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Seeing Protest Up Close and At A Distance


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Photographs of protests from around the globe abound.   But whether taken in Hong Kong, the Ukraine, Greece, or almost anywhere else—including the United States—it is often difficult to discern little more than an opposition between police clad in riot gear, wielding shields, batons, and tear gas or pepper spray squaring off against scantily clad dissenters seeking to maintain their presence in a public space. Some protestors prove to be violent, to be sure, though the cause of provocation is never all that clear. But the point is that at least in recent times there appears to be little that distinguishes the unrest that is unraveling state authority almost everywhere. Or to put it differently, it seems like the legitimacy of state power is increasingly pushed to the furthest limits of authority and required to use force to sustain its primacy. Isaac Asimov has one of the main characters in his Foundation trilogy note that “violence is the last resort of the incompetent,” and the point is doubly significant when it is directed at those entrusted with the maintenance of governmental authority.

The photograph above is of a “lego” display that appeared outside of the government headquarters in Hong Kong this past week and the yellow umbrellas clearly mark it as signaling the pro-democracy protests that have dominated news coming out of China for the past month. But apart from the umbrellas that signal the protests in Hong Kong, this could be a conflict anywhere in the world, positioning a faceless state authority against a diverse population of individuals (comparatively diverse, that is, but then there are limits to what one can accomplish with lego figurines). And notice the attitude of the opposition, with the military forces cast in the darkest of tones, carefully arranged in preparation for a military style assault and “the people” dressed in brightly arrayed, ordinary clothing with no particular order to their arrangement, rather as one might expect to find a democratic populace, each moving in its own direction without actually getting in the way of the other.  What is most pronounced, however, is the barely visible fence that divides one side from the other and leaves no room for negotiation or compromise.   The opposition between state and citizens is stark, and Order must be regimented and maintained at any cost, even at the risk of destroying the society that the state presumably represents and is consigned to protect.

That the meme represented by this lego display (and a scene reproduced in photograph after photograph from conflicts all over the world) is so easily recognizable—even for someone who has paid no attention to the protests in Hong Kong—should alert us to the possibility that there is something larger going on here than a local battle. Of course every particular conflict is rooted in local concerns and animated by very specific objections and complaints that need to be considered, but the larger point is that increasingly the opposition between state authority and the voice of a democratic polity seems to reveal few opportunities for accommodation. And it might leave some wondering if there is room for democratic dissent anymore.  It is hard not to be pessimistic.

Occasionally, however, one encounters photographs that offer a more optimistic possibility, and this overhead view of demonstrators gathered in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district might be a case in point. Like with the lego display the vantage point is

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from above, though the protest site is now at a greater distance from the viewer. And what we see is both more and less. The immediate sense of opposition is neutralized (or veiled?) by the fact that we see the protest framed by the larger cityscape. The markers of difference between state and citizenry are impossible to discern or distinguish, as one would hope to be the case in a properly democratic order. All are equally cast in a natural darkness, though all are equally illuminated by streetlights and buildings (and perhaps a bit of moonlight), and so the opposition of lightness and darkness loses much of its normative force, and more it is clear that the darkness will soon return all to the light of day, if only for a bit. More important, perhaps, is that the scene marks a high modern society that blends both skyscrapers (and notice the cranes, which indicate continued construction and development) and multitudes of people who appear to be in some measure of harmony with both the city and one another. Indeed, the protest notwithstanding, there is a degree of everyday orderliness to the display, with tents and shelters dispersed through the scene and people milling about as if at a street fair. Order here does not have to concede to rigid regimentation and oppositional dissent does not necessarily have to reduce to drawing a line in the sand.

Of course, the multitudes could become outraged by continued efforts to deny their voice or the state could choose to wield force to have its way, and tragic, bloody violence could easily end up being the order of the day. The point here is not a call for a Pollyanna sensibility about the possibilities for peaceful protest and democratic governance. Rather, it is to suggest that the photographic conventions that too easily pit the state against the people in simplistic terms (as demonstrated by the meme represented by the lego display) are not the only possibility (however “real” they might be in some register), and that taking a longer view (and at some distance) sometimes allows us to imagine other ways of imagining the possibilities available to us.

Credit: Tyrone Siu/Reuters; Philippe Lopez/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

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Sight Gag: And Then There Was Seattle


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Credit: Mike Keefe, The Denver Post

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.

 

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A Realist Imagination (or is it An Imaginary Realism?)

Realism and the Image

By some persistent, traditional accounts photographic representation is driven by a technological determinism that derives its power from the mechanical capture and reproduction of an event. Accordingly, the fundamental measure of a photograph is its indexicality, i.e., the photograph establishes that the thing was there to be photographed. This position has been critiqued by those who underscore the difference between analogue and digital photographs as if the question of indexicality could be reduced to measurement of a positive reality. But of course there are two problems with this that underline what seems to be a naïve and simplistic sense of “the real.” First, of course, we can never fully test the accuracy of the positive existence of the indexical reality presumably represented because every photograph is always a representation of a transient moment in the past. The best we can measure it against is human memory which, as we know, is fallible in multiple registers. Second, even the best analogue photograph offers a two dimensional representation of the scene recast which inevitably flattens the thing represented (and even stereographic representations, analogue’s predecessor to 3D digital technologies, was an illusion of two dimensional representation).  If the “real” is to mean something useful in the discourse of photography it is going to have to avoid such naiveté and offer a more complex sense of photographic realism.

I cannot offer such a theory here today, though we begin to develop such an approach in forthcoming work, but the photograph above does offer something of a gesture to what such a theory might include. Here we have a photograph of a man painting a scene which is included in the photograph. The painting has an impressionistic quality to it underscoring the role of the imagination in recasting the scene before him. But the photograph is not simply about the painting of the scene or the man doing the painting, but rather calls our attention to how his creativity is important to making sense out of the photographic event itself. In an important sense the photograph is divided between foreground and background, of the man and his painting and of the scene that his being painted. The lens is wide open and so the depth of field is wide, teasing the eye to move back and forth between the shaded areas in the foreground and the natural light that illuminates the background. And in the end it is almost impossible to settle one’s vision on one vs. the other for very long. In short the photograph implores us to reflect on the relationship between the role of realism and imagination in making sense out of what we are seeing.

We might thus call this photograph a representative anecdote for the “photograph matrix” that always and already consists of both a referential (or indexical) orientation and an imaginative orientation. Any photograph is both more or less a record of what has happened, and more or less an artistically enhanced experience, both more or less empirical, and more or less interpretive, both more or less accurate, and more or less suggestive.  The point here is that photographs –whether analogue or digital—operate in the interspace between reality and imagination. The camera records the surface of the world like no other instrument, but the truth of what is shown can be realized only through an act of imagination. Stated otherwise, the photograph is inherently not reducible to a simplistic realism, but is instead a heterogeneous object where different sources of meaning intersect, and the intersections are lodged in the formal design and explored through interpretation. How those intersections occur is the subject for another time, but for now it is enough to note the need for a complex photographic realism that is not reduced to a simple or naïve notion of indexicality and such a conception needs to think hard about the inherent– necessary–connection between the real and the imaginative.

Photo Credit: Carols Barria/Reuters (Caption: An Artist paints a picture of a pro-democracy site near government buildings in Hong Kong.)

 

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Sight Gag: What Does Equality Look Like?

Credit: M. Wuerker

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.

 

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All The Comforts of Home

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I have a chair very much like this one in my living room. I sit in it when I am watching television or reading a novel or socializing with friends and family. It is really quite comfortable. Sometimes I even fall asleep in it. But there are differences. My living room is not made of cinder blocks or painted in a bland, institutional beige that matches the color of the chair and the floor and enhances the intensity of the harsh bright lights above; nor for that matter is my living room shaped as an acute triangle that doesn’t seem to be much more than 8 feet across at its base and it doesn’t have a one-way security mirror. And it should not go without mention that my legs are never shackled to the ground when I am sitting there.

 The photograph is of the “Compliant Detainee Media Room” – that is both the caption for the photograph and the actual name of the room –at Guantanamo Bay, where one of the 149 prisoners being “housed” here can watch DVDs for an hour or two if he “follows the rules.” Prisons don’t have to be fully austere or inhumane institutions – and truth to tell it would be best if they were never neither of those things – but there is something oddly perverse about this scene as it underscores the extreme contradictions between comfort and constraint that govern our detention of prisoners who have never been formally charged with a crime or granted anything even approximating the due process of law. There are legal reasons we can get away with this, of course, since Guantanamo Bay is not governed by the U.S. Constitution, but such a technicality aside it surely violates the spirit of our founding documents.

 “To comfort” is to give physical relief or sustenance, to provide support and serve as a source of strength, courage. It is fundamentally a social function. But nothing in this room is designed to do any of these things, or even anything close to them. It serves instead as a reminder of all that has been lost in the process of detention. The chair, which is designed to recline, is constrained by the feet that are shackled to the ground. The appearance of freedom is thus an illusion. All color has been removed from the world and with it something of the possibility to imagine difference. And finally, the very possibility of sociality has been effaced as there is only one chair, the only possibility for interaction with a polished mirror that displays the prisoner to himself (while knowing that others are watching his every move). The room, in short, is something of a torture chamber masquerading as a comfort station.

The contradiction between comfort and constraint is accented by a second photograph by the same photographer, captioned “Detainee Comfort Items.”

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The photograph shows a single person detention cell. Everything is laid out in near perfect order, clothes and blankets clean and neatly folded, shoes shined, hygiene products new and unopened. The blue matt on the back wall is a mattress, and so it is pretty clear that the sleeping conditions are anything but comfortable—indeed, it is hard to imagine that the room is much more than six feet wide. But that turns out to be the least of it. And to get the point, ask yourself this question: In what world would these items—an orange jump suit, shoes, minimal hygiene products, a thin blanket and a pillow, a book—be considered comfort items?

 What we have on display is a troglodyte world. One in which comfort has been recast as a teasing reminder of one’s condition of un-freedom. It is, in short, a world of constant and continual torture. And as we noted in a post at this blog many years ago, we wonder why they hate us?

Photo Credit: Debi Cornwall

 

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A Second Look: Judging In Camera

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Yes, this is the same photo featured in our Sunday post. Michael Humphrey commented on that post with the accusation that it was animated by “moral idiocy” masquerading as “moral seriousness.” His argument is that publishing photographs that underscore the notion that “war is hell” don’t accomplishing anything without being accompanied by a “serious statement.”   His position is a serious one, and indeed something of a conventional piety that gets repeated often and again by any number of iconoclasts (most notably Susan Sontag) and it deserves serious response.

The iconoclastic position is simple enough: photographs can at best be only a surge of raw emotional energy that is devoid of the rational capabilities necessary for ethical relationships; this is so, as the photograph—by itself—cannot provide moral knowledge. Accordingly, the viewing public is locked into a passive spectatorship that leaves little room for anything like serious moral engagement (i.e., at its best something like compassion fatigue, at its worst, “moral idiocy masquerading as moral seriousness”). Photography may be put to better or worse uses but remains a profoundly suspect medium of representation, indeed one that is presumably and inherently fraudulent because the image can never provide the adequate knowledge of reality that is promised.

The argument assumes that photography bears the burden of representation, which is to say that the “truth” of any photographic image is mitigated by the fact that it always offers a partial and limited view of the world—and in its most extreme forms the argument is that photographs offer little more than fantasy, deceit, and manipulation. So far so good, as any medium—not least, the spoken and written word—is subject to precisely the same limitations. The difficulty is that proponents of this position place the full burden of representation on the photograph with the assumption that its inherent inadequacies can be solved by turning to the word (i.e., “serious statement”) without recognizing that rational discourse and verbal narratives are no less subject to the exact same problem. To get the point, note how discussions of photographs often underscore the fact that we need to “know more than is shown” or that the “context” needs to be elaborated, but we never see rational or narrative reports that include serious discussion of the inadequacy of the word to fully explain a situation.

Ultimately, all media are mixed media, and the image needs the word as much as the word needs the image, so this is not an argument against “serious statement.” It is, however, an argument in favor of taking the photographic image on its own terms and to be willing to “think” with and through it. That is, not just to look at it, but to see what is being shown on its own terms and to seriously consider its implications. Mr. Humphrey quotes a Washington Post editor who is altogether blithe in conceding that “war is hell” as a simple matter of fact without being willing to interrogate its particular hellishness (as displayed in the photograph of carnage) apart from a “serious statement,” and in so doing creates the conditions for normalizing our attitudes towards war as a taken for granted assumption. What matters then are the rational causes for conflagrations and not the affective or moral implications of the body of the dead child that the photograph above forces us to stand in witness to.

Mr. Humphrey assumes a degree of “moral clarity” to the political situation in the Middle East. Maybe from his perspective it is morally clear, but I don’t quite see it. When I allow myself to think with and through the above photograph on its own terms, however, I find myself questioning the world in new and different ways as it invites consideration of what is at stake when we concede that “war is hell” and move on to other matters. Are we comfortable participating in a world that assents to the normalization of war as a taken for granted assumption and, more, one that accepts any rationale whatsoever as justification for the murder of children? Whatever the answer to these questions, the point is that the photograph invites—perhaps demands—their asking, and it such invitations/demands that coaches moral seriousness.

Photo Credit: Stringer/Reuters

 

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Judging In Camera

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A Facebook “friend” living in Tel Aviv recently admonished analyses of Mideast politics from academics “who only know about the Mideast from their shithead blogs and cherry picked newspapers.” Scatological references aside, I was prepared to agree. The history of the Middle East, and the Israeli-Palestine conflict in particular, is so fraught with local complexities that anyone who has never been part of that world—intellectually, socially, politically— would have to be either a fool or incredibly arrogant to enter the fray. And then I came across the photograph above at more than a few major news outlets, and I was literally stopped in my tracks.

Photographs of corpses are always gruesome and hard to look at, but the image of a dead child is especially hard to view; when it is the result of human volition—and in this case military ordinance—it is nearly impossible to avoid judgment. The photograph here is especially difficult to look at. The child cannot be more than six or seven years of age. Dressed for what looks to be a day at the beach, he carries all of the innocence of childhood; he should be flying kites or building sand castles, not lying face down, his body wracked and contorted by the force of the blast of the shell fired by an Israeli gunboat. Wars may be necessary, or at least inevitable, as hard as such ideas are to swallow. But one can only wonder what threat this child posed to those who chose to bombard this strip of Gaza beach.

If this were the only photograph of the only Palestinian child killed by Israeli air raids and bombings it would be enough to demand that we sit in judgment. But of course it is neither. Such images are abundant and it is not sufficient to say either that there are Israeli children who have suffered a similar fate or that Palestinians have been given “fair warning” when such bombings are about to take place. Were the photograph above of an Israeli child killed by a rocket launched indiscriminately by Hamas the demand for judgment would be no less. And to warn those locked within a narrow strip of land with no real opportunity for cover to take heed is, well, no warning at all.

But what judgment to make? There’s the rub. This photograph—as with any photograph— forces us to stand in witness, to question and to query, to see what is before our eyes and to take responsibility for what we see; in short, it calls out for our engagement if only by way of imaging the possibility of a future that is different from the past. It does not tell us what judgment to make—though it is hard to imagine the circumstance that warrants the indiscriminate killing of innocent children, regardless of the provocation—but it demands that we not sit idly by. Judge or be judged; that is the calling of such photographs.

Photo Credit: Stringer/Reuters

 

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In the Name of ‘Ole Glory

147884_600Credit: John Cole/Scranton Times-Tribune

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.

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Sight Gag: At The Creation: Rediva

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Credit: Siers/Charlotte Observer

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.

 1 Comment

Witness to a Demolition

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When it comes to trauma and atrocity the photograph is frequently cast in a confounding conundrum: Because it is driven by an indexical realism it is presumed to bear witness to the worst of human behavior; and yet, because it is only capable of showing a fragment of reality in a sliver of time it is doomed by its incapacity to tell “the whole story.” Of course, no medium is capable of “telling the whole story”—and certainly not in objective fashion—but for some reason we seem to place the full “burden of representation” (to borrow John Tagg’s phrase) on photography itself without paying attention to what it might be accomplishing despite its limitations. And more, when it fails to persuade we assume that somehow the onus of blame resides solely with the photograph (or the photographer) rather than, say, with the viewer or the spectator.

Perhaps the photograph above is a case in point. According to the caption you are witnessing the “demolition” of a private residence in the village of Idnha, just outside of Hebron. The home belonged to Ziad Awad, a Palestinian and a member of Hamas, “charged” with killing an off-duty Israeli police officer. His home is being demolished by Israeli security forces “as a deterrent” to future terrorist activity. If Awad was found to be guilty of murdering an Israeli police officer—and there does seem to be sufficient evidence to support the facts of the case—then surely he should be detained and justly punished. But the demolition of a private residence in the middle of a village or neighborhood to punish or deter an individual crime is excessive. Indeed, far more than an “eye for and eye” mode of justice, it seems to fit in the category that Ariella Azoulay dubs a “regime made disaster.”  Regime made disasters are catastrophic circumstances initiated by democratic institutions in full public view; they are rarely identified as disasters per se, and they divert attention from the larger population being effected (focusing instead on the most immediate victims) by deflecting attention from deeper, underlying causes.

As one reads about Awad, for example, journalistic focus is directed largely at the fact that he was a known terrorist—indeed, he had been imprisoned for a number of years and only recently released, that an Israeli citizen had been  murdered, and that the State of Israel was exacting justice. What receives only marginal attention is the fact that the home being demolisthed did not belong to Awad, but his brother, and that now the brother, his wife and five children, and Awad’s wife and six children have been rendered homeless. It could be a scene out of the Old Testament—think The Book of Judges. But the larger point is that what receives no attention is how such actions impact the ecology—social, political, economic, and otherwise—of the neighborhood, already something of a refugee state, in which a home is precipitously razed. Equally ignored—and perhaps more to the point—is any attention to the the deeply seeded, underlying causes that animate the tensions between the State of Israel and Hamas in the first place.

And yet, for all that, the regime made disaster is there for all to see if only we are willing to accept the invitation. But “invitation” is not really the right word, for an invitation implies the right and opportunity to turn away, to reject or resist the entreaty with some measure of impunity. The photograph, by contrast, issues something that is more like an ethical demand to take responsibility for what we are seeing and for how we respond in reaction to it. No, the photograph does not put the act of demolishing this single home on display, though it does show us the immediate traces of smoke and dust as they expand outward beyond the original location and work to encompass and choke the entire neighborhood. Nor does the photograph tell the entire story, focusing on this singular event. But what it does is to put the impending and unfolding disaster before the public eye, insisting that we look, and that we see, and in seeing, that we engage, that is to say, that we stand as witnesses who not only testify to what they see, but who will ask the questions necessary to make sense out of what is before their very eyes and to act accordingly. It requires, in short, an ethics of spectatorship.

In Dispatches, one of the most affecting novels to come out of the Vietnam War, Michael Herr notes that the war taught him that, “you [are] as responsible for everything you [see] as you [are] for what you [do].” That obligation does not diminish just because what we see is mediated from half-way-around the globe.

Credit: Mussa Issa Qawasma/Reuters

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