It’s not easy to find a distinctive photograph on election day in the US.

This certainly would seem to qualify, but it is one of three very similar images that I found in a few minutes of looking through the slide shows at several major papers.  Each of the three was close cropped to feature a hand or hands, voting stickers, and nothing else.  I think this is the best of the set, and the best image overall, but the bar was pretty low.  The ritual event seems to bring out the conventional in all of us: red, white, and blue clothing, lines of people at the polling places, a few contrasts between the official paraphernalia and local culture, early morning voters or rows of candidates’ signs, representative examples of The Common People voting and finally of the suits themselves: candidates voting, winners raising their arms in victory, losers standing bravely before their tearful supporters.

And what would you expect?  it is precisely the ritualized character of the event that is so important: democracies may have bitterly contested electoral campaigns, but the transfer of power is supposed to be peaceful, orderly, routine, and–although in one sense momentous–entirely unsurprising.  This is not to be a drama of succession among the nobility, not a story of cabals, intrigue, and violence, no tense transition from one ethnic group to another.  The public art in this case reflects the polity’s lack of recourse to anything but its most ordinary version of itself.  The aesthetic dullness is a sign of democracy’s strength.

Even so, the images may be doing more than reporting the conventional features of election day.  The photograph above, for example, seems to be a poignant celebration of the root belief that democracy is the government of all the people.  The rough-hewn hands and skin color channel a great deal of American history, not least the 14th Amendment, while their pose is almost religious, as if praying or holding a communion vessel.  Or, if they are the hands of a working man, the stickers could almost be seen as food, perhaps that given out at breadlines in the depression of the 1930s.  (I mention the date as we now have to be a bit more specific than was necessary a few years ago.)  Thus, the image beautifully celebrates democracy itself, as if the vote is both substance and sacrament of the common life.

That’s the good news.  I think we also need to consider how the image may be inadvertently pathetic.  This image of citizenship shows us a truncated citizen, just as it has reduced civic participation to the sheer act of voting.  What’s wrong with that?  On a day that celebrates civic unity after the divisiveness of the campaign, nothing.  As a symbol of what the country really needs, however, it’s not enough.  This country needs not only elections but good decisions, and not only winners but leaders, and not only control of the House or the Senate but also consensus on behalf of serious policies to address real problems.

To get that, much more is needed than merely voting.  If all that is asked of citizens is that they vote, their citizenship can be reduced to something like the sticker itself: a cheap display of temporary virtue that really doesn’t change anything.  If all that is asked of elected officials is that they mouth platitudes while consolidating power and obstructing effective government, you don’t even need to vote.  So, before you take that sticker next time, ask yourself, what are you doing, really, on election day?

Photograph by Luke Sharrett/New York Times.

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According to our WordPress statistical report, this week NCN passed 1,000,000 views.  That’s views, not dollars, but we’re not complaining.  The blog actually will have passed the mark some time ago, because RSS feeds are not likely to be included in the WordPress report.  But it will include robots, guys looking for porn–hey, we love you, too–and perhaps an occasional space alien, so we might as well take the count we have as a good enough reason to celebrate.

Since John and I live in separate states, the celebration will be rather low-key.  Much more important, however, is that the day gives us another opportunity to thank our readers.  We don’t get any credit in our day jobs for doing the blog, so the fact that you are reading it, and that some of you comment from time to time, means a great deal.  So, thanks: for your interest, your comments, and your suggestions, which always are welcome.

Photograph by J. R. Eyerman/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

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Car accidents, like the one above, are pretty common events in the US, somewhere in the vicinity of 12 million per year.  And that’s probably one reason why we don’t see very many photographs of them in national and regional newspapers.  That the above photograph of an accident in Queens showed up in the WSJ’s “ New York Photos of the Week” slideshow for October 2-8 is thus a bit odd.

For one thing, it’s not a particularly good photograph.  The caption reports a head-on collision but we can only see one vehicle; the car we can see is obscured by the person standing in front of it; and the cropping is somewhat off kilter yielding an unbalanced image with too much empty space on one side, and too much clutter on the other. But more than that, there is nothing that seems to distinguish the event itself.  No one died, though there were injuries, and it doesn’t seem to have been the result of road rage, alcoholism, or texting while driving … all topics that seem to be of some recurring interest—at least in local newspapers. It appears simply to have been a run of the mill car crash.  One of the 12 million.  And what makes its placement all the more curious is that there are two other photographs of relatively ordinary car accidents in the same slideshow for a total of three out of eighteen images.  One can only assume it was a very slow news week in the Big Apple.

Or maybe something else is going on here. Maybe the point is precisely the ordinariness of such accidents in contemporary society. Amidst the work and play of everyday life accidents simply happen.  Individuals may be responsible in some measure, but in an advanced technological society calculated risks are also systemic, animated by the conditions of modern life.  And yet, as the photographs in the WSJ imply, there is also a certain randomness to all of it.  Here two cars hit one another head-on, there two police cars run into one another, or a van runs into a store front.  All we can do is clean up the mess and move on.  Its how we live our lives.

Of course, what counts as ordinary is relative to time and place.  And so we have another photograph concerning an automobile “accident” that circulated across  the blogosphere and showed up on more than a few photographic slide shows in the past week:

The place is East Jerusalem.  The driver of the car is the leader of an Israeli settlement. The boy hurtling through the air is a Palestinian youth who, along with the other boys in the photograph, was allegedly throwing stones at the car. Depending on who you want to believe the driver was either trying to run the youths over or attempting to escape their attack.  There is plenty of evidence to support each interpretation, but truth to tell, the photograph really does very little to help us sort it all out.  What the photograph does indicate, however, is the ordinariness of everyday life within the settlements of the West Bank, a world where settler violence is so common that it becomes impossible to distinguish an accident from a violent assault.  Or, perhaps more to the point, it suggests the sense in which the ordinary risks of everyday life in some parts of the world life far exceed the otherwise simple concerns of random mishaps and misfortunes.

Photo Credit:  Ken Maldonado/Wall Street Journal; Ilia Yefimovich/Agence France-Presse/Getty

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Photographs often provide a necessary challenge to the abstractions of political discourse.  When state officials speak of “relocation,” a photograph can expose the squalor of the camp.  Against claims of “national security” and “regional stability,” one can point to visual documentation of murder.  Nonetheless, it also is important to consider how photography can identify basic forms of political power: forms and features of domination that otherwise might easily become hidden behind the particular identities and passions of specific conflicts.

This photograph is a case in point.  According to the caption, “Israeli soldiers guard Jewish settlers as they walk down a closed street in the Palestinian territory during Sukkot celebration.”  Nicely balanced reportage, that: “guard” implies that the settlers are likely victims of violence, while “closed street” can remind us that the Palestinian residents of the town will have been driven or prohibited from the area so that the settlers could walk to and from their religious service.  You could almost say the report is fair and balanced.  It also is ironic, as Sukkot commemorates a time when Jews lived in temporary dwellings, while the question of whose dwelling in the occupied territories is “temporary” is a very vexed issue.

The photo both naturalizes and exposes a division of labor that is crucial to state power.  We see both civilians who are unarmed, and soldiers who enact the state’s monopoly on violence.  In a just, well-ordered, democratic state, that is a good contract.  From that vantage, the ubiquitous images of Palestinians throwing stones or carrying weapons while still in street clothes imply immediate illegitimacy; no wonder that the US rarely sees images of settlers carrying arms, as some do.  In the photograph above, the settlers appear merely as citizens exercising their basic right to walk unarmed and unharmed in public.  The soldiers are merely guarding, not inflicting violence on others.  The degraded, graffiti-smeared buildings are just there, ominous signs of danger that make the soldiers appear all the more appropriate rather than one cause of the poverty.

Hebron is home to about 163,000 Palestinians and roughly 800 Jewish settlers.  In the sector where the settlers live, Palestinian movement is highly restricted, whereas the settlers can move anywhere and have some streets reserved solely for their use.  According to a report in the Washington Post, “Shuhada Street, the principal thoroughfare [in the H2 sector], is well-paved thanks to multimillion-dollar renovations funded by the United States, but empty of Palestinian pedestrians and Palestinian vehicles. . . . In some areas near the settlements, Palestinians cannot walk unless they are residents or visit unless they have a special permit from the Israeli army.”  In short, the “closed street” shown in the photograph is just one example of a much larger state practice for controlling the territory and degrading the well-being of a captive population.  Thus, although no Palestinians are in the picture, it is precisely because no Palestinians are in the picture that the photograph is another witness to the practice of domination in everyday life.

And so a seemingly innocuous photograph suggesting the likelihood of violence against the Jewish settlers also exposes some of the means and effects of Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory.  The soldiers in the photograph are one small part of a vast apparatus of restriction, deprivation, intimidation, and outright violence.  Of course, the settlers are likely to be risking violence, but the same can be said of anyone who breaks into a house.  And to get the full implication of how the photograph exposes a practice of domination, one might compare it with this image.

Here Hamid Karzai is accompanied by his armed guards while visiting an American military base in Afghanistan.  Apparently Karzai isn’t safe anywhere.  Once again, a civilian is cordoned by his protectors as he walks through an environment marked by the signage of another slow war.   Although protected by concrete blast shields and his guard, Karzai still looks wary, as if looking for a potential assassin.  Contrast his stance with the casual demeanor of the settlers, and you can see how confident they are of IDF protection.  And because Karzai’s mercenaries are wearing their preferred uniform of street clothes and Kevlar vests, his legitimacy appears shakier still.

But despite their differences, both photographs reveal the same, sad reality: no amount of military force on the periphery can compensate for injustice or corruption at the center of the state.  If the regime is legitimate and just, it will still need military protection.  But Karzai’s regime is not legitimate, and Israel’s occupation is not just, and force, no matter how effective, can only protect, not change moral failure.

Photographs by Mamoun Wazwaz/Xinhua/ZUMApress.com and Massoud Hossaini/pool photo.

The gesture is so small as to risk insult, but this post is dedicated to Ariella Azoulay, author of  The Civil Contract of Photography, who very recently has been denied tenure at Bar-Ilan University for reasons that can only be construed as shameful–and shameless.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Aerial photos were a big deal back in the day, but they had lost their cachet well before Google Earth and Google Maps came along.  Now the aerial photo lies in the odd fissure between a novelty item and the technologies for navigating of everyday life.  Until, that is, someone thinks to make it an instrument for social thought.

This photograph by Christoph Gielen of a Phoenix-area retirement community is one of several you can see in a slide show at the New York Times Opinionator blog.  The accompanying post by Gielen and Geoff Manaugh provides relevant commentary, including an apt reference to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, in which a grid of tract houses is compared to a circuit board.  That’s Pynchon doing what he does so well, and it’s also an example of the rhetorical figures of metaphor and synecdoche.  Metaphor is a comparison to suggest identity, and synecdoche identifies part-whole relationships.   They can work together powerfully by fusing microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, as when one sees the world in a grain of sand, or a galaxy as a piece of jewelry.  (The Greek word kosmos meant, revealingly, both universe and ornament.)  Both come into play above in the photograph above if you see, perhaps, a hieroglyph, as Gielen and Manaugh do, or the nosecone of a rocket, or a colony in outer space.

In looking at the photo, we always can stay with a literal transcription of the suburban infrastucture of houses, streets, and arterials, and, with that, an analysis of land use, population density, and other administrative variables.  Or, without loss of the more pragmatic perspective, we also might let the image work through our imaginations.  Not for mere flights of fancy, but to encounter wider perspectives toward the same end of living well collectively.

As I see the suburban development morphing into a space colony, I become aware of the dreams underlying suburban American development–dreams of escape, adventure, self-sufficiency, and community in the desert–and also of vulnerability, hidden dependencies, problems with environmental and social sustainability, and other dangers that cannot be paved over forever.  The suburbs, like the American West, always were about colonization one way or another.  If images such as the one above can help us see how the burbs, like the cities they encircle, are as amazing and as precarious as an outpost on a distant planet, that is an artistic achievement.

To get the most out of thinking with visual tropes, you have to look for inversions of whatever figures you might have before you.  For example, instead of extending a small suburban development into deep space, you might imagine the entire planet as a single city.

This delightful image is from Transit Maps of the World, by Mark Ovenden and Mike Ashworth.  The more I look at it, the more possible it seems.  Not boring tunnels under the oceans, but living together, all of us, through sensible, sustainable use of public infrastructure.  Living in a time, perhaps not too distant, when such ideas wouldn’t make people wonder, “What planet are you from?”

Photograph by Christoph Gielen.  The map also can be seen in Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities, by Frank Jacobs.

Update: Since I wrote this post, Alan Taylor as put up a terrific example of aerial analysis at The Big Picture.

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September brings the religious festivals of Ramadan and the High Holy Days, while Christians have–what, Halloween?  So for those readers who might be feeling a spirituality deficit, I thought we could turn to our Buddhist friends, or, at least, this photograph of children dressed up as Buddhas for a peace festival in Naida, India.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have labeled them, as they also could have appeared to be cheap Roman statues or extras for a low-budget sci fi film.  Whatever they might be, there is no doubt that they are children.  Where else could one find such openness before the social eye of the camera?  Although the gold paint makes them appear masked, they are in fact unmasked, exposing the unique personality and momentary attitude of each individual.  And as with Roman statuary, those individual faces in turn reveal how the human soul is traversed by suffering, self-consciousness, willful composure, and endurance that has been forged out of continuing vulnerability.  Though but a photograph, we are brought to a moment of existential truth much like Rodin’s great statue of The Burghers of Calais, where distinct individuals share a common fate.  The children seem to be looking at something both awesome and terrible, as if they have been brought before a sacrificial alter, perhaps one waiting for them.  They are indeed thoroughly human.

But wait a minute–aren’t they Buddhists at a peace festival?  What’s with the sacrificial alter?  Perhaps my imagination is too grounded in an Abrahamic religion, but you can’t spin suffering out of Buddhism, and the photograph is a powerful testimony to something deeply human.  It captures how we bind ourselves together through religious ritual and other forms of community in order to keep terror at bay, only to still suffer as we await destruction.

And that attempt to bind ourselves together and to God makes all the difference.  Perhaps another reason the photograph struck me so powerfully is that it reminded me of the annual Christmas pageant.  I don’t recall being in one, but I’ll never forget the first time I watched my children among the others dressed as little shepards, angels, and the like.  There they were–halos askew, wings off-kilter, awkwardly yet intently trying to play their roles–and then it hit me: that’s how God sees us.

In other words, you don’t have to believe a thing about God or the divine spark in each of us to understand that human beings are over-matched by reality–pathetic creatures condemned to self-consciousness who survive only by amateurish acting in the theater of social life.  And if you will accept for the moment that religion exposes humanity as it is, then you might go a step further and consider how any divine intervention is going to have to come through human hands.

I close with this image of refugees from the floods in Pakistan.  Like the gilded children above, this image is obviously artifiical: a trick of back lighting suggests supernatural emanations.  Again, no one label need apply.  The man could seem to be something out of Night of the Living Dead, leading the boy to be sacrificed.  Or they could appear to be bathed not merely by the flood waters but by some spiritual power that can withstand the monsoon and signify that they are worth saving.  And as before, the child is watching, looking at something that awes and worries him.

These images are tinged with suffering, and they expose a few of the devices that human beings use to bind themselves to one another.  Devices such as pageants and photojournalism.  The question remains: will we see what is there to be seen when the sacred appears among people humbled by circumstances?  People of low status such as children, or those who are knee-deep in flood waters. . . .  I see humanity, over-matched yet enduring, watching and waiting, and perhaps wondering whether they will ever be treated as children of God.

Photographs by Parivartan Sharma/Reuters and Daniel Berehulak/Getty.

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H. Rap Brown once famously remarked that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”  Brown was challenging dominant myths, not least the idea of America’s providential exception from the dark side of history.  Now that America has become a major exporter of violence, Brown’s statement may seem antique.  Myths die hard, however, and it remains difficult to say who might make people stop and think about the production of violence today.  One place to look is an installation by Yoko Ono in Berlin.

This photograph captures the artist posing behind her artwork entitled “A Hole.”  Perhaps the work need not appear to be a bullet hole, but it certainly becomes that when backed by the blood and black silhouette of her head.  It’s easy to fault Ono for putting herself in the front (even when in the back) of her art–Is at all about her?–but I think that is mistaken.  She and the photographer have created a moment of near-perfect performance, one that captures the deadly allure of the aestheticized violence in its mass market forms of detective fiction, Noir and action films, and even high fashion.

The image is a set of contrasts (of course): shimmering surface and dark depth, centrifugal dispersion across a plane and the concentrated energy of the human figure, obliteration and the human face, a circle of nothingness where a person should be.  Add to this the tension between the formal elegance of the composition and the shattering force at its center, and violence seems to become an aesthetic achievement.  If so, one might recall Walter Benjamin’s prophetic observation that humankind’s “self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”  That may be, but one also could consider that the photo is highlighting some of the design elements of how that already has happened, not here, but elsewhere: in the movie theater, for example, or the nightly news.

It takes nothing away from the artist to note that the art can reveal only some of the truth of a complex reality.  So it is that the artistry of the image ought to be balanced by another photograph, one that may be thought of as looking at the same thing from the other side.

This image is more conventional than the photograph from Berlin but an artful study in violence nonetheless.  Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front leader Mohammed Yasin Malik stands in front of a crowd of supporters in Srinagar, India.  There are no bullet holes or other overt signs of violence here, yet the scene is all about violence and the potential for violence.  The liberation movement represents one side in a long-standing and often violent conflict over Kashmir; the crowd is protesting brutal crowd control measures by Indian government forces that have included killings; the crowd itself is capable of becoming a mob (such is one source of crowd power and its frequent definition by the state); and the leader could both unleash violence by the crowd or revolutionary fighters and be himself a target of assassination.

Here Politics mediates violence just as Art did above.  In each case actual violence is off stage, but its presence can be felt powerfully.  In the first photo, the violence is completely artificial but visible; in the second, it is implicit but leads directly to actual deaths.  Both are moments of performance, with the artist remaining hidden and the politician exposed to public scrutiny: and yet both are enigmatic, as you don’t know the artist’s opinions on the subject, while the political leader looks by turns hard, worn, calculating, concerned, and both a man of the people and yet set apart and isolated by his role.  In the first image, the scene is nowhere and anywhere there is a cinema; in the second, the urban masses of the Global South are paired with a figure who could be stepping out of Shakespeare.  Put the two photographs together, and Malik becomes the figure behind the hole made by the assassin’s bullet.

In the first image, the spectator could be the assassin; in the second, it could be the state.  It remains unclear whether that is much of a difference.

Photographs by Hannibal Hanschke/EPA and Mukhtar Khan/Associated Press.

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Now that Tea Party rallies have become “non-political” and dedicated to the vague ideal of restoring honor, perhaps the US media can get on with the business of covering what we might call the Real Government–you know, the one that makes laws, distributes resources, provides services, and generally is tasked with protecting the general welfare.  The Tea Party will be a footnote to history soon enough–no, not soon enough, but soon–and thus the weekend’s march on Washington provides a fitting moment for reflecting on political movements and their leadership.

According to the caption at the New York Times, this is a photograph of Glen Beck waiting backstage with security personnel.  The photo also is a critical study in American propaganda.  The center of the photograph is dominated not by any political actor but rather by a symbol: the Washington Monument celebrates both the nation’s first president and the Enlightenment rationality that his generation of political leaders valued so highly.  Austere, abstract, and not in any way religious (unless you count the Egyptian allusion), the monument perfectly captures both aspiration and stability as they are to be deep virtues of a federal government.

That is not to say that the monument shouldn’t serve as a rallying point for populist movements lead by demagogues preaching about “faith.”  The monument does set the key for the photograph, however, one that is developed further by the framed images left and right.  Abraham Lincoln is Washington’s equal in the pantheon of great leaders, and the figure who guided the nation through its second great crisis.  The Native American figure is apparently emblematic of natural nobility and honor–and perhaps of the honor of the Lost Cause now neatly brushed clean of slavery and Jim Crow lynchings.  In any case, it is clear that he is a warrior and perhaps a leader of his people.  Thus, you have three symbols of leadership on behalf of the nation: a triptych binding together the founding, the second founding, and those who were displaced, all supposedly united by–I hate to say it–a native sense of honor.

And then there is Glen Beck with his guards.  Perhaps we are to believe that dark suits and sunglasses are the latest incarnation of the warrior spirit, but the photograph is much more a depiction of contrasts than continuity.  Today’s political actors are dwarfed by the images of their forebears, and the supposed unity of the neatly balanced composition belies the tensions between the founding of the union, its being rent apart by slavery, and its reunification including the conquest and near eradication of the original peoples.

Most important, the symbols are inert, objects for manipulation.  And that is what the political actor of the day is all about: manipulating symbols and, through them, crowds.  And manipulating those symbols without any regard to the original history, commitments, or sacrifices of the real men and women who built the nation or suffered the often tragic turns of its making.  (One might note that both suffering and victory were eloquently joined in the original March on Washington, to which Beck’s rally was the “accidental” and parodic sequel.)  Indeed, the leader of this rally has rewritten the record book for those who trammel history, which one can do when leading consists in no more than giving speeches without ever having to govern.  And when the leader is far removed from his audience, a crowd that is visible only in the distance as a staged source of applause across the moat formed by the reflecting pool.

There is one more contrast built into the photograph, albeit one that requires a bit of history.  Construction of the Washington Monument began in 1848 but wasn’t finished until 1884.  One reason for the delay was that the project was hijacked by the Know-Nothings, the nativist reactionaries of the day who were precursors to the Tea Party movement.  Know-Nothings were virulently opposed to immigration from Ireland and Germany–immigration by people with names like Beck, for example.  They also thought that Catholics couldn’t be good citizens in a democracy, wanted Bible readings in the public schools, and otherwise endorsed positions that, with the change of a name or two, are all too common among those gathered on the Mall last Saturday.

Fortunately, the Know-Nothings became a footnote to history, and the monument was completed.  Perhaps we could do worse than to have our symbols outlast those who now would speak in their name.

Photograph by Brendan Smialowski for the New York Times.

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