes that systematically (and quite proudly) ignore the scientific facts.  And more, we forget that the spring-like conditions of a romantic liaison in the park during the dead of winter will have its costs, if not now, soon, and they will point to even deeper problems and contradictions within our collective lives.

 Photo Credits:  Lucas Jackson/Reuters; Gleb Garanich/Reuters

 4 Comments

Taking the Long View in Disaster Photos

Scientific imaging plays a limited role in photojournalism, but a role nonetheless.  X-rays, ultrasonic images, brain scans, electron microscopy, nanotechnologies, and other marvels reveal the many worlds underneath the surface of things, while telescopes peer ever more cannily into deep space.  So it is that you might wonder what is being show in this photo which was released last week.  Protoplasm?  A virus? A lesion?  Neural excitation for the smell of loam?

Or perhaps a satellite photograph of Isola del Giglio and the cruise ship Costa Concordia.  The ship is the bright smudge in the lower right quadrant, and the small bright spots  below it are other craft.  The photo was taken by the Italian Space Agency (A.S.I.).  (Those who like to sneer at Europe might want to ponder that concept while chewing on their freedom fries.)  Although I don’t want to do anything to diminish the suffering and other costs associated with the disaster, this photo nonetheless provides an object lesson in the limitations of seeing everything to human scale.

Even though I knew I was looking at photos about the ship running aground, I couldn’t help but see this image as something microscopic.  It looked too much like a scrap of the cellular world, or perhaps some bit of flotsam in a laboratory–“Scientists develop artificial skin,” or something like that.  And when I realized I was seeing a topographical image, it seemed more like a living thing that a promontory of rock.  And although a dot on the map and miniscule in comparison to other landforms, it dwarfs the ship, which then seems to be something less than a piece of lint in the natural order of things, which it is.  The image evokes an enormous, living planet, itself part of a cosmos that flows endlessly inward and outward.  Human life is part of that mystery but also microscopic within that outer world.

Perceptions of magnitude have a highly elastic quality within human consciousness.  Events can loom large and then whoosh back to the vanishing point is a second.  You are furious with a family member–until you learn the terrible news, and then everything changes.  The school board election is a disaster, until the phone rings late in the night.  The deficit is a national crisis, until tomorrow when it disappears from view.  Pain is real no matter what, but those of us watching at a distance have an opportunity to think about what we consider important.

But let’s not get too serious, either.  Here’s another satellite image, but one that transports us into the context of surrealism.  The ship is visible as a ship but cockeyed, laying on its side, and looking as if it is floating in space.  The land form is becoming more familiar as well and less attractive for that: lumpy structures clutter the terrain while any sense of of the whole has been obliterated.  The ship dominates the scene, but as if it were a toy or a dream.  The vessel’s importance is implied but also undermined.  Again, we are left to ask, well, what really should be important here?

I think that it is precisely because humanity is so small in the great scheme of things that we should be particularly attentive to caring for one another and otherwise living well together.  You may come to another conclusion, and that is your business.  Just don’t think that the difference is as big as it appears at ground level.

Photograph by ASI/Associated Press and DigitalGlobe/Reuters.  These and other photos of the wreck are at Alan Taylor’s In Focus photoblog at The Atlantic; there is some overlap with the archive of the same day at The Big Picture.

 0 Comments

Flying Too Close to the Sun

The Costa Concordia is a floating resort. Larger than the Titanic by nearly seventy feet, it boasts 1,500 cabins, one third of which have private balconies, the world’s largest fitness center at sea (65,000 square feet), five restaurants (two of which require reservations), thirteen bars (in addition to cigar and cognac bars), a three level theater, a casino, a discotheque, a Grand Prix race simulator, an internet café, and much, much more.  It houses 4,300 passengers and an additional 1,100 crew members—that’s one crew member for every four passengers—on seventeen decks.  It is valued at just less than $600 million dollars.  And while we would probably not consider it a technological marvel in the late modern world, as we would have considered the Titanic or the Hindenburg in an earlier era, it is nevertheless something of a marvel, its sheer magnitude making it larger than life.

Of course, the photograph above doesn’t quite do it justice. Foundered on a rock off of the coast of Tuscany near the island of Giglio that left a 160 foot gash in its hull and listing to the starboard side, the marvel and magnitude of the Costa Concordia are somewhat diminished. The actual cause of the grounding has yet to be finally decided, though there is no evidence of bad weather or other emergency conditions that would have required bringing the ship this close to the coast line.

It is both a catastrophe and a tragedy. As of this writing the death toll rests at eleven with twenty or so others still unaccounted for.  And as with the mythological Icarus, the disaster is a result of sheer hubris.  In the days ahead the focus will no doubt be on the captain’s unauthorized deviation from the planned course and his lack of good sense animated by assumptions of unfounded pride in either his skills as a sailor or in the capacity of the ship. Or perhaps we will learn that he was intoxicated or otherwise distracted.  We are already hearing that much of the problem was due to the fact that passengers failed to participate in muster drills, as if the disaster was their fault.  In any case, “human error” will no doubt bear the weight of the burden.  And to be fair, a good measure of this may well be warranted.   But of course the hubris here extends beyond the human failings of the captain or the passengers and extends to a society that places its unfettered faith in its technological ability to master nature.

Elsewhere we refer to this faith as “modernity’s gamble”—the wager that the potential for catastrophic risks assumed by a technology-intensive society will be avoided by continuing progress.  Modernity’s gamble is most apparent in the building of airplanes and rockets designed to conquer the skies, or in nuclear power plants intended to free us from our reliance on fossil fuels, but it is no less relevant to things such as online banking and commerce, where the risk to economic catastrophe is no less disastrous—or likely.  It may be that we are passed the point that we can refuse modernity’s gamble, but surely we need to learn to respect it and to avoid challenging the odds for frivolous purposes. That here the wager was lost in a disaster involving a technologically advanced and sophisticated playground for the upper classes only underscores the hubris of a society that cares little for how it employs its resources and even less for how it respects its environment.

 The photograph above is telling in this regard, as it contrasts the  failure of an overextended and idealized technological mastery of nature (for fun and profit!) with the sustainable houses and buildings that occupy the coastline.  A storm could come along that wipes out the village, no doubt, but it wasn’t an unpredictable weather event that led to the disaster here.  It was the failure to respect modernity’s gamble.  And while those who built the village appear to have respected the natural crag of the outcropping, preserving it as a defense against the sea and the wind, but not trying to overcome it, those sailing the Concordia did not respect it, running aground in the process.  As Don Quixote’s sidekick Pancho reminds him, “whether the stone hits the bottle or the bottle hits the stone … its always bad for the bottle.” And so here, the ship once visually magnificent, is humbled; indeed, in its own way it appears to have settled into a fetal position of total resignation.  It is perhaps a subtle irony that the ship’s name—referring to the state or condition of agreement or harmony—is betrayed by the scene depicted in the photograph in which harmony rests with the village and not with the trappings of an unbounded hubris.

Photo Credit: Remo Casilli/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

 0 Comments

9/11: Looking Back Through Legos


9/11

The New Security State 1

The New Security State 2

The “Liberation” of Iraq

Abu Ghraib 1

Abu Ghraib 2

Abu Ghraib 3

Abu Ghraib 4

Guantanamo Bay

Extraordinary Rendition

Vice President Dick Cheney and Friend on a Hunting Trip

“We Got Him!”


Searching for Bin Laden in Afghanistan

Finding Bin Laden

“Old Glory” Continues to Fly Proudly

 4 Comments

Citizen Action When Systems Fail

This photograph won’t win any awards, but it tells an important story.  A story within a story, to be exact.

The larger story is that a terrorist attacked both a government center and a civics camp in Norway, killing at least 72 people.  That story includes all the madness you might expect.  The attacker wanted to protect Europeans, so he murdered Europeans.  To oppose Islamic groups advocating authoritarian rule to enforce cultural conservatism, he called for an authoritarian takeover of European governments to enforce cultural conservatism.  He got as far as he did by exploiting the freedom and social trust that he deplored.

Sadly, we know that story all too well.  It also is a story of how ordinary precautions didn’t work, how the state does not maintain a monopoly on violence, and how even advanced societies are sure to fail.  Which is why the smaller story is so important.  The photograph captures what can happen in the aftermath of system failure.  One person is comforting another who has been wounded by the blast in Oslo.  She appears to have a head wound, and he is responding appropriately by applying a compress while keeping her head elevated.  His posture can’t be comfortable, as he is on his knees while supporting and steadying her body.  Equally important, he is comforting her: holding her closely, talking and listening, being deeply attentive to her person despite all the mayhem surrounding them.

The scene is a moment of civic intimacy.  They are framed by the ordinary decor of the city street: pavement, a metal and glass door, the signage, chair, and trash bin of a cafe, yet they are closely attuned to one another.  Nor is this a merely personal incident, as we can see from the shattered glass strewn across the sidewalk.  She hasn’t simply fainted or had a seizure, and the person helping her may not have known her at all–the caption identified him as a “passer-by.”  They were strangers who have been thrown together by the blast–and his kindness.

His action is underscored by their ambiguous ethnicity.  Is he Norwegian?  Is she?  Could he be one of those dreaded Islamic immigrants?  Fascist ethnic typing is scrambled by this act of compassionate citizenship.  For whatever passports they might have, he has made both of them citizens: strangers having obligations of equality and assistance regardless of other differences.  As Ariela Azoulay argues, any photograph implies that relationship; here the citizenship conferred by the camera reinforces what is already evident on the street.

The Chicago Tribune’s report on the attack was on page 26 of the Sunday edition.  I can’t believe that the story of a fundamentalist killing 72 people in a European country would have been buried had the attacker not been Christian and blond.  (Don’t like the Christian label?  Then stop labeling Middle Eastern terrorists “Muslim.”)  The Tribune is another example of system failure–in this case, the way the story will be underplayed in most of the American media.

Fortunately, as important as institutions are, we don’t have to rely on them alone.  Disasters demonstrate again and again that, amidst large-scale disruption, small-scale action by ordinary citizens is vitally important to limiting damage and restoring order.  The photograph above is one example of true citizenship.  More will be needed, and in response to disasters ranging from terrorist attacks to economic catastrophes.

Photograph by Scanpix/Reuters.

 2 Comments

Reading the Ruins of an Ephemeral State

Guest Post by Bryan Walsh

While ruin gnaws at the promises of American democracy, photography serves as an invaluable technology for visualizing our increasing vulnerability to social and political abandonment—and just maybe for defending against it.  Consider the above image of a classroom in Detroit’s St. Margaret Mary School: empty desks are scattered throughout, littered course papers amass on a burnt and charred floor, lectures and exam dates are faintly scribbled on a chalkboard, closets are stripped of their possessions, windows are broken and boarded-up, lighting fixtures dangle from a moist and moldy ceiling, and what appears to be a broken ruler lies on top of a desk in the bottom right of the frame.  Despite being reduced to rubble and debris, the objects are nonetheless glaringly clear.  The wide-angle offers a perspective to the viewer that encompasses the totality of the classroom while the deep focus enhances the details and intricacies of the landscape and its objects.  The composition of the photograph effectively brings the space to life, offering all its complexity to the careful contemplation of the viewer.

But what does this photograph want us to contemplate?  Note the spatial layout of the remnants of the school: the chalkboards, windows, papers, closets, and most of the desks are relegated to the periphery of the room.  Complimented by the circular formation of the desks and the directionality of the lines on the windowsills and chalkboards, the fallout of the classroom orbits around an invisible but nonetheless noticeable center.  Indeed, there is something missing here and the photograph renders  it a ghostly presence that glares back eerily at the viewer.

Put bluntly, St. Margaret Mary School is haunted by the everyday activities that once animated it.  Even if you didn’t live in northwest Detroit, or attend Sunday services at the St. Margaret Mary parish, or endure lessons taught by an Order of Sisters, the landscape and its remnants are identifiable for most Americans: I once sat at those awkward desks and wrote childish nonsense on those papers; I gazed in reverie through those windows; my teacher scribbled on those chalkboards and demanded my attention with that ruler.  In short, this photograph displays a powerful paradox: what is so overwhelmingly visible within these spaces is also what is so painfully absent–the everyday activities that sustain and are sustained by a flourishing and hopeful city.

Despite its collapse, this  photograph of an abandoned classroom in the St. Margaret Mary School  calls forth the memories of a more promising past.  Such is the topic of concern for Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s photographic project “The Ruins of Detroit.”  Depicting Detroit’s dilapidated metro-stations, schools, theaters, banks, industrial facilities and other civic spaces, Marchand and Meffre’s photographs invite a range of interpretations that put past and present in tension with one another: they could evidence the extent of Detroit’s civic and infrastructural abandon, or that of a weathered and beaten civilization, or for that matter they could even foreshadow the impending doom of American Empire.  Invoked by the images, such memories are nostalgic and mournful, at least insofar as they eulogize a flourishing cityscape buzzing with prosperity and modern mass production.

Detroit now stands (leans?) as a veritable wreckage of infrastructural and social disaster: not only have a quarter of its population fled the city in a desperate search for employment, but city officials and enforcement agencies have displaced families from their homes and boarded-up entire neighborhoods, leaving it in nothing less than a thorough state of collapse.  Just last spring, roughly 5,500 teachers and 250 administrators received pink slips, while seven public schools have been shutdown, and 45 others have been packaged to charter school developers, 18 of which will be closed if they don’t find a buyer.  This photograph of  a single classroom in the St. Margaret Mary School does not tell this part of the story, but it does provide resources with which communities can make sense of—and intervene in—the perpetuation of personal injury, social inequity, and political abandonment.  The image, then, does not  “exploit a city’s misery” through a “decontextualized aesthetics of ruin”; rather, it tangles the past with the urgency of the present, reminding viewers to acknowledge both the vulnerability of the people of Detroit as well as the imperative to do something about it.

Photo Credit: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit

Bryan Walsh is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University. He can be contacted at btwalsh@umail.iu.edu.

 3 Comments

Seeing the Environmental Problem

This past Sunday was World Environment Day (WED).  Unless you are especially attuned to such matters you probably did not know that. And it is little surprise since the day seemed to be missed almost entirely by the mainstream media despite.  Indeed, the only reference I found to it in the major national media  was in the caption to this photograph in the WSJ of June 6, which read: “SIFTING THROUGH GARBAGE: A boy who collects items to earn a living for his family searched through dirty water in Karachi, Pakistan on Sunday, World Environment Day.”

I find it difficult to understand why WED would slip by with barely any notice.  It’s not as if there have been major breaking stories in the past week that would eclipse all other news, unless, of course, your count concern for Congressman Weiner’s problems with his twitter account.  Nor is WED an insignificant event.  Sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme since 1972, it is an annual affair designed to stimulate global awareness of the environment and to promote “positive environmental action.”  Hosted this year by India, the particular theme is “Forests; Nature at Your Service,”  and given the impact of deforestation and forest degradation on climate change, water quality and supply, and general biodiversity—not to mention the fact that over 300 million people worldwide live in forested areas and that millions of acres of forests are lost each year—one would think that the day and its particular theme would warrant a couple of column inches and a few photographs.  But alas, no.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is the difficulty we have in visualizing the degradation of the environment—or at least the difficulty that the mainstream media has in doing so in ways that don’t mitigate prominent corporate, national, and multi-national agendas.  And so we come to the photograph above.  It is all but certain that this unnamed boy seeks to “earn a living for his family” by searching through these dirty waters on more than one day in the year, but the image takes its significance here from the fact that here he does it on World Environment Day.  The question is, why?  The cynical answer, of course, is to take the implication that the serious environmental problems, the places that most need attention, are not in the industrialized and corporatized west, but elsewhere, places like Pakistan, where “earning a living” by “sifting through garbage” in polluted waters is a matter of survival that displaces concerns for environmental sustainability.  By this read the “real” problem of environmental degradation is localized and fragmented rather than global, and the caption to the photograph underscores the irony of WED.  It is a day of little interest because it doesn’t identify a problem that is of real interest to the west.

But there may be another, more productive reading, one that resists seing the image in an ironic register and instead sees it as a synecdoche—a part-whole relationship—for the sense in which the problem of the environment is truly global.  From this perspective the photograph invites us to see the world (the whole) in the particularities (the parts) of a young boy reduced to sifting garbage in polluted waters.  Yes, this is Pakistan, but it could also be anywhere else in the world, if not actually today, then someday, and maybe even soon.  If we can bring ourselves to embody this optic it is hard to understand why WED passed without barely a mention in the western press. And whether we choose to honor this day in the future or not, we ignore the global problems of environmental degradation at our peril.

Photo Credit: PPI/Zuma Press

Note:  The relationship between visuality and  environmental concerns is of no small significance.  The editors of Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture have just announced a special issue on “Visual Environmental Communication.”  For more information you should contact Anders Hansen at the University of Leicester.  The due date for manuscripts on a wide array of topics is 30 November 2011.

 

 5 Comments