Photographer Stuart Pilkington brings word of The 50 States Project, a special archive that 50 photographers are building this year. Each of the participants, one from each of the fifty states in the US, will produce six images during the year to represent some aspect of their state. Photographs like this one from North Dakota:

Each of the six images is on a common theme–the first three have been People, Habitat, and Landscape, with three more to be announced later in the year. Each photographer is given two months to complete the assignment, and the images are available online by theme and state. The archive is up and growing, and twitter, Flickr, and email links are available as well.

Do the math, and there will be 300 dedicated images there by the end of the year. You can see what already is up and watch the archive grow here.

Photograph of “Ice Fishing Hut on Devils Lake, North Dakota” by Dan Koeck.

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Last week I encountered a number of photographs in various mainstream journalistic slideshows of the Terra Livre (Free Earth) indigenous camp meeting that took place in Brasilia and where thousands of Indians from numerous Brazilian tribes congregated to demand government attention to indigenous issues.  Most of these photographs, shot in middle distance and at oblique angles that put them on display for the viewer, featured Indians dressed in colorful tribal costumes, applying or displaying body paint, playing instruments and performing traditional dances, and the like.  Not a single caption mentioned a single indigenous issue nor could I find I newspaper article anywhere that described or discussed the event.  There to be seen, there evidently wasn’t anything worth reporting on—or at least writing about.

In order to understand this somewhat odd situation we might take account of one photograph that actually stands out from the rest for its apparent critical and ironic appeal.  It is a fairly tight close-up of Cacique Raony Kayapo, a member of the once nomadic Kayapo tribe that now lives in the Brazilian rainforests, as he downs a can of Coca-Cola before attending a protest march at the Terra Livre indigenous camp.

The photograph could be an ad for Coca Cola—and indeed, I would not be surprised if I were to see it on a billboard in the near future.  Or it could be a critique of western, cultural imperialism (think “The Gods Must Be Crazy”), though that seems less likely if only because the tight close-up and low angle invite the viewer to identify with the scene.   But there is another point to be made.  For the image also performs—or perhaps neutralizes—the ideological problem at the heart of the tension between traditional society and modern globalization.  Indigenous groups like the Kayapo recognize the need to protest against modern concerns that threaten their very survival, such as the building of dams and the polluting of rivers caused by growing gold mining projects, but at the same time they have become “addicted” to the sweet allures of modern society—whether nutritionally empty soft drinks or the technological wonders produced by late capitalism such as satellite television.  And as long as one has to have a swig of Coke before standing up to the lords of globalization it seems that the battle is over before it ever begins.

Appearances aside, then, publications of the photograph (and it showed on a number of mainstream journalistic slideshows) function less as an act of visual irony and more as prima facie evidence in support of the globalization thesis itself.  No articles accompany the image (or any of the images of the Terre Livre indigenous camp published by the mainstream media) because they aren’t necessary to make the point: whatever “local” issues vex the Kaypao and threaten their ecology, what matters is that they have embraced the economic symbols of western globalization. Seeing is believing.  What more need be said?

Photo Credit:  Eraldo Peres/Reuters

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It’s easy to make fun of the media panic over the outbreak of swine flu, and to laugh again when other marketers jump on the bandwagon. This photo shows how an enterprising supermarket in Taipei quickly put together an “Anti-Flu Section.”

Maybe they can use that pig again for the Summer Barbecue Section. And in the meantime, there can be additional media alarms about children swallowing the disinfectants now being stacked in kitchens and bathrooms. And then there can be an “Anti-Poisoning Section,” and maybe the economy will begin to rebound after all.

I told you it was easy, didn’t I? There is more to the story, of course. The media and marketing systems help contain the spread of disease, and activating the network now may hone capabilities that can save additional lives should a more virulent pathogen develop later. But we know that, just as we know the story of the boy who cried wolf. Rather than ask what is an appropriate response, I’d like to consider how the photo is making a larger point as well.

I am often amazed when I survey the seemingly endless abundance of goods in the supermarket. Look again at the display in the foreground of the photograph: the boxes, bottles, spray bottles, spray cans, and jugs are perfect copies of each specific product, just like hundreds of thousands of other identical items, and all have been produced and distributed with machined efficiency.  As have the rows of products on the shelves in the background of the photo, leading off to the right and the left to take up aisle after aisle in nearly identical stores all over the world. And behind them, the trucks, roads, ships, factories, and labs that continue to produce and distribute the 100,000+ products that typically are available in any one of those stores.

This is a replication system that any virus would kill for. And isn’t that the truth of the photograph? Any virus can spread quickly because the modern world has become linked together by distribution systems of astonishing scale and efficiency. Airports are just one small part of it, and a high quality of life for billions of people (though not nearly enough people) depends on the continual, constant mechanical reproduction of products, information, and services.

Photography, as Walter Benjamin noted, is one of the technologies of mechanical reproduction that has given the modern world its distinctive character, powers, and vulnerabilities. The photo above is part of the process it documents. (How else do you keep a pig in the air?) And viruses that are continually developing also are part of the modern world system, ready to replicate themselves throughout global networks that can no longer be dismantled without dismantling modern society itself.

The hastily assembled “Anti-Flu Section” of products is a miniature version of the anti-flu response more generally. The same practices that create the flu can be turned against it, perhaps to good effect, but they also are the conditions in which the next virus is already developing. The epidemic is not a modern thing, but only modernity makes a virtue of replication.

Photograph by Pichi Chuang/Reuters. Additional photos on the swine flu outbreak are available at The Big Picture.

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Most of the photographs put up during Easter could double as an argument against religion–and for anthropology. Spiritual yearning is reduced to cultural performances characterized by pre-modern costumes, ritual processions, and other forms of excess. But then I saw this:

This photograph doesn’t break with the prevailing conventions for documenting religious spectacles, but it gets past them to touch some basic questions about both photography and religious experience.

You are looking at Despina, an 89-year-old Greek Orthodox nun in Northern Cyprus. You can’t see the candles she is lighting, but perhaps you can see their light reflected in her face. Or would, if you could get past looking at her face. Cowled in black, without visible hair and certainly without feminine makeup, her person is concentrated in her face. But you probably looked at her face, rather than into it, because you were scandalized by the wrinkles etched into her flesh like deep channels on a barren planet. Add the enlarged nose and blotched skin, and aging is staring you in the face.

Photography, Susan Sontag reminded us, has been keeping company with death from the beginning, and this photo seems a stark testament to the art’s insistent revelation of human mortality. Photography is being featured because of the contrast between the sharp clarity of her image with the painted icons stacked on the wall behind her. They are antique and at once hazy and luminescent, and so easily symbolize religion as an institution. Now think of Walter Benjamin’s insight that the aura of a work of art is deeply embedded in the fabric of tradition. In this photograph, the aura of religion is deeply embedded in the fabric of tradition. But the photograph itself does not have an aura, nor does Despina due to the stark clarity of her image.

Thus, the photograph contrasts two arts and two conceptions of religious experience: religion as the luminous representation of the divine, and faith as a personal encounter with mortality. One is set in the rear of the picture, painting rather than photography, and the past; the other is set in the front of the picture, in the photograph itself, and in the present. The first view of religion is a nostalgic image–literally bathing the icons in a warm glow as they recede in ascending order toward the vanishing point. The second view is critical–the icons will outlast her, and perhaps her vocation, and nothing she believes will change her mortality and perhaps the passing of all human things, including the church.

But it’s not quite that simple. By positioning the icons behind her head, they provide her with a faint aura. And the contrast between the two media can go a step further: each represents different ways of seeing and thinking. The religious icon is never one thing–it is both material and spiritual–and it is a pedagogy of immanence–of seeing God in all things. Those habituated to Western painting and a doctrine of transcendence learn to see differently, and that can include a sharper distinction between material and spiritual realities. Say, between the sharp image of an individual human face riven with aging, and a hazy image of God placed in a separate sacred space.

And so look at the photograph one more time. See how she is set in a series with the icons behind her. One might say, with the other icons. If we were to look at her as if she were a religious icon, that is, within the Greek Orthodox optic, we might see that she is much more than one thing.

Photograph by Murad Sezer /Reuters.

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There is an ongoing discussion in the public media about the dangers of photographs being altered or otherwise faked. To put it bluntly, you can make good money warning the newspaper reader about the dangers of visual deception. Never mind that many of the quotations and all of the verbal descriptions in that paper will be somewhat inaccurate every day of the week. But the photograph seems so real, we are reminded, whereas everyone knows that words are unreliable.

But people also know that photographs are unreliable. In fact, society now has over 150 years of experience in dealing with photographs–taking pictures, having our pictures taken, showing them to others, examining them as evidence, and seeing them every day in advertisements. One result is that photographs can be used to identify relationships between reality and illusion that are much more interesting than the question of whether an image is true.

On Monday I posted on a photographer’s use of a mirror to help the viewer think about the political spectacle. By showing two political leaders accompanied by their reflections, the photograph highlighted both the performative dimension of political leadership and the public use of images. Today’s photograph shifts out attention from elites to ordinary citizens.

One man walks down a street along life-size photos of six other people in an advertisement. The photo is mildly comic: They could be fellow citizens, were they real; he could fit right into the ad, were he an image. They have been carefully posed to model what the retailer wants people to wear; seemingly by accident and without needing to buy a thing he is wearing clothes that qualify as suitably stylish. The caption embellished the point: “Real style on display as a man walked by an ad for clothes in Pristina, Kosovo.” He is real while the photographs are not real; likewise, his style is real while theirs is imaginary, artificial, fake.

The caption also provides an example of how words are unreliable. The sentence could mean that the ad displays real style while the man walking in front of the ad is but the lesser approximation of that style. That interpretation is less likely because it isn’t supported by the typical contrast between reality and images, or by the real man being placed in the foreground of the photograph. The ambiguity, however, runs deeper than a case of sloppy sentence construction.

Someone ought to say it, so I will: the man isn’t real either. As in the image on Monday, the photograph has created a sense of its own reality through an internal contrast between a transparent image and another that is obviously a copy of something else. We know that the real models are no longer in the advertisement, yet we assume that the man on the street is really there.

This use of visual composition to activate a discourse about illusion to create a reality effect is more than mere deception. I think the image raises a number of interesting questions. Isn’t “real style” located more in the collective imagination rather than individual statement? (Would he be dressed as he is if he didn’t already imagine himself as part of that line, albeit today without the additional items of consumption being promoted in the ad?) Aren’t we always walking down the street amidst imaginary citizens whose presence keeps us on the straight and narrow, provides assurance that the street is safe, allows us to feel both connected and individuated, and otherwise constitutes civic space? Of course, that presence also creates social pressure, distributes social goods unfairly, places unreasonable demands, and leaves us unsatisfied, but it is there as surely as that ad was on display in Kosovo.

In other words, the photograph reveals the role that photojournalism plays in creating the civic strangers populating the imaginary space necessary for citizenship.  The man in the photo is in the same relationship to us as the six figures in the ad are to him.  He is one of the imaginary citizens placed beside us by the media.  Instead of seeing images as copies of real people, why not, once in awhile, see ourselves as people who live among images?

The contrast between image and reality often is used to ward off awareness of how society depends on seeing, copying, and imagination.  Photojournalism suggests not only that the contrast might be overrated, but also how it can be used to explore and perhaps understand our virtual world.

Photograph by Amend Nimani/AFP-Getty Images.

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A state decrees that its pure stock is being diluted and displaced by inferior populations, many of them from Eastern Europe. The situation is becoming intolerable, and drastic steps must be taken. A Bekämpfung (fight) is declared. The world is notified and even asked to help the state assert its legal right to protect its property and identity. A systematic program of extermination begins.

In this photograph, a shipment of the impure element is being assessed for disposal after having arrived at the processing center.

I’d understand if you think I’ve got a screw loose. Chairs are not people. Manufactured objects are recycled all the time–and it’s considered virtuous to sort your cans and plastic containers to that end. But I was paraphrasing the statements made by the Fritz Hansen furniture company at a weird web site where they display their efforts to collect and destroy copies of their signature lines. If their declaration of a struggle to maintain the purity of their brand had been nothing but text, I might have skimmed right over it. But then there are the images: the site includes two slide shows and a video of chairs being destroyed, along with a video of the company president justifying the program. The stiff demeanor, Germanic accent (it’s a Danish company), bureaucratic prose, and gray modernist architecture could all come from a movie on the Final Solution. Or so it seems when you look through the slide show.

I know my reaction is not unique because a reader tipped me off to these images, which have an uncanny resemblance to Holocaust photographs. At first, the allusion is very faint: a sense of vulnerable bodies being exposed, assessed, and destroyed in an industrial setting. The second image goes a step further: those flesh-colored torsos could be naked bodies being readied for the gas. The next image goes further still, evoking the skeletal corpses being stacked like cord wood in the concentration camp yard.

I’m not going to show the originals; one reason is that I’m assuming they already can be called to mind. And that raises another issue, because the company insists that “A copy has nothing to do with an original.” That assertion of radical difference among similar things cuts in several directions at once: back to fascism and across the contemporary digital world–where, for example, my copies of their images apparently have nothing to do with the original–and forward to a future when more and more of human life and capabilities will be copied into other things. Fortunately, however, the “Republic of Fritz Hansen”–they really say that–is ready to take a stand for the industrial equivalent of racial purity.

I would not endorse dismantling copyright laws, but there is something disturbing about producing photographs of destruction. Perhaps my sympathetic reaction is what is really out of place–an example of the emotional response typically evoked by the photographic relationship but rightly applied only to people. Because chairs are shaped to conform to the human body, they become accidental copies of the body, and that also makes misplaced identification a likely response. On the other hand, I wonder about the emotional condition of those who take pleasure in destroying things that are so much a part of the common human world.

You can see the Fritz Hansen display and one of the slide shows here. The videos, including the interview, and the written statement and another slide show are here. A site that mourns “Endangered Machinery” is here, which I learned about after an earlier post on When Machines Die.

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It’s a beautiful desert image, something one might see in Arizona Highways or National Geographic. And the dark brown ridge snaking towards the horizon? It could almost be a natural formation, one exemplifying the waveform topography and severe plain surfaces of this barren environment. Close inspection reveals construction material, however, and so it could be an art installation: perhaps something by Christo that will be up for only a short time before being dismantled to return the scene to pure space and light.

Don’t be fooled by the beautiful design. You are looking at a section of the “fence”–otherwise known as a wall–that separates the US from Mexico. This massive construction project has been going on for several years now, almost completely under the radar. You will not have noticed a shortage of illegal alien labor in your city, but you can rest assured that they had to become ever more ingenious or courageous to get here.

I wish we had built the wall as an artistic work–if only to take this one photograph before tearing it down. Others will say the wall is justified, of course, even though the US once boasted that it had undefended borders. Whatever the cost-benefit ratios for various immigration restriction technologies, there is additional significance any time a nation creates a wall.

Walls are uniquely symbolic, and paradoxically so. Those erecting them are demonstrating their power, wealth, and commitment to control and order on their terms. Think of the great powers who have built walls: China, Rome, the Soviet Union, Israel, and now the US.

The same list reveals the other side of the symbol: a wall is an admission of political failure. Walls are put up precisely because the state cannot keep people out–or, with the Berlin Wall, in. They are erected because a people can’t be beaten, dominated, bought off, or otherwise managed without changing the state’s relationship with the world.

We might want to think of the wall along the border of the US later in the year. In November, 2009, there will be official and unofficial celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The media will be circulating photographs such as this one.

Such photographs should be valued. They remind us that a wall once was torn down by the power of the people. The nation is still present in this photo, signified to any German by the Brandenburg Gate in the background, but the people are in the foreground and have become the living enactment of the dissent and democratic self-assertion previously known only through the graffiti smeared across the brick barrier.

The people of Berlin could take down that wall because they were on the right side of historical change, and because it had become all too clear within East Germany that a society cannot thrive by walling itself in. In the 21st century, the US government is on the side of the builders of walls, which I’d like to think is not the right side of historical change. The first photograph above is part of the process of creating an enclaved nation: you see only an empty space and bare surfaces–no people, no dissent, nothing political at all, really, just a natural formation. The border is both secure and desolate, nothing ordinary citizens need think about. All that remains is to await the barbarians.

Photographs by David McNew/Getty Images and from the Wikipedia Commons. For another comparison of the two walls, go to the announcement for the 2009 Joint Conference on “Migration, Border, and Nation-State.”

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I am suspicious of references to “the Arab Street,” particularly when the phase is applied–as it often is–to nations and other vast swaths of territory that are not Arab or not exclusively Arab. Several years ago Christopher Hitchens declared that it was a vanquished cliche, but he was misusing it himself to justify the rush to war by the Bush administration. And he wasn’t speaking of its persistence as a visual convention.

The caption of this photograph at The Guardian says only, “Nowruz celebrations in Afghanistan.” Nowruz is the name of the Iranian New Year, which is celebrated in a number of countries by people of several faiths. The baskets of dried fruits eaten during the holiday provide the only visual connection to the colorful festivities, and you have to know more than the paper tells you to see that. For many viewers, this will a thoroughly conventional image of the Middle East.

That image is one of throngs of working class men massed together in the street. What little business is there is in the open air markets lining each side of the densely packed urban space. We see small batches of everyday goods on display–probably to be bartered for, no less. The open baskets of food are a sure marker of the underdeveloped world. (Imagine how many packages it would take to wrap up that fruit for sale in the US.) Everything fits together into a single narrative, but the masses of men and boys make the scene politically significant. This is the place where collective delusions take hold, where mobs are formed, and where unrest can explode into revolutionary violence and Jihad.

Which is why I get a kick out of this photograph of another Nowruz celebration.

The caption reads, “An Iranian man skewers chicken for grilling as he picnics with his family.” My first thought when I saw the image was to check and make sure it wasn’t taken in Chicago. This also is a very familiar scene: grass, blankets, families and friends, plastic containers of food, dad getting ready to do the grilling.

What is astonishing is that I was able to see them at all. A typical summer holiday photo becomes a radical disruption of Western visual conventions when taken in Iran and shown in the US. Of course, it wasn’t shown in the US: this, too, is from the UK paper.

In this photo, there is no Arab street, and no Iranian masses dominated by Mullahs and demagogues. A middle class tableau reveals that so much of what is in fact ordinary life for many people in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East is never seen in the US. And it isn’t seen because it doesn’t fit into simplistic categories, outdated stereotypes, and a dominant ideology. All that is shown and implied in the cliches is of course also there, but it is there as part of a much more complex and varied social reality.

As evidence of how things might appear a bit different, notice how seeing the second image can affect perception of the first one. In the second, it seems evident that the family is posing for the photograph. They’re doing exactly what they would have been doing but now with the additional, amused awareness that it is, for a moment, also an act. And sure enough, if you look back to the first photo, you can see the same thing. And if you can see that, they no longer need appear as a mass, or poor, or threatening, or anything but people enjoying a holiday. Much like people in the US were doing this past weekend to celebrate St. Patrick’s day, thronged together, in the street.

Photographs by Natalie Behring-Chisholm/Getty Images and Behrouz Mehri/AFP-Getty Images.

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