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Credit: Unanonymous (Linked from SchizoAmerica)
“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. 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.
An exhibition by photographer Tim Davis opened yesterday at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, Fifth Avenue at 57th St., New York.
It’s titled The New Antiquity.
The exhibition runs through October 24th. You also can see the set of slides at his website, here.
We have written here at NCN on numerous occasions about Joe Rosenthal’s iconic “Raising Old Glory on Mt. Suribachi” (here, here, here, here, here, and here). While there is much to be said about the photograph our basic approach has been to call attention to how it operates as an eloquent inventional resource (by some accounts, a national treasure) for performing civic identity. The power of the photograph, we maintain, is in large measure its aesthetic capacity to transcribe three related but nevertheless different (and sometimes competing) commitments to egalitarianism, nationalism, and civic republicanism. This transcription animates an expansive public emotionality that opens the image to to a wide array of interpretations and subsequent appropriations or usages that range from reverential civic piety to a deeply seeded public cynicism.
A month doesn’t go by that we don’t encounter new appropriations of the photograph (and we are much indebted to the many readers who direct our attention to them), and interestingly enough, increasingly many of these appropriations come from sources outside of the U.S. Sometimes such appropriations seem to be reflecting directly on U.S. foreign policy (as with the first two images below), but in other instances the appropriation seems to speak to a more transcendent meaning that the image invokes as it appears to have little or no connection to the location of the photograph in the symbolic economy of U.S. public culture(as in the last image). We are not entirely sure what to make out of all of this just yet and we will return to the subject of the global appropriation of U.S. iconcic photographs in a subsequent post. But for now we leave you with three of the most interesting recent appropriations of the Iwo Jima icon and invite your reflections.
Die Burger: Iwo Jima (FCB Advertising Agency, Cape Town, South Africa)
Raising the Flag at Museumplein (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam)
Raising the Flag in the U.K.
Photo Credits: Chad Henning, Zoran Koracevic, drawgood
Credit: Branch, San Antonio Express
“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. 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.
If you think Wikipedia is a good idea, you might also want to look at the Encyclopedia of Life. This is an online collaborative project to document all living species. If short on taxonomic skills, you might still be able to enjoy and perhaps contribute to the photo archive. Here’s looking at you, kid.
Photograph of the eye of a European Green Toad, Bufo viridis, © Matt Reinbold via the Encyclopedia of Life media image page.
When raging wildfires threaten a city, the imagery quickly acquires an allegorical tone. Apocalyptic horizons suggest that much larger catastrophe looms, and civilization itself can seem exposed, unprepared, unprotected. At that moment, the public art of photojournalism becomes capable of both revealing vulnerability and meeting the need for reassurance. Like this:
As fires engulf one side of Athens, Greece, the Parthenon arises above the city in magnificent splendor. Marble bathed in electric light, the monument anchors the image. One could almost image a cosmic battle between firestorm and enlightenment. Culture rises up against Nature, a glorious past against a chaotic future, continuity against conflagration.
In between lies the city. Although hundreds of thousands of people will live and work there, it is subordinated between the monument in the foreground and the ring of fire on the horizon. Set in a natural crater, in the middle distance, with small lights scattered across it as if they could wink on and off, the city seems to lack both significance and power. Actually a dynamic achievement greater than any monument or natural event, here its fate seems poised between two alternatives, one of which is no longer possible while the other is terrifying. It becomes merely a firebreak between past and future, between a lost world and the task of staving off disaster.
You may have to look at the image for awhile to notice the city at all. The monument dominates the scene, and there is reason to be suspicious of its prominence. Is Athens only the conservator of the Golden Age of Greece (and, according to the standard narrative, the West)? Are we to be reassured that the shrine still stands, despite whatever havoc is being experienced by ordinary people whose houses are in the fire zone? If the photograph reveals a deep tension between civilization and catastrophe, it also may be helping some return to a false sense of security.
One might ask, isn’t that what monuments are supposed to do? Yes, but then there is this image:
I won’t dote on this unusual shot of the Washington Monument, but it is a remarkable example of how the conventional view–and experience–of a public work can be altered by a change in angle and lighting. Instead of the white tower rising in sublime simplicity amidst the capitol city, we see what could be ancient ruin. Stragglers wander about the obelisk on a dark plain under a threatening sky. We could be on a moor near Stonehenge as pilgrims pass by on the way to another destination. The pennants in the background could be from a temporary fair in some dark age yet to come. Again, the future seems much less promising than the past. The difference here is that, instead of using the monument to anchor collective experience against disruption, now the public icon has been turned against that conventional experience. Instead of security, the monument anchors a sense of foreboding about the national project.
Two monuments, two visions. The photographs in each case contain no news, but they do provide allegories of collective life.
Photographs by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images and Jewel Samad/AFP-Getty. For other NCN posts on wildfire images, go here, here, and here.
