2010

When Things Speak Louder Than Faces

As much as I’m committed to progressive photojournalism, I have to like this cover from the Onion:

Onion Cover Child photography

The nice touch of imitating the New York Times Sunday Magazine only gilds the lily, as the photographic convention being lampooned is used everywhere: glossy magazines, newspaper ads, direct mail, web sites, billboards, photography books, TV documentary trailers, and more. You can donate or you can turn the page, but you can’t avoid seeing the picture.

There actually is a continuing debate among human rights advocates and cultural critics about such rhetorical appeals, and the Onion cover neatly summarizes a number of key arguments. First, the problem of human deprivation is given a human face, but at the cost of reinforcing damaging stereotypes. The poor (and the Third World) are portrayed as essentially dark, passive, weak, simple, and dependent (need I add that images of want usually are of women and children, and often female children?). Second, analysis has been replaced by the direct emotional impact of the visual image, and reasoned commitment by a sentimental appeal. You are asked to help an individual child who seems so close that you could pick him up and hold him, although the money will in fact go through many hands and may make no difference whatsoever in his life. Third, the poster child’s innocence and obvious dependency dissociates charity from any serious attention to structural change, an inattention that often excuses how the US and other affluent nations are also among the causes of the problem. Fourth, the magazine’s tony production values suggest that there is money to be made off of human misery, and even the photographers’ mixed motives are exposed–indeed, are the point of the parody. Fifth, the enduring contrast between deprivation and the affluent world of the magazine audience is all too obvious: $5 per day is not going to set anyone back on this side of the street, and yet mere charity is all that is imaginable, not serious redistribution. Finally (for now, anyway), the audience may experience the perverse pleasure of indulging in feelings of pity about the suffering of others while giving their middle class conscience an easy out. Whether I donated or not, I gave at the magazine, so I can feel sorry for the poor and good about myself–and turn the page.

Actually, there are additional criticisms, and all of them can (and have been) developed in great detail. So why does the debate continue? There will be many reasons, but one is inescapable: the images work. Despite having become highly conventional, images of needy children open purse strings. Furthermore, if the appeal is not effective, no one else is likely to step in and make up the difference. So, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and most advocates conclude it is better to do than to do nothing.

Other options remain, however, especially for photographers looking for another angle on a problem. Instead of the exceedingly conventional character of the typical humanitarian image, one might want to ponder this photograph:

Chile aftermath aerial view

Of all the images of the Haitian disaster, I find this one to be surprisingly eloquent. And it shouldn’t be: I shows no people, only property, and instead of the close-up that might grab one personally, we have the distant and distancing impersonal perspective of an aerial view. Nor is it an action shot, and there are no dramatic special effects such as smoke and fire. One might think the most likely reaction is simply, “well, at least it’s over, and although there is a lot of damage, it’s only property damage, not lives lost.”

That’s not what I see or feel when caught in this photograph. Somehow it reveals the massive dislocation that remains after a catastrophe–the profound wreckage, disorder, waste, and raw mess that remains. It also reveals that disaster has its own full weight of inertia. Nothing that has been crushed together in that picture can be pulled apart and moved back or out of the way, much less restored to what it was, without labor, effort, work, and much more of the same, just to get back to even. And imagining it being sorted out–or, more likely, bulldozed–starts one thinking about how it got there, and about what ought to be put back and what ought to be built anew but differently. The photo reveals the enormous forces that were involved, and requires that one imagine what the city should be. In short, it demands more than is required to give five bucks to a child (or a photographer). And if people aren’t evident, neither are the denigrating associations that pull people down.

Communication depends on conventions of representation, but it can become trapped in them. As much as humanitarians rightly insist on the value of the individual person, there may nonetheless be times when we don’t need to see another face. Given the scale of the humanitarian disasters now and to come, more thought might be given to how even things can speak.

Onion Magazine cover from issue 45-45, May 2, 2009; photograph from Chile by Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press.

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SIght Gag: "… and the second time as farce."

Credit: John Sherffius, Boulder Daily Camera

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.

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Photographer's Showcase: Shaped By War

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin

Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, England

For more than 50 years, Don McCullin’s images have shaped our awareness of modern conflct and its consequences. His courage and integrity, as well as the exceptional quality of his work, are a continuing inspiration and influence worldwide. The Imperial War Museum is collaborating with McCullin in featuring a major exhibition of over 200 photographs, objects, magazines and personal memorabilia that shows how war has shaped the life of this exceptional photographer and those across the globe over that past five decades. The exhibit runs in the Special Exhibitions Gallery of the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England, from February 6 to June 13, 2010. It is free to the public and will travel to Bath (September to November, 2010) and London (October 2011-January 2012). To see a slide show of McCullin’s photographs click here, to see a brief interview with him click here.

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When Can We See the Police?

Photographs of policeman, often in riot gear, are legion this week. The rioting in Israel/Palestine is one reason for the images, but there have been earthquakes and demonstrations as well as bombings and other flareups of violence around the globe, and in every case the reassertion of law and order is part of the story. Of course, that story is not without irony: you can see people being cordoned, kicked, shot at, detained, arrested, and in some cases even protected by the police, and it often is not at all clear that the cops are on the right side, or that there is a right side. That might provide the most cynical justification for state violence, but the distinction between police and soldiers rests entirely on the assumption that the police are to be defined by just procedures, restraint in use of force, and direct accountability to their fellow citizens. Perhaps the political and moral complications of today’s civil wars are one reason (but not the only reason) why it both is and is not easy to see the police.

Israeli border policeman at the Wall

This photo of an Israeli border policeman praying before the Wall in Jerusalem is likely to evoke highly polarized reactions. It is part of a familiar archive of religious militants, especially Jewish citizen soldiers (often in ritual garb such as Tefillin), and the reactions are predictable: on the one hand, muscular defense of the sacred; on the other hand, the moral abomination of holy war. This photo would seem to be tilted toward a critical reaction: the rough mantle looks almost medieval, the wooden club is worn from repeated use, the small head seems brutish, and the Wall–his object of devotion–is distant and hazy. It might be titled, “Do Thugs Really Pray?” But what interests me is that his face is not visible.

That lack of accountability, despite the harsh realism of the photo, may be why I think it can be paired with this seemingly very different image:

Mexican policeman shattered glass

This photograph–and it is a photograph rather than a cheap painting–captures a policeman in Acapulco, Mexico reflected in glass shattered by gunfire between rival drug gangs. It might seem like something you could buy on the street; or, better, something bought on the street and retouched (defaced) by an artist working with found objects. In any case, and like the photograph above, the scene is one of violence now temporarily inert, and the cop is both there and not there. And in each case a hazy scrim provides some kind of moral buffer: both the religious background of the first image and the aesthetic foreground of the second suggest that we are not supposed to see the police by themselves but rather in a context that justifies their presence.

There are many times when a great deal of violence is prevented simply by seeing the individual cop as the representative of the state. And there are times when it is essential to also see the individual in uniform, and for everyone to see that way. What may be peculiar about the present moment–and we are a long, long way from The Andy Griffith Show–is that we see strong, often paramilitary police forces, and yet we really don’t see the police–not the individual, and not even the institution. Displays of force, it seems, are there to intimidate but not to provide accountability for either those who would break the law or those who would act in its name.

Photographs by Menahem Kahana/AFP-Getty Images and Pedro Pardo/AFP-Getty Images.

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"… and a little child shall lead them."

March 15, 2010February 6, 2014
Lucaites
no caption needed
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The trope of “youthful innocence” is a common photojournalistic convention, often marked by photographic representations of children playing as if they were adults. Such images can range from the somewhat ordinary and everyday—a young girl selling lemonade to passersby for 10¢ a cup—to the extraordinary—a young boy saluting the passing caisson of his assassinated father. But in almost every instance what we are being invited to see is a glimpse into a generational future animated by a nostalgia for the purity and innocence of youth unencumbered by the world of experience. And even when the world of experience insinuates itself, as with the John-John salute, the point of the photograph seems to be that what these children will become is forecast by how they manage the tension between innocence and experience. In recent time we have been inundated with images of Middle Eastern children “playing” with guns and other weapons of war, and in this context the trope has become a harbinger of a threatening and dystopian world.

I emphasize the word “playing” in the last sentence because, as with the photograph above, the romance of youthful inexperience is transformed into a tragic mythos in which all sense of the child as behaving “as if” an adult has been obliterated, and with it, all hope that the next generation can see its way to a better or more peaceful future. The above image is of a group of “young supporters of the Islamic Jihad movement,” marching at a rally in Gaza City to show “solidarity with the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.” The toy guns and uniforms are clearly pronounced and thus underscore the potential militancy of the image, but they are not the key signifiers of the shift from romance to tragedy. To take the full measure of force of the symbolic transformation you have to look at their facial expressions, and more specifically their eyes, which teeter between being altogether vacant and deadly serious, and in either case are wholly dissociated from our expectations of an otherwise idealized world of youthful innocence.

What clearly marks this and other such photographs from the Middle East is the presumption of their sheer otherness. These simply could not be “our” children for they lack any and all sense of the purity or carefree joy of childhood that presumes to define the western world. Their experience is not ours. The conclusion is wrong, or perhaps more accurately, wrong headed, but what is important to remember is that the idealized, romantic mythos of the relationship between worldly experience and youthful innocence is every bit as much a fiction as its tragic transformation, and that indeed, the former is ever at risk of morphing into the other.

Photo Credit: Ali Ali/EPA/WSJ

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Sight Gag: Texas Textbook Massacre

The thing is, it’s no joke. To find out the bloody details, click here.

Credit: Huffington Post

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Street Seen, at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959

Ted Croner, New York, 1947 Milwaukee

Milwaukee Art Museum

January 30, 2010–April 25, 2010

“See more than 100 photographs in the first major exhibition of street photography from this era in nearly 20 years. Refuting the common claim that photojournalism was the only significant photographic activity at the time, Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940–1959 uncovers a crucial time in American art, when global media was in its adolescence and photography was just beginning to gain recognition in the art world. The exhibition focuses on the work of six photographers (Lisette Model, Louis Faurer, Ted Croner, Saul Leiter, William Klein, and Robert Frank) who broke the rules of conventional photography to create emotionally engaging photographs.”

Information about the exhibition, related programming, and catalog is available here.

Photograph Ted Croner, New York, 1947. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 13 7/8 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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A Moment's Rest

The caption reads, “Towards the end of a two-day road-clearing mission, a marine got a moment’s rest.” It is a reminder of war’s numbing brutality, not just as a matter of lives and limbs lost, but in terms of its impact on the human soul. Bent double, his shoulders slumped, he appears to be exhausted by the sheer weight of his weapon and equipment, if not more so by the stressful weight of his charge to clear a road of bombs on what appears to be a road to nowhere; we might say that he is suspended in a state of rest—somewhere between standing and sitting, or perhaps in a liminal state between life and death — but we surely can’t say that he is resting. His line of sight is directed downward. He can see no more than the craggy ground beneath his feet—if he see’s at all. And where he will go next is not clear as he seems literally to have come to the end of the road. Perhaps that’s the point.

War takes its toll in many ways, not least by how it deadens the human spirit by thoroughly disrupting the ordinary routines of everyday life like eating a meal or taking a bath, or as in the picture below, getting a restful night’s sleep.

Once again we see a soldier who is utterly exhausted, or as perhaps the photograph implies, “dead to the world.” In Greek mythology Thanatos and Hypnos – the personifications of death and sleep – were twin brothers, hardly distinguishable from one another. And so it is here. The scene, with its bricked-in doorway invites comparison with an ancient burial crypt, the sleeping bag calls forth images of modern war’s ubiquitous body bags, and the “bed” itself bears resonance with a shallow grave. The awkward and rigid tilt of his legs and back implies the state of rigor mortis. His hands seem to be ceremoniously placed upon his breast, as one often finds with a funereal corpse, and the expression on his face is frozen in place. Only the color in his cheeks resists a totalizing narrative of death. One might confuse him with any number of images of homeless people slumbering in alleyways or under bridges—and how many of them are recognized for the veterans they are?—but for the conspicuous presence of an automatic weapon within his arm’s reach, a clear sign of his warrior status. In all likelihood he is only half asleep—once again in a liminal state somewhere between sleep and death—ready to muster at the crack of a rifle.

War kills, and there is nothing new in recognizing that. What we too often fail to see is that it also produces a “living death” that bears its cost in different but no less tragic terms.

Photo Credit: Tyler Hicks/NYT.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Myth and Reality in the Iraqi Election

What is it about photo editors’ obsession with inked fingers? After seeing dozens of the purple digits being offered to the camera, I want to scream “out, damned spot” and do a post on something sane–like fashion week. It is just when the media are caught up in a new craze, however, that older habits can be revealed.

Burqa inked finger Iraq

This might be the paradigmatic inked finger photo. In the foreground, direct physical evidence of democratic participation; in the background, display of the traditional, nondemocratic society that is being brought into modernity by the electoral process.

The symbolism is comprehensive: the finger signifies an individual voter and perhaps liberal individualism; the ink implies both institutional legitimacy (one person, one vote, via reliably transparent procedures) and the manner in which democratic identity might become a second skin, voluntarily painted onto the flesh. Likewise, the individual is otherwise wrapped in that society’s depersonalizing and oppressive traditions. Thus, these highly gendered and Orientalist images of veiled women are particularly useful for maintaining Western mythology about colonial occupation. The US is (and always was) there to provide democracy and other forms of emancipation, which occur when the client nation adopts Western procedures on their belated march into modernity.

Even if this were true, those in the occupation zones have always been able to see that there is another dimension to the story. The second side of modernization is revealed in this photo of another inked finger.

Iraqi security inked finger, gun

“I VOTED” began the caption for this photograph of a member of the “security personnel” in Iraq. Yes, he voted, and he also locked and loaded. Once again, we have the finger set against a backdrop, but instead of traditional costume we see a machine of the national security state. Now democracy goes hand in hand with military force. Of course, elections do need to be protected from disruption, and the state is to have a monopoly on violence, but this image of militant democratization may imply that the election is a temporary ritual while the projection of military power will remain the constant feature of national life long after the dye has washed off.

More telling is the lettering on the gun: all in English, it reminds us that the weapon was bought from-and very likely paid for by–the US. “I voted,” but the US equipped, and this election cannot escape the fact that it is still being conducted in a country stocked with US troops and on the US payroll.

The first image implies (falsely) that Iraq’s past was one of traditional Islamic repression. The second image exposes its present condition as a client state. One might hope that there can be a third alternative for the future.