NO CAPTION NEEDED – Page 34 – PHOTOJOURNALISM, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Sight Gag: The (Twenty-First Century) Searchers

May 5, 2013May 4, 2013
Lucaites
sight gags
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Credit: Bruce Plante

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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Art, Domestic Space, and Theoretical Archaeology

OK, this is a mash-up. There are two events this weekend that we didn’t publicize earlier, so they are being posted together. First, Photoworks in the UK is putting up the House 2013 exhibition at sites around Brighton. This year’s theme is Art and Domestic Space. To get a sense of the imaginative range, consider that the exhibition includes this photo.

You can read more about the event, artists, and venues here. The exhibition runs from May 4 through May 26.

For those in the Chicago area, the Theoretical Archaeology Group is hosting a conference this May 9-11 at the University of Chicago. The conference theme is Vision, which the paper call defined as including (but not being limited to):

•vision as dream: from its Latin root, visionem – things seen in dreams, the imagination, the supernatural
•vision as sense: the phenomenology of sight and the place of art, aesthetics, and contemporary architectural theory in archaeological contexts
•vision as power and domination: surveillance, panopticons, and legibility
•vision as time and intention: planning, futures, utopias, millennial movements, and the forecasts of the past
•vision as method: the rapidly changing visual methods of archaeology through computer technology and imaging and the ways these methods are transforming epistemology

To see where that lead, you can download the program and abstracts here. Conference details are here.

Photograph by Mariele Neudecker.

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Landscape Photography and the Philosophy of Abundance

May 1, 2013February 20, 2014
Hariman
no caption needed
4 Comments

There is no doubt that landscape photography is popular, but is it really important? When people take photography seriously, they almost always are doing so to focus on the people who are being shown. War, poverty, politics, sports–whatever the subject, the point is to show what people are doing and experiencing. They are shown in specific circumstances, but there is no doubt that who matters more than where.

So why would we value an image that shows us only the land, the flow of light over a hill, and the ease with which the earth exceeds human scale? Perhaps this photograph from Donglan county, Jiangping, Cbina isn’t the best example, as it allows a concession for admiring human handiwork. The exquisitely fitted paddy fields are the result of many generations of careful agriculture, and if their beauty, as if fine jewelry, can’t be appreciated from the ground, they are no less artfully wrought for that.

Like any garden, most landscapes reflect human engineering of one sort or another–and not least the framing and other artistry provided by the camera–so perhaps it’s not such a bad example after all. The landscape could be a subtle exercise in narcissism: Humans can pretend that they are looking at nature while actually admiring their own reflection. Or these photos could be another form of vanity: suggesting an easy harmony between humanity and nature (and perhaps nature’s God). Such photos rarely feature nature’s harshness, where animals will eat their prey before it dies, and in any case the camera will not let you feel how cold the desert gets at night or how flies can drive you mad.

Some landscapes have been put to very good use, and very serious use, in the service of the environmental movement. With images from Ansel Adams’ portraits of Yosemite to the Earthrise on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog to the successive Sierra Club magazine covers to the many documentaries of environmental degradation, landscape photography has been a powerful means for political advocacy on behalf of a planet that cannot speak for itself.

I wouldn’t want to leave it there, however. At some point, the environmentalism (which includes some posts at this blog) overwrites the images; they become merely means to an end, rather than something also capable of guiding other forms of reflection. Let me suggest one such alternative, one that is consistent with an environmental ethos but not the same thing either.

Whatever else it is, the landscape photograph can be an image of abundance. Whether capturing purple mountain majesties or the traces of the wind on a barren sand dune, the landscape shows a world that is immensely larger, more interconnected, more amazing than anything any human society will ever make. Buddhism has tried to capture that immensity, and to contrast it to the paucity of human meaning-making, but I’m not sure the Abrahamic religions and the civilizations they are part of have an equivalent point of departure. Sure, there are Biblical passages celebrating cosmic power, but that’s just the beginning of how one might marvel at the richness of this planet in this universe.

None of this denies the role of scarcity in nature or human affairs. Indeed, the photograph above can be seen as a subtle meditation of how to build a sustainable relationship with scarcity on behalf of abundance. But often abundance is misunderstood and under appreciated (“under theorized,” as they say on my side of the street). A few have approached it–Georges Bataille, Paul Feyerabend, Anne Norton–but an abundance of writing on the subject is not yet the norm.

I don’t think complaints about over-consumption qualify as a sufficient account of abundance, as they presume a more beneficial scarcity. And don’t conclude that this post a brief for obesity, gluttonous oil consumption, or other dysfunctional or non-sustainable habits that harm individuals, society, and the environment. Both abundance and scarcity need to be understood apart from contemporary extremes, not least if we are to see how often those extremes are artificial rather than natural conditions.

Whatever has been said, I doubt that it begins to articulate how much we could learn, and how well we could live, if we were to really look at what landscapes can reveal.

Photographs by Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media and Elmar Akhmetov/Sony World Photography 2013 award.

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“Oh Happy Day”

April 29, 2013April 29, 2013
Lucaites
boots and hands visual memory
6 Comments

This past week marked the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Southern Methodist University. “Oh happy day,” announced the former president. And as is the convention with such dedications, it was a grand celebration of the past president’s legacy. And for the most part photojournalists followed the script, featuring numerous images of the five living presidents collected together in fraternal solidarity, as well as snapshots of various library exhibits such as the dedication to “free people” shown above, or in photographs of Barney and Miss Beazley’s food dishes and the former president’s baseball collection.

The dominant theme for the library is “What would you have done?” inviting visitors to participate with interactive displays allowing them to second guess the president’s various controversial policy decisions, from the search for weapons of mass destruction to the handling of Hurricane Katrina to addressing the debacle on Wall Street, and more. Ironically enough, such judgments were rarely if ever solicited during the president’s two administrations and when they were expressed by various publics (or “free peoples”) they were systematically ignored. But it is of course impossible to visualize something that did not occur—and in any case is not featured in the museum—and so the best that photojournalists were able to do was to call attention to the glitz and glamour.

One photograph, however, broke through the veneer of praise and acclaim that dominated the day’s festivities, although it was not featured in very many places.

The prosthetic leg belongs to Army 1^st Lt. Melissa Stockwell (Ret.), the first female American soldier to lose a limb during the war in Iraq. She is reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with the Bush family standing in the background. Interestingly enough, neither of the former first ladies is looking directly at Lt. Stockwell, each carefully averting their eyes, while former President George W. Bush appears to be staring at her with a befuddled and confused look on his face. We can only imagine what he might actually be thinking, but his gaze clearly directs our attention to her star spangled, red, white and blue prosthesis, an ersatz symbol of the personal and private cost of the war in Iraq that contrasts with the shape and contour of her remaining, normal leg.

We cannot see Lt. Stockwell’s face, but perhaps that is altogether appropriate, for while she is without doubt a hero and the cost to her has been inestimable, she is not alone. Indeed, she stands literally to represent the more than 1,300 military personnel who have lost an arm or a leg (with more than 40 triple amputees and 5 quadruple amputees) in Iraq or Afghanistan (and with more than 63% from the war in Iraq alone). Perhaps this photograph and those statistics should be featured at the museum exhibit which announces: “No stockpiles of W.M.D. were found.”

After all, if a “free people” are truly to “set the course of history” they should have access to all of the facts.

Credit: Allison V. Smith/NYT; Alex Wong/Getty Images

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Sight Gag: Congress In Action

April 28, 2013April 27, 2013
Lucaites
sight gags
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Credit: Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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Photography’s Renaissance and the Curators at Time’s Lightbox

April 26, 2013April 26, 2013
Hariman
no caption needed
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Photographers are finding it harder and harder to make a living while print journalism is being pulled deeper and deeper into the undertow of history, but photography is experiencing a renaissance.

I don’t have the time today to say much at all, but consider two related examples of how photography is thriving as a public art: the rise in highly accessible distribution and in high quality curatorial work, all of which is coming to be taken for granted.

The distribution is amazing. Life and Look are long gone, but the slide shows at In Focus, The Big Picture, and many other online newspapers and magazines are becoming increasingly prominent and sophisticated, and the images are relayed and given added value through the commentary and discussion at any number of photography blogs, all of which of course then flows through social media as well, which also is circulating billions of vernacular images while sending some of them up the media chain, and so it goes on day after day.

This media swirl could be a maelstrom, but in the midst of it all major media are investing in photo editors who are doing amazing work. Sure, cliches still abound, as we are talking about mainstream media in mass societies, thank you very much. People want some of that, and the press has to make a living, and frankly every day isn’t so unique as the Hallmark card might want you to believe. (Speaking of cliches. . . . ) Even so there is plenty of curatorial work, not least by Alan Taylor at In Focus as well as other sources alluded to above, that is remarkably good.

And there is one source that may be an index of the changes that have occurred. Time was never the gold standard in photojournalism (the division of labor with Life probably accounted for a lot of that). But Time’s online LightBox just keeps getting better and better. I used to go to Time for examples of what not to do, and now I kick myself for what I’ve been missing.

The addition of Mikko Takkunen is the most recent example of how Time is making a strong investment in photojournalism. But there is much more going on as well. Just today, I noticed their 365: The Year in Photographs, which I hadn’t seen yet for 2012. The concept is as cliched as it gets, and yet the selection is outstanding: one that reflects a rich aesthetic sensibility that still serves reporting and reflecting on the news.

They aren’t perfect, of course, but the trend is definitely in the right direction. And you can’t say that about a lot of the news business these days. Let’s hope that investing in quality can become part of the business model again, and not just for photography.

Photograph by Narciso Contreras/Associated Press. Dec. 1, 2012. Smoke rises from buildings due to heavy fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government forces in Aleppo, Syria.

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What Do We See When We See Tears?

April 24, 2013April 23, 2013
Hariman
catastrophe no caption needed
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There have been many tears shed this past week, like every week. Somehow those of a woman in China seem especially evocative.

She is siting outside of a house that was damaged by the earthquake last Saturday in Sichuan province, China. Her family’s house, we can assume. You can guess that someone has moved the couch into the courtyard and parked her there, while other items are also being salvaged so that they can have water and perhaps a meal.

A much younger woman is caught mid-motion, and it is easy to imagine her going back and forth, in and out, attending to the many new problems all around her, but always with the unconscious energy of those not yet old. She doesn’t need a heavier coat for the same reason, as she will be continuously active throughout the day. The damage and disruption will be causing her a lot of trouble, but she can be engaged in dealing with that, and the quake already will be moving into the past while she has plenty of future in front of her.

By contrast, the older woman can only sit and absorb the fear and loss still reverberating like aftershocks through her small world. She is bundled up for the cold and seems vulnerable, even precarious, holding on to the armrest as if she might fall, even though her body seems too heavy to move on its own. The bright floral cushions and her stylish hat and coat seem almost a mockery of her predicament: instead of an abundant life, she seems on the verge of abandonment.

And she is crying. Perhaps it’s a delayed physiological reaction to the earlier trauma, or fear of the unknown or of her own vulnerability, or distress at not being able to be helpful, or grief over possessions that have been lost or loved ones who are unaccounted for or have been harmed. Or, or, or. . . . There are many reasons to cry.

Critics of photography often fault the medium for a supposed propensity to emotional excess and to evoking the wrong emotions–not least those self-serving, power-laden, condescending, bourgeois emotions such as pity. This photo could be seen that way, but I don’t think that is really what is being offered. Frankly, there is every indication that the women is going to be OK. So what are we being shown, or asked to do?

One might imagine that she actually is being useful in the scene, that she has a job to do. Her job is to experience the emotional wreckage that is the invisible consequence of the quake or any other disaster. I’m making this up, of course, but to make a point. The quake will have spurred many people to high levels of activity, and activity often is used to manage–that is, defer and deny–intensely negative emotions such as fear, sorrow, and helplessness. That emotional management is necessary to contend with and recover from disaster, and perhaps not entirely a bad thing anyway (let’s not make an art of feeling miserable), but it also is a lost opportunity. What is lost is an ability to know oneself, connect with others, and actually think about the risk that lead to the disaster–a risk that already is being forgotten.

Even when the disaster is far away, the spectators elsewhere may spend more time watching and then find the rest of their day busier for that. And they may volunteer, send money, give blood, and so forth (The photo was used at the New York Times to accompany a story on changes in Chinese philanthropy when responding to disasters.) Disaster coverage can put powerful emotions into circulation, but it also can energize practices of emotional management. Amidst all the activity, there could be no one left to cry.

So let me suggest one answer to the question in the title to the post. When we see tears, we might see an opportunity for knowledge, solidarity, and change that we otherwise would have missed.

Photograph by a stringer for Reuters.

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WItness to a Public Tragedy — One Death At A Time

April 21, 2013December 3, 2013
Lucaites
catastrophe
1 Comment

The anguish displayed in this photograph is palpable. And if one takes time with the image it is hard not to feel this woman’s grief. But of course the image is not so unlike so many similar representations of pain and sorrow—both foreign and domestic—and it is not surprising that we would be unlikely to linger over the image. And truth to tell, while I did come across it in a slide show at a mainstream regional newspaper, it has not achieved a great deal of national circulation. Therein lies its importance.

The woman is the mother of a twenty four year old male who was found, with three others, shot to death “execution style” in an Akron, OH, townhouse. Numbers here are hard to know with exactitude, but according to the interactive website at Slate, he is the 3,788^th person to be killed by gun shot since the tragedy in Newtown, CT. That is approximately twenty five people per day. Or to take a different measure of the magnitude, that is 811 more than the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks. This mother’s grief is no doubt personal, but it is not solitary. It is shared by the parents and loved ones of at least 3,787 others in the past four months, and who knows how many in the months ahead. The problem is that there is no way for us to see them in their collectivity, to host or witness vernacular memorials to their loss of the sort that cropped up spontaneously around Ground Zero, or to publically memorialize their loss in the whole. All we have are fragmented, individual images of the private grief of their closest loved ones. And because that grief is private—even if made public in images such as the one above—we are inclined to look away or ignore it. One important dimension of the significance of events like Sandy Hook is that they animate a profound public presence to problems that otherwise remain private and hidden from the public eye.

Those who opposed the recent effort to legislate even modest federal gun controls laws were fond of arguing that we should not politicize the horrific event that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School; the situation there, they argued, was so fraught with emotion that it would be irrational to respond to this one incident as if in kneejerk fashion. Admittedly, kneejerk responses are almost never productive, and I am inclined to resist purely affective responses to social and political crises, but to ignore the public emotional force of a near constant, sustained and growing problem is, well, thoroughly irrational. But of course, this is exactly what forty six members of the U.S. Senate did this past week when they chose—in the most cowardly of fashion—to vote against a modest, bipartisan plan supported by 90% of the American people to require background checks for online and gun show sales. The senatorial opposition supposedly was based on an absolutist interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment—a standard that we have never maintained for any other constitutional amendment, including the vaunted 1^st Amendment.

The photograph above is not the last one of its genre that we will see in the days, weeks and months ahead. And each time we encounter such an image we need to force ourselves to avoid the impulse to look away as if to honor and respect the privacy of personal loss and grief being experienced; rather, we need to see and witness in such images the public tragedy that is accumulating, one death at a time. And if we can force our legislators to witness and respond to the images each time one occurs, well, all the better.

Photo Credit: Ed Suba, Jr./AP Photo

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Sight Gag: There Are Victims Everywhere

Credit: Chan Lowe, South Florida Sun Sentinel

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21st Century Weather: It’s not the Heat, It’s the Humidity

April 19, 2013April 18, 2013
Hariman
catastrophe
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It was Chicago’s turn (again) on Thursday: rain, then heavy rain, then more heavy rain. Soon the infrastructure as was swamped. Sewers spouted like blow holes, yards and then basements flooded, and highways turned into rivers and then lakes.

Too much water may seem an odd sign of global warming, and I don’t expect any sympathy in Australia, but one of the signs of climate change underway is more violent storms. Annual rainfall might not change much, yet the rains can be less frequent and more intense. The difference in impact between a rain and a downpour is considerable: much heavier loads on urban infrastructure, with more damage and less sustainability for agriculture. City planners in Chicago are drawing up strategies for the warming that will come in the next 50 years, but that doesn’t meant that water control is where it needs to be today.

This photo from a Twitter account was one of many that were being collected by local media. The practice of hooking into social media is a useful response to disasters and part of a larger skill set that is emerging among media providers at all levels. (Think of the collaborations large and small that developed immediately in response to the Boston Marathon bombing, for example.) It’s good to see that people are learning to adapt to environmental change, but that hardly excuses the more comprehensive inertia on behalf of doing little or nothing about the big picture. Society needs to both do all it can to slow down climate change while also investing heavily to prepare for the changes that are likely to occur in any case.

Perhaps that’s why I like this photo. Sure, it provides a great example of how infrastructure was overwhelmed and individuals sorely affected. There are at least three people in Chicago who obviously had a very bad day. Yet it also seems almost elegiac, with the dark water reflecting lights that are impersonal yet warm. The grey concrete structures and strip of grass could be part of a mausoleum. The cars have died, but instead of a scrapyard they seem to be waiting internment.

Thus, the photo captures several kinds of immobility. The drowned cars can no longer move, traffic has been brought to a halt, a dynamic civilization has been stopped by the inexorable persistence of nature, and a society’s inertia–its inability to adapt to changes of its own making–has been exposed.

Yet the photo does more than expose ecological vulnerability and political stasis. It also adds something: a contemplative tone. The lack of movement, activity, productivity, and other signs of a society on the go is framed as if one were in a Japanese garden. The artful quietude and serene tensions suggest that this is not a disaster but rather a place and time for reflection on living in harmony with the world. Human craft and natural processes can be beautifully aligned, or they can be made into a game of chance where the only thing left to do is pretend it’s not so bad.

And once the roads are drained and the basements dried, who will take the time to think about what is too easily forgotten or denied. The disaster can contain a hidden gift–the time to reflect on the need for deep change and with that the possibilities for more artful living.

Photograph by Maddy Clary.

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