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Rebuilding One World Trade Center Hollywood Style

Shot from ground level somewhere in nearby Battery Park, the photograph above features the construction of One World Trade Center (OWTC) as it nears completion slated for sometime in 2013..  This past week it grew to 1,271 feet high, making it arguably the tallest building in New York City. By the time it is completed it will sprout an additional 505 feet, to a height of 1,776 feet, and will lay claim to being the tallest building in the United States.

We will no doubt be seeing many pictures of OWTC in the coming year, but I was especially struck by the juxtaposition of this photograph with another in a slideshow on the building of the tower at Totally Cool Pix, shot from the 90th floor and looking out over the Empire State Building and lower Manhattan.

Although the two photographs are separated by a number of others depicting construction workers on the job, their proximity is nevertheless close enough to invoke the effect of a cinematic technique known as “shot reverse shot.”  In this technique the camera reverses back and forth between two subjects so as to create the seamless appearance that they are looking at one another along a common eye line in a common space. The shot reverse shot is symptomatic of what is often characterized as the classical Hollywood style, a realist style that erases the role of the camera in the production of meaning and emphasizes a narrative structure driven by linear, chronological, and logical continuities that animates a rational, goal-oriented conclusion to a problem.

The effect here is to anthropomorphize the new tower as it both sees and is seen.  In the first image the tower is an object of desire that looms over the surrounding cityscape, even as it absorbs it in its mirrored surface.  It is seen from a human perspective that underscores its magnitude—sleek, polished, and standing tall— even before it achieves completion.  In the second image the tower is no longer seen, but rather becomes the site for seeing.  Sharing the line of sight of the new tower one looks out over Lower Manhattan, and all that one sees, including the Empire State Building, once thought of as a marvel of modern technology, is dwarfed in its presence.  But more than just accenting the magnitude of scale, the view naturalizes the logical rationality of the new tower’s location within what is generally understood to be the center of U.S. business and commerce.  A place for everything and everything in its place.  A building was tragically destroyed, but now it remerges, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of an earlier tragedy.  Nature restores itself.

The shot reverse shot logic of the relationship between the two photographs invites the viewer to locate the (re)construction of the edifice as not just another technological wonder, but as a seamless, natural event.  But what exactly is the event we are being encouraged to witness?  That the new building is dubbed “Freedom Tower” is not incidental in this regard, and neither is the fact that when completed it will be 1,776 feet tall—a number that recalls the origins of the new nation.  In short, the relationship between the two photographs reinforces a narrative that frames an allegedly natural (re)birth of the nation in which freedom is defined as a fundamentally capitalist enterprise.  That may or may not be a good story to tell, but it is perhaps equally important to note that a different photographic array—or a different visual style—might underscore the arrogance of our deification of that relationship and the implications it has for how those around the world view us.

Photo Credits: Andrew Burton/Reuters; Lucas Jackson/Reuters

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Portraits of that Alien Thing: The Human Being

You may not have noticed, but part of the current renaissance of photojournalism is the continuing development of the slide shows offered by online newspapers and magazines.  Before waxing nostalgic about the glory days of Life and Look, spend some time at the Boston Globe‘s The Big Picture, the Atlantic‘s In Focus, and similar sites.  You will see that the editors are doing more than slapping together the news of the day or putting up human interest eye candy.  I won’t say they are immune to those tendencies, but most of the time they are going one better to help create a richer and more visually literate public culture. And speaking of culture, when Alan Taylor at In Focus put together a set of photos under that label in response to reader requests, he included this portrait of Mitt Romney.  Taylor will have had many requests, but he had a stroke of brilliance in selecting this subject for a show on culture and this photo for what would otherwise be the most conventional of images: the candidate profile.

Taylor reports that he looked for a photo “that let you see him [Romney] as more of a person, less a politician.”  So he was trying to get us to see through the usual framing of the political candidate–you might say, to actually see him as he is, rather than to simply see the stock character in the standard pose.  Although Romney hasn’t stepped out of role–he’s still carefully groomed, tactically controlled, precisely calculative, and even a bit wary–the portrait creates a sense of something like intimacy.  Indeed, he seems exposed rather than scripted, and despite the fact that his shirt, haircut, and tan are thoroughly conventional, he is inescapably a single, specific person.  This is the image of someone who has a history, personality, and mortality all his own.  Being cast into the glare of the public stage clearly frames, envelopes, and may consume him, but he is who he is nonetheless.

But is this culture?  Aren’t we told that culture is art and artists and other things that, whatever else they might be, are more unusual, unconventional, and even otherworldly than a mainstream presidential candidate.  Something like this, for example:

This photo from a Comic Con event (which would draw fantasy, sci-fi, and gaming enthusiasts) would seem to fit the bill for “culture.”  A woman has costumed herself as a character from the “Portal” computer game, and whatever she is, she is not yet another politician.  No wonder that she was the lead image for the slide show: her ghostly hair and skin, space-age clothing, and cyborg eyes create an uncanny effect: she is both human and not human, image and reality, organic material and living artifact.  In other words, the conjunction of 21st century folk art and good photojournalism has given us a different kind of exposure: we can see how the human being could become alien to itself.  That is, we can imagine how human and alien are in fact kin, like image and reality, perhaps.  Nor does this recognition scene have to be set in a fantasy world.  Right here and how you can look at this alien thing and realize that she is human.  And thus that what is human is from another vantage also alien.

Just like the first image.  The best reason they both belong under the “culture” label is that they are the same image.  Each one reveals how human being depends on self-representation that is inherently uncanny, were we but to step back and notice.  So it is that I want to push back a bit against the caption provided at In Focus, for the verbal text puts a familiar face on what otherwise can be a troubling image.  Romney is a real person, of course, so this is not a question about veracity.  But it is reassuring to be told that someone who is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to present his image to hundreds of millions of people is in fact still an individual human being, one of us.  I think that deep artistry of the photography is this: at the same time that it is presenting the individual person, it also is showing us how much we don’t know about Mitt Romney, and how much we rely on a very few stock features to feel comfortable with him, and how much the public’s relationship with him will remain a relationship with a skillfully crafted image.

If you don’t buy it, reverse the order of looking at the images; then look carefully at her to see how she is in fact a specific individual, and then do the same amount of work to see him as an artful composition, as someone acting like a person.  This is not done to claim that Romney or any politician is somehow more phoney and less substantial than the rest of us.  Degrees of performance still exist, but my point is precisely that he and you and I could not do otherwise than to exist as both actor and character, familiar and strange, human and alien.

So it is that he perfectly mirrors her, and she perfectly mirrors you.

Photographs by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press and Leon Neal/AFP-Getty Images.

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The Day After Earth Day

Sunday was Earth Day 2012, and I spent part of the day in my garden.  If I had to live off of that garden, I’d die.  Fortunately, environmentalism is well past the back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s (or was it the 70s?).  Everyone recognizes that environmentally sound practices depend on complex networks of social interaction and economic interdependence.  Of course, unsustainable use of the planet also depends on vast networks of production and distribution, so negotiations can be complicated.  One way that humans deal with complicated realities is to turn to myth; a related option is to turn to art.  Garry Winogrand did both at once in this photograph:

It was taken in 1964, and it is not your typical Earth Day image.  Those who know the 1976 film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, might wonder whether the photo inspired the desert scenes on the plant Anthea, which was suffering from a catastrophic drought.  Perhaps not, but the sci-fi reference seems apt anyway.  Winogrand has brilliantly captured American cultural modernism at one of its most unworldly moments.  Nor is the catastrophic implication entirely absent, as the photo was taken at the White Sands National Monument, which is not far from the White Sands missile range.

But I digress.  Of all that is remarkable about this image, I am most captivated by the contrast between the comprehensively barren landscape and the sense of sublime possibility extending over the horizon.  Instead of seeing the white desolation as the last place, the end of the line, a dead zone in which they could not possibly live, it has become instead a launch pad to another world.  Everything is pointed or aligned toward the vanishing point, while mother and son are already walking forward as if entranced, caught up in something like the narcosis of the deep.  The structure on the right could be a second vehicle, ready to hover and then glide through the desert air into the beckoning atmosphere.  The image captures how modernism is always about the future–a mythic current that can carry people to the ends of the earth and beyond, but also one that can make any environment no more or less than a place for moving on.  No matter how empty the place, no matter that one day a car will use up the last drop of gas on earth, the belief persists that humanity will keep moving forward, and that fuel-intensive technologies will have done no worse than to bring us to the point of transcendence.

Winogrand need not have thought of any of that when he took the photo, but his artistry nonetheless reveals how modernism is suffused with its own mythic yearning, an attitude that both motivates and rationalizes driving well past sustainable resource use.  Of course, one must give complexity its due, as well as acknowledge how many benefits have come from moving beyond perceived limitations–benefits ranging from this computer to lifting millions out of perennial poverty.  But other attitudes are needed as well, for prudential use of the planet will only come from balancing different perspectives.

Another artist is at work here.  Andres Amador creates giant sand sculptures on beaches.  Although it looks inked, he uses only a rake.  The beautiful designs suggest a deep correspondence of art and nature, technique and flow united in the universal movements of earth, air, water, fire, planets and stars, seashells and galaxies.  Not unlike scientific modernism, one might say, but with a difference.  The painstakingly crafted design that you see was intentionally created during low tide.  The artist labored knowing all the while that everything would be washed away, returning to the natural ebb and flow of the planet itself without human intervention.

There is Earth Day with all its good intentions and images of a better, greener life, and then there is the day after, when most people return to largely unabated, unsustainable consumption of non-renewable resources accompanied by toxic byproducts.  The question is not how are we going to stop doing that today–our current practices were determined some time ago and we have next to no choice otherwise.  No, the question is what is going to be done today and tomorrow that will shape what people are doing years from now.  The answer may depend on facing what artists in varied media have revealed.  One option is to see the arid plains and polluted waters as just another stepping off place to a dazzling future somewhere over the horizon.  Another is to realize that everything will revert to nature eventually no matter what, such that beauty and longevity alike depend on what we do in the meantime.

Photographs by Garry Winogrand (Estate of Garry Winogrand and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco) and Andres Amador, Ocean Beach, San Fransisco.

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Romney, Santorum Form Joint Ticket

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum turned the political world upside down today by announcing that they had formed a joint ticket for the Republican presidential campaign.  The former antagonists declared that the bruising primary contests of the past several months were behind them, and their new-found solidarity was evident in everything from their smiles to their repartee with a stunned press corps.  “As long as Mitt doesn’t fire me, we’ll be fine,” joshed Santorum, while Romney laughingly added, “I guess I passed the religious test.”

More seriously, the two candidates assured their supporters that they see eye to eye on key principles of the Republican campaign: ending the class war and making America strong by transferring wealth upwards and overseas; cutting big government by reducing public education and ending public insurance programs such as “Obamacare,” “Medicare,” and “Social Security,” and restoring American values by returning to the comprehensive subordination of women.

Some differences were still evident, however.  For example, it seems clear that Santorum would prefer Christian theocratic rule at the federal level, whereas Romney believes that it should only be allowable in the states and private corporations.  The two men preferred to see such disagreements as a strength of the ticket.  “It’s good to have these discussions in the executive office,” Romney said.  Santorum agreed, as “that way the full range of opinion is represented before the President makes a decision.”

The White House declined comment on such short notice, but an anonymous staffer acknowledged that the two GOP candidates appeared to be a very attractive couple.

Photograph by Jae C. Hong/Associated Press.

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Apertures into Mortal Time

The news was largely theatrical yesterday–the Pope in Cuba, protest and prayer outside the Supreme Court, a new Madonna album–but not much to get excited about.  And speaking of aging, there was this image, which poignantly evokes a different kind of drama.

An old man looks though a crack in a door.  The door is in a nursing home, the nursing home is in China, and he is going to die.  Until then, however, he has a beautiful combination of good humor, intelligence, and gentleness.  His eye may be dimming, but he still absorbs, considers, and responds rather than merely see.  The door of perception may be narrower than it once was, but the slender space, like the eye itself, remains an aperture through which light and thought can travel.

The humanism of the image may be helped by much of his genetic and cultural inheritance not being visible.  What strikes me, however, is how he looks simian.  Rather than reverting to childhood, he seems to be aging into the prehistory of his species.  Photography recapitulates phylogeny, you might say, and like a mirror image reversing the evolutionary process.  We can see not a single individual but the human being as it is a thinking primate.  But no more immortal for that.

This is another photograph that takes us back in time.  The ultraviolet image of Cygnus Loop Nebula captures the remaining gases of an explosion that occurred about 5000 years ago.  It, too, is poignant.  Although nothing but inanimate matter, the beautiful tracery becomes a mirror image, inviting recognition as if it were the remnants of a mind, an intelligence still somewhat structured even as it fades into nothingness.  Such allegories are not science, of course, but why then create the image, itself a work of artifice, and why give the galaxy the name of a swan?  Myth and science need not be far apart, and so the astral form suggests a life form, and in any case, the pattern is an aperture into the history of the star system.  Stars are neither mortal nor immortal, but they, too, are subject to the relentless passage of time.

Which is why I like the rest of the photograph as well.  It’s easy to satirically intone Carl Sagan’s “billions and billions of stars,” but there are billions and billions of galaxies.  Each one is a field of light that will some day be extinguished.  But until then, perhaps a source of perspective on the minor dramas of the news cycle, and maybe even something that might make an old man smile.

Photographs by a stringer for Reuters and by NASA.

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Spring Break at the Blog

We’ll be taking a break to get away from and get caught up at our day jobs.  Regular posts will resume on Monday, March 26.  For those many readers who will be wandering around despondently until our return, spend some time with the artwork below and ask yourself what it might add–justly, misleadingly, or insightfully–to the idea that photojournalism is a public art.

If you get it worked out, do let us know.

John Baldessari, “An Artist Is Not Merely the Slavish Announcer . . .,” 1966–68. Photoemulsion, varnish, and gesso on canvas, 59 1/8 × 45 1/8 in. (150.2 × 114.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and gift of an anonymous donor  92.21.

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The Modern Condition

It has been a full year since Japan was overwhelmed by an earthquake and tsunami and like clockwork the major media slideshows have responded with a series of “then” and “now” photographs (e.g., here, here, and here) marking the slow but steady progress of an advanced society—in many regards a society much like our own—as it returns from utter devastation to a bustling, self-sustaining economy.  It has not fully returned, but it is on the path to recovery and the comparisons surely invite our sympathy and admiration.  In January we saw a similar set of visual comparisons (e.g., here) on the one year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, but with this difference: while it appears that Haiti has recovered some from the disaster, it continues to be an impovrished, utterly dependent, “other world” nation that invites neither our identification nor our sympathy so much as our pity.

The differences between Japan and Haiti are signified in a multiplicity of ways, not least in how the devastation in Japan seems to have been largely structural, effecting roads, bridges, buildings, and other forms of physical property, whereas the devastation in Haiti has been more social and economic, exacerbating an already starving, unemployed, uneducated, and generally impecunious population.  The above photograph is telling in this regard.  It is a photograph of lost photographs collected in a local school gymnasium in Natori, Japan, waiting for their owners to seek them out and recover them.  Some are quite obviously old, perhaps even antique, and thus mark a sense of historical continuity that spans generations and thus mitigates the impact of the more recent and comparatively minor “then”/”now” dialectic that commemorates no more than a span of twelve months.  But perhaps more importantly, these photographs are obviously cherished items, their value signified not just by the fact that they are framed and were thus objects of display in the home, but because they were patiently and laboriously culled from the detritus left behind by the earthquake and tsunami and collected with the hope that they would be found by their respective owners.

Collection centers such as the one above can be found throughout Japan, and some are down right enormous as in the photograph below which identifies a site that contains more than 250,000 photographs .  And the point should be clear: more than lost property, these lost photographs are quite clearly significant momento mori, cultural artifacts that identify the society that takes them and preserves them as a modern, technologically sophisticated, bourgeois civilization (not that one has to be bourgeois to take and keep photographs, and the practice of snapshot photography cuts across all economic classes where it is an established cultural convention, but it rarely occurs in societies that lack an established middle-class).

And so it is that when we turn to retrospectives of Haiti we don’t find the preservation of family photographs at all.  That is not to say that photographs are unimportant, but as with the image below, they signify not an established, modern cultural practice, but rather a modernist intervention of sorts.

Here a Haitian woman shows a photograph of herself as she was pulled from the rubble of a house that had fallen upon her. The photograph was taken by an AP photographer and then given to her.  It is clear that she values it, but importantly it is more a curiosity—or perhaps a marker of humanitarian aid—than a conventional cultural artifact, and as such it designates the society in which she lives as pre-technological if not in fact premodern.  One finds a similar curiosity and intrigue displayed and accented in photographs that show Haitian children (here and here) being introduced to cameras and photography by the Art in All of Us project.

The simple point would be to notice how two societies are distinguished by their attitudes towards photographic technology: one modern and mature, the other premodern and either immature or innocent, but in any case defined as childlike and needy.  But perhaps more important is the way in which the photographs above function in each instance as media that model social relations, inviting us to see and be seen as members of a social order driven by the differences that simultaneously separate us and connect us. That, perhaps more than anything, defines the modern condition.

Photo Credits:  Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images; Toru Hanai/Reuters; Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo

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A Meditation on Things Lost—and Found

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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A Rocket, a Tomato, and a Slice of Bread

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

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit:  Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

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The Texture of Political Action: Democracy and Dictatorship

Last night millions of people were watching the Academy Awards ceremonies, which might be thought of as Hollywood’s prom.  You might expect that this next sentence would remark that at the same time millions of other people were suffering and fighting for something more important. But let’s not be too quick to separate society and politics.

This photo of Egyptian twenty-somethings uploading video from Tahrir Square is a portrait of political action–and a study in youth culture.  They could get beaten, imprisoned, and tortured for what they are doing–and they are wearing just the right kind of student fashions and working on what is the cool computer for anyone who gets anywhere near a university.  We particularly like how the color of the hard drive matches the laptop, which also gets picked up on the Coke cans and the floral pattern on the tablecloth (we probably can thank mom for that).  But nothing is too neatly coordinated, for that would nullify the wonderful informality and messiness that most characterizes the tableau.  They don’t have to wait for an election: this already is a portrait of democratic life.

Of course, the image also plays on sentimental memories, for those who have them, of student days–the ashtray and toilet paper are near-perfect touches–and these revolutionaries also are middle class (or better), Westernized, and otherwise liberal-democratic elites in the making.  They do not look like those demonstrators who were poorer or embodying more traditional customs and Islamist commitments, and less privileged viewers might be quick to see and resent those who don’t have to go to work as soon as they are able.  No one should conclude that these students are or ought to be the face of the revolution or that democracy can’t include wearing galabiyyahs or that every viewer should warm to the glow of the Macbook Pro laptop.

Still, sometimes you can just see the difference.

This is the interior of a nondescript building somewhere in Damascus.  The New York Times caption had nothing to do with the photo as such: “The escalation in Syria, where Mr. Assad has vowed to end a 10-month-old uprising that he has characterized as the work of foreign-backed terrorists, came within a few miles of the epicenter of his power in the capital on Sunday.”  So, what is the photo doing?  We don’t see a recognizable building or evidence of warfare or anything specific to the day-to-day struggle being reported in the text.  But perhaps it’s there to communicate something about the nature of the regime.

Institutional buildings can be dull, unadorned, vaguely depressing places; that, too, is part of the look.  “See how your money is not being wasted, and how functional and egalitarian your government is, and how the rule of law is applied uniformly?”  Even so, the large photograph of Our Leader is the stock image of authoritarian regimes, matched only by the elimination of most other images and their implications of pluralism.  This photo captures that and more, including a sense of social impoverishment, as if the energy is being leached out of everything.  Even Assad’s portrait is fading into a ghostliness.  Perhaps he’s on his way out (I wouldn’t bet on it), but this photo says that the authoritarian regime has already reduced its society to a kind of lifelessness.  Those flags could be in a mausoleum, whether one run by the state or one used for the state’s internment.  Empty surfaces, listless symbols, and a fire extinguisher: welcome to the Syrian government.

Egypt is doing better that Syria but is still a long way from becoming a democracy, so easy contrasts are not the point here.  But one can consider how politics is textured: that is, how the social context and consequences of political action are evident on the surface of things.  By paying attention to the social surface, we can understand how both individual experience and collective action might be shaped by many different factors coming together in a particular place and time.  And we can see how different political practices can make the world more richly interwoven and vibrant, or more relentlessly ordered and depressing.

The genius of the camera is that it captures everything that is there on the surface, whether we intended to see it or not.  Photographers are taking considerable risks to photograph the political events of our time.  To better understand what is happening, one might want to pay more attention to the surface of things, and to how life is being textured.

Photographs by Ed Ou and Tomas Munita for The New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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