The close conjunction of Earth Day and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill  in the Gulf should not go unremarked, and as more than an occasion for irony.  Disasters have the virtue of exposing the hidden costs of old habits, not least habits of seeing.  So it is that a slide show at the Manchester Guardian provides not only a counterpoint to the mess in the Gulf, but also an inadvertent example of how meaningful change has to go beyond strengthening government regulations and refining extraction technologies.  Such changes are needed ASAP, but there also is need for cultural change if a sustainable civilization worth having is going to emerge in the 21st century.

The Guardian asked the world’s leading “professional conservation photographers” to select the top forty nature photographs of all time.  Those images were then auctioned off in conjunction with Earth Day to raise money for a suitable charity.  You can see ten of the images here.  Frankly, I would find it very hard to pick the top 1000 nature photographs, and my list could very well not include many of those at the Guardian, but that’s a small matter.  What was striking, to my mind, about the ten photos selected for the Guardian slide show was that four of them were double images, such as the one above, and five were images of multiple members of a single species, with the image below combining both elements.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, but both images are highly unusual.  Nature is not a hall of mirrors, nor do species live primarily among themselves.  Even if we grant each figure its due–as all nature from crystals to organisms involves reproduction, and many species are social species naturally oriented toward those within the group–there is something decidedly crafted about the professional photographs.  The two above, for example, are masterful studies in composition that are the result of considerable effort and adroit camera work, and they bring the viewer to a highly privileged vantage for seeing nature in its most revealing moments, whether with the clarity of dawn or the intimacy of twilight.  I am the last person to fault such images for their beauty, yet I can’t help but notice how much these images are about photography itself.

Photography is an art of reproduction.  The photograph is a copy of what is seen through the lens of the camera, and the photograph then can be copied many times over.  The ten nature photographs in the slide show certainly reflect the idiosyncratic preferences of some photo editor, but their uniformity also discloses how much the human spectator can’t help seeing itself reflected in what it sees.  Nature, it seems, is a version of photography: always doubling and multiplying further to create reproductions of itself.  This is what has been called “the world as picture”: the world taken as if it did not exist unless it can become a picture, finally most real when it is seen as an image.

This is an indirect way of saying that we can’t help but seeing the world on our own terms.  And how nice is it to think that nature has a formal structure that can be perfectly captured by modern technology, and that large, intelligent, social animals can serenely dominate the landscape.  But, of course, only the camera leaves a scene untouched, and the pathos of the elephants is that an intelligent species can find itself at the last watering hole.

Some might point out that “nature” is a human construction and subject to criticism on those grounds.  Even so, it is fair to ask whether photographers or anyone else have really seen nature, and how familiar images reflect a particular way of seeing that might be shaped too much by cultural habits.  Those habits currently may encourage contemplation, but at the cost of seeing other species apart from us and defined primarily by their own prospects for reproduction.  By contrast, the techniques and sensibility of an ecologically sensitive photography might lead to a different way of seeing nature.  That perspective could not escape its own projection of human interests onto the image, but it also might feature interdependency rather than species standing alone, and complexity that is more dynamic and even more beautiful and more profound than what can be caught in mere reflection.

Photographs by Jack Dykinga and Frans Lanting/Corbis-iLCP.

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Michael Shaw, founder of BAGnewsNotes, the innovative blog on visual politics, has brought a new look to the BAG.

The changes are part of a significant upgrade across the board.  Although I haven’t spoken with Michael about his sense of what he has accomplished, it seems to me that he is creating a digital magazine on par with what Harper’s was in the traditional media system, while keeping his focus directly on photojournalism and concerned photography.

John and I have been fortunate to have some of our posts cross-listed at the BAG, and we will continue to be contributors there–the same posts you see here, so you don’t have to go there to read us.  But there are many other reasons to go there, and we encourage our readers to bookmark the BAG.

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The scene here is Ramallah, February 2002.  The tank is Israeli and the people blocking its path with their hands raised as if under arrest are Palestinians.   The photograph is part of a NYT slideshow featuring the work of the recently wheel chair bound Palestinian photojournalist Osama Silwadi, who continues to photograph Palestinian life, albeit from a “new vantage.”  His work, both prior to being crippled in 2006 by two bullets that shattered his spine and subsequently, is a testament to the power of photography to document the ever present tension between the tragedy and soulfulness of human life.  The image that caught my attention, however, was the one above, which features the visual trope of the tank as the symbol of the totalitarian state.

Developed by the British during WWI, the tactical and strategic capacity of the tank was revolutionized by the Germans during WW II, where it became a central element of the military strategy of “lighting warfare” known as the blitzkrieg. Known for the combination of offensive and defensive mobility, as well as its strong fire power, the tank was understood to be a formidable, if not altogether unassailable, weapon of modern warfare, and its technological development was a key feature of the Cold War “arms race.” More important to the purpose here, it was during the Cold War that the “tank” took on symbolic significance as something more than just a military weapon as it was regularly featured as an emblem of state power, typically by eastern bloc nations.

The symbolic connection of the tank to totalitarian regimes in particular was marked visually not only by its size, but more importantly, by its panoptic quality: thoroughly enclosed and sealed off from any outside observation or unwanted intrusion, the arbiters of state authority residing inside of the tank are nevertheless in position to monitor and control the outside world with near invincible power.  But, of course, as powerful as they are, tanks are not invincible, just as totalitarianism is not unconquerable, and so the visual trope of the tank has developed across time to call attention to the power and capacity of unarmed (and armor less) humans to challenge and even overcome totalitarian regimes, generally in the name of human rights.  The first such image to make the point might well be the photograph of revolutionaries standing atop a Soviet tank in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, though no doubt the most famous of such images would have to be of the lone individual standing down a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square.

Silwadi’s photograph draws upon the visual trope of the tank as the signifier of totalitarianism in powerful ways, but it does it in a manner that make it importantly distinct from the famous Tiananmen Square image. Shot at a low angle, as if from the perspective of the humans beings being assaulted, Silwadi’s tank looms large, dominating both the frame and the scene it purports to represent.  No faces are evident, as the tank functions as the mask of the totalitarian state, and those being imposed upon have directed their gaze away from the camera to the immediate power that challenges and confronts them.  At the same time, the gun barrel is directed at the viewer in the manner of a visual demand that encourages identification with the crowd and in opposition to the authority of the tank.

By contrast, the Tiananmen Square photograph is shot from on high and at a distance, invoking an optical consciousness that James C. Scott dubs “seeing like a state.”  The viewer is here insinuated as a distant observer of the scene and not an immediate participant in the drama that is unfolding.  But more, note that it is a lone individual who challenges the authority of the state, and not a collectivity, and so in a sense the viewer of the image is encouraged to identify with the scene as a liberal individual.  As we have argued elsewhere and extensively, the Tiananmen Square photograph activates a cultural modernism that displaces democratic forms of political display and opposition (remember that the protests in Tiananmen Square included thousands of students and nearly a million protesters in all who had organized in various groups) and plays to western conceptions of individualism and apolitical social organization.  Thus, while the  photograph of a man challenging a tank can function as a progressive celebration of human rights, it also risks limiting the political imagination to narrowly liberal versions of a global society.

Silwadi’s photograph confronts this logic by reinterpreting the visual trope of the totalitarian tank and reminding us that what is at stake here is not just a challenge to universal and liberalized human rights that can be observed and contested from afar, but that indeed we are all implicated in and by the presence of totalitarianism wherever it occurs … and not just as individuals but as citizens in a democratized, global public culture.

Photo Credits:  Osama Silwadi/Apollo Images; Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos

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Whether covering political conflict or natural disasters, there is a tendency to feature photographs that express the dramatic scale of the event.  Pictures of burning vehicles or of a throng of victims overwhelming an aid station–such images seem to be made for the big screen. They announce that you are seeing News about History in the Making.  Sometimes, however, the devil is in the details.

This photo of riot police in Thailand is almost too close to make sense.  Any clear sense of the larger scene lies outside the frame, and our attention is drawn away from the action to focus on the costuming.  And they are costumed.  If nothing else, the neck guards allude to Samurai movies while the face mask adds a classic Ninja accessory, and these guys could be stepping right out of Studio B.  There are fashions in police wear just like anything else, not to mention cultural and national traditions to be donned on behalf of an appearance of authority.  But that’s actually the least of what is being revealed here.

Note the use of English in the police badge: “Riot Control” speaks loudest, and only then the text in Thai below that.  Likewise on the front of the protective vest in the background: “Police.”  Nor is this limited to Thailand: I’ve been able to read “Police” on uniforms, cars, shields, barriers, and cordon tape from dozens of countries around the globe.  The enhanced legibility is to be appreciated, but I also wonder why the police are so likely to be identified in English.

Perhaps this habit of identification is entirely pragmatic.  English is an international language, there are many English speaking tourists and other travelers, double coding uses available space to reduce misunderstanding, state legitimacy requires legibility, and it can’t hurt to accommodate US media.  But uniformed police are easily recognized anywhere without the label, and why is the Anglophone reader being told that these police are riot police?  Are we to believe that they don’t exist otherwise, or that they could only be responding to violence instead of instigating it, or that the event in question is a riot and not, for example, a demonstration of political dissent?  And why tell that to the US or UK or Australian media audiences, and not, say, China?

The use of the English “police” is clearly political on several levels.  I’ve learned that it is not easy to quickly find the extent of US funding of the Thai police force or of any other police force.  I did learn, however, that despite “legislation prohibiting US agencies from using foreign economic or military assistance funds to aid foreign police,” Congress also granted so many exemptions that the “GAO did identify 125 countries that received U.S. training and assistance for their police forces during fiscal year 1990.”  That was then, but I doubt much has changed (and note that the GAO was having trouble identifying countries, in part because money for police forces flows through many difference agencies).  It certainly hasn’t changed in Thailand, where the US Embassy reports a staff of ten to support police work and even includes a slide show of police training.

I suspect that one reason the police of the world prefer to label themselves in English is that so many of them are being funded, trained, and equipped by the US, with the UK and Australia playing supporting roles.  The English speaking peoples of the world can bask in the knowledge that their common tongue has become the international language not merely of science and commerce but also of police power.  No matter whether those police are corrupt or not (want to place a bet, say, about the Royal Thai Police?).  No matter whether they enforce rule of law or take the law into their own hands.  No matter whether they maintain civic order or brutalize regime opponents, English gets the credit.

Photograph by Christophe Archambault, AFP/Getty Images and by an unidentified photographer in Nairobi, AFP/Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Photo Credit: Jim Morin/Miami Herald

Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

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It seems like barely a week goes by that we don’t see a photograph somewhere in the mainstream press of individual Palestinian youth twirling a sling or hurling a stone at an Israeli military patrol, usually somewhere in or around Gaza.  The images have become so regular and ordinary that the biblical irony seems to have lost all resonance.  What was once a potentially poignant comment on a tragic situation has become something of a pitiable commonplace.  And yet the visual trope of the stone thrower persists as a common representation of  political unrest throughout the nonwestern world.

The most recent examples come from anti-government protests in Thailand and, as above, in Kyrgzystan.  The particular issues at stake don’t usually matter—or at least they are typically not featured or explained—as the point of such photographs seems to be to dramatize the difference between a more or less disorganized group of grassroots protestors—“the people”—and a rationally organized and heavily armed and armored military or riot police. The odds against the success of the protestors under such circumstances is enormous, almost incalculable.  But of course in the West we “know” that when “the people” arise as if with one voice and a common will to challenge the military might of the state with little more than stones and brickbats that a serious challenge to political legitimacy has been tendered.

And therein lies an important moral.

No matter how rationally organized or far better equipped the military arm of the state might be, and no matter from where it derives its political authority, it cannot succeed without huge costs—or maybe succeed at all—when the will of the people it would fetter and control is enraged.

Photo Credits: Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty Images; Ivan Sekretarev/AP

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With the introduction of X-ray body scanners at airports, there has been plenty of talk about how much of one’s personal life might be exposed. That roll around the middle, the glitter on the underwear, and Lord knows what medical or erotic devices–well, actually, more than the Lord will know, and that is the problem.  Once again modern surveillance technology is likely to prove to be a devil’s bargain: too much information that we don’t really need, to reduce privacy and promote anxiety, on behalf of security that probably is illusive.  One can’t help but feel exposed; like this, perhaps:

You are looking at an X-ray image of a payloader and operator that was taken by a cargo scanner.  Some viewers of a certain age may find themselves peering into the guts of the machine to see how many parts they can identify. Others might look at the driver and be a bit shaken, as there doesn’t seem to be much to the human being.  Small, thin-boned, almost insect-like, it seems more a sci-fi species than a person.  Indeed, the machine is the far greater animal, while the operator seems reduced to being part of the machine, and both are fused together by the uniform industrial imaging into a single cyborg.

This precisely articulated exposure of that is beneath the skin isn’t quite uncanny, although it is a bit strange, as X-rays typically are strange and we don’t often see large machines though that lens.  I think the full value of the image goes well beyond both its aesthetic qualities and its novelty, however.  Something else is being exposed: one of the porous borders of human being.  Or, to be a bit more up to date: one side of the posthuman.  Instead of defining human being as a fixed essence (as with a soul) that is fundamentally different from all other animals, on the one hand, and from all machines and other technologies, on the other hand, the posthuman considers how humanity is both more variable across time and other dimensions, and how it is more continuous with both nature and technology.  Again: humans are not defined solely by their intelligence and so are embodied creatures like all other species, and they are defined and changed by the technologies that they create to alter and control the rest of the world.

Photography has been celebrated for its ability to portray humanity and so to celebrate humanism.  Think of The Family of Man exhibition, for example, or the many celebrations of the human face.  And so it does, but I think it is time to start considering how photographs may occasionally be moving beyond humanism to reveal various hints of the posthuman.  Like this, to take another example:

The caption said that this Marine was washing his head during an operation in southern Afghanistan.  His head, of course, is nowhere to be seen.  Instead we have an acephalic figure, one still demonstrably human–we recognize the back and clothing as such–but also disturbingly not human–that is, as long as one grounds humanness in the possession of a mind rather than simply an animal body having a familiar form.  Until the photo above, this image seems to be all body rather than design, and all skin (literally and the second skin of his uniform)–but not quite, for the spine extrudes partially, signifying his skeleton and the cord of nerves than runs through every vertebrate.  None of this is particularly reassuring, however.  He is too much a brute animal in some primitive crouch at the water hole.  But, of course, that is a bottle of soap beside him, and he is cleaning himself, and he is human, but also posthuman, squatting, thanks to the photograph, at another border of the species, though not to lose his soul.

Photographs by Nick Veasey/Caters News Agency Ltd. and Maurico Lima/AFP-Getty Images.

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Among the sophisticated, raison d’état (“reason of state”) is the first principle of foreign policy.  Decisions are to be made on behalf of the national interest without regard to confounding values.  So it is that democracies can support dictators, to take one example that might apply to U.S. foreign policy now and again.  Although the idea has been the subject of extensive debate, it has at the same time become ever more deeply embedded in practices of state administration.  It should not be surprising, then, that those practices acquire the look of rational, efficient mechanisms of control.

This photograph of a common room at Guantanamo Bay prison is a study in rational organization, everything in its place.  The room is used for activities such as watching television, but its real purpose is obvious: maintaining comprehensive control of the inmates while they are out of their cells.  And, yes, those are leg irons on the floor; the prisoners are locked in while sitting at the table.  The photo may be intended to feature the functionality of the room: containment appears almost transparent–no dungeons here–while the asceticism and cleanliness double as substitutes for morality.

Modern regimes of control rely heavily on assumptions about reason and necessity in the use of power.  They can’t be less powerful or more moral, we are told, because the rational consequence will be that a more powerful and less moral opponent will triumph.   They can, however, apply instrumental rationality and modern technologies to maintain security, and that competence becomes sufficient justification for administrative sovereignty.   If they can’t be moral, democratic, or otherwise defined by anything other than the use of power to maintain security, at least they can be systematically organized to achieve their one objective.

Fair enough, but for one problem.  The result of this mentality has been not the enlightened use of reason, but rather ever more well-financed stupidity.  Massive expenditures on prisons don’t reduce either terrorism or crime.  Funneling billions of dollars to dictators doesn’t build states or economies, but instead wreaks civil society and produces great swaths of poverty and dependence.  Trammeling democratic values (and others as well) doesn’t win hearts and minds while it does feed cynicism and hatred.  But we knew that.  And that knowledge doesn’t change much, in two senses: it hasn’t influenced those in charge of the state, perhaps because it hasn’t itself become more insightful or articulate.

I want to suggest another, perhaps odd approach to the problem of state stupidity.  Let me ask, when can we see stupidity?  Would we know what to look for?  This is not a matter, at least for the moment, of defining the term, but rather of considering how behavior and practices known to be stupid can be seen as such.  The culture provides a few cues: some, such as slapstick comedy may not be too helpful unless analyzed rather than simply applied.  Other sources such as Kafka’s Trial and Castle might be important sources, but they are highly literary rather than directly visual.

I’m running out of time, but as I look at the photograph above, an architecture of stupidity begins to emerge.  For example, the extreme functionality of the space that actually inhibits any reasonable use, much less any use that might lead to resolution of the larger conflict.  Also perhaps the overdesign of the security apparatus: tables bolted to the floor within a cage will have their rationale, but there is something so excessive here that it has to be a sign of arbitrary rules, endless procedures, and near-complete inattention to anything else but the literal replication of the machinery of power.  Nor is that a dynamic process, but one that depends on stasis, on the inactivity, boredom, and habitual resignation to routine evident in the guards’ postures.

The prison is a monument to stupidity.  It is not enough to reform the prison, however.  My point is that the national security state produces stupidity because it depends upon stupidity.  The national interest of a democratic people may be served well by reason, but the modern state, to the extent that it is a regime of coercive control, will rely on another mentality: stupidité d’état.

Photograph by Tim Dirven/Panos Pictures.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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It’s Holy Week and Passover, so naturally I thought of the river Ganges.  A crescent moon over the river would have been a nice touch, but that’s not a picture you see often.  With this bit of irreverence, we have four great faiths and secularism in play, but the question of which image to use didn’t get any easier.  That’s when convention comes to the rescue, and there is a typical image of the Ganges as a spiritual symbol.  This photograph provides one version of that stock image.

Someone is walking into the great river for a devotional immersion.  The human being is naked or nearly so.  The river is calm, dark, and expansive.  The human being is vulnerable, small, singular; the river appears enormous and eternal.  It is easy to imagine it as “The swarthy water/That flows round the earth and through the skies,/Twisting among the universal spaces” (Wallace Stevens).  This cosmic flow of being envelops all, and we see ourselves standing apart from it only briefly, while lost in illusion.

This photograph captures that sense of isolation and yearning against a horizon of eternal being.  It adds a somewhat darker inflection as well: the birds can suggest that the body below them is so much carrion, while the murky clouds imply a universe that is pitched toward obliteration rather than salvation.   The river is eternal, flowing outward and back, absorbing all of creation, and the best the individual human being might find is calmness, serenity, the peace that comes from passing into nothingness.

But like I said, that’s a conventional view of the river.  And here’s a different view:

This view of the river was taken during the Ganga Dussehra festival in Haridwar, a city whose name means “Gateway to God.”  One might title it “I sing the river electric,” except that some of the lights are oil lamps.  It is ablaze with light and energy of every sort, and so seems to be a very different river from the one above.  Thronged with people, this is no place for solitude.  Lights, pavilions, and other delights clamor for attention, and the river becomes a conduit for the many flows of social life: commerce, religion, entertainment, arts, technologies, and sheer human hubbub press against the banks and surge down the channel.  This river carries civilizations, each of which will continue in some way in those that supersede it.

Some will want to point out that the second river already is encompassed by the first, and that any celebration of the vitality along the banks is only another example of being distracted by the veil of illusion.  But one also could say that the first river is a part of the second, one of the many ways to understand life, but not the only way of life available.  Rivers have birthed many cities, and the cities themselves become great channels of human energy, and human diversity.

It may be reassuring, even a source of spiritual solace to imagine the Ganges as a river of eternal return.  That is not the only Ganges, however, or the nature of India.  During a time of spiritual reflection, let’s also marvel at the vitality of the human world this side of eternity.

Photographs by Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press and John Stanmeyer, VII/National Geographic.  The Stevens’ quotation is from his poem, Metaphor as Degeneration.

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