no caption needed – Page 35 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

"Shane! Come back!"

I have written previously about the regularity and profusion of photographs of children in the Middle East—Israeli, Pakistani, and Iraqi children in particular—playing with toy guns. Such images operate in a somewhat allegorical register as they invoke one or a number of ironic, dialectical incongruities between child and adult, innocence and maturity, play and reality, the pleasure and horror of war, plasticity and steel, “their” present and “our” past, and so on. This photograph seems to capture all of that and something more.

The caption reads: “An Iraqi boy holds a toy gun during a joint American and Iraqi military security sweep in the neighborhood of Sariyah in Baghdad, Iraq.” The key to the image, however, is in recognizing that the toy gun is incidental to the scene that that we are witnessing. The boy holds a toy weapon, to be sure, but he does so awkwardly as if he doesn’t quite know how to use it, and in any case he does not hold it in a manner that might be thought of as threatening—or even effective. Nor is it the toy itself that draws the viewer’s attention—the caption to the contrary notwithstanding—but rather the young boy’s gaze. But what could he be looking at? What does he see? And where have we seen this image before?

Of course, we cannot know for sure what he is looking at. But the soldier standing behind him is Iraqi, and the boy is clearly not looking at the photographer, who is positioned at an oblique angle to the field of vision. Given that the caption identifies this is a joint Iraqi-American “military security sweep” it stands to reason that the boy has fixed his gaze upon the American soldier—or at least that is what the interaction of image and text invites us to imagine. And what he sees there is clearly something that pleases and inspires him. Indeed, it is the look of a child’s wonder, perhaps even hero worship, as if in the presence of a powerful and incorruptible majesty. One might discount it as the misdirected gaze of youthful innocence and naiveté but for the fact that the family members in the background giving their smiling approval to the scene that unfolds before their eyes as well.

The young boy’s gaze is not new to us, at least not to those of us who were raised with the myth of the American west, where physical strength and a skill with six-guns (and the resolve to use both when necessary) served as individual virtues necessary to taming an otherwise dangerous frontier and to making the world safe and secure for democracy and domesticity. Indeed, the boy’s gaze almost perfectly mirrors the look of Joey Starrett in the 1950s western Shane, the young boy (played by Brandon DeWilde) who worships the title character—a somewhat mysterious stranger with a gunslinger past that he is trying to forget nevertheless draws upon his strength of character to save the homesteading community from a brutish cattle baron—for precisely these virtues. At the end of the movie, after having completed his work, Shane moves on, even as Joey cries “Shane! Come back!” for he knows that there is no place for him in the world that he helped to make safe.

It is highly unlikely that the photographer knew of or was modeling a sluice of U.S. popular culture circa 1950, but given the ways in which the Bush administration has framed the intervention in Iraq from the very beginning as an extension of our history as a gunfighter nation, the analogy—what biblical hermeneutical scholars might call an anagogical relationship or “in spirit” comparison—is apt. And the current situation in Iraq makes the Shane myth all the more attractive as an interpretive frame for those who think of the U.S. military as the western hero carving out a path for civilization in the wilderness, leaving behind a feminized and domesticated community beholden to the those with the character and resolve to do the hard work at great personal expense. As the U.S. allegedly prepares to leave one can hear this young boy’s plea to stay. We can only hope that the incoming administration has the same good sense of Shane to realize that he has to move on

Photo Credit: Hadi Mizban/AP

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The Beauty of War Through a Child's Eye

November 17, 2008
Lucaites
no caption needed visual memory visualizing war
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This past week we honored America’s veterans, but except for a few conventional news stories and ritualistic photo ops the day passed with little notice or fanfare, eclipsed in the national consciousness by trying to figure out who President-elect Obama will appoint in his new administration and political wrangling over how to address the so-called “financial crisis.” And what has been missed (or is it repressed?) in all of this has been the 150,000 U.S. troops who continue to occupy Iraq (and who are likely to continue to occupy Iraq until at least 2011); the 278 U.S. military deaths and 1,500 + U.S. military casualties that have occurred in Iraq since January of 2008; or the astonishing admission by the Veteran Administration that on average a staggering 18 veterans commit suicide everyday.

It is against this background that I was stuck by this AP photograph that showed up in a number of on-line newspaper slide shows this past weekend.

The image is of a young girl as she “looks at a life-size painting of men from the Columbus-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25^th Marine Regiment, 4^th Marine Division” that is part of the Lima Company Memorial at the Cincinnati Museum Center. Lima Company suffered some of the heaviest casualties of any unit fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including the death of 22 brave marines in a very short period of time in 2005. There is no question but that their service and sacrifice needs to be sanctified in public memory and yet there is something altogether unsettling about this photograph. Part of this (dis)ease is no doubt a recognition of how an innocent child—and a young girl at that—serves as the cipher for orienting the model citizen towards the nation-state as a gendered and infantilized spectator.

Children, we are told, “should be seen and not heard.” Notice here how the young girl silently directs the national gaze upon the marines even as she holds their attention. The colors of her hair, sweatshirt, and pants coordinate perfectly with the red, white, and blue of the flag that she holds and thus cast her as the metonymic (and fetishistic) embodiment of the nation-state. Her shadow marks the corporeal distance of the passive spectator from the painting no less than the candles, boots, and photographs that frame it. There can thus be no mistaking that the young girl is a passive spectator clearly separated from the scene in the painting—seeing and not speaking or acting. And so, we must wonder, is she a child citizen or the citizen-as-child?

There is no final answer to this question, of course, but the smiling and approving gaze of the marines seems to suggest a paternal protectiveness of the child/citizen/flag that resonates with normative assumptions of the public as an innocent and passive child and all of that is troubling for those who might imagine a vibrant democratic public culture. But what if the child was not in the photograph? How else then might we understand the painting as part of a public memorial?

This life size canvas, it turns out, is one of eight panels portraying all 22 marines from Lima Company painted by Anita Miller, a liturgical artist motivated “to paint images that open the viewer’s eyes to the beauty of the world.” In each of these eight panels we have portraits of two or three of the deceased marines and in each instance we are presented with a smiling and caring countenance. And there can be no doubt that the images offer comfort to those who knew and loved these men as friends and family members within the contours of private life. But when cast as a war memorial the appeal to the spiritual beauty of the individuals doing the fighting diverts attention from the sheer ugliness that is combat regardless of the cause. War’s “beauty”—if that is the right word—is terrible, and that is a lesson that we forget at our peril.

And so, once again back to the photograph and the young child who gazes upon the scene with what we can only imagine is beatific awe and admiration. And the question here must be, is this the best way to transport the civic virtues of sacrifice and service from one generation to the next? I am not so Pollyanna as to believe that wars will never be needed—though hope springs eternal— but I never want my children to think of war as “part of the beauty of the world” or that those who do the fighting do so with a “smile” upon their face. We owe the men of Lima Company more than that.

Photo Credit: Ernest Coleman, AP Photo/The Enquirer

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Sight Gag: Would Twer That It Were True

Credit: The Yes Men and Gawker

“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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CRASH!

NCN was down from about Saturday noon until early Monday morning.

Need I add that John and I were clueless about what to do beyond emailing tech support? Thanks to David Huffaker at Northwestern for helping out and to the Dreamhost staff for the repair. Everything seems to be back to normal, but if you encounter problems, please let us know. We should be back to our regular posting schedule by Wednesday.

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Sight Gag: Breaking the Glass Ceiling

Credit: Anonymous (brought to our attention by Cara Finnegan)

“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.

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Sight Gag: If You Were A Train, What Would You Be?

Photo Credit: Anonymous E-Mail (With thanks to Maurice Charland who brought it to our attention).

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Stay Tuned For Something Big

Photojournalist James Nachtwey was one of the 2007 recipients of the TED Prize. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it brings people from these three worlds together to spread ideas, mostly by challenging fascinating thinkers to “give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. These talks are available on-line at TED.com. The annual prize winners are given a $100,000 award AND granted one WISH to help change the world. James Nachtwey’s wish is to “break [a story that the world needs to know about] in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digitial age.” That story will break on October 3 both on-line and around the world. Don’t miss it!

James Nachtwey’s Homepage

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The Organic City or the Global Desert?

Will the 21st century be a chronicle of cities or deserts? The stark contrast may seem artificial, but powerful forces are pushing global development in both directions at once. On the one hand, many hundreds of cities are growing rapidly and many of those are thriving. They are the sites of tremendous concentrations of wealth, human capital, social energy, information, and innovation. In the US, cities such as New York and Chicago are experiencing record levels of young people living in the urban core, which historically is a vital source of commercial and cultural progress. If rising energy prices keep that generation from migrating to the suburbs, then the transformation of the urban environment will continue. The future, then, will look like this:

I love this photograph of London at night. The city is a living thing, pulsing with vital forces, growing relentlessly along natural paths. The lighted arterials flow like roots feeding a plant, like blood vessels coursing through the body, like water cutting through rocks to become the channels of a great river carving the landscape. That landscape is suffused with both energy and density–an incredible concentration of social organization and electricity. This achievement is marked by the bridge and the river in the upper right of the photograph. The coordination of human enterprise and natural constraint is there in miniature, an historical token whose small scale and simplicity underscores the enormous amplification of social, political, economic, and technological power characterizing modernity.

So why talk about the desert? Because all that electrical power has to come from somewhere, and the enormous changes wrought by modernization in China, India, and elsewhere are–like the industrialized nations before them–rapidly depleting all natural resources, not least those that are non-renewable. Urbanization has been aligned with global warming and greater inequities in wealth, education, and many other social goods. To put it bluntly, one way to make a city (and a civilization) is to turn the surrounding area into a desert.

As nations compete for ever more limited resources to achieve the benefits of modern civilization, one outcome could be a lot more of this:

This beautiful image is from the Sossusvlei Dunes in Namibia. The caption in the New York Times describes the country as one of “stark beauty and riveting contradictions.” If you want riveting contradictions, you don’t have to go to Namibia, and the picture has more in common with London as well. Note how the desert trees have the same ancient natural form as seen in the aerial view of the world city. The reversal of the color fields emphasizes their similarity: the branching pattern is gold on dark in the city, and dark on gold in the desert. In place of the teeming life of the city, however, here we see an environment defined by scarcity. And in place of density, we find stability gained by resisting erosion.

Deserts, like cities, are the result of both human and natural forces. London is the sum total of millions upon millions of decisions yet still subject to the deep interdependencies shaping the planet. Deserts will grow or shrink depending on how humans are or are not able to cooperate with each other regarding resource consumption, economic regulation, and other requirements for a sustainable modern civilization. Taken together, these two photographs remind us of one more thing: just as natural beauty is evident in both the city and the desert, nature couldn’t care less whether humanity brings itself to success or failure.

Photographs by Jason Hawkes/The Big Picture and Evelyn Hockstein/New York Times. For more of Jason Hawkes‘ stunning photographs of London, go to this post at The Big Picture. The Times story on traveling in Namibia is here.

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Fantasy Island

It is hard to find much to smile about in the news these days what with the U.S. economy in the toilet, sectarian conflicts erupting throughout the world, and nature following its own rhythms and paths to devastating destruction. And so when I saw this picture featured front and center on the NYT website yesterday with the headline “A Vision of Tourist Bliss in Baghdad’s Rubble” I broke out in laughter –and then I double-checked the URL to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently clicked on the website for The Onion.

The man we are looking at is Humoud Yakobi, the head of Iraq’s Board of Tourism, who is looking to convert a small, bombed out island in the Tigris River and within sight of the Green Zone into a fantasy island getaway that would include a “six star” hotel, an amusement park, and luxury villas “built in the architectural style of the Ottoman Empire-era buildings in Old Baghdad.” It would be topped off with – and I kid you not – the “Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club.” The only thing missing, it would seem, is Ricardo Montalban’s “Mr. Roarke” and his sidekick Tattoo. The problem, it seems, is not only finding financial backers to fund the 4.5 billion dollars to underwrite the enterprise, but reckoning with the fact that the target audience—Western tourists—tend to be “sensitive to bombings and things like that” (at least in the opinion of the head of the media relations department of Iraq’s tourism board).

The return to normalcy will surely require venture capitalists willing to take risks on Baghdad’s future and so perhaps we should not be overly cynical here. And yet it is hard to be anything but cynical when the NYT’s “Week in Review” features another story that presumes to underscore the first stages of the return to “calm” and “normal” with a photograph of a mother and child walking about safely in a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood:

Of course, one cannot look beyond the edges of the photographic frame, and so it is impossible to see what, if anything, enables or secures the apparent calm and safety. And as if to acknowledge this absence the NYT slips in two small clickable photographs sutured together in a sidebar labeled “Street Scenes”:

It is important, I think, that the two images function as a vertical diptych, forcing the viewer to take them in seriatum as part of a coherent narrative. The top photograph, the caption tells us, shows members of the “Awakening Council” controlling a local “checkpoint.” The bottom photograph is a car bombing from “early 2007” and is captioned as a once “frequent” scene. The implication then is that the only thing that stands between the bombed out cars and the scene of relative calm in the Sunni-Shiite neighborhood are these local militias.

This logic of the visual narrative is impeccable and if we stop here we might be inclined to read the story as designed to animate support for U.S. policy and the Bush administration’s Pollyanna conclusion that “the surge” has helped Iraq recover its middle American, Main Street calm. But I think another possibility has to be considered. For surely one implication of the visual logic has to be that just as one needs to look outside of the frame of the first photograph to discover what might be supporting the relative calm, one needs equally to look outside of the diptych to discover what supports the Awakening Councils—which are, after all, groups of former Sunni insurgents funded as mercenaries by the U.S. government as part of a “hearts and minds” campaign –and to wonder what will happen when that support dissipates.

The answer to this question is by no means clear, but given the history of this region one has to assume on par that the return to sectarian violence is a very real likelihood. And so we come back to the article that reports Hamoud Yakobi’s plans to build a luxury, tourist retreat on an island in the Tigris River. It really is an absurd fantasy, but then again perhaps no more absurd or fantastic than portraying a neighborhood controlled by former insurgents hired as mercenaries by a foreign and occupying government as somehow a return to normalcy. And maybe that was the point all along.

Photo Credits: Max Becherer/Polaris and New York Times; Ali Jasim/Reuters.

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Being Flooded, Letting Go

This is going to be a brief post as I’m not through cleaning up the basement that was flooded this weekend. Of course, the damage was not even close to what people are experiencing in the Gulf Coast, while many other people will not have had to worry about water at all. The question for all of us, regardless of circumstances, is what is there to learn from being flooded? When I looked through the photographs in the papers I realized that one lesson was hidden in plain sight. Somewhat like this, perhaps:

You are looking at a car under water on a Chicago highway. Nice car, isn’t it? It’s also a nice photo: The dirty water is everywhere, making the car appear all the more self-contained and beautifully machined. The car is both there and not there, seen yet only partially visible, as if already being transmuted into a ghostly counterpart of itself. The streamlined design and smooth surface implies power and mystery as if it were to emerge like some god out of the primal waters, except that you know that everything is going in the other direction. This vehicle will be written off as a complete loss.

The hurricane and flood coverage has been all about loss. The loss of property, to get right down to it. Granted, there has been little loss of life and the deaths largely are unknown or kept private, but I doubt those are the only reasons that so much of the coverage features the destruction of property. The encounter with nature reveals any society’s preoccupations. A modern, capitalist society is one that is absorbed with the acquisition of material things. Nothing wrong with that, but it does shape our emotional response to what happens. Perhaps that is why I liked this photograph:

A single sandal floats, almost as if it had been made for floating. It is a small and inexpensive thing, yet it has the same sleek design and machined look of the car in the first photo. And this photo also is about being both present and absent. The sandal is there, ready for wear, just the thing for a wet day, and yet it is a study in subtraction. It’s mate is missing, and more to the point its owner is no longer there. Again, person and property have been separated. If the image is poignant it is because we realize that only the property remains. That sandal could last for centuries, but the naked foot that fits inside can only last a few years before being reabsorbed into the earth.

Which is why I’ll close with this photograph.

A villager is walking through floodwaters in Kumarkhad, India. The photograph reflects both the flood and a latent Orientalism, but let’s use that frame for the moment. The tone here is one of serenity–and that of the “perennial philosophy” of Eastern nonattachment. We see no property whatsoever, only a single human being half-immersed in oceanic stillness. This is not a study in loss but rather a depiction of eternal return: from nothing, through the small disruption of the waters that is human consciousness, to nothing.

I don’t think you will see many photographs like this in media coverage of the flooding in the US. People will be picking through their broken, sodden property and holding on to whatever they can. After all, what else can they do? This is no time to ask them for transcendence. Those who have not lost so much, however, might want to think about why we hold on so tightly to what are just things. Why we hold on to them because we are trying to hold on to something else that is sure to slip away.

A hard lesson, perhaps, but no reason to be mournful. Rilke knew as much:

And though you fade from earthly sight,
declare to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water say: I am.

The Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Robert Hunter.

Photographs by Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune, unknown/Chicago Tribune, and Diptendu Dutta/AFP.

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