boots and hands – Page 4 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Captioning the New Year

The new year has started very much like the old year: renewed war in the Middle East, exceedingly uncivil civil wars in Africa, spasms of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Asia, drug wars in Latin America, and economic decline everywhere. That’s not the whole story, of course, but it is a continuing story.

Faced with another year of violence, journalists and citizens alike have to make choices about how to depict and understand what is happening, and how to do so without becoming cynical or otherwise numbed to the obligations and possibilities for change. One place to begin is by looking at this photograph.

Recently I got somewhat lyrical about two images of “Hands of Death.” Now we are looking at the foot of a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Rather than speak about the photograph directly, let me ask you how it might be captioned.

That’s a real question. What are we to make of this awful, pathetic, powerful image? How should we label it to use it well–that is, to provide material for public thought?

I’ll suggest several captions that occurred to me, along with their implications for framing events to come. First, “Picking up the Pieces.” Cute, isn’t it? But that is what has to be done. After the dramatic cataclysm of the blast and perhaps heroic efforts to save the wounded, someone has to pick up the shards of material, bone, and flesh that remain. At the same time and for much longer, someone has to pick up the pieces of shattered families, broken communities, a damaged society. The violence that has occurred is still occurring, not only in the continuation of political struggles, cycles of violence, martial habits, and the arms trade, but because the harm already done lasts for decades among the living. Whatever will come to pass, surely one of the tasks facing governments and individuals today is to pick up the pieces still strewn about, the sorry fragments of past destructiveness that have to be gathered up and put to rest as part of moving forward.

I also thought of labeling the photograph as “The Human Remnant.” Although we don’t typically look at the soles of our feet, much less think of them as emblems of humanity, that foot now becomes expressive. It looks capable, vulnerable, well cared for, and generally a sign of how humans are a distinctive species. The top of the foot has been seared by the blast, leaving the soft, fleshy underside as the only trace of the human being who existed before ideology, socialization, self-immolation. Perhaps that foot could have walked down another path; indeed, isn’t that true of everyone? Thus, the image reminds us of how war wastes human potential. But let’s not get too sentimental. He killed three other people, and the soldiers, munitions makers, and strategists also are human, as are the torturers and those who authorize torture. It is not enough for humanity to endure.

Other captions include: “Putting Your Best Foot Forward” and “Adding Insult to Injury.” The first ranges from contempt to cynicism, while the second plays off of the cultural significance in the Middle East of showing the soles of one’s feet. I could go on, but you get the point. One question we face in the new year is how to represent, understand, and react to a world riven by violence. This is not an academic question.

Photograph by Ahmad Masood/Reuters via The Big Picture.

Update: Thanks to the double post at BAGnewsNotes, you can read additional comments there.

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An Act of Contrition

When the CEOs of the “big three” U.S. automakers came to Congress last month with hat in hand seeking a financial bailout they were admonished for their greed and arrogance—if not downright insensitivity—symbolized by the fact that they had arrived separately in private corporate jets. When they returned this past week (via hybrid automobiles) they were a bit more contrite, as captured by the photograph below that appeared in a slideshow at the NYT website. They mark a pious stance, very much in keeping with the image of praying hands often associated with the “Act of Contrition”: “I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee … I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace, to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life.”

The public performance of contrition is a puritanical art form—think of Bill Clinton’s multiple attempts to seek public forgiveness—that demands careful attention to a subtle and nuanced civic republicanism that negotiates the tension between individual humility and the capacity and resolve to do better. One has to be both abject and majestic; totally subject to sovereign forces and yet capable of forging a virtuous path into the wilderness of the future. It is not yet clear that the heads of the auto industry have entirely mastered the role, though the warm color temperature of the above photograph, as well as the one that followed it in the NYT slide show seems to signal some hope.

Cast in a cascading portrait that emphasizes file and not rank, their lips tightly pursed, their eyes riveted in unison upon the source of power and absolution—the duly representative agents of a sovereign “people”—the photograph offers the viewer the statuesque countenance of humble, virtuous men—the elect Captains of Industry—who understand the gravity of their past human failings, and yet nevertheless are eager to take on the responsibility to get the job done right. Robert Nardeli’s eyeglasses are especially notable in this regard. Symbols of human frailty, they sit low on the Chrysler CEO’s nose, allowing him simultaneously to see through them (to the immediate economic problem that sits in front of him) and over them (to the arbiters of the public trust). Surely no less will be needed if the crisis is to be averted and the public’s faith is to be sustained.

But even as the second photograph above inflects the first, framing the act of contrition in the context of a traditional and stylized civic virtue, so too the very next photograph to appear in the slide show seems to inflect the first two photographs.

Here again we see the performance of an act of contrition, but the affect is altogether different: more farce than tragedy. The penitent is immediately recognizable, not just because his body is whole (in contrast to the fragmented bodies portrayed in the first two photographs), but also because of his celebrity and notoriety. Having previously and arrogantly (if ambiguously) admitted to a dastardly crime for which he had been acquitted, here he seeks the mercy of the court by apologizing for his most recent “stupidity” by casting his crime as a “foolish mistake.” The actual performance proved to be unconvincing to the judge, who sentenced the defendant to a minimum of nine years in prison with a 33 year maximum, but it is the photographic performance that bears special significance.

The success of public acts of contrition rely upon a modicum of belief that the “sinner” can rise above his or her human failings—or at the very least that a commitment to live up to the public’s faith will be treated with gravity and responsibility. In this regard, there may be no greater crime than the arrogant disregard of the public trust. And when such arrogance rears its head a second time, the warm tones that give the first two photographs their special cast and resonate with a hopeful future give way to the cold, harsh tones of reality evident in the last photograph. Here, the body, no longer fragmented in terms of the mechanisms of human agency (hands and head) is intact, but more importantly, it also constrained and disciplined by both the instruments of the state (the shackles) and public opprobrium (evidenced by the expressions on the faces of the citizens sitting in the courtroom). Scorned once, the photograph seems to caution, the people look on subsequent acts of contrition with profound skepticism. And, we might add, as well they should.

Photo Credits: Stephen Crowley/NYT; Isaac Bracken/Pool Photo

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Hands of Death

Photojournalism is vexed by the problem of how to portray degradation and death without harming the dignity of those being photographed. The medium’s capacity for evoking emotional response and moral judgment cannot be separated from its ability to add insult to injury. With that problem in mind, one can appreciate why this photograph is not only striking but also an ethical achievement.

A Congolese government soldier lies dead in the road not long after having been shot in the head. He is one of many who have died or will die in the continuing violence in central Africa. It is easy to immediately think of him as a statistic. Another distant victim in yet another civil war, one about which the viewer probably has no interest, no knowledge, no connection. A war that becomes merely another example of the seemingly endless violence spreading through the jungles and across the deserts and up into the mountains around the globe as poor people are recruited to maim and kill one another for the benefit of unseen warlords.

Thus, it can be easy to dismiss him, except for that hand. There is something achingly beautiful about it. It seems so alive, or if we know otherwise, so etched with life. It is a particular hand, not the abstract symbol of labor, but the hand of an individual whose lifetime of experiences, however common, were encountered with all the particularity evident in each crease of skin, the line of each cuticle, the smudge of dirt. More than that, the image evokes all the skill of a hand, its capability for craft and communication. Caught in a last gesture, this hand seems to still want to communicate, to reach out or up, to plead, perhaps, or to touch and say goodbye.

We know that he is dead, however, and so the raindrops on the fingers become poignant. They course down his limb, set in rigor mortis, as they do on any other inanimate thing, and yet they still seem to signify life. As if he were still capable of bleeding, or of washing, as if he could perhaps be revived with cool water. But the point is not to keep hope alive. Rather, the hand offers mute testimony to the value of the life that has been lost. It presents him as an individual person but not merely because he had a name or a personality. And it records his death with dignity, suggesting how much has been lost without showing the devastation of the head wound.

Photojournalism can not be satisfied with avoiding habits of dehumanization, however, as it also has to confront and expose those practices in their worst forms, which are not done by shooting with a camera. This second photograph was in a number of slide shows recently, perhaps because it captures so well the gross destructiveness of war.

These are the hands of men executed near San Ignacio, Mexico. They are among the latest casualties in the border wars between Mexican drug cartels. (For a current report on the violence, see “Day of the Dead” in The Observer/The Guardian.) The photo documents the practice of tying up the victims, which in turn implies that this was a planned execution characteristic of high level gang warfare. It also captures the fact of murder without revealing the identities of the victims or the full violence done to their bodies.

These hands in this image accomplish something different from the work done in the first photograph. Where before dignity was salvaged from chronic violence, now the shameful nature of mass killing is exposed. These men were left this way to demean them, while the photograph exposes where the shame really lies–with those who kill, and with those could try to stop the killing but look the other way.

Equally important, now the implicit metonymy of hands signifying labor is rightfully in play. These men could have been productive laborers (and managers) had the work been available. Whatever bad choices they might have made, the narco-economy and its attendant carnage involves a terrible waste of human potential. The drug trade, like the arms trade, is a global business, and globalization can spread destructiveness just as easily as it can generate wealth. If hands could speak, these would beg to be given a second chance, one with real work that could lead to a better life.

The hands do speak. The question is, who is listening?

Photographs by Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters (via The Big Picture) and the Associated Press.

Update: Thanks to Michael Shaw for the double post at BAGnewsNotes, where you can read additional comments by readers there.

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The American Gulag

The prison system in the United States gives a hard meaning to the adage “out of sight, out of mind.” Just as the prison keeps its inmates out of public view, the buildings themselves are placed well off the main roads in what are often economic dead zones. Few ever go by the place, and no one ever needs to go inside unless you work there, are making a delivery, or want to visit with an inmate. And most of those people won’t be allowed to see anything like this:

This stunning photograph by Andrew Lichtenstein shows a prisoner’s hands being held out in order to be handcuffed before he is taken to a shower. I find the image deeply disturbing–as if it were something I would see because I was already insane, looking down the asylum hallway and still accosted by hideous visions distending reality. The hands lie there as if the body is a corpse, worse, as dismembered body parts. The sickly green color scheme, hard surfaces, and sharp, metallic fixtures are a nightmare of institutional authority gone horribly perverse. The red stains on the wall and the white stains on the linoleum floor look like traces of bodily fluids, and the yellow lines suggest a steady traffic in gurneys and terror always rationalized by official procedures.

The image doesn’t tell only one story, however. Those hands may be murderous. Tattoos are commonplace today, but in this tableau the heavily tattooed arm seems demonic, as if the outer sign of snakes writhing within. There seems to be no place for innocence in this world, which can only provide further justification for rough justice, inhumane conditions, and policies that do more to perpetuate violent crime than prevent it.

This marked, abject body waiting to be shackled is a fitting reminder of the cesspool at the end of America’s criminal justice system. (“Criminal justice system”–a phrase in which each term twists the others.) The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world; only Russia is even close, and the European states are far, far below. The causes include both excessive income inequality and the disintegration of the family. Given that both conservative and liberal arguments are proved correct, you might think that a strong bi-partisan effort could be made to keep millions of Americans out of prison. Think again, for why would anyone bother to fix something they never see?

This image and others like it can be seen in the exhibition “Behind Bars: Photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein” through January 4, 2009 at fovea in Beacon, New York. Lichtenstein’s portfolio includes the eloquent book Never Coming Home, which documents the funerals of eight soldiers killed in the Iraq war. You can see one of those heart-rending images in an earlier post at this blog on Shared Suffering in Iraq and America.

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Political Theater on the Trading Floor

October 13, 2008
Hariman
boots and hands economic optics the visual public
2 Comments

The collapse of the global financial markets is difficult to understand in part because it is difficult to visualize. That may be why there have been so many photographs of traders in various states of consternation or dismay. The shot is so conventional that photographers always are looking for a fresh angle, like this:

The trader on the right is literally laying down on the job. His more conventional associates don’t mind, however, because there is no longer a job to do. They might try to drone down into the disaster, but this guy knows better. That isn’t going to save him, however. He also looks like he’s laid out on a hospital gurney: the skin tone of his bare feet is picked up by the flesh colored shirt and bare head to suggest the vulnerability and dependency we experience when wearing a patient’s smock. He could be looking at his X-rays before they put him under. He’s cool but not in control; he’s just comfortable with not being in control.

The contrast between the the bare-footed patient and his environment pervades the image. Amidst the institutional decor, messy array of machines and printouts, and cyborg workers, he looks like a human being. The photo is unusual in featuring his composure, but still conventional in that it brings the global, systemic, structural collapse down to human scale. As does this:

From feet to hands, but to the same effect. Like the image above, this is both a conventional photo and an attempt to be distinctive. Just as there are many shots of trading floors littered with equipment and distracted traders, so are there many photos of people staring into screens that bear only bad news. And just as the first photo was keyed by those bare feet, here the trader’s hands define the picture. He, too, has stopped working–leaning back to hold his head as if it to keep in place while he watches the disaster unfold. Hands are symbols of work, and his have been taken off the task. They can’t stop the lethal dive depicted on the screen. Even so, they are young, strong, capable hands. The photo may be reassuring after all.

There is much to not like about the convention of reducing collective trauma to images of traders reacting to the news. The images are highly gendered, fragmentary depictions of isolated individuals. Anything like a social fabric or common good is left to the mise en scene of the market–what most of us would consider a seriously mistaken substitution. Worse, perhaps, the harm that will in fact be distributed across millions of lives for years to come is localized–as if only these guys are bearing the brunt of the crash.

The public often has to make do with less than optimal resources for understanding and judgment. These images have their problems, but they also may be an attempt to put a human face–and feet and hands–on the problem. Seeing the disaster as the operation of an alien system with its own harsh logic can only make the problem worse, destroying political will and accountability alike. These images are performances of the body politic–albeit the fragmented body politic of a liberal society–and they each offer a slightly different perspective and varied means for grasping and responding to the crisis.

But good theater will not always be reassuring. So it is that I’ll close with this image.

The intention to capture a distinctive image may seem to be all there is to the photo, but there is more. The hands on head cue attitudes of dismay and capability just as in the image above. This time, however, the economic data are not set apart from the trader, not placed in a safe distance in the background (or off screen as in the first photo). While looking at a screen, he has become a screen. Although still caught up in his human choreography, he appears completely subsumed under the operation of an alien system with its own harsh logic. This is not so reassuring.

And so we need other resources for dealing with our fate. Humor, for example. In this case, an excellent post labeled Sad Guys on Trading Floors. Dozens of photos, each with a clever caption. Enjoy the show.

Update: See also Images of a Crisis? at Spiegel online; the link comes courtesy of Conscientious. And here’s another variation on the theme: Traders with Hands on their Faces.

Photographs by Adi Weda/European Pressphoto Agency, Martin Oeser/Agence France-Presse-Getty Images, and Hassan Anmar/Associated Press.

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The Lone Red Shoe

It is hard to look at the images of the “riots” in Tibet and the Chinese provinces and not be reminded of our own history of human rights repressions, and especially the violence that erupted across the South in the early 1960s. Just as then, those animated by a commitment to non-violent protest and resistance are being accused of causing the disturbance. And just as then, the visual evidence seems to give the lie to the claims by those defending the repressive regime—or at least it did until the Chinese government began to censor internet sites and to expel foreign journalists. And perhaps with good reason …

The Chinese government maintains that the police and military have used “restraint,” refusing to “open fire” on the crowds. That might be true enough (though there are conflicting—albeit unconfirmed—reports of nearly 30 Tibetan Monks being shot by the police in Aba, Sichuan), but the photograph above from Nepal and others like it would seem to give new meaning to the word “restraint,” at least as it is used by governments in the area. The lone individual laying in the middle of the street seems to be helpless, and even if he had previously been “riotous,” here he certainly isn’t much of a threat to anyone or anything, least of all a squad of riot troops who could easily detain and arrest him if that was their goal. And yet the soldier about to beat him with a baton has his legs spread and weight back to bring the full force of his weapon to bear upon the face and head of his target, a victim who can only feebly attempt to ward off the blow.

What makes the photograph all the more difficult to look at—and yet also somehow hard to look away from—is the red shoe left sitting in the middle of the street. We can only assume that whoever lost the shoe literally ran out of it in a frantic effort to escape the oncoming mayhem. But more than that, it is only a flimsy canvas shoe, a stylized covering for the foot that offers the merest of protection. Notice how it sits in stark contrast to the heavy leather boots worn by the approaching troops. And thus, the photographer has revealed the sense in which the supposed physical threat posed by the protestors is no threat at all. What we have here, then, is an image not of restraint but of brutality. The difference between the shoe and the boot marks the fundamental inhumanity that all too easily results when established regimes set out to suppress ethnic and sectarian differences. We’ve seen the inhumanity before, and not just in foreign lands.

But there is more, for the image of the lone shoe also invites comparison with another photograph taken during the Burmese government’s brutal suppression of protests challenging its violation of human rights. That crackdown occurred in Myanmar this past September:

The obvious difference is that here we have hundreds of shoes and sandals, not just one, and so the magnitude of the situation is somewhat more pronounced. But now, the street, virtually empty with the exception of a single individual lurking in the margin, is being guarded by troops as if democracy will arise spontaneously from the shoes and sandals left lying around. And it might, for that is the mythic promise of the democratic movements that the Chinese and Burmese governments fear. My fear is that it will take more than simple faith for sandals and flimsy shoes, however numerous, to challenge jackboots in any effective way. This is not to say that it cannot happen, but it will surely take more than lone individuals to forge the battle, whether lurking in the shadows or standing up against tanks in a public thoroughfare.

Photo Credits: Euan Deenholm/Bloomberg News; Mandalay Gazette-AFP/Ghetty Images

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Traces of a Vanishing World

In his magnificent book The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer includes a meditation on how different photographers’ styles are revealed by looking at how they have photographed hats. Dyer is a master at zeroing in on the distinctive genius of the individual artist, but attention to the distinctive object can lead down other interesting paths as well. John and I have been intrigued by how frequently isolated shots of hands or feet occur in the daily papers and slide shows. The feet can be bare but usually display footwear, and often the footware alone are featured. Like this:

Although actually taken in February (in North Carolina), this photo presents a typical end of summer shot. The winter light and muted colors imply a transition from summer to autumn and so from leisure to work. The lone sandal probably was lost as someone was playing in the waves and then washed up later. Someone else probably stuck it in the sand to help it be found again.I’d like to think that the motive was not so pragmatic. Perhaps someone saw the sandal and propped it up as a votive offering, a small memorial to the end of the season. Even better if it were taken off and stuck there, dooming its partner to the trash bin but becoming the more fitting gesture for saying goodbye. By leaving this fragment behind, you get to take a piece of the place with you. Leave a bit of your heart here, and you can have an inner beach when back in the daily grind. These thoughts make the photograph itself seem less contrived as well: what hints at being posed and a bit too neatly elegiac can be thought of instead as a small and beautiful act of homage.

Yesterday John commented on a pile of shoes in Baghdad that looked like they were from a lost and found bin. As he noted, the shoes were the remains of people who had disappeared due to a bombing. What little was present signified how much had been lost. This theme of loss doesn’t haunt every photograph of empty shoes, but it can mark a vanishing summer–and the disappearance of much more as well.

You are looking at a photograph of the Barrios de Luna reservoir in Northern Spain. The reservoir, which is dry due to a severe drought, is aptly named for it does look like a moonscape. As above, the image positions the viewer between earth and sky, nature and culture, and, once you’ve read the caption, between water and land, now ironically so. Just as the shoe is missing its owner, the lake bed is missing is reason for being. Again, the lighting and color tone suggest that the good times were in the past. And they were.I can’t help but see the shoe as a track, like a fossilized footprint. It’s as if we are looking back to a prehistoric riverbed, at the traces of a lost species, homo sapiens sapiens, who were not so wise after all. Someone lost a shoe, probably when playing in the water long ago. Now it becomes an accidental memorial, the trace of a vanishing world.

Photographs by Josh Kruzich/National Geographic Daily Dozen; Eloy Alonso/Reuters.

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"Lost and Found" in a Baghdad Marketplace

March 13, 2008
Lucaites
boots and hands no caption needed visualizing war
1 Comment

Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad early this week, the deadliest single day for Americans troops since the “surge” this past summer. But, of course, it would be hard to know this by reading the national newspapers. On the NYT website it barely received notice at all, cast in tiny type and posted below the bar on the home page, subordinated to the carnival of reports on the sexual peccadilloes of “Client #9,” as well as stories on efforts by the Federal Reserve to jump start the economy, and the travails of college and university soccer, track, and softball coaches who simply don’t have the resources dedicated to “revenue earning” sports like basketball and football. The story of the bombing faired only slightly better at the WP, where it was front and center on the home page, but again set in small type and subordinated to a much larger headline announcing “Coupon Cutters Help Military,” a human interest story about senior citizens at an American Legion Post who do “their part in the war on terror” by clipping coupons and sending them to military families overseas.

As for pictures of the bombings, well, nada. Nothing. A visual void. It is always hard to know how to judge the absence of evidence, visual or otherwise, but in this case it would seem that the lack of pictures is evidence of the very presence of absence; or put differently, we have become so inured to the continuing presence of the war, it has become such an ordinary, everyday event, that reports such as this don’t even rise to the level of awareness. “Eight soldiers died in Baghdad yesterday, and in basketball the Celtics beat the Bulls …”

One month ago today we reported on what was then considered to be the “worst attack in months.” It was a suicide bombing in a Baghdad marketplace, not unlike the event that took place this week. No U.S. troops were killed in this earlier bombing, though 65 Iraqis died and twice that many were injured. But there were pictures of the after-effects of the attack, and perhaps we can learn something by looking at one of those photographs published at the time in a NYT slide show.

It is an altogether curious image. The caption reads “Iraqi soldiers and civilians examining a pile of shoes left in Ghazil market.” That might at first seem obvious, but if you bother to trace the line of sight of just about everyone in the photograph you quickly realize that no one is actually looking at the pile; indeed, they seem to be looking almost everywhere but at the shoes. It is almost as if the shoes are hidden in plain sight—rather like news reports of the more recent bombings. And there are other oddities as well. For one, the shoes themselves are massed together as if a “lost and found” collection. The passive construction of the caption—“a pile of shoes left in Ghail market”—is telling in this regard, suggesting the image of articles of clothing either misplaced or forgotten by irresponsible school children, not the remains of the dead and injured that have been purposefully collected. For another, the scene is thinly populated, certainly not what we would expect to see in a vibrant marketplace; but note too that the people that are there are spaced in a pattern that invites a sense of complete and utter disconnection. Ironically, then, we have a public marketplace in which people are present, but any sense of the public communion essential to a productive and robust civil society is altogether absent.

In one register, then, the photograph is a visual study of the trope of presence and absence. The shoes of the people who should be populating the public space are present, but the people themselves are absent; the state (“Iraqi soldiers”) and private individuals (note the more general characterization “civilians” and not the more politically affected “citizens” ) are minimally present, but the civil society that might connect them as part of a common culture in communion with one another is absent. But more than this, the representations of presence and absence function as an allegory for the effects of war and collective violence on civil society more generally, framing the photograph itself as something of a metaphoric “lost and found box”: the visual display of a scene in which a thoroughly fragmented polity searches in vain for what for what it can never quite seem to find (or what it desperately needs), even as it implicitly harbors the hope that what is lost is safely waiting to be found hidden away somewhere.

The oft told myth, of course, is that wars unite communities in common cause—and in some ways they surely do that—but such is also a romantic notion that sublimates the larger sense in which wars tear civil society asunder, making it unrecognizable even when all of the elements seem to be in place. This is one of war’s most profound tragedies and it is often hard to see.

Photo Credit: Eros Hoagland/NYT

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Ben Bernanke: Report from the Castle

I doubt that many photography class assignments include problems like this: “Imagine that you are going to photograph the chairman of the Federal Reserve; what angle should you take?” The New York Times had an interesting answer:

There are obvious reasons for choosing such an unusual approach to the chairman. Now that photo editors can choose from among 10,000 slides per day, photographers will resort to anything out of the ordinary to catch the editor’s eye. Nor was the the House Financial Services Committee hearing likely to provide much visual interest if left to its own droning routine. But neither of these considerations suggest that the photograph should have been in full color front page above the fold. So what is going on?

I can’t account for the intentions of those involved in production, but I can speculate about how the photograph can influence understanding of the hearing. Two things are notable: how little we see of chairman Ben Bernanke, and what we else see instead. Although just a few feet (so to speak) away from the camera, the chairman appears distant, somehow in his own space that is not directly accessible to us. The dark lines of table edge and pant leg form a V that, when framed by the top of the photograph, form a narrow aperture. It is as if we are looking through a keyhole, which is how K sees the great and mysterious Klamm in Franz Kafka’s The Castle.

Behind Klamm/Bernanke is a bare, blue-white space, as if he is on a promontory and there is no higher authority over him. He must be far from those sitting across from him as well: The caption says that he “signaled his readiness to further reduce interest rates.” We talk, but he signals, for surely his intentions are too great or mysterious to be communicated in full. As he sits alone at the heavy wood table, he is wholly indifferent to those looking up at him. He doesn’t look down on us as if to dominate us, no, that would be too much to hope for, because then we would know, or at least have some assurance, that he was aware of us and might want to, if not actually talk with us, at least contemplate the distance between us. And that distance is very great indeed.

My apologies to Franz Kafka, but the analogy still holds when we turn to the rest of the picture. K yearned for an audience with Klamm but instead had to contend with far less auspicious bureaucrats. Those standing between K and Klamm were of course the surest testament to the power of the one and the hopelessness of the other. And so we see the feet of unnamed minions from the Federal Reserve. These are the men in the gray flannel suits. Uniformity, austerity, discipline, seriousness–bureaucratic character is being performed, and woe to those who would attempt to step over these officials. And how could we, who are literally at the place where one can lick their shoes, how could we do anything but look up and beg, like a dog for a bone? Like a dog.

Photograph by Doug Mills for the New York Times. Shameless plug: If interested a further discussion of the bureaucratic style, readers might want to look at chapter five of my Political Style: The Artistry of Power.

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My Vote, My Valentine

The Super Tuesday elections were reported yesterday with stories and graphics and victory celebration photos, and for once the hype may have been matched by the results and the good vibe. Perhaps the turnout will help the media move on from their theme of the week, which was fretting about the “arcane” primary process–as if monarchy would be more rational or bureaucracy more transparent. In any case, we all can take a breath, plug the answering machines back in, and get back to our less than super-sized routines. As one last look back, however, I’d like to put up a couple of images from the slide shows at the major papers that were part of yesterday’s coverage.The slides depict the considerable variety and common shabbiness of the places where America votes. Schools, churches, laundromats, garages, you name it–we haven’t moved up much from the days when Americans voted in taverns. Any one of the slides would do, but this one caught my eye for several reasons:

By cropping the photo to feature people from the waist down, the trope of metonymy is put in play. John and I write about this focus on “boots and hands” from time to time because, first, such images are everywhere despite their individual peculiarity, and, second, they push forward a particular idea of the body politic. This image is a case in point: voters are known by their anonymity but assumed to have walked the walk and taken a stand on behalf of the polity. They are inherently fragmentary and so needing to be aggregated, but also inevitably plural and otherwise part of a society in which their are many walks of life. (If you don’t like cliches, even when used to make a point, this is not your day.)

The photograph elaborates this conception of democracy. By cutting out the markers of personality, we are left with a social scene and social types. The scene is totally functional: voting machine with wheels and handles for being moved in and out of storage, bare floor, warning pylons for when the floor is being washed, folding chairs and tables in the background. This is never going to be a personal, intimate place but rather a place where people congregate to do something in common. The clothes of the two figures take it a step further: jeans, dark coats, boots or worn shoes, these are the clothes of the mythical common man. She is a bit more stylish, he compensates for that. Their clothes are unconsciously coordinated with each other, as is her bag with the cloth on the voting booth. The only really garish color is the weird aquamarine of the machine, as if it were something for a party, which it is.

This last suggestion that democracy is somehow both routine and festive is taken a step further in the second photo.

Again we have a functional scene–the wood floor and brick wall of a recreational center–and a social type–the elderly. There also is the visual irony, which contrasts the seriousness of voting with the frivolous decor of a holiday, and the bent postures of old age with the frizzy excessiveness of young love. The visual grammar places the elderly in the space of the real, with the decorations in the place of the ideal. Their complete lack of attention to the decorations makes it seem that whatever cupid symbolizes, its completely irrelevant to the preoccupations of old age.

There is a third contrast as well. I doubt that those in the picture are oblivious to either romance or decorative arts, but they are paying attention to their ballots. Thus, the photograph depicts not only youth and age but also romantic love and love of country. The photograph’s ironies are superficial but pose an interesting question: Can one have two loves? This is a fundamental question in a liberal-democratic society, where we regularly experience the tension between the right to a private life and the value of government by the people. The answer to the question is a choice. You can see the two loves as existing only side by side and ironically so, or you can see them as different but ultimately compatible. And on that question, the polls are always open.

Photograph by Nathaniel Brooks and Monica Almeida for The New York Times. The first was taken at Saint John the Evangelist church in Barrytown, New York, and the second at the Belvedere Park Recreation Center in East Lost Angeles, California.

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