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Iconic Images, Lego Art, and the Limits of Imitation

One of the characteristics of iconic images is that they are reproduced across a wide range of media, genres, settings, and topics. Actually, that is true of media more generally–think of how songs, jokes, quotations, recipes, fashions, and many other other things circulate widely–but it usually is not so intentional or distinctive as when it is done with widely recognized and influential images. Iconic photographs have been reproduced as drawings, paintings, sculpture, murals, graffiti, embroidery, beadwork, silkscreens, figurines, stamps, plates, coins, tattoos–you name it. Oh, yes, and Lego art:

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This is one of a set of nine that are posted at a Flickr page. The set contains reconstructions of three canonical photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Charles Ebbets’ shot of iron workers sitting on a beam hanging in empty space, Robert Capa’s photo of a soldier being shot in the Spanish civil war, the Times Square kiss, two from the Vietnam war, and the lone protester standing before a tank in Tiananmen Square.

The question is whether there is anything to be learned from the Legos. One wouldn’t expect much beyond what we already know: with a few key features in place, we can recognize the iconic image in any medium, and people can be clever when they have time on their hands. The odd imitation is basically a joke, and we marvel–briefly–that someone could get so much out of Legos or ice cream (it’s been done: the flag-raising at Iwo Jima) or whatever else is getting the iconic upgrade.

I wonder, however, if there isn’t more to the Lego art. Let’s take two examples–briefly. First, the Times Square kiss:

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The Lego version captures both the strongest positive feature of the photo as well as one cause for criticism. The positive feature is the good vibe that so many people get from seeing a young couple passionately “kissing the war goodbye” on V-J Day. You get that feeling in the Lego work from the smile on the sailor’s face. In the photograph from Times Square, there is much more: youth casting off of wartime restrictions, Eros and regeneration triumphing over war and death, private and public life beautifully harmonized; what’s not to like? Well, there is one thing for some, and that’s how the woman may be a less that willing participant. He didn’t ask first, and so one form of domination could be giving way to another form of domination. And sure enough, the Lego art gets that as well: look at how awkwardly she is bent back, and how she is not returning his advance.

I could stop there, but let’s do one more:

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This is a reprise of the Eddie Adams photograph from the 1968 Tet offensive in during the Vietnam War.

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Adams believed that the officer was justified in executing the bound prisoner of war, and perhaps a case can be made. But the photo records more than a single incident, and it fit too well with many other acts that were both criminal and marked by the official indifference that is displayed here. So, much to Adams dismay, the photograph became memorialized as a statement against the war.

And something like that ambiguity is evident in the Lego art. The smiles of the two figures, and particularly the one being shot, are just not right. They’re wrong because not in the photograph, and because not fitting with the scene, and because not appropriate for cuing our reaction to a killing. As with the iconic photograph, what seems to be a simple image is in fact one that churns complicated responses, in part because it isn’t right with itself.

There are limits to imitation. Not everything can be said in any medium, and some media can’t say much at all, but there still can be more there than we might think. Next up, iconic images in cornfield mazes. Really, they’re out there.

Photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images; Eddie Adams/Associated Press.

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Domesticating Dissent

When I ask my students to make a list of iconic photographs they almost invariably recall the image of the two black athletes at the 1968 Olympics with their hands raised in a “black power” salute.

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They rarely know the names of the athletes, nor can they typically recall the particular track event that was being celebrated or who won what medal, but the image itself seems to be seared in their collective consciousness. And why not? Reproductions of the photograph of this moment of political dissent during a time of social and civic turmoil are ubiquitous. Indeed, one can barely read about the 1968 Olympics without the picture showing up, and indeed it has been the subject of several movies including an HBO documentary film titled “Fists of Freedom: The Story of the ’68 Summer Games.” It was prominently displayed in the movie Remember the Titans and it is available for purchase as a mural-sized poster and as a fine art print, as well as stenciled on t-shirts; a rendition of it was cast as a larger than life size statue and is on display at San Jose State University were the two athletes went to school. Both of the men—Tommie Smith and John Carlos—have recently published autobiographies about their experiences featuring their moment on the victory stand.

Given the notoriety of the photograph it is of little surprise that Smith and Carlos have embarked on a year long lecture tour in anticipation of the 40th anniversary of the “black power” salute and the significance of the moment of political dissent that it depicts. What is surprising—if not altogether disappointing—is how the NYT chose to cover the lecture tour as it made its way to the Black National Theater in Harlem last Wednesday. The Times article is titled “Enduring Image Leads to Enduring Dispute” and the story it reports focuses on the petty and personal jealousies that have vexed the lives of Smith and Carlos, once good friends who now “harbor deep-seated and previously unexpressed resentment toward each other.”

As with so many iconic photographs – think of the migrant mother, the flag raising on Iwo Jima, the Times Square Kiss, the Kent State massacre, accidental napalm, and the list goes on – popular interest seems quickly to shift from the key public issues represented and negotiated by such images to the subsequent private lives of the individuals being depicted, i.e., who are they? what became of them? And so on. And in the process, the complexities of significant political events central to the history of liberal-democratic public culture fade deeper and deeper into the background, as a neo-liberal interest in the life of the individual trumps the public interests of a democratic polity. Or at least that is how such images are typically treated by the national media.

This cultural and ideological revisionism is marked by the photograph that accompanies the NYT report on Smith and Carlos:

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The first thing to note is that the image signifies the tension between “then” and “now” while putting the accent on the present moment. The point is emphasized spatially as the contemporary Carlos (on the left) and Smith (on the right) dominate the image. But note too that the two men are cast in the light and seen in living color, while the past that spawned their relationship is represented by black and white photographs and cast in dark shadows. The author of the article bemoans the “inevitable” moment when “idealism” (then, black and white) gives way to “reality” (now, in color), but the focus in the article on the contemporary travails of these two men (now more private individuals than citizens) seems reinforced by the photograph which treats the past as a antique and fading memory. One might wish for more attention to the idealism of that earlier time, perhaps emphasizing a truly “Olympian” moment when at least some athletes were guided more by issues of social justice—and its attendant risks—than by private self-interest. But I think that there is a different and more important point to be made here, for the photograph above also functions to domesticate the original image of the “black power salute.”

Notice how the contemporary photograph puts the black and white image of King closer to the foreground than the iconic image of Smith and Carlos, even though chronologically the later image is more recent. Our present day remembrances of King thus become the frame through which we are encouraged to view and interpret the original image of the two athletes, and accordingly it is the standard of King’s Christianized, “beloved community” that becomes the marker of idealism against which the current day dispute between Carlos and Smith is to be measured (and found lacking). What this ignores is that the 1968 summer Olympics took place nine months after the publication of the Kerner Commission Report, six months after the assassination of Dr. King, and in the midst of increasing concerns that the then so-called “civil rights movement” had lost its political edge and effectivity. And most of all, what it ignores is that the “black power salute” – a phrase which is never once mentioned in the NYT article – constituted a very different and more threatening political idealism than the one we retrospectively affiliate with King’s “dream.”

In short, what we seem to be witnessing is the domestication of a valued photograph that marks and models an important and radical moment of dissent in the life of the polity. The tragedy here is that the “enduring dispute” announced in the title of the NYT article refers to a normalizing, private quarrel between two individuals, and not the more important tension animating our understanding of the relationship between the “civil rights movement” and the “black power movement.”

Photo Credits: Staff Photo/AP, Gabriele Stabile/NYT

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Who's That Man in the Picture, II

Chicago Storm

According to the caption this is “a pedestrian [who] battles a heavy rain storm in downtown Chicago.” It could be Bob Hariman, but I happen to know that he is stuck in Evanston without electricity and working hard to bale out his rain drenched basement. Rather, what we see is an anonymous citizen doing his feeble best to stay dry in the wind blown rain while walking down a nondescript urban street. We are told it is in Chicago, but it could be in any city in the world. Indeed, is an altogether ordinary picture of an ordinary event on an ordinary public thoroughfare. And it was designated by the Washington Post for display as part of its “Day in Photos” slide show for 8/24/07, which obviously makes it something just a little bit more than ordinary.

Of course, it is highly unlikely that anyone will come forward claiming to be the man in the picture in the same way that individuals have lined up trying to prove that they are the sailor in the famous “Times Square Kiss.” But in some measure that is precisely part of its attraction. For while we tend to focus attention on those photographs that emphasize the recognizably great and the near great—political leaders and celebrities—or major crises and tragedies, a large portion of the photographs published in daily newspapers show ordinary citizens doing ordinary things, negotiating the travails of everyday life including everything from battling the weather to participating in civic and communal activities (e.g., voting, assisting at the PTA, participating in a charity car wash), to helping their neighbors, doing their jobs, nurturing their families, caring for their pets, celebrating local events and holidays, mourning their losses, and so on. Sometimes they are identified by name, but usually the particular identity of the people being represented doesn’t matter very much (except perhaps to the individuals pictured and their families and closest friends). What matters is that we have an opportunity to see ourselves in all of our sociality as members of a public or a community, that we have models of citizenship and political friendship, and that perhaps (and just perhaps) the world is made a little bit less strange.

It is a small point, to be sure, but one well worth emphasizing: A successful late modern democratic polity relies upon our ability to negotiate with a public full of strangers—people we don’t know personally and who are different from us in some measure and to some degree, but people with whom we also share ordinary and everyday similarities. The anonymity (or near anonymity) of many of the photographs that appear in our newspapers and other media is thus an important feature of photojournalism as a civic and public art which functions at its best to help us to see ourselves and to be seen in turn as citizens in a world full of strangers as we struggle to engage the stresses and strains of ordinary, everyday life.

Photo Credit: M. Spencer Green/AP


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Who is that Man in the Picture?

Last week I commented on the latest effort to discover the “true” identity of the kissers in the famous “Times Square Kiss” photograph. Reporting on such efforts is a fairly common narrative that follows along with the circulation of many iconic photographs. After all, most such photographs rely upon a certain degree of anonymity and when we encounter the anonymous our curiosity is piqued. Who is the migrant mother? Or that young girl at Kent State? Or the man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square? And so on. Earlier this week Erroll Morris, an important documentary film maker, reprised the question raised last year (3/11/2006) in the NYT concerning the alleged identity of the man known as”Gilligan” in the iconic Abu Ghraib torture photograph:

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Morris argues that the controversy demonstrates “how we make false inferences from pictures.” We think that he gets it wrong, or perhaps more to the point, he asks the wrong question and thus diverts attention from the very important range of ways in which photojournalism contributes to a vital and robust democratic public culture. Robert posted our response as a comment at the Times. We’ve reposted that comment below, but we also encourage our readers to attend to the continuing and very spirited and engaged debate on this topic at the NYT.

Posted at the New York Times, August 16, 2007:

Errol Morris’s essay is one example of his claim that “We do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is determined by our beliefs.” His critique of the Abu Ghraib story depends on several axioms of Susan Sontag’s critique of photography. Unfortunately, each one of them is at best half true.

1. Photographs corrupt moral response by substituting the image of the victim for reality: “The no longer anonymous Hooded Man became a national news story – not because he was a victim of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib but because he was in a famous photograph.”

2. Photographs corrupt our knowledge of reality: “Namely, the central role that photography itself played in the mistaken identification, and the way that photography lends itself to those errors and may even engender them. . . . photographs attract false beliefs – as fly-paper attracts flies.”

The basic problem with both of these ideas is that the critic is attributing to photography what is true of all representation, verbal as well as visual. Think about it: can you depend any more on written accounts of reality? If so, I have a bridge to sell. You don’t have to spend more than ten minutes in a court of law to see that writing is highly suspect. Newspaper reportage is partial at best while details often are mistaken; government reports have an additional set of problems, scholarship is subject to paradigmatic restrictions, and so forth and so on. The most false, dangerous, immoral, and harmful publication in the world is not a photograph, but a book: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And for all that, writing, like photography, is a remarkable tool for learning about, knowing, and navigating through the world. If left only to what we see directly, we would know and care about very few people (and no more accurately, by the way: eyewitness testimony is notoriously bad evidence). That we care about victims because we see images of them—or read about them, say, by reading the Diary of Anne Frank—demonstrates that we can expand our capacity to care through our use of the public media. Nor are we trapped in our representations. In fact, belief and experience work both ways: prior belief shapes perception, yet human beings, like other animals, continually adjust their conception of the world based on what they observe.

That said, I’ve gotta like the attention Morris pays to iconic images such as the photo from Abu Ghraib. (Full disclosure: I’m co-author with John Lucaites of No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, and John and I maintain the blog No Caption Needed.) The debate about identifying the specific individual in the Abu Ghraib icon is one measure of the photo’s status: similar efforts are made with every iconic photo. At least two issues need to be noted here: one is that, although indifference to the specific individual in the photo could be a moral mistake, the moral testimony of the photograph requires only that someone is there, not any one person. Morris makes the right distinction but gets things backwards when he claims, “Now we are talking about reality – not about photographs.” No, we are talking about photographs, specifically, about a photograph’s documentation of torture. As with other iconic photographs, the image’s moral power depends on the anonymity of those in the picture. We empathize because the person could be anyone, not because it is this or that individual. The photograph of the napalmed girl running down the road in Vietnam was moving not because it was a picture of Kim Phuc, but because it was a picture of a girl much like children you have known.

This is why I can’t get excited about the stories of who was in the photographs from Iwo Jima, Vietnam, Kent State, or Abu Ghraib. These narratives usually serve to domesticate the image, to transform its powerful call for public action into a feel-good story about private life. Barthes said the photograph could be mad or tame. Locating the individual in the iconic image, however accurately, only tames the photograph and perhaps the public as well.

Photo credit: Shawn Baldwin/New York Times


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What Does Peace Look Like?

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(“New York City celebrating the surrender of Japan. They threw anything and kissed anybody in Times Square.” Lt. Victor Jorgensen, August 14, 1945. National Archives, 80-G-377094.)

War continues to be a major topic of photojournalism and will be one of the topics of continuing interest on this blog, at least until the arrival of perpetual peace. While there are a number of fine studies of war imagery, I happened to ask myself today whether there are, or can be, photographs of peace. Obviously, art history archives are full of images–say, of the lion lying down with the lamb–that signify peace figuratively. Although photographs can acquire figurative and even allegorical meaning, I think that the realism, fragmentation, and other elements of the medium make it more difficult to represent peace. War is force, action, violence, destruction, pain–all things that can be communicated photographically. Peace involves the absence of war and the freedom to experience and enjoy other things, which then become the object of visual interest. If you define peace as necessarily involving sustainability and therefore justice, the problem gets even more complicated.

If you go to the Pictures of World War II at the National Archives Web site, you’ll see that one of the categories is “Victory and Peace.” There are ten photographs available there, and were a space alien to access them, it would have a hard time figuring out what either “victory” or “peace” mean. But those of us on Earth don’t do much better, do we?

This representational problem might be why the Times Square Kiss is an iconic photograph. (The public domain version is shown above.) John and I have much to say about it in No Caption Needed, although it now occurs to me that more could be added about how the image mediates the idea of peace. What I find more interesting, however, is another photo from the same collection, one that you probably haven’t seen before:

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“Jubilant American soldier hugs motherly English woman and victory smiles light the faces of happy service men and civilians at Piccadilly Circus, London, celebrating Germany’s unconditional surrender.” Pfc. Melvin Weiss, England, May 7, 1945. National Archives, 111-SC-205398.

I find this to be a poignant image, particularly when compared with the Kiss. (Let’s leave the jokes about American and English eroticism aside for the moment.) Each photo is of a victory celebration in the public square of a great city, with spectators smiling at the camera to cue viewer participation in the scene. But instead of two sexually hot adults clenched in a powerful kiss, in this image we see mom getting a hug from one of the kids. And that’s the point that tears at me: they really are kids. I’m reminded of (and paraphrasing from distant memory) a scene at the beginning of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: angry about the self-satisfied reminiscing by the narrator and his war buddy, the narrator’s wife spits out that they were just kids, children, when they were sent to fight and die. That’s what this photograph reveals so clearly (no caption needed). And so this really is a war photo after all.

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Main Street, USA … or is it the New American Imaginary?

I am unable to identify a single iconic photograph that represents the naturalization process for those immigrating to the United States, but it is of course not uncommon to find pictures of immigrants being sworn in as citizens at places like Ellis Island, Independence Hall, Monticello, and at court houses across the country in cities large, medium, and small.

And it all makes a great deal of sense, for while no single photo of this process of becoming a citizen may be iconic in itself (i.e., in the way, say, in which Lange’s “Migrant Mother” singularly marks the Great Depression or Eisenstadt’s “Times Square Kiss” singularly marks the end of World War II and the so-call “return to normalcy”), each such image nonetheless locates the ceremony in physical places that are in their own rights icons of the American imaginary. The ceremony of becoming a citizen is thus linked in such photographs directly to a foundational part of the nation’s coming to be — whether historically or at the present moment.

The on-line version of the July 5, 2007 New York Times offered a new twist on all of this, as it reported on a recent surge in applications for citizenship, accompanied by a picture of some 1,000 new citizens celebrating their naturalized status on Disneyland’s “Main Street” after having been sworn in beneath Cinderella’s Castle:

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Being sworn in at Independence Hall or Ellis Island or at some other physical place marker of national legitmacy clearly operates in a somewhat romanticized narrative of American citizenship, and so we should be careful about being too critical here. But surely such places are more real, or at least have more of a connection to who and what we are (or want to be) as a people than the pure fantasy of Cinderella’s castle? Or Disney’s version of “Main Street”? Or maybe not.

In any case, the absurdity of the situation must have quickly registered at the Times, because the picture was shortly removed and replaced by a different photograph. The new image, a cropped version of which was actually part of the original on-line story and the full version which was featured above the fold on the front page of the newspaper (see below), shows a close-up of a group of immigrants in the process of being sworn in as citizens:

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What is notable about this newer photograph is not only that the physical place has been visually obscured (even the caption relocates the event, emphasizing that the ceremony took place “near” Cinderella’s Castle, not “at it” as in the original), but nearly all sense of individual difference has been muted or removed, as the new citizens appear more or less “uniform,” wearing identical rain ponchos (the one clear exception, of course, is the poncho bearing an image of Mickey Mouse). And I don’t choose the word “uniform” here randomly, for on the front page of the Times this image is paired with and placed beneath an image (that was also part of the original and now no longer available on-line story) of U.S. Marines being sworn in as citizens … and where else, but in Baghdad!

New York Times, Front Page

It is hard to know what is going on here. I would be inclined to say that the original on-line story was a parody, something like what we might find at The Onion: “Citizenship Available for an ‘E Ticket Ride’ at Disneyland!” But the NYT is, after all, “the paper of record,” and we would not expect to find satire of this sort here. And of course the front page story seems to play it straight, even though the visual identification between Disneyland and Baghdad could be read in a subtle but cynical register. But then why does the original image of Main Street, Disneyland disappear from the on-line version? The American imaginary is always something of a fiction, to be sure, but here it seems to have transformed into pure fantasy. And one, it would seem, we are all too willing to buy! Perhaps that’s the point. Or maybe not.

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American Faces

The June 2007 issue of the Journal of American History includes a series of articles on the use of photographs in collective memory and historical scholarship. The issue, which is entitled American Faces, includes:

“Introduction,” by Donna Drucker and Edward Linenthal (pp. 97–8)

“Worth a Billion Words? Library of Congress Pictures Online,” by Barbara Orbach Natanson (pp. 99–111)

“Religious History and Visual Culture,” by Colleen McDannell (pp. 112–21)

“The Times Square Kiss: Iconic Photography and Civil Renewal in U.S. Public Culture,” by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (pp. 122–31)

“‘The Day in Its Color’,” by Eric Sandweiss (pp. 132–42)

“Visual Literacy by Michael Lesy,” (pp. 143–53)

“An American Atrocity: The My Lai Massacre Concretized in a Victim’s Face,” by Claude Cookman (pp. 154–62)

“Where Are Our Fathers?” by Ted Englemann (pp. 163–71)

“An Image from Oklahoma City,” by David Allen (pp. 172–78)

“Remembering the Oklahoma City Bombing,” by Anthony Fernandez (pp. 179–82)

“The Public Face of 9/11: Memory and Portraiture in the Landscape,” by Jonathan Hyman (pp. 183–92)

“Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age,” by Martha A. Sandweiss (pp. 193–202)

Full texts (and images) are available online.

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On the Surreal Relationship of Stones and Balloons in Everyday Life

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Photographs of Palestinian youth throwing stones and brickbats at Israeli troops are a dime a dozen.  Barely a day goes by that one or two don’t show up in one or another of the major news media slideshows.  And they are generally all the same more or less.  The photograph above, which appeared in several media sources this past week is typical and altogether unexceptional when compared to all of the others.  The Palestinians are rarely recognizable beyond their jeans and the face masks they wear, and, of course, the fact that they are brandishing primitive weapons—stones and sometimes slingshots—against a modern and state based military.  The Israelis are no less typecast, wearing military uniforms and wielding the accouterments of contemporary warfare—automatic weapons, tanks, etc.  Sometimes the Israeli’s are not visible within the photograph, but their physical presence is always implied and it is hard not to imagine them looming  just outside of the frame of the picture. Usually shot in neutral tones of greys and browns, the sky typically overcast and the scene shrouded in smoke, the aesthetic is altogether dreary—an affect occasionally accented as by contrast with images of burning tires or other kinds of explosions.

Such photographs are so common that I barely pay any attention to them anymore, which raises the question, why do they keep appearing and with such stereotypical ubiquity?  This is not a rhetorical question that I will answer later in this post.  I truly don’t understand why such images appear with such frequency.  Surely such images play to both sides in this long and fraught controversy, Israeli supporters seeing vigilantes and guerilla warriors threatening national security and Palestinian supporters seeing the oppressive forces of an occupying power, but such appeals in themselves doesn’t seem quite enough to warrant their near constant publication and circulation.  Nor do they seem to have an especially powerful effect on those who don’t know quite which side in this controversy to favor.  I suspect that many simply don’t see the images at all, glancing at them at best—as have I in the past—as their eyes move to the next image in an on-line slide show or turn the page in a magazine or newspaper.

Two things called my attention to the image above this weekend.  The first was a slideshow at “Daily Life.”  This is a regular feature at The Boston Globe’s Big Picture in which sluice of life images from around the world are brought together to create something of a “feel good” affect, though I don’t mean to suggest that all that we see are pictures of puppy dogs lapping up ice cream cones.  Rather, the images call attention to the rhythms of everyday life across the globe, often featuring a sensibility that makes “us” and “them” simultaneously similar and different from one another.  Sometimes the pictures feature the altogether ordinary and sometimes they feature a devil may care attitude, but always they underscore daily living.  And so we see everything from Indians praying to the God Shiva to window cleaners in Bangkok to a skier relaxing in Juneua, Alaska to a high school principal kissing a snake to two lovers on a bench in a piazza in Rome, and the list goes on.  What we don’t see, of course, are Palestinians hurling rocks at Israeli soldiers, and yet this would seem to be every bit a part of daily life – and perhaps more so – as what we are shown.  And again I ask, why?  Part of the answer is that there is nothing “feel good” about the battle between Palestinians and Israeli’s but that only begs the larger question, why are we inclined to ignore this facet of daily life with its incredibly tragic overtones for virtually all involved.

The second thing that caused me to contemplate the image above is the photograph below.

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It is a picture of a Palestinian boy carrying toy balloons past Israeli border guards in Jerusalem.  It is a photograph that could easily have appeared in the “Daily Life” slide show, although it did not. And that too raises the question: why not?  But there is perhaps a different point to make, for as with the stone throwers, the individual identity of the Palestinian child is obscured, here hidden beneath and behind the colorful array of beach balls which lend a bizarre quality to the image.  Indeed, the boy seems altogether out of place as this does not appear to be a market square of any sort and the Israeli border guards seem to be ignoring him—or in any case not treating him as if he as any kind of threat.  And, at least on the face of it, he is not.  I am not at all sure I understand why he is there or what he is doing, but it does seem peculiar that the security guards show no concern.  What is important, I believe, is that his individual identity is hidden (like that of the stone throwers) and can only wonder if the photograph doesn’t underscore as by contrast how surreal daily life is for Israeli’s and Palestinians alike.

There is no real conclusion here, except perhaps for this:  Photographs rarely stand in isolation of one another.  It is up to us to look at them carefully and closely and in comparison and contrast to one another, and to wonder why we see them where and when we do and how they might function in their collectivity and relationship to one another to provide a picture of the world we might otherwise miss or ignore.

Photo Credit:  Nedal Eshtayah/APA Images/Zuma Press;  Menahem Kahana/AP

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This is Not A Declaration of Peace

There is something altogether uncanny about President Obama’s declaration that “America’s war in Iraq will be over” by the end of the year.  And it goes well beyond the irony that President Bush had already declared “Mission Accomplished” eight years ago in 2003.

If you survey the almost constant litany of U.S. wars that have ended since the beginning of the 20th Century, their cessation is always marked by newspaper headlines with a flourish—and in the present tense: “Armistice Declared!” “Japan Surrenders, War Over!”  “The War in Europe is Ended!  Surrender is Unconditional.”  “Korean Armistice Signed: Hostilities Cease Today.”  “Peace with Honor.”  In short, the declaration of the end of a war meant something more or less definitive.  Or at least factual.  And, of course, the accompanying photographs would typically exalt the event with all manner of celebrations, most notably the iconic image of a sailor and a nurse kissing in Times Square.

But here and for the first time we have a war that is being declared over in the future tense. We claim to know it will be over, and we can say exactly when, but it isn’t quite over yet.  No one wants the ignominious fate of being the last casualty in a war before victory or peace is declared, but the concept clearly takes on a whole new meaning when we can pinpoint the future date that the war will end. One can only hope that when the war ends they will have survived–what we might call a future perfect ending to the war.  I’m not sure how much such thinking will inspire confidence among the troops.  The bigger difficulty, of course, is that absent a crystal ball the future is always a cognitive fiction, an imagined event, a wish dream.  And this is one place where photographs enter the equation.  Photographs are technically always about the past, but when we attend to them it is because we are treating the past as usable for understanding and managing the present in anticipation of an unknown future.  But how exactly do we photograph a future event?

Many of the news outlets who reported on President Obama’s speech repressed this problem by simply photographing the President speaking, marking the event of his speech while ignoring its implications.  But other news outlets published the above file photograph of an Army infantry division sitting in the belly of a C-17 aircraft.  The captions always indicate that the photograph was taken in 2010 and that the soldiers were preparing to return home, but of course there is nothing in the photograph itself that would indicate as much.  For all we know this could be a photograph of that very same infantry division as it was deploying to Iraq.  The point here is not to challenge the veracity of the caption but to question what exactly we are being shown.  And here what we are being shown is somewhat ambiguous, a past event being cast (or is it miscast?) as a hopeful image of the future.  But really, how hopeful can it be? After all, when these troops went home in 2010 they were part of a rotation that saw other troops take their place.  And how can we know that such will not be the same in the future?

We know because the President has exercised the future imperative in declaring that the war “will be over.”  But according to the NYT, even as such a declaration was being made, Defense Secretary Panetta was “[holding]out the possibility of keeping a small force of American military trainers in Iraq in the future,” and there are no plans as yet to remove “4,000 to 5,000 private State department security contractors.”  And more, “possibilities [are] being discussed for some troops to return in 2012.”

John Stewart of The Daily Show reported on the President’s speech by noting, “It’s finally over!  Find me a nurse in Times Square.”  But its not over. And there are as yet no such photographs to be taken.  Let’s hope all that changes by year’s end.

Photo Credit: Maya Alleruzzo/AP

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Being Private in Public

“Liberal democracy” is a political paradox animated by the competing and often contradictory demands and interests of individual and collective living.  The liberal-democratic conundrum manifests itself in numerous civic contexts, but none more clearly than in those situations in late modern society that underscore the tension between the public and private spheres of life.  One solution to such quandries might be to balkanize our public and private selves—to perform one sense of self in public and another and different sense of self in the privacy of our homes—but of course the two are not so easily separated; indeed, insofar as “public” and “private” are dialectical terms, defined contra one another, one might imagine the relationship between our public and the private selves as opposite sides of the same coin: distinct from one another but nevertheless literally and inextricably connected.  The problem for  maintaining a productive liberal democratic life then is in learning how to enact a sense of our private self in full view of a public of  strangers while accommodating the demands of civic decorum.

There is perhaps no more mythic public setting in U.S. civic life than Times Square.  A carnival of commerce, signage, flashing lights, and more, it is often characterized as the “crossroads of the world.” It is also the site of one of the most famous and often reproduced photographs of American life, Alfred Eisenstadt’s “Time Square Kiss,” an image that embodies the key tensions between the public and private selves of the two kissers—sailor and nurse, anonymous man and woman—who spontaneously and yet decorously perform one of the key obsessions of private life in full view of an attentive public of strangers.  That it is a somewhat restrained kiss, and that it achieves the full support of all who observe it seems very much to the point as eros is present, but contained. We have written extensively about this photograph both here and elsewhere and I will not repeat what we have had to say about it any more than I already have.  That said, the Eisenstadt photograph came to mind recently as it was announced that Times Square had been converted into a pedestrian mall that provoked, in the words of the NYT, the sense of “being in a big public room.”

The photograph above was taken on May 25th, the day after the area was closed to traffic and it shows a wide range of individuals in various social configurations lounging in the middle of Broadway as if a day at the beach.  Apparently oblivious to the activity that surrounds them, each individual or group seems caught in and contained by his, her, or their own private universe.  The physical markers of public life are there, to be sure, including a curb, street vectors, pylons placed to identify boundaries, and stop lights in the distance, but none of this seems to have much social significance as a couple eats their lunch, a group of three engage in what appears to be nonchalant conversation, a man and woman (husband and wife?) sleep and read as if in lounge chairs in their own living room, and an isolated, lone man seems lost in self-contemplation; others simply walk about. The point, of course, is that there is no sense of a public here. Less a “big public room,” the photograph portrays a thoroughly fragmented social order, a setting in which the conventions of private living have completely colonized the most public space in America and where individuals have seemingly forgotten how to perform their private selves in public in a way that acknowledges others and  accommodates to the demands and decorum of civic life.

It is really hard to know what to make of this scene. On the one hand it is no doubt churlish to complain about a world in which individuals are given the freedom and safety to relax in a public thoroughfare, unhindered by the needs and demands of others.  And yet, on the other hand, one can only wonder what the effects will be of a social order that so completely reduces the norms and conventions of public life to the unrestrained habits of private living.

Photo Credit: Damon Winter/New York Times

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