Photographers occasionally shoot images of people reflected in windows, framed by windows, or looking through windows. Such images can be visually distinctive while also prompting more reflexive viewing: one sees both the image and some aspect of seeing. The two images below are examples of this visual thinking, while also reflecting other conventions that mediate global communication.

This photograph shows an Afghan schoolgirl. The good news is that she is in school–not a given in Afghanistan. The bad news is that the photographer has put her under the veil. The window screen stands in for the chadiri she is likely to wear as a woman, while the rip in the screen might be a trace of orientalist fantasy, one shaded further by the stain on her hand. The implication is that, despite being in school, she still needs to be liberated. She would welcome that, it seems, as she is looking not through the screen but through the tear. That gash in the screen could stand for poverty or accident, but it makes the screen appear the more inevitable. Although a close-up shot of a vibrant young girl, she remains on the other side of a barrier. That barrier dulls perception in both directions. She seems a lost soul, ghost-like, someone who can see and be seen but not someone we can touch or help, as she really is from another world.

There are others in that world.

This is actually only a temporary confinement, as they are passengers in a Chinese train delayed by heavy snow. But that news is the least of it. Surely this is a vision of the human condition of separation, of the transparent barrier that stands between any human being and another. One grips the rail and looks to the side, warily; he has learned to expect the worst. The younger man still can admit to his yearning to connect. He looks at us, reaches out and puts his hand to the glass, as if we might place ours against his, as if we could touch and not feel only the cold glass.

Each photo tells us that it is not enough to see; we also need to connect. The Biblical allusion in the title of this post is to the beautiful poem in 1 Corinthians 13. Now we see in a “glass” (in the oft-quoted King James translation, referring to a mirror) darkly, but when united with God we shall see face to face. This vision of heaven doubles as a vision of how humanity might live with itself. Indeed, it might be that one step to achieving heaven on earth is to see one another as if face to face. To do that, we have to not settle for merely being able to see through barriers that still dull empathy and divide one from another.

Photographs by Rafig Maqbool and Vincent Yu for the Associated Press.

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One of the basic ideas of this blog is that photographs can depict more than what was happening in front of the lens. This added value can include highlighting larger patterns and processes and also providing imaginative projections of current tendencies. This is what some artists try to do by writing, and science fiction is particularly keen on exploring possible technological and political consequences of present tendencies. This comparison came to mind when I saw this photograph from Afghanistan.

 

The caption confirms that these are cricket players in a sandstorm. It also adds that they are on a “playground,”but something seems lost in translation. The scene looks more like something out of Dune (the book, not the movie). Recreation on the desert planet Arrakis may not be a lot of fun, but we can marvel at how humans can adapt to anything. At the same time, the imperial influence seems to be alien and superficial rather than any genuine improvement of the place. The storm and much more may pass, but there is something poignant about this image of human beings defined by arbitrary rules and shared isolation on their desert planet.

With this photo sitting on my desktop, I wasn’t entirely surprised when a second appeared a few days later.

 

You are looking at the competitors begin the 150-mile Sand Marathon in Morroco. The race includes a full marathon, and a 50-mile day, and others as well across varying terrain. The race has to be run while carrying all their equipment on their backs and getting only 9 liters of water a day. Again, the old fort, the desert, and the peculiar, imported form of ritual play by hardy adapters could be from Dune. Where one would think survival would be enough, more is achieved, but always by staying close to the severe limits of nature.

My comparison may be fanciful, but I can’t help but think that these photos are displayed for reasons that go beyond being visually distinctive or documenting unusual forms of recreation. They might also be images of a possible future. That would be a future not on some distant planet, but on this one, should it become ruined by some combination of unrestrained emissions, deforestation, warfare, and other forms of ecological destruction.

Photographs by Ahmed Masood/Reuters; Pierre Verdy/AFP-Getty Images.

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I hated that I was required to memorize poems when I was in the 8th grade. But I had one of those truly inspirational teachers by the name of Abraham Elias, and when Mr. Elias said memorize poems … well, I memorized them. I never imagined that it would become an useful exercise. But then I encountered the above picture in an LA Times slide show titled “Building a Better Fence,” and the words came tumbling out, almost as if I couldn’t control them:

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

The photograph is of a portion of the 15–foot-high wall fence that stretches 40 miles east of San Luis, Arizona and separates the U.S. from the Mexican state of Sonora. In case you can’t tell, that is Sonora on the right side of the wall fence and San Luis, Arizona on the left. When completed the wall fence will start in San Diego and extend in fits and starts some 700 miles along the 2,000 mile U.S./Mexico border. Sometimes walls fences are designed to keep people in, like was the case with the Berlin Wall, but here the wall fence is designed to keep people out, protecting the U.S. from its neighbors to the south. In our post-cold war era this is what we call “homeland security.”

The need for serious immigration reform in the U.S is real, to be sure, but a 700 mile wall fence across a barren dessert valley in the name of national security is … well … insane. Indeed, upon first glance my initial thought was that the photograph above was actually an April Fool’s Day joke, but then I recalled that President Bush had signed an order to start such an enterprise and that the U.S. Congress had actually designated an initial 1.2 billion dollars (of what is expected ultimately to be a 6 billion dollar expenditure) to begin the task. But even still, I had to check to make sure I wasn’t reading The Onion.

The photograph marks the absurdity, if not the futility, of such an effort. The wall fence, which looks as much like a crack in the earth as anything, extends from an unidentified “here” to an infinitely distant and unknowable “there.” Its scope is thus hard to imagine, all the more so as we recall that the wall fence itself will only cover one-third of the border dividing the U.S. and Mexico. The viewer is located on the U.S. side looking across the wall fence line into Mexico, but of course we know this only because the caption tells us so since the two sides of the wall fence are equally barren and desolate, virtually and otherwise indistinguishable from one another. The arbitrary and political nature of the boundary between the two nation-states and of the location and exercise of power to enforce the separation is thus pronounced. And more, the very thought that such a physical boundary can be sustained for any extended period of time seems to be mocked by the natural landscape of the desert which promises to encompass and contain all that would disturb its contours.

It is difficult to see the poet’s “ground-swell” from this perspective, shot on-high and from a distance, nor are the two-abreast “gaps” that render such structures altogether ineffective apparent, but rest assured that they are there or will soon appear. For historically that has been the nature of walls and fences, whether in Berlin or Belfast or Jerusalem or Padua or elsewhere. What they are designed to keep out always finds its way in, and what is being contained always finds a way to leak or leech out. And for all of their failures such structures only fortify and reinforce the obsessive paranoia and fear of the alien that led to their being built in the first place, one more event in a cycle of state driven violence that keeps us from discovering more humane solutions to our problems.

The poet had it right, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Photo Credit: Don Bartletti/LA Times; and the poet, of course, was Robert Frost, the poem, “Mending Wall.”

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The story of Hillary Clinton’s compulsive lying about being under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia is already slipping away, so much so that she now is referring to is as a minor mistake. Well, I guess we should forgive and forget, right? (Wrong.) Before that happens, however, let’s take one last look at Hillary dodging bullets as she sprints across the tarmac:

As one astute reader put it at another blog, it depends on what your definition of “sniper fire” is.

Cynics will be gloating over this egregious example of how “all politicians lie.” That sloppy thinking only helps cynics and liars. Not everyone is in Hillary’s league, and she, not her opponent, has asked that people judge her on her judgment and experience. Note that character is not on that list, and the lie about her reception upon landing in Tuzla reflects both bad judgment and a misuse of experience. But, truth be told, her claim may have been not so much a lie in her own sense of things as a fiction–something not true that is told to convey a truth. OK, the snipers weren’t there, and she had to know it since she brought her daughter along, but you’ve just got to know that she is soooo ready to be a “war-time president.”

I don’t think earnest yearning excuses much, but if we grant Hillary any slack, she had better be ready to concede that visual commentary might tell the story slant to get a better sense of the truth. Like this:

Editorial cartoonists love to use the Iwo Jima icon. This one may seem a tad unfair because of how the icon is gendered, but, again, it’s Hillary who has said she’s the only one who ought to answer the mythical National Security Phone. What is more telling is that she is facing the viewer. In contrast to the anonymity of the soldiers laboring together selflessly on behalf of the nation, she is jumping in unbidden to serve personal ambition. Of course, she wasn’t claiming to be a soldier, and there are no bullets in the iconic photograph of the flag-raising, but the cartoonist has revealed more than one problem with Clinton’s lie.

Hillary got caught telling a whopper; perhaps she ought to be given a dose of her own medicine. Some people wish it could be her Dukakis moment–that is, the equivalent of the 1988 Democratic candidate’s mistaken photo-op, when a shot of him riding in a tank became a defining moment of the campaign and one reason you don’t hear references to “President Dukakis.” That episode may be why you can see this image online today:

 

Really, really unfair. I’m just broken up about it.

Photograph by the Associated Press. Cartoon by Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette (March 31, 2008). Photoshopped image by registered@aol.com. For scholarly discussion and examples of the use of the Iwo Jima template in editorial cartooning, see Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997(: 269-89, and Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, at pp. 121-124 (on Iwo Jima) and elsewhere.

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Everybody knows that politicians are two-faced. They say one thing and mean another, or promise something to one audience and promise the opposite to someone else. They smile and smile and smile and we know that nobody can feel that happy. We know that they are supposed to put up a good front but have to be someone else inside, and so we don’t trust them. And then we go and vote according to how we like them or how we judge their “character.”

So it is that the politician’s face deserves some attention. And gets it. The photograph below is one of several that have featured the candidates up close and personal. Too close, perhaps:

You are looking at Barack Obama through a television camera viewfinder. Surely this is one example of the lengths to which photojournalists will go to create a distinctive image that might be picked out of the thousands sent to photo editors each day. This is distinctive and more. Some might say it’s a hatchet job–cutting Obama’s head away to make him look grotesque. Could be, but it also captures some of the elements of the presidential campaign as it is almost completely embedded in and defined by the media.

We could caption the photo “Moon Man.” The visual allusion is at once to the man in the moon and to an astronaut (think of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey). In either case he is far away, distant, almost alien. He also appears to be behind heavy glass, as if on the other side of an air lock. In fact he looks trapped in there, encased in the media apparatus of the campaign, ready for launch but also in danger of running out of oxygen.

The more you look, the worse it gets. The dark framing on the bushy brows, direct gaze, and exposed teeth might appear menacing to some, but look closer. I see someone assuming the look not of a predator, but of someone’s prey. The cross-hairs are just about dead center while he seems immobilized, caught in the hunter’s scope, stunned by the glare of a sudden flash, almost imploring us to help him. All we can do is stare and in staring note the moles, the pores, the creased skin–all evidence that here, in this twice mediated, highly distorted image, here we are actually seeing a real face.

But not the only one:

Again, it may have been taken for its novelty value, but it succeeds as a work of art. I won’t say this is Everywoman, but she is one very tired woman. She also is someone whose long experience with fatigue is matched by deep reserves of strength. Most of the American public have not a clue about how grueling the presidential campaign is, but you get a glimpse of it here.

I’m not backing Hillary in the campaign for the nomination, but I’m touched by this photograph. Perhaps it’s the contrast with the conventional shots of candidates smiling (much less the manic, bug-eyed shots the press likes to serve up about Hillary). Likewise, the closed eyes offer her to the viewer, as opposed to the demand placed by eye contact and the campaign generally. That’s only part of it, however. As with Obama’s image above, the dark framing isolates the face and all it stands for. But where Obama looks trapped, she has been exposed. We see her make-up and a tracery of wrinkles in spite of that. This, too, is an image of vulnerability. And look closer: it could be a death mask.

It certainly is a mask–and this is the photographer’s achievement. We are shown the candidate in an unguarded moment, one in which she is doing nothing to please anyone, and, sure enough, she is wearing a mask: the make-up, the disciplined concentration, the facial mask itself. And it is for precisely that reason that we can be sure we are seeing a real person.

Photographs by Damon Winter/New York Times; Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.

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