Photo Credit: Diorama Creater/Washington Post
The “Sight Gag” 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.
We have written about Eddie Adams’ infamous, Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner in the middle of a street in Saigon before (here, here, and here) It is among a small handfull of photographs regularly referred to when one talks or writes about the Vietnam War—the others include most prominently the “Burning Monk,” “Accidental Napalm,” and the “Kent State Massacre.”
As with so many other iconic photographs, it retains its symbolic currency through mass circulation and reproduction, a process of distribution that animates it as an inventional resource for cultural commentary and critique as it is appropriated, performed, and parodied to particular cultural and political interests. We were recently reminded of the ubiquity of such usages by a post at frgdr.com where a number of such efforts have been collected. A quick google search turned up a number of others, including one by an artist named minipliman that appears to be joining the mass media celebration of Barbie’s fiftieth birthday:
We leave it to our readers to decide how the legend for this image should read … though on second thought, perhaps in this case “no caption” really is needed.
Photo Credit: Eddie Adams/AP; minipliman
This photograph is altogether commonplace. A simple headshot of an altogether ordinary, middle-aged, white guy. He looks healthy. His face is washed, his hair and mustache neatly trimmed. He is what we might call “clean cut.” If you passed him on a street corner you probably would not give him a second glance. There is something of an irony to this last statement, but more on that later.
His name is Daniel Fore. He is a resident of Oak Park Village, a quiet suburb on Chicago’s west side famous for the many houses and other structures built by its number one son Frank Lloyd Wright. Oak Park Village considers itself to be a small and friendly community fully committed to social and political diversity. Indeed, Oak Park Village is so committed to diversity that in 1973 it issued a “diversity statement” that is now prominently featured in a sidebar on its website. That statement reads, in part:
“The people of Oak Park choose this community, not just as a place to live, but as a way of life … Ours is a dynamic community that encourages the contributions of all citizens, regardless of race, gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, religion, economic status, political affiliation or any of the other distinguishing characteristics that all too often divide people in society. . . . Oak Park recognizes that a free, open, and inclusive community is achieved through full and broad participation of all its citizenry. We believe the best decisions are made when everyone is represented in decision-making and power is shared collectively. Oak Park is uniquely equipped to accomplish these objectives, because we affirm all people as members of the human family (emphasis added).”
But back to Daniel Fore, the ordinary guy in the picture above—the guy who doesn’t appear to warrant a second look. He has been living in Oak Park Village for at least the past twelve years, where he has regularly attended Village board meetings and is recognizable around the town as a community activist. All of that turns out to be irrelevant, however, as his recent petition to run for the Oak Park Village Board (signed by 800 members of the community) was challenged because he listed his residence as “homeless” and the only address he gave was an Oak Park PO Box. The challenge was upheld by a Cook County judge because he did not list a “home address” on his nomination application. (Aside: The irony here is much too rich to ignore given the tales—perhaps apocryphal—of the numerous deceased voters on the Cook County voting rolls who nevertheless cast ballots in elections throughout the 1960s; of course, one can only assume that these voters did have home addresses).
The Court’s ruling is under appeal, but the point to note is that the commitment to a “free, open, and inclusive community” where “the best decisions are made when everyone is represented in decision-making and power is shared collectively” apparently doesn’t extend to the homeless who have been summarily excluded from the “human family.” And the exclusion is doubly ironic, for just as we (shamelessly) avert our eyes from the homeless we encounter sleeping in alleys or panhandling on street corners, refusing to give them a second glance, so too now have the courts and our laws looked away. As the unemployment rolls rise and as the number of house foreclosures add to what seems to be a growing “class” of homeless people—many, if not most who will look and be no more or less ordinary than Daniel Fore—one wonders how long we can continue to do that and lay claim to being a truly democratic society.
Photo Credit: M. Spencer Green/AP in the Washington Post
President Obama’s declaration that we will remove all combat troops from Iraq by the end of 2010 is something of a moment for celebration (if leaving a country that we occupied and brought to its knees under false pretenses and is now caught in the throes of sectarian violence can be seen as a moment of joy), but the pleasure of that announcement has to be mitigated a good deal by the fact that he has also committed an additional 17,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan (on top of the 32,000 troops already there). Al Qaeda is ensconced in the caves and hills of the Afghanistan mountains and the Taliban does arguably pose a national security threat to the U.S., so this may be justified at some level, though whether it is a winnable war or not—or what a victory here would actually look like—are certainly open question (just ask the leaders of the former Soviet Union … if you can find any of them). But what is troubling is the way in which we seem to have convinced ourselves that the reason we having been fighting this war, at least in part, has been to save the women of Afghanistan.
To be sure, I have no doubt that the women of Afghanistan are treated in ways that are horribly inhumane and cannot possibly be justified in any way by appeals to cultural differences or long standing traditions. But there is a continuing and nagging cultural meme that presumes to justify U.S. military presence in Afghanistan as somehow connected to securing the human right of these women. It’s not part of the official rationale for our being there as far as I know, though I do recall Laura Bush making such a public appeal a few years back, but the concept nevertheless seems to float along within the public discourse in a network of vaguely connected narratives and cultural associations that functions as a sort of moral imperative for our presence there; and here’s the point: it does this in a way that distracts attention from the larger public debate we should be having about our national interests and concerns in this part of the world and how we should go about accomplishing them.
The presence of this meme was given visual prominence this past week on the front page of the NYT as part of a story (and a website slide show) dedicated to the idea that talk of women’s rights in Afghanistan is starting to take hold and with the clear implication that it is a direct effect of the U.S. defeat of the Taliban in 2001. The photograph is of a seventeen year old woman by the name of Mariam, who had been forced to marry a forty-one year old blind man at the age of eleven and was then beaten and otherwise abused because she failed to conceive. She eventually fled and found refuge in a woman’s shelter
The narrative is full of pathos, and one would have to be cold hearted not to be deeply affected by it, but what distinguishes it from numerous other such stories one can find on the internet is the image that anchors the report, a photograph that bears distinct resemblance to the photograph of the now famous “Afghan Girl” that graced the cover of National Geographic in 1985 and again in 2002, and has been a persistent sign of U.S. concern for the plight of women and war refugees caused by the Soviet aggression. And so instead of focusing attention on the fact that we will increase our military presence in Afghanistan to nearly 60,000 troops, we are encouraged to a state of self-satisfaction in the knowledge that we have somehow done better than the evil empire that preceded us in a war that seems never to end.
But there is more. For one week earlier the NYT reported on the plight of Iraq’s war widows. According to the United Nations 10 percent of all Iraqi women aged 15 to 80 are widowed—740,000 in all—and without the resources to sustain themselves, often forced to resort to begging, prostitution, or “temporary marriages” required to procure even a modicum of state support. Many if not most of these women were widowed by sectarian violence unleashed by the U.S. invaston and at least some—there is no way of knowing exactly how many—have lost their families to American gunfire and missile attacks, such as Nacham Jaleel Kadim, age 23, pictured below who lost both her twin sisters and her husband.
If we are truly concerned about the plight of women in the Islamic world perhaps we should start here.
Photo Credit: Lynsey Addano and Johan Spanner for the New York Times
There may not be a reflective cue in every photograph, but some photos make up for that by reminding the spectator of how vision can be mechanized.
This photo goes in two directions at once, for the striking effect is created by combining modern technology (complete with plastics and calibration) and the colonial visual convention of the dark-hued peasant. The man can be seen as “native” and “primitive,” which makes the goggle-eyed apparatus seem even stranger than it might otherwise. The caption tells us that he is having his vision tested at an eyecare clinic in Mumbai, and so the narrative of modernization can draw down the initial shock of seeing a cyborg staring back at the camera. He isn’t seeing through us; no, he is being lifted up out of darkness.
And it that makes you feel better, you might want to take a look at this:
You are looking at another cyborg, one who is part of a system of surveillance that is projected back across his face. The half mask looks like something out of Star Wars. The military bearing makes him seem ready to be used without hesitation by the System that is mapping and monitoring the nation state. He looks proud of his role–and ready to launch the death ray on command. Some viewers might see this guy as One of Us, but few would want to be so intimately defined by technology.
In fact, this photograph of Captain Bob Edwards on duty at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado was taken after a US Airways jet landed in the Hudson River on Jan. 15. Amazingly, a 911 call in Queens could be linked to the Center, which probably provided help during the rescue. As with the first photo, the sinister aura that would be picked up by some viewers depends on the mind of the believer. Though likely to be relatively conservative in the first case and liberal in the second, the anxious viewer would be mistaken with each image.
Once that initial reaction is set aside, the opportunity arises to think about how we see mechanically. Sight in the first case, surveillance in the second: both are essential for collective life. (Yes, surveillance is a social good: read Jane Jacobs on urban design.) Modern engineering has provided immensely valuable technologies for improving both sight and surveillance. Both can be used abusively–from prying into private life to creating panopticonic work places–but they remain pervasive features of modern life that we usually take for granted. The question arises, what would we see if we looked at our cyborg selves without fear of what we might find?
Photographs by Arko Datta/Reuters and Kevin Moloney/The New York Times.
One thing that nearly everyone on the political spectrum seems to agree about is that the U.S. immigration bureaucracy is an incredible mess. Of course, there is no consensus on what the problems are, let alone the solutions, but there truly doesn’t seem to be anyone who thinks that the status quo is acceptable. I suppose that’s a start, but if we are going to make any real progress we need to come to some agreement over key terms, and there, of course, is the rub, for at the heart of the issue of immigration policy is a disagreement over terms: is the problem a matter of “undocumented immigrants” or “illegal aliens”?
I was led to think about this problem this past week when I came across a photo-essay in the Chicago Tribune on “Flight Repatriate,” one of a fleet of Boeing 737s contracted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “expedite the removal” of “illegal immigrants” to their “homeland,” often in Central or South America, but also Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Since October 2007 ICE Air has transported more than 367,000 immigrants to their countries of origin (a 77% increase in the number of deportations since 2006), the vast majority of whom have lived peaceful and law abiding lives within the US borders, notwithstanding their designation as “illegal.” Animated by a desire for “cost effectiveness and safety,” Air ICE flights include “sandwiches, cheese and crackers, fruit, bottled water, civilian clothing, checked baggage and a private nurse.” As one ICE official put it, “there is no reason why we can’t treat them with as much respect as is possible.” Indeed, “nonviolent” passengers can even have their shackles and handcuffs removed on international flights. It is hard to imagine how anyone could complain. And yet …
From the moment of its origins the U.S. has been a land of immigrants, and across the broad expanse of that history the vast majority of those immigrants—starting with the pilgrims and moving forward—have been “undocumented.” The development of the modern nation-state changed all of that, of course, but not even a bureaucratic sensibility can mitigate the irony of castigating “undocumented immigrants” as “illegal aliens.” The doubled shift in terms is much to the point, as the absence of documentation becomes not just a sign of exclusivity, i.e., non-citizenship, but of criminality, just as one’s status as an immigrant becomes a sign of alterity that warrants a stigmatizing alienation further marked by the presumed need for armed guards, caged busses, and shackles and handcuffs.
Some undocumented immigrants might be criminals (rather like, say, some Wall Street bankers and financiers can be criminals) or even dangerous individuals, but it is somewhat churlish to designate and treat them as such simply because they lack the proper documentation—or at least one might imagine that a democratic society would adopt a more liberal and humane attitude towards such persons.
But then again, perhaps one can’t be too careful. After all, in the right hands even a three inch heel can be a deadly, dangerous weapon.
Photo Credits: Alex Garcia/Chicago Tribune
Credit: Chicago 2016
The “Sight Gag” 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.
Close your eyes, think Big Three auto companies, and open them again:
Just about perfect, isn’t it? An out-of-date vehicle with crappy decor designed to distract you from substandard engineering has been wrecked by a head-on collision. And what do we see now that the barrier between the car and the outside world has caved in? Utter darkness.
Even if you stagger away from the wreck, head-on collisions are particularly awful because you know you should have seen it coming. Although the crash explodes in an instant, it was developing well before: when people weren’t paying attention, when merely adequate brakes were installed, or barely adequate regulations enacted. The long aftermath of an accident is the other side of a long winding of the spring beforehand. Emily Dickinson said it best:
Ruin is formal — Devil’s work
Consecutive and slow —
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping — is Crash’s law.
The Big Three didn’t collide with market reality overnight. They had been warned and warned, but they looked the other way, as did a lot of other people. The result is broken glass, broken dreams, and a dark future.
The photograph is by Nicolai Howalt, from his series Car Crash Studies. I found the series at Amy Stein’s blog on photography. The poem is an excerpt from “Crumbling is not an instant’s Act.”
Cross posted at BAGnewsNotes.
I’m not sure anyone expected that the celebration of Barack Obama would have continued this long, yet it is still in full swing. For once, right-wing pundits may have a point when they lash back, but they also have a well-deserved credibility problem. The question remains, however: What might be lost in the shadows when all the lights are on Obama?
Let me offer one of the many answers that could be provided: By celebrating Obama too much, we can conclude that only he can do what he does well. When he is the only figure in the picture and the only hero in the story, it becomes too easy to see him as the sole embodiment of virtues that could be developed more broadly.
This conflation of the political leader and his skills is most evident in the responses to Obama’s eloquence. Perhaps because the contrast with his predecessor could not be greater, it quickly became commonplace to declare that Obama’s speeches, answers, and other remarks were astonishingly skilled. Make no mistake about it: he’s a very, very good speaker–and one whose speeches, like everything else he does, show all the marks of political genius. But you don’t have to be a genius to speak effectively.
The photograph above features Obama’s sure command of the platform, but it also reveals commonly available means of persuasion. Obama is speaking at a town hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana. The white dots on the blue background could be lights but actually are the stars on a large American flag. Framed by the flag and the closely cropped photograph, Obama appears to be the epitome of the political leader as public speaker. His words can’t be shown in the photograph, of course, but look at what is on display: the focused line of sight toward the audience, the comfortable ability to speak across the microphone rather than be disturbed by it, the thoughtful tilt of the head as he strives to connect with the questioner, the forceful gesture of arm and hand to emphasize the argumentative point while exuding confidence, the slight smile of public combativeness oriented toward conciliation, and all seemingly without breaking a sweat.
You can’t deliver a speech much better than that. But asking how he does it is like asking how an NBA player can make a three-pointer. He can do it because he’s done it a million times. And because he studies the game, and works at it, and enjoys it when he does it well. And if everyone can’t play in the NBA, anyone can become a better player if they work at it. The same holds for public speech.
If you look at Obama performing, you can see how to do it well. Look closely and you also will see a lot of small mistakes and other features of ordinary, everyday communication. He’s not perfect, and virtually everything he does is something anyone could do with a bit of practice. How to answer questions masterfully? Well, if asked two questions at once, respond to each in turn directly and succinctly and don’t answer other questions that weren’t asked. How to respond when someone is channeling the opposition’s talking point? Well, identify the source and its characteristic bias, then counter with the corresponding principle on your side. How to do this without dying of nervousness? Well, put yourself where you get to practice before others who take it seriously.
When looking at Obama on the stump, you can see the consummate public speaker without peer, or you can see the art of rhetoric that he practices. That art is something that can be taught to and learned by ordinary people. More to the point, democracy depends on ordinary people taking turns speaking and listening with some commitment to doing both well. To think that only great speakers can speak well is to mistake the artist for the art.
Someone once said that the genius of democracy is that it doesn’t require genius. A good monarchy requires a great monarch, while democracy can do just as well or better if ordinary people put enough effort into public discussion. Obama concluded his press conference Tuesday night by saying that he believed in civility and rational argument. Those are the values of good public speech. He shows how it’s done, but many people could do it. Let’s admire the artist, but work at the art.
White House photograph by Pete Souza, 2/9/09.
In the classical tradition “decorum” called attention to the linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical standards of propriety designed to coordinate the relationship between thought and expression. The eloquent orator was decorous when he performed his civic persona in a manner that seamlessly and invisibly embodied a style of expression and a substance of thought that was appropriate to the audience and occasion being addressed. More than just a set of rules for eloquent speaking, however, decorum was understood to be a normative habit of civic participation that would animate the balance or harmony “necessary for the comprehension and direction of life in the pluralistic space of public experience.”* It was, in short, a control against unrestrained ego necessary to managing the tension between individual desires and collective responsibilities in civic life.
The photograph below depicts the fundamental problem of the late governorship of Rod Blagojevich as a failure of decorum—a complete and utter lack of civic harmony.
We like to think that the conduct of our leaders will call us to a higher standard of public responsibility as citizens, an entailment, perhaps, of the assumption that as elected servants of the public they are temporary stewards of an office that is larger than themselves. We often accent this assumption by talking about how an elected official will “grow into the position,” underscoring both the sense in which the office transcends the mortal embodiment of any one person, as well as how the formal demands of the office shape and control any given occupant. But in this photograph—which occupied the four middle columns, above the fold on the front page of the NYT on the day that Governor Blagojevich was unanimously convicted on an article of impeachment—none of these assumptions seem to abide.
A governor’s office is a public, symbolic space, its size and visual tableau functions as a marker of its long standing history and civic power, a reminder that the “office” is bigger than the current office holder. Here, however, the photograph diminishes the effects of such magnificence by photographing the governor in a relatively tight, middle-distance close-up. Indeed, the photograph contradicts the assumption that the office is bigger than the man by making it seems as if the physical space of the office can barely contain him, a point further accentuated by his slumping posture, as if the chair is too big for him and he never grew into it.
But there is more, for one might expect to see the governor’s office festooned with the emblems of the state—flags, the state seal, artifacts that mark the state’s history, and quite possibly photographs of the sitting governor as he conducts the business of his office. And surely such things exist somewhere in the office. But here, however, there is none of that. Instead, the governor is triangulated by a small bust of Abraham Lincoln, a much larger, statuesque figurine of Elvis Presley (that recalls the ridiculous photograph of President Nixon posing with Elvis in the Oval Office of the White House), and a framed snapshot of Blagojevich, the private citizen, with his children. Decorating one’s workspace with personal effects is a habit of contemporary life, but even in the private sector the assumption is that such artifacts will operate moderately, in the background, visible and yet not seen—hence decorous. One would anticipate even more such moderation in the governor’s office, but here the emblems of personal eccentricity and private life dominate the mis-en-scène almost to the point of impropriety.
What gives the photograph its dramatic force, and in the end what pushes it fully beyond the bounds of propriety, is the shoe poised awkwardly and somewhat precariously on the edge of the desk. Truth to tell, I will occasionally put my feet on my desk in my office when I am reading a manuscript or talking on the phone. But I would never do it if someone else were in the room, and certainly not if there was a photographer within viewing distance (let alone a NYT photojournalist). And the reason is quite simple: doing so marks the space as private and proprietary. To do so in an otherwise public space is a sign of arrogance and disrespect; to do so as an officer of the state, literally posing for the a NYT photographer, marks the behavior as a gesture, as an intentional performance of utter contempt for the office and all who might see it.
More even than Blagojevich’s absurd claim to the NYT reporter that “[we] should have been more selfish, not selfless,” the photograph is a representative (visual) anecdote of the deep habits of his governorship and why he is deserving of public opprobrium whether he is guilty of the formal charges against him or not. More, it is a reminder of why the standards of public decorum are valuable guides to the harmony and ministrations of civic life.
Photo Credit: Amanda Rivkin/New York Times
*Michael Leff, “The Habitation of Rhetoric” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, ed. John Louis Lucaites, et al. New York: Guilford Press, 1993, p. 62.
