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“Something There is That Doesn’t Love a Wall”

Borderbeachtj

Several weeks ago the U.S. Senate managed to overcome all odds and agree on a bill to address the so-called “immigration problem.”  To accomplish this they had to agree not only to hire an additional 20,000 border police but to build 700 miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.  That would be 700 miles in addition to the approximately 350 miles of fence that begin at the shore’s edge in Tijuana (see above) and extend to the east.  Of course, the U.S.-Mexico border is approximately 1,950 miles long, so you can see the problem; then again, when we add 20,000 more border police to the approximately 21,000 we already have we will be able to station one officer every 1,000 feet along the border—a human fence, as it were— so maybe things will work out (although, as far as I know, no one has addressed the question of how far west into the Pacific Ocean we will be able to station border guards).

Of course all of this assumes that walls and fences work to keep things out (or is it to keep things in?, it’s always hard to know which way the structure works).  And therein lies the rub, for whether they are designed to contain or exclude, it is pretty clear that they also exist to be breached.  They might make it hard to get from side A to side B (or visa versa) but their very presence marks the desire to do so.  And more, however high and sturdy a wall or fence might be, it always has to answer to the test of time, crumbling and falling apart, leaving holes large and small that encourage and enable their breach.  I was reminded of this recently by a photograph that shows a man sneaking through the Old City Wall in Jerusalem.

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The wall is pretty substantial, and yet what the photograph emphasizes is its inevitable fallibility.  But there is more. According to the caption the man is Muslim.  Whether he is sneaking in or sneaking out is not all that clear, but the irony is pronounced: the wall itself was built in the 16th Century by a Muslim Sultan with the intent of protecting the interests of the Ottoman Empire, i.e., keeping non-Muslims out.  Of course, today, and so many years later, the wall serves a diametrically opposed set of interests.

And so, to return to the photograph of the fence that separates the US-Mexico Border, one has to wonder how successful it will be in containing and excluding whatever it is that it is supposed to contain or exclude.  Or even how successful it can be given all of the constraints it must weather?  And for how long?  And most importantly, perhaps, whose interests might it serve, both now and in the future?  Artificial borders like fences and walls, it seems, know no permanent masters other than time and that should give us pause when we commit ourselves to building them, for what today serves to fence out may one day serve to imprison.

Photo Credit:  James Reyes; Abir Sultan/EPA.  The title for the post is from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.”

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Sight Gag: The House at Work

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Credit: Sack, Star Tribune

Sight Gag is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.

 

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Jonathan Hyman and the Landscapes of 9/11

Landscapes of 9:11 cover

In the emotional aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, people from all walks of life created and encountered memorials to those who were murdered. Vernacular art appeared almost everywhere—on walls, trees, playgrounds, vehicles, houses, tombstones, and even on bodies. This outpouring of grief and other acts of remembrance impelled photographer Jonathan Hyman to document and so preserve these largely impermanent, spontaneous expressions. His collection of 20,000 photographs, along with field notes and personal interviews, constitutes a unique archive of 9/11 public memory.

In The Landscapes of 9/11, Hyman offers readers a representative sampling of his photographs and also relates his own story in a clear and detailed narrative. He is joined by a diverse group of scholars and museum professionals, including editors Edward Linenthal and Christiane Gruber, who use the Hyman collection to investigate the cultural functions of memorial practices in the United States and beyond, including Northern Ireland, the Palestinian West Bank, and Iran.

Full disclosure: John Lucaites and I co-authored one of the essays in the volume.  The book is being released this month in cloth and paper; you can order copies here.

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Vegetable Mineral Animals: After the Blaze at Lac Megantic

Just what are they, exactly?

fuel train carcasses

The caption at Reuters referred to “the remains of a train wreckage,” and it is that.  The train of tank cars carrying crude oil had exploded in Lac Megantic, Quebec, creating an inferno that killed at least 15 people, with others yet to be accounted for.  This human toll should not be minimized, and I will be among the last to grieve over the loss of company property.  Nonetheless, the photo above deserves attention even as it takes us in away from those whose lives were torched by the blast.

The scorched tank cars look like carcasses more than anything else.  Like the bloated bodies of pigs after a flood, or dead fish after an oil spill in a river.  Or, if you like sci fi noir, like pods leaking alien spoor in some industrial wasteland of a long dead planet.  The sense of scale is all off–certainly not to human scale, as the tanker truck and other vehicles on the road are dwarfed by the giant metal rames piled up like so much slag at a gargantuan mill.

But I keep coming back to a sense of organic life now dead.  As if some life form has been decimated arbitrarily, accidentally, without dignity or purpose.  Again, I know that human beings really did suffer that death, but nonetheless I think this photograph captures something important about the larger economy of life and death in a machine age.

The word “petroleum” comes from the Greek petra/rock and Latin oleum/oil, and that etymology captures the sense of being both inorganic and organic.  Technically, oil is not a mineral, yet oil rights are covered under mineral rights, it is pumped out of the dark depths of the earth,  and then it is turned into tens of thousands of materials and other products.  Likewise, the black (and blackened) steel tanker cars represent the black oil they carried, as if two parts of the same whole.  Thus, oil can be thought of as a mineral that once was a mixture of plants and other decomposing matter, and perhaps the photo taps into that deep organic history.  Plants and animals were transformed over vast expanses of geological time into the crude oil that then was used in just over a century of industrialized production to support an incredible expansion of human development, but one not without its costs. And that process of oil extraction, distribution, refining, and conversion into machine power increasingly seems to have developed a life of its own, or at least a great many defenders of its right to exist and expand without limit.  But as the photograph above suggests, even that process can come full circle, destroying its own and leaving nothing but waste that will be much less likely in the long run to change into anything else.

I’ve always enjoyed the family road trip game of Twenty Questions, where you start by asking if the object is Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral.  For the time spent trapped in the car, we could at least share the illusion that all the world could be placed neatly into one of three categories, and with everything either bigger, smaller, or (less often) the same size as a breadbox.  Without cheap gasoline, I doubt we would have played the game.  At the same time, we were being driven toward a world where those simple categories were going to become increasingly intertwined.

Look again:  the tanker cars are at once bigger and smaller than a breadbox.  More important, or less a trick of the eye, they also are at once vegetable, mineral, and animal.  And so, as this photograph senses, there may be something to mourn there after all.  But just what that is, exactly, I’m not sure.

Photograph by Mathieu Belanger/Reuters.

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All’s Well That Ends Well?

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If we take the photojournalistic slideshows at the major newspapers as evidence, the news for the past two weeks has been dominated by protests, both large and small around the world—though oddly enough hardly any that apparently warranted documenting in the United States—and a wide array of American patriotic displays, ranging from ersatz celebrations of red, white and blue to reenactors playing out the battle of Gettysburg on its 150th anniversary.  The photograph buried amidst all these images that caught my eye, however, had nothing to do with any of that and instead showed four children “playing” on a burned out armored vehicle in Kabul.

The vehicle is unmarked, and so it is hard to know who originally brought it to this spot. It could be American or British or even, however unlikely, a left over from the occupation of the former Soviet Union.  But none of that seems to matter as the particular history of this weapon of war has been erased.  What does seem to matter is that it has become a part of the “natural” landscape and that these children, young, innocent, and altogether happy, seem as comfortable climbing on it as we might imagine an American child climbing in an oak tree in his own back yard on a bright summer day.  There may have once been a war in Afghanistan that put these children at risk, but as this photograph suggests, there is now something like a return to normalcy.  Once there was a war, but now all is well.

Of course, notwithstanding the claim the U.S. has accomplished its combat goals in Afghanistan and turned military control back over to Afghani security forces, we know that the hostilities are not over, nor is it likely that we will see the significant downturn of U.S. or NATO military forces—whether we choose to call them combat troops, security forces, or military advisers—in Afghanistan for sometime to come.  In short, all is not well.  That said, what makes the photograph disturbing has less to do with the implication of a return to happier times, and more to do with the way in which it functions to make the past invisible by removing specific markers of the occupying forces and by naturalizing what has been left behind. And this all the more so as it appears in the midst of images of continuing conflict and social protest and American celebrations of its own exceptionalist past.

Photo Credit: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

 

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NCN Celebrates Sixth Birthday Party

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We even got dressed up for this one.  And once again it is a time to say “Thanks” and to take stock.  Thanks to all our readers, and not least to those who comment on the posts.  If anyone would like to give us any advice about the blog itself, now is a good time to do it.  We can’t say we’ll follow that advice, especially given our limited resources, but it always is appreciated and sometimes one thing can lead to another.  You can comment below or email us at rhariman@gmail.com and lucaites@indiana.edu.

We won’t be posting for a few weeks, but we will continue to read our mail and hope that you will return on July 8th as we start another year at NCN.

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Sight Gag: China, Land of Individual Freedom

crgva130614Credit: Gary Varvel

Sight Gag is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture.  These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.

 

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Photographic Mood, on the Eve of Destruction

You might say that this image is all too conventional: the people’s hero bravely taking a stand on the barricades, right out of Les Miz.  Of course, it’s much better than that, but why?

Protests in Istanbul

All the elements of the Revolution in the Streets script are there: the people milling about (check); smoke from tear gas or guns (check); trashed furniture and other stuff piled up as a barricade (check); the hero at the center of the barricade (check); the standard held high precisely as the hero is being sacrificed (check); what’s not to like?  Well, someone might say, “He’s a real human being actually putting his body on the line.”  OK, but we knew that, and the drama never was entirely in the image: politics itself is a mode of conflict before spectators, and if you take away all the conventions of presentation, the scene becomes aimless, meaningless, incapable of being seen as action of any sort.  Like any photograph, this image has to draw on conventions of social behavior to be intelligible at all, and like many photographs it might be artfully compressing and coordinating those conventions to say something to a public audience.

But what is being said?  We can’t settle for something as banal as “Protestor waves a flag in Istanbul,” or even the more dramatic “Protestor waves a flag in Istanbul while being gassed.”  Let me suggest that two reasons I think this photo stands out above many others.  The first is the way that the man is framed, not by other protestors or the police, but by the wreckage being created by the conflict in the street.  Instead of merely becoming a symbol of The People, we see that he actually is having to contend with the destruction of his environment.  (Indeed, the willingness to accept that destruction is one sign of how fed up people are with the deeper destructiveness of the regime.)  While holding up the flag and covering his contaminated eyes, he also has to step carefully, each foot on a different level, obstacles that could trip him in every direction.  More to the point, the photo may be prophetic: suggesting that, as with other revolutions in the region, this one will end in the Pyrrhic victory of regaining one’s country only to find it gutted, looted, and reduced to rubble.

One need not come to that conclusion, of course, but the second distinctive feature of the photograph provides a context for doing so: now I am referring to its amazing color.  It’s much easier to see than describe, so look again.  Neither quite color nor black and white, it seems to create a dimension halfway between documentary reportage and artistic reflection.  Color can provide tone (in oratory, the speaker’s sense of the situation), and mood (the emotion offered to the audience as a means for thinking and feeling along with the speaker).  The tone here seems both candid about the dire situation and yet willing to believe in the cause.  The mood seems almost elegiac, as if they have already lost but should be remembered nonetheless.

To appreciate more fully what has been accomplished, let me briefly bring in another photo.

Lee Chong Kuang, scrapped supertanker

Amazing, isn’t it?  One might think that all these two images have in common is their similarity in color, tonality, and mood.  Or one might feature important differences: say, that the second places human action within an expansive natural tableau where serenity will persist long after these small creatures called humans have passed through the scene.  Either way, the comparison could be faulted for trivializing the political action in Istanbul.  That, however, is not what I have in mind.

Consider instead that the second image can extend some of the strengths of the second.  It can slow us down a bit to think more carefully about the nature of change. Note also that both images feature wreckage (the looming hulk is a supertanker being cut up for scrap in Bangladesh).  Perhaps wreckage is our lot, and therefore no reason to avoid change.  And perhaps regimes, no matter how large and powerful, will all one day be cut up for scrap.  (They will, as they always have.)

Perhaps the scripts don’t change much, but that need not determine how we feel about them.

Photographs by Daniel Etter/Redux and Lee Chong Kuang/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.  Etter’s photo was included in a guest post earlier this week on viral images in Turkey; Time Lightbox provides more on the photo here.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Images of Protest in Istanbul: The Woman in Red

Guest Correspondent: Brandon Thomas

pepper girl

There is no shortage of potent imagery from the Gezi Park movement, which has evolved into a pseudo-1960’s around-the-clock “Be-In” where spaces and resources are shared communally. Though victorious and celebratory, the police-free zone that currently surrounds Taxim Square still carries the scars of the weekend’s turmoil. Overturned cars have become in situ art installations. Vendors peddle corn, simit, and beer on the streets. One bus, its windows smashed out, has been repurposed into a library. And every day thousands of supporters, revelers, and tourists make the pilgrimage to what has become the epicenter of Turkey’s biggest peoples’ movement in years.

In many ways the protest today is unrecognizable from the sit-in it began as in the last days of May, before the bulldozers, riot gear, and international attention. Despite this, a photo produced on the fourth day of the protest has emerged as the movement’s first signature image. Dubbed the woman in red by Alexandra Hudson of Reuters News Service, the picture immediately went viral in Turkey before being snapped up by multiple news agencies and acclaimed by many as the symbol of Occupy Gezi.

What is it about this image that makes it so compelling? Looking at the key elements in the frame, we see two people, a male police officer with a gas mask and a hose that appears to be spraying a female with what we surmise is pepper spray. Her face is a contorted grimace and her hair bizarrely on end. In the left foreground, another female faces the camera. Though she is perhaps unaware of the action behind her, her furrowed brow confirms a physical reaction to the spray. Behind her, a third female covers her mouth and nose with apparent distress.

Juxtaposed with the key figure of the woman in red, these women’s intense reactions to second-hand contact with the spray heighten the viewer’s awareness of the anguish that the woman in red must feel. Though this human suffering is certainly enough to invoke viewers’ empathy, additional signifiers convey more subtle meanings which make the image more powerful within the social context from which it is viewed.

For starters, the girl’s youth, her red summer dress and her purse or book bag evoke a myth of “the girl next door,” a girl we are at once familiar with and unthreatened by. Indeed, the power of this image lies in just how ordinary the girl looks. She does not fit the stereotypical image of a political activist, but rather appears as a bystander caught up in someone else’s conflict. Perhaps she took a wrong turn on her way home from school or work. Even her body position is inoffensive; with one hand on the purse strap and another at her side, she seems surprised, even defenseless.

The subtext of these signifiers – her body language, youth, attire, and gender – make the girl an object of innocence that is instantly relatable and sympathetic. That such a character is subject to such extreme violence without provocation moreover invokes a narrative of victimhood that heightens viewers’ empathy for the girl and provides moral high ground to the protesters.

Contrasting with the main officer’s gas mask and the police squad’s tactical riot control gear, the woman in red’s fate appears further unjustified. The heavily armored police squad does not appear to be restoring order to a hostile protest, but stands like a row of pawns in a chess game. Indeed, the absence of provocateurs from the image’s frame, enriched by the empty green space behind the woman in red, suggests that police are the true aggressors, unconcerned and unfettered by the operational standards of proper use of force.

These polarizing symbols of innocence and abuse of power imbue the image with an iconic presence. Through an emotional and ethical appeal to viewers’ sense of right and wrong, the woman in red successfully mobilizes public opinion. By simply viewing the image, we begin to root for the woman in red and, by default, the protesters themselves.

Photograph by Osman Orsal/Reuters.

Brandon Thomas is an MA student currently living in Istanbul, Turkey.  He can be contacted at kingblt@mail.sfsu.edu.

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Those Who Forget the Past …

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The above photograph pictures a sluice of life in Mobile, Alabama in 1954. I don’t know who saw the photograph in 1954 or how they might have interpreted it, but it is hard to imagine that one would not have been affected by the ironic tension between the image of an elegantly dressed African-American woman and her niece, shot in “living color”—a  rarity in 1954—and the neon sign to a movie house marking the “colored entrance” and designating a stark difference between black and white.  However one might have received and engaged the photograph when it was first produced there can be no questioning the fact that the scene that it depicts serves as an aide-mémoire to a critical moment in the American experience to which we are all heirs, a collective past that we ignore or repress only at our national peril.

Of course, Jim Crow segregation was not only a southern phenomenon—I remember seeing “colored only” beaches at Asbury Park, New Jersey when I was growing up in the 1950s—but it certainly had a home in Dixie where it was aggressively defended in the name of “states rights.”  And from this perspective the photograph is a vivid and eloquent reminder that there are times when “home rule” and a parochial localism need to be governed by a more capacious moral compass, not least when human and civil rights are at stake.

It is this last point that bears special attention today as the photograph was recently printed in the NYT along with the reprise of a series of similar images shot by Gordon Parks for an issue of Life magazine originally published in 1956.  What makes it especially pertinent is that the Supreme Court is about to rule on a number of cases concerning the constitutionality of gay and lesbian marriages and legal unions. Many are arguing that such decisions should driven by local interests under the rationale of states rights.  Of course, it was not so long ago that the cultural logic that warranted the “colored entrance” sign in the photograph above also proscribed interracial marriage as an unnatural act of miscegenation in many states.  That changed in 1967 with the Courts decision in the case of Loving v. Virginia.  One needs only to ponder the photograph above and the legacy that it gestures to, both past and present, in order to understand why the Court needs to guarantee the civil right of gay and lesbian couples to marry and join in legal union.

Photo Credit:  Gordon Parks/Gordon Parks Foundation

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