Like a fair number of our readers, we’ll be on vacation for the first two weeks of August.  Travels include some time in Minnesota, where one becomes the subject of the mosquito’s gaze–surely an under-theorized facet of visual culture.  Thanks to the FEI Image Gallery, however, we can see the apparatus itself.

This electron microscope image is described as a frontal view of the compound eyes of a mosquito.  They actually don’t see very well, but that hardly matters as their antennae can sniff out your blood every time.  Perhaps the vacation can be used to think about incorporating other species and other senses into the study of visual culture.  Yeah, we’ll get right on that. . . . .

Posting will resume on August 17.

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The current issue of the British Journal of Photography contains a review of “10 of the Best Photoblogs.”

We’re proud and very pleased that NCN is on the list.  The selection is particularly gratifying as it was done by Jorg Colberg, author of the terrific fine-art photography blog Conscientious.  (And that’s the only reason that Conscientious would not be on the list.)  The others listed are 5b4, aCurator blog, David Campbell’s blog, DLK Collection, Mrs. Deane, Prison Photography, Too Much Chocolate, Unless You Will blog, and Visual Culture blog.  Links to each are in the story at BJP and in our sidebar.

We are compelled to mention that this is not the only list out there.  Most notably, NCN was not included in the Life.com 2011 Photo Blog awards, but our good friend Michael Shaw’s BAGnewsNotes was included in that company, and so we’re that much happier to be cross-posted occasionally at the BAG.  As for getting with Life.com directly, there’s always next year.  In the meantime, thanks to Jorg and to all our readers.

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Homosexuality occurs across the rainbow of human cultures.  The same seems to be true of homophobia, except that the numbers are much larger.  Why are so many people troubled by this small constant in human variability?  There will be many sound answers accounting for a range of social structures and personality types, but sometimes an image comes along that reveals a deeper truth.

The real “threat” of gay life has nothing to do with sex, natural or otherwise.  The real problem is that it exposes just how much human nature is a contrivance–something that itself is not natural as other species are natural, but rather excessively given over to artifice, performance, and an often painful interplay of social display and self-consciousness.

And that’s why I love this photograph of two guys of a certain age at a gay pride parade in Bogota.  I assume they are wearing nurses’ hats, but I’m not going to speculate on that, although they should get some credit for the matching lipstick.  Gender trouble (alerting us to the fact that sexuality is performed rather than given), queering the standard categories otherwise in place with business suits and hospital uniforms, whatever might be the carnivalesque disruption of social categories underway here is only half of the story.  (An important half, as our management of the surface of things has enormous consequences in determining whether people will thrive or suffer, but not the point I want to dwell on today.)  The drama in this photo is all about the face.

Let’s spell it out: are they wearing masks?  They could be.  Especially the one on the right, as the smile looks somewhat frozen, as if sculpted in plastic.  And the headscarves could be hiding the rest of the trappings, whether Velcro straps or a loose fit at the back of the head.  But why the double mimicry of both age and a feminine profession–what kid would do that?  And the one on the left wears his face too well: the meaty heft to it, the tight creases of control between the eyes, and the delicious lift of the upper lip as if on the verge of a sneer–well, you can’t buy that.

The “naturalness” of the face is heightened by the way the black eyeglasses are perched awkwardly high up on the bridge of that considerable nose.  The rather large lenses seem small on that face, as if there only for vision but not really very good for that.  It starts to dawn that the make-up doesn’t extend only to the red lips and scarves, or to the silver ornament and the purple straps and the garish rose tint from the umbrella.

They are wearing masks–their faces.  Eyes look out from behind those facial masks just as they also look out from behind a pair of glasses.  Those faces, which almost could double as the conventional tragedy and comedy masks signifying the theater, suggest that these two individuals are old troupers in the play of life.  They have used their masks to fend off trouble, make their way in the world, express their thoughts and feelings, please, deceive, warn, and love.  Those faces carry scars and the knowledge gained, they are studied for intentions and more, and at last they will dissolve to black and become mere vessels emptied of consciousness.

Wonderful things, but in the end still masks.  And that’s the problem.  Human beings yearn to forget that they are creatures of their own making.  Too much responsibility, and not enough assurance.  Better, it seems, even for society to be ruled by nature, hardly a merciful sovereign, than to see it as a stage where one’s inner and outer selves will never line up exactly.

The gay pride parade may be a celebration of human rights, but it also is a reminder that everyone is queer.  That’s one more reason why we should be thankful there now are so many parades, and that everyone can attend.

Photograph by William Fernando Martinez/Associated Press; one of many in a slide show at The Big Picture on gay pride parades around the world.

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Individual scientists will dream of many things, but what are the collective fantasies that tie them to the stars, and us to them?  Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica, and other popular series were all structured by the discourse of empire.  Whichever side you, or the emperor, were on, the template was political.  Expansion was a given, hubris the constant danger, and some combination of classical virtues such as prudence and courage the key to winning in the long term.   But for all the superficial similarities involved in “the conquest of space,” that really wasn’t NASA.

Perhaps only now, with the last mission about to lift off, can the final veil be lifted off the dream.  This image, taken through the window of a passenger jet, shows the space shuttle Endeavor climbing above the clouds this May.  It’s consistent with the many, many other images of NASA lift-offs: the single line arcing heavenward, leaving behind only a pillar of exhaust, monument to the enormous energies needed to push 4, 640,000 lbs  above the earth.  (That’s orbiter, rockets, and fuel tank, fully loaded.  Now try jump two feet into the air.)  And yet this is a very different image from the typical launch slide show. We don’t see the massive machinery of the launch pad, the roaring flames of the rockets’ ignition, the gleaming machinery rising godlike into the sky, the puny spectators gazing upward as the craft curves away from the “surly bonds of earth” to a final, bright spark of visibility before it passes into space, that place where you will never go.  No, this image is much closer to something else:

My point is not to make a joke. Nor is it to state the obvious, which is that there always has been an all-too-obvious phallic dimension to the whole rocket thing.  (Something to which this post obviously is not immune.)  Perhaps the amateurism of the photograph can help, for the glare of the window makes the image seem a bit like a specimen under glass.  The shift in the spectator’s standpoint also matters: for once we are looking down on the launch, which also is placed against the wide horizon of the planet rather than above those few able to stand and look upward at Cape Canaveral.  These and other features of the image combine to miniaturize what had been a long-running media spectacle.  That change in magnitude allows a hidden drive to become visible.

Whatever the idea behind the space program, the dream never was to get most of us up there.  The “space truck to nowhere” made that realization all too clear.  Gravity is our lot.  But reproduction is not about getting most of the adults through nature’s bottlenecks.  Instead of conquering the stars, perhaps the real drive is to seed them.  Still all too masculine and likely to be doomed for that reason, but now at least one can grant that the humans really weren’t serving the machines.  The dream, the image suggests, was to get just one pod through to some unknown egg.  Humanity wouldn’t conquer anything, but if it was found by the right host, some version of the species could spread across the galaxy.

This rumination is crazy, of course.  But then the space shuttle program was crazy: an unbelievable feat of engineering that had minimal scientific value for the enormous amount of money expended.  Rather than letting it become merely a museum piece, perhaps photographs such as the one above can buy a moment’s reflection.  Even though the smart thing is to focus on living long and well on this planet, the space program’s inversions of magnitude can reveal not only the smallness and fragility of human life, but also how our primitive urges can lead to dreams of almost infinite extension.

Photograph by Stefanie Gordon/Associated Press.  It accompanied this essay in the July 5th New York Times.  The sperm diagram is from a histology course.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Once again, this is a time to say “Thanks” and to take stock.  Thanks to all our readers, and not least to those who comment on the posts.  If anyone would like to give us any advice about the blog itself, now is a good time to do it.  We can’t say we’ll follow that advice, especially given our limited resources, but it always is appreciated and sometimes one thing can lead to another.  You can comment below or email us at rhariman@gmail.com and lucaites@indiana.edu.

We will celebrate–if that is the right word, which it isn’t–by taking two weeks off to get caught up on some other work.  We’ll continue to read our mail, however, and hope that you’ll be back on July 6 as we start another year at NCN.

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Buy ’em by the box!  Great for June weddings, Fourth of July picnics, August vacation reading, back-to-school gifts, course syllabi, holiday stocking stuffers. . . .  You name it, we’ve got it.  Or not.  But we are pleased that the University of Chicago Press has released the paperback edition of our book.

 

Curiously, it’s more expensive at Amazon.com than the cloth edition, but that will sell out soon and this edition will become the standard copy.

Can an e-book be far behind?  Don’t hold your breath, but stay tuned.

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Beautiful, isn’t it?  And beautifully engineered: the sleek design, the precisely machined pleats in the plastic surface, the undulating surface transferring energy back to the water as the strong prow slices through the water–these are the marks of technological prowess taken to near perfection.

Or would be, if it were a machine.  Instead, you are looking at a whale opening its jaw to channel water and krill into its feeding pouch.  But are you really seeing what has just been described?  I still don’t quite see an animal feeding.  I see an elegantly complex shape that is further distinguished by beautiful lines carrying a waveform along a dazzling array of parallel lines.  I see an astonishing combination of strength and suppleness, and I see something that is at once a model of precision and completely organic.  The structure is both a bold assertion, a statement rising above the uniformly horizontal surface of the sea, and yet profoundly a part of its environment, so deeply adapted that is is part of a larger harmony.   And, of course, it is both completely functional and seemingly so uniquely itself that is could be a work of art.

I don’t mean to rhapsodize, but words do come up a bit short when captioning this photograph.  Or at least it’s fair to say that my abilities as a stylist don’t begin to match the beauty evident in the image.  The point is not simply to marvel, however.  I do think that awe and similar emotions are not only appropriate but also necessary to understand what is before our eyes, but that is not enough.  This photograph provides an opportunity to reflect on why “design” need not be surrendered entirely to pseudo-science, and why visual media provide important resources for seeing how nature works and how human beings might live in closer harmony with natural processes.

The image could have been of a submarine or other craft built to imitate a whale’s capabilities.  Or perhaps it could inspire any number of other analogies and applications, whether in agriculture, building ventilation, whatever.  A friend and I recently played a game where I would send him an image from nature without comment and he would reply with another of a machine: say, a bird and a plane, etc.  It quickly became evident that we could go on a very long time, and for the simple reason that our modern, industrialized civilization already had become very proficient at imitating nature.

To a point, that is, for we know very well just how out of whack that civilization is with the deep processes of nature–the processes that must be understood if we are to achieve an adequate degree of sustainability.  How to feed everyone, for example, without adding to global warming that in turn makes it harder to feed everyone.  That is but one example, and the list of what needs to be done is a very long one.  Perhaps one more item should be added, however: to look, marvel, and see what nature already knows.  The knowledge, that is, that is locked up in our capacity to see nature’s beauty.

Photograph by Hiroya Minakuchi, Minden Pictures, via National Geographic.

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Well, the world didn’t end, so the catastrophe continues.  As Suzanne Ross has remarked, “We need no divine intervention to destroy the world–we are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves, thank you very much.”  Even so, the major fail of the latest Last Days prediction opens, for only a moment, a curious window for seeing things anew.  The snide but understandable pleasure in seeing another media evangelist make a fool of himself extends only so far, and beyond that the invocation of new heavens and a new earth (Isaiah 65:17) remains a distant yet radical promise.  That promise can be understood not as an assurance of divine intervention, but rather as the insistence that human societies can provide prosperity instead of exploitation and peace rather than war.  In short, that the the order of things can be turned upside down.

Like this, perhaps.  Were the two machines reversed, the 52-ton tank would crush the spindly treadmill.  But, for once, in a rare moment of imagination, leisure trumps warfare.  The art work by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla is part of an exhibition scheduled for this summer’s Venice Biennale.  The work is delightfully not didactic, and yet it invites reflection on pragmatic questions.  The machines seem to be going in opposite directions, yet neither is going anywhere.  They seem to be opposites in many ways: e.g., the human runner would be outside the treadmill, while the crew would be inside the tank.  Yet they also are complements: both are machines, and fitness is needed for warfare, and the middle class workout may be complicit with the national security state.  Most important, the artwork not only raises questions but also performs the process of inversion. And when the imagination is freed to think about what could be and ought to be possible, the answer is not going to be more of the same.

I could stop there, but one public artwork can evoke another, however accidental the connection might be.  This is one of the “Strandbeests” made by the Dutch artist Theo Jansen.  The work invites many associations, but I see a large, endangered species lumbering along a shoreline.  Perhaps it is the animal’s last shore, the liminal, nearly empty space where it will at last lay down and die.  Like an old tank, you might say, when the last of the oversize military hardware is being abandoned to its fate as ruins of an era no longer even remembered.  Or perhaps it is something beyond that: one of the delightful creature-crafts that could emerge once the war machines no longer ruled the land.

In reality, of course, the artworks are far less permanent than the military-industrial complex.  War will continue, as will economic exploitation and untold suffering perpetrated by those who know only too well that God is not going to intervene.  Photojournalists will continue to bring us the bad news, and risk their lives to do it.  Photography also can relay other public arts, however, and with that the opportunity to turn from cynicism, however pleasurable it can be, to whimsy, imagination, and the brief possibility of genuine transformation.

First photograph by Daniele Resini and Vincent G. Allora.  Second photograph by the Spacex gallery.

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He could have had it all, if he had just played it safe.  Instead, Tim Hetherington had this crazy idea that he might help others, even at the risk of his own life.  He could have cashed in on his looks and talent, but instead he took his camera and went into one war zone after another so that the world would know what was really happening behind the abstractions and the lies.  And then, on Wednesday, the photographer paid the full price for his commitment to conflict photography.

And the same can be said again.  Chris Hondros was killed in the same attack.  Hetherington may get more press as he was the producer and director of Restrepo, the award-winning documentary film from the Afghan war, but they both could have had easy lives far away from the front lines.   Hondros also won awards, and he also got inside the news and then grabbed your attention so that you could no longer see categories instead of people.  Galleries of his work are here and here.  We have posted on images by both photographers, and wish we had done more.

Photography is used for everything from astronomy to porn to selling vegetables, but photojournalism has an inescapable compact with violence.  Without documentary photos of aggression and suffering, a society’s moral sense would be enfeebled and its capacity to behave ethically would be diminished.  Photojournalism, for all its limitations, continually confronts us with two brutally intertwined facts: humans destroy one another, and we are bound to one another nonetheless.  The individual photographers will go into the war zone for many reasons, including the high it offers (as Chris Hedges has admitted), but the most important reason is that they are trying to be agents of conscience.  The risks they take to do so can be extreme.  All they ask in return is that we pay attention: that is, really look at the world and recognize the people living there.

The violent world; our world.  A world that just became a bit emptier.

Photographs from Valerie Macon/Getty Images, public domain, and Tim Hetherington/Panos Pictures.

Update: An excellent archive of articles, commentary, and interviews is at Photojournalism Links.

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