2008 – Page 17 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Fighting the War on … ur, umh, Terror

At first glance it might look like these troops are in the poppy fields of Colombia or possibly Mexico, “fighting” the so-called “war on drugs.” After all, the U.S. government has dedicated five billion dollars to Plan Colombia since 2000 and more recently another 1.4 billion dollars to the Meridia Project, all with the goal of defeating the illicit traffic in opium and heroin. And according to the DEA it has been effective, forcing a 44% increase in the street price of a gram of cocaine, as well as a 15% reduction in its purity. Indeed, it almost seems like it is worth the effort … almost, but not quite, since there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of a reduction in demand, which means the drug dealers are just getting richer. But in any case, I digress, for the photograph is not of a battle field in the war on drugs, but actually a battle field in the war on terror!

The picture is a taken of a poppy field in the Khost Province where the U.S. military—now 32,000 strong in Afghanistan vs. 160,000 strong in Iraq—has effected a “basic strategy shift” in its war on terror. No, those troops aren’t looking for Osama bin Laden (remember him? the one apparently responsible for 9/11, the one President Bush said was our “number one priority, we will not rest until we find him”) hiding among the plants. Rather, they are “destroy[ing] opium poppies while on patrol.”

There might actually be some sense to focusing on the drug trade in Afghanistan given the evidence that there is a connection between the illicit traffic in opium and various insurgent groups, including both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But, of course, the approach is all wrong. For one thing, the U.S. government has dedicated the majority of its resources to eradication, interdiction, and the prosecution of high-level drug traffickers, strategies which, as we’ve seen in virtually every instance that it has been employed, only makes the drug more valuable. And for another thing, it is stretching an already thin military cohort even thinner as, in the picture above, its efforts are being devoted to an odd form of “search and destroy” fixated on poppies and not the real enemy.

But there is a bigger point to be made. As I thought we learned in Vietnam, winning a war such as this requires capturing the “hearts and minds” of local populations, and here those populations—altogether absent from the photograph as if to mark their irrelevance to the basic “shift in strategy”—are the peasant farmers who subsist on their illicit poppy crops. When our policy is to target poor farmers through strategies of eradication and interdiction we not only alienate those who should (or at least could) be our allies in the war on terror, but we push them closer to the enemy with its grassroot ties and increase the likelihood of civil unrest if not actually civil war. And what is sad is that there are more effective approaches, such as those used to undermine the international drug traffic coming out of India and Turkey, including licensing farmers to produce crops to be used for legal pain medications and/or buying crops from the farmers and then destroying them.

But apparently John Walters, America’s drug czar, and the Department of State will hear none of it. After all, this is a war on terror. Either you are with us or you are against us. Why use the carrot when you can use a stick—even if it doesn’t work!

Photo Credit: Rafiq Maqbool/AP

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The Sight of Blood

Some get light-headed at the sight of blood, others get nauseous, kids are amazed, nurses get used to it. Most of the time, we don’t see it. Despite the gallons of fake blood spilled in the movies, the sight of the real thing continues to be a shock. That will be one reason you don’t see it often in a family newspaper. The daily slide shows have more leeway, however. That’s where I found this image:

The caption stated that a number of people had been injured when a rally in Katmandu was broken up by police wielding tear gas and batons. (Why do they call them police?) Now this photo isn’t grotesque. Indeed, it’s not too far aesthetically from the more familiar tourism photos of Buddhist monks in colorful robes, or from other images that have been in the news lately from the many carnivals and similar rites of spring that are going on around the globe. And one could suggest that it’s somewhat staged: he could be propped up for the camera, and the red, white, and blue sign in English certainly is directed at the Western media. Besides, blood flows freely above the lip line; he could just be nicked as if by shaving, right?

Wrong. He’s been clubbed, and he’s being held up because he might collapse. He is not colorful. He is bearing witness to violence. If they will club him in the public square, you can imagine what can happen behind closed doors. But we don’t go there, and that is why it is important to see the blood. Stunned into silence, his body now speaks for him.

If we were to measure speech, perhaps it could be done in blood. How much has to be spilled to secure the right to speak freely? How much has to be said to stop the flow of blood in police states and failed states and war zones and ghettos around the globe? How often will we turn away rather than look, nauseous, at the blood streaming from the victims of beatings and bombings and drive-by shootings? When will we face this:

Sadr City, Baghdad, a local clinic after a firefight between US troops and militiamen. It makes me sick.

Photographs by Brian Sokol/New York Times and Ahmed Al-Rubaye/AFP-Getty Images.

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Looking at the Pope, Seeing Humanity

With the Pope’s visit to the US this week, some Protestants will be sorely tempted to fall into the sin of pride. Protestants like me, for example, when I look at photographs such as this one:

Just what American needs, a medieval monarch. Just what Christ had in mind: opulent robes, gold trim, courtiers, pageantry, all on behalf of hierarchy.

But that’s too easy. Irony and two bucks will get you a seat at the coffee shop, but it’s no more righteous than sitting in a pew. Rather than rehash differences, the more interesting question is, what might a non-Catholic learn from the Pope’s visit? While looking through the photo essays on his pending arrival, there seemed to be little there that I hadn’t seen before and that wasn’t playing out a familiar script in the courtly style. But then I saw this image:

The ornate robes and crown are gone, leaving the human person who temporarily inhabits the institutional role. The off-write robe or shawl could be a rough covering against the cold, or a shroud. The bare head, thin, white hair, and almost fearful expression suggest vulnerability, yet his eyes are resolutely open to what awaits him. He is illuminated from above, but the light bathing him seems not to confer a blessing but to call him toward the next realm. The shadows along his face and body cue the sense of pending mortality that suffuses the picture.

The first photograph allows ironic contrast between the majestically robed pope and the body of Christ on his scepter. No irony is intended, of course, but instead the suggestion of a common immortality: Christ in heaven and the universal church. In the second photograph, I see only one body: the mortal body, seen to be aging where not covered with common cloth signifying the grave. The scepter has changed as well: in place of the tortured Jesus, only a small cross. Most tellingly, in the center of the metallic halo, one sees a translucent circle. Note also how the light illuminates both the pope’s head and the center of the sceptered ornament. One can see a human being and the mechanism of the church. One can imagine that he will at the last see an aperture to heaven, or only emptiness, diffusion, nothingness.

There need be nothing parochial about that choice. Instead of the Grand Inquisitor, this pope, for one moment, bears witness to the human condition.

And there is more. My response to the second image did not occur by accident. The robe is called a humeral veil–from the Latin humus, or soil–and was once a burial shroud and then a baptismal vestment, thus signifying death and rebirth. Likewise, the scepter is called a Monstrance–from monstro, to show–and is used to display the consecrated sacrament (the body of Christ) to the congregation. Thus, although one need not follow the path all the way through death to eternal life, the liturgical ritual clearly had marked out a path. What it cannot do is mandate a single valid interpretation of what is shown: if one sees faith and the promise of salvation, another can see empty ritual and collective delusion. Regardless of what I believe, I see a signifying animal that persistently, perhaps even nobly confronts the void with its need to communicate and ability to imagine a better world.

Photographs by Darlo Pignatelli/Reuters; Pier Paolo Cito/Associated Press. Thanks to the Rev. Dr. Robert Clarke for technical support on church liturgy.

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A Man, A Tank, and A Cow

From time to time we comment on creative appropriations of iconic photographs. One image that has been frequently copied, parodied, and otherwise appropriated to various political and commercial ends is the photograph of the lone individual standing before a row of oncoming tanks in Tiananamen Square in 1989. The image has shown up with some frequency recently in protests against the upcoming Beijing Summer Olympics, as in this photograph of a rally in San Francisco that appeared this past week in the NYT. The iconic photograph (which is really three different photographs by three different photojournalists—Jeffrey Widener, Charles Cole, and Stuart Franklin—all shot from similar but nevertheless different vantages) is widely recognized throughout the western world, but interestingly, it has almost no visibility or recognition in China where it has been effectively censored.

We have written about the image somewhat extensively in No Caption Needed (the book) where we argue that the image activates a cultural modernism that displaces democratic forms of political display and opposition (remember that the protests in Tiananmen Square included thousands of students and nearly a million protesters in all who had organized in various groups) and plays to western conceptions of individualism and apolitical social organization. Thus, while the original photograph can function as a progressive celebration of human rights, it also risks limiting the political imagination to narrowly liberal versions of a global society.

We see the possible implications worked out to some extent in an ad for Chick-fil-A that parodied the Tiananmen Square photograph during the 2002 Peach Bowl. To see the ad click on the image below.

As we note in our discussion of the image in No Caption Needed, the ad’s sophistication speaks volumes about liberal-democratic identity construction. Key features of public dissent are recreated within a comic fame that allows one to enjoy them without actually becoming in any way committed to political action. Instead, identification occurs entirely with regard to a topography of private life: the viewer makes choices about small scale consumer consumption—where to drive through tonight?—that supposedly are choices between social conformity or individual self-expression. Cows cannot speak and consumers are not likely to speak out, but the comic imitation of a silent act of public protest makes consumption appear to be a public act. The democratic mythos of representing the will of the people to challenge authoritarian power becomes a vehicle for motivating completely individuated acts within private life. But the active agent with whom we are invited to identify is a cow with no voice. And there, of course, is the rub, for while the ad is witty, it nevertheless also masks a deep fatalism about individual powerlessness as it asks us to smile along when the brutal suppression of a popular movement is remembered as an argument to shift our allegiance from one fast food franchise to another.

Photo Credits: Reagan Louie/NYT; Chick-fil-A, Inc./The Richards Group. For our detailed discussion of the Tiananmen Square photograph and its many appropriations, see No Caption Needed, 208-41.

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Sight Gag: Old Glory in 2D-3D

Credit: Lex Drewinski, 2D-3D Silkscreen

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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Conference Call: A Return to the Senses

CALL FOR PAPERS:

A Return to the Senses: Political Theory and the Sensorium

– A Theory & Event Conference –
May 7 – 9, 2009

The resurgence of scholarly research on the nexus between politics and aesthetics has brought to the fore rich and diverse investigations on the role of the senses in political life. Whether engaging the theories of perception that configure our understandings of justice, or forms of aesthetic experience in an ethics of appearance, or the role of affect and the passions in human motivation, the concerns that motivate these and other cognate inquiries stem from an important fact of pluralist democratic societies: namely, that individuals or groups in pluralist democracies attend to one another at the level of appearances. In this respect, how we imagine the configuration, disposition, character and function of the senses when engaging political events is of critical importance for political theory.

In collaboration with the political and cultural theory journal Theory & Event, an international conference will be held at Trent University in Peterborough (Canada) on May 7 – 9, 2009. Multidisciplinary in scope and ambition, this conference seeks proposals from scholars whose research interests pursue the diverse cultural sites of political theory’s sensorium. Such sites might include television, cinema, new media, food, music, and dance; practices of visibility, iteration, aurality, flavor; contemporary and historical treatments of perception and taste, time and movement – from a multitude of political, historical and theoretical perspectives.

The submission deadline for proposals is October 1, 2008. Please submit abstracts of 300-400 words (Ph.D. candidates should indicate their expected date of completion) to the following email address: sensorium2009@gmail.com. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out in January, 2009.
Conference Organizer:
Davide Panagia
Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies
Traill College, Trent University
Conference Coordinator:
Adrienne Richards
The Center for the Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics
Trent University

Sponsored by the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and The Centre for the Study of Theory, Culture, and Politics at Trent University.

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UPDATE: We are at a conference at the University of Rochester on Visual Communication this weekend. Last night we had dinner with Michael Shaw of the BAG and Cara Finnegan, University of Illinois, where we prepared a “collective” post on a photograph from yesterday’s NYT. You can see the post titled “Serpentine Days” here.

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The Global Neighbor: Behind a Glass Darkly

Photographers occasionally shoot images of people reflected in windows, framed by windows, or looking through windows. Such images can be visually distinctive while also prompting more reflexive viewing: one sees both the image and some aspect of seeing. The two images below are examples of this visual thinking, while also reflecting other conventions that mediate global communication.

This photograph shows an Afghan schoolgirl. The good news is that she is in school–not a given in Afghanistan. The bad news is that the photographer has put her under the veil. The window screen stands in for the chadiri she is likely to wear as a woman, while the rip in the screen might be a trace of orientalist fantasy, one shaded further by the stain on her hand. The implication is that, despite being in school, she still needs to be liberated. She would welcome that, it seems, as she is looking not through the screen but through the tear. That gash in the screen could stand for poverty or accident, but it makes the screen appear the more inevitable. Although a close-up shot of a vibrant young girl, she remains on the other side of a barrier. That barrier dulls perception in both directions. She seems a lost soul, ghost-like, someone who can see and be seen but not someone we can touch or help, as she really is from another world.

There are others in that world.

This is actually only a temporary confinement, as they are passengers in a Chinese train delayed by heavy snow. But that news is the least of it. Surely this is a vision of the human condition of separation, of the transparent barrier that stands between any human being and another. One grips the rail and looks to the side, warily; he has learned to expect the worst. The younger man still can admit to his yearning to connect. He looks at us, reaches out and puts his hand to the glass, as if we might place ours against his, as if we could touch and not feel only the cold glass.

Each photo tells us that it is not enough to see; we also need to connect. The Biblical allusion in the title of this post is to the beautiful poem in 1 Corinthians 13. Now we see in a “glass” (in the oft-quoted King James translation, referring to a mirror) darkly, but when united with God we shall see face to face. This vision of heaven doubles as a vision of how humanity might live with itself. Indeed, it might be that one step to achieving heaven on earth is to see one another as if face to face. To do that, we have to not settle for merely being able to see through barriers that still dull empathy and divide one from another.

Photographs by Rafig Maqbool and Vincent Yu for the Associated Press.

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A Sparrow Falls in Sadr City

This one is heartbreaking.

I can’t help but think of a small bird lying in the dirt. Small yet once throbbing with life and song, now lifeless, soon to disappear entirely. Perhaps it’s the bright yellow–so unusual for a shroud yet somehow appropriate for a child–or the shape of a broken wing with the telltale blood, or the feet sticking out birdlike from beneath the body. Such a small, innocent thing. Do not speak here of the grandeur of war, or of forging character and testing national resolve.

There is a companion photograph, this one of the boy’s parents grieving outside the morgue.

In the first photo, the body is both there but not there. Here the body is not there but there–signified by the open coffin that will be used to put him away forever. Even the parents are both there and not there: physically present, but hopelessly distracted, lost in their grief, separate from each other, from anyone else, from themselves. The mother could be a wounded bird, flopping awkwardly in the dirt, not yet killed but crippled by the blow.

In the first photo, the bare feet evoke the vulnerability of a small animal but also are the one sure mark of a human body. Likewise, the hand extending into the second picture may be the one sign of human compassion in the scene. I don’t know, but it seems as if someone is cautioning the photographer to not get too close or otherwise intrude on the grieving parents. That small gesture holds out the promise that others could recognize their pain and respect their need to mourn. Thus the hand cues response to the photograph as a whole, suggesting that others might care for those being harmed by the war. The question remains whether that is a plausible hope or an empty gesture.

Photographs by Michale Kamber and Joao Silva for the New York Times.

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A Dream Deferred

This is the vantage point from which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed his “Dream” in 1963 of a world in which “little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with the little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” I have listened to King’s oration hundreds of times and I have published essays on that moment in history; and more, I have taught the speech in classes more times than I can remember and I never—not ever!—fail to be deeply affected by the sound and the power of the words. But all of that paled in comparison to standing in the exact spot that King stood, literally cast in the shadow of Lincoln and gazing out upon the broad vista of the National Mall with the reflecting pond leading one’s sight to the Washington Monument. The Mall was not entirely full on the day I was there, but I could easily imagine it packed with a quarter of a million people, sitting and standing in common cause for racial equality guided by King’s eloquent tones and his vision of a “beloved community.” It was a truly spiritual moment.

And then I saw this photograph in the Washington Post and it brought me up short. The clouds are a steely grey and somewhat foreboding, as they engulf the top of the Washington Monument and seem to be moving forward to enshroud the entire Mall, and by extension the nation that it stands in for. There is no sun, and so Lincoln’s shadow is nowhere to be seen. But most of all, there are no crowds of people—black, white, brown, yellow … —joining hands or otherwise; what we have instead is something of a civic and social void underscored by the lone microphone stand that substitutes metonymically for the absent King—the eloquent voice of our national social conscience. Shot straight on and from ground level the microphone stand is placed in linear perspective with the Washington Monument and seems to dwarf it in size. And what it made me consider is how seductive the romantic mythos of the National Mall can be with its magnificent views and enormous monuments, and yet how symbolically empty (and even ominous) that mythos can be when there is no one to speak for social justice or when there is no one there to listen.

Photo Credit: Tim Sloan-AFP/Getty Images

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Sport on Planet Arrakis

One of the basic ideas of this blog is that photographs can depict more than what was happening in front of the lens. This added value can include highlighting larger patterns and processes and also providing imaginative projections of current tendencies. This is what some artists try to do by writing, and science fiction is particularly keen on exploring possible technological and political consequences of present tendencies. This comparison came to mind when I saw this photograph from Afghanistan.

The caption confirms that these are cricket players in a sandstorm. It also adds that they are on a “playground,”but something seems lost in translation. The scene looks more like something out of Dune (the book, not the movie). Recreation on the desert planet Arrakis may not be a lot of fun, but we can marvel at how humans can adapt to anything. At the same time, the imperial influence seems to be alien and superficial rather than any genuine improvement of the place. The storm and much more may pass, but there is something poignant about this image of human beings defined by arbitrary rules and shared isolation on their desert planet.

With this photo sitting on my desktop, I wasn’t entirely surprised when a second appeared a few days later.

You are looking at the competitors begin the 150-mile Sand Marathon in Morroco. The race includes a full marathon, and a 50-mile day, and others as well across varying terrain. The race has to be run while carrying all their equipment on their backs and getting only 9 liters of water a day. Again, the old fort, the desert, and the peculiar, imported form of ritual play by hardy adapters could be from Dune. Where one would think survival would be enough, more is achieved, but always by staying close to the severe limits of nature.

My comparison may be fanciful, but I can’t help but think that these photos are displayed for reasons that go beyond being visually distinctive or documenting unusual forms of recreation. They might also be images of a possible future. That would be a future not on some distant planet, but on this one, should it become ruined by some combination of unrestrained emissions, deforestation, warfare, and other forms of ecological destruction.

Photographs by Ahmed Masood/Reuters; Pierre Verdy/AFP-Getty Images.

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