NO CAPTION NEEDED – Page 144 – PHOTOJOURNALISM, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Courting the American Dream in Ramadi

The lemonade stand. It is as American as apple pie, a time-honored tradition deeply rooted in the American dream and its Horatio Alger ethos. All it takes is an old soapbox or small table; some lemons, sugar, and ice; a few paper cups; a hand scrawled sign and, of course, some good old American initiative. For many children it is their first encounter with the spirit of capitalism, and hey, even if there isn’t much monetary profit at .10¢ or even .25¢ a cup, there is the social capital gained by cooperating with friends and neighbors, and learning how to encounter the marketplace, both of which may be far more important civic lessons.

A safe and open marketplace is essential to a vital democratic public culture. What better way, one might then imagine, to demonstrate the success of our military surge in Iraq than to show a safe marketplace operating in the Al-Anbar Province, one of the most volatile and dangerous places in all of Iraq. And more, what better way to show that safety than with “a young Iraqi boy selling lemonade in the town of Ramadi …”

Prior to the surge, Al-Anbar Province had been the “hub of [the] Sunni insurgency.” But apparently not anymore, as over 6,000 U.S. troops walk the streets, along with a growing Iraqi police force and tribes of “provincial volunteers.” That the police force is beleaguered and the volunteers bear a striking resemblance to vigilante groups doesn’t seem to matter, for here in Ramadi, seventy miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, safety and commerce seem to rule as the marketplace is open for commerce and, as the caption tells us, a young boy sells lemonade. At least according to the caption, one might imagine themselves on a street corner in middle America.

Upon a second glance, however, it is not clear that all is well. The eye is drawn initially to the boy who we might expect to see smiling for the camera or making a sales pitch to a potential customer. But there is none of that. The tentative and concerned look on his face and the gestural attitude of his body suggest that he is far from at ease with the situation. And with good reason, for the soldier and his weapon pose an ominous presence as they simultaneously frame and obscure the scene—perhaps a metaphor for U.S. military presence in Iraq writ large. Indeed, one has to wonder how truly safe things can be if something on the order of international martial law is needed to insure the everyday routines of domestic commercial life.

The contrast between the two images points in some measure to the problem of the project of exporting liberal democracy. A liberal democratic public culture relies upon the sense of trust that is generated by the kind of social capital we see being invested in the photograph of the two young girls at the top (or in any of the hundreds of pictures that you will encounter if you google “lemonade stand”). Such images are tinged with nostalgia and too easily romanticize our bourgeois and middle class sensibilities, and we need to be very careful about being too proud of ourselves in this regard, but the sense of trust and cooperation that they depict is necessary to such a politics. It is not the only thing, of course—the opportunity for free and open dissent come to mind as no less important—but it is essential. And it is hardly the cultural or civic attitude that is generated by a massive and sustained foreign military presence or roving tribes of provincial volunteers. 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.

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

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9/11, the Continuing Tragedy

September 11, 2007October 19, 2012
Hariman
visual memory
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US 9/11 deaths. US military deaths. Iraqi civilian deaths.

And Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. . . .

Photographs by Spencer Platt/Getty, Denis Poroy/AP, James Nachtwey/National Geographic, Khalid Mohammed/AP, Kim Komenich/Chronicle.

Update: For educational resources, Hannah Edwards offers this site.

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“… the sometimes illusory promise of a fresh start.”

Ritualistic photographs of the first day of school operate in a number of different interpretive registers, some of which we discussed last week, but none is more pronounced in the public media than their function as visual tropes of a “fresh start.” With new clothes and new teachers everyone enters the schoolhouse door with a clean slate to make of the new year what they will—or so the myth of our merit-based, public educational system suggests. And the kids are rarely alone in such images, as adults are typically present to nurture and protect, as well as to legitimize the succession of authority as it passes from parents to teachers who serve both in loco parentis and as surrogates of the state :

The power of a trope is that it relies upon conventional understandings of meaning, but it is also a figuration subject to ironic manipulations that can be turned against convention to create what Kenneth Burke called “perspectives by incongruity.” When used as such, a trope positions and encourages us to see things from a new or different view designed to induce an “attitude” or disposition to action. A good example of such an ironic turning of the visual trope of the first day of school as a “fresh start” appeared in the paper version of the NYT on 9/5/07 in a full-page photo essay titled “With Start of a New Year, Excitement and Jitters” (p. C14). The photo essay included six photographs from around New York City and the nation, five of which easily met the conventions of the trope of “fresh starts,” as students displayed the “excitement and jitters” of a new school year in pairs and small groups, while parents calmed nerves and teachers greeted and protected their charges. The lone exception was this photograph:

Twice again as large as any other image in the photo essay, it appeared in the very middle of the page cutting across the fold. The caption directly beneath the image read, “A Fresh Start in New Orleans. A kindergartner at his school in the Lower Ninth Ward which reopened last month after Hurricane Katrina flooded it in 2005.” The image has appeared elsewhere on the web, and in bright and vivid color, but here it is in black and white (as were the other images in the photo essay). Instead of a blue sky and billowing white clouds that encourage the sunny optimism of a new day, we get the muted tones of a grey scale that flatten the image and mitigate the difference between the “in here” of the schoolyard and the “out there” of the rest of the 9th Ward. And what we find “out there” is quite literally a ghost town, replete with boarded up houses and unkempt lawns and shrubbery growing out of control. Notice too, that there are no people outside of the chain link fence. It is a public space without a palpable public. Indeed, it bears a striking similarity in this regard to many images we have seen recently of the barren streets of Iraq.

But there is more. For in every other picture in the photo essay the frame is filled with a distinct and manifest sociality: schoolmates are engaged with one another in groups and in pairs, while parents and teachers comfort and greet. And all are facing the camera, thus inviting some measure of communion with the viewer. The Bronx, Boise, San Antonio, it doesn’t matter, for these are common scenes from a national social imaginary that are acted out anew every fall in local communities throughout the land. But in the 9th Ward the conventions of sociality are either absent or subverted. The child is alone. Eerily so given that this is the first day of school. There are no reunions with friends or schoolmates, and parents and teachers are nowhere to be seen. Moreover, the student’s back is towards the camera, and thus there is no opportunity for eye contact or interaction between the child and the viewer. His only companion is his shadow, the spectral illusion of otherness that moves only as he does, and thus accentuates his sheer social isolation. Most noticeably, there is no adult presence that says “we care” or “you are safe here.” One might easily imagine it as a recipe for a social pathology.

And so the visual trope of the first day of school as a “fresh start” functions here ironically as an allegory for the fate of New Orleans. Just as the student, who should be with friends and teachers, is alone and isolated, so too is the 9th Ward in the larger scheme of things; and just as the student is left to his own designs to make his way without help or protection, so too, once again, is this New Orleans parish. “Sometimes,” a sidebar caption to the right of the photograph announces, the promise of a fresh start is “illusory.” And here we see the stark contrast between a national imaginary where fresh starts and renewal are taken for granted assumptions deeply rooted in the American dream, and a place where the pledge is a false promise … if not in fact a traumatic nightmare.

Photo Credit: James Estrin/New York Times, Mario Tama/Getty Images

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Sight Gags: "September 12, 2001"

September 9, 2007
Lucaites
sight gags
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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.

Photo Credit: John Lucaites

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Remembering to Forget … Vietnam

As we prepare for General Petraeus’s report on Iraq later this week, we should perhaps recall earlier times when Generals have addressed Congress in the interest of an embattled admistration seeking to prolong a contentious military engagement. Here, of course, we have General Westmoreland who had just travelled from Vietnam to “brief” the U.S. Congress on “military gains in Vietnam” in 1967, six months prior to the “Tet Offensive” :

Of course, for Bush the Elder one of the significant outcomes of the First Persian Gulf War—Desert Storm—was putting “Vietnam syndrome” to rest. It is at least somewhat odd then, if not wholly ironic, that Bush the Younger would seek to revive the specter of Vietnam as a point of comparison to the current war in the Persian Gulf, particularly given how contentious it has become at home. Nevertheless, the current administration has made a concerted effort of late to use our experience in Vietnam as an analogy to support our continued military occupation of Iraq, lest a precipitous withdrawal of troops animate the middle east equivalent of the “killing fields.” It is an odd argument that seems to reverse the terms of George Santayana’s famous “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.” Here, by reliving the past, it seems, we put ourselves in position to forget it. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson makes the case as well as anyone:

“Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney and the other principal architects of the Iraq war never served in Vietnam … [but] I’m less concerned with their hypocrisy than their distortion of history. To say that the US should not have withdrawn its forces from Vietnam is to say that there was something those forces could have done—something beyond napalm, carpet-bombing, destroying villages in order to save them—that would have led to some kind of victory. Of course, Bush and others don’t say what that special something might have been, because they don’t know. They’re seeing nothing but a historical mirage ….

“George W. Bush wants us to remember Vietnam? Fine, then let’s remember those iconic images – the Viet Cong prisoner being executed in cold blood with a pistol shot to the temple, the little girl running naked and screaming from a napalm attack. Let’s remember how little we really understood about Vietnamese society. Let’s remember how wrong the domino theory proved to be. Let’s remember how much damage prolonging an unpopular war did to our armed forces and our nation, and how long it took us to recover”

For our part, here are the iconic images that Robinson invokes:

And lest we forget the effects of a government that actively strives to limit and demonize public dissent from a policy of war, there is this poignant reminder:

Photo Credits: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images, Eddie Adams/AP Photo, Nick Ut/AP Photo, John Filo/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. The phrase “remembering to forget” comes from the fine book by Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye.

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Thin-Skinned about the Veil

This week and last a number of newspapers, including The Washington Post, censored publication of the Sunday comic strip Opus by Berkeley Breathed.

Why? According to Fox News, the Post was concerned about depicting a Muslim as an Islamist, and also about the sexual innuendo in the strip. (Obviously, the Post has not been reading its own strip that often.) The good news is that the Post’s stupidity now has Fox on record in opposition to censorship, but that is cold comfort from the network yet to discover irony.

The incident caught my attention because it provides another example of how the veil disturbs Western norms of public order. (Previous posts on this theme are archived under The Visual Public Sphere.) Although the Post may have been caught in a different trap, the strip itself gets its laughs from playing with what is–in the Western gaze, at least–something terribly serious. In the mind’s eye, we have a vision of radical Islam shrouding the world in theocratic darkness. In the comic strip, Lola Granola’s flower power veil is the perfect symbol of her faux counterculture fashionista spirituality, which is as stable as a butterfly and surely incapable of jihad. Perhaps the strip expresses the wish that Muslims would take their religion less seriously, although there is no doubt that just about any attitude is better than the cravenly egocentric and self-interested cynicism of Lola’s boyfriend, Steve. He, too, is too serious, and it is left to the reader to have a good laugh at how bent out of shape people can get about religion (Lola), sex (Steve), and keeping up appearances (all of us).

As it happens, another story that works a similar vein was brought to my attention this week.

You are looking at a protest at the Rancho Palos Verdes (CA) City Council. When the council selected member Doug Stern as mayor pro tem rather than member Barbara Ferraro, who had been expected to be granted the position through rotation, five women entered the meeting covered in burqas. Needless to say, it appears that this did not go over well on the council or in some quarters of the surrounding community. (Several local news reports are collected at Doug Stern’s web page. Stern is not exactly an objective source, but he’s what I’ve got.)

Once again, I think we need to lighten up a bit. If you want to, you can look at the opposed symbols of flag and burqa and see the clash of civilizations. The protest draws on that framework to imply that instead of opposing the Taliban abroad we are imitating them at home. Likewise, you can look at the contrast between the faces of the council members (including Barbara Ferraro) and the burqa-clad figure with her back to the camera, and you can see a choice between, on the one hand, Western transparency and individualism and, on the other hand, Middle Eastern illegibility and oppression. Again, the protest implies that the one has been substituted for the other. But I can’t help but see something else: Lola Granola.

My point, if I have one, is not that the demonstrators are flakes. Their detractors have already said as much, but I don’t want that kind of seriousness either. Rather, I’d like to see everyone become a bit less tense about the veil, and perhaps even a bit more open to discussion about cultural difference, and most of all, able to laugh at ourselves as we make a mess of things in our own backyard. The burqa-clad demonstrators made their point, but they are a better example of unintended silliness than democracy as it is practiced up close and personal. On the other side, the ever so conventional council members seem to make a virtue of being self-important–and, really, do they need to be backed by two flags, one of which is the size of my garage?

We don’t need either institutional censorship or small town gossip to police public expression, and we always need a laugh. Thanks to Opus, I got one twice today.

The full cartoons are here and here.

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Why a Hummer isn't a Humvee

Hummer owners are proud owners; why else would you own one? It’s easy to single them out for criticism: the vehicles obstruct other drivers, waste fuel, and punish the environment while signaling dominance. That’s unfair in one sense, however, for such wretched excess is true of many SUVs and other vehicles as well. (If you do want to slam a Hummer, you might enjoy going here or here.) And some Hummer owners really do know how to have fun behind the wheel. This shot from the photo gallery at GMHummer.com says “Took me three hours to clean this!!!”

Was worth every minute, we can assume, and there are worse ways to get dirty. As the new Jeep SUV ad campaign says, “Have Fun Out There.” So what’s the problem?

I want to suggest that Hummers are one small–ok, not so small–part of a larger problem, which is the domestication of war. The more that the equipment of war is packaged for retail consumption, from fatigues to Hummers, the easier it is to think that war is not much different that tearing around the desert for an afternoon. The Hummer is exhibit A because it is a civilian version of the military Humvee (technically a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle) which got its boost in the domestic market following the first Gulf war. Since then, SUVs have militarized the streets–industry research discovered early on that a primary motive for buying them was to purchase a sense of security. As a result, it becomes easier to assume not only that our streets are dangerous, but that other dangerous streets are not much different from ours. The process can work in the other direction as well: when we see soldiers in Iraq drinking bottled water while staring into laptops, it can seem that they’re at school or work like anyone else.

The terrible lie beneath this superficial continuity was brought home to me when I saw this photograph in the Sunday New York Times Magazine:

This Humvee had driven over an I.E.D. (improvised explosive device). As it was carrying a colonel who survived the blast, it probably was pretty well armored. Even so, a fair amount of luck was involved: the bomb wasn’t too big, the blast caught the back of the vehicle, and no one was riding there at the time. This is just another day in Iraq–the story reports that every time this unit leaves their base they have “contact” with the enemy. In the real war, the road really is a very dangerous place. And it’s going to take more than three hours to clean his one up.

New York Times photograph by Benjamin Lowy.

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Central Casting in Iraq

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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The Way We Were

The first day of school. It is a bourgeois, middle-class ritual. New clothes. New backpacks. A new start on a new year. And, of course, photographs; lots and lots of photographs, usually taken by parents and grandparents trained to recognize a Kodak moment when they see one—snapshots that celebrate the normative and gradual transformation of childhood to adulthood, marking it for future use and consumption with the tinge of nostalgia. “This,” the photograph says, “this is the way we were.” My family photo albums are filled with such images. And I cherish them, even though I know the many crises and unhappy moments that they help to repress and erase from memory and family history.

Capturing the first day of school is also a photojournalistic ritual, especially in local newspapers that regularly mark and celebrate the various cycles of the calendar: fall harvest, winter holidays with families meeting in reunion and engaging in spiritual observances, spring break renewal and the planting of new crops, summer fun on the beach, and on an on. And, of course, in an analogy with the photographs in our family photo albums, they frame and feature the habits of sociality and collective living that we want to observe and remember. The picture below appeared in a Washington Post slide show titled “Starting a New School Year” and consisting of eighteen photographs of elementary school children returning to school in the Washington D.C. area.

The photograph is in many respects typical of the other pictures in the slide show and of similar images one might find at many other newspapers. According to the caption they are a group of children “march[ing] to class” in a new school in suburban Maryland. Clean and orderly, they have learned early to walk in line at a common pace and to maintain their distance from one another (“no touching” is one of the rules we learn in kindergarten), and yet they are not automatons as each displays a somewhat unique personality in dress, attitude, and gesture. They are different and yet unified, obedient but not rigidly or obsessively so, and thus they evidence the habits of communal living a liberal democracy might want to inculcate among its citizens. And, of course, they are all African Americans being educated in a brand new school.

What caught my attention in the picture was the second girl from the left, dressed in a white blouse and taking what seems to be a playfully long stride, nipping at the heels of the boy in front of her. Where had I seen this image before? It took a few moments to register, but eventually I realized that it was vaguely reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s “T he Problem We All Live With.”

This painting first appeared in Look magazine in January 1964 but it depicts a scene from four years earlier when six year old Ruby Bridges was escorted by U.S. Federal Marshals to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans following a court order to integrate the schools in accord with the mandate of Brown v Bd. of Education (1954). White parents removed their children from the school and only one teacher—Barbara Henry—was willing to instruct Ruby. And for much of the next year Ruby was a class of one.

It is a painting, not a photograph, but in all likelihood it was artistically derived from one of several AP photos that show Ruby and her escorts entering the school. It is marked by strong contrasts of color: her dark skin and white dress, shoes, and hair ribbon stand out against the drab, muted colors of the suits and the wall. Notice in particular how the color of the suits connect the headless and anonymous marshals to the wall and the vicious word scrawled across it; the composition thus subtly identifies the institution now protecting Ruby with the institution that built the walls of segregation and contributed to her oppression and stigmatization. The wall is stained with the red of a tomato, the color of heated passion and blood, and thus a sign of the threat that abides outside of the frame of the picture. But amidst all of this is Ruby, pure, innocent, and, of course, looking forward to a new day–the first day of school with a new notebook and ruler in her hands. Note too that her stride is natural, but she walks faster than the escorts behind her, riding up on the feet of those in front of her. She is thus anxious to get to her destination, but she also holds herself in reserve, her emotions contained and constrained, another strong contrast with the scene around her. She is also an individual. And though there were hundreds of persons who orchestrated this moment in history, it is the lone individual standing up against the much larger forces of oppression that is featured (and remembered). It thus functions as part of the standard liberal antidote to political trauma, and in its own way it anticipates the photograph of the lone individual stopping a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square many years later.

There is no doubt a great deal more that can be said about this image. But it is its relationship to the contemporary photograph from the Maryland suburbs that most warrants attention here. For now we have seven children not one. We can assume that there are teachers directing the parade even though we don’t see them–a sign, perhaps, of established authority and effective leadership. Indeed, the photograph purports to be an ordinary (bourgeois, middle-class) first day back at school. It depicts an orderly scene in an open and brightly lit modern building. There is nothing that suggests even the hint of a threat; the vicious “n” word has been replaced by an affectively neutral and abstract term: “primary.” That the children are exclusively African American seems almost incidental—and more so when seen in the context of the entire slide show—as if the problems of equal educational opportunity among the races has been solved; and maybe in this school district they have, as this is a picture of a brand new school. But one has to wonder if there is not also a sense in which the photograph works to erase the image of the Rockwell painting from public memory, a substitution of the “real” for the “mythic.” Or if the word “erase” seems too strong, then perhaps the photograph mutes the mnemonic force of the earlier image, suggesting “that was then and this is now.” In either case, its reference to the conventional first day of school frames both images in a somewhat nostalgic register that underscores a myth of social progress: the idealism of the lone individual standing up to the forces of oppression (then) and the appearance of the happy-go-lucky first day of school (now).

If only that’s the way it truly was.

Photo Credits: Marvin Joseph/Washington Post; Norman Rockwell Estate

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Labor Day

To the American worker:

Photographs by Charles C. Ebbets/Bettmann Corbis; Lowell’s Restaurant and Bar, Seattle, WA; Daily News, Los Angeles, CA (Dept of Special Collections/UCLA Library, A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library); Gordon Parks; unknown.

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