There have been so many photographs of the democratic protests in Egypt than one can’t help but look for something unusual.

This image is a remarkable exception to the parade of images: it contains no demonstrators, no police, no political slogans, no action.  We don’t see crowds or tanks or flags or blood or burned out buildings.  So what is being shown?

Perhaps irony.  I thought about making the caption “Things Go Better with Coke.”  Some political commentators are quick to contrast citizenship with consumerism, and so this image of pop bottles being “repurposed” as Molotov cocktails can seem doubly misplaced: the consumer product shouldn’t become the vehicle for political action, and the act of making these bottles into weapons degrades politics by turning it to violence.  It seems that Coke can’t win as a public good: no matter how much it might be the people’s drink throughout the world, it either distracts or destroys.

But that’s too clever.  Whatever irony is there–and some is there–the mood of the image is something else.  Organized trash is still trash, and that’s the best in the scene.  Broken and crumpled plastic are so much flotsam in this sea of stone, and the dingy case holding the grungy bottles is hardly a triumph of civilization.  True, someone carefully prepared each of the weapons, but now they sit there as if forgotten like some old thing left at the beach at the end of the season.  The scene seems forlorn, as if they called for a revolution and nobody came.

But, of course, the people did come.

Now we’re back to a more conventional image, and a beauty at that.  This view of Tahrir Square in the evening, filled with crowds and lights, brings back so much of what was missing before: the city framing the demonstration reminds us of its purpose of political reform on behalf of the general welfare, something that is being articulated by the banners and everything else flowing into the square.  The intensity of the scene is communicated both by the sheer density of the crowd and by the lights burning brightly.  The symbolism is obvious but no less meaningful for that: a democratic Egypt is awakening, blazing forth here and there and here again amidst the darkness produced by decades of authoritarian rule.

So it is that we are tempted to allow the second image to displace the second.  How much nicer it is to be lifted up emotionally rather than pushed into sarcasm or discouragement.  The pictures are not merely opposites, however.  Light is an effect of fire, and electric lights are the descendants of fire, and Molotov cocktails are weapons of fire.  More to the point, one reason the demonstrators can fill the square on Day 15 of the protests–one reason they can still be there, well-organized against the night–is that not too long ago some of them were making and throwing Molotov cocktails.  Despite all the froth in press coverage about Facebook and the Internet, this revolution has been a bloody battle.

We all should be grateful that it may be developing into a more peaceful and more recognizably political process.  But amidst the calls for “calm” and “patience,” we should not forget that democracy at times has to resort to violence.   Those who start there should be trusted even less than those who call for civility when it protects the corrupt, but there are other alternatives.  I don’t know whether the bottle bombs shown above were ever used, or even if they were used by those opposing Mubarak or those supporting him.  In Egypt as elsewhere, most of the violence will have been directed against the protesters by reactionary forces who usually are well-armed.  The fact remains, however, that more than one democracy has of necessity been born in violent confrontation.   The lights in the square this week may have been started by those who last week were willing to fight fire with fire.

Photographs by Ed Ou/New York Times and Hannibal Hanschke/DPA/ZUMAPRESS.com.

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One of the interesting facets of photographs is how they can contain information that often goes unnoticed.  The same is true of the discourses of empire.  For those living at the center of the system, the operation and effects of the imperial state might as well be invisible, for they have been neutralized by long periods of habituation and denial.  Thus, one thinks nothing when presidents speak of the need for “stability” in a region, not questioning how that is code for “continued support of authoritarian rule.” Or one is genuinely puzzled why demonstrators in a small country far away would burn an American flag–what have we ever done to them?  Even when caught up in the euphoria and instinctive identification with a democratic revolution, it is easy to overlook the evidence that at the end of the day geopolitical relationships may prove to be, well, stable.

This is one of many photographs from Egypt’s civic uprising that features army tanks surrounded by the demonstrators who could conceivably have been or still become victims of a military assault.  As John Lucaites pointed out on Monday, the images draw on a rich iconography of political upheaval while capturing key elements that are obviously important yet still not fully understood in this particular event.  The ongoing, often micro-political negotiation between the people and the army seems to be crucial to whether the demonstrations succeed or are betrayed and crushed.  That alone would seem to be reason enough for the photograph.

Even so, you might wonder why no one bothers to talk about the tanks themselves.  They are symbols, sure, but they also are real tanks having specific designs and manufacturers.  And that’s where some of the “missing” information is actually there to be seen.  The tanks in the long line are versions of the M1 Abrams.  I’m not positive about the tank on the left, but I’m fairly sure it’s an M60 Patton.   Want to guess where they are produced?

Tanks are not cheap, of course, but Egypt has the benefit of $1.3 billion in US military aid every year.  Although President Obama’s recent statements on behalf of regime change are a good thing, don’t think they is going to change the client status of the Egyptian state or the role of the Egyptian army, its officer corp properly schooled by the US, in maintaining that relationship.  As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others have already said, the military aid is not going to change.

And so a photograph of a democratic moment is also a photograph of an imperial relationship.  From there, its a small step to answering the question of “why they hate us.”

Unlike the army, the Egyptian police have not been playing nice.  Gassing, beating, shooting, spying on, and probably torturing the demonstrators, they have revealed in a few days what they have been doing continuously for many years.  The basic reason that many people hate the US is that we maintain dictators who run police states.  We support those autocrats by providing the enormous advantages in money, weapons, information, and just about anything else they need to suppress their own people. And the people notice.

So it is that we have the photograph above: If you look at the figure on the right, you might see the incarnation of a Fox News nightmare: the terrorist, black on brown, his face covered in defiance, his eyes sharply focused in hate.  (Or you can see a young man wearing a scarf to protect himself against tear gas and perhaps the secret police.)  But look at the tear gas canister on the left.  It will have been fired by the police into the crowd; its effects range from painful to terrifying to debilitating.  And look at the bottom of the can: “Made in USA.”

Photographs by Miguel Medina/AFP-Getty Images and Yannis Behrakis/Reuters.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Some photographs require that we ask the question we should ask of every photograph: What are we seeing?

A boy?  A boy looking at something we can’t see?  A boy posing for a photograph?  A boy and some sort of mask?  Perhaps a boy’s face shrouded in darkness and doubled by something inchoate; but what is that?

So we turn to the caption, as much for reassurance as for information.  Reuters labeled the photo as “A Free Syrian Army fighter looks through a hole in a wall in Aleppo’s Saif al-Dawla district September 22, 2013.”  OK, I guess that shape on the left is a hole, although it still looks like a brown papier mâché mask, something that is more akin to modern sculpture than conflict photography.  It is a hole through which the light illuminates a rock wall, but the dimensions seem off or the perspective turned somehow.  The odd shape, unfamiliar surface, and strict two-dimensionality of the image create a sense of optical distortion, almost like the anamorphic projection of a skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors.  And so it could be a mask–or a death mask–after all.

Which is why I think the caption provides its own share of distortion.  I’m sure it’s accurate enough, but really: did you see a “Free Syrian Army fighter.”  Were the photo from Africa, wouldn’t he have been likely to be labeled a child soldier?  And is he looking as much as he is being offered to our view?  And does the place and date tell you anything about the substance of this photograph, that is, about this work of art?  Captions are important, but they also can be instructions in how not to see what is being shown.

So it is that I grasp for analogies.  Instead of a fierce freedom fighter, I see something closer to the funerary portraits of Roman Egypt.  (The paintings were placed on the mummified remains, and masks were made as well.)  Set amidst the dark background, the boy above seems almost to be a life-like image of himself (which, of course, he is to us).  Lifelike yet motionless, showing both the mummified head and the painted face: it’s as if he were already dead.

And he may be.  Aleppo is dying.  Syria is dying.  In the second decade of the 21st century, something of humanity itself seems to be dying.  Because that has happened before, we know that the human spirit can be regenerative, but the photo may be capturing a glimpse, as if through that odd hole, of another turn in the story.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this photo is how its slow, still artfulness may represent the way that Syria is dying.  It’s as if the energy already has been directed to creating the semblance, crafting the memorial, and remembering the dead rather than saving lives.

Those on all sides seem content to let Syria die, while saving just enough to maintain appearances.  If that’s so, all that’s left is portraiture.

Welcome to death’s studio.  There’s a mirror if you would like to use it.  We’ll be ready for you soon.

Photograph by Loubna Mrie/Reuters.

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I think it’s safe to say that it’s a slow news summer in the US.  Ironically, Europe and the Middle East are up to their ears in trouble: floods, riots, civil war in Syria, a coup d’etat in Egypt, . . . . but that doesn’t exactly qualify as news in the US press.  The unrest is so pervasive elsewhere, however, that you can have a choice of themes as you browse through the slide shows.  Water canon shots were big this week, for example.  Tear gas, and the ingenious ways to deal with it, remains a staple.  What caught my eye, however, was the way that the Guy Fawkes mask has become an international symbol.

This photo is from Salvador, and the one below is form Istanbul.  (You can locate hundreds of examples from around the world with a few key words at Google Image, but these are more recent than many.)  I love the pepper spray shot, as it perfectly captures one function of a mask.  The cop is spraying as if at the protestor’s face, except that the guy actually has his backside to him.  By putting the mask on the back of his head, he simultaneously deceives and mocks, protecting himself and exposing the authority’s abuse of power.  Of course, the cop may know better, but the fact that he shoots anyway perfectly replicates both the mask’s function and his own excessive use of force.  Instead of being a mere prop, but mask seems to write the play.

This more pensive image also has the mask off the face.  The woman in Taksim Square has pushed it atop her head so that she can use her phone during the demonstration.  Illumined by her phone, she is a small island of repose amidst the raised arms and flags of the crowd.  Once again, however, the mask works just as well where it is.  Whatever her private message, she continues to play her public role.  The mask now works almost as a hat or crown as well, but even more as a disembodied face, smiling Cheshire Cat-like through the fray.  And that is what a mask is, of course: a face without a body, ready to be adopted by anyone who is willing to become two personalities instead of one.  Or you can think of that face reposing on her body, as she becomes a willing platform for something at once more ethereal and larger than herself.  A single person and a continuously replicating image are easily conjoined, so much so that she can push it up like a pair of sunglasses while it can continue nonetheless to imply havoc.

The Guy Fawkes mask now has a history that includes the V for Vendetta comic book and film, the hacker group Anonymous, and more as well.  It has been banned in Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Canada.   (Yes, Canada; maybe it’s that civility thing they’ve got going.)  Given that smile, it shouldn’t be without irony, and it’s not: the mask, a best seller at Amazon.com, makes money on every sale for Warner Brothers.  (Yes, Warner Brothers–not your typical revolutionary anarchist movement.)  Given its complexity, ubiquity, wide distribution, and visual salience, perhaps it might become a sort of measuring stick: something photographers can focus on to capture at once what is both uniform and yet locally distinctive about this demonstration or that protest.

In any case, you don’t have to wait until November 5 to celebrate Guy Fawkes day.  Around much of the globe, it’s now a regular occurrence.  After all, around much of the globe, people are upset about the bad behavior of their elites.  But that’s over there.

In the US, the big story at the moment–other than the All Star Game, of course–is that the Senate voted to keep the current filibuster rule–and this is supposedly a breakthrough, a push back against the political paralysis that has resulted from–you guessed it–overuse of the filibuster.  This is not a good play.  At the very least, someone ought to show up properly attired.

Photographs by Jorge Silva/Reuters and Stoyen Nenov/Reuters.

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Last night millions of people were watching the Academy Awards ceremonies, which might be thought of as Hollywood’s prom.  You might expect that this next sentence would remark that at the same time millions of other people were suffering and fighting for something more important. But let’s not be too quick to separate society and politics.

This photo of Egyptian twenty-somethings uploading video from Tahrir Square is a portrait of political action–and a study in youth culture.  They could get beaten, imprisoned, and tortured for what they are doing–and they are wearing just the right kind of student fashions and working on what is the cool computer for anyone who gets anywhere near a university.  We particularly like how the color of the hard drive matches the laptop, which also gets picked up on the Coke cans and the floral pattern on the tablecloth (we probably can thank mom for that).  But nothing is too neatly coordinated, for that would nullify the wonderful informality and messiness that most characterizes the tableau.  They don’t have to wait for an election: this already is a portrait of democratic life.

Of course, the image also plays on sentimental memories, for those who have them, of student days–the ashtray and toilet paper are near-perfect touches–and these revolutionaries also are middle class (or better), Westernized, and otherwise liberal-democratic elites in the making.  They do not look like those demonstrators who were poorer or embodying more traditional customs and Islamist commitments, and less privileged viewers might be quick to see and resent those who don’t have to go to work as soon as they are able.  No one should conclude that these students are or ought to be the face of the revolution or that democracy can’t include wearing galabiyyahs or that every viewer should warm to the glow of the Macbook Pro laptop.

Still, sometimes you can just see the difference.

This is the interior of a nondescript building somewhere in Damascus.  The New York Times caption had nothing to do with the photo as such: “The escalation in Syria, where Mr. Assad has vowed to end a 10-month-old uprising that he has characterized as the work of foreign-backed terrorists, came within a few miles of the epicenter of his power in the capital on Sunday.”  So, what is the photo doing?  We don’t see a recognizable building or evidence of warfare or anything specific to the day-to-day struggle being reported in the text.  But perhaps it’s there to communicate something about the nature of the regime.

Institutional buildings can be dull, unadorned, vaguely depressing places; that, too, is part of the look.  “See how your money is not being wasted, and how functional and egalitarian your government is, and how the rule of law is applied uniformly?”  Even so, the large photograph of Our Leader is the stock image of authoritarian regimes, matched only by the elimination of most other images and their implications of pluralism.  This photo captures that and more, including a sense of social impoverishment, as if the energy is being leached out of everything.  Even Assad’s portrait is fading into a ghostliness.  Perhaps he’s on his way out (I wouldn’t bet on it), but this photo says that the authoritarian regime has already reduced its society to a kind of lifelessness.  Those flags could be in a mausoleum, whether one run by the state or one used for the state’s internment.  Empty surfaces, listless symbols, and a fire extinguisher: welcome to the Syrian government.

Egypt is doing better that Syria but is still a long way from becoming a democracy, so easy contrasts are not the point here.  But one can consider how politics is textured: that is, how the social context and consequences of political action are evident on the surface of things.  By paying attention to the social surface, we can understand how both individual experience and collective action might be shaped by many different factors coming together in a particular place and time.  And we can see how different political practices can make the world more richly interwoven and vibrant, or more relentlessly ordered and depressing.

The genius of the camera is that it captures everything that is there on the surface, whether we intended to see it or not.  Photographers are taking considerable risks to photograph the political events of our time.  To better understand what is happening, one might want to pay more attention to the surface of things, and to how life is being textured.

Photographs by Ed Ou and Tomas Munita for The New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Instead of last spring’s inspiring images of democratic solidarity, the images now coming out of Cairo are becoming increasingly surreal.

This one is getting a lot of play–the guy is so distinctive that you can even see another photographer in the picture trying to get his shot.  And what’s not to like?  The bizarre gas mask is hardly standard issue (where did he find that?), and its white rubber both contrasts with his dark clothing and matches the white smoke pouring out of the tear gas canister.  The smoke streams back along his path as he is running forward, for this is definitely an action shot.  (Think of how many demonstration photos feature relatively passive postures: sitting, standing, or milling about, with raised hands, signs, and banners displayed for the media having to stand in for more extended or dramatic action.  Look, for example, at the rest of the people in this photo.)  Revolutionary action wearing an alien, almost unintelligible mask, the photo captures key features of a popular revolt defined, like so many demonstrations today, much more by its opposition to a corrupt establishment than by a clear idea of what an alternative future might bring.

And that’s where I get a bit worried, as the photo may be fitting too well with the anti-democratic meme of late that progressive movements are incoherent.  (Back in the day, the left was tarred with being a rigid, centralized, international organization adhering strictly to the explicit ideological doctrines of Soviet communism; now that the Cold War is over, I guess it makes sense that the left, sans directives from Moscow, would have to be disorganized and inarticulate.  As long as you’re outside of the reality-based community, that is.)  Unlike many other images of painted faces and massed bodies, the masked man doesn’t seem to link with any political aspiration or populist movement.  Because his pending action of throwing the canister mirrors the original assault, he seems equally prone to violence while this false equivalence cancels out any sense of political difference.

Worse, he looks grotesquely simian, as if political demonstrations were a form of devolution.  Worse yet, this falling backward is also a cyborg projection where organic and mechanical natures have been horribly fused.  The close fitting headpiece reveals a human skull in all its distinctiveness and fragility, yet the mechanical mask destroys any hope of wholly human sympathies.  The bare hands make the dark clothing seem like a pelt, while the loping limbs suggest a life alternating between predation and flight.  The bag hanging below his waist looks like another limb and thus another example of organic life distorted, whether by bad science or the pressures of a harsh environment. Five-limbed with a machined face, there is little basis for identification.  It seems that only violence is legible, and can calls for restoring order be far behind?

And yet, the more strange he appears, the more likely another interpretation also applies.  I’ve posted a number of times about how photojournalism is revealing the often surreal nature of violence in our time.  In addition, I’ve suggested in several posts that a corresponding political aesthetic is emerging as well, one in which the modern apparatus of power can look increasingly medieval.  Admittedly, sometimes costumes are just that, and the surface rarely expresses what lies below unerringly, but I believe that these changes in style can reflect far more troubling changes in political relationships.

To take a page from science fiction–indeed, one of its most insistent and important lessons–technological progress can proceed with and contribute to regression along every other dimension of human experience: social organization, economics, politics, culture, you name it.  Thus, rather than merely supporting or undercutting the demonstrations, photos such as the one above might be working more prophetically to identify how a harmful future is emerging in the present.  More to the point, they are showing not who is causing what, but how ordinary people are already coping with deprivations and more explicit forms of systemic violence, not least by adapting to those harsh conditions at the very moment that they are fighting against them.

Welcome to the future.

Photographs by Tara Todras-Whitehill/Associated Press and Mahmud Hams/AFP-Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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