The photograph above appeared on the front page of the NYT a few days ago in conjunction with a story concerning a series of bomb blasts that rocked Baghdad killing twenty people, including 8 Iraqi policemen and two U.S. soldiers.  At first glance, the image is altogether banal. The remnants of the wreckage in the foreground are barely recognizable, with only a single tire giving a clue as to its identity as a vehicle.  The absence of security personnel or emergency vehicles make it apparent that the explosion did not just happen.  And the individuals sitting and standing in the background are altogether relaxed, if not nonchalant, their attention dispersed in multiple directions, making it difficult to know what event the photograph is actually recording—the scene in front of us, whatever is outside of the frame of the image, or something else altogether.  Indeed, on the face of things the photograph does not appear to be an image of anything in particular at all.

At second glance, however, it may well be the very banality of the image that makes it especially worthy of our attention.  An explosion has taken place, or more specifically, as the caption directs the reader, “a series of attacks” have taken place, and yet any sense of urgency in dealing with the situation is altogether elided.  Everyday life  has been disrupted, to be sure, tragically so with the violent loss of life, but the event is shown to be so routine, so commonplace, that its status as a horrifying emergency claim goes unnoticed and unaddressed. The photograph thus purports to be the visual representation of a slice of life in a society that has become conditioned to such everyday violence, so much so that it lives, in Ariella Azoulay’s terms, “on the verge of catastrophe.”  This is not an appeal to the now tired idea of “compassion fatigue,” which claims that we become so weary of images of violence and disaster that we simply stop noticing.  Rather, it suggests the sense in which “the contours [of the scene represented] are indistinct; one could easily fail to notice it, passing in front of it without stopping.”  It is portrayed as a nonevent, however quotidian it might be, and thus it never rises to the level of an emergency claim. Put simply, the everydayness of the scene, which should alert us to the profound, catastrophic condition of the society, actually veils—if not altogether erases—the tragedy before our eyes.

To get the point, compare the photograph above with the photograph and slide show that the NYT published in conjunction with the 2008 bombing of a U.S. Army recruiting station in Times Square.

No one was injured in this blast, the physical damage to the building was relatively minor, and disruption to the city lasted for only a few hours, but nevertheless, all of the signs of urgency and emergency are present and pronounced.  Yellow tape marks the scene as the site of a dangerous criminal act.  Members of the bomb squad—state officials—stand post in front of what appears to be a technical expert dressed in a hazardous materials suit as he examines the bomb’s residue.  And note too that the explosion took place in the early morning hours and the street lamps in the background are still on, suggesting the immediacy with which the event was responded to and handled. Everything in the image casts this as a special event and in so doing initiates the conditions for classifying it as a catastrophe.

The point, of course, is that catastrophes come in a variety of forms.  The problem is not in reducing the conditions for defining a catastrophe to a singular event, but in how we visualize those conditions as a matter of urgency.

Photo Credits:  Karim Kadim/AP; Chip East/Reuters.  And with special credit to Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Esp. 289-373.

 

 

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There is no way that press coverage of the Mississippi river flooding can match the damage, discomfort, and discouragement that is spreading across the flood plain.  Maybe the coverage really doesn’t matter, but if it does, people are getting too little of it.  Nor is this surprising.  Big news from the Middle East continues to overshadow a story driven by the weather.  The news is drawn to dramatic events, while the flood has been spreading slowly.  Tragedies are supposed to be monumental, but the flood is about sandbags and soggy carpets.

You might say that this photograph says it all, precisely because it says so little.  A woman is carrying clothing out of a flooded house.  She is wading through the kitchen, which is standing in a couple inches of water.  The kitchen looks like many other kitchens across America and the world, right down to the magnetic decorations on the fridge.  The one difference is the water, which is not too deep but thick with mud and getting under everything.  Her expression is just right: this is an unexpected, unwanted chore, and one requiring concentration so that you don’t make it worse, but what can you do except wade through it?  Why waste time complaining?  Or making a big deal about it in the news?

The house has not burned to the ground, been devoured by an earthquake, or shattered by artillery shells; it’s just wet.  So it is that floods usually fall short of other disasters in terms of visual interest.  You can only look at so many photos of a boat being piloted down the street of a small town.  But something is being revealed, nonetheless.  The problem is not the nature of the disaster, but of a media system that is not suited to capturing conditions of general deprivation.  The news is drawn to emergencies, and to making emergency claims, but not to understanding how large groups of people may be on the edge of despair or at least having to get by with far less support than others take for granted.  Consider, for example, how the health care debate was hijacked by images of Tea Party protests, allowing millions of people to be shorted and billions of dollars squandered for want of being able or willing to depict systemic problems on behalf of the general welfare.  Also lost along the way was an appreciation for the fragility of human life and the social systems that we erect to protect ourselves from the forces of nature.

Another woman, another room of the house, another natural disaster.  This bedroom was exposed to the elements by a tornado that blew through Alabama not long ago.  (Remember?)  Once again, you see a demonstration of the coping skills that are so essential to everyday life.  The walls have been torn away, but what can you do except sort out the possessions that remain?

What strikes me the most about the scene is that the walls were so close to the bed.  We’ve all been in small bedrooms, but how often do we then feel that we are just on the other side of the outside?  Here we can see that, large or small, a house is but a thin shell between inside and outside, between the forces of nature in all their violent capriciousness and the shelter, security, warmth, and everything else we hold dear when in our own space.

Whether flooded or torn asunder or still intact, a house is a fragile thing.  More generally, housing has proved to be a fragile part of the national economy, one that, if poorly managed, can come crashing down to spread harm far and wide.  When deregulation allowed the housing market to be flooded with financial malfeasance, disaster struck, and ordinary people who had done no wrong were left to pick up the pieces.

We live in shells.  When they are well built and protected, we forget how fragile they are.  When disaster strikes, the thin barrier between ordinary life and catastrophe is exposed.  What remains to be seen is whether anyone else will notice or care.  And care not just about this house or that one, this town or that one, but enough to rebuild a society with the protections and support that ordinary people deserve and need.  It’s called government, by the way.

Photographs by Scott Olson/Getty Images and Butch Dill/Associated Press.

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A flood is a general thing.  Tornadoes are idiosyncratic, fires depend on their fuel, mudslides are site-specific, and so it goes.  Sure, not everyone is in the flood plain and the other natural disasters can cause a lot of damage, but somehow a flood seems the most comprehensive of them all.  Noah wasn’t asked to build a firebreak, and even today a flood can look as though it might cover the earth.

This photograph from a farm within reach of the Mississippi River shows how a flood brings everything under the singular dominion of water.  It’s not as if nothing is left, but everything is inundated, either covered or cut off and then suspended in the same elemental medium.  As you can see here, the structures may remain intact (for awhile, anyway), but everything else is swept away or drowned.

The dunning uniformity of a flood’s destructiveness is depicted perfectly by this photograph.  One result is that it becomes easy to see the disaster as a general problem, something that affects the whole community and is defined by collective action such as building dikes.  That’s not the full story, of course.  In fact, you are also looking at a personal disaster: this farmer is effectively wiped out for the year or worse.  House, place of business, equipment, everything has been ruined, and don’t even think about getting the crop planted in time.  Likewise, the waters that look so uniform from a distance will be a silent maelstrom of cross currents, fish, other animals, and debris, and the waters will reshape the land this way and that before they recede.  The particulars are not the story, however, nor should be.  The flood, both materially and symbolically, is one way that nature reminds us of how things that seem separate can share a common fate.

Which is why disaster relief will flow like waters from the federal government to the states.  Of course, it flows regardless: after the tornadoes that ripped through the South last month, and after the hurricanes and every other natural disaster.  The federal largess is particularly interesting this year, since–as often is the case–most of the damage is in so-called Red States.  That’s right, in the states where majorities pride themselves on their commitments to small government, low taxes, and deficit reduction.  And so the photograph above needs to be paired with the pictures that you won’t see: (1) Red State governors not applying for or accepting federal aid.  (2) Red State governors, senators, and representatives saying that they don’t want any aid if it would increase the deficit.  (3) The same crew saying that they will be willing to raise taxes or increase deficits to cover their own disaster needs, much less others’.  (4)  Anyone realizing that low taxes and deficit refusals are automatically denying aid to those who are experiencing disaster elsewhere–including economic disasters and social disasters such as bad schools and unsafe neighborhoods.  (6) Any suggestion that we should ask those citizens with low state taxes to rely on their tax savings to cover the costs of the disaster.  (7) Any suggestion that we should rely on market solutions: say, in line with health care revisionism, that the afflicted states should bid for the aid, with the lowest bidder winning while the other states are free to apply for help from other countries.

Hypocrisy is a necessary part of democratic politics, but there ought to be limits.  Unfortunately, the Red State politicians will ask for every penny that might be available and scream if they don’t get it, and do so without a thought to changing their relentless assault on federalism.  They should be helped, of course, but they also learn the lessons that disasters have to teach: lessons of reciprocity and other forms of cooperation on behalf of the general welfare.  That’s how human beings have been able to survive.  If you look at the photograph above, you might begin to understand how cooperation is the way that we can match nature’s comprehensiveness.

Photograph by David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

 

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Even without the recent nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, there would be good reason to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the nuclear catastrophe in Chernobyl, Ukraine.  Every source of centralized energy production has human costs, but only one can poison large swaths of territory while making some areas uninhabitable.

Chernobyl is now a ghost town, which is one reason this mural is so powerful.  The photographic record–including slide shows here, here, and here–documents one abandoned habitat after another: schools, hospitals, office buildings, homes, everything had to be abandoned.  Harder to capture are the many illnesses, deformities, and deaths caused by the radiation, but evidence is there to be seen.  The empty rooms seem haunted, and so they are: by those who will never live there again, and by those who lost the better part of their lives to sickness, and by those who died before their time.

Public art often is commemorative, and the photograph above is doubly so: it acknowledges both the dead city and the spirits who continue to haunt the place.  It does so by having photojournalism relay another public art, the vernacular mural.  The mural is tied to a single place, while the photograph is capable of global circulation; the two media together mimic the nature of a ghost: a spirit that can travel across all realms but remains tied to one place, ethereal yet trapped, and unable to let go while powerless to act.

The city can’t move, while the mural was made by someone who has left the scene; the space between immobility and mobility can be occupied, temporarily, by the spectator.  We are asked to stop for a while, to look and reflect: to ask, what do we see?  One thing I see is that the mural is channeling another art: the photographs of bald-headed children weak with cancer caused by the reactor’s radiation spill.  Thus, the two visual arts circulate through one another to call a public audience to witness the reality of the disaster, a disaster that is both material and spiritual.

Ghosts travel across space and through time.  I have come to realize how much photographs about the past are really about the present, and how photographs about the present are really about the future.  Damaged children are signs of a damaged future, and so it is that images of children are used to depict what is at risk if one nuclear catastrophe leads to another.  If each disaster becomes a normal accident leading only to marginal improvements of a system that is at bottom a devil’s bargain, then the future has been poisoned.

This image is another example of one public art relaying another.  The photographer captures some of the iconography of a demonstration against Tokyo Electric Power Company.  The artwork on the paper cup lantern mashes up the triangle symbol of radiation warning signs with an image of children put at risk.  What is particularly interesting–and perhaps quite Japanese–is the ambiguity in the child, who could also be a nuclear imp, say, the horrid issue of a contaminated population.  Images of sprites have been associated with both electrical power and nuclear weapons–think of Freddy Kilowatt and the “nuclear genie”–and fears of mutation caused by radiation exposure have a history in Japan.  So it is that both photography and the spirit world may be a source of messages about the future.  The question remains whether the messages will be heard.  The ghosts can’t act; it remains to be seen who will.

Photographs by Sergie Supinsky/AFP-Getty Images and Ji Chunpeng/Xinhua.

Cross-p0sted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Sometimes a mundane photograph can capture historical conditions that usually are obscured by powerful habits of denial.

This image of a doctor reading an X-ray certainly seems part of the mundane world: that is, a world of cinder-block walls, florescent lighting, bottled water, and people standing around waiting.  The trick of having the film replace the doctor’s face does add a touch of aesthetic flair, and the caption, which tells us that he is treating a rebel fighter in Libya, suggests that the scene is part of a larger historical drama, but all that is muted by the blue tone, the static figures, and the matter-of-fact demeanor of the orderly on the right.  Even in an emergency room, there can be business as usual.

Except for the blood on that white glove.  What could in fact also be a typical feature of medical practice here acts as a punctum, in the sense introduced by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.  It pierces our complacent response to touch us emotionally and awaken a more critical engagement with the photograph.  Is that blood fresh?  Even if not, why hasn’t he changed gloves?  How dire is the situation?  (It feels almost as if he has pulled that X-ray film out of the body cavity of the patient.)  And why is he reading it in the hallway?

The last question begins to peel back the familiar response to the photo to expose something else.  What kind of medical facility is this, where water has to come in bottles, where orderlies aren’t in uniform, where X-rays have to be read by the rude light of a corridor, and where the doctors are having to do diagnostic work amidst people milling about?

In The Civil Contract of Photography Ariella Azoulay uses the concept of being “on the verge of catastrophe” to describe the condition of a population that is deprived of resources and otherwise injured to the point where it is just above becoming a humanitarian disaster.  Azoulay argues that Israeli  governing techniques keep the Palestinians in the occupied territories and Gaza in this condition indefinitely.  (Corroborating evidence includes Wikileaks documents quoted here.)

Her argument need not be limited to that single case, however.  These controlled catastrophes appear banal enough that their visible harms fall short of the urgency and drama required for the intensive news coverage that might prompt outrage and action.  Consider Azoulay’s first example of how this works, which is a photograph of a doctor reading an X-ray in Me’in village: “bare, dusty walls, a dirty space, the use of the natural light coming from the door due to the lack of electricity, the absence of proper equipment for examing X-rays, the conspicuously detached encounter between doctor and patient, the improvised clinic in which medical examinations are made amid people who are having a makeshift picnic after waiting for hours at the checkpoints” (p. 69).  As you can see, it is not the same photograph and yet is it the same photograph as the one above, right down to what you can’t see here: the center of that photo dominated by a hand holding a blurry X-ray.

That film, at once opaque and yet capable of still being read by someone with suitable training and dedication, can stand for the photographs themselves.  The conditions for response are less than ideal, but we can see what is there if we will but make the effort in solidarity with those who have been injured.

These photos are being taken all around the globe: photos of situations that are not and yet are the same.  Libya may have a better future than the Palestinian past, but don’t count on it.  Africa is littered with broken villages, regions, and states from decades of warfare and anarchy, and the larger forces at work in the Libyan war have much of the Middle East locked into political and economic stagnation.  Libya may have been on the verge of catastrophe for decades, and it now may be trading one form of sustainable disaster for another.

What we can’t say, however, is that we never saw it coming.

Photograph by Odd Andersen/AFP-Getty Images.

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The human mind has the amazing capacity to calculate magnitudes far beyond the scale of ordinary experience.  We can speak of the size of the earth or the galaxy or the universe, using terms such as “light years” as if we had lived through them regularly, or discuss whether the earth is 4.5 or 4.54 billion years old as if we might have there for the birthday parties.  We can “scale” up with ease, whether increasing a recipe or clicking on the magnitude button at Google Maps.  One result is that it is easy to forget how much distortion is occurring when we do so.  Our knowledge of magnitudes comes at a price: we forget how much distance or time or damage is actually involved.   Indeed, we are more likely to grieve for one death than 100,000.  So, magnitude, particularly when talking about human experience, can prove to be a difficult matter: something that can lead to serious distortions in sympathy, knowledge, and response when trying to deal with disasters and other large scale events.

One consequence is that people need to imagine magnitude: they need to draw on their imaginations to fill in the abstraction created by large numbers.  This imaginative representation of events is particularly important for collective action on behalf of the general welfare–which is the key to human success as a species.  That is, an ability to imagine the magnitude of a catastrophe can ensure effective collaboration in response to present emergencies and guide precautionary measures on behalf of a better future.  But large magnitudes are, by definition, difficult to see.  I can use a world map precisely because I don’t see the actual size of the earth.  Managing scale requires abstraction, not visualization.

Fortunately, we have visual arts that we use for just this reason (among others).  The photographer or designer can show us the world in a way that emphasizes magnitude in order to counter our habitual abstraction and its emotional and thus social consequences.  The public image is an aid to public imagination, one that can help us move beyond merely seeing the localized effects of what happened where and when.  The challenge is to show us that and more: to engage the imagination in a manner that fills in the gap between particularity and abstraction, between the collapsed house and numerical measures of causal forces.  And by bridging that gap, the public image helps us cross the space between one person and another person, one group and another group, one nation and another nation.

Everything depends on it.  By seeing ourselves in respect to the large-scale forces shaping our lives, we can begin to recognize our common vulnerability.  From there, perhaps we can understand that humanity succeeds or fails as people learn to work and live together across the distances that only seem to separate them.

Notes: Photograph of shipping containers in Sindai by Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press; computer simulation image of the tsunami by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; whole earth photograph by the crew of Apollo 17 for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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You’ve seen photographs of the devastation, the images that chronicle the magnitude of the quake and the sheer mess it can make, and you’ve seen photographs of the rescue efforts, as governments swing into action to provide shelter, food, medical care for the survivors, and you’ve seen photographs of those who didn’t make it, and of those who now are wounded by grief, sometimes watching helplessly or walking aimlessly through a world turned upside down.  But you might not have seen an image such as this one:

The caption at The Big Picture said that “an official in protective gear talks to a woman who is from the evacuation area near the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant in Koriyama.”  I find the description puzzling, as the woman clearly is speaking to the official as well.  The difference reveals more than gender bias, although that should be pointed out.  We are to believe that the official is instructing the woman, guiding and helping her on behalf of her safety and others as well.  Shouldn’t communication during a disaster be from the official to the citizen, and from those who are equipped with modern technology to those who are wrapped in a blankets?  Well, yes and no, not least because effective response to a disaster depends on two-way communication: those who are deployed need information from those who have direct experience of what is happening on the ground.  Given the sensory deprivation involved with that Hazmat suit, she probably can help.

But I digress.  One reason this photograph is remarkable is that it seems to be a still from a science fiction movie.  More precisely, by considering it as a movie still we can begin to discern its ability to reveal something about our civilization.

There she stands, one of the new nomads, continuous with primitive peoples from tens of thousands of years ago and yet newly vulnerable.  Her blanket and mask were machine made, but she seems to be illuminated by firelight, and her gesture suggests that she knows the terrain and even how to negotiate with the alien questioning her.  But we know that she is in danger; it’s as if the red tent behind them is blaring a continuous state of emergency.

As well it should, for what kind of world includes the figure on the right?  Its clothing isn’t something that was grabbed while scrambling for safety.  The suit and gloves were designed, tested, manufactured, ordered, and worn in training because they are part of the normal operation of managing the nuclear reactor.  That is to say, because responding to nuclear catastrophe is part of the normal operation of this society.

A friend has remarked that prophets are always right because their predictions of destruction in the future actually are descriptions of what is happening right now.  (When the effects become evident down the road may be less well known; similar to public opinion polling, perhaps we should grant prophets a margin of error.)  The earthquake had to come, and the reactor, despite the many precautions taken, was likely to crack and release radiation, and both happened because of natural and social processes that were underway, day after day, well before the bad news arrived.  Thus, we might consider how the photograph above reveals not only that a dystopian future could happen, but that we already are getting used to it.

Photograph by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters.

Update: For a fine essay on the role of science fiction in Japanese public culture, see “Japan’s Long Nuclear Disaster Film” by Peter Wynn Kirby at the New York Times Opinionator Blog.

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Disasters often provoke “finger pointing,” fault-finding, recriminations, and other accusations of failed responsibility.  As well they should.  Those who complain about “politicizing a disaster” usually have something to hide, and spirited public discussion of possible causes is essential for better preparation and improved response.  Even so, preoccupation with what did or did not happen before and during the event can lead to a missed opportunity.  Disaster photographs can contain hints of how the present contains within it alternate futures: suggestions, that is, of how present tendencies could lead to catastrophic conditions.  Those outcomes are not caused by the disaster, but they can be exposed as the smooth surfaces of a civilization are twisted into wreckage.

This photo from Tuesday’s blizzard is a lovely example of what I have in mind.   The crumpled SUV is positioned in front of Chicago’s magnificent skyline, as if the vehicle were a harbinger of things to come.  The wrecked car is one small example of the civilization symbolized by the tall buildings: all are miracles of metal and glass created by the industrial technologies now exposed to the elements once the car’s skin has been sheared away.  Of course, we are aware of the difference in scale and realize that the car can be towed away without loss to the urban core, and yet: could the city be more vulnerable that it had seemed?  Could the car and the city share not only a common environment but similar fates, different only in the time it takes for the entire society to collide with an increasingly harsh environment?

The more I looked, the more I realized how other photos were making similar suggestions.  This image of a long line of abandoned vehicles on Lake Shore Drive could be right out of a science fiction movie.  Somewhere between Victorian ideas of “heat death” and a dystopian future of abandoned cities, this image once again positions the disabled vehicles on a line toward the still illuminated buildings in the background.  Nature is clearly winning, however, and it is easy to imagine the feeble street lamps winking out and the climactic pall becoming ever more deadly, smothering everything at last.

The movie can’t dwell on panoramic shots, however.  We have to move in closer to get the real feel of decline and death.  This image of snow drifted into a bus does that very well.  We can imagine people once filing in, sitting, standing, and jostling as the driver navigated through traffic, and yet we can see only cold, inert abandonment.  Returning to nature, but not for organic regeneration, this is a scene of icy metal, useless equipment, brittle decay.  The door stands open, but no one wandering through would stay.  The snow is like desert sand, and this place has become a ruin.

Life would continue somehow, of course, but Beware the Prong People.  This image of a rescuer on a snowmobile will have brought relief to those trapped in the blizzard, but it can double as an image of a predatory nomads.  Morlocks on ice, Mad Max in the snow, whatever the allusion, the yellowish miasma of snow, fog, glare, and swirling winds suggests a hideous world where cyborg killers can prey on those already weakened by the unending storm.

Surely, however, it can’t get that bad.

If Blade Runner had been shot in Chicago in the winter, it could have looked like this.  But don’t feel too sorry for her.  She’s got her goggles and her Bud Light, and one person’s blizzard is another’s party. This could be a study in individual improvisation or in gradual cultural adaptation to a steadily deteriorating climate, but it doesn’t have to be so bad.  Her stylish insouciance in the face of the storm is charming, and one is reminded that the young often don’t know enough to cynical, which benefits us all.

A blizzard in Chicago is not a catastrophe, nor is it a disaster, not on the usual scale of things, anyway.  It is a disruption that can have unfortunate consequence in the individual case, but generally people deal with it and often are better for it.  Even so, the imagery is part of a larger archive of public art, and the artistic insinuations may be worth considering.  It’s not often that we take the time to consider just how the present may already contain the seeds of futures we’d rather not see.

The point, howover, is not to become either morose or dismissive.  The lesson once again lies in the last photo: The future might not be worse or better than the present, but simply different.  That might be the most disturbing thought of all.

First photograph by Henry C. Webster, Chicago.  Additional photographs by  E. Jason Wambsgans (2 & 3) and Brian Cassella (4 &5) for the Chicago Tribune.

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