2008 – Page 20 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

"Lost and Found" in a Baghdad Marketplace

March 13, 2008
Lucaites
boots and hands no caption needed visualizing war
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Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in Baghdad early this week, the deadliest single day for Americans troops since the “surge” this past summer. But, of course, it would be hard to know this by reading the national newspapers. On the NYT website it barely received notice at all, cast in tiny type and posted below the bar on the home page, subordinated to the carnival of reports on the sexual peccadilloes of “Client #9,” as well as stories on efforts by the Federal Reserve to jump start the economy, and the travails of college and university soccer, track, and softball coaches who simply don’t have the resources dedicated to “revenue earning” sports like basketball and football. The story of the bombing faired only slightly better at the WP, where it was front and center on the home page, but again set in small type and subordinated to a much larger headline announcing “Coupon Cutters Help Military,” a human interest story about senior citizens at an American Legion Post who do “their part in the war on terror” by clipping coupons and sending them to military families overseas.

As for pictures of the bombings, well, nada. Nothing. A visual void. It is always hard to know how to judge the absence of evidence, visual or otherwise, but in this case it would seem that the lack of pictures is evidence of the very presence of absence; or put differently, we have become so inured to the continuing presence of the war, it has become such an ordinary, everyday event, that reports such as this don’t even rise to the level of awareness. “Eight soldiers died in Baghdad yesterday, and in basketball the Celtics beat the Bulls …”

One month ago today we reported on what was then considered to be the “worst attack in months.” It was a suicide bombing in a Baghdad marketplace, not unlike the event that took place this week. No U.S. troops were killed in this earlier bombing, though 65 Iraqis died and twice that many were injured. But there were pictures of the after-effects of the attack, and perhaps we can learn something by looking at one of those photographs published at the time in a NYT slide show.

It is an altogether curious image. The caption reads “Iraqi soldiers and civilians examining a pile of shoes left in Ghazil market.” That might at first seem obvious, but if you bother to trace the line of sight of just about everyone in the photograph you quickly realize that no one is actually looking at the pile; indeed, they seem to be looking almost everywhere but at the shoes. It is almost as if the shoes are hidden in plain sight—rather like news reports of the more recent bombings. And there are other oddities as well. For one, the shoes themselves are massed together as if a “lost and found” collection. The passive construction of the caption—“a pile of shoes left in Ghail market”—is telling in this regard, suggesting the image of articles of clothing either misplaced or forgotten by irresponsible school children, not the remains of the dead and injured that have been purposefully collected. For another, the scene is thinly populated, certainly not what we would expect to see in a vibrant marketplace; but note too that the people that are there are spaced in a pattern that invites a sense of complete and utter disconnection. Ironically, then, we have a public marketplace in which people are present, but any sense of the public communion essential to a productive and robust civil society is altogether absent.

In one register, then, the photograph is a visual study of the trope of presence and absence. The shoes of the people who should be populating the public space are present, but the people themselves are absent; the state (“Iraqi soldiers”) and private individuals (note the more general characterization “civilians” and not the more politically affected “citizens” ) are minimally present, but the civil society that might connect them as part of a common culture in communion with one another is absent. But more than this, the representations of presence and absence function as an allegory for the effects of war and collective violence on civil society more generally, framing the photograph itself as something of a metaphoric “lost and found box”: the visual display of a scene in which a thoroughly fragmented polity searches in vain for what for what it can never quite seem to find (or what it desperately needs), even as it implicitly harbors the hope that what is lost is safely waiting to be found hidden away somewhere.

The oft told myth, of course, is that wars unite communities in common cause—and in some ways they surely do that—but such is also a romantic notion that sublimates the larger sense in which wars tear civil society asunder, making it unrecognizable even when all of the elements seem to be in place. This is one of war’s most profound tragedies and it is often hard to see.

Photo Credit: Eros Hoagland/NYT

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The Olympics of the Street

The photographs below are interchangeable with thousands of others, each of which captures something usually overlooked. I am referring to the athleticism required to get through a street demonstration that is being attacked by “police” or other military force. The image below gives one example.

This guy is having to outrun tear gas through an obstacle course of barbed wire. He is hurling himself forward, full out, while staying focused on each step as he also looks ahead to shift direction yet again. He could be a halfback running through a drill at the NFL combine. But he’s too small for that, of course, and too old and not completely in control of his body. No surprise, as he is a lawyer in Pakistan. Although demonstrating much greater physical ability than he needs in his day job, he is strictly amateur.But the tear gas run is an international event, and so we can see younger and more agile competitors:

This is am image Whitman could love: we see a young man beautifully active. He looks like an athlete–well muscled, balanced, gracefully coordinated–and he moves through the obstacles and the gas with speed and agility while still able to direct others. In the US, he could play quarterback; he’s from Panama, however, and so settles for the Olympics of the street.

But which event to enter? Instead of the tear gas run, many are drawn to the rock throw.

Again, this photograph shows a fine athlete in top form. You can guess that he will do well in each part of the event: the run from the crowd into the dangerous open space before the troops, the throw itself, and the run to safety from the counter-attacking swarm. This particular competitor is in Germany and exhibits the superb skill we expect of the German team. At the same time, some doubt whether he can make the adjustment from contending with the relatively civil German police to the much rougher conditions of the Middle East and elsewhere.

And so we get to the injuries. As with any Olympics, success depends on both training and luck. You probably have seen photos of Olympic runners falling or crashing into hurdles and grimacing in shock and pain. It’s the same–well, worse, actually–in the street.

The caption for this photo from the West Bank states that the man on the ground was “kicked in a confrontation with Israeli soldiers.” From the look of it, the caption should have read “kicked in the groin.” It’s tough out there.

In some parts of the world, athletes gravitate to organized sports programs. From there, the best are then trained, challenged, and rewarded toward ever greater refinement of their ability. Their lives may become dominated by one thing while years of preparation can end in a career-ending injury, but there are worse problems to have. In other parts of the world, however, that talent–like so much talent–is largely undevloped. Walled into systems of domination, trapped in cycles of violence, and denied jobs, a civil society, and any prospect of a better future, they are left with the rag-tag activities of life in the street. In spite of that we can see moments of physical grace. That can be admired for a moment, and then we should recognize how much is being wasted.

Photographs by Emilio Morenatti/Associated Press; Arnulfo Franco/Associated Press; Michael Probst/Associated Press; Abbas Momani/Agence France-Presse, Getty Images.

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Second Look: Silda Spitzer, The Political Wife

I was among those who were shocked and thoroughly dismayed by the report that Eliot Spitzer had been busted for frequenting a prostitution service. I also should admit that dismay can turn to laughter very quickly when you start following the story in the blogosphere, not least at the Wonkette. If you go there, you can peruse some of the advertisements from the Guv’s high end whore house, otherwise known as The Emperor’s Club. (Did someone forget to tell Eliot that he’s a governor, not an emperor?) Spitzer deserves to be the the butt of every single joke that is made in the next year, but that’s not why I’m writing today.

As usual, some bystanders will have been hurt as well. If Hillary Clinton is one of them, you can understand why she might be really, really tired of this kind of news. Tired of, but not as sad as Silda Spitzer.

Photojournalism provides a record of the art, rituals, and performances of political theater. This photo is one of many that we can classify as portraits of the political wife. I saw the image for the first time yesterday afternoon and it stayed with me through the rest of the day and into the evening. Whenever I thought of some aspect of the scandal, I soon would be back to her standing there, taking the hit. Eyes down, hands behind her back, face and neck exposed to the camera’s glare, she is a picture of vulnerability. The contrast with him is all too telling: his stance remains combative, and although caught in the glare of publicity he’s still maneuvering, still fending off his opponents while protected by a lecturn that bears the great seal like a shield.

Although close beside him, she appears to be a study in isolation. She could be a statue, and one that surely would be able to represent not only loss and grief but also duty and loyalty. That probably should be admired for what it is; I also look forward to the day when the ritual changes and the emperor has to stand there alone. But that is not this day. She has chosen to stand beside him, however far away she may wish to be. Her response is not to fight back but to reflect, perhaps to think about how she got here, or what she still can hold on to, or just to remember better days. Perhaps she might be remembering a day like this:

She’s even wearing the same pearls.

Photographs by Patrick Andrade/New York Times; Jim McKnight/Associated Press.

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The Difference Between Water and Waterboarding

What we have here is an apparently innocuous photograph of Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saluting President Bush as he leaves the Pentagon on Friday, March 7, 2008. It is raining–hence the umbrella–although it doesn’t seem to be coming down all that hard. But of course even the smallest amount of mist or precipitation could stain the President’s tailored suit or effect its drape; at the least it might make it somewhat uncomfortable to wear. And who needs that. The photograph was used by the WP the following day, Saturday March 8th, in conjunction with a report that President Bush had just vetoed an intelligence authorization bill that would have banned the use of “waterboarding” as a CIA interrogation technique.

The President continues to insist that waterboarding is not an act of torture—after all, Americans don’t use torture!—though it is hard to imagine how having water forced into one’s mouth, nose and sinus cavity so as to create the sensation of drowning would be anything less. And in point of fact, we have brought U.S. soldiers who have used the practice to justice before military tribunals in both the Phillipines in 1901 and in Vietnam in 1968. In 1947 Japanese officers who employed the technique against American soldiers in World War II were found guilty of the use of torture by the Tokyo War Crimes Trials and sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor.

The photograph is marked by irony, of course, but there is more. For what this photograph puts on display is the image of an administration that is habitually shielded from the world that exists outside the halls of power that here surround and protect it, as well as from the effects that its actions have in that world. Torture may “work” in the fictional universe of TV shows like 24, or in the sadistic imaginations of neoconservative chicken hawks, but elsewhere its record of usage is a consistent and abysmal failure in every regard except as a profound violation of human rights.

But don’t expect the President to understand that. For him, unwanted water is an inconvenience. For the American people it is has become an element of shame.

Photo Credit: Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP

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Sight Gag: "The Wasteland"

Photo Credit: John Louis 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 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: Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot

March 7, 2008
Lucaites
no caption needed photographer's showcase
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This week’s showcase photographer is Ashley Gilbertson. He will need no introduction for many NCN readers. Gilbertson is an internationally recognized photojournalist whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, and the NYT and many other national and international publication outlets as well. Deeply concerned with the problem of social conflict he has photographed everything from Kosovar refugees to heroin addicts in Melbourne to the gun trade in Papua to the accelerated disappearance and destruction of the Uyghur culture to Aids patients in China. In 2004 he won the prestigious Robert Capa Award for his work in Fallujah and was also named the National Photographer of the Year.

Gilbertson is perhaps best known for his recent work on the American experience in Iraq and his 2007 book of photographs and reflections titled Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer’s Chronicle of the Iraq War. We are very pleased to showcase a small bit of that work here at NCN.

Click on the photograph below for a brief Quicktime movie slide show of Ashley Gilberson’s work from Iraq.

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Welcome to Rubble World

One of the important features of public culture today is that globalization has become a social fact. For example, economic historians can document that the world has had a global economy for centuries, but now people know that they live in a global economy, and many people know this, and they know it not only in New York and London but also in Peoria and Bangladesh. At the same time, it would be a mistake to conclude that this shared social knowledge carries with it a common map of the world. To the contrary, another interesting facet of the 21st century is the emergence of multiple geographies. One still acquires a geography of nation states, but amidst that there are diasporic communities, media capitols, free trade zones, black markets, clashing civilizations, greater Kurdistan, the New Caliphate, and perhaps someday the fabled Northwest Passage.

This melange of borders, flows, and visions is not yet a social fact, but it is not merely academic speculation either. One sign that the maps are changing is that the terms First World/Second World/Third World are becoming increasingly outdated, although not because hierarchies are being leveled. Let me suggest that something else is being leveled, and offer one suggestion for a more up to date map. What matters today for a significant number of people is whether you live in Rubble World:

This photograph is from Baghdad. But it also could have been in Beirut, like this one:

Or, most recently, Gaza:

These are without a doubt among the leaders in the field, but let’s not forget Grozny and Sarejevo, among others. And then there are the periodic terrorist bombings in Kashmir, New Delhi, Sri Lanki, or wherever, not to mention Ground Zero in New York. Nor should we limit ourselves to the devastation of war, as the combination of poverty and political failure allows quakes, typhoons, and plain old shoddy construction due to corruption to add to the pile. Type “rubble” into Google Image and you can begin your guided tour of Rubble World.

If you take that tour you might notice that many of the images look very similar to the three here. Rubble World doesn’t start from scratch: there has to be something to wreck first. Like war itself, it is parasitic. The curious thing is that it seems as if everything still is pretty much as before–say, as if only the facade of the building has been blown off, or the wallboards and mattresses rearranged. The blast exposes building infrastructure or leaves people gathered together on the ground as if they were in a house, but you might think that everything important remains in place. That is a lie, of course. The buildings have to be condemned, and rebuilding can’t even begin until the all the work and expense of clearing the site has been completed. We are looking at skeletons, not at disruption; not a setback but ruin.

And so we get to the people–those still alive, that is. Rubble World is not uninhabited. As in many of its images, the people here are reduced to being spectators to their own desolation. There are many such scenes, whether of a few people in the urban ravine or of a small gathering of neighbors trying out their new status as squatters on their own property. Each might be a sign of hope. The urban space can be rebuilt only if citizens survey the damage and begin to talk about how to to organize. The local community can only survive if people remain attentive to one another amidst danger. Even so, these people have all been idled. The loss is not limited to an apartment building or a house, but spreads like a blast pattern across the entire economy. Rubble World includes some stories of renewal, but the total losses of productivity, prosperity, and hope itself are staggering. By documenting architectural wreakage, these images reveal how civil society is being laid bare, torn apart, damaged, and dispersed. As that happens, the rubble is sure to spread.

Photographs by Associated Press; Getty Images; Abid Katib/Getty Images.

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Who's Afraid of Pink and Blue?

In the late 1940s and throughout the next decade Life magazine would regularly put private individuals and and their nuclear families on display with their accumulated property: consumer goods. One of many visual convention for doing this was to have the family surrounded by their prized possessions, collected en masse and organized in a careful and orderly fashion, a visual metaphor perhaps for their ordered and conformist lives (and much more as well).

I was reminded of this visual trope when I came across a NYT slide show reporting on “The Pink and Blue Project,” a photographic installation by JeongMee Yoon that will soon be on display in Chelsea at Manhattan’s Jenkins Johnson Gallery.

One is struck immediately by the sheer mass of consumer goods accumulated “by” five year old children – consumers in training – but it is the stereotypical and gendered color schemes which appear to convert the images into something bordering on a spectacle. The title for the slide show announces a “Wonderful World of Color” – a phrase that no doubt resonates for those of us old enough to remember watching “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” on Sunday evenings in the late 1950s and early 1960s – and it would seem to be the coordinated concentration of bright color that animates the author of the accompanying article, Bonnie Yochelson, to note that the project delights “the eye” while “coercing a smile.” Color, it would seem, trumps gender segregation and “compulsive shopping.” And while the smile she remarks upon is “coerced,” it is nevertheless an approving smile.

What Yochelson misses is the way in which the “wonderful world of color” diverts our attention from an even more pronounced (and arguably troubling) element of the spectacle: not simply the sheer mass of similarly colored consumer goods, or even the ways in which color simultaneously marks and masks a narrow and conventional set of gender stereotypes, but the way in which everything within the scene is carefully ordered and organized, literally schematized as if by a structural anthropologist. Like the convention from Life that it seems to mimic, the project thus becomes something of a cipher for the underlying assumptions of bourgeois life, and not least the commitment to a rigid sense of order and regimentation disciplined by cultural demands for the accumulation and conspicuous display of wealth and possession. And in this context it should be noted that one has to look to pick the children out amidst the exhibit of consumer goods, a sure sign that like everything else in the hyper-ordered scene, they too are possessions; and like the glittering commercial trinkets that “coerce” our smile, they are put on public display by and for the benefit of cultural and economic interests that exceed their easy control.

In some ways we have not come far from Life’s America of the 1950s and 60s.

Photo Credit: JeeongMee More

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Miss Landmine Angola 2008

I kid you not.

I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to the intersections of aesthetics and politics, but I was struck dumb by the Miss Landmine project.

Others will react with much more clarity. At the least, the issues regarding gender and commodification are, well, explosive. They even have a T-shirt bearing the logo:

Still a princess, and perhaps Hallmark will want to get into the act. Hell, there already may be sections for Landmine Survivors in the card shops in Angola. Or around Army bases in the US. And who am I to tell them how to get past their trauma?

After reading the manifesto, turning on the theme song (yes, the theme song), and looking at the contestants, I started to get the point. But I’d still be interested in what others think about this weird, Angolan-Norwegian attempt to confront the continuing toll of war in our time.

And if you are interested, voting remains open until April 3.

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Ben Bernanke: Report from the Castle

I doubt that many photography class assignments include problems like this: “Imagine that you are going to photograph the chairman of the Federal Reserve; what angle should you take?” The New York Times had an interesting answer:

There are obvious reasons for choosing such an unusual approach to the chairman. Now that photo editors can choose from among 10,000 slides per day, photographers will resort to anything out of the ordinary to catch the editor’s eye. Nor was the the House Financial Services Committee hearing likely to provide much visual interest if left to its own droning routine. But neither of these considerations suggest that the photograph should have been in full color front page above the fold. So what is going on?

I can’t account for the intentions of those involved in production, but I can speculate about how the photograph can influence understanding of the hearing. Two things are notable: how little we see of chairman Ben Bernanke, and what we else see instead. Although just a few feet (so to speak) away from the camera, the chairman appears distant, somehow in his own space that is not directly accessible to us. The dark lines of table edge and pant leg form a V that, when framed by the top of the photograph, form a narrow aperture. It is as if we are looking through a keyhole, which is how K sees the great and mysterious Klamm in Franz Kafka’s The Castle.

Behind Klamm/Bernanke is a bare, blue-white space, as if he is on a promontory and there is no higher authority over him. He must be far from those sitting across from him as well: The caption says that he “signaled his readiness to further reduce interest rates.” We talk, but he signals, for surely his intentions are too great or mysterious to be communicated in full. As he sits alone at the heavy wood table, he is wholly indifferent to those looking up at him. He doesn’t look down on us as if to dominate us, no, that would be too much to hope for, because then we would know, or at least have some assurance, that he was aware of us and might want to, if not actually talk with us, at least contemplate the distance between us. And that distance is very great indeed.

My apologies to Franz Kafka, but the analogy still holds when we turn to the rest of the picture. K yearned for an audience with Klamm but instead had to contend with far less auspicious bureaucrats. Those standing between K and Klamm were of course the surest testament to the power of the one and the hopelessness of the other. And so we see the feet of unnamed minions from the Federal Reserve. These are the men in the gray flannel suits. Uniformity, austerity, discipline, seriousness–bureaucratic character is being performed, and woe to those who would attempt to step over these officials. And how could we, who are literally at the place where one can lick their shoes, how could we do anything but look up and beg, like a dog for a bone? Like a dog.

Photograph by Doug Mills for the New York Times. Shameless plug: If interested a further discussion of the bureaucratic style, readers might want to look at chapter five of my Political Style: The Artistry of Power.

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