Our primary goal with this blog is to talk about the ways in which photojournalism contributes to a vital democratic public culture. Much of the time that means we are focusing on what purport to be more or less serious matters. But as John Stewart and Stephen Colbert often remind us, democracy needs irony, parody, and pure silliness as much as it needs serious contemplation. For our part, we will dedicate our Sunday posts to putting some of that silliness on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the carnivalesque. Sometimes we will post pictures we’ve taken, or that have been contributed by others, or that we just happen to stumble across as we navigate our very visual public culture. And we won’t just be limited to photography, as a robust democratic visual culture consists of much more. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.
Credit: Neff/Illustrator
I noticed that you refer to a vital “DEMOCRACY” instead of a “Republic” that we were given by our Forefathers, please read =
http://www.freestateproject.org/about/essay-archive/freestate-02sep03.php
And ,YES, the sheep follow the sheep herder,,,it is a sad day when supposedly God’s People dont recognize the REAL sheep herder ??????Jesus Christ !!!!!!
Your comment will be appreciated.. Thks.
Jude: That link doesn’t work. So I’m only guessing as to what I will find there. There is of course a distinciton between civic republican forms of government and democratic forms of government in the more radical senses of each term, and I’m not sure how far anyone can sustain the claim that the U.S. is “pure” in either senses of the words. However, our focus at NCN not on “government” per se but on “democratic public culture” — the sense in which the public might be understood to operate in a democratic context and, in that context, how public understanding implicates governance. Thanks for writing.