Once again it is a time to say “Thanks” to all our readers, and not least to those who mention, retweet, or favorite us on Twitter.
We won’t be posting for a few weeks. We plan to return on Monday, July 7 to begin another year at NCN.
Photograph by J. Sander/plainpicture/Corbis.
A frame is always a specification: look here, not there; inside, not outside this space. Photography’s framing of the world seems to be essential to both its success and its liabilities. It allows specific persons, places, things, and events to be seen, and always without most of what surrounds, constrains, qualifies, or otherwise defines them. So it is that captions are thought to be essential: only they can say what lies outside the frame.
But that doesn’t mean they would tell you much, or that the additional context contributes to perception. Let me suggest that this photo will be diminished, not enhanced once you learn that it is showing steam rising from a thoroughbred horse in Kentucky. That caption has widened the frame, but only to make the image less distinctive, less focused, less intense, and less suggestive. It has displaced what are acutely aesthetic properties, substituting instead a common sense understanding of a routine world. In that world, horses and steam are very familiar things, and things rarely seen without some larger interest controlling perception. What is the temperature? Will he run well today? You might as well ask What’s for lunch? Whatever the answer, it comes with a very wide and very conventional sense of context.
Photographs are so useful in so many settings because of how they provide neatly framed perceptions. “Here, look at this?” can be a very pragmatic and efficient act. The uniformity of the physical framing is an important part of that pragmatism, even as it sets up the medium for easy criticism. (Hint: reality is not prepackaged. Why that isn’t said about painting is beyond me.) What may be under-appreciated is how the framing works in concert with a deep tendency toward formalism. Framing still is tilted toward specificity, but it also can, in some cases, transform perception from being focused on objective subject matter to being attuned to formal patterns.
Patterns, of course, are never merely specific. They generalize. They come from somewhere and extend, if only in the imagination, through continued replication. But to do that, they have to be interrupted. A continuous pattern soon becomes a blank wall, an empty horizon, a long stretch of ground. Hence, the importance of the frame: by cutting off perception, it brings form into view. What remains to be fully explored is how these two elements of all artistic expression combine in photography to create a distinctive capacity for abstraction, or perhaps for something that is no longer merely specific but not quite abstract. Something that may go without saying in language, but that could perhaps have additional power in a visual medium.
If nothing else, photography at least provides a distinctive availability. In the right hands, all you need is an iPhone:
Photographs by Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images and David Sutton/Sutton Studios. For an excellent study of abstraction in fine art photography, see Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (New York: Aperture, 2009).
The post today can be somewhat brief, not because there isn’t much to say, but rather because, well, we’ve said it several times already (e.g., here and here), most recently two weeks ago (here). Today’s photograph simply makes the point in dramatic fashion.
Wildfires are overrunning different parts of the world and in ways that are completely out of synch with normal weather patterns … and in ways that really ought to be of some serious concern. They are catastrophic in their effects, both economically and environmentally. But the bigger catastrophe—or perhaps the proper term is “tragedy”—is that we seem to have begun to take them wholly for granted, treating them as the new normal. Or, as in the photograph above, treating it as an interesting backdrop to an otherwise romantic scene of personal avowal and commitment. What better way, after all, to secure one’s wedding vows—“for better or for worse, through sickness and in health”—than to locate the beginning of one’s life long future with another person against the conflagration that apparently promises to be there forever and anon.
It really is hard to know what to make of this photograph. For one thing it has appeared at a number of different “pictures of the week” slide shows for different national news groups, none of which otherwise pointed to or commented on the wildfires burning in the background. And even if there was something “new” to report on this account, its not like one more photograph of the fire is adding probative evidence to make a claim about basic facticity. I mean, does anyone really question whether these wildfires exist (even as I write that I know that there have to be “fire deniers” somewhere in the world, but for the remaining 99.99% of the population, do we really need one more picture of a wildfire to make the case that such fires are and have been raging out of control?). That said, it should also be noted that the photograph is being taken by a photojournalist, not a wedding photographer, and yet it is also something of a mashup of two photographic genres. So if the photograph is not contributing to the “news” what is it doing?
One answer to this question might be that it is offering evidence of a pervasive attitude—and attitudes, of course, are incipient actions.The caption identifies a couple near Bend, Oregon posing for a wedding portrait. It is hard to register the photograph as anything other than a publicity stunt, perhaps an advertisement for the next apocalyptic movie to come down the pike. But, there you have it, its a “real” photograph of a real couple. Why settle for a lake or a pond or a nestled grove of trees to mark your nuptials for posterity when you can have a raging wildfire in the background! The fire was apparently close enough that the minister performed a “shortened ceremony” so that the wedding party could be safely transported elsewhere for the reception, but then again it was not so close that the couple seems distracted by it from the passionate fires that burn within their own breasts (or so we might assume). The irony is astonishing. Then again, perhaps the irony here cuts in a different direction if we can assume that this woman and this man are actually dedicated environmentalists and that they are using the occasion of their union to call attention cynically to the inanity of such rituals and ceremonies when in fact the world is ablaze—and the fire is getting ever closer. Perhaps in the next moment (or at least after their reception) they peel off their wedding vestments and don the attire of activists concerned to alert the world to the need to address the problem. Maybe. It’s hard to know. It would certainly make for an interesting movie.
However you read the photograph—whatever attitude you note or potential action you see— there can be little doubt that it pictures a profound problem that surely predicts a troubling future. Right now it seems to point to a tragic outcome, particularly if we persist in accepting the background in the photograph as just another backdrop for a dramatic wedding portrait. The fire, after all, will only continue to burn brighter and to get closer. If we continue to ignore that problem, however, or worse, if recast it as something which is altogether normal, it is possible that the story which points to a tragedy will end as a farce.
For better or for worse … indeed.
Credit: Josh Newton/AP
Credit: Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Sight Gag is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture. These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.
This blog is devoted to photographs, not data, but hey, “all media are mixed media,” so let’s not forget about our friends in survey research.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has released its Digital News Report 2014. You can see summaries in various media at the website, or download the entire report. For video of a discussion of the report in the UK, go here. That video had received 20 views when I was there, so it’s not yet a hot item. Perhaps a good photo would help. . . .
One of the standard criticisms of photography is that it produces an idealized conception of reality. Framing, depth of field, and many other techniques are used to feature what is attractive and ignore everything else. Much of the time we see single events, not the surrounding confusion or complexity; clean surfaces, not inner turbulence; smiles, not heartache. Of course photojournalism and art photography alike strive to escape these conventions, whether to document what is going wrong in the world or to explore extraordinary modes of perception. But for every one of those images, there are thousands from commercial photography, advertising, public relations, travel and snapshot photography, pornography, soft news–in fact, just about everything else, including those great pictures of distant galaxies from NASA. And did I mention sunsets?
If I had a dollar for every photograph like this one. . . . . Yet they continue to appear, and not only on Flickr and Facebook. The more conventional they become, the easier it is to disdain them. So, we can point out that this “real” sunset is also a highly idealized portrait of nature. And of a nature that, like the dog waiting for the stick to be thrown, has been thoroughly domesticated. Except that you can’t domesticate the sea and the sky, not least on a planet becoming less hospitable to humanity due to modern resource consumption, so we have only a delusion of control and reciprocal beneficence.
The photo also assumes that the woman (and dog) can easily escape any bad turn in the weather, and that she can take the leisurely stroll because she doesn’t have to depend on actually finding enough to eat along the shore. Her leisure and ours in enjoying the image depend on a prior, taken-for-granted surplus; without it, the photo could only be a weather report or a guide for foraging. Any thought that somewhere, somehow, sustainable food, shelter, and other protections might be at risk is put to rest by the vision of natural harmony. Human, animal, and inanimate nature share a common beauty, what more do you need to know?
I think that is one reading, but not the only legitimate reading of the image. In other posts, I’ve suggested how landscapes and other seemingly superficial images and conventional emotions can provide important resources for living together: for example, by inviting us to a more abundant life than we might think possible. I will say, however, that until recently I was much less likely to see just how idealized many images were. And then I saw this photo:
The caption said, “A crow eats it’s [sic] prey sitting on the roof of the Chancellery in Berlin on May 6, 2014.” That’s a model caption–who, what, where, when–which doesn’t begin to capture what is being shown. On reflection, of course, we are seeing nothing unusual. How do you think all those birds you see stay alive? (They don’t all eat sunflower seeds.) This is nature up close and personal. There may still be a small measure of buffering, as at least in this instance the prey is not being eaten while still alive, but I’d say we are close enough, thank you.
The image is remarkable in its close depiction of predation, but even more remarkable for its rarity. This is a very unusual photograph, yet one that could be taken every day. It presents a very different vision of nature from the sunset. Here survival is front and center, nature consists of killing and being killed, and while there may be pleasure there is no room for remorse.
By focusing without flinching on a single meal by a single bird, the photographer has exposed the pervasive idealization that saturates so much of our mediated experience of the natural world. It would be a small step from there to conclude that the second image is superior to the first: showing us reality as it is, not as we wish it would be; reminding us that we, too, are animals who kill to eat, not pretending that we treat all animals like pets; showing that nature is wholly indifferent to whether any animal lives or dies, not assuming that we fit seamlessly into a natural order of transcendental beauty.
It would be easy to stop there. Let me suggest, however, that doing so would be mistaken. A vigorous realism has to go beyond the claim that life is harsh, and idealization might be one way that we rise above that condition, however precariously. Consider for example, what it would be like if the second photo were the norm: that we saw thousands of images like it every day. (One could say we do but don’t know it, because they involve humans preying on other humans. Let’s leave that for another day.) Imagine that photography’s consistent message was that nature was cruel, that life was only a struggle to survive at others’ expense, that fairness and every other social value had nothing to do with it, and that there was nothing to be seen that suggested any other way of being in the world. Of course, that message is being promulgated from one end of the political spectrum, but fortunately they don’t have photography on their side. (TV and film are another story.) The consequences probably would be gruesome.
So it is that idealization may not be so bad after all. Not all of it, and not without criticism and other reminders of how it can be misleading, but compared to a severe insistence on the struggle for survival, visions of a beautiful, peaceful world might be worth having. Better yet, perhaps they could be inspirations to create such a world in reality.
Photographs by Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via the Associated Press and Odd Andersen/AFP-Getty Images.
The scene could be a community beach front almost anywhere in the world. Cabanas set up for those who can afford them. Tents and umbrellas for others. White sand, small dunes, and blue sea for everyone—swimmers, sailors, and those who just want to sit and catch the breeze coming in off of water. Sun bathers intermixed with children, families coming and going. Soon, one can imagine, the sun will be down, the tide will be up, and only a very few will remain on the beach. A quiet, restful place, with only the rhythmic sound of the waves beating on the surf, lights perhaps shining from the windows in the buildings lining the beach as a reminder of a living community.
But for all of that, it is not just anywhere. It is Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, France. Seventy years ago this past week it was known as Juno Beach, one of the primary landing zones in the D-Day invasion. Taking this beach head was necessary to provide flanking support to the operations at Gold and Omaha beaches and to give the Allied forces a direct route to a German airfield near Caen. The beach was heavily fortified by two German battalions armed with over 500 machine guns plus numerous mortars, a defensive position enhanced by weather patterns that made it necessary for landing crafts to come as close to the fortifications as possible before releasing troops and equipment. The responsibility to take the beach head fell to the 3rd Canadian Infantry division, which suffered over 1,000 casualties by day’s end—the highest ratio of Allied casualties for anyone other than those landing at the more famous and costly Omaha and Utah beaches.
Photographs, of course, only mark a sliver of time—typically only a fraction of a second that frames the here and the now in stark and radical terms. One cannot know what happened moments (or months or years) before this photograph was snapped, let alone what might happen even seconds after the shutter has opened and closed. Temporal continuities with the past, let alone alternate future possibilities can only be surmised. Such limitations don’t mitigate the value of images, but instead only emphasize the need for us to be imaginative in how we understand the reality that they put on display. And too, it requires us to recognize the ways in which the historicity of an image operates in tension with what it was then (or it what it might be later). It is, in short, part of an archive that has to be curated and engaged.
And so here we have Juno Beach shortly after the D-Day invasion. A crashed fighter plane where families today luxuriate. The detritus of battle washed up against fortifications that protected Axis forces from the landing Allies. The appearance of a solitary ghost town cast in somber grey tones where today colorful commerce flourishes, marked by the flags of multiple nations.
This too, of course, was only a stark sliver in time. A scene of courage and fortitude, of death and destruction that can only remind us that what was before the lens when it clicked was there and then, even as it only framed a reality that could survive only in imagined memories.
Credit: Chris Helgren/Reuters; National Archieves of Canada (for other “before” and “after” pictures of the D-Day invasion click here.)
Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv
Sight Gag is our weekly nod to the ironic, satiric, parodic, and carnivalesque performances that are an important part of a vibrant democratic public culture. These “gags” may not always be funny or represent a familiar point of view, but they attempt to cut through the lies, hypocrisy, shamelessness, stupidity, complacency, and other vices of democratic life. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think might deserve a laugh or at least a wry and rueful look by those who are thinking about the character of public life today.
Important news sources ranging from the Onion to the New York Times have discussed China’s amnesia regarding the Tiananmen Square massacre that occurred 25 years ago this week. The Times article was accompanied by an illustration that picked up on what has become a common lament: in place of the quashed democratic revolution, China has become a case study in consumer capitalism. Citizens have become shoppers, thronging to the malls instead of the public square.
Needless to say, the point is made visually by invoking the iconic image of a man standing before a row of tanks on Chang’an Avenue. The contrast is clear: by substituting more contemporary figures for the man before the tank, a public act of protest against the authoritarian state has been replaced with political quiescence on behalf of commercial consumption. Nor is the shift in values limited to China.
Whether stylish consumers or fat cat merchants, everyone is on the take. Democracy has been sold out; surely the martyrs did not die for this.
They did not die for China’s mashup of capitalism and authoritarian government, but the story always was more complicated than the ironic contrast would suggest. To see that, you need look no farther than the iconic image.
As John and I argued in No Caption Needed (the book), the Tiananmen tank icon channels a deep tension within Western, liberal-democratic societies: it articulates both democratic and liberal attitudes, reflecting what is a persistent trade-off one way or the other in modern politics. This tension often is resolved very productively, but it is constitutive and dangerous. As Tocqueville, Benjamin Barber, and others have suggested, democracy nurtures liberalism, which ultimately can subvert democracy. Note also that China has expanded private liberties without democratization.
The democratic commitment is to governance of, by, and for the people. The liberal commitment is to respect and protect the autonomy of the individual person. These are not the same thing, and neither is an unalloyed good thing: democracies can become a tyranny of the majority, and individual freedom can be used to harm one’s fellow citizens. More to the point of the Tiananmen commemorations, liberal democracy means that you should be able to elect your public officials, and to ignore politics altogether while you shop until you drop.
In the tank icon, a lone individual stands up the to impersonal state on behalf of the people, and so it is a liberal-deomcratic vision, but more liberal than democratic. Consider, for example, how much is not being shown of the democratic movement that had inhabited the Square for weeks. Consider also that the original protester was holding what appears to be a shopping bag.
The full argument runs to 34 pages, which I’ll leave to your discretion. (Hey, would it kill you to buy the book?) Nor am I suggesting that commemorations of the massacre are misplaced. The people living in Hong Kong will not let us forget, and we shouldn’t. But nor should we get off too easy. Citizens are turned into consumers every day while democratic governance is being subverted on behalf of oligarchy, and I’m not talking about China.
The man standing before the tank embodies two fundamental principles, not one, and the challenge of making them work together is one of the great ongoing tasks of modern societies around the globe. I have no doubt that China needs more democracy, but I would not offer the present mix of populism and neoliberalism that defines politics in the US today as a splendid model to which they should aspire.
One virtue of iconic images is that they can provide models for citizenship. The tank icon does so, but it also says something about the world in which we have to act. And what seems to be an image, may also be a mirror.
Cartoons by Michela Buttignol/New York Times and Scott Stantis/Chicago Tribune.
Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.
I won’t mess with you: he’s alive. They’re just kids playing at the beach. “Hey, cover me with sand, OK?” “Sure, you wanna be a mummy or a zombie?” And it was a beautiful day, with lots of kids and some adults all having a fine time. And nothing terrible happened to wreck the day. In much of the world, that wouldn’t be news, but this was in Somalia.
It’s a remarkable photo, of course, even if you don’t know the locale. Zombie, mummy, initiation rite, mud pack, body cast, bombing casualty, burn victim, corpse, death mask, burial rite, . . . . The photographer has captured something like spontaneous performance art in everyday life: a moment of theatrical technique in the time out of time of a vacation day, and to register some deep sense of the uncanny. The boy is both alive and dead, whole and maimed, playing in the everyday world and exhibiting the ghastly iconography of a war zone. It seems that even his pal is starting to sense that something strange is happening. And something strange is happening: an interlude of play is being overtaken by the possibility of a horrific future.
Somalia is one of the more dangerous places in the world right now. This photograph provided the visual coda for a story on Mohamed Abdiwahab, a freelance photographer who has been taking hundreds of images of the carnage for the past several years. It’s a small miracle that he’s still alive, and living means that he has to deal with both the trauma of conflict photography and the near total indifference of most of the world to whether Somalians live or die.
Which is another reason that the photograph above is remarkable, for it documents what is most likely to be forgotten and most surprising when brought back to our attention. Thus, it is a both reminder and a statement of hope. We are reminded that Somalia is not just a war zone, and that the people there, like people everywhere, continue to do what they can to enjoy life, not least the simple pleasures of a day at the beach. The point here is not to celebrate the human spirit, but rather to understand that people don’t have to be asking for the moon when they ask for peace and stability. A normal life will do, thank you very much, and is that really beyond the reach of those who rule them, sell them their Samsung t-shirts, or are otherwise invested in Somalia?
The hope is, as it often is, invested in the children. They can play, God bless ’em, even as Death stalks them. More to the point, the photographer is giving them their day in the sun. They are not to be seen or remembered only if they are victims, but rather for what they are: kids who, like all kids, deserve a shot at having a future worth having. As the view stretches beyond them to shimmering beach and blue sky, one can at least imagine that the solution to pulling Somalia back from anarchy need not be impossible.
But then we get back to that mock corpse. Mocking, insistent, it says the scene holds not one future but two: a future where kids grow up to have kids that play at the beach, and one where younger kids watch their older playmates turn into casualties. We owe it to the kids, and the photographer, to hope for the first, and to recognize which one is more likely if hope is all they have.
Photograph by Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP-Getty Images.
Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.
