Underlying the debate over sequestration is the question of whether or not we should have “big government.”  By some accounts big government does very little for us and we would be better served by allowing smaller, local governments to regulate and address our collective needs.  Those who make this argument, such as, say, the Governors of Texas and Louisiana, miss the irony of seeking and accepting federal aid in the wake of disasters of one sort or another, but the photograph above makes a somewhat different point.

I came across the above image as part of an exhibit that is about to go on display at the National Archives (March 8-September 8, 2013) and which recalls “Documerica.”  Sponsored by the EPA in the 1970s, Documerica was modeled after Roy Stryker’s 1930s “photography unit,” which was housed in the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) and charged with the task of photographing the effects of the depression on rural America.  The FSA photographs were shot mostly in black and white and the results are considered to be one of the treasures of American documentary photography—the vast archive of 170,000 negatives are now housed in the Library of Congress.  The EPA images are in vibrant color rather than black and white, and so they contrast with most of the work of the FSA photographers, but they too are an important historical resource as they stand in as a visual reminder of the state of the U.S. environment at the point at which the country was first becoming conscious of the effects of consumer and industrial waste on the national ecology.

This photograph foregrounds abandoned automobiles and other rubbish rusting in a five acre pond filled with acid water and oil.  In the background we see the big sky blend into a majestic mountain range.  The contrast between dark and light which distinguishes the foreground and the background is too pronounced to ignore, and framed as a landscape it is clear that while the mountains are too far away to identify in any exact way, they are nevertheless close enough to know that the distance can be traversed without too much trouble.  Nature and culture are in disharmony, and it is clear where the threat resides. The photograph was shot near Ogden, Utah in April of 1974, and the pond is close enough to both the Great Salt Lake and a wildlife refuge that, if left unattended, it would have contaminated both in relatively short order.  As luck would have it, the EPA interceded and supervised its clean up.  But of course it had nothing to do with “luck”!  It had to do with a big government agency attending to matters with a landscape eye’s view of the common good—seeing, as it were, not just the trees but the forest.

Big government might not always be the best way to handle all domestic social and political issues, but to argue against it as a simple matter of principle would leave us with little more than the image above.  And that would surely be a tragedy … in the long run, if not sooner.

Credit:  Bruce McAllister/National Archives/Records of the EPA

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“Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators…. Eccentricity is [its] special category, organically connected with the category of familiar contact; it permits–in contcretely sensuous form–the latent sides of human to reveal and express themselves….[It] brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”

                                  — Michael Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 122-23

Photo Credits:  Ricardo Moraes/Reuters – Images 1, 4, and 5; Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images; Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images;

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The scene is a recycling plant.  It could be anywhere in the world, but in this instance it happens to be in Lahore, Pakistan.  The plastic bottles, either clear or lime green, are recognizable, not only by their labels—some because they are in English and clearly mark internationally recognizable brands, and many others because they simply reproduce a common form of branding—but also by the general uniformity of their size and shape.  Not perfectly identical, they are nonetheless similar enough to mark a common commercial product.   Almost to a number they were used to sell sugared drinks or bottled water, but in any case each was generally used one and only one time.  That they are being recycled rather than burned or buried or simply left to deteriorate  at their own glacial pace is a good thing, to be sure, but their sheer volume, accented by the tight framing of the photograph, suggests that something is remiss.

If you look closely you will see that there is an individual in the very middle of the image.  He is barely recognizable. Nearly buried by the bottles that encompass his body, his face all but occluded by two bottles that he appears to be juggling, only his dark skin distinguishes him from the commercial colors that surround him. And therein likes the paradox of neoliberal globalization for all too see.  Cast in the center of a sea of products reliant upon and marketed to his individual needs and desires, his individuality has been almost totally effaced, made unrecognizable by the commercialization and mass production of a product that for all intents and purposes lacks any nutritional value.  And one can only imagine what will happen when he has been thoroughly absorbed by the waste.  Here, it seems, we see one version of the future of the global individual.

Photo Credit:  Rana Irfan Ali/Zuma Press

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OK, so God can’t be photographed.  And the suggestion of any visual image–any semblance or likeness–is anathema in some faiths, and in at least one not even the name should be seen in full.  (Note also that the Greek verb for both drawing and writing is graphein, from which we get photo-graphy, “light drawing” or “light writing.”)  Nor would more secular thinkers be likely to be contrarian on this point: the cosmos is enormous, with much of it beyond the sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye.  The universe is big, humans are small; get over it and get on with the practical business of living in this world.  You know: one day at a time, in the here and how, where it is hard enough to see your way to the end of the week, much less across the endless, expanding vastness for ever and ever.  Really, who has time for that?

And yet, sometimes I think that too many of us have given up too quickly on the idea that we could be in the presence of eternal holiness.  Others, however, have not forgotten.

These monks are looking into the night sky of the Yi Peng lantern festival in northern Thailand.  I can’t pretend to know the full meaning of the festival, the specific religious practice of the monks, where the lanterns came from, or just about anything else specific to this scene.  Nor can you, I suspect.  Nor does it matter, for we are being shown something else.

Readers of Buddhist texts such as The Lotus Sutra are likely to notice the continual repetition and elaboration of the vastness, richness, and endlessness of the Buddha worlds.  Multitudes of beings, worlds, eons–“innumerable hundreds of thousands of billions” of buddhas, each showing “bodies as innumerable and numberless as the sands of hundreds of thousands of millions of billions of Ganges,” extending for “innumerable tens of millions of billion of eons,” and that is only one small part of the teaching.  One tiny fragment of the immeasurable Dharma of the innumerable millions of billions of buddhas, but still glorious.

Radiant, you might say, like a thousand (million billion) lights in the sky.  I have no doubt that the monks know that they are looking at lanterns, and I expect that they are enjoying them much as anyone would, that is, for the sheer delight created by the visual spectacle.  But I suspect that some of them are seeing more as well.  Seeing through teachings and ritual practices that have developed the human ability to discern the universal radiance that lies beyond the range of ordinary vision.  Religion and science alike draw on and extend this larger power of perception; not always, of course, but enough to give us a hint of what more could be known or experienced.

Photography can be another way to extend that power of perception, or at least to hint at what more could be done.  Not least when it teams up with the right ritual or the right telescope.  But even though such images are familiar enough, they often come wadded in spiritual denial.  We see them as images of something, instead of understanding them as signs of things unseen.

There are many reasons for the falling away from a sense of holy immanence–and many of them are of religious origin, not least in Western Christianity.  But part of that falling away may have included writing off images as vehicles of spiritual enlightenment.  You might say there has been an iconoclastic attitude within the secular construction of Western image culture, not least in respect to our habits of interpretation.  Thus, images are secular, and images of the cosmos (of which we have many stunning examples from astronomy) are scientific illustrations of an immense but essentially alienated reality.

I’m not the first to think that modern religion needs to reconnect with a palpable sense of the immensity and beauty of the universe as that has been revealed by modern science, but that is a topic for another day.  (As is the idea that modern science might draw on holiness traditions to extend its understanding of how all of reality is fearfully and wonderfully unified beyond human perception.)  Let it be enough for the present to begin to sense what is suggested by the photograph above: that not only a festival or the night sky but all of reality is glittering with the same connecting, enveloping, awakening energy.

Photograph by Justin Ng/Sony World Photography Awards 2013 Open Short List, Arts & Culture.

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You have no doubt seen the above photograph in the past couple of days as it has been making the rounds, featured, well, just about everywhere on the internet, as well as places like The Daily Show and the Sunday morning news programs.  Yesterday it appeared on the front page of the New York Times, centered and below the fold, although the story about it was buried on p. 22.  The photograph, it seems, was much more important than the story that went along with it.

I find it a troubling image,  but before I get to that I should make a confession:  Although I am a strong advocate for strict gun controls laws, I too once purchased and shot a gun.  Some years ago I had a woodpecker roosting in a nest it had created inside one of the side walls of my house.  Woodpeckers are (or at least then were) endangered species and so one could do nothing about this that would actually endanger the life of my feathered friend.  On the advice of an exterminator I sheepishly and with no small amount of embarrassment went to the local K-Mart and purchased a BB gun pistol with the idea of trying to scare the bird.  The logic was that a BB gun pistol did not have enough force to hurt the bird from the distance I would be shooting, but if I could ping it once or twice in the butt it would move away.  In retrospect the arrogance of thinking that I could hit anything with this weapon is, well, truly stunning.  And my friend Woody figured that out pretty quickly too, as he sat there and actually mocked me—and my manhood— as I shot away at it.  After a day of this I decided that peaceful coexistence was the better policy, but then out of nowhere an owl perched in a tree in my backyard.  Owls are natural predators of woodpeckers and Woody took his leave.  Sitting on my deck and watching the owl swoop through the trees in the early evening hours gave a whole new meaning to Hegel’s invocation that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”  But I digress.

The controversy that has flourished around this photograph concerns whether or not President Obama really does hunt skeet at Camp David or not.  And if not, so the logic goes, it would seem to be a somewhat disingenuous performance posed for the camera and simply for the purpose of creating political identifications and promoting his own agenda.  I find this a somewhat odd argument because one of the things that politicians (of all stripes) do is to perform their jobs for the purpose of creating political identifications and promoting their own agendas.  In its way, such photos are not much different than pictures of politicians cooking meals in country diners or kissing babies.  It is worth calling attention to the convention, but making a major issue out of it seems to be more trouble than it is worth—or at least an unwarranted distraction—particularly given the gravity of the debate over the mayhem created by the usage of guns in the United States.

But that said, I do find it a troubling image.  And the reason is that it is a visual symptom of the troubling love affair we have with guns in the United States.  Guns are weapons designed to destroy life—an irony given their phallic symbolism.  And but for their original and primary purpose we would not have them.  It really is as simple as that. That we rebrand them for the purposes of “target shooting,” whether as the manly weapon the President wields or the child’s BB gun that I purchased with the idea that it wouldn’t hurt anything, is a marker of how easily and willing we are to accept and mask their fundamental purpose. Whether the picture above was posed for political purposes or not is really besides the point, what should trouble us is the assumption that the image it displays really does create lines of identification with very many Americans by naturalizing and valorizing a tool created for the purpose of maiming and killing.

We may live in a world where such weapons are as necessary as some allege, and our Constitution guarantees at least some rights to “bear” them under qualified conditions.  But I would hope that we never lose sight of how regrettable the former condition is if it is in fact true, or how truly profound our obligations are to securing the later.

Photo Credit:  Peter Souza/White House

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