A recent New York Times report on the Korean summit meeting was captioned with this photograph:

 

We are seeing the South Korean president returning home. For a moment, I thought it was taken in North Korea, where the Glorious Leader is regularly surrounded by the conventions of visual propaganda that you see above. Then again, it also could have been taken in the US:

As Michael Shaw pointed out at BagnewsNotes, these carefully posed images become even more incredible now that Bush has vetoed legislation to extend health insurance for children. Unfortunately, we know all too well that this president knows no shame. It might also be interesting to note how his use of kids as props puts him in interesting company. Guys like this, for example:

 

For all I know, Lenin may have done more for school children than Bush ever will, although that’s not saying much. It is clear that they both had the time to pose with kids for propaganda photos that were used to cover draconian policies. (This one is from a magazine accompanying the occupation of Latvia.) What remains to be shown, however, is where the template probably comes from, which is this iconic tableau:

The image of Jesus with the children refers to a story told in Mathew, Mark, and Luke (Mat. 19:14, Mark 10:14, Luke 18:16). When his disciples had stopped those who were trying to bring children forward for a blessing, Jesus rebuked his self-appointed campaign managers. The scene has been reproduced in various images countless times in many art forms, high and low. It will have been put to many uses, including church propaganda and social hegemony. (For the record, Jesus will not have been blond.)

There is much that could be said about the relationship between the religious icon and secular image-management. Let me just note two things: First, there is no indication in the story that Jesus posed with the children. As Mathew tells it, “he laid his hands on the children, and went his way.” Second, the point of the story is not that Jesus liked kids or that they liked him. No, the story is about gatekeeping. To say that “the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these” meant that no one was barred from that Kingdom because they lacked status or power. In welcoming the children–and rebuking those who would keep the weak, dependent, or socially inferior out of sight–Jesus was upending the hierarchies that structured that society. That idea has been forgotten when kids can become props for sham displays of compassion by cynical rulers.

 

Photographs: pool photo; Charles Dharapak/Associated Press; back cover of ”Darba sieviete” magazine, # 1, 1940. Stained Glass window from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Church. My reading of the Biblical text is indebted to Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity. The quoted text is from the New English Bible.

 

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite:

The launch is still seen as the official beginning of the Space Age. Doesn’t that term sound quaint today? “Grandpa, what was the Space Age?” Even so, the anniversary is an occasion for news stories, commemorative events, a documentary film, special (promotional) reports, retail products, and surely a joke or two.

NASA’s home page features presentations on the “50th anniversary of the space age” and on the history of NASA. Perhaps I’m over-reading, but I can’t help but think that the agency is a bit ambivalent about the occasion. Why, when it is their moment of origin? Because they have invested so heavily in “manned” space travel, rather than in the much less dangerous and much more cost effective “unmanned” technologies. Now that the space race is over and the shuttle program has become something like a children’s museum in the sky, that investment seems increasingly mistaken. Even the myth itself is shopworn: space is not the “final frontier,” astronauts are not explorers, science and technology are transforming life on earth rather than transporting it into space.

Dreams die hard, however, and I don’t like to be a cynic. So it is that this photograph caught my eye a few days ago:

You are watching spectators looking up at the launch of the Dawn spacecraft, which is beginning an eight-year trip to the asteroid Vesta. There are no teachers on board.

This strikes me as a poignant photograph. It is an image shaped by alignments and contrasts. The craft named Dawn launches at dawn, nature and culture perfectly aligned to carry us forward into a bright future. As it escapes “the surly bonds of earth,” the contrail becomes ever more bright and pure–and distant. As the trajectory bisects the pictorial space on the diagonal, it likewise seems to ride the edge between sunlight energy and the cold blackness of outer space. As the craft arcs cleanly outward, it seems to leave cares, fears, conflicts, all forms of gravity behind.

And we are left behind. That, too, is represented in the picture. Against the bright escape of the machine, a group of human beings look up in awe. They are silhouetted, cast in darkness, as if made of the dark earth. We don’t see individuals but rather something like a group of hunter-gatherers, or perhaps Druids or some religious cult. We are reminded that they are moderns from the cameras being lifted up as if an offering. We see not a premodern cult but rather a camera culture hoping to snare an image. And that image is itself such a tenuous connection to the craft soaring out of sight. One machine surges away into a place we will never go, while a smaller machine only serves to accentuate how we far removed we remain from one kind of heaven.

The rocket launch begins in a darkened swirl of exhaust and soars to light. Those who have come to marvel at the technocratic sublime are left with little patches of light. Data flows back to NASA, and this is real science, also thoroughly human and likely to advance knowledge that can benefit life on earth. We don’t need to be on Vesta, and the machine will do the job. But it can do nothing to stop the yearning, while the camera can remind us that even as we dream of escape, we do so while living as human beings have always lived–sharing a common fate, bound to gravity and darkness, yet capable of joining together in a common life.  All are bound by the same limits, members of the same tribe.

I like the photograph for another reason as well, one that comes from comparing it to the file photo of Sputnik. In that image, we see only the machine, its metallic surface enhanced further by sharp black and white contrasts. It is a machine for a hard environment of energy and void, where neither death nor life have any meaning, only thrust, structure, data. The satellite looks self-sufficient, the epitome of modern design that in turn represents a technocratic future. Perhaps the commitment to lifting up astronauts was, in that context, a kind of humanism. If so, that moment also has passed. Now we stand as if in the second photograph. Our machines go not in advance of us, but in place of us, whether into space or into the ocean and the bloodstream. But they go for us, not as an end in themselves. After all, we are back in the picture.

Sputnik photograph from a NASA commemorative photo gallery; launch photograph by John Raoux/ Associated Press.

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The September 23rd Sunday Times Magazine (London) contained a story on this year’s winners of the International Photography Awards. I have to say that I found the collection very strange because so many of the images seemed soooo dated: two head shots of auteurs, two female nudes, a posed scene of the bourgeois family cracking apart in an elegant restaurant. Where have the judges been for the past fifty years? As I flipped through the pages, I was reminded yet again of why fine art photography is such a small thing among the fine arts, and why photography’s artistic vitality usually is found not there but in photojournalism. That was the set-up for this image:

Ok, now we are in the 21st century. Again, I see a possible future world of post-human species where androids dream of electric sheep. By contrast, the Magazine’s caption tries to pull it back into a familiar humanism: “Bagg’s 2006 self-portrait features shiny lips and ‘plumes of red smoke.'” Not to worry: this is an individual person engaged in an act of self-expression, and the only manipulations are a bit of lip gloss and some red dye no. 5.

I don’t think so. This is the image of a facial mask, a mouth, a species, a thing from another order of being, an oracle. What they call smoke may be some post-industrial fluid, blood, breath, bio-informatic desire, or visual speech carrying the one true Word of a new revelation.

What is most revealing, however, is that this is not something from a vat in the 22nd century. This is one part of human nature, now. It may be how we would look to anyone, artist or victim or alien or machine, who saw us as we are and not as we think we are. We might wonder what they would say.

Photograph by Farren Bagg.

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I pulled this photo out of the Images in the News at the Chicago Tribune online a month or so ago:

Unfortunately, I’ve lost the photo citation, but maybe that will turn up. I’ve decided that the picture is too striking to be buried for want of a footnote. The paper knew as much, for the photograph certainly isn’t “News.” You are looking at four river otters swimming, something they do every day.

The image captures much more than four otters in the water. The silver sheen fuses light, water, and animals into a single, perfectly unified event. The otters are completely at home in the water, moving together with the flow of the river, the flow of all of nature’s energies. And yet they also look like they are made of molten metal, crafted forms emerging out of a bath of silver alloy. Caption it “Metal World” and you have a movie still. More seriously, the photograph alludes to the art and history of photography, as if a silver gelatin substrate has been beautifully brought to the surface of the image.

Whether you see the aesthetic unity of the image as the eloquence of nature or art, the question remains of what it has to say. And the otters aren’t so much at home as on the move. They seem to push purposively through the water, tightly coordinated, like a team or other work group. The four are entrained, and entrainment is both an important feature of social life and an artistic technique in photojournalism. Entrainment also can be suggested by mechanical reproduction of the same image, so once again the image channels the art, in this case, the aesthetic element and cultural anxiety marked by Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” This photograph provides the multiplied image within the frame rather than through reproduction of the photograph itself (as I’ve done), but it is the more fitting for that.

The photograph fundamentally isn’t about itself, however. I think the uncanny quality comes from the combination of the light, the entrainment, and the implicit analogy between one species and another. They are coordinated very much as humans can be: working together while each still exhibiting individuality. Although each is looking in a different direction, these four animals may look much more uniform than individuated, but that may be due to our inability to see them from inside their own social experience. Is the difference between humans and otters that they are much the same while we are each an individual person, or is that belief merely the mistaken result of our ignorance, our inability to enter their world? The photograph, which may have been selected for merely “aesthetic” reasons, poses significant questions about who we are and what we value.

Such comparisons may be more than academic exercises. The river otters are among the many species endangered with extinction. Seeing them as if they were artificial otters in some liquid metal bath of the future, perfect reproductions of the extinct species, makes me realize that they then could just as well be a team of specialized workers finely engineered for the industrial environment of that world. Looking at the picture again, I see the complexity and beauty of nature, and also a possible future that includes not only the otter’s extinction but ours.

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John and I will be traveling from the 18th-26th.

We hope to maintain our schedule of six or seven posts a week, but, well, don’t hold your breath.  Between jet lag, conferencing, and perhaps spotty wireless coverage, some posts may stay up longer than usual.

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Americans like to think that the world revolves around the U.S. For vivid demonstration of a different perspective, look at this photo, which is dated September 11, 2007:

The caption said, “German herders guide a decorated cow and other cattle Tuesday on the move from high alpine summer pastures to lower altitudes in the mountains near Bad Hindelang, in southern Germany.”

Even without the 9/11 date, this picture strikes me as uncanny. The bucolic scene could be from centuries ago, except for the state-of-the-art hiking boots, perfectly machined clothing, and farmers who obviously have never wanted for food, good health care, and all the other benefits of late-modern European civilization. The cow’s ornate decoration is equally incongruous, like something found in a tourist boutique Christmas Store rather than on modern livestock who are blessed (as these probably are) if they can stay out of a wretched feedlot. Above all, these are German herders, and the idea that they are part of the labor force of a modern, high-tech nation just doesn’t mesh with the incredibly relaxed, ambulatory slowness of the scene. They obviously are walking at a cow’s pace–for those of you who don’t know, that is really s l o w–and they are doing so easily, comfortably. While I was getting edgy waiting impatiently for a traffic light to turn green, these guys were ambling through a verdant alpine valley. And what little work they were doing by walking downhill was being made into ritualized play.

Whether acting out an invented tradition or authentic examples of the German volk, the incongruity is extended further by the boy in the foreground. While mountain people should be hardy, wild, and reclusive, he looks so open and gentle. Though likely to grow up like the physically impressive men behind him, he appears vulnerable, still formed in the soft clay of childhood. He is presented directly to the viewer as if we ought to take him in, and so the photograph suggests that this pastoral scene might become part of our world. The herders are walking into our space, perhaps to bring their green harmony with them.

That sense of peace seems a long way from 9/11 and the urban canyons of New York or Chicago, but there are sharper contrasts beyond that. This photograph appeared in the New York Times on September 13:

The story featured a sense of incongruity: “In Southern Sudan, Peace Alters a Way of Life.” Peace can do that, particularly when contrasted with rape, murder, starvation, forced migration, and other forms of terror that are never mentioned by the Times reporter. This picture isn’t about war, however, but about third world deprivation. The point of the story is that the Dinka way of life is becoming harder to sustain as young people are lured to the city. This boy is on the cusp: he herds the cattle, yet wears modern clothes. His indeterminate age symbolizes his indeterminate position: the caption informs us that his parents don’t know his age but guess he is about 11 or 12, i.e., about to enter the transition to adulthood. There are no adults in the picture, and the Western reader will conclude from the parent’s ignorance that they are either primitive or negligent, neither of which bodes well for a child caught between two worlds.

The photograph pushes this point. We are looking up at the boy as if he were in a position of power. But it is the wrong kind of power: he is a boy doing adult labor. This mismatch is reinforced by seeing his clothes come up short, by his sullen expression, and by the contrast with the open vista behind him. He is a capable herder but yoked to the cattle. His herding stick suggests the yoke and is matched by another stick protruding upwards to create an artificial border within the picture. The boy is already hardened by child labor in the desert and confined by the boundaries of his primitive society. (The benefits of living in this traditional society are no part of the story or the photograph.) Though revealing some of the incongruities of contemporary Dinka life, this photograph is not uncanny but rather one that makes reality seem hardened, depressing, and perhaps hopeless.

Two photographs, two boys herding cattle, two very different worlds on the same planet.

Photographs by Christof Stache/Associated Press, Evelyn Hockstein/New York Times.

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Karl Rove may have left the White House, but they have lost little of his magic when it comes to staging a photo-op. I can’t help but gawk at the combination of pandering and denial in this one:

Have you ever seen a better bunch of kids? Happy, wholesome, good-looking, fresh-faced, smiling–they look like they’ve had a great time at a neighborhood charity clean-up. And what a line-up: from the right, we see a black female, Hispanic male, white male, Bush, indeterminate female. The rows in the back do much the same. They could have stepped right out of a Disney movie. The raised hands from the back confirm what we already know, which is that this photo is posed and taken on cue, but that cynical fact is swamped by their good-natured, exuberant innocence.

It looks as though there is a cluster of white men around Bush, covering his back, perhaps, but I wouldn’t make too much of that. More important is that the group forms a triangle pointed toward the vanishing point of the picture, with Bush smack in the center. The photo is all about him, with everyone else there as a prop. He stands at the center of a miniature society of egalitarian citizen-soldiers who are there primarily to frame him. And who is that man in black at the center? He looks like the beloved uncle or model civic volunteer: gentle and ever-helpful but also wise, the perfect scout leader being recognized for his many years of service.

And not for the first time. Bush has been setting records for his use of military personal as props. And the troops are stand-ins for those he was using before 9/11:

This image is from November 28, 2000, when the election was still on the line. Note the same mix of ethnicities and genders, the same happy faces, the same innocence, the same focus on the man in the middle.

I’m tempted to follow with an image of a maimed soldier, but that shouldn’t be necessary. The point is that we already can see the stagecraft, and we know how much is being denied. Whether propping up a stolen election or a failed invasion, Bush knows where to turn.

Photographs by Jason Reed/Reuters and Jeff Mitchell/Reuters. The first accompanied this story in the New York Times.

Update: Occasionally our posts cover the same images as those posted by Michael Shaw at his excellent blog, BAGnewsNotes. These may be on the same day or, in this case, a day apart due to the writing schedule on one side or the other. (Sometimes, as is the case this week, John or I write several posts in a row that then can be put up each day before we run off to meetings and the other demands of our day jobs.) So, if you want to read Michael’s take on the same photograph, go here. Michael was one of the inspirations for this blog, and it is gratifying when we see things alike while learning from each other’s point of view.

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Brenda at The Photography Pages is giving away a great button challenging censorship.

Better yet, she is encouraging viral distribution. As she says at her post about the badges: “These were made by Brilliant Badges in the UK, but please feel free to copy the artwork royalty-free, and make and distribute your own.”

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This is a hard photo of a bad day at the workplace:

At about 8 in the morning a former employee of the RiverBay Corporation gunned down a supervisor, then shot two other employees before taking the bus to a courthouse where he turned himself in. (Where would we be without good mass transit?) The photograph with the story shows the body of Audley Bent being brought out of the building at 12:50 p.m.

This is about as harsh an image of death as I want to see. The full body, including the head, wrapped up in that heavy tarp and strapped down tightly–right where the mouth and neck would be–well, there is no doubt that he is cold stone dead. The dramatic effect is heightened by the gurney and the technician’s gloves, which often are seen with a living victim who is being treated by med-techs while being ferried to an ambulance. Indeed, the brisk professionalism of the one, along with the casual attentiveness of the cop in the right foreground, make it seem as if this is just another accident.

Perhaps we’d like to think there might be some hope, but that huge, hulking, inert bag, stuffed with what is unmistakably a human body, crushes hope. Worse, look at how it matches up with the dumpster behind it: bag and trash bin appear to be the same dark green color and almost the same length. It’s as though the dumpsters are a row of coffins and the latest load from the apartment building is being taken to the next open bin. And what a cemetery: metal and concrete, everything rectilinear, featureless, and hard. The two living men could be prison guards. This industrialized back alley is no place to die, or to live.

The Bronx is better than that, of course, and you don’t take a dead body out the front door if you can avoid it. But the photograph does raise the perennial question about what images should or should not be published. Here one has little cause to complain about not being shown the dead.

The photo also raises a question about how violence is framed. Had Audley Bent been gunned down in Iraq, he would have been “processed” in much the same way, but no image of the body bag would be in the newspaper. During wartime, the soldier’s death is rightly treated with respect, although that respect can include visual practices that also hide the nature of industrialized warfare while sacralizing war itself. Likewise, the fact that we are shown the body bag of a murder victim suggests that .38-caliber violence is somewhat taken for granted on the home front–as if it were another not-so-hidden cost of modern civilization like pollution or traffic congestion.

Or maybe I’m wrong about that. I hope so.

Photograph by Uli Seit for The New York Times.

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