Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Sante Fe, NM, is pleased to announce “A Thousand Words: Masters of Photojournalism”, an exhibition of more than 60 great photographs from the field of photojournalism. The exhibition opens with a public reception on July 3 from 5 – 7 pm, and will continue through September 25. Additional information is available here.
Photograph taken in Ann Arbor, Michigan in October 1950 by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life.
Debates about the moral value of photography have to deal with poverty. One might think that there is little to discuss: poverty can be distressingly visible, and photographs have been a principle means for motivating efforts to help those in need. From the classic photographs by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine to those persistent Save the Children ads, images of poverty and particularly of its effects on children have raised awareness, shaped public policy, and opened pocketbooks. All that remains, one might think, would be to continue to produce compelling images of destitution.
This photograph from Haiti may not prick one’s conscience, perhaps because we can’t see the child’s face, but it remains a striking image. It also reflects the other side of the debate about photography’s moral legitimacy. One argument against the image is that the photographic depiction of poverty is in fact highly sentimentalized: a continuation of the stock attitudes–including charity, but also condescension–of the Victorian era. In short, the photograph of the poor child is a transposition of the Victorian waif from illustration into photography. For this and other reasons, photographers such as Gordon Parks and others have been accused, not entirely without cause, of simplifying or otherwise aesthetically framing poverty as an object for concerned contemplation, instead of either exploring the social fabric of the poor community or exposing the causes of its continued oppression.
This photo would seem to fall under that criticism. The image is too good: on the one hand, a near-perfect outline of the waif and, on the other hand, a composition of elegant design and rich colors that belies the child’s lack of resources. Indeed, it could be in a Renaissance painting, and both the cropping and the oddity of the one shoe draw one into a close study of the image itself and thus away from critical attention to the social and economic conditions that lie behind it.
The photograph may reflect another criticism as well. Somewhat paradoxically, photography is faulted (and by the same people) both for not evoking the correct moral response and for wearing out compassion or other charitable or progressive inclinations. (Save the Children does come to mind.) That idea could drive photographers to look for new angles on an old subject, and the image above certainly has been cropped in that manner. Instead of the typical dirty face, we see asymmetrical feet (one shod and one bare); instead of the usual sense of need, there is a strange self-sufficiency in this child’s pose; instead of the same assurance that everyone knows what is needed, wearing one shoe creates a whiff of illegibility. And so a photo that may be making poverty into art could also be reworking viewing habits to suggest that seeing is not knowing.
The debates about photography are not going to be resolved today. I don’t think one can or should avoid the work done by public art, which includes channeling sentiments and thus risking sentimentality. Photojournalism does traffic in stock sentiments, just as intellectuals rely on stock criticisms. I’ll admit that there are days when I side with Oscar Wilde’s comment that “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” But there is still reason to take a good look at the other side of privilege, and to consider how compassion must at some point be a way of seeing.
Photograph by Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press. (This post is the second this week on channeling 19th century public art; the first is here. Another relevant post is here.)
The Statue of Liberty is open for business again for the first time since 9/11. As a result, New York photographers have had to deal with the task of finding a distinctive angle on one the the most familiar images in public art. This one shows the lengths we all are expected to go to see the icon anew:
A child’s arm points upward while the massive statue looms above. The photo is not likely to find its way into a photography textbook: we see nothing whole but instead only a truncated pedestal, sectioned statue, and disembodied person. You have to peer into the image to locate the child’s small arm, which then makes the statue’s bulk all the more overpowering. Distinguishing features are cut out of the picture while proportion is mangled. In its place, attention is drawn to the institutional concrete and the heavy metalwork, and to the fragility and impermanence of the child’s limb.
But the photo is not cutting anything down to size. Instead, it may be depicting a relationship between the national icon and the viewing public. Note now the child’s arm is reproduced by the arm of the statue. This is the only correspondence visible between the living person and the icon. The parallelism is likely to be symbolic: and so, just as the statue is a token of America’s past, so is the child a sign of its future. As both are aligned, and as the one is there to provide inspiration to the other, the implication is that America’s future will continue to be true to the ideals and aspirations of its past.
At this point, some would quote the text at the monument, say, about “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but my point is not to endorse a specific sentiment. I do want to suggest, however, that the sentimental work of the 19th century public artwork is being continued today in two registers–by the statue itself and by its photographic reproduction. Neither is innocent of complicated motives, but if you accept (as I do) that democracies depend on sentiments just as they depend on critical reason, then it is interesting to see how public arts continue to evoke such admittedly formulaic emotions. Sometimes photography simply relays another artwork and much of the time it draws on its own iconography. The image above does some of each.
An image of obvious fragmentation should also alert the viewer to its own limitations. This view of the national monument makes it seem even more, well, monumental, while reducing actual citizens to the miniaturized status of a small child who can, of course, do little more than look and point. The state may loom too large, and the people are now all but invisible individuals and certainly not masses that might be not so much huddled as unionized. But perhaps that is too much of a stretch. On the other hand, if we are to follow the lead of the photographers, we should be willing to consider more than one angle on our national icons, and on the state of the union they represent.
Photograph by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times.
Photo Credit: Alberto Pizzolia/AFP/Getty Images
“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.
By guest correspondent Nathan Atkinson
When catastrophe strikes we can always count on photographers to offer up images of citizens helping their fellows in times of need. These images usually focus on the drama of rescue amid dangerous circumstances. Firefighters work to save property and lives, police officers maintain order on behalf of the helpless, and EMTS rush to aid the sick and the injured. The camera follows dutifully, recording their efforts for a public concerned, curious, or otherwise compelled to look. What’s a disaster good for if it doesn’t bring out the best in our best?
But what of those smaller, one might even say trivial acts of assistance of the sort depicted in this picture?
This photo represents the community that emerges from the mundane aftermath of tragedy. An anonymous commuter dealing with the disruption caused by the June 22 Metro accident struggles to board a train. A rider, already on board, holds the door so that another might enter—a telling courtesy given that our usual stance on public transportation is one of unenlightened self-interest.
In holding the door this woman—the hand looks female though the figure is invisible behind the equally anonymous office-casual male in the foreground—gives up a bit of her comfort for a stranger she recognizes as a resident of a community brought together by the inconveniences that follow inevitably from catastrophe. It translates the bodily pains and horrors we extrapolate from the collision photos into the harmless bisection here.
We feel guilty when angered by the minor inconveniences of catastrophe. The profound suffering of the catastrophe’s immediate victims makes our frustration with a missed appointment seem the height of selfishness. The paper held by the same hand holding the door reminds us to feel this guilt, to forfeit self-pity and our personal comfort to make room for empathy.
This picture shows us that these minor inconveniences provide the opportunity to recognize our membership in a public in trivial acts, and in the comings and goings of civic life. We rarely think of ourselves as part of a community when riding public transit. We react to the limited personal space by retreating into our audio players, cell phones, newspapers, ourselves.
The minor inconvenience to which the door-holder exposes herself echoes the small claim on our time that disaster coverage makes, our compulsion to read the paper—a compulsion the door holder shares. Her discomfort echoes moreover the discomfort we feel when we take the time to look at images of disaster. This discomfort, in turn, functions as a visceral reminder of our membership in a community. Reading the paper, looking at photos, it’s the least we can do.
Photograph by Justin Maxon/New York Times. Nathan Atkinson is a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently completing a dissertation on the visual rhetoric of atomic testing at the beginning of the Cold War. Nate can be contacted at natkisno@andrew.cmu.edu.
The “Summer Surge” has begun in Afghanistan, though more with a whimper than a bang if we measure it in terms of media attention. The death toll creeps higher each day, but one has to search hard to find any mention of it. The stories that do appear on a war that is now eight years old (and counting) tend not to be headline fare in most U.S. news outlets, and those stories that do appear exude something of an everyday, taken-for-granted quality about the whole matter.
While news stories seem lacking, there have nevertheless been a small number of slide shows cropping up at various news outlets (here and here, for example) over the past several weeks. What marks these slide shows is their almost singular banality as they repeat over and again the same, tired, visual clichés for representing war that we have become accustomed to in recent times: tight close-ups of marines—in many cases young boys trying to appear like hardened veterans—expressing intense and stern determination; images of U.S. troops preparing to do battle or returning from battle or approaching and searching what appear to be empty villages or fighting the boredom of war or playing games with local children; photographs that feature the advanced technology of U.S. warfare, including weaponry, night vision capabilities, and so on. Rarely and only occasionally do we see some actual fighting—and perhaps for good reasons—but on the whole what we are shown are stock pictures we have seen before and but for the fact that they emphasize a desert locale, there is nothing particularly distinctive about them. In short, there would appear to be no news here.
And yet, for all that, it would be imprudent to ignore what such visual displays show us and how such “seeing” contributes to normalizing our understanding and attitudes about the war. The photograph above led off a recent slide show of forty seven images at the Denver Post website titled “Marines Pour Into Afghanistan.” One might imagine such a slide show beginning with photographs of marines parachuting from planes or embarking from helicopters, literally “pouring into” the Afghani countryside, but instead of emphasizing the activity of the headline caption we encounter an anonymous and relatively passive soldier. That the image crops out the face and head of the soldier does more than just accent his anonymity as a cipher for the U.S. military, for the photograph is shot as if literally from his point of view. Notice how the camera locates the viewer in the physical space of the soldiers’ head and eyes. We see what he sees—or what we might imagine that he sees if he were to hold his gaze—and thus the photograph coaxes our identification with his very being by suturing our vision with his.
And what he/we see, of course, is the Holy Bible, which sits at the very center of the image. And more, along with the hand that holds it, it is photographed as if in a portrait, where the face is in sharp focus and all that surrounds it is softened so as to direct and hold our attention on the main object. One might think of the photograph in this respect as one more cliché of war rhetoric, an aestheticized visualization of the old saw that “there are no atheists in foxholes.” But of course the conflict in Afghanistan is at least in some measure a religious war, and as such representations of the Holy Bible take on a much larger significance. Here, it is not just a symbol of comfort for those in harms way—though it may certainly be that—but poised at the beginning of the slide show as it is, it frames the meaning of all that follows.
But what is that meaning? We get something of a clue by attending to the brief narrative paragraph that precedes the above image where it quotes the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines as he speaks to his troops as they are about to embark on their military mission: “You’re going to change this world this summer and it starts this morning.” The name of that mission is “Operation Khanjar, or Strike of the Sword.” Now look at the photograph one more time and notice that the Bible holds the place where one might otherwise imagine a weapon—a rifle, or in an earlier epoch, perhaps a sword—particularly in the hands of a Marine about to occupy hostile terrain. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …
There are other ways to interpret the photograph, to be sure, but the point here is that the photograph needs to be interpreted. And this is all the more so when the images shown by such photographs appear to be all too normal and ordinary, or when they beckon our identification all too seamlessly.
Photo Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Recently USA Today ran a photo contest to answer the question, “Can a single image capture the essence of America?” Of the 1,035 entries, this one was judged to be the best:
It’s a fine image, and one can easily concur with the judges’ statement that it has “gorgeous color, beautiful light and a killer reflection. The visual surprise makes the eye move back and forth, and the subject is emblematic of the American West.”
But wait a minute. There is a difference between the first half of that judgment and the second. Color, light, and the reflection are one thing, while surprise and emblematic representation are another. In fact, water reflections are standard stuff in nature photography, so there would be little surprise there (nor would viewers be likely to be confused about which horses are real). And what about the idea that the landscape is the definitive image of the American West–and therefore of America? Can you get more conventional than that?
My unease wasn’t helped by the paper’s claim that the contest photos “capture America the beautiful beyond obvious landmarks to its glorious landscape and spacious skies.” OK, no Statue of Liberty, but the Western landscape is an equally obvious visual figure, and it is clear from the text that our perception is supposed to be shaped by the iconography of “America the Beautiful.” Sure enough, the second and third place photographs are from Antelope Canyon, Arizona and Arches National Park, Utah: in other words, they are beautiful examples of familiar scenes in the photographic archive of Arizona Highways, National Geographic, and similar house organs of travel photography.
The fourth place photo is of an ocean sunset, and so it goes. Most tellingly, of the top ten photos, only two–numbers 6 and 10–include people. In the first of these, we see children practicing with lariats at a “cowboy training camp” representing “family fun vacations in the American West”; in the second, there are tiny figures in the background of a photo of kites at a beach.
Don’t get me wrong–some of the contest entries are fine photographs. But what about the big question: do they picture America? If so, we may have a problem, because then America is in some important sense essentially empty.
If you look at the rest of the submissions, it seems evident that America is the West, which is largely void of people. As Richard Avedon, Michael Shapiro, and others have stated before, this is not an innocent idea. The photo operates ideologically, whether by hiding the workers, implying that natural resoures are boundless, or reinforcing assumptions about American exceptionalism and providentialism (as if Central Asia didn’t have similar vistas, or lacked God’s grace).
To be fair, however, we also have to note that these photos also are negotiating other problems of political representation: by not featuring people, no one ethnic or social group is given the privilege of being the “face” of America, and showing natural scenes through conventional iconography does supply the typical places and common objects that are necessary for the shared seeing that is a vital element of democratic public culture.
That said, it seems to me that we could do better. The dedication and skill of the amateur photographers in the contest needs to be augmented by critical discussion of how one might represent “the essence of America.” One argument is that there is no such thing to represent; another is that no one representation could do so. On the other side, the US is not simply a neutral aggregation of autonomous individuals having nothing in common, and collective living requires common images and ongoing judgments about what is more or less representative.
And let me say it as clearly as possible: America is not empty. Nor is the natural order of things walking serenely in single file. Nor can photographs represent a political community as neatly as still water reflects horses. Public life needs many images–these and others as well. America is beautiful, but not because the people are invisible.
Photograph by Joanne Panizzera/USA Today.
Today nocaptionneeded.com celebrates its second birthday.
There is a lot to be said for the Web, but virtual parties are not likely to be high on the list. Even so, we’re still here and somewhat amazed about that, and still growing and somewhat amazed about that.
As we did last year, this is a time to say “Thanks” and to take stock. Thanks to all our readers, and not least to those who take the time to comment. We don’t always like what you say, but you don’t always like what we say, and that’s what we should expect from an honest and engaged discussion.
We also want to pause a moment and take stock. If you would like to give us any advice, now is a good time to do it. What works and what could be improved? What might be added? Where should we be headed? Advice might not be heeded, especially given our limited resources, but it always is appreciated. You can comment below or email us at rhariman@gmail.com and lucaites@indiana.edu.
We’ll be taking two weeks off from posting—first, to lead a week-long seminar at the Rhetoric Society of America’s summer institute for scholars, and then to get of out of Dodge for awhile. Both should provide additional context for our assessing what we do here, and we’ll continue to read our mail. . . .
See you July 6, as we start another year at NCN.
Photo Credit: Matson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“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.
The riveting images and real time coverage of the events in Iran this week are about as good as it gets for those who celebrate public demonstrations on behalf of progressive social and political change. The power of the people is there to see, as are the democratizing effects of modern media technologies when they are used to organize and amplify what is happening on the street. The interlocking institutions of authority and corruption begin to look like the walls of Jericho, cracking as they are about to come tumbling down.
May it be so, but let’s not forget that the media also features one story at a time. There always are other protests, other causes, other appeals to the international community that are, have been, or will be overlooked. Equally important, perhaps, is the recognition that most protests are frail things that seem pathetic at the time and inconsequential thereafter. Most important, we should celebrate the fact that people protest anyway.
When it rains, for example.
This photograph from a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia captures so much of the dismal side of dissent. A single hand strives to hold plastic sheeting together to keep out the rain that is ruining the demonstration. It’s hard to make your case in the public square when you can’t be seen and no one is going to be there anyway. The hand is all that remains of the citizen, who is reduced to a small act of self-preservation. So much for the will of the people. The sheer vulnerability of the protester is emphasized further by the white sheet, which could as well be a burial shroud. And yet he lives, and waits for another chance to stand for his cause.
As does this demonstrator in Jakarta.
This might be titled the activist’s very bad day. He has gone to considerable trouble to make a statement–body paint, a performance that will have been scripted and rehearsed, all to be presented before an audience who probably couldn’t care less. Yet he, too, is a study in fatality: white as a corpse, looking as if beaten, nakedly vulnerable, and alone but for his fatigue and discouragement while the public looks elsewhere. It was Earth Day in Indonesia, which has a terrible environmental record including 70% deforestation and some of Asia’s worst air pollution. Let’s hope that next year things go better.
Heroism can’t be the staple of democratic dissent. I won’t for a minute belittle those who are standing up to brutality today, but let’s not forget the many others who have been keeping up the struggle in other settings. They, too, keep the spirit of democracy alive, and they do it by withstanding humiliation and failure. Heroism is a rare and beautiful thing, but for those bad days, a different kind of courage may be required.
Photographs by Shakh Aivazov/AP and Mast Irham/EPA.
