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Sight Gag: Give Peace A Chance

Photo Credit: Helgren/Reuters

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 Jon 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 such moments on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the ironic and/or 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. Sometimes the images will be pure silliness, but sometimes they will point to ironies, poignant and otherwise. 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.

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Photographers Showcase: "Freedom's Cause"

Today we welcome MIchael David Murphy to NCN.  Michael is a writer and photographer based in Atlanta, GA.  We featured one of his photographs earlier in the year under our “Sight Gag” category, but here we ask you to consider one of his photo-textual studies called “Freedom’s Cause” inspired by Barack Obama’s stump speech.  The photographs below are a side project of Michael’s presidential campaign project “So Help Me …”

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Barack Obama’s candidacy for President contains a direct link to the successes of the Civil Rights movement. While campaigning, Obama often referred to the movement’s successes and struggles:

“That’s how women won the right to vote, how workers won the right to organize, how young people like you traveled down South to march, and sit-in, and go to jail, and some were beaten, and some died for freedom’s cause. That’s what hope is.” (02/12/2008, Madison, WI)

While photographing the primaries across the Southern states, I visited locations where the echoes of the Civil Rights struggle can still be heared — places that have nearly gone quiet during the more than forty years in between. History doesn’t just happen, it goes down, and as a photographer, witnessing what our country chooses to commemerate, and what we all collectively and selectively choose to forget, can be instructive. These three locations, each in Mississippi, may be views of America’s troubled past, but when seen through the lens of Obama’s candidacy, they telescope forward toward an optimistic future.

On August 27th, 1955, a few months after the murder of Rev. George Lee, fourteen year old Emmitt Till walked into Bryant’s Store in Money, Mississippi. 

There are conflicting stories about what happened when Till left the store, but he apparently said something (or whistled) at the store owner’s wife, Carolyn Bryant. Later that night, Till was kidnapped from his great uncle’s house, and taken to a shed where he was beaten, then shot, then dropped into the Tallahatchie River with a fan tied to his neck. 

When Till’s body was recovered, Till’s mother insisted on having an open casket funeral in Chicago, and encouraged photographs of Till’s disfigured body, which were published in Jet. Nearly 100,000 people saw Till’s body during a four-day public viewing. 

in 1957, Bryant’s Store closed due to lack of business. In August, 2007, a Mississippi historical marker showing the location of the killing was stolen. 

On May 7th, 1955, Rev. George Washington Lee, the first black person to register to vote since reconstruction in Humphreys County, Mississippi, was driving down Church St. in Belzoni, a small town in the Delta. Rev. Lee was well-known in the area for his voter initiatives, successfully registering blacks to vote. 

As he drove down Church St., Rev. Lee was tailed by men in a convertible. Someone shot out his right rear tire, at which point another car pulled alongside, and Rev. Lee was fatally shot, point-blank in the face. Rev. Lee’s Buick hopped a curb and slammed into a house, and the Reverend died on the way to Humphreys County Memorial Hospital. 

There were witnesses who saw the fatal shot, but couldn’t identify the killers. The FBI investigated, discovered enough evidence to take the case to trial, but the local prosecutor declined, saying a Humphreys County grand jury “probably would not bring an indictment.” There seemed to be consensus in Belzoni as to who the killers were, but they were never prosecuted. In death, Rev. Lee’s actions helped usher the passage of the Voting Rights Act ten years later, in 1965. 

Belzoni is a quiet town in the Mississippi delta. It’s catfish country, and they even have their own Catfish Museum and Catfish Festival. It’s the kind of place where you can stand in the middle of the road under a darkcloth to make a photograph and no one will pay you any mind. 

This is Country Road #515 in Mississippi. It was called “Rock Cut Road” back in 1964. 

On June 21st, 1964, three civil rights workers were booked into the Neshoba County Jail after being arrested for speeding through Philadelphia, Mississippi. The three (James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman) had driven to Longdale earlier that day to see the remains of a church that had been firebombed by the KKK. The firebombing was apparently targeting Schwerner, who had plans to turn the church into a “Freedom School”. Freedom Schools where established during Freedom Summer in the South by a coalition of CORE, SNCC & the NAACP. 

The three were released at 10:30 that night and told to leave the county. Just before reaching the county line, their car was overtaken by a group of men that included law enforcement. Their station wagon was forced over to the side of the road. The three were pulled from their vehicle and taken to “Rock Cut Road”, where they were beaten and shot. 

The killings raised national attention to the Civil Rights struggle in the South. Robert Kennedy got the FBI involved (because Mississippi law enforcement was so slow to respond), and their remains were found a month later. No one has been convicted for their murder, but in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted for manslaughter for his role in recruiting the mob that was involved with the killings. 

Through the efforts of volunteer workers (often from out of state, Schwerner and Goodman, who were both from New York), over 100,000 new black voters were registered in Mississippi in two years, and the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965.

 

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On the Democratic Sublime

In democratic societies political leaders serve (and derive their legitimacy from) a collective master. In U.S. style liberal-democracies the collective, legitimizing sovereign force goes by the name of “We the people …” Of course, “the people” is a metaphor for the “body politic,” itself an abstraction which lacks any objective material reality. Lacking objective material reality however, does not mean that it lacks influence or force; following the terms of the metaphor, that influence is typically cast as “the voice of the people.” And so the problem for political leaders who want to retain their legitimacy to serve/rule is to be able to claim to be the material embodiment of “the people,” literally to speak for “the people.” I call this a problem, but of course it is as much an opportunity as anything, for since “the people” lack an objective material reality it is difficult to countermand a duly elected leader’s claim to speak for “the people” in any objectively verifiable or decisive way. Think, for example, of how difficult is was to contest President Nixon’s claim to speak for the “great silent majority.” Of course, being difficult and being impossible are two different things.

The photograph below made me think about this political dynamic:

It appeared above the fold on the front page of the NYT as part of a story concerning popular protests against recently elected South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s decision to “resume imports of American beef.” The image is an aerial view of “thousands of South Koreans” massed along a major avenue in Seoul. Shot at dusk and from both a long distance and an acute, high angle, no individual person is identifiable in any sense at all. What we see instead is a vibrant and speckled mass—later described in the accompanying article as “South Koreans with candles”—that appears almost to pulsate with its collective energy as it surges like flood waters between and among the buildings for as far as the eye can see. And indeed, what appears initially to be a beautiful expression of unity resonates as well as a sublime, natural force totally beyond control. 1 or 100 or even 1,000 protestors might be seen as malcontents or perhaps as a small minority whose concerns will be duly noted before being ignored. But hundreds of thousands of individuals (the estimates range from 100,000 to 700,000) collected in one place, appearing to be animated by a common cause, make it much harder—and far more dangerous—for a leader to discount or ignore. And so it should come as no surprise that Lee’s newly appointed cabinet members offered to resign in recognition of their failure to meet the needs and expectations of “the people” (or whatever the comparable moniker is for the collective sovereign source of political legitimacy in South Korea).

What is particularly interesting here is how the above photograph operates as an allegory for the democratic process. On one hand it helps to create the illusion that we can see “the people” as an objective material reality—a collective body with mass that is not easily reducible to the individual, even though the flickering candles call attention to the fact that the individual is in there somewhere. On the other hand, it serves as a reminder that however beautiful such a representation can be, nevertheless, “the people” can be a sublime democratic force and leaders who toy with its will or interests do so at their own peril.

Photo Credit: Dong-A Ilbo/AP

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When is a Flag Not a Prop?

One of the more successful cases of symbol capture in my lifetime is the Republican Party’s wrapping itself in the flag. Of course, the Left gave it away and then had to seethe in frustration while watching it used to set records in hypocrisy. But what credibility did they have when it came to the flag itself? That monopoly is fading however, down to Fox News and MSNBC sputtering about whether Barack Obama is wearing a flag pin. (He is. Feel better?) This decline in faux patriotism may be another side-effect of the Bush years, not that they have caught on:

There are thousands of these shots, but this one seems particularly offensive. This is the guy who had “other priorities” than serving in the Vietnam War but no qualms about sending other young men to die in the sequel of his own making. The arrogant sneer seems just right, a moment of truth revealing this administration’s cynical use of the flag–and the troops–as props. They are props in two senses of the word: devices for staging a show, and supports for something that would collapse of its own bad weight otherwise.

The image caught my attention because it demonstrates a principle of symbolic action. The basic idea is that when you see excessive display, it often is compensating for some lack. When we raise our voice, it often is not because we have the better argument. Excessive make-up can be a response to a lack of skill in a preteen or a lack of self-esteem at any age. If we go on too long, it may be because we have so little to say. Getting back to the photograph, if the administration displays not one flag but seven (and counting), it may be not because they have a surplus of patriotism and demonstrated commitment to the common good, but because there is so little evidence of those civic virtues in their policies.

For a sense of contrast, consider this image:

This flag is flying near Belle Fourche, South Dakota. The town has the distinction of being the geographical center of the nation. We see one flag, not seven, and it is a worn flag, not the imperial banners behind Cheney. Most important, it wasn’t put up there to prop up anyone. Think of it more as an act of homage, something done because it felt right, not because it would play well. The frayed edges tell us that it’s been there awhile, taking a beating from the wind but still standing as someone’s testament to their love of country. And so the principle works in both directions: when an act of display shows signs of being ragged and worn, it can be a sign of some larger fullness. What looks like a simple gesture in an all but empty place may be something much bigger. Not just the center, but the heart of the nation.

FYI to our readers: I posted on Belle Fourche recently, and this second post is something of an atonement for a mistake made at that time. If you read to comments to that post, you’ll see what I mean. Thus, this second post is another demonstration of the relationship between excess and deficiency, a dynamic that endlessly fuels language and culture.

Photographs by Seth Wenig/Associated Press and Angel Franco/New York Times.

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Punctuated Equilibrium in the Photographic Record

Punctuated Equilibrium is a theory of evolutionary change that accounts for both the overall stability of large populations across time and the process–or periods–of significant change–e.g., in the species, if studying biology, or the social practice, if studying human organization. Generally, species maintain themselves as species by not changing, which happens because most local adaptations are diluted by more comprehensively functional features, but adaptations that develop at the margins of the population, where the species is less likely to match environmental conditions, can acquire selective advantages that subsequently can spread quickly across the population. So why am I telling you this?

The question came to mind of what image of the world is being maintained by photojournalism, and particularly coverage of world politics. Were we to examine the photographic record as if it were a fossil record, would we see a history of punctuated equilibrium? More to the point, when we look at the images in the news, do we see a world of general stability punctuated by moments of rapidly spreading change? Or do we see another model of collective behavior: for example, nearly uniform stability occasionally disturbed but always restored? Or relatively stable civilizations that once in a long while are destroyed or fundamentally transformed by some catastrophic upheaval? Or perhaps a continual improvement regrettably but inevitably accompanied by “creative destruction”? Or, if we do see a stable order that is occasionally subject to rapid change, what is the norm and what is developing in the margins? And might we see these larger patterns across images or inside of individual images?

Let’s look at two photographs to consider how this line of thinking might develop.

This photograph depicts the aftermath of a car bombing in Baghdad. It is one of hundreds of images that I could have grabbed from the last month’s slide shows: images of bombing, rioting, shooting, clubbing, and similar forms of violence. These are images of disruption. For example, we see the mise-en-scene of ordinary life–and the blast. Street with truck, curb with light pole, functional building and people going about their business–and looming up where there should be light and perspective, a dark cloud, miasmic, bearing bad news on an ill wind. But the cloud will disperse, the truck start up again, the people break away to get back to a semblance of routine, right?

One might see the bombing as a minor disruption of an otherwise stable social order, or as something more ominous, like the dark cloud of smoke in the photograph. Generally, the concrete street and steel structures, along with the smoke of the blast, imply that social order is the norm and violence the disruption, but one might not be too sure. Perhaps the frame is tipped one way rather than the other by images such as this one:

This photograph also features an ordinary scene–cultivated fields greening in the springtime–and a dark shape, but one that is not threatening. The balloon’s shadow is but an extension of the sunlight illuminating the balloon and feeding the crops below. Instead of being faced with a loss of control, the elongated shape can stand for the magnified sense of freedom and personal extension that one might feel while floating above the earth. Whether thinking of the special experience of being aloft in a hot air balloon or the collective good in verdant fields stretching to the horizon, life is good.

And so it goes. The newspapers, magazines, and slide shows feature a steady stream of both images. On the one hand, hard news images of continual disruption (whether political or natural disasters), and, on the other hand, soft news images of peace and harmony (both natural and political). It might be that journalism in a democratic society is inclined to present a dystopian world–by contrast to the obligatory good news of an authoritarian press–but that the need to hold on to readers also motivates the signs of reassurance provided by the soft news.

The question remains of which view is correct. Which tendency is more characteristic of the species, and which might be a marginal adaptation? Is civilization the norm, with violence a marginal adaptation, or is violence the general characteristic of the population, punctuated occasionally by selective adaptations toward peace? Look again at the photographs. Which is more indicative of what is breeding at the margins today? is it light technologies and sustainable cultivation that can bring some degree of prosperity and peace across a planet riven by conflict? Or is it anarchy and war that can spread contagiously in a global order built upon the competition for non-renewable resources?

Photographs by Ahmad Al-Rubaya?AFP-Getty Images and Viktkor Veres/AFP-Getty Images.

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Good Grief

We have written previously about the photojournalism coming out of China with regards to the recent earthquake, noting the powerful images of a government mobilized to help its people in times of need.  And as the imagery has demonstrated, those efforts have been a model of efficiency and effectiveness that put U.S. efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina to shame. But, of course, what we should not forget is that Beijing continues to house a repressive governmental regime that refuses to endorse the most basic tenets of democracy such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.  And, of course, the western media is quick to call the tune and to remind us of China’s totalitarian tendencies.  The point was driven home more recently by state efforts to intimidate the parents of school children killed in the earthquake who were protesting “shoddy school construction.”

The above photograph, which anchored a story in the NYT, features the parents of school children killed in the earthquake in Dujiangyan (in the Sichuan province), as they are being confronted by the police (dressed in black).  And one can see why the western media would be attracted to it, for the image is an almost perfect representation of occidental perceptions of the  difference between totalitarianism and democracy as it portrays a black clad and masculine force quieting and controlling a feminized people (literally “brought to its knees”) clad in a wide array of colors that mark its pluralist and individualist identity.   But there is, I think, a more interesting point to be considered if we focus more directly on the parents themselves and the fact that they are all clutching photographs of their dead children.

The question, of course, is what are the parents doing? If one were to crop the parents’ faces it would be hard – at least to western eyes – to discern whether they are expressing mournful grief and sorrow or protesting a political or moral wrong.  But, of course, their faces are not cropped and they all embrace photographs of their dead children, a posture which frames the meaning of the image even as it complicates the relationship between mourning and protest, imbricating the two in a single mode of social and political action.  This relationship is accented by a set of photographs that appeared in the NYT and elsewhere of  parents posing with pictures of their dead children in more or less private and physically isolated settings and locations.

The tension in such images between the controlled but sorrowful gaze of the parent and the smiling faces of the children is palpable, producing a visual hybrid of more traditional photographic conventions that operates at the conjuncture of “offer” and “demand.”  As with most of these images, the setting records a private world turned upside down—notice the overturned bookcase in the above photograph—which, when combined over and again across a series of such shots, is emblematic of a larger public disorder. And indeed, it is the repetition of the form in photograph after photograph that animates the affective force of the image.  At some point in time the aesthetic might become a cliché, subjecting such photographic representations to theories of “compassion fatigue,” but here at least their inventional novelty seems to avoid this result.

Such photographs are interesting for what they tell us about how protest might operate in political regimes where voices cannot be spoken with impunity, for they acknowledge the threat and potency of repressive silence even as they assert the power of something like a “public screen” to challenge and subvert controls on free speech traditionally understood. The people in such images recognize that they have little status to “speak” out in protest, even if such efforts did not put them at personal risk, which they obviously do.  But, of course, being seen is a different matter. The point is especially pronounced in the above photograph of  Zhao Xiao Ying and her twelve year old son Ji Qing Zhen, which foregrounds and underscores the political performativity of posing for such images; notice, for example, how the subjects in this photograph are visually thrice removed from the political present, even as as their political presence is accented by the photographic frame: what we have is quite literally a visual representation (a photograph) of a visual representation (mirror image) of a visual performance (posing for a photojournalist) that is equal parts private and public, and thus simultaneously an expression of personal grief and collective, political protest.

The individuals in such images do not speak per se, and thus in one sense they are “seen and not heard,” but in a much larger sense their collective visual presence—as displayed in the photograph at the top of this page—demonstrates the capacity for the performance of visibility to “speak” truth to power by affecting what we might call a “visual public sphere.” 

Photo Credits:  Ng Han Guan/AP, Shiho Fuakada/NYT; For discussion of the concept of the “public screen” see Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Pepples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” in Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 121-51.

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Sight Gag: The Crucial Moron Vote

Photo Credit:  Unknown

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 Jon 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 such moments on display in what we call “sight gags,” democracy’s nod to the ironic and/or 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. Sometimes the images will be pure silliness, but sometimes they will point to ironies, poignant and otherwise. 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.

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Harlem, the Landscape

ArIc Mayer is an exceptionally thoughtful photographer whose work has been featured before at this blog. He has a new series of images that, like so much of his work, encourage contemplation of a subject that is otherwise trapped in stock images articulating a standard narrative. We know all about Katrina, right? Or the beauty of the American West. Or Harlem. We may have never been there, but we know the story. Aric never denies what is really there in the story, nor does he provoke the viewer to see things from some odd angle. Instead, he carefully works you into his line of vision until you start to think about what you are seeing. After that, you’re on your own, but that is enough.

The new set of photographs are from Harlem. You know, the streets teeming with bodies, sound, and signage. The once magnificent buildings now dilapidated, the streets lined with litter and grafitti, the iron grates on the storefronts and the lurid murals on the walls. Like this:

Oh, to be able to describe the beauty, the intelligence of trees. Beauty too rarely seen, for how often do we stop and simply look up? How often on a cloudy spring day, and in the city? What is more important, however, is not that he looked up, but that this is given to us without any sense of contrast. The message is not that a world of beauty and potential lies just above the concrete, nor the ugly insinuation that beauty is everywhere–i.e., even in Harlem. This is a photograph of nature, but not to denigrate urban life. There is no myth, no transcendence, no need to escape. Instead, a different resonance: wisdom, ancient ways, endurance, another dimension waiting to be heard.

Perhaps even serenity:

But “serenity” is too simple. As with the first image, there is something poignant, even haunting about this photograph. A drain can conjure up images of water and of floods, or of blood and of too much being drained away, or of waste and the ultimate return to the earth. And yet this spot is so clean, and so well worn, as if rubbed smooth by many generations of spring rains. The bird-like shape of the lighter patch could be a totemic animal, or the drain some kind of communication device. If the stones could speak, would we listen? Were we to see the city anew, like a spring landscape, what would we see?

You can see the full set of Aric Mayer’s Harlem photographs here.

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Olympic Training and the Nation

We almost never write about sport at this blog, yet I’m putting two posts up this week on the run-up to the Olympics. Maybe it’s because the war in Iraq is all but won–based on recent coverage, anyway–so I need something new to talk about. More likely the increase in coverage is producing a fresh crop of images. Here’s another one that caught my eye:

The New York Times story featured China’s heavy investment in rowing as part of its push to win the medals competition. The enormous investment is very real, but the whole idea seems quaint–just the thing you’d expect from a somewhat socially backward newcomer. Does anyone really care if medal total goes to China, the US, or the USSR–whoops! I mean Russia? The whole game is a relic of the Cold War. Aren’t such symbolic measures meaningless next to the real competition for oil, markets, and global economic dominance?

The short answer is yes, and the photo above illustrates just how the game is changing. Two things immediately define the image: the athlete’s magnificent physique and the high-end modernist decor. He is a superbly trained athlete walking through the functionally designed training facility. Both have all the marks of smart and lavish investment. Any difference between his individual person and the impersonal setting is covered over by their uniform simplicity and shared engineering.

The signage on his shirt and the wall also are part of the image. CHINA marks him as member of the national team, but this is not the flag-waving patriotism of a public ceremony. That shirt could just as well say NIKE or any other logo–you are looking at the new international style, another iteration of the high modernist culture of scientific training, standardized competition, and expert performance that links the top-tier athletes across the globe. By contrast, the Olympic rings and number on the wall look like crafts project from the local school–clearly a temporary addition. Cute, but hardly essential. After all, the Olympics are only the next event in an unending push for optimization.

In short, we can see the nation-state becoming a platform for economic and organizational power. This arrangement has enormous productive capacity and clearly can benefit some individuals. As it happens, however, much of what used to distinguish both the nation and interaction across national borders is changing, perhaps withering away. The contrast is even more evident when looking at another photo:

A boxer is being wrapped in a Brazilian flag prior to a qualifying bout for the Olympics. Boxing, which had a good run in the twentieth century as one of the premier sports nationally and internationally, is all but extinct. The setting in this photo does not suggest strong financial support. The flag is the only lavish thing there–colorful, rich material with plenty of drape to cover his body. Needless to say, it will come off very soon. The image is touching, really: this poor kid about to get beat on is putting on the national flag to become something larger than himself. It will be done to get the crowd on his side and intimidate his opponent, but not only for that. He wants to look good in that flag, and he’s proud to wear it. And that flag probably is about the extent of the support he will get from the state. Brazil has a lot going for it, but it’s still content to be a collective, not a platform.

That boxer probably could do a lot with Chinese training. But don’t feel sorry for him, for there is one more thing to see. It’s a coincidental effect in each case, but nonetheless food for thought. Standing amidst not much of nothing, the boxer is looking up, head held high. His face already looks cut, but he is unbowed. Now look again at the Chinese athlete. He is strong, perhaps thoughtful–going over the training routine one more time–but his head is down, as if habitually, submissively so. As if accustomed to the yoke. He is beautiful, but he is not free. Whether due to the state or the discipline, he is not free.

Photographs by Doug Kanter/New York Times and Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press.

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