The caption at the New York Times said, “Protesters claiming government overreach in Nevada paused to observe the national anthem.”  Which means it didn’t say much at all, except to tell you that the boys are not paying their respects to a fallen cowpuncher or to a good horse that had to be put down.

There really are only two ways to go with this anyway.  One leads straight into the news story and from there to the long, delicious, near-perfect opportunity for exposing the full extent of the stupidity, hypocrisy, and greed of the far right.  The caption’s reference to the national anthem points the way, but frankly, it’s been done.  Check out Jon Stewart or the comments at the Times.  There you can savor the many, many, many ways Cliven Bundy’s armed defiance of the rule of law on behalf of a $1,000,000 theft is wrong, wrong, wrong, not to mention flat out incoherent and crazy to boot.  That all needs to be said, of course, but it is being said.

Which leaves the other path, one that is cued by the picture itself and may involve a more empathetic response–not to Bundy or the other right wing opportunists, but to the ordinary folk who also are getting dragged into the story.  To start with photograph: I can’t help but see a movie still.  And not just any movie, but rather some archetypal though unnamed movie.  The cowpokes look exactly right, the empty vista rising to distant mountain peaks is just as it should be.  And other kinds of emptiness also are typical: no women, Native Americans, cities, highways, or any other sign of civilization and of American diversity are evident.  The trickle of water suggests the landscape is just barely liveable, and so a place for continual struggle–whether against the land, other inhabitants, or the government depends on the story.

This close correspondence with stock footage from the Western is all too revealing.   Sadly, the defenders of Bundy’s ranch are playing out their parts in a B-movie.  Unable for whatever reason to understand the facts or the law or their real interests–although their news source will have a lot to do with that–they are left with mythology to mediate their relationship to a difficult world.  Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s tough out there: the work is hard, the water is drying up, the towns are dying, ordinary people are struggling to get by on less disposable income and no job security, and the long term looks only worse yet.  Yes, they vote for the party that makes it worse, but that gets back to the mythology with which they are so easily manipulated.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m for full prosecution or Bundy and perhaps others as well.  I do think it was wise that the government avoided armed confrontation. ( I wish they would have been equally cautious in some other situations that come to mind involving, shall we say, urban settings.)  There is plenty that can be done down the road to enforce the law and thereby not reward anarchy, threats of violence, and stealing from the American people.  Even so, I keep coming back to this photograph.

Perhaps there is something pathetic about it.  If you don’t want to live in the reality based community, why not try to live in a movie?  But that’s not exactly an admirable response to what is a sad situation.  The title for this post suggests a comic alternative: finding the closest fit among the many possible movies could be a good game in the right crowd.  But that’s not going to do justice to the photographer’s art either.  It’s precisely because one can’t really see the photograph as an image of the present, much less the future, that makes it seem all the more depressing.  What may be a moment of reverent patriotism, however misguided, is also an image of the last cowboys mourning their own demise.  They’ll continue to work and to complain about the government, but given their cause, their ability to stand for something big is gone.

There may be another lesson in the comparison as well.  In many of those old Westerns, ordinary people were being bilked.  Often they would overcome terrible hardships and dangers to persevere in their quest for a good life, only to have it stolen (at least for a while) by some big operator or city slicker who often had the government in his pocket as well.  That’s why Chinatown is a Western, in case you were wondering. And while we’re at it, Westerners might want to reflect on why they were always portrayed as being gullible.

And so . . . here we go again.  The ordinary folks in the West are being swindled, but not by the US government.  (Without federal money and other services such as subsidized grazing fees, many of those Western states would go down hard.)  If you want to know who will be taking the money and then disappearing when the times get harder still, just take a look at those who are bankrolling the attacks on big government.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before.

Photograph by  Jason Bean/Las Vegas Review-Journal, via the Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Regarding the question of income inequality, JFK famously remarked that all boats rise with the tide.  But that was then.  In the global economy of the 21st century, it seems that low tide is the best some will ever see.

These workers are hauling a 10,000-pound cable to a beached ship at one shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh.   The photograph is part of a story at National Geographic on The Shipbreakers, which documents the dangerous working conditions and high profit margins that are business as usual in Bangladesh’s maritime demolition industry.

These shipyards are not exactly case studies in either worker safety or environmental protection, but they are marvels of recycling.  Enormous cargo vessels are striped of everything that can be carted off, and then cut to pieces so that the steel can be rerolled.  You’ve got to admire the extent to which the market can motivate additional use of industrial waste, and generate income all along the redistribution chain as it does so.  At some point perhaps the margins are such that demolition would not be profitable, but obviously we are not there yet as business is booming.  And workers are getting poisoned, maimed, and killed.  Even if the country is better off having these jobs, it also remains poor enough that unionization is not a likely option.  Obvious questions arise about just how amoral capitalism should be.  Are we really supposed to believe that these men–and boys–couldn’t be treated better?  Data presented in the article suggest that the industry can succeed in other countries with better regulation, but for the most part the prevailing international attitude remains the same: let the worker beware.

Up to this point, this post has been following the line of the National Geographic story, and particularly its logic of documentary photography on behalf of social reform.  The photograph is their signature image for the story, and it serves the documentary purpose admirably.  But it caught my eye for other reasons as well.  It is more than another image of substandard working conditions.  The image documents something else as well: the shift in modernism from a utopian to a dystopian trajectory.

To see what I mean, think back to the many images we have seen of ships, buildings, and other marvels of modern technology.  There are at least three characteristics of most of those images that are pertinent here: the technological marvels are displayed when they are new, and as  engines of progress, and as if they are controlled by their designers and operators.  There are exceptions to this optic, of course, but these are examples of the occasional mishap–the ship that ran aground or the plane covered with fire retardant foam because it went off the runway–not metaphors of a global distribution of wealth and poverty.

Now look at the photograph again.  The ships are old, beached, and yet looming over the workers below.  Even in their decrepitude, they seem to be the masters, and the men on the chain gang their slaves.  That would be a mystification, of course, but it points toward another form of invisibility: the owners of the yard, who are the masters, are not seen here (or in any of the photographs in the story, which were taken despite the company’s ban on photography.)  Enough is being revealed, however: the muck that mires and tires the men, the long expanse showing the many ships and the sea that will bring many more (not the rare exception, but the new normal), and above all the sheer magnitude of the steel hulks, which clearly are worth more and objects of greater interest than the men below.

Ironically, the demolition business may be a triumph of sorts for modern economics, but the photograph reveals a larger problem.  Modern technologies and economic development are as powerful as ever, but the idea that progress will bring prosperity to all may now be only a myth.  An idea that is being dismantled day by day–and if not in your neighborhood, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

Photograph by Mike Hettwer/National Geographic.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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The slide shows now contain photographs of cherry blossoms, crocuses poking through the snow, and other Scenes of Spring.  The images are as predictable as the return of the season.  And perhaps just as welcome to many people.  (It snowed where I live yesterday, so I’m more than ready to see things bloom again.)  You won’t see many of those images being held up as models of Engaged Photography, however.  And that may be, if not a mistake, at least a missed opportunity.

This photograph is a wonderful image of spring, and we could just leave it there.  Let me use it as a case in point, however.  On the one hand, it is easy to disparage the image: It is merely pretty and so caters to “aesthetic consumerism”; it is a brief glance at a distant place seen without commitment, and so a form of “tourism” that sets up “a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world”; instead of bringing us closer to the world, it “anesthetizes” us to the real feelings of direct experience and contributes to “a depleted sense of reality”; instead of prompting artistic engagement or thoughtful reflection, it makes “distinctive and vivid artifacts out of cliches” and is “the most irresistible form of mental pollution.”  (If you guessed that all of the quotations came from Susan Sontag, you would be right.)

On the other hand, that’s not exactly a generous attitude toward either the medium of photography or the world it depicts.  Frankly, those are not the first trees or flowers that I’ve seen, so claims about a glancing encounter need to be recalibrated against the shared experience of a common world that is part of the context–and contribution–of photography.  And the fact that a stock image is being recycled needs to be put in the context of the cycles of nature: photographs, like flowers, may be following deep patterns of repetition but are no less remarkable or welcome for that.  And so it goes: the arguments can be dismantled, but sadly the attitude too often remains–and, we should add, is recycled as much as any other cliche.

So why don’t we take a breath and look at the photograph again?  You are looking at Bluebells carpeting a forest near Halle, south of Brussels, Belgium.  Doesn’t it elicit a sense of wonder: say, that natural beauty could be at once so delicate and so profuse?  (Philosophy begins in wonder, according to Plato.)  I think it offers something more as well: a sense of immanence, that is, of how the world is suffused with an abundant indwelling of energy, divinity, call-it-what-you-will: something that is beautiful and sustaining, a presence beyond understanding, beyond representation, that nonetheless suffuses all of reality.

Photography always can be faulted for mediating experience that could otherwise be apprehended directly.  (Philosophical arguments remain, but let the point stand in terms of relative levels of everyday experience.)  But it also can make us aware of what eludes attention precisely because it is so much a part of our experience of the world.  A sense of presence, for example.  Something that is offered to us every spring, and every time we look at a photograph.

Photograph by Yves Logghe/Associated Press.

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