All art relies on conventions and public arts especially so.  Shared assumptions and known patterns are necessary for artists and audiences to connect at all, while they also provide a basis both for more nuanced communication and for innovation.  Mass audiences are particularly dependent on conventional forms for the obvious reason that they have to span enormous differences in education, experience, and perspective.  Whether watching TV, going to the movies, reading a who done it, or looking at the photographs in the newspaper, you can expect to see things you’ve already seen many times before.  This character, that plot, another government official or another demonstrator.  Been there, done that, but what else is there to do?  Even so, those writing the stories and taking the pictures find a way to capture the event–and the audience–to articulate some important idea or emotion that can draw people together.

A soldier and his wife share a last tender moment before he ships out for a year long deployment in Afghanistan.  I don’t have to do a close analysis of this photo: you know what it means.  Heartbreakingly tender, her caress will not be felt again for a long time–if ever.  Her hands have to slip away, as if gravity itself were working against them, and she will know only emptiness in their place.  The delicate, intelligent tracery of her fingers can’t protect the head and neck that already seem exposed, vulnerable, all too susceptible to the unexpected.  As private life gives way to public service, coupling can be undone.  Thus, the image is both ideological and critical: citizenship is militarized and heteronormative while family and state mutually care for one another, but everything shared might be sundered and happiness lost to another sacrifice for a purpose that, like their faces, remains unknown.

The departure of the troops is a stock event within the conventional narrative of military service.  (That narrative runs visually from the recruiting poster to the war memorial, but that’s a topic for another day.)  Likewise, the kiss is a familiar part of private life, from the first kiss to the wedding kiss and beyond.  Here the photographer has artfully captured the pathos of a private moment in a necessarily public space, and the scene is both instantly recognizable and yet resonant with emotion.  Just like this photograph from 2007:

Let me be very clear: I am not criticizing either photographer.  The later photo very likely was taken with no knowledge of the first, and both are beautiful works of public art.  Each evokes the same pathos, relays the same obligations and ideologies, exposes the same conflicts and contradictions, and invites the viewer to a range of responses from direct identification to critical reflection.  A few differences remain, but that is not my point.  Instead, the pairing reveals two facts of public life: There is never only one photo, and this war has gone on too damn long.

The first point is simple, but bears repeating (one might say).  There is never one photo, because any photo is in part a repetition of prior images.  That’s why you can recognize it and respond to it reliably.  Despite the ability of the photograph to record a unique conjunction of time and space, photojournalism remains performative: that is, it displays patterned behavior and engages people in social relationships.  Its purpose is not singularity or even artistic uniqueness, but rather communication, which will have to rely on things taken for granted and held in common.  Indeed, to appreciate the photographer’s skill, one has to first understand how difficult it is to even reproduce the convention well, much less find some variation on a theme to achieve a distinctive capacity for thought, feeling, and connection.  Photography is repetitive because life itself is repetitive, and any cultural or political work has to begin there.

But not all patterns are the same.  There is a kiss, and then there might be a lifetime together.  There is war, and then there is endless war.  One photo is like another five years later because one deployment is like another five years later.  Five years of lives shattered and treasure lost forever, and for what?   Some things, it seems, never change.

Photographs by Bill Tiernan/The Virginian-Pilot/Associated Press and Mike Morones/Associated Press.  For another variant, see this post.

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One of the interesting elements in the myth of Pandora’s Box is that all the evils of the world could be contained in a single jar.  One can imagine any small thing containing a world in miniature–for example, the Greek word kosmos could mean both universe and ornament, and William Blake spoke of seeing a world in a grain of sand–but usually the shift from microcosm to macrocosm is in the direction of order and the revelation of something divine.  But why should Evil not work the same route?  That, anyway, is one thought that comes to mind when I look at photographs such as this one, where a process of disruption, disorder, ragged violence, and pandemonium sees to be slowly unfolding from what was not long before a relatively benign urban space.

There was the street surrounded by its buildings, then the normal routines of commerce and civic life, then the choreographed standoff of political protesters and riot police in Jerusalem during Palestine’s Land Day, and then a provocation (whether from one side or another) and then another and a response and the escalation continues and then minor mayhem begins–nothing too dramatic but unfurling discord, insult, and injury and then what you see above: bodies flying, a kick being delivered to someone whose back is turned, horses hooves clattering dangerously toward someone rolling on the ground. . . . .

Not all the evils of the world, of course, but something bad coming out of what was otherwise just a container, a space that could include peace or domination, prosperous cooperation or a cycle of violence.  It all depends on who controls the box and what they put into it, I suppose.  And that’s the irony, for the result is not control, but rather chaos.  Small scale chaos may not seem too dangerous, but it spreads all the more insidiously for that.  The person being kicked will not forget the blow, those who praise themselves for their restraint will never understand what it feels like to be driven to the pavement, nothing in the scene itself will be altered to make it less likely to crack open again to release still more trouble.

Capturing this sense of the slow unfolding of disorder is an achievement and one that is purchased at the cost of giving up many other elements of a “good” photograph.  One’s gaze is pulled this way and that as if part of the action, and yet everything is far away and thus distant emotionally as well; the scene as a whole is messy and one’s attention is drawn to incidental details (the brown shoes, for example) rather than a decisive action within a coherent narrative.  But these deficits are an important part of the image.  The violence, disorder, and slow wreaking of the world that is going here and in many other sites of “low-intensity” conflict today exists in part because it has become so woven into the fabric of ordinary life, because it persists largely without direction toward resolution, and because it can retract back into civic containers rather than become too persistent and visible to be ignored.  By forgoing the dramatic action shot to document a small, stupid, street fight, the photographer has actually captured a much more extensive process of spreading disorder and civic decline.

There is an aesthetic here, one that gives up on formal values of artistic excellence to capture how violence is being unloosed in ordinary life.  And with that, one also can see how the capacity to act is reduced to coping within environments that are degraded in more ways than one.

Again, a somewhat distant view of a messy scene, but then as you look more closely, horror.  A man is carrying the body of a suicide bombing victim in Afghanistan.  He looks like a body snatcher, but more likely a working man is just doing his job.  Dead weight, rough ground, a maze of partial barriers and military vehicles–it can’t be easy, even if you’re used to it.

This image also might be capturing the process in reverse: the way everything (well, almost everything) gets put back into the box for awhile.  Bodies to the grave, hostiles rounded up and imprisoned, streets swept and buildings repaired, the surface will look much the same in a day or two, but for the traces of the bombing around the edges.  Once again, one might be able to imagine living in an orderly world–a world where little things can unfold toward something larger and more beautiful.  Until, that is, the next blast or the next confrontation on the street, when ordinary places can once again be undone to release the evils stored within, as if by malevolent gods.

Photographs by Sebastian Scheiner/Associated Press and AFP/Getty.

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There a a lot of photos from Afghanistan, which is not known for a wide variety of landscapes–or cityscapes, for that matter–and so one can understand why a photographer would look for the odd angle or unusual object.

This is not a photograph likely to win an award, but it speaks volumes.  The only thing in focus is a cheap plywood door and its improvised door knob.  That’s the tail end of a rocket, one of many stray parts likely to be strewn around a working combat outpost.  In WWII this detail might have come with a narrative of Yankee ingenuity and the egalitarian ethos of a Bill Mauldin cartoon, but that war hadn’t lasted ten years.

The line of sight loses focus as it extends down the wall, where it picks up the inert soldier in his camp chair and then runs into that grey fabric cover on some undefined storage space.  Beyond that is more grey, including the stony ground, storage silos, and a wall, all harshly lit or left in dull shadows.  Not exactly an image that you will see in an Armed Forces ad.  This is your back lot, Dogpatch, lost world army, stuck in time in some place that, if not forgotten by God, has been forgotten by just about everyone else.

Which is why one might think about the things they will leave behind, and what that says about why and how they are there.  However successful the mission, I don’t think the 13th Cavalry is going to crate up that outpost and ship it back home.  And when they leave it behind, it’s not going to last long.  Already slap-dash and not made to last, this is not evidence of nation building.  The fact that the rocket is inert adds a lame joke, but it wouldn’t take much to tear through that shed.  Not to worry, though, it is more likely to be abandoned than attacked, while the real danger is waiting to maim and kill the minute anyone starts walking outside the perimeter.  No wonder a soldier might want to stay put in that chair.

Or, if wanting to pass the time more enjoyably, take a few swings with a golf club.  Yes, that is the second odd metal object in the photo.  I’m not sure which is more implausible: that a golf club would be casually leaning against the wall, or that the fully equipped soldier would be working on his game, or that anyone would be hitting golf balls off that rock strewn field into the impossible fairways of Laghman province.  But the implausible we do today, because the insane is already second nature.

These are golf clubs that were left behind when the US pulled out of one of its bases in Iraq.  The walls of the building are marble, but the scene nonetheless is shabby, sad, and forlorn.  A study in excess–why one club would be there is strange enough, much less dozens–it becomes a small monument to misspent resources, misplaced priorities, and the futility of this imperial project.

The camera has a special relationship with objects: capturing their quiet but persistent eloquence amidst the welter of events.  When objects are left behind, they acquire the special resonance of ruins, and with that an allegorical voice that can speak of the decline and fall of civilizations.  America isn’t gone yet, but it may be losing its way.  And if it is to be known by what it leaves behind, those in Iraq and Afghanistan surely could ask whether it ever really knew where it was.

Photographs by Erik De Castro/Reuters and Andrea Bruce/The New York Times.

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