The most direct means for inducing reflection about the photographic medium is to capture a literal reflection, making the photograph an image of an image.  One then can ponder, for example, how a photograph is itself a trick of light sure to include some degree of distortion.

This remarkable double image reveals how the camera can see what usually will elude the unaided eye.  You are looking at a swimmer in the European swimming championships, and also at his image as it is reflected off of the underside of the surface of the water.  The odd, upside down inversion is disorienting: Is that two swimmers or one?  Where is the surface of the pool, and which way is up or down?  (I’ve spent some time studying the image just to be somewhat confident I have it right.  Note that the air bubbles provide a referential anchor, and since the swimmer in the foreground is underwater the camera must be below him pointing up toward the surface.)  It seems that photographic images need not be clearly legible, and precisely because they can record the visible world somewhat independently of encultured habits of perception.  Fish, for example, probably would have no trouble seeing this photo for what it is.

But I suspect that only the human being can experience the uncanny.  The swimmer in the background is a strange double of the first.  Due to the refraction of light through water, some parts of him are a more exact reproduction than others; note, for example, how his right arm seems crippled as it is refracted by the water.  The comparison between the two bodies is unsettling: instead of two toned athletes, one of them seems to be bent by disease or disability.  He could be the athlete in another life, or working out when he is infirm with age.  One might imagine that we each carry such images with us all the time, saved from reflection on our luck and mortality only by the absence of the right kind of mirror.

Reflections of and on reflection are not limited to existential musings.  They also can be a study of collective life.

These children are reflected in a window at a camp in Pakistan for people displaced by the flooding.  As above, the reflection is on a surface that usually is transparent, and again the effect can be disorienting.  Are they all on the same side of the window, or only some of them?  Are they enthralled and amused by their own images or by something else that we can’t see?  And again the answers would not be enough to dispel the strange sense that some of those visible may not actually be of the present but rather a haunting from another dimension or another time.  However one speculates, the photographer has succeeded in making one pause long enough to no longer see only the stock images of Third World Children and Disaster Refugees in a Camp.

And once again the multiple images prompt reflection on more than the nature of the camera.  Instead of a few isolated children, one gets the sense of a multitude.  Instead of an appeal for charity in respect to a specific event, there is the suggestion that something vital and beautiful is multiplying regardless of natural disasters and political malfeasance.  There even is a theological concept that might apply: the Christian idea of a “cloud of witnesses,” past and present, whose labor, sacrifice, and presence will sustain the community of believers.  These children, wherever they are, can be thought of as such a presence on behalf of a better world.

That world is not yet available to be photographed.  These photos are also a study in contrasts.  Water plays a role in both of them, but consider the difference between the controlled environment of the European pool and the uncontrolled rivers disrupting millions of lives in Pakistan.  Together they represent a bi-polar world.  The swim meet and the camp, high energy and enforced waiting, personal achievement and talent wasted, wealth and deprivation.  An image and its reflection, you might say.

Photographs by Francois Xavier Marit/AFP-Getty Images and Aaron Favila/Associated Press.

 2 Comments

With the dog days of summer upon us your NCN guys are taking a short break.

We wil be back on Wednesday, August 11th.

 2 Comments

This week nocaptionneeded.com celebrates its third birthday.

As we did last year, 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.

A big party is not in the works–living large is so last year–but we will take two weeks off from posting 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 7 as we start another year at NCN.

 6 Comments

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has renewed debate about key elements of modern resource use.  How dependent should a society be on fossil fuels?  What constitutes “energy security?”  Can extraction industries and other commercial interests such as tourism thrive in the same ecosystem?  Advocates of various stripes argue that we should drive less, drill more, or rely more on either government or markets to mange complexity.  These are important debates, but the familiar antagonisms can create their own smoke screen.  To understand our predicament more deeply, it can help to look at those images that capture modernity’s basic promise and pathos.

This photograph of a plane at Heathrow airport is not only a stunning depiction of modern design, but one that evokes the dream of technology liberating humanity from earthly bonds.  The marvel of flight has been intensified into a few, sharp, geometrical lines.  The sleek lines of the machine represent sheer efficiency, while its dark undercarriage harbors the deep thrust of power that can lift everyone into the sky.  The terrain of earth is reduced to wisps of low-lying trees in the background, while machine and sky, technology and nature, exist in a pure space of perfect harmony.  The plane is at rest, yet poised as if waiting for a radio signal from heaven.  Flight has become a reality, while even greater potentialities for transformation are waiting to be released.

One might ask, however, why the sky is so golden, or whether the sun is rising or setting.  It might help to know that the plane was on the tarmac because it had been grounded by the ash clouds blowing across Europe last April.  Despite its technological prowess, modern society is still bound to unwanted natural constraints.  Indeed, looking at the image again from the standpoint of a catastrophic situation awakens one to another dimension of technological achievement.  Attending now more to color than line, a melancholic mood emerges to mark what is at risk.  The plane conquered the air only by consuming vast quantities of jet fuel.  The dark fuselage, wings, and engines now stand for the hidden cost of otherwise efficient design.  The darkness below becomes systematic denial of what continues to bind us to the earth.  The golden hue is not a sign of transcendental favor but rather the sunset of a civilization.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, but modern technology has allowed society to advance to a point where it is capable of engineering its own collapse.  That is an achievement, actually, and not for the first time.  It is small consolation, however, to imagine that at least we, too, will be remembered for our beautiful sense of design.

This insight holds even if the sun is actually rising, as it is in the photograph taken on the morning of the 50th anniversary of the city of Brasilia.  The epitome of high-modernist urban design, Brasilia has become a monument to both the Utopian dream and social poverty of modernism.  This beautiful image captures each condition and can stand as a complement to the one above.  Using the same economy of line and the same combination of color and darkness, the photograph exposes at once the precision, the promise, and the danger of a society organized around modern technologies.  Once again, society seems poised for ascension into a higher order of being, and yet also reduced to emptiness and darkness.  The golden dream, it seems, will be eternal, even when only one person remains.

Photographs by David Levene/The Guardian and Fernando Bizerra, Jr./EPA.

 0 Comments

Don’t ask what it is, just enjoy it for a moment.  Earth and stars, a soft layer of cloud and a bright river of light–the scene is both timeless and transitory.  The stars wheel across the sky as night turns toward day, and the mountains will keep their deep geological time while that strip of  illumination flares for an instant and then is gone.  Perhaps it’s a line of fire, more likely something human and so even more impermanent.  One can imagine the stars slowly fading out and the universe sinking into final darkness, yet planet and sky would still be part of the same unity.

But if your fate were tied to that light snaking through the darkness, you might wonder just what it is.  The answer is, a US border patrol vehicle travelling near Otay Mountain, on the outskirts of San Diego, California. I don’t know enough about the area to say whether the vehicle is following the border exactly, but the time-lapse photograph nonetheless becomes an image of how the state draws a line in an otherwise  inchoate reality.  In place of the deep regularities of nature, here we see a division that could just as well be drawn a thousand different ways.

That assertion of sovereignty seems mighty puny against the galaxies passing overhead, but it is closer to human scale, for better or worse.  It also is not inconsistent with the world around it: the trail will be following the contours of the landscape, and its light and shape mirror the landform and firmament in the background.  What is inescapable, however, is that the patrol can only be a momentary traversing of a much bigger reality.

Like this, for example.  Now you are looking at shrimp boats dragging booms to collect oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  Like the border patrol, they, too, are drawing lines in the dark.  The effort to capture some of the oil has to be undertaken, but any attempt to capture all of it is surely futile.  This is not a brief against the state, however.  The boats probably are working for British Petroleum, but it is not likely they would be working at all if the US government wasn’t able and willing to enforce some corporate compliance with environmental protection.  Modern societies need to have states, and states are defined by borders, so what is the point?

These photographs are not images of trucks or boats or even of their visible traces in the darkness of a desert night or the deep waters of the Gulf.  These images are hieroglyphs of human limitation.  They mark the enormous difference between human–and, yes, modern–activity and the natural world encompassing it.  They remind us that large scale collective enterprises–states and corporations–are nonetheless very partial, incomplete attempts to manage a world that remains too often inchoate and beyond control.   In short, these images declare that we are overmatched–and not only by natural forces but by our own attempts to live well at all.

And for all that, they are beautiful.  Some would say that is a liability, but I think it’s a clue.  Even when working through the stupidities that define US immigration policy (too much policing) and regulation of the oil industry (too little), the hints of more harmonious relationships are there to be seen.  The societies that need to be developed will always involve drawing lines in the dark, but perhaps they will make more sense if they are undertaken with a sense of humility, and with the idea that beauty need not be accidental.

Photographs by Jorge Duenes/Reuters and Eric Gay/Associated Press.

 5 Comments

On Memorial Day we want to honor the memory of all who have given their lives to the nation.  In the photograph above the Arlington Gay and Lesbian Alliance commemorates gay veterans at Congressional Cemetery.  Some day soon we hope that they can be honored in Arlington National Cemetery as well.

Photo Credit: Katherine Fray/Washington Post

 0 Comments

At first blush, the scene is actually kind of funny, almost like something of out a Keystone Cops movie:  Six security guards chasing a young man in a Philadelphia Phillies t-shirt around the outfield of Citizen’s Bank Park, incapable of corralling  him.  And then it happens.  A slightly overweight police officer (above) aims his taser and brings him down in a flash, the young man’s arms contorted, his body thoroughly incapacitated.  The fans, who were apparently chanting “Tase him, tase him!” were delighted.  Players shook their heads with a bemused look that seemed to say, “what an idiot.”  The body was removed and the game went on.  The event, captured on U-tube, went viral and became the subject of jokes by everyone from Jay Leno to Charles Barkley to the local reporters on Fox News.

Fans running onto the field at sporting events is really nothing new.  Indeed, it has become something of a ritual in a culture that continues to honor fifteen minutes (or even forty-five seconds) of celebrity and fame.  These diversions are an inconvenience for those assigned to maintain order at such public gatherings and, perhaps, more so for the broadcast networks who are caught between the desire to present the sideshow to their viewers—who, after all, really want to see it—and to avoid encouraging such transgressions. The question, however, has to be, does such an inconvenience warrant the use of 50,000 volts of electricity to maintain law and order?  In the City of Brotherly Love the answer appears to be yes, as the caption to the above photograph reports that the Police Commissioner concluded that “the officer acted within department guidelines, which allows officers to use tasers to arrest fleeing suspects.”  But even a quick search on google makes it clear that the use of tasers hss become a regular part of a growing police state, employed not only to detain violent criminals, but also to force compliance from individuals asking unwelcome questions at political rallies and, in one instance, a 72 year old great grandmother who refused to sign her speeding ticket.

Clearly, the police need to be able to protect both the public and themselves against dangerous criminals, and just as clearly, non-lethal weapons are generally to be preferred to more lethal alternatives (although we need to be mindful of the fact that the characterization of the taser as “non-lethal” might be something of an overstatement).  But as this photograph shows, the standards for affecting such “protection” have been normalized in disturbingly Orwellian terms.  The young man doesn’t seem to be a threat to anyone, a point made all the more clear in the U-tube video of the spectacle. And to identify him as a “suspect” certainly stretches the meaning of that term to the outer limits of use or recognition.  A more accurate term to characterize him might be “scofflaw,” but then that would hardly warrant the brutal usage of what the police now euphemistically refer to as “pain compliance.” Tasers, make not mistake, are weapons of torture, emitting as much as 120,000 volts of electricity in the name of achieving “compliance.”  And what we are witnessing here is the gradual descent into a world in which “law and order” is routinized as a culture of “zero tolerance” for any and all discretions.  It really ought to give us pause.

Photo Credit:  Matt Slocum/AP

 4 Comments