NO CAPTION NEEDED – Page 143 – PHOTOJOURNALISM, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Heads Up in River World

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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Sight Gag: Who We Were, Circa 1950

September 23, 2007
Lucaites
sight gags
0 Comments

Our primary goal with this blog is to talk about the ways in which photojournalism contributes to a vital democratic public culture. Much of the time that means we are focusing on what purport to be more or less serious matters. But as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert often remind us, democracy needs irony, parody, and pure silliness as much as it needs serious contemplation. For our part, we will dedicate our Sunday posts to putting some of that silliness on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the carnivalesque. Sometimes we will post pictures we’ve taken, or that have been contributed by others, or that we just happen to stumble across as we navigate our very visual public culture. And we won’t just be limited to photography, as a robust democratic visual culture consists of much more. 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.

1950s Poster Produced by U.S. Government

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Kern Conference on Visual Rhetoric

Announcing the 4th biennial
William A. Kern Communications Conference

Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology
April 10-13, 2008

Rochester Institute of Technology
Strathallan Hotel, Rochester New York

Call for Papers: The first Kern conference on Visual Communication took place in 2001 and provided a wide-ranging forum for scholars and practitioners to share their work. Since then, the interdisciplinary study of visual communication has continued to grow, generating a variety of projects, books, journals, studies, and methodological approaches to research and critical studies. The fourth and final Kern Communication conference on visual communication continues the conversation with a renewed commitment to interdisciplinary interests and scholarship. Visual Communication: Rhetorics and Technology (2008) focuses on the study of visuality and communication with a special interest on the interconnections between visual rhetoric and visual media technologies.

We invite individual papers, panels and presentations that address this theme in the widest ways we can imagine. How does scholarship in visual communication interact with traditional approaches to the processes of human communication, inclusive of rhetoric and communication media technology? How do individual cases of visual communication, visual rhetoric, visual documentation and creative innovation enlarge our understanding of human communication? How does the history and practice of visuality inform our teaching of communication, media and rhetoric? What is the state of the field? Where are our individual research projects taking us? Individual papers, presentations, experimental “work in progress,” panel proposals and workshop proposals are welcome.

Send complete papers or 500 word abstracts via email as a Word document attachment to Diane S. Hope, [dshgpt@rit.edu], or by paper mail to Diane S. Hope; 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, RIT, Rochester, Institute of Technology, Rochester NY, 14623, by December 1, 2007.

Confirmed plenary speakers include:

Paul Martin Lester, author of the text, Visual Communication: Images with Messages and incoming editor of the journal Visual Communication.

Roger Remington, Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design, School of Design, Rochester Institute of Technology, who will present a talk on visual communication and posters.

Ron Osgood, documentary film maker, Indiana University, who will present and screen his new film “My Vietnam, Your Iraq.”

Confirmed plenary sessions include:

“Blogging Visual Politics,” a panel of visual rhetoric scholar/bloggers, explores the blog as a compelling public forum for visual engagement and political critique. Chair, Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://caraf.blogs.com/caraf/ ; participants, John Lucaites and Robert Hariman (http://www.nocaptionneeded.com/), Jim Johnson, University of Rochester, http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/, Michael Shaw, http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/).

“Visual Rhetoric: Past Present and Future,” an occasion to reflect on past studies of visual rhetoric with an eye to priority setting for the future of scholarship in the area. Chair, Lester Olson, University of Pittsburgh, author of Emblems of American Community and Benjamin Franklin’s Vision of American Community; Carolyn Handa, University of Alabama, author of Visual Rhetoric in a Digital Age; Charles Hill, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Marguerite Helmers, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, co-editors of Defining Visual Rhetoric.
(Others to be announced).

Keynote speaker to be announced

Please check the website: www.rit.edu/kern for updates, further details and on-line registration information.

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A Second Look: Courting the American Dream in Ramadi

September 19, 2007
Lucaites
a second look
4 Comments

Today we introduce a new feature at No Caption Needed that we call “A Second Look.” One of the lessons we have learned (and continue to learn again and again) is that the “meaning” of photographic images is dynamic and multidimensional. No matter how hard we try to situate the affect or idea-content of a photograph, the image rarely fully accommodates us. Part of the problem is that human perception can be annoyingly monocular and myopic. We fixate our attention on one aspect or dimension of an image and then stubbornly (if not intentionally) ignore other aspects and dimensions. Only days or weeks later do we realize our short sightedness. Another part of the problem is that one of our primary interpretive tools for discerning the meaning of images is “convention,” and the conventions of realist representation in particular have a powerful hold on both what we choose to see and what we choose not to see, even when we are sensitive to the need for reflexivity. And yet again, our interpretations of images are relentlessly culture- and time-bound, their meaning and usage subject to difference and change based on one’s social and political experiences, as well as location in time and space. Accordingly, from time to time we will dedicate our daily post to taking “a second look” at an image we have previously considered, sometimes to correct the errors of our ways, sometimes because “shit happens” (as the bumper sticker says) making it possible for more to be seen and said.

To inaugurate this feature we want to take a second look at two images that we recently compared and contrasted with one another:

The first is of two angelic young beauties in Anywhere, USA, encountering the joys of the marketplace, perhaps for the first time; the second is of a “young boy selling lemonade” in Ramadi. The point in juxtaposing these two photographs was to underscore the irony of locating the mythical American “lemonade stand” – a trope that marks the space of a safe and secure free marketplace – inside of a war zone being guarded by thousands of occupation forces and deputized insurgents. I’ll not repeat the analysis except to reprise the concluding line: “To accent the point one need only visualize the scene of the two girls at the top—innocent, pure, and white—with the soldier and his weapon framing and overshadowing the scene. It is virtually unimaginable.”

But on reflection, it may not be quite so unimaginable after all. Or at least for it to be unimaginable we have to concede a host of assumptions about the idyllic world represented in the first picture. One assumption, pointed out by a commentator to our first post, is that the state maintains an invisible presence in the image, ever at the ready to intercede if and when the safety and security of the marketplace is breached. And we do have photographs of where the state has interceded in such situations, such as images of six year old Ruby Bridges being escorted by federal marshals into a New Orleans elementary school, or the slightly older Little Rock Nine being escorted into Central High School by the Arkansas National Guard. But, of course, these were moments of national crisis and no one would mistake the photographs as representations of a normative or safe and secure public sphere.

This calls to attention a second assumption that seems necessary to make the transposition of images unimaginable: the viewer must be able to identify with the white, Anglo-Saxon world depicted in the photograph of the lemonade stand. While one obviously doesn’t have to be white to run a lemonade stand, the vast majority of images one finds in a google image search for the phrase “lemonade stand” are of white Caucasian children. There thus seems to be something like a cultural norm being marked by the trope, and one that clearly excludes those at the margins of racial difference. The question then has to be, what does someone who cannot identify with the “lemonade stand” mythos of the American dream see when they look at the photograph from Ramadi?

There is probably no one answer to this question, but one strong possibility has to be the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent pointing his MP5 submachine gun at six year old Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban refugee, hiding in a bedroom closet with a local fisherman trying to protect him.

The”arrest” and eventual deportation of Elian back to Cuba was highly controversial and it polarized the nation, leading to mass protests in Miami, Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. And by many accounts the force of the reaction was affected by this photograph. Whether the image really fueled or otherwise animated the controversy is hard to say, but what is clear is that it has achieved iconic status and is widely recognized, especially amongst subaltern populations. And its connection to the photograph from Ramadi is pronounced. The two boys look similar enough at a distance to be blood relatives; and the weapons, while not identical, are similar enough and, more importantly, functionally dominate the scene. But what makes the picture in Ramadi especially powerful in this regard is not its similarity but its difference from the earlier photograph. There, the horror of the scene is a manifest function of the rifle being pointed at a clearly terrified child; in the later photograph the horror is more latent, a function of the child’s (dis)ease as he cautiously considers the soldier and his weapon and what he might do with it. Of course, the child in Ramadi selling lemonade probably doesn’t know the story of Elian Gonzalez, and thus while he might have his own reasons to distrust the soldiers it is unlikely that he is thinking of this picture; on the other hand, Americans, and especially non-white Americans are very familiar with the picture of Elian, and there is a strong possibility that when they see the picture of the child in Ramadi, what they see is not the safety and security of the marketplace but the threat that the state poses to subaltern populations. And that is not unimaginable at all.

It’s all a matter of how you look at it.

Photo Credits: Central Ohio Center For Education, Richard Mills/The Times, Alan Diaz/AP

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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

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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John-John Kidnapped!

September 17, 2007
Hariman
afterimages
4 Comments

The Public Editor at the Sunday New York Times had a lengthy column yesterday, and for good reason: he had a lot of explaining to do. The Times, along with many others, was taken in by photographer Joe O’Donnell’s fraudulent claim that he had taken the iconic photo of John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s caisson:

The problem was that the Times obituary for Mr. O’Donnell had featured the iconic image as his signature photo. As the paper soon learned–and reported–the photo had been taken by Stan Stearns, not O’Donnell. In fact, a second photo shown also had been taken by someone else, and soon a string of deceptions came to light.

Those who love to hate the Times will enjoy their evident mortification, but I’m not among that crowd. They were working at the demanding pace at which they nonetheless produce detailed and reliable stories day after day after day. More important, they were taken in by someone who apparently spent years crafting elaborate deceptions. It’s easy to be fooled by someone who already has fooled many of the people you trust.

The several stories provide an interesting glimpse into both the work of a con artist and the way stories are put together at the Times. They also reveal a thing or two about visual culture today. For one, the fascination with iconic images continues. In an earlier post I asked “Is there an icon for everything?” Well, it seems there has to be for noteworthy photographers. As quoted by the Public Editor, the night photo editor at the Times set aside his reservations about O’Donnell’s claim about the photo because “That the Times was writing the obituary made it ‘a done deal as far as I was concerned,’ he said. ‘I assumed that Joe O’Donnell, famous photographer, had already been verified, and my job was to find iconic images to illustrate his career.'” There you have it: famous photographers, like the great events they cover, must each have their iconic shots. Unfortunately, O’Donnell had taken other images that also deserved to be seen. Instead of yet another Kodak Moment with dead Kennedys, the Times missed an opportunity to show its readers something of the Cold War. Icons are important, but they should not be used to paper over the rest of the visual archive.

A second point allows me to grind another ax. One way or another many people in academia, the press, and more generally have picked up Susan Sontag’s critique of photography. Fortunately, nodding along to Sontag doesn’t inhibit their actual viewing practices–let’s hear it for hypocrisy–but they nonetheless parrot her arguments when talking about photography. Thus, we are re-exposed to her anxiety about the power of the visual image to counterfeit reality, to be manipulated, to deceive, and generally to corrupt our ability to know the world and be ethical. Images can do all of that, of course, but no medium or art is innocent of these charges. And that’s what I love about this episode with John-John. O’Donnell deceived a lot of people about the photograph–but not with the photograph. No, to fabricate reality he used another technology, one that also has a very good track record for deception: words.

Photograph by Stan Stearns/Corbis.

4 Comments

Sight Gag: Those Crazy Kids in Madison, WI

September 16, 2007October 6, 2012
Lucaites
sight gags
2 Comments

Photo Credit: © Michael Kientiz, all rights reserved. Post Card of Life Size Papier-Mache Replica of Statue of Liberty from the Eyes Up on Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin. For other versions see here.

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One Planet, Many Worlds

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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Islamic TV: A Two-Headed Monster?

This image from the Washington Post Day in Photos lies right across the line between soft news and hard news.

On the one hand, it’s a visual joke. The incongruity of a woman from a traditional society carrying a TV rather than water or the wash on her head at once upends and reconfirms Western assumptions about the Arab world. She’s not completely not modern, and modern civilization is what she desires. See: the woman values that TV so much that she will carry it instead of more traditional necessities. Imagine: she’s all wrapped up and yet gets to see the world through the wonder of modern technology. On the other hand, the woman is engaged in the difficult task of carrying her household possessions through a war zone while probably leaving much behind. The caption adds that “about 2,000 Iraqis leave their homes every day due to violence and economic uncertainty resulting from the four-year conflict.”

Although cast as a representative of displaced Iraqis, I doubt the woman will elicit much sympathy. Indeed, the image calls the bluff of the serious captioning: the photo is striking but not for the reason given. As noted several times before in this blog, the burqa troubles the Western gaze whenever it is is placed in modern context. (Within the traditional setting, it confirms ideological assumptions instead of challenging modern norms of transparency.) By walking with the TV balanced on her head, the burqa-clad woman becomes a cyborg, both human and machine, organic and artificial, traditional and modern. She now has two heads, one veiled, turbaned, and a platform for the other, which is a blank screen capable of channeling the vast information flows of the modern media. Despite the visual joke, the latent fascination of the image is that she has become monstrous. Not terrifying, but more akin to a freak show. The fact that the photo is half soft news and half hard news reinforces this sense of an unnatural though not too dangerous mixture.

Of course, it’s not news at all. We know all about Al-Jazeera, and scholars, not least Martin Marty’s Fundamentalism Project, have documented that fundamentalists of all religions have no problem rejecting modernity’s values while becoming cutting-edge producers and avid consumers of modern media. It turns out that modern liberals are the ones who have a hard time managing that contradiction. Which is why the photograph above, which could be seen in a very ordinary way, instead implies that the two civilizations can never be blended but must instead be joined only precariously, amidst violence.

Photograph by Alaa al-Marjani/Associated Press.

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Footwork at Reed College

We could post about the war in Vietnam–oops, I mean Iraq–every day, but since continuing the quagmire depends on a loss of perspective, we should turn to other things as well. Like feet. Next week John and I will be giving a paper at a photography conference, where we will discuss why photojournalism features hands and feet when one could show more of the individual pictured. Like this:

This example may be somewhat more artistic than others we could show, and it has more of a pretext as it was part of a New York Times “Trendspotting” story on the custom at Reed College of going barefoot just about anywhere and any time. Even so, it’s not a typical news photo, which suggests that something else is going on.

Most of the images in the Trendspotting photo essay were mildly informative and less evocative. They showed students standing in line, standing in groups, and so forth. In each case we saw young people much as we often see them, and they happened to be without shoes. This much more distinctive photograph removes the student body (sorry, I couldn’t resist), but for the sharp focus on a pair of bare feet resting on a desk between books (front) and computer (middle). In the back of the photo we see the blurred top of a student’s head. He is wearing earphones, and the effect of the image comes in part from the contrast between the student’s heavily mediated experience–books, computer, digital music, even the food is processed–and the unmediated, elemental experience of resting his bare feet in the air. Whereas the other images showed more of the local culture through stock scenes such as standing in the lunch line, this one joins the special experience of higher education at an elite school with a seemingly universal symbol of youth.

Most people have neither occasion nor inclination to go around barefoot, or to study as much as is the norm at Reed. The photo does double duty at making the story significant: by foregrounding books, computer, and the obviously habitual posture of the student reading, the seeming frivolity of going barefoot–rather than working for a living–acquires a serious cast. The student isn’t working, but he is in training. Likewise, Reed’s foot fad stands in for the peculiar subculture of good higher education and makes it appealing through an iconography that channels the barefoot boy of American myth. Huckleberry Finn now goes to school, and leisure time is spent not on the river but drifting through the liberal arts.

Reed’s reputation includes both intensive study and liberal politics. Note the student’s longish hair. And so this post is about Iraq after all. Those feet are the feet of privilege and are not likely to wear combat boots. But there are places where privilege is used to learn, to discipline judgment, and prepare for both innovation and good stewardship. The press now provides many images of boots on the ground, and while honoring the sacrifice of working class youth it becomes too easy to forget their betrayal by those who benefited from the privileges of wealth without bothering to learn from history, deliberate carefully, and act with regard for others. We need boots on the ground, but we also need good education and good government. And not just for the few.

Photograph by Molly Gingras <gingrasm@reed.edu>.

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