The image below is a not very good photograph of a tar ball on the beach at Dauphin Island, Alabama.  Despite the many more dramatic shots of  the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, this low-grade photo of a mundane object might be the better image of things to come.

Tar balls from this big spill will be washing up for years, but that’s only part of the story.  What I envision is that the beaches will be cleaned and booms strategically placed and signs put up for the kids–“playing with the tar balls may be hazardous to your health”–and generally the Gulf will get back to normal.  That is, to a new normal that is a somewhat degraded version of what was there before.  Boats will still launch for both commercial and sport fishing, although now they will be working more tightly zoned catch basins (or not, and risk the fines that will be part of loosely enforced regulations).  The oil companies will continue to place drilling platforms throughout the Gulf, although now with two blowout preventers instead of one.  The damage suits and insurance claims will keep a legion of white collar workers driving to work in cars having everything but good gas mileage, and life will go on.

This new normal is already evident in photos of vacationers and clean-up crews on the same beach.  What was the couple on the blanket supposed to do, cancel their plane reservations?  This continuity is hardly limited to the beach: New Orleans is still struggling to recover from the Katrina disaster, but, hey, the Saints won the Super Bowl, and so the city puts on a good face while quietly adjusting to a smaller population and neighborhoods still a long way from recovery.

One reason I fear for my country is that there seems to be so little commitment to replacing damaged infrastructure with state-of-the-art public works.  The stimulus money was largely used for patch jobs; that may be expected when you have to spend money quickly, but there was little talk of what might have been: a grand program of civic renewal.  So much of the US currently is just being maintained–and now vast swaths of the suburbs have to be added to that list as they, too, are aging.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal wasn’t used to return the country to 1928.   After World War II, the Marshall plan wasn’t used to recreate the Europe of 1939.   The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 didn’t merely repave existing roads but went on to create the Interstate Highway System.  In each case, the money was used to get back to better.  The same needs to be done in the US today.

The most obvious cases are in response to disasters such as the big oil spills, but that is only part of the challenge.  There also are the slow moving economic disasters that have been destroying the cities and towns in the industrial Midwest and elsewhere.  (Detroit wasn’t hit by a hurricane, but it’s in worse shape than New Orleans.)  The same holds even in relatively prosperous sections of the country: bridges, rail lines, subways, parks, pools, beaches, boulevards–there is so much in the US that could look a lot better.  Add to that the need for redesign and serious negotiation of complicated structural problems (say, such as supporting recreation, fishing, and extraction industries in the same ecosystem), and there is more than enough work to be done.

What is missing, however, is political will and a genuine commitment to the future.  Both deficits can be traced to the Republican hegemony since Ronald Reagan’s presidency.  Reagan rebranded government as the problem while proclaiming that the marketplace would provide nothing but solutions, and now several generations have become habituated to the degraded environments that are the result of that ideology.

And so here we go again.  The usual response will be to clean up the worst of the mess and then make do with a bit less than you had before.  But why settle for that?  I’d like to think that the time is coming when, instead of getting back to not very good, the country can get back to better.

Photograph from The Huntington Post.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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One of the standard academic criticisms of photojournalism is that it “aestheticizes” its subject.  Catastrophes and suffering are not only documented but transformed into beautiful images, and any reaction to those images can’t avoid being compromised by the pleasure of viewing them.  Instead of poverty and the political disaster behind it, we are shown an artistic portrait of a mother and child.  Instead of the brutality of violence and the moral ugliness behind it, we are shown victims whose bodies are still beautiful.  More generally, by continually framing the world for aesthetic appreciation–each image internally balanced, formally appealing, sensually evocative–photography remakes the world into a picture.  That sense of the world provides continual reassurance that the reality being depicted is well-ordered and that whatever is wrong isn’t really, deeply, irrevocably wrong.  In the same manner, the image world is one in which the spectator should remain just that–someone who only looks at what happens instead of trying to change it.

With that critical framework in mind, one would be expected to tear into this photograph of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning fifty miles offshore from Louisiana.

The oil platform exploded last week and is continuing to pour 42,000 gallons of oil a day into the Gulf.  Yet another environmental disaster that can be traced back to the US oil habit, the likely consequences and costs are all too apparent.  As still more nonrenewable resources go up in smoke and pollute the seas it is easy to launch into denunciation of America’s addiction, capitalism’s amorality, and modernity’s hubris.  That and more is needed to demand better engineering, regulation, and accountability as well as the technological, economic, and cultural development to get beyond the Age of Oil.

Likewise, the image could be faulted for being part of the problem.  It minimizes the spill: making it seem small, distant, a single pillar of smoke almost like a bonfire; worse yet, it looks like a natural disaster rather than one caused by a giant machine owned by a major corporation.  And above all it makes the spill seem to be part of the beauty of nature.  The smoke billows upward to become another cloud while sky and sea spread out serenely around it.  Not to worry, it says: this small disruption is part of a much larger harmony, and in nature’s time all will be peaceful again, so all you need to is marvel at nature’s beauty.

Even if that is how the image affects many people, I think it also can evoke a different way of seeing.  Disaster coverage typically relies on dramatic images, and all photographers strive to get close to the action, but that intensified exposure can carry another illusion: the belief that the human being is naturally at the center of things, and not only in political matters but in regard to the behavior of the planet.  I am not about to suggest that humans don’t increase global warming, but I am going to suggest that comprehensive change might come from stepping back rather than plunging into the inferno.

Of the many images of the recent volcanic activity in Iceland, I found this one profoundly beautiful–and all the more politically valuable for that.  Instead of the overheated accounts of the economic disaster befalling the airline industry, here the obviously explosive force of the volcano is both exposed and yet minimized, put back into wider and more expansive sense of scale.   Because of the airline shutdown many small businesses were hurt, many lives were disrupted, and billions of Euros lost, and that should all get its due recognition, but it the midst of the economic drama it became easy to forget that we always live within nature.  Not just when something blows, but always.  And nature is very big.

By letting this photograph work, the hubbub of coverage is replaced by a sense of awe–and not at the volcano, but at how a volcano can be a small thing.  Although the eruption looks like a solar flare it also is a tiny part of one planet, which is a minute part of the cosmos.  For all the problems caused by the ash, the economic event was a tempest in a teapot.  For all the talk–including my own–about how humans are going to destroy the planet, humans are not going to destroy the planet.  We pride ourselves perversely on being able to do so, and we are able to make a serious mess of things, but the planet will thrive long after we are gone.

In fact, just as there is need to more beyond current energy sources, so is there need to change the way we see if we are to get there.  The aesthetic appeal in these photographs is a resource for seeing anew.  Their beauty offers a kind of humility: the acceptance of our smallness and our finitude.  We should conserve and otherwise work toward more sustainable societies not because we can control nature and are so powerful that we can change the climate, but because we are such a small part of the universe and here for only a sliver of time.

The beauty in the photographic image can distract and displace, but it also can be a source of wisdom.  This explosion, that eruption: each is a small part of a much larger harmony, and in nature’s time all will be peaceful again.  For precisely that reason, human beings should strive to preserve the earth that will outlast them, and to create societies that can work in concert with nature rather than in the pursuit of dominion.  To that end, beauty is a form of moral truth.

Photographs by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press, Halldor Kolbeins/AFP-Getty Images, and Lucas Jackson/Reuters. The third photograph is of rocks  reflected in a lake that has been muddied by volcanic ash from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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As much as I’m committed to progressive photojournalism, I have to like this cover from the Onion:

The nice touch of imitating the New York Times Sunday Magazine only gilds the lily, as the photographic convention being lampooned is used everywhere: glossy magazines, newspaper ads, direct mail, web sites, billboards, photography books, TV documentary trailers, and more.  You can donate or you can turn the page, but you can’t avoid seeing the picture.

There actually is a continuing debate among human rights advocates and cultural critics about such rhetorical appeals, and the Onion cover neatly summarizes a number of key arguments.  First, the problem of human deprivation is given a human face, but at the cost of reinforcing damaging stereotypes.  The poor (and the Third World) are portrayed as essentially dark, passive, weak, simple, and dependent (need I add that images of want usually are of women and children, and often female children?).  Second, analysis has been replaced by the direct emotional impact of the visual image, and reasoned commitment by a sentimental appeal.  You are asked to help an individual child who seems so close that you could pick him up and hold him, although the money will in fact go through many hands and may make no difference whatsoever in his life.  Third, the poster child’s innocence and obvious dependency dissociates charity from any serious attention to structural change, an inattention that often excuses how the US and other affluent nations are also among the causes of the problem.  Fourth, the magazine’s tony production values suggest that there is money to be made off of human misery, and even the photographers’ mixed motives are exposed–indeed, are the point of the parody.  Fifth, the enduring contrast between deprivation and the affluent world of the magazine audience is all too obvious: $5 per day is not going to set anyone back on this side of the street, and yet mere charity is all that is imaginable, not serious redistribution.  Finally (for now, anyway), the audience may experience the perverse pleasure of indulging in feelings of pity about the suffering of others while giving their middle class conscience an easy out.  Whether I donated or not, I gave at the magazine, so I can feel sorry for the poor and good about myself–and turn the page.

Actually, there are additional criticisms, and all of them can (and have been) developed in great detail.  So why does the debate continue?  There will be many reasons, but one is inescapable: the images work.  Despite having become highly conventional, images of needy children open purse strings.  Furthermore, if the appeal is not effective, no one else is likely to step in and make up the difference.   So, damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and most advocates conclude it is better to do than to do nothing.

Other options remain, however, especially for photographers looking for another angle on a problem.  Instead of the exceedingly conventional character of the typical humanitarian image, one might want to ponder this photograph:

Of all the images of the Haitian disaster, I find this one to be surprisingly eloquent.  And it shouldn’t be: I shows no people, only property, and instead of the close-up that might grab one personally, we have the distant and distancing impersonal perspective of an aerial view.  Nor is it an action shot, and there are no dramatic special effects such as smoke and fire.  One might think the most likely reaction is simply, “well, at least it’s over, and although there is a lot of damage, it’s only property damage, not lives lost.”

That’s not what I see or feel when caught in this photograph.  Somehow it reveals the massive dislocation that remains after a catastrophe–the profound wreckage, disorder, waste, and raw mess that remains.  It also reveals that disaster has its own full weight of inertia.  Nothing that has been crushed together in that picture can be pulled apart and moved back or out of the way, much less restored to what it was, without labor, effort, work, and much more of the same, just to get back to even.   And imagining it being sorted out–or, more likely, bulldozed–starts one thinking about how it got there, and about what ought to be put back and what ought to be built anew but differently.  The photo reveals the enormous forces that were involved, and requires that one imagine what the city should be.  In short, it demands more than is required to give five bucks to a child (or a photographer).  And if people aren’t evident, neither are the denigrating associations that pull people down.

Communication depends on conventions of representation, but it can become trapped in them.  As much as humanitarians rightly insist on the value of the individual person, there may nonetheless be times when we don’t need to see another face.  Given the scale of the humanitarian disasters now and to come, more thought might be given to how even things can speak.

Onion Magazine cover from issue 45-45, May 2, 2009; photograph from Chile by Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press.

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There are now thousands of photographs of the disaster in Haiti available at the major online providers.  The New York Times is even placing their slides in categories such as ruins, crime, aid, prayers, a return to normalcy. OK, so the last one might seem a bit premature, but how much devastation can anyone take?  I find myself backing away from the media’s furious concentration on the collective wreckage, and perhaps that is why I was drawn to this photograph.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with Haiti.  Nothing is collapsed or broken, and there is no blood, no open wounds or stumps instead of hands or feet, no burning bodies.  The photo itself is banal: crowded, cropped, with the only identifiable person slumped in some kind of torpor, all in some vaguely institutional hallway–the image is too familiar in one sense and yet still not adequately informative.  No wonder that it was tucked away in a slide show on the New York region.

But then you read the caption: “Alex Alexis collapsed when he learned that his wife and three children had died in the earthquake in Haiti.” His wife and three children.  Dead.  Now it is a different photograph, and informative: We are reminded that Haiti is not only a place but also the epicenter of a diasporic community.  The catastrophe is being measured not only in the damage done at the original scene but also by the long strands of anxiety, pain, and desolation defining the losses felt by loved ones around the globe.  And the coverage of the island’s troubles is revealed to contain a provisional quality, as if everything is somehow already tending back towards recovery.  But there is no way this loss can ever be restored.

And that is why the decor troubles me.  Even with its bland hues and the metal display case for the bureaucratic pamphlets, it still appears affluent, secure, and safe in contrast to the mess on the ground in Haiti.  It reminds me that this is not only a world where many rush to aid those in need, but also a world where vast disparities in wealth are taken for granted.  And why is the husband in New York if his wife and three kids are in Haiti?  In this individual case the reasons could be purely personal or accidental–an estrangement, a business trip, whatever. The likely story, however, is that he, like many others, is separated from his family in order to support them.

In The Civil Contract of Photography, Ariella Azoulay identifies “threshold catastrophes”–situations where a community becomes trapped in chronic misery that is never allowed to become either completely genocidal or adequately alleviated.  Palestine is one example, and Haiti may well be another.  The catastrophe caused by the earthquake widens as its circle of suffering expands outward, but the fact remains that the world knows how to respond to spectacular events such as a natural disaster.   What also is needed is to widen the understanding of catastrophe to include the insidious relationships and multiple failures that perpetuate the condition of poverty and other continuous political disasters.

Widening one’s understanding of catastrophe means looking beyond high-impact mobilization to see how many of the same agencies are complicit in keeping people at the threshold of destruction.  It also means admitting how victims can be complicit in their own oppression, and how personal efforts to escape–say, to a good job in New York–are not going to be enough for systemic change.  These are not easy truths, but they can point toward a common recognition that the catastrophe–any catastrophe–is happening here as well as there.

Photograph by Julie Glassberg/The New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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When raging wildfires threaten a city, the imagery quickly acquires an allegorical tone.   Apocalyptic horizons suggest that much larger catastrophe looms, and civilization itself can seem exposed, unprepared, unprotected. At that moment, the public art of photojournalism becomes capable of both revealing vulnerability and meeting the need for reassurance.  Like this:

As fires engulf one side of Athens, Greece, the Parthenon arises above the city in magnificent splendor.  Marble bathed in electric light, the monument anchors the image.  One could almost image a cosmic battle between firestorm and enlightenment.  Culture rises up against Nature, a glorious past against a chaotic future, continuity against conflagration.

In between lies the city.  Although hundreds of thousands of people will live and work there, it is subordinated between the monument in the foreground and the ring of fire on the horizon.  Set in a natural crater, in the middle distance, with small lights scattered across it as if they could wink on and off, the city seems to lack both significance and power.  Actually a dynamic achievement greater than any monument or natural event, here its fate seems poised between two alternatives, one of which is no longer possible while the other is terrifying.  It becomes merely a firebreak between past and future, between a lost world and the task of staving off disaster.

You may have to look at the image for awhile to notice the city at all.  The monument dominates the scene, and there is reason to be suspicious of its prominence. Is Athens only the conservator of the Golden Age of Greece (and, according to the standard narrative, the West)?  Are we to be reassured that the shrine still stands, despite whatever havoc is being experienced by ordinary people whose houses are in the fire zone?  If the photograph reveals a deep tension between civilization and catastrophe, it also may be helping some return to a false sense of security.

One might ask, isn’t that what monuments are supposed to do?  Yes, but then there is this image:

I won’t dote on this unusual shot of the Washington Monument, but it is a remarkable example of how the conventional view–and experience–of a public work can be altered by a change in angle and lighting.  Instead of the white tower rising in sublime simplicity amidst the capitol city, we see what could be ancient ruin.  Stragglers wander about the obelisk on a dark plain under a threatening sky.  We could be on a moor near Stonehenge as pilgrims pass by on the way to  another destination.  The pennants in the background could be from a temporary fair in some dark age yet to come.  Again, the future seems much less promising than the past.  The difference here is that, instead of using the monument to anchor collective experience against disruption, now the public icon has been turned against that conventional experience.  Instead of security, the monument anchors a sense of foreboding about the national project.

Two monuments, two visions.  The photographs in each case contain no news, but they do provide allegories of collective life.

Photographs by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images and Jewel Samad/AFP-Getty.  For other NCN posts on wildfire images, go here, here, and here.

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By guest correspondent Nathan Atkinson

When catastrophe strikes we can always count on photographers to offer up images of citizens helping their fellows in times of need.  These images usually focus on the drama of rescue amid dangerous circumstances. Firefighters work to save property and lives, police officers maintain order on behalf of the helpless, and EMTS rush to aid the sick and the injured.  The camera follows dutifully, recording their efforts for a public concerned, curious, or otherwise compelled to look.  What’s a disaster good for if it doesn’t bring out the best in our best?

But what of those smaller, one might even say trivial acts of assistance of the sort depicted in this picture?

This photo represents the community that emerges from the mundane aftermath of tragedy. An anonymous commuter dealing with the disruption caused by the June 22 Metro accident struggles to board a train.  A rider, already on board, holds the door so that another might enter—a telling courtesy given that our usual stance on public transportation is one of unenlightened self-interest.

In holding the door this woman—the hand looks female though the figure is invisible behind the equally anonymous office-casual male in the foreground—gives up a bit of her comfort for a stranger she recognizes as a resident of a community brought together by the inconveniences that follow inevitably from catastrophe. It translates the bodily pains and horrors we extrapolate from the collision photos into the harmless bisection here.

We feel guilty when angered by the minor inconveniences of catastrophe.  The profound suffering of the catastrophe’s immediate victims makes our frustration with a missed appointment seem the height of selfishness.  The paper held by the same hand holding the door reminds us to feel this guilt, to forfeit self-pity and our personal comfort to make room for empathy.

This picture shows us that these minor inconveniences provide the opportunity to recognize our membership in a public in trivial acts, and in the comings and goings of civic life.  We rarely think of ourselves as part of a community when riding public transit. We react to the limited personal space by retreating into our audio players, cell phones, newspapers, ourselves.

The minor inconvenience to which the door-holder exposes herself echoes the small claim on our time that disaster coverage makes, our compulsion to read the paper—a compulsion the door holder shares. Her discomfort echoes moreover the discomfort we feel when we take the time to look at images of disaster.  This discomfort, in turn, functions as a visceral reminder of our membership in a community. Reading the paper, looking at photos, it’s the least we can do.

Photograph by Justin Maxon/New York Times.  Nathan Atkinson is a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University.  He is currently completing a dissertation on the visual rhetoric of atomic testing at the beginning of the Cold War.  Nate can be contacted at natkisno@andrew.cmu.edu.

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Sometime during the day I picked up the news that an Air France airliner had disappeared in the mid-Atlantic. Dropping from 35,0000 feet, hope for a heroic water landing seemed remote. As I checked periodically, the lack of news became increasingly ominous. Along with that, another form of unease began to make itself felt. Where was the plane–or at least the wreckage? Had it completely disappeared without a trace? Would there be nothing to mark the loss? No twisted fuselage, or crumpled wing–of course not, they sink–but not even objects floating on the water? A pillow, a suitcase, something, anything that could provide a sense of personal connection, of continuity between before and after, some cushion against complete annihilation?

If such a photograph can be taken, I’m sure it will be circulated widely. Until then, the press is having to make do with images of officials, machines, maps, and relatives or friends facing the news. This one is the best so far:

The caption at the New York Times says that “a woman . . . reacted while being taken to a private room at Tom Jobim Airport in Rio de Janeiro.” That doesn’t tell you much, and in fact the photograph doesn’t tell you much. Without the context of the disaster and the information and emotional cuing provided by the caption, the photo could be completely banal. They could be tourists on a bus.

My first reaction was that this photo, like all the initial photos, were merely place holders–images temporarily standing in for the images of the crash that were not available. The disaster could not yet be seen–no one even knew where the plane went down–but it was too disquieting to allow a complete absence of images. That absence would have been an apt representation of the gaping loss created by a catastrophic disappearance, but who wants that?

As I let the photo assert its own quiet presence, however, something happened. It seems to know how difficult it is to comprehend the event of which it is a small part. The darkness dominating the interior space suggests how all are enveloped in ignorance and foreboding. The hazy bright space (water and sky?) outside suggests the vast emptiness into which the plane has vanished. The photo provides a portrait of not knowing, of not being able to see what really matters.

Like the passengers on Flight 447 before them, the two people in this photograph don’t know what is out there. They can’t see the disaster that is engulfing them. Nor can we.

Photograph by Ricardo Moraes/Associated Press.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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At least since Nathanael West, artists have turned to California for periodic images of an American apocalypse. This photograph fits nicely into that category.

Cars stream along a Southern California highway as wildfires rage across the mountains. The fires seem all-consuming, yet beneath that terrible horizon motorists can still creep along in semi-darkness. Indeed, lights have to be turned on in the valley despite the radiant holocaust above. This fusion of fire and darkness seems a premonition of hell, perhaps the level reserved for those who are complacent amidst pending disaster.

The New York Times caption said that the traffic included residents fleeing their homes in the hills. The photo contains a larger story as well. Intensive automotive use is not the direct cause of the wildfires’ destructiveness, but it is a key part of a larger pattern of land use, resource consumption, and social organization that is the reason the fires burn so extensively and cause so much damage. Likewise, the combination of business-as-usual behavior on the highway (a good thing in itself, of course) and the emotional tone of the twilight exodus captures an attitude of normalcy-by-denial while suggesting its larger cost. That attitude will result in insurance claims being filed, homes rebuilt, and another turn of the wheel.

Perhaps one of the symptoms of a catastrophic culture is that people take more pride in surviving disaster than in preventing it. Nothing to brag about, of course, but calm, resolute determination to carry on during the worst of it and then rebuild. If a bridge collapses as happened in Minneapolis, then build a new and bigger bridge rather than reassess the mixture of automotive and light rail transportation. If the levees break as in New Orleans, rebuild the city right where it was rather than move it inland while improving on past inequities. If the financial markets collapse, shore up the banks rather than jettison the ideology that destroys public goods to fuel private greed.

Bearing up and rebuilding makes sense during a war, but the major economic and environmental damage of the 21st century has been self-inflicted. Take another look at the photograph. The End Time may not be here, but you may be looking at the last days of twentieth-century America.

Photograph by Dan Steinberg/Associated Press.

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