2008 – Page 18 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Sight Gag: American (Gothic) Nightmare

Credit: Marco Lanzagorta, Dread Reckoning, American Gothic

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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Photographer's Showcase: The Ways of Paint

This week our showcase takes us outside the ambit of photojournalism. David Sutton is a professional photographer who creates remarkable portraits of people and their animals. His distinctive black and white images have appeared in numerous media outlets and brought him the unique honor of being named the best pet photographer in America by the magazine Forbes FYI. You can see some of David’s portraiture at his studio website. Today’s showcase provides a glimpse of some of David’s other work and of how he sees the world in color. The five photographs below are from a series entitled The Ways of Paint. David remarks that he is intrigued by how “paint reveals processes.” And so it does, while also becoming richly evocative.

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The Wall

I hated that I was required to memorize poems when I was in the 8th grade. But I had one of those truly inspirational teachers by the name of Abraham Elias, and when Mr. Elias said memorize poems … well, I memorized them. I never imagined that it would become an useful exercise. But then I encountered the above picture in an LA Times slide show titled “Building a Better Fence,” and the words came tumbling out, almost as if I couldn’t control them:

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

The photograph is of a portion of the 15–foot-high ~~wall~~ fence that stretches 40 miles east of San Luis, Arizona and separates the U.S. from the Mexican state of Sonora. In case you can’t tell, that is Sonora on the right side of the ~~wall~~ fence and San Luis, Arizona on the left. When completed the ~~wall~~ fence will start in San Diego and extend in fits and starts some 700 miles along the 2,000 mile U.S./Mexico border. Sometimes ~~walls~~ fences are designed to keep people in, like was the case with the Berlin Wall, but here the ~~wall~~ fence is designed to keep people out, protecting the U.S. from its neighbors to the south. In our post-cold war era this is what we call “homeland security.”

The need for serious immigration reform in the U.S is real, to be sure, but a 700 mile ~~wall~~ fence across a barren dessert valley in the name of national security is … well … insane. Indeed, upon first glance my initial thought was that the photograph above was actually an April Fool’s Day joke, but then I recalled that President Bush had signed an order to start such an enterprise and that the U.S. Congress had actually designated an initial 1.2 billion dollars (of what is expected ultimately to be a 6 billion dollar expenditure) to begin the task. But even still, I had to check to make sure I wasn’t reading The Onion.

The photograph marks the absurdity, if not the futility, of such an effort. The ~~wall~~ fence, which looks as much like a crack in the earth as anything, extends from an unidentified “here” to an infinitely distant and unknowable “there.” Its scope is thus hard to imagine, all the more so as we recall that the ~~wall~~ fence itself will only cover one-third of the border dividing the U.S. and Mexico. The viewer is located on the U.S. side looking across the ~~wall~~ fence line into Mexico, but of course we know this only because the caption tells us so since the two sides of the ~~wall~~ fence are equally barren and desolate, virtually and otherwise indistinguishable from one another. The arbitrary and political nature of the boundary between the two nation-states and of the location and exercise of power to enforce the separation is thus pronounced. And more, the very thought that such a physical boundary can be sustained for any extended period of time seems to be mocked by the natural landscape of the desert which promises to encompass and contain all that would disturb its contours.

It is difficult to see the poet’s “ground-swell” from this perspective, shot on-high and from a distance, nor are the two-abreast “gaps” that render such structures altogether ineffective apparent, but rest assured that they are there or will soon appear. For historically that has been the nature of walls and fences, whether in Berlin or Belfast or Jerusalem or Padua or elsewhere. What they are designed to keep out always finds its way in, and what is being contained always finds a way to leak or leech out. And for all of their failures such structures only fortify and reinforce the obsessive paranoia and fear of the alien that led to their being built in the first place, one more event in a cycle of state driven violence that keeps us from discovering more humane solutions to our problems.

The poet had it right, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Photo Credit: Don Bartletti/LA Times; and the poet, of course, was Robert Frost, the poem, “Mending Wall.”

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Lying to Tell the Truth about Hillary Clinton

The story of Hillary Clinton’s compulsive lying about being under sniper fire during a trip to Bosnia is already slipping away, so much so that she now is referring to is as a minor mistake. Well, I guess we should forgive and forget, right? (Wrong.) Before that happens, however, let’s take one last look at Hillary dodging bullets as she sprints across the tarmac:

As one astute reader put it at another blog, it depends on what your definition of “sniper fire” is.

Cynics will be gloating over this egregious example of how “all politicians lie.” That sloppy thinking only helps cynics and liars. Not everyone is in Hillary’s league, and she, not her opponent, has asked that people judge her on her judgment and experience. Note that character is not on that list, and the lie about her reception upon landing in Tuzla reflects both bad judgment and a misuse of experience. But, truth be told, her claim may have been not so much a lie in her own sense of things as a fiction–something not true that is told to convey a truth. OK, the snipers weren’t there, and she had to know it since she brought her daughter along, but you’ve just got to know that she is soooo ready to be a “war-time president.”

I don’t think earnest yearning excuses much, but if we grant Hillary any slack, she had better be ready to concede that visual commentary might tell the story slant to get a better sense of the truth. Like this:

Editorial cartoonists love to use the Iwo Jima icon. This one may seem a tad unfair because of how the icon is gendered, but, again, it’s Hillary who has said she’s the only one who ought to answer the mythical National Security Phone. What is more telling is that she is facing the viewer. In contrast to the anonymity of the soldiers laboring together selflessly on behalf of the nation, she is jumping in unbidden to serve personal ambition. Of course, she wasn’t claiming to be a soldier, and there are no bullets in the iconic photograph of the flag-raising, but the cartoonist has revealed more than one problem with Clinton’s lie.

Hillary got caught telling a whopper; perhaps she ought to be given a dose of her own medicine. Some people wish it could be her Dukakis moment–that is, the equivalent of the 1988 Democratic candidate’s mistaken photo-op, when a shot of him riding in a tank became a defining moment of the campaign and one reason you don’t hear references to “President Dukakis.” That episode may be why you can see this image online today:

Really, really unfair. I’m just broken up about it.

Photograph by the Associated Press. Cartoon by Joe Heller/Green Bay Press-Gazette (March 31, 2008). Photoshopped image by registered@aol.com. For scholarly discussion and examples of the use of the Iwo Jima template in editorial cartooning, see Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997(: 269-89, and Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, at pp. 121-124 (on Iwo Jima) and elsewhere.

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Iconic Images, Lego Art, and the Limits of Imitation

April 1, 2008December 3, 2013
Hariman
afterimages
7 Comments

One of the characteristics of iconic images is that they are reproduced across a wide range of media, genres, settings, and topics. Actually, that is true of media more generally–think of how songs, jokes, quotations, recipes, fashions, and many other other things circulate widely–but it usually is not so intentional or distinctive as when it is done with widely recognized and influential images. Iconic photographs have been reproduced as drawings, paintings, sculpture, murals, graffiti, embroidery, beadwork, silkscreens, figurines, stamps, plates, coins, tattoos–you name it. Oh, yes, and Lego art:

This is one of a set of nine that are posted at a Flickr page. The set contains reconstructions of three canonical photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Charles Ebbets’ shot of iron workers sitting on a beam hanging in empty space, Robert Capa’s photo of a soldier being shot in the Spanish civil war, the Times Square kiss, two from the Vietnam war, and the lone protester standing before a tank in Tiananmen Square.

The question is whether there is anything to be learned from the Legos. One wouldn’t expect much beyond what we already know: with a few key features in place, we can recognize the iconic image in any medium, and people can be clever when they have time on their hands. The odd imitation is basically a joke, and we marvel–briefly–that someone could get so much out of Legos or ice cream (it’s been done: the flag-raising at Iwo Jima) or whatever else is getting the iconic upgrade.

I wonder, however, if there isn’t more to the Lego art. Let’s take two examples–briefly. First, the Times Square kiss:

The Lego version captures both the strongest positive feature of the photo as well as one cause for criticism. The positive feature is the good vibe that so many people get from seeing a young couple passionately “kissing the war goodbye” on V-J Day. You get that feeling in the Lego work from the smile on the sailor’s face. In the photograph from Times Square, there is much more: youth casting off of wartime restrictions, Eros and regeneration triumphing over war and death, private and public life beautifully harmonized; what’s not to like? Well, there is one thing for some, and that’s how the woman may be a less that willing participant. He didn’t ask first, and so one form of domination could be giving way to another form of domination. And sure enough, the Lego art gets that as well: look at how awkwardly she is bent back, and how she is not returning his advance.

I could stop there, but let’s do one more:

This is a reprise of the Eddie Adams photograph from the 1968 Tet offensive in during the Vietnam War.

Adams believed that the officer was justified in executing the bound prisoner of war, and perhaps a case can be made. But the photo records more than a single incident, and it fit too well with many other acts that were both criminal and marked by the official indifference that is displayed here. So, much to Adams dismay, the photograph became memorialized as a statement against the war.

And something like that ambiguity is evident in the Lego art. The smiles of the two figures, and particularly the one being shot, are just not right. They’re wrong because not in the photograph, and because not fitting with the scene, and because not appropriate for cuing our reaction to a killing. As with the iconic photograph, what seems to be a simple image is in fact one that churns complicated responses, in part because it isn’t right with itself.

There are limits to imitation. Not everything can be said in any medium, and some media can’t say much at all, but there still can be more there than we might think. Next up, iconic images in cornfield mazes. Really, they’re out there.

Photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images; Eddie Adams/Associated Press.

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Radiant Agriculture

Every spring and fall the photographic record in the US includes a few stock images of agriculture. Spring images include tractors turning the earth and kids holding newborn lambs; typical autumn fare includes combines moving across the Great Plains and pumpkins waiting to be carved. Modern agribusiness and a mythic county life each get their due. For the most part, however, we don’t see where our food comes from. The near-complete separation of the production and consumption of food is more than a distribution of labor–it is one of the things that makes us feel modern. Not surprisingly, it also ensure that “food” becomes very elastic, so much so that the local supermarket can have over 100,000 different products for sale.

The absence of images about food production is part of this willful dislocation of eating from growing, killing, and preparing food. It also isn’t a big loss much of the time. Who wants to watch wheat grow? Even so, once in a while an image comes along that can stop me in my tracks. Like this one:

The photo is of a rice field in Yunnan province in Southern China. It’s displayed both as a photo of the day at National Geographic online and at the Yunnan entry at Wikipedia. I think it belongs in the tradition of Chinese fine art. Indeed, if it seems familiar that probably is because it evokes earlier art works. Those paintings also may have captured terraced fields on landforms that seem so dynamic that they might be clouds. They, too, will have showed a place as if it were both uniquely particular and some fantastic otherworld. They also have mastered the exquisite tension between energy and order that makes the scene appear at once airily ephemeral and so beautiful that it could be eternal. The photograph stands alone, however, because of how it captures the light. The bright-hued light doesn’t so much shine on the landscape as radiate from within it.

The photo’s sense of aesthetic harmony amidst powerful natural energies might carry over, through the caption, to the idea that this also is an image of the good life: carefully manicured fields hug the wild mountain, and one can imagine that farmers are serenely engaged in sustainable agriculture as they have been for millennia except when drunk on sunshine. In fact, Yunnan has been a poor province that only now is producing enough rice to feed itself thanks to the addition of high-tech seeds and other modern practices. And so we get to the next photo:

This image from North Dakota seems almost funereal. The land is cold and empty, the sun is setting, and all that remains are a line of metal railroad cars that are evenly spaced as if sprockets in some cosmic abandoned factory. This is mechanized commodity crop production, and it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to be in the picture. The image accompanied a report on North Dakota’s population decline; the story was entitled Not Far from Forsaken.

That’s not the whole story, however. This barren winter desert is an unbelievably productive source of food that is shipped all over the world. So let’s look at the photo again, for it, too, suggests the promise that was so vivid in the first image. As Kathleen Norris learned, Dakota also is a place of heavenly energy. Look at the sun in this photo as something radiating constantly through the land, through the networks of exchange that define every meal we eat, and, most important, through the wheat that lies in the rail cars waiting to be converted into food and all we can do when we don’t want for food.

Photographs by Eugene Richards/New York Times; Jialiang Gao.

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Sight Gags: Play ball?

Photo Credit: John Lucaites

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.

0 Comments

Journal Announcement: Photography and Culture, Volume 1

March 28, 2008
Lucaites
conferences/shows/books no caption needed
1 Comment

For more information–including special two year subscription rates for individuals–go the Photography and Culture website.

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The Silent Costs of War

Several days ago we talked about the “faces of death” in Iraq. Today I want to talk about the costs of that war. The obvious costs are astonishing. Over 4,000 American personnel dead with at least seven times that number injured—and this doesn’t include those inflicted with some version of PTSD—and an additional 90,000 Iraqi deaths plus who knows how many injuries. Some media outlets have scandalously reported that this is far few casualties than in comparable wars in the past, but the number remains stunning, all the more so for a war fought under false pretenses. Locating the costs in dollars and cents is no less stunning. Through 2007 the war has cost 522 billion dollars; that’s $1,800 for every resident of the U.S. and it doesn’t take into account the 70 billion dollars already allocated for 2008 with no end in sight. But as I say above, these are the obvious costs.

But there are other costs, no less shocking or troubling, even if words to describe them are harder to come by and if we have to look harder to see them.

I came across this picture in the Guardian while meeting with some friends at the coffee shop in my local Borders Bookstore. It looked like just one more of the numerous pictures of destruction that we see quite regularly coming out of Iraq and to which, if you are like me, you have become somewhat anesthetized. And then I read the caption: “A man stands in the Mutanabi books market [Baghdad], once a thriving intellectual hangout.” Sitting in a book store where I regularly meet with friends and colleagues to discuss the events of the day I was struck by the irony that what I was looking at was not just the tragic destruction of an ancient and majestic city, but the obliteration and erasure of civil society itself. With enough money and manpower cities can be rebuilt, but without the obligations and social capital generated by the relationships cultivated by civil society they are barren places; totally devoid of affiliation with friends and strangers alike, they are little more than political and economic facades that ultimately leave us alienated and alone, rather like the old man in the photograph, searching in vein for some sense of meaning lost amidst the wreckage of history.

But the cost of war exceeds even the destruction of civil society.

I have seen many photographs of the war in the past five years that have had a strong effect upon me, but few have been as poignant or as troubling as this AP image of an Iraqi girl who “checks out the damage” of a suicide car bomber that killed 7 and wounded 14 more. The girl cannot be more than nine or ten years old. Her smock and blouse are neat and clean, and her hair is carefullly braided and adorned with yellow ribbons. And, of course, she is eating ice cream, surely one of life’s simplest pleasures, especially for children. She belongs in a park playing with friends, or perhaps in a schoolroom somewhere. But here, instead, she is framed by the remains of an insane act of destruction. What makes the picture so deeply troubling is that I cannot avoid the conclusion that what I am looking at is not the picture of innocence but a horrifying portrait of the utter normalization of war. She “checks out” the damage of a suicide bomber with the same nonchalant curiosity that my own young daughter would display when noticing a simple car crash for the umpteenth time: Interesting to be sure, but nothing she hadn’t seen before or didn’t anticipate seeing again—a mere fact of life, something to “check out” in passing, but certainly nothing to disrupt the pleasures of eating ice cream. One can only imagine with dismay how the young girl in the photograph will “see” the world as an adult.

No more tragic than the loss of lives, the scenes on display in these two photographs are no less tragic either, and perhaps all the more so because we so seldom include such scenarios in the ledger when we calculate war’s bottom line. But if we look real closely we can surely see the devastating effects of war’s silent costs. And we should mourn. And we should be horrified.

Photo Credits: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and AP

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When Machines Die

I suppose I’m getting sentimental in my old age, but this photo brings me to the first pangs of sadness, even grief.

A forty-year-old DC-9 is being dismantled after being damaged by a ground vehicle at Midway Airport in Chicago. After being stripped of its avionics and other high-end materials, it’s being broken apart for scrap. Something about the scene really gets to me, as if it were a beloved old dog being laid to rest. But this is the fuselage of a plane, one I probably never even flew in, and what if I had? This is like getting sentimental over a bus stop bench that you drove by once or twice. Who cares?

Perhaps it’s because the the wings are gone and the plane is broken in two and laying at an angle on the ground; that, along with the appearance of a face and mouth makes it seem like an animal, something that once was alive and now is returning to the earth. This organic feeling is heightened by contrast with the machine that is tearing into it–and looking like some large insect predator feeding on a carcass. I would no more identify with a garden slug or snake or any rotting backyard mammal than with a machine, but the innate fear of being prey may have changed all that. A broken machine has become the embodiment of mortality, and with that the horror of being killed and eaten, or, almost as bad, dying alone and unmourned.

This is not the usual reaction to seeing machines hit the scrap heap. Usually there is some fascination with the heaps of twisted metal and similarly mangled objects following any accident, but no grief. “Was anybody hurt?” we ask, not referring to the vehicles. Sometimes we go further, taking out our rage against the machine in delightful visions of cars exploding or other familiar objects getting what they deserve. Like this:

I once read about a place in New York City where you could take your small appliances, put them at the business end of an indoor firing range, and blast away. I’d absolutely love to go there. But that’s personal. There is something collective, and importantly so, in the reaction I had to the DC-9. Something like what was captured in this painting about the Hindenburg explosion.

John and I included this in No Caption Needed (the book), and I’ll repeat a bit of what we said there: “By drawing on the traditional form [of the pieta] and making the machine so palpably organic, the work fuses two contradictory tendencies: she mourns the burning body and so the humanity burning in a fire of their own making, and she mourns the machine itself, a beautiful, almost living thing, a life form of the machine age that, like the age itself, is doomed to catastrophe.” Maybe the photo from Midway touched the same nerve. If we don’t mourn the death of a machine, we are in some degree indifferent to our own demise.

Photographs from the Chicago Tribune, SomethingAwful.com, and Bruce Duncan.

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