NO CAPTION NEEDED – Page 11 – PHOTOJOURNALISM, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

The Serenity of Networks

January 21, 2015January 23, 2015
Hariman
no caption needed
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It could be a circuit board, or a strip of DNA, or a bit of jewelry, or a painting. Whatever it is, it is orderly, yet not too severe; colorful, but no riot of brash hues; uniform, yet also pleasantly varied; textured, but simply so; a collection of many things, but still a study in form; abstract, yet somehow familiar–almost like crayons in a box, although it may be much bigger than that. Small/large, micro/macro, ordered/varied, colored/white, delighting the eye yet immobile, still, serene.

The caption said, “Snow covered containers decorate the port of Rotterdam, The Netherlands on January 15, 2013.” You really don’t see a port, though, or anything quite so institutional. The key is in the verb: “decorate.” Exactly right. And “snow covered” is right, too, even though it’s not literally correct: many of them are not covered with snow, but the phrase captures the feel of the image, the way in which the ordinary sense of things can be covered by a blanket of snow and seemingly transformed, as if by magic, into something quiet and beautiful. Or, you might say, the way snow can damp down the ordinary way of seeing objects–that is, in all their detailed functionality–so that we can experience the quietude that always lies in the small spaces between things.

Let me suggest that there is another sense of serenity that also might be available here. Like the snow, the shipping containers are only in a temporary repose. They have moved and will move again, to flow though circuits of trade that span the globe. The miniaturization achieved by the camera symbolizes the relationship of this one scene to the vast, dense circuitry of the global economy. What it captures, however, is not the dynamic movement of goods, information, and capital, but rather the stability in the system as a whole. That stability is not inert–like the weather, it is one feature of a system that is constantly changing–but there can be something to admire in its impersonal replication, week after week, month after month, like strands of DNA replicating again and again within a global organism.

From the view on the ground, this is nonsense, of course. The shipping industry consists of thousands of variable decisions being made at every level, all while being buffeting by winds of change over which they have no control: government policies, market conditions, technological developments, even the weather. But that’s why the view from above can be valuable. Instead of seeing only competition, friction, and another day’s work, we can see the deep sense of decoration: how the small ornament can mirror a cosmos.

“The serenity of networks” alludes to one of the classic works on the Internet: The Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler. His title in turn alludes to The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. The relationship between digital networks and market economies is still being explored, but each has prompted the dream that we can find in the impersonal processes of large-scale exchange something more reliable than the political behavior that so often disrupts, destabilizes, and leads to want, anxiety, and anger. The dream is not impossible, but it will not be realized without political organization.

If only that politics could start with an image such as the one above. An image that is surely decorative, but not merely so, as it also suggests how abundance can be a stable resource, orderly yet varied, complex yet reliable, grounded in what we do well and not in ignorance, fear, and anger, waiting only to be distributed where it is needed. Something that could be done, you know. . . .

Photograph by Robin Utrecht/EPA.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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On Not Seeing the Homeless

January 19, 2015January 25, 2015
Lucaites
no caption needed
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Homelessness in the United States persists. Estimates vary, but by most conservative accounts 3.5 million people experience homeless each year. That said, it is only a mere 1% of the population. And the number has actually declined a small bit in the past few years. No problem, right?

But consider this: 35% are families with children, 25% are under the age of 18, 23% are military veterans, 30% have been the victims of domestic violence, and, no surprise here, 25% suffer from some form of mental illness. The problem is significant, in other words, and many of the most vulnerable are in little position to do anything to help themselves. And so the socially conscious continue to pursue awareness campaigns.

The photograph above is from Cape Cod, MA, where 27 high school students “slept in cardboard boxes and took turns playing in a 10-hour continuous soccer game throughout the night.” The effort is well-intentioned and even honorable, but the question is: what do we see? Or perhaps, more to the point, what are we being shown? Not the homeless—or their condition—that’s for sure.

There is something of an irony here. At its heart, a huge part of the problem with homelessness is that it is a human condition that we are conditioned not to see; indeed, it is a social phenomenon that we actively turn our head away from: as children we are told not to stare and as adults we look through the homeless on our streets as if they were altogether invisible. And so, of course, the need for awareness. But there’s the rub: As much as we seem to try to animate awareness we do it by turning attention away from the thing itself and to those who no doubt feel righteous in their service to a larger cause. And as with this photograph we complicate the problem further by substituting faux homelessness for the real thing.

Look closely at the photograph. Those sleeping “in cardboard boxes” is a bit of a misnomer. They look more like children who have constructed a play fort in their living room or basement more than anything approximating a homeless person consigned to sleeping in a tattered and used cardboard box. They all look well fed. While they are surrounded by a wall of cardboard they are actually sleeping in what look to be clean and warm sleeping bags with more pillows than they know what to do with; comfortable and content, they rest with their faces fully exposed to the world as if without a care in the world. And why not. After all, they are not exposed to the elements. There is no rain or snow or cold to contend with and the bright lights of the gymnasium add an extra level of security that those sleeping in parks or alleys or under highway by-passes and bridges can rarely if ever rely upon. Those not sleeping are playing soccer, another sign that all is safe and secure. And, of course, when morning comes they will return to their homes—no longer homeless!—where breakfast and their own warm beds await.

So again, what are we being shown? The all too easy answer is the efforts of young people working to right a social wrong the best way that they know how. And the photograph certainly does that. But more than that it also shows how easy it is to sentimentalize a profound and complex social condition, to invoke the pathos necessary to action—and for that matter to access our very humanity—and at the same time to contain and direct such emotions away from the actual problem itself. Instead of seeing the homeless and the common problem that it poses for a liberal democratic society, once again we are encouraged to look elsewhere.

Credit: Stan Grossfeld/Boston Globe Staff

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Sight Gag: Strange Bedfellows (in the Indiana University Library)

January 18, 2015January 17, 2015
Lucaites
sight gags
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Credit: Saul Kutnicki

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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Where Can You Take a Visual Joke?

January 14, 2015January 13, 2015
Hariman
no caption needed
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One answer would be in India, as with this photo. Why you would do so may be harder to say. The visual joke has been one of the lines of demarcation between amateur photography and photojournalism. Families and friends delight in them, but the pros avoid them for obvious reasons: the basic technique and typical examples are born cliched, and the practice of documentary photography is known in part by its attitude of seriousness. When some journalists are getting killed, others know better than to goof off.

There are exceptions, however. This photo was among those labeled “Editor’s Choice” at the Reuters website. More significantly, Elliott Erwitt is a photographer of the first rank, and he always has had a fondness for the visual joke. (See how easy it would have been to say “a weakness for the visual joke”?) His gag photos–e.g., of a dog’s head in place of its master’s–are numerous. More important, they are part of a social vision that is comic in the deep sense of the term: at once objective and generous, Erwitt depicts human frailty and social artifice as they are each the common lot and saving grace of our human condition. From that perspective, visual jokes are not merely low level entertainment but also invitations to tolerate each others’ imperfections, and to find moments of accidental joy in what might otherwise be a dreary day.

In the wake of the murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff for publishing political cartoons, the question of “Where can you take a visual joke?” acquires additional significance. It also has multiple meanings. One might ask where you can create and publish such humor, and where the jokes can be taken for what they are (and not, say, blasphemy), and where you can take them to do other things (say, entertain your friends or engage in political advocacy), and where you can take them now that you have offended someone (as in the American idiom of “you can take that and shove it up your . . . “). This last sense is not trivial, even if does have a range, e.g., from merely violating professional norms to risking death at the hands of evil men.

Perhaps this context contributed to the decision at Reuters to feature a photo of a man with a soccer ball for a head. If so, the gesture can be appreciated, but there is reason enough without it to admire the photograph. The substitution of the white ball with its geometric lines for a human face conforms neatly to Scott McLeod’s theory of the identification evoked by cartoon characters, which, because they are relatively featureless, match our interior and necessarily schematic sense of self rather than our experiences of how others look. Thus, the faceless figure prompts the viewer to look at another person from a distant place as a way to see oneself. What you might see is up to you, but it does matter that you can see it, or a hint of it, in someone who is not you.

That abstract sense of the individual is reflected in the simplicity of the rest of the scene. The barren yet textured field creates the perceptual ground against which the central figure is defined. The fences surrounding the athletic field create a sense of enclosure, almost as if it were a prison yard or military base, which is matched emotionally by the morning fog. The man’s posture and hands suggest attentive focus of mind and body, just as the uniform, equipment, field, and the routine itself–keeping the ball in the air as he marches down the field–all are part of a disciplined practice. He is not joking, but he is demonstrating the intense involvement in a single activity that is the mark of play and of work at its best. Some might say that the fusion of work and play is civilization at its best, and that excessive separation of the two is a downward path. Jokes might be closer to our higher selves than we think.

The photographer was joking, just a bit, anyway, as the image involves taking delight in the obvious artifice of the camera. In a week when there isn’t much to joke about, the small moment of levity provided here might be thought of as a moment of grace. And as a reminder that life goes on, especially if you are in a place where you can take a joke.

Photograph by Jayanta Dey/Reuters.

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Gesturing Towards Sociality

January 12, 2015January 13, 2015
Lucaites
boots and hands
1 Comment

We have written here (here, here, and here) and elsewhere about the photojournalistic penchant—indeed, we are inclined to call it a photojournalistic convention—to produce photographs that feature hands (and feet). Often such images feature the fragmented human body, emphasizing the hand (or the foot), and thus diverting attention away from the face. The face is, of course, the chief marker of the liberal individual and by deemphasizing it notice is directed away from the particular individual to a more universal(izing) “human feature. The inclusion of the face in the image above is something of an exception to the typical convention that makes the point, as the caption to this image calls attention to an Argentine Court’s ruling that “Sandra,” an orangutang who has spent 20 years in a Buenos Aires zoo, is a “non-human person which has some basic human rights.” Humanity here trumps personhood.

The photograph is part of a Big Picture slide show titled “Hands in the News.” According to the BP, “Hands tell stories. They are functional and they have the power to communicate emotions…. Represent(ing) hope, communication, power, connection, and longing.” All of this is true. But there is more. For such photographs don’t just invite us to see the “hand,” but rather to see “with the hand,” and as such it activates a traditional way of thinking about sociality and politics (e.g., the body politic) that is adapted to conditions of public representation: it is fragmented rather than organic, realistic rather than idealized, and provisional rather than essentialist. Most important, the dismemberment of the body implies a body politic that is no longer whole yet still active and engaged.

In short, the image of the hand (or the foot) as a bodily fragment signifies the distributed body of modern social organization, the pluralistic body of modern civil society, the multicultural body of a transnational—or as with the photograph above, transhuman—public sphere. This is the body that resists the abstraction and political symbolism dominating official discourse, but always indirectly, through figures of embodiment that are already dismembered. This is a rhetoric of bodily experience, but not the personalized experience of identity politics or the faux intimacy of infantilized citizenship. These images have proliferated when official authority is already discredited, and they are used to both contest that authority and finesse the problem of maintaining public legitimacy.

We should attend to them with care, not just as a stylistic affectation or an instance of cultural kitsch, but as an important convention of a powerful public art that invites us to see and be seen as citizens in the broadest way possible.

Credit: Natacha Pisarenko/AP

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NCN on Holiday Break

December 14, 2014December 13, 2014
Hariman
no caption needed
0 Comments

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday. We’ll return to our regular schedule on January 12.

Architectural detail from St. Pascal’s Church in Chicago, via “A rare bird: the Art Deco church” at A Chicago Sojourn.

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Azoulay, Luski, and Horizontal Photography

December 12, 2014December 10, 2014
Hariman
conferences/shows/books
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Ariella Azoulay will be delivering a series of lectures next week in Leuven, Brussels, and Amsterdam regarding her new book, Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography.

This book is the product of a unique collaboration between Israeli artist and philosopher Aïm Deüelle Lüski and visual culture theorist Ariella Azoulay. In their longstanding working relationship, they research how to theorize the structure of the contemporary scopic regime and open a space for its civil transformation. On this occasion, Azoulay interprets a particular series of cameras built by Deüelle Lüski, along with photographs taken by these cameras. Unlike conventional cameras and their vertical photography, Deüelle Lüski’s cameras seek to generate new sets of relations between the camera and the world. Azoulay’s text unfolds four different ‘short histories’ of problems in photography, each of which deconstructs what otherwise might appear as a coherent photographic regime, yet which is shown to be based solely on principles of sovereignty and possession. Through and with Deüelle Lüski’s project Azoulay seeks to ‘potentialize’ the history of photography, that is, to recover long forgotten, un-materialized possibilities. The book contains 100 images and a conversation between the author and the artist.

The lectures are listed here, here, and here.

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The Beauty of LA Burning

December 10, 2014December 10, 2014
Hariman
catastrophe
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Spectacular. Beautiful. Hauntingly Beautiful. Disturbingly beautiful. Terrifying and yet enthralling. Awe-inspiring, except that it shouldn’t inspire at all. Why does disaster dazzle the eye? How could the spectator not be faulted for enjoying a holocaust?

Such questions have dogged photography as if they were the sign of an original sin. The medium inadvertently exposed a disconcerting truth: the good, the true, and the beautiful are not transcendentally aligned. Not for us, anyway.

From comprehensive theoretical critiques to glib labels such as “disaster porn,” academics and pundits alike have faulted those who are drawn like moths to the flame of the disaster photo. Mark Reinhardt, Susie Linfield and other contemporary writers have tried to push back against such moralizing, but the suspicion of a guilty pleasure remains, and perhaps it should. There certainly is no lack of beautiful photographs of devastation, and the enjoyment, fascination, and safety of the viewer’s experience will not be remotely like the experience of many at the scene. But that’s true of all media, while first-hand experience itself can be inchoate, deluded, and otherwise not only mistaken but in need of precisely the distance, perspective, and other resources that art can provide to make sense of the world.

I won’t say that this photograph is likely to be needed by those closer to the fire, but it is a near-perfect example of how photojournalism continues to evoke a mode of seeing that is simultaneously highly aesthetic and yet focused on moments of disaster. No artistic stance is immune to misuse, but I think images such as this one are an important addition to public life, and not least because they reveal the seamless conjunction of beauty and moral hazard. Others pay so that we can see that destruction can be beautiful. They would have paid anyway, however, and your turn will come, so the hard truth is worth having.

Thus, I wasn’t being snarky when titling this post. LA burning isn’t beautiful because LA deserves to burn. LA burning is beautiful because we can see it that way. The interesting question is, what else does that allow us to see? In the photograph above, we might admit to the close conjunction of civilization and catastrophe. Note, for example, now the fire and the city towers are each offset from center while side-by-side. The eye is pulled to the blaze, but then to the gleaming buildings, and then perhaps pulled back a bit to encompass the wider cityscape that now seems aglow with thousands of smaller, safer fires. The hanging foliage and surrounding sky frames the city within a state of nature where elemental fires burn, ready to consume anyone foolish enough to ignore them. And yet the city is such an achievement within that frame. . . . As long as the blaze is contained, that is. The incredible dynamism of the city becomes framed by a logic of containment, with rupture sure to follow.

I suspect that there are many reasons we enjoy this view. Light dazzles us, and we like to be dazzled, as the many holiday decorations make clear. More nasty is the fact that there can be something liberating about destruction. Where some will see the city enduring and overcoming fires and other occasional spasms of destructiveness, others will sense the possibility of a city consumed in flames–if not in reality, at least close enough that one can feel it. For those who experience civilization as arbitrary repression or daily humiliation, destruction would become a fantasy of freedom. And the sheer, almost abstract destructiveness of a massive fire may promise a pure form of liberation.

At the end of the day, however, it does matter that the fire is in LA. In more than one art form, the city of angels has been America’s harbinger of the apocalypse. Perhaps this photograph’s visual hint of a mushroom cloud is part of that legacy. For whatever reason, and by several means, the message continues to be repeated. A visual spectacle may be the hook, or it may be part of the message. The question remains, what are we supposed to see?

Photograph by Nancy Yuille/Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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’Tis the Season …

December 8, 2014December 8, 2014
Lucaites
no caption needed
4 Comments

I used to think that one didn’t have to be Christian to celebrate and appreciate the Christmas season. Yes, for the devout it marks the birth of Christ, and in that context it has an important spiritual significance that should not be scanted. But it also corresponds roughly with the winter solstice and, for the past century, at least in the West, it has been a secular holiday that celebrates the virtues of charity and selfless giving regardless of one’s religious affiliation. If it were only so simple!

Sadly, Christmas has also become a season for the gross accumulation of commodities under the sign of charity and giving. Children—in all of their innocence—are the primary beneficiaries of the holiday as they are indulged with all manner of toys and goodies distributed, somewhat magically, by an elfish deity who somehow distinguishes good from bad. And, of course, the more toys and goodies all the better. Or at least such is the myth of its representation in popular discourse. But truth to tell, there is something of a fetish to such giving that is more important to the adults who underwrite such indulgences than to the children who receive it—think of all the commercials you’ve seen where the parent’s satisfaction in observing their children far exceeds the joy of the children themselves. Put differently, the joy of giving in this scenario is more a justification for one’s own desire for the accumulation of goods than it is a desire to please the other.

The photograph above is only one of many representations of Black Friday, where adults camp out for hours in anticipation of the opportunity to accumulate commodities at a highly discounted rate. The supply always far exceeds the demand accenting the value of the goods and animating the desire for their possession, often leading to violence. Here, adults and children fight over a high definition television. There are many things worth fighting for, to be sure, but a television set? What is most revealing about the scene, however, is not so much the scuffle as it is the reaction of the spectators, some who have already claimed their own televisions. Some seem to be ignoring the scene altogether, not unlike the way they might walk past a homeless person as if they weren’t there, while others look on with a sadness that stands in marked contrast to what is supposed to be the joyousness of the season.

It is hard to know what to make of all of this, but perhaps there is a clue in the presence of the videographer who is capturing the scene for the nightly news. He knew exactly what was going to happen because what he is watching is a ritual event that takes place throughout the capitalist world (this scene is in a superstore in Wembley, England, but it could be in any Best Buy or Walmart in any city in the United States, or elsewhere for that matter), year after year, and as much as we might revile the greed that seeps through in such images we seem to celebrate it as well, casting such images each year as real time performances (advertisements?) of what we secretly value the most—and that is not the joy of giving but the accumulation of goods. As the bumper sticker says, “He who dies with the most toys wins!”

No, one does not have to be Christian to celebrate the Christmas holiday, and all I can say is … more’s the pity.