2008 – Page 8 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Dulce et Decorum est, Pro Patria Mori

I’ve written previously about my eighth grade teacher, Abraham Elias, who taught me to memorize poetry when all I really wanted to be able to remember were things like batting averages and shooting percentages. I did it because he inspired me to do so, but I was never really sure how well the exercise would ultimately serve me. And yet, as the years have passed I’ve found myself returning to those poems over and again—almost as if I can’t help it—as I try to make sense of the world around me. And so it is today with this photograph of two “Russian military officers tak[ing] part in a Flag Day Holiday in St. Petersburg” that appeared last week on-line at the Washington Post.

The words that billowed forth from consciousness when I saw this photograph are originally from the Odes of Horace (iii 2.13): “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.” In English: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” But truth to tell I’ve never read the Odes. Where I encountered these words was in Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poem, “Dulce et Decorum,” written in 1917 during the Great War, the first of “the war to end all wars.” Owens’ point, of course, was that Horace’s aphorism was a lie told to boys and young men in an effort to nurture a desire for military glory and to mobilize their bodies to national interests without regard to question or cost.

What is most striking about the photograph is the uniform intensity of the youthful faces staring straight ahead, teenage boys trying ever so hard to look like the men that they want to be, strong and in control. Note the cold and emotionless expression on their faces. It is perhaps what we might call the look of a killer, and thus altogether out of place on young boys who we might otherwise imagine playing soccer on a school field or trying to steal their first kiss. But here that stoic look is legitimated and glorified by the adornment of military regalia and the national flags that simultaneously cover and substitute for their bodies. It would be hard to mistake these boys as anything but interchangeable instruments of the nation state. And indeed, the very proportionality of the image, with their faces barely peeking out from behind the unfurled and flapping flags, underscores the sense in which they stand behind the nation in a doubled sense, both subordinate to it and propping it up at the same time.

The photograph here is from an eastern European country, and it would be easy to deride and dismiss it as the artifact of a once and future totalitarian nation-state, but of course the image is less about Russia than it is about the apparatus and mechanisms of nationalist desire, which seem always and everywhere to feed upon its youth regardless of its particular geographical location. Those could be young American faces and US flags, and of course we have encountered such images all too frequently. What remains is for us to see them for what they are.

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori, indeed.

Photo Credit: Sergei Kulikov/AFP-Getty Images

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Sight Gag: Behind Every Great Leader … Is His Behind

Credit: Fish

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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Picturing America, Past and Present

Recently Laura Bush was in New Orleans in tandem with the Picturing America project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project involves reproductions of 40 works of art that are available for use in the classroom. Freedom, equality, and similar civic virtues are featured as themes for the collection, which includes works from a range of periods and media. Many will be familiar to adults and none of them are likely to offend the protectors of public morality. Indeed, the lack of a critical edge is all too predictable, which is why this photograph has added value.

Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother is one of the 40 art works, but here it has become a part of work number 41. This photo of the two students raises many of the questions that could but perhaps would not arise during discussion of the iconic image. The fact that they are placed in equivalent positions to the two children in the Lange photo makes the point sharply: These are now the children at risk, and they are here, in real time and living color, waiting to see if their government will respond as it did during the crisis of the 1930s.

There has been no New Deal for New Orleans, of course, of for anyone else below the million dollar line during the seven years of the Bush administration. Another difference between the two photos provides some consolation, as the two students look attentive and capable rather than wholly dependent. Progress has been made in spite of everything, but that should be no excuse for not having good schools, levees, health care, banks, and all the other little things that once were understood to be the obligations of a good society.

Photograph by Bill Haber/Associated Press.

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Peace in Iraq

In one of the early posts on this blog I asked, what does peace look like? One answer, I suggested, was that peace appears when you start seeing soldiers as kids rather than as warriors. Let me be clear: I don’t mean that you would see grown men and women as if they were small children, only that you would see that many of the soldiers are still very young. Young adults, perhaps, but young. Like this:

This photograph was taken in Baghdad about a month ago. You can’t predict the future from a photo, but this was the first time that I thought real change for the better might be occurring on the ground. The American has let his guard down so much, the Iraqi is so comfortable in his presence, the photographer is able to capture the moment–all of this bodes well as an indication of a sense of security in ordinary life.

Of course, the soldier still is intruding into someone’s home–something protested in the Declaration of Independence–and both the floor and the view through the doorway suggest that war has turned a nice place into a fixer-upper. More generally, the troop levels, expenses, bases, and everything else being negotiated in the draw-down agreement all portend a protracted and costly transition and then continued military engagement in a client state for decades to come.

But still, what a photograph. The American looks like he should be sitting in a classroom waiting for the bell to ring. The pairing with the civilian boy next to him marks his youth, which is accentuated further by being encased in his military carapace. Obviously, they both should be dressed like the boy on the right; everything else is an unnecessary addition there only to serve the interests of an alien machine far larger than either of them.

The flowers on the wall complete the domestic tableau. Everything fits except the uniform and the gun, which is propped uselessly against his leg, barrel down in the dirt. The boy on the left seems to be thinking about what comes next: that when the break ends he’ll have to pick up his gear and walk out of there. The posture and look of the boy on the right say all that and more. He clearly is waiting for the American to leave. After all, it is his house.

More soldiers and more civilians will die before its over, but maybe, just maybe, scenes like this can become more commonplace and more representative of present and future alike. We’ve seen heroes and victims enough; now it is time to see people as they are. After years of war, that might be what peace looks like.

Photograph by Maya Alleguzzo/Associated Press.

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Two Views of China and the West

You are likely to have seen many photographs from China recently, but probably not this one:

Here models and student designers stand side by side during a fashion show at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I’ll let you guess which ones are the models. Of course, the drastic contrast between female models and designers who look like ordinary people occurs at any fashion show, but here that difference is accentuated by ethic polarization.

This post is not about the Olympics, except that this week everything is about the Olympics. Despite smug predictions in the Western press, the Chinese are pulling it off. The events are going smoothly, the bad news is not happening or quickly forgotten, and you have to admit that the place looks great. (I’d like to see a marathon course in any US city look half as nice as the one I saw Saturday night.) It looks like Beijing will achieve its objective–again. One result is likely to be a more widely held realization that China has become highly modernized. And so the question arises: On what terms are we likely to imagine Chinese assimilation into modernity?

The photograph above provides the conventional idea: the West is obviously higher, more sophisticated, and literally the model to be imitated. Likewise, modernity is thoroughly raced: the ideal is Aryan, and one acquires all the benefits of modernization by forming oneself along those lines. If there happen to be obvious disadvantages, well, just be patient and they will be overcome in time–the shorter women in the photo are not going to get any taller, but their children could surpass them. And even though fashion is all about hybridity some of the time, here it is clear that the transmission of culture is entirely one-way.

Even so, the image also contains another story as well. The Western women are there only to be draped and displayed, while the brain work is being done entirely by Asians. The West is a model, but passively so, and rendered passive by its own sophistication. If you had to pick three women to take to the moon, or the office, or the future, I don’t think there is any doubt which three should be given the job.

If a conventional image of catching up to the West contains its own internal caveat, that still falls short of more robust ideas of cultural change. Nor do we have to go too far down the road to get a glimpse of what that might involve:

This is a portrait of Li Shurui, a contemporary Chinese artist whom the New York Times says is “quietly emerging” as a talent within the male-dominated Chinese art world. Although the mask could double as a muzzle, there is nothing quiet about Li Shurui in this photograph. The story emphasizes gender equalization–currently, something featured as a sign of the West’s continued lead in the modernity Olympics–but Li is a study in conflated binaries: She is both male and female, Asian and Western, and organic and mechanical. As a cyborg she performs an important moment in modern feminism; with slanted eyes and blond hair she is actively hybrid, and her intensely focused look makes it damn clear that there is nothing passive about this woman.

Most important, perhaps, is that she can represent an alternative model of Chinese modernization–one that includes key elements of Western society and culture without being mere imitation and gradualist assimilation toward a homogeneous ideal. This is likely to be the real China. Nor should anyone be surprised–it also is the likely to be the real West.

Photographs by Alex Hofford/European Pressphoto Agency and Natalie Behring/New York Times.

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Gone Fishin'

“It’s summertime,” and as the saying goes, the “livin’ is easy.” Or at least it will be for your NCN guys as we take the week off to recharge our batteries before the political conventions kick in and the new school year begins for us. It has been a great year for us and we appreciate the support of everyone who has written in with comments and suggestions, criticism and encouragement. We will be back on August 18th.

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Sight Gag: In Search of Human Rights (and Wrongs)

Credit: Cameron Cardow; Ingrid Rice

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Color and Politics

This week we are pleased to welcome Aric Mayer as a guest correspondent. Aric’s work has previously been featured in our Photographer’s Showcase here and here.

The entire media experience this week seemed dominated by questions of color and politics. Numerous polls were taken asking variations of the question, “Is America ready for a black president?” The results came back mixed. Maybe yes, maybe no. The question here has to be, what exactly does this mean?

The color palette below was generated from four popular images of Barack Obama and John McCain. These are the combined colors needed to recreate images of both of their faces in their entirety.

As a photographer with extensive experience in photo retouching for national publications, one of the first things that I learned was how to measure the color of a skin tone in an image. Colorimetrics is an interesting and exact science, and suffice it to say that it is possible using ink densities and light measuring tools to describe skin tones in very specific ways. What is surprising is how subtle the differences are between the skin tones of all races. Hues across the spectrum of ethnic groups vary only by a few percentage points. It turns out that all the possible hues and tones of human skin color do not make up an actual rainbow of diversity, but in fact are only a tiny sliver of the possible colors in the visible spectrum. Indeed, skin tones exist in a fairly mundane part of the spectrum, consisting mostly of light tans into dark browns, with subtle variations in color. These colors are dwarfed by the incredible diversity of other colors in the world, greens for instance, the color of chlorophyll. While we are hyper-attenuated to the cultural meanings of skin colors, we tend to categorize them into large groups; what we lack is a cultural language with which to accurately describe their appearance.

Biases and barriers in the political polls are written right into the questions. Barack Obama is not visibly black, nor is John McCain actually tinted white. But the cultural divide between them is frequently shown to be as extreme as the end points on the possible spectrum. The real polling question should not be, “Is America ready for a black president?” But instead, “Is America ready for what might lie between the two extremes?”

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The More Things Change …

What you are looking are members of the Russian Olympic Woman’s basketball team just prior to an exhibition match against the United States in Hainilng, China. The young women in the front with her hand on her chest and her eyes fixed above is Becky Hammon, a former All American at Colorado State University and currently a member of the top-ranked San Antonio Silver Stars of the WNBA. She is also a native of South Dakota and, as of this past year, a naturalized citizen of Russia. There has been something of a small controversy brewing here, as some such as U.S. basketball coach Anne Donovan, have accused her of being unpatriotic, but Hammon’s more numerous defenders have been quick to point out that there is nothing new about naturalized citizens playing in the Olympics, and the simple fact is that she was not originally invited to try out for Team USA and this was her one opportunity to participate in the Olympics. And truth to tell, the look on her face as the Star Spangled Banner plays tells you what uniform she would much rather be wearing, and given the intensity of the gaze—in contrast to the bored and nonchalant indifference of her teammates—I doubt it is simply because it would give her a much better chance of winning a gold medal. This is not a picture of an unpatriotic U.S. citizen regardless of the uniform she is wearing. Indeed, it displays the passionate love of country with a powerful and subtle nuance that reminds us of the tension between nationalism and individualism.

There is more to this picture, however, than the pained and conflicted loyalties of a single, individual athlete, however pronounced that might be. For it also stands as a marker of the changes that have taken place in world of geopolitics over the past 30 years. In the late 1970s the Cold War between the United States and Russia (then the USSR) was at full tilt and the tensions animated by ideological differences between western capitalism and Soviet style communism were no more evident than in the politics of the 1980 Winter and Summer Olympic games held respectively in Lake Placid, NY and Moscow, Russia.

The Winter Games came first, and the picture above stands in stark contrast to the most famous image to come from the Lake Placid games of a ragtag collection of U.S. college hockey players who “miraculously” defeated a Soviet team which, by almost any standard, consisted of seasoned and “professional” veterans.

The present day image comes from before the sporting event not after, and so it is marked by a degree of calm and reserve that we would not expect to find following an upset victory, but the larger point to be made is that the contemporary photograph would never have been taken in 1980 (and if taken surely not featured in the NYT), precisely because it would have been anathema to the spirit of the times—a Cold War world where national citizenship trumped all. We have no doubt not yet moved fully into the “globalized” world that recognizes the legitimacy of post-national citizenship—and, indeed, we clearly continue to live in a country where at least one version of the cold war optic organized around the notion that walls of national separation and isolation might be a good thing persists— but that such a picture as the one of Hammon could even be taken and featured in a mainstream news outlet suggests at least the possibility of such transformation to a more complex and nuanced sense of citizenship on the worldwide stage.

But there is perhaps one additional point to be made as well. For while we have a photograph from Lake Placid that helps to foreground the difference between a Cold War world and a post-Cold War world, there is no contrasting image to be found from the subsequent Summer games later that year in Moscow. The reason, of course, is because the U.S. led a boycott of the Moscow games and no such pictures exist period. And the reason for that boycott: in the summer of 1979 the Soviet Union had invaded …. Afghanistan. There are differences, to be sure, as we are tracking “terrorists” and not seeking to oppress “freedom fighters,” and yet, the more things change …

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Dalziel/AP

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Downsizing the Chain Store Near You

“Several national restaurant chains were shuttered last Tuesday, possibly offering a early taste of what’s in store this year for businesses that depend on free-spending consumers whose budgets are now being squeezed.” Clever puns aside, this lead-in to a New York Times report says a lot. So does this photograph that accompanied the story.

We know what we are supposed to observe here: ordinary people who are glum. Some may have lost their lunch and others may have lost their jobs, but no one can see a ready alternative. The photograph itself reinforces a mildly depressive reaction: it seems a banal, cluttered, diffused shot with the lighting either dull close in or too harshly white in the background. No one of the three figures holds our attention, yet they don’t form a coherent group either as they each are alone, left with their thoughts as they go their separate ways. Arrayed along a line of sight that leads only into the open street where others go about their business, the prospects for a new start close by seem slim.

Other elements of the picture add more to the story. Look at the garish ad for $4.99 burgers. That probably includes fries as well, and in any case it’s a good example of how the US has been awash in cheap food. Look also at the guy’s supersized drink. Or her large bag–the fashion this summer–or the fact that no one in the picture has been going hungry. Even as the restaurant closes, it does so amidst signs of overconsumption. Add the American eagle from the sign in the upper right of the photo, and you’ve got a small allegory. An entire way of life based on cheap food, cheap gas, and constant consumption may be shutting down.

Bennigan’s was the casualty this time, with Steak & Ale to follow and other brands in the “causal dining” category also in jeopardy. In addition, the neighborhood or strip mall typically loses a familiar place that will help anchor the local community or business district, while the space will be hard to rent in the downturn. The sad fact is that the housing crisis, the oil crunch, the commodity price hikes, the devaluation of the dollar, the drain on the national treasury from the trillion dollar war, and similar the big-picture troubles are hardest on the little people. This closing isn’t the first and won’t be the last, and every time it happens more people have to go home and tell someone they love that that things just got worse.

I dream of the day that Main Street Republicans figure out that their interests are not served by the party of Wall Street. Maybe if enough stores close and enough people vote their interests, then local businesses can start up again, this time with health insurance and the economic security that comes from regulation, conservation, and other proven measures for a sustainable society. I’d drink to that–and maybe even go out to eat.

Photograph by Roger Mallison/Star-Telegram via Associated Press.

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