I suppose we are getting used to reports of Western wildfires, but the Yosemite rim fire is a bad one.  It doubled in a couple of days to burn 125,000 acres by Saturday, and the 2800 firefighters have so far achieved 7% containment.  Nor is this merely a story about the loss of natural beauty, for the fire is threatening San Francisco’s electrical grid and water supply.

Given the large scale and destructive potential of the fire, the pictures from the fire line can seem mundane: guys walk along spraying liquids, either to put out spot fires or start back fires, while above them the monster is creating its own weather pattern that can send it in any direction.  And yet there is one photo that, as improbable as a downdraft, leaps into the imagination to communicate something deeper still.  Not surprisingly, it also is a photograph about beauty.

I don’t know which is more striking: the radiant tree branches or his nonchalance in the inferno.  It almost seems that he is spraying paint on a canvas, or washing a mural, or waving a magic wand that is creating the luxurious tableau before him.  Some critics might object at precisely this point: the fire has been completely aestheticized, they would say, with any sense of danger or moral significance–and of public response–displaced by the pleasures of spectatorship.  And they might seem to be right, for the fire does seem to have become a painting of a fire, an event so fictive and distant that the balls of white heat triangulated around the man could be distant galaxies.  The image seems to speak to art history–is the influence Japaneese, or Romantic, or from a video game, or . . . ?   It does not bring to mind climate change, environmental politics, or emergency funding.

And yet, it is beautiful, isn’t it?  Both the fire and the photo are dazzling and enthralling, strange and enchanting.  More than that, the photo doesn’t hide its art; instead, by emphasizing the aesthetic distance and coherence of the scene as well as its elements of incongruity, it makes the beauty of the fire an object for serious contemplation.  That prompt can be taken in several directions: for example, one might consider how all disaster photos draw on artistic appeal or manipulation, or how beauty is agnostic about whether sequoias are green or aflame, or how human beings have a rather complicated relationship with fire.

Or, to quote Walter Benjamin, how humanity’s “self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”  That degraded relationship would seem to be demonstrated by the firefighter in the photograph: standing apart from the scene he actually is in, enjoying the view while casually hosing down an environmental disaster that one way or another will eventually engulf the planet.  His indifference mimics our own, while we can pretend that the conflagration isn’t real simply by being spectators.

But he may not be enjoying the view. and Benjamin’s observation may be applied too easily today.  I think we need to look again.  Nature, like the photographer, could be telling us something–something still inchoate, beyond ready verbalization, and essential.  Something about the close connection between civilization and catastrophe, for example.

Whatever the message, I’m sure that the key to understanding is to value the beauty of the image, rather than try to contain it.

Photographs bt Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

 0 Comments

Just what are they, exactly?

The caption at Reuters referred to “the remains of a train wreckage,” and it is that.  The train of tank cars carrying crude oil had exploded in Lac Megantic, Quebec, creating an inferno that killed at least 15 people, with others yet to be accounted for.  This human toll should not be minimized, and I will be among the last to grieve over the loss of company property.  Nonetheless, the photo above deserves attention even as it takes us in away from those whose lives were torched by the blast.

The scorched tank cars look like carcasses more than anything else.  Like the bloated bodies of pigs after a flood, or dead fish after an oil spill in a river.  Or, if you like sci fi noir, like pods leaking alien spoor in some industrial wasteland of a long dead planet.  The sense of scale is all off–certainly not to human scale, as the tanker truck and other vehicles on the road are dwarfed by the giant metal rames piled up like so much slag at a gargantuan mill.

But I keep coming back to a sense of organic life now dead.  As if some life form has been decimated arbitrarily, accidentally, without dignity or purpose.  Again, I know that human beings really did suffer that death, but nonetheless I think this photograph captures something important about the larger economy of life and death in a machine age.

The word “petroleum” comes from the Greek petra/rock and Latin oleum/oil, and that etymology captures the sense of being both inorganic and organic.  Technically, oil is not a mineral, yet oil rights are covered under mineral rights, it is pumped out of the dark depths of the earth,  and then it is turned into tens of thousands of materials and other products.  Likewise, the black (and blackened) steel tanker cars represent the black oil they carried, as if two parts of the same whole.  Thus, oil can be thought of as a mineral that once was a mixture of plants and other decomposing matter, and perhaps the photo taps into that deep organic history.  Plants and animals were transformed over vast expanses of geological time into the crude oil that then was used in just over a century of industrialized production to support an incredible expansion of human development, but one not without its costs. And that process of oil extraction, distribution, refining, and conversion into machine power increasingly seems to have developed a life of its own, or at least a great many defenders of its right to exist and expand without limit.  But as the photograph above suggests, even that process can come full circle, destroying its own and leaving nothing but waste that will be much less likely in the long run to change into anything else.

I’ve always enjoyed the family road trip game of Twenty Questions, where you start by asking if the object is Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral.  For the time spent trapped in the car, we could at least share the illusion that all the world could be placed neatly into one of three categories, and with everything either bigger, smaller, or (less often) the same size as a breadbox.  Without cheap gasoline, I doubt we would have played the game.  At the same time, we were being driven toward a world where those simple categories were going to become increasingly intertwined.

Look again:  the tanker cars are at once bigger and smaller than a breadbox.  More important, or less a trick of the eye, they also are at once vegetable, mineral, and animal.  And so, as this photograph senses, there may be something to mourn there after all.  But just what that is, exactly, I’m not sure.

Photograph by Mathieu Belanger/Reuters.

 1 Comment

Visibility can be an important property, one that represents status, legitimacy, rights, privileges, and powers.  If you don’t think so, ask the women who have been Invisible Wives at corporate dinners, or the men and women who are still trapped in the closet, or the street people who are treated as if they don’t exist, or the elderly who have to endure others talking about them as if they were in another room.  Consider also what it can mean for an ethic group when one of their own achieves celebrity, or when they can see themselves as they are in entertainment and advertisements, or when strangers nod pleasantly as they pass by in the office or at a restaurant.  Sure, the very rich prize not being seen by the masses, but they already have what they need otherwise and are assured plenty of recognition and deference within their own circles of entitlement.  For most of us, however, it’s a good thing to be visible: more specifically, to be seen without social stigma or stereotype and as if we belong in the picture.

Which is why the problem of Native American invisibility continues to be part of that prolonged catastrophe that otherwise is known as their history.  This invisibility is not for want of paintings and photographs; in fact, they are part of the problem.  Can you think of an image of a Native American that is not of a primitive warrior, or rural poverty, or a casino?  Photographers return to the reservations and urban ghettos, but no matter how hard they try, it seems that the mix of persistent social problems and ritual trappings will defeat any attempt to see anew.  And in any case, this may be a prime example of how, as Errol Morris has reminded us, believing is seeing: the stereotypes are likely to dominate perception no matter what else is intended.  And because of their geographic isolation and how that compounds dysfunction while reducing assimilation, the native peoples of the Great Plains may be in for the worst of it.

This week Time put up a slide show by Aaron Huey centered on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.  Aaron has put years of work into gaining the trust of the Oglala Lakota people living there, and he is trying to break through the wall of invisibility that prevents any understanding of both  the “failures of the reservation system” and how, for all that, people are finding ways to care for one another, preserve their shattered culture, and perhaps even one day receive justice.

I won’t presume to speak for the photographer, but the show is provided to prompt discussion.  I find the image above to be incredibly reverberant, and the news is not all good.  Once again, no one is in the picture; once again, the West can be imagined as both unpopulated and awaiting European civilization.  Once again, Native American culture appears almost immaterial, ephemeral, a collection of feathers, scraps of fabric, and other ornamental flotsam that will be carried away by the next big wind.

But that’s only part of the tableau, for European culture doesn’t come off any better.  That neoclassical monument was never an award winner and it’s gained nothing with the passage of time, but above all it was out of place from the start.  What would simply be overlooked (invisible) in today’s urban park here looks ridiculous; worse, it can stand for all that did not follow, the promises of settlement and development that never came to pass.

Instead of another city of the prairie, we have instead only the fence, and with that the political fact of forced enclosure.  That fence is too banal to really qualify as a symbol, but it will have to do: like the reservation system itself, it’s a cheap but effective barrier, and one that–like the monument–was out of place from the start.

So it is that another roadside memorial tells a story, but not the one that was intended.  Nor is that the whole story, for there is one more thing: that impossible sky.   Thus the photo provides myth and reality: the sad, forgotten memorial, itself a hodgepodge of two cultures that tragically collided, and its backdrop of sublime natural beauty with all the spiritual power and promise that still holds.  To live under that sky is still to be impossibly rich, unless of course you are impossibly poor, sick, abandoned, and traumatized.  There are a few white settlers still living under that sky, and some of them can still see it, but for most of us on all sides, that experience has been lost to either catastrophe or affluence.

It’s odd that the sky could become invisible, but that, too, is part of the history signified by that monument.  I don’t think Aaron breaks through the barrier of Native American invisibility, but I doubt that any one documentary project could do so.  What is needed as well is a change in the audience.  Now that Aaron has done his part, the question remains of who will bother to see what is there.  You might start by looking up, and then around you.  And then?

Photograph by Aaron Huey, Mass grave at the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.

 2 Comments

The anguish displayed in this photograph is palpable. And if one takes time with the image it is hard not to feel this woman’s grief.  But of course the image is not so unlike so many similar representations of pain and sorrow—both foreign and domestic—and it is not surprising that we would be unlikely to linger over the image.  And truth to tell, while I did come across it in a slide show at a mainstream regional newspaper, it has not achieved a great deal of national circulation. Therein lies its importance.

The woman is the mother of a twenty four year old male who was found, with three others, shot to death “execution style” in an Akron, OH, townhouse.  Numbers here are hard to know with exactitude, but according to the interactive website at Slate, he is the 3,788^th person to be killed by gun shot since the tragedy in Newtown, CT.   That is approximately twenty five people per day.  Or to take a different measure of the magnitude, that is 811 more than the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks.  This mother’s grief is no doubt personal, but it is not solitary.  It is shared by the parents and loved ones of at least 3,787 others in the past four months, and who knows how many in the months ahead.   The problem is that there is no way for us to see them in their collectivity, to host or witness vernacular memorials to their loss of the sort that cropped up spontaneously around Ground Zero, or to publically memorialize their loss in the whole.  All we have are fragmented, individual images of the private grief of their closest loved ones.  And because that grief is private—even if made public in images such as the one above—we are inclined to look away or ignore it.  One important dimension of the significance of events like Sandy Hook is that they animate a profound public presence to problems that otherwise remain private and hidden from the public eye.

Those who opposed the recent effort to legislate even modest federal gun controls laws were fond of arguing that we should not politicize the horrific event that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School; the situation there, they argued, was so fraught with emotion that it would be irrational to respond to this one incident as if in kneejerk fashion.  Admittedly, kneejerk responses are almost never productive, and I am inclined to resist purely affective responses to social and political crises, but to ignore the public emotional force of a near constant, sustained and growing problem is, well, thoroughly irrational. But of course, this is exactly what forty six members of the U.S. Senate did this past week when they chose—in the most cowardly of fashion—to vote against a modest, bipartisan plan supported by 90% of the American people to require background checks for online and gun show sales.  The senatorial opposition supposedly was based on an absolutist interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment—a standard that we have never maintained for any other constitutional amendment, including the vaunted 1^st Amendment.

The photograph above is not the last one of its genre that we will see in the days, weeks and months ahead.  And each time we encounter such an image we need to force ourselves to avoid the impulse to look  away as if to honor and respect the privacy of personal loss and grief being experienced; rather, we need to see and witness in such images the public tragedy that is accumulating, one death at a time.  And if we can force our legislators to witness and respond to the images each time one occurs, well, all the better.

Photo Credit: Ed Suba, Jr./AP Photo

 1 Comment

It was Chicago’s turn (again) on Thursday: rain, then heavy rain, then more heavy rain.  Soon the infrastructure as was swamped.  Sewers spouted like blow holes, yards and then basements flooded, and highways turned into rivers and then lakes.

Too much water may seem an odd sign of global warming, and I don’t expect any sympathy in Australia, but one of the signs of climate change underway is more violent storms.  Annual rainfall might not change much, yet the rains can be less frequent and more intense.  The difference in impact between a rain and a downpour is considerable: much heavier loads on urban infrastructure, with more damage and less sustainability for agriculture.  City planners in Chicago are drawing up strategies for the warming that will come in the next 50 years, but that doesn’t meant that water control is where it needs to be today.

This photo from a Twitter account was one of many that were being collected by local media.  The practice of hooking into social media is a useful response to disasters and part of a larger skill set that is emerging among media providers at all levels.  (Think of the collaborations large and small that developed immediately in response to the Boston Marathon bombing, for example.)  It’s good to see that people are learning to adapt to environmental change, but that hardly excuses the more comprehensive inertia on behalf of doing little or nothing about the big picture.  Society needs to both do all it can to slow down climate change while also investing heavily to prepare for the changes that are likely to occur in any case.

Perhaps that’s why I like this photo.  Sure, it provides a great example of how infrastructure was overwhelmed and individuals sorely affected.  There are at least three people in Chicago who obviously had a very bad day.  Yet it also seems almost elegiac, with the dark water reflecting lights that are impersonal yet warm.  The grey concrete structures and strip of grass could be part of a mausoleum.  The cars have died, but instead of a scrapyard they seem to be waiting internment.

Thus, the photo captures several kinds of immobility.  The drowned cars can no longer move, traffic has been brought to a halt, a dynamic civilization has been stopped by the inexorable persistence of nature, and a society’s inertia–its inability to adapt to changes of its own making–has been exposed.

Yet the photo does more than expose ecological vulnerability and political stasis.  It also adds something: a contemplative tone.  The lack of movement, activity, productivity, and other signs of a society on the go is framed as if one were in a Japanese garden.  The artful quietude and serene tensions suggest that this is not a disaster but rather a place and time for reflection on living in harmony with the world.  Human craft and natural processes can be beautifully aligned, or they can be made into a game of chance where the only thing left to do is pretend it’s not so bad.

And once the roads are drained and the basements dried, who will take the time to think about what is too easily forgotten or denied.  The disaster can contain a hidden gift–the time to reflect on the need for deep change and with that the possibilities for more artful living.

Photograph by Maddy Clary.

 0 Comments