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One of the many things that photographs do is to function as mirrors, reflecting ordinary and everyday human behavior.  And because they have the capacity to stop action, they invite us to contemplate what we regularly take for granted.  Sometimes, however, they capture the exotic, or the down right bizarre, inviting us to meditate on the ordinary as it is “reflected” by the  extraordinary. Nonhuman animals, whether wild or domesticated, often stand in for humans, embodying and performing all manner of emotions (like compassion), affects (like raw fear), and norms that invite a more complex or revealing understanding of the “human condition” than we might get by looking at humans alone.  The photograph above is a minor case in point.  The scene is in Kuala Lumpur; the monkey, who is the focus of the image and wears the flag of the People’s Justice Party, rests on a motorcycle and attends to a speech by Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Malaysian opposition.  The monkey wears the flag of the opposition party, so we can assume he (?) is a supporter, but more to the point, is that he is altogether other-directed, respectful of and attentive to the speaker.  A somewhat rare thing in this day and age.   And not just attentive, but contemplative, as he appears to listen with care, weighing each and every word spoken. While only a domesticated animal he nevertheless seems to be a mature model of civic decorum.

By contrast, the photograph below tells a different story.

Here we have Aaron Schock, the representative from Illinois’ 18^th District and the youngest member of the House of Representatives.  He is intently reading the April issue of Washington Life magazine, which advertises itself as “D.C. Metro area’s premiere guide to luxury, power, philanthropy, and style.” There is no way to tell what in particular has captured his attention, but one of the featured articles this month discusses how to beat the stress of tax day and perhaps that is what has him so entranced.  Or maybe it is the fashion report on “Barbie’s new Swag.”  Whatever it might be, it must be pretty important given that just outside of the frame of the picture Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is testifying to the House Ways and Means Committee on Medicare spending.  Given that Schock serves on the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security one would think that he would be concerned about issues related to health care spending for the aged—particularly given the prevailing attitude of House Republicans towards budgeted funding for social welfare programs—and thus would attend carefully to the testimony before engaging the Secretary in dialogue; or at the least we might think that he would show some respect for the speaker as a matter of civic decorum in the most important legislative assembly in the nation.  But apparently we would be wrong in making either assumption, or at least that is what the photograph would invite us to consider. What the mirror here reflects is a self-indulgent and rude individual who appears to show no concern for the gravity of his office or those he serves.

Placed side-by-side the two photographs mirror the extraordinary and the ordinary. Upon reflection it is not clear which is which.  But the only real question is: with which are we willing to identify?

Photo Credit:  Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images; J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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Spring is a season of festivals: Chinese New Year, Carnival, Mardi Gras, and many, many more around the globe.  A recent example is the Holi festival, which you can see in slide shows here and here.  Such celebrations are photographic attractors, and for obvious reasons: brightly colored costumes, outlandish floats, dazzling light shows, and other displays of over-the-top theatricality in ordinary settings provide ritualized departure from winter’s humdrum routines, as well as plenty of eye candy.

And once in a while, a moment of profound visual art.  This stunning photo is a powerful example of how the camera can do more than capture the color and excitement of another culture.

Holi is a festival of color: individuals festoon themselves with paints while great crowds of people are drenched in colored powders of every hue.  Colored water bombs explode, people sing, dance, and surge through the streets, and not a few may be imbibing intoxicants along the way.  There also are vernacular theatricals replaying mythic stories, which is why, in the photo here, “Indian villagers from Nandgaon wait for the arrival of villagers from Barsana to play Lathmar Holi at the Nandagram temple famous for Lord Krishna and his brother Balram, in Nandgaon, India.”

Despite its aesthetic fidelity to the festival, this photo is quite unconventional.  Many festival images feature thick washes of color, the energy and excitement of people in motion, and displays of massed exhilaration.  By contrast, here we see the riot of color framed and subdued by the blue grey building, static poses instead of movement, individuals instead of a crowd, and attitudes ranging from bored to indifferent.  And instead of being in the middle of the action, they and we are waiting for something to happen.  And while that isn’t happening, we can sense that what is yet to come already is on its way being over: the red/orange/yellow/green stains look more messy than festive, and it is easy to imagine how the clothes will be washed, the walls washed down, and the bodies scrubbed to return everyone and everything to the ordinary time and business as usual the extends beyond the ritual celebration.

So the photographer isn’t showing us the festival that we would expect to see–an expectation determined by ideological habits that locate culture in the premodern present of a developing world known for being more colorful than productive.  (See Reading National Geographic for a thoughtful account of how these habits are formed.)  And when you think of it, the virtual experience that is being communicated by the typical photographs is a bit of a sham.  Instead of all the noise and sounds and physical sensations of being pulled along by a crowd, intoxicated with sensual overload, freely yelling and laughing gleefully, we get—an image.  Mute, and also lacking taste, smell, sound, or touch, two-dimensional, static . . . there isn’t much to get excited about.  Of all the media that one might use to capture the experience of being caught up in a moment of collective delirium, photography probably is the worst choice you could make.

And that should tell us something.  Several things, in fact.  One is that the photographs that we do have must be working not merely in respect to the event being recorded, and not merely to reproduce that event, but rather in respect to a larger economy of images, one where they provide visions, or reminders, of social relations that are needed to fill out a larger conception of the world as picture.  Another is that the visual encounter, and the virtual festival, might be doing more than we realize, for example, by stimulating imaginative reconstructions of events as if we were experiencing them through our full sensorium.  (This is in part a psychological question, which I’ll leave to the scientists, but it also could be an interpretive claim.)  A third point is that a specific image may seem more profound to some viewers (me, for example) as it comes to approximate the conventions of the Western fine art pictorial tradition.  Most important, however, photography’s limitations when it comes to festivals could also provide a way of thinking about the role of ritual in human affairs.

And so we get back to the photograph above.  It gives us a more institutional sense of theatricality, and with that, a basis for serious reflection on the relationship between drama and life.  The guys in the picture are not merely villagers out of role, but rather acting like experienced troupers long accustomed to waiting backstage.  And they are backstage, which provides a reverse shot on the explicit theatricality of the festival while miming a type of social theory developed by Erving Goffman and others.

And there is more: they are arrayed as if on stage, but in the sense of being posed for a painting.  The four arched spaces could have been taken from a renaissance alterpiece, one now updated to include Hindu saints.  Or they could be statues on a cathedral, giving us apostles, angels, and perhaps a defiant gargoyle on the inner left.  Krisha has no need of a cathedral, of course, but some of his viewers might need a little help in seeing what is right in front of their eyes.

If you go back through the slide shows on Holi and the other festivals, it turns out that there are quite a few backstage shots.  The photographers are doing what they have to do to file the story to compete in a marketplace of attention, but they are doing more than that as well.  Precisely because the photo above is so static and composed, it gives us some insight into the carnival’s celebration of excess, play acting, and role reversals.

Or perhaps more than one insight. On the one hand, human beings are always on stage, always acting, always in character even when no one is supposed to be looking.  And if waiting is part of the frenzy, then likewise the madness that is supposed to be released during the festival is always with us, no matter how mundane ordinary life may seem.  On the other hand and at the same time, we retain an ability to step back, be still, carefully look at one another, and marvel at the strange, beautiful, fallen angels before us, just as they look and marvel at us.  Indeed, all the distractions of color and action might be there in part to avoid seeing how much can be seen in ritual repose.

So look again.  Notice that those in the photograh are not only being looked at, they also are looking: at others outside the frame, inwardly, and at us.  As we study them, they study us, each mirroring the other.

Photograph by Manish Swarup/Associated Press.

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The “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” aka The Berlin Wall, perhaps the preeminent icon of the Cold War, came down officially in 1989.  Photographs at the time featured throngs of individuals standing on the wall and around it, many using hammers and pick axes to destroy it.  Images of large scale demolition followed and as time has passed we have seen photographs of the wall converted into relics of a distant time and place—who would like to buy a piece of the wall for display in their living room?—or of specific locations such as the famous Checkpoint Charlie paved over with hot dog stands and tourist attractions.

The largest remnant of the wall is a nearly mile long section along the Spree River known as the East Side Gallery on which artists have painted murals—105 paintings in all—marking Germany’s history and the movement to freedom that culminated in 1989.  It is by some accounts the largest outdoor gallery in the world and something of a memorial to its own creation, its vibrant colors a marker of individualism and freedom and a stark contrast to the drab gray of the walls that it covers and which served as the institutional aesthetic of the Soviet Bloc authoritarian political culture that it supplanted.

But alas, the forces of progress known no bounds, as in the recent image above in which heavy industrial equipment is being used to eliminate a large section of the wall to make way for an access road to luxury apartments that are being built nearby.  Where once “the people” thronged to tear down a drab, authoritarian wall in the name of democracy—and, one might assume, the ideology of free markets—the forces of democracy and free markets now conspire to eliminate the colorful vestiges of the freedom that animated it in the first place.

And so we have the photograph below.

Portions of the wall that contain the East Side Galley have been torn down, only to be replaced by drab, industrial grey barriers that gate the pathway to the development of capitalist development.  The only colors that stand out are those of a  woman wearing a red beret and a colorful scarf.  She holds a yellow rose, an international symbol of friendship, but in Germanic cultures also a symbol of jealousy and the fear and insecurity attendant to an anticipated loss.  Individual freedom and a different version of institutional control are once again at odds with one another   And one can only wonder if she isn’t contemplating the opening lines to Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice.  He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Photo Credits: Britta Pedersen/DPA via AP; Carsten Koall/Getty Images

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