A recent New York Times story featured this photograph of a woman walking toward a yak herd in northern Afghanistan.  The photo was taken in August.

She lives in the Wakhan Corridor, a region beyond the Hindu Kush mountain range that has been remote enough to usually escape the ravages of war.  It doesn’t seem hard to see why.  Sans oil or accessible mineral deposits, the combination of geography and climate should suffice to maintain relative isolation.  That was the point of the story and certainly of the photograph: some modernization is underway, but the people there are likely to continue to live largely as they have, that is, in pastoral cultures bound by the simple routines and set traditions that equip them to survive in a harsh natural environment.

The woman in the photograph exemplifies this portrait.  She is layered in the colorful clothing assumed to be the mark of ethnic authenticity, and if she looks apprehensive, it has more to do with the intrusion of the photographer than any hesitation regarding the challenges of separating her yak from the herd spread across the frozen landscape.  She trudges out into the cold dutifully, as she really has little choice: the yak has to be milked, and her family needs the milk, and what else is there to do anyway?  This is not her world from the inside, of course, but the image draws on a long history of travel photography carrying these assumptions.  The bottom line is that she may be doing well enough–look closely at her clothing, for example–but that few readers of the Times would want to change places with her.  Yak milk in a yurt on a frozen plateau is one thing, and a latte in an urban coffee shop is quite another.

If those were the only two options, the world might be a pretty good place.  But there can be worse environments than those created by the weather.  The market economy, for example, particularly when people have to depend, not on their animals, but on predatory mortgage companies.  This woman was featured in another Times story on the same day.  She is standing before her house in Colorado.  This could be a picture of the American Dream: a single women can own her own house, complete with a terrific view of the Western sky.  You can sense that’s not the case, however, as her rueful expression is reinforced by the dark tonality of land and clouds.  The weather is warm enough that she can be sleeveless, but the scene nonetheless feels cold and ominous.

And rightly so: she is having to defend herself against foreclosure by Deutsche Bank, which, after a mortgage company changed her locks without cause and then encouraged her to skip a payment while restitution was arranged, has moved to seize the house on grounds of non-payment.  Having done nothing wrong, she now is having to incur legal fees just to hold on to the home and the equity that was rightfully hers.  And I’ll bet that her sense of security and social trust is not doing so well, either.   Maybe having your own yurt wouldn’t be so bad after all.

Photographs by Gilles Sabrie and Kevin Moloney for The New York Times.

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The demonstrations in France are getting a fair amount of play at the moment, not least because street spectacles provide more dramatic photographs than mortgage foreclosure practices or candidate debates.  Amidst the tear gas, rioting youth, and phalanxes of police, this photo caught my eye.

The large reproduction of the iconic image of Che Guevara surely is the point of the photo: otherwise we are looking at someone’s back, a flare in daylight, and a jumbled background of smoke and signage.  The man wearing the icon is a worker with the Solidaires union, which was part of the protest against pension reform.  The French government has proposed raising the retirement age to 62, and in response hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have been taking to the streets.  The government estimate for yesterday was 800,000 demonstrators.  That’s right: 800,000, to fight raising the age to 62.  Such numbers do not compute in the US.

And wait a minute. . . . Che, a symbol of the welfare state?  Isn’t this another example of how the French left is out of touch, living in a fantasy world?  Well, that’s one interpretation, but it can’t hold if it is specific to France.

This photo is from Reykjavik, Iceland.  The issue isn’t pension reform per se, but rather housing and other issues believed to be examples of the government’s inadequate response to the economic crisis that began with the financial meltdown in 2008.  So, much the same as above, people are taking to the streets to demand government action on behalf of social democracy.  So it is that young people can be demonstrating for pension plans, and that Che can be a symbol of progressive response to the global recession caused by financial mismanagement abetted by neoliberal economic policies.

If you type “Che” into Google Image, you’ll quickly see that this icon is already an object of conservative parody and invective, and the examples above certainly are fair game in that regard.  That’s not all that can be said, however.  For one, they are examples of how iconic images are used in ways that go well beyond their original context, and how that can include become a visual relay on behalf of both specific solidarities and public culture generally.  In photographing the iconic photograph, the press is reporting on one of its own visual processes for creating a public world, and here that world is one in which workers are united across national borders.

That’s the good news.  There also is this: the transformation of Che from a socialist revolutionary into a symbol of the European social contract may be one indication of just how far the Western democracies have been pushed to the right.  I’ve never been a fan of faux revolutionaries, and the Che icon certainly played to that, but it’s sad to think that revolution on behalf of economic justice has come down to holding the line on a pension plan.  Pensions are very important, of course, but there is so much more that needs to be done.  A post-revolutionary society may be not only more realistic but also a step forward on the march of progress, but only if governments accept that their job is to protect ordinary people from the ravages of a market economy.  Surely that standard is not being met when the people have to beg government to not sell them out.

Photographs by Pascal Rossignol/Reuters and Thorvaldur Kristmundsson/ZUMApress.com.

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Sometimes a feel-good story does more than merely make you feel good.  Take, for example, the celebrations in Chile at the rescue of the miners who had been trapped underground for two months.  There is much to like in this story: dedicated, skilled rescuers, a government that capably managed help brought in from around the world, families and friends who maintained long vigils of support for those trapped below, and a perfect ending.  Just consider how much could have gone wrong, and you can begin the understand the elation of those who had been waiting for their loved ones’ safe return.

Of the many photographs from the rescue, I thought this one captured the powerful emotional current running through the story.  The caption read, “Relatives of miner Dario Segovia react as watching Segovia on a TV screen during his rescue operation at the camp outside the San Jose mine near Copiapo, Chile, Wednesday Oct. 13, 2010.”  I’ll bet I know which one is the mother, but that doesn’t really matter.  They all are experiencing the incredible release that comes from seeing their beloved returned to life among them.  Biological functioning had never ceased, but life had been suspended–the life that comes from living together, having shared histories, habits, meals, journeys, arguments, laughs, successes, and failures–everything that makes up the richness of a common world bound by affection.

I like the photo because it captures not only the love that usually lies beneath the surface of ordinary life,  but also the messiness that is always there.  The photo itself is messy, with no sure center but for that odd black hat with the TV logo, and the scene itself is more so: people jumbled together amidst ID cards, jewelry, flags, cameras, both laughing and crying, being in the moment and photographing it–everything is happening at once.

The scene also can remind us what photography is about.  The people in the picture are caught between visual technologies: being photographed while watching TV that is being photographed.  Despite all the media apparatus, however, their emotions and their lives are media’s reason for being.  They deserve the help that was provided by the government, which came in part because they always had the leverage of the public media, and their being presented to us both continues and extends those webs of support.  We, in turn, in resonating to their joy, have the opportunity to live in a richer world, one we share with them and in which people can care, not only for loved ones but for strangers.

And speaking of a better world, the love evident in this photograph gives special emphasis to another dimension of the rescue.  It’s kind of a funny story, you might say.  As the New York Times reported, “Defying grim predictions about how they would fare after two months trapped underground, many of the Chilean miners came bounding out of their rescue capsule on Wednesday as pictures of energy and health.”  And how did that happen?  “The miners’ apparent robustness was testimony to the rescue diet threaded down to them through the tiny borehole that reached them on Aug. 22, but also to the way they organized themselves to keep their environment clean, find water and get exercise.  Another factor was the excellent medical care they received from Chilean doctors.”

In short, they had good food, a clean environment, a well-organized routine of work and other activity, and excellent medical care.  With that, you can live in a hole deep in the earth and come out looking fine.  And now look around you, right here on the surface.  How many people have those “advantages”?  For all the technical wizardry employed to lift the men to the surface, the key to their survival while entombed was to live exactly as one ought to live anywhere.  And so the story provides much more than a warm glow: it’s a story not of heroism, but of good sense, and it’s not a miracle, but what happens much of the time when people are organized so that they can have the basics needed for a good life.

I feel good for the miners, but I grieve for all those who still need to be rescued.

Photograph by Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press.

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It wasn’t but a few weeks ago when the ballyhoo in the US was that the congressional elections this fall were going to be determined by the economy.  Unless the rate of recovery improved, and particularly with regard to the critical variable of unemployment, the Democratic majority was sure to be doomed.  Such conventional wisdom can’t be entirely mistaken, because discontent can drive people to vote for change, but now that the election is approaching the tea leaves are turning a bit muddy.  One reason, of course, is that the airwaves are full of ads about everything but economic policy.  Such reticence is not surprising: the Democrats don’t have a lot to crow about–it’s hard to get excited about saying that things could have been worse–and the Republicans have the even bigger problem of wanting to restore the very policies that created the disaster in the first place.  The result is that we are treated to discussions of Sharia law, the right to carry a concealed weapon while you are drinking in a bar, and whether Social Security is constitutional.  (As for the latter, no, that’s why you have slaves.)

I don’t want to disregard the more obvious explanations for the continuing dysfunction in American public discourse today, but let me suggest another, overlapping reason for the difficulty that the US seems to have when it comes to thinking about the economy.  That reason, as I’ve suggested before, is that too many people don’t think of themselves as workers and of workers as labor, and their distorted conception of themselves is reinforced daily by the images of work that do circulate.  Stated otherwise, neoliberal fantasies about the economy now dominate not only government policy but also the conventions of representation that we rely on to think about the economy.

The photograph above is a convenient example of what I have in mind.  This week the Dow Jones climbed back above 11,000-good news, right? Well, yes, except that it did so after the announcement that 95,000 jobs were lost in September.  This troubling relationship between corporate profits and unemployment is captured neatly in the photograph of Japanese white-collar workers seen through a scrim of stock market data.  On the one hand, the photo seems to depict that labor and stock prices are indivisible parts of the same economic whole.  For there to be profits, there have to be workers; for there to be workers, there have to be profits.  On the other hand, the photo could also reveal how labor and finance are not coordinate, and how the electronic data flows of the stock market are obscuring, displacing, literally writing over the body of labor.  Despite the many workers massed to cross the street, they are becoming invisible beneath the numbers, spread sheets, and abstractions that have become, not merely representations of productive work, but their own reality.

There will always be work, of course; the question is whether it will be seen, recognized, and rewarded.  That’s why I like this photo.

These are workers–and perhaps one customer–at a German Octoberfest.  Needless to say, the photo is a bit different from the typical images of happy waitresses serving tall steins to happy customers.  Here, the waitresses are on break–a couple of smokes, a phone call, a text message.  These last details are informative: although still a part of the global data sphere, the ratio of bodies to electronic display has been reversed.  This is a place of actual work.  Another reason we know that is because there is nothing romanticized about it.  Unlike the smiling faces and effortless activity seen in ads, here we understand that working people can be bored, tired, and having to manage the rest of their lives around the edges of their work, which is tightly scheduled and often includes having to deal with people, like the kid on the left, who are not exactly at their best.

And even if this photograph shows labor, the workers are still back stage, caught in an unguarded moment that might not be subject to company surveillance and proprietary control.  In the US, anyway, we’re not accustomed to looking at work in public, and not at all comfortable–the word should be “competent”–at talking about labor.  Until workers can have their rightful place in the pictures that animate public discussion, the results on the ground are going to continue to be grim.

Photographs by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters and Matthias Schrader/Associated Press.

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Last Wednesday the New York Times and ran this this photograph of demonstrators filling a street in the Paris during a one-day national strike organized by the French labor unions.

The photo was front page above the fold but not on the web site at mid-morning (if it had ever been there).  For the most part, visual coverage of the strike at the Times and elsewhere focused on the disruption experienced by commuters–in short, on its effect on everyday activity rather than its purpose of affecting national policy.  (The unions were protesting a government proposal to raise the retirement ages from 60 to 62 for the minimal pension and from 65 to 67 for a full pension.)  Subsequently, coverage of any sort has vaporized, as if the controversy in France had lasted only a day and had no relevance in the US anyway.

I’m not going to discuss the ins and outs of social democracy in France, because this photograph exposes something far more fundamental: the invisibility of labor in the United States.  To put it bluntly, to imagine a photograph like this being taken in the US, you might as well be in an alternate universe.

Estimates of the turnout in France range from 1.12 million to 2.5 million people.  That is the equivalent of a turnout of roughly 5 million to 11.5 million in the US.  Can you imagine what would have to happen to provoke that kind of response across America?  Certainly not the rollback of the Social Security retirement age, which recently was pushed back from 65 to 67 with about as much discussion as you would have when changing the clocks to Daylight Savings Time.

In this photograph, however, the massed response to another neoliberal assault the quality of life of ordinary citizens seems entirely to be expected.  Although the demonstration stretches into the vanishing point of the picture, as if it were endless, the woman looking down on the crowd isn’t in any way put out of joint by its presence–she might as well be stepping outside to check the weather on a balmy day.  And although the woman, like the viewer, is set above the fray by being positioned on the balcony, that viewpoint is also connected with the demonstration by the parallel lines of the balcony and street and by the colors of the red flowers above and orange insignia below.  Instead of setting individuals and mass movements at odds with one another, here they are coordinate.  Indeed, one can imagine the demonstrators being advocates for the woman, who may well be in her 60s.

That can be imagined, that is, as long as the photograph is about France.  Its presence in a US newspaper makes it an oddity or an allegory.  It is an oddity because one has to cross the Atlantic to photograph a strong union movement.  It is an allegory because in the States it acquires a double significance: it both depicts the labor movement that exists in France and marks the empty space left by its demise in the US.

The image goes further still.  By looking at what is there, I realize how amidst the pervasive neoliberalism of US public life, not only the unions but labor itself has been rendered invisible.  In its place is a phantasmic world of derivatives, debt-to-GDP ratios, stock market indexes, and even unemployment statistics–but not labor–and a refashioning of everyday life through bar codes and on-line shopping supported by globalized production–but not labor.  Many people are still doing the work, of course, but the work and the people doing it are disappearing from public consciousness.

And when labor is no longer visible, capital is that much closer to becoming completely dominant.  The disappearance of all other values cannot be far behind.

Photograph by Christophe Ena/Associated Press.

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Credit: John Sherffius, Boulder Daily Camera.

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When I came across this photograph in the NYT yesterday I was stopped in my tracks. The story that it anchored concerned “the way we live now” in an era of debt, but all I could think was that this is a picture of the late modern ghost town.  A shopping mall without shoppers … or for that matter, without shops or shopkeepers.  Instead of sage brush and weeds we have rubberized plants, and while the store fronts are not boarded up it is a fair bet that the building has been locked down to keep vandals and scavengers away, but the scene nevertheless evokes the eerie, spectral presence of the now absent, bustling commerce that once filled these halls.

In the days following 9/11 we were told that it was our civic duty to consume in order to keep the economy on its feet; the now prolonged recession makes even this limited civic responsibility impossible for many to honor; and for others, well, as the Times reporter notes, “it just [feels] better to owe less money,” and so rather than to spend many citizen-consumers have resorted to saving, or paying down their debt.  It is hard to blame individuals for the same strategy being exercised by banks who severely limit the money they are willing to loan in a “risky” economy or corporations who refuse to invest or hire—or for that matter, the strategy being counseled by Republicans who think that the solution to our economic woes is to limit spending (including on such items as extended unemployment insurance) while extending the Bush tax cuts.  But nevertheless, the effect of such thrift on the economic recovery is palpable.

The question is, how do you give presence to an economic problem, particularly when it is animated, at least in part, by a psychology of risk?  The photograph above does a pretty good job as it visualizes the problem (or at least the effect) in chicken-and-eggs terms:  what comes first the shoppers or the shops?  What the picture makes most clear is not the old saw that a “penny saved is a penny earned,” but rather its counter, that one needs to recognize what is entailed by being “penny wise and pound foolish.” The members of Congress in particular should pay heed.

Photo Credit:  Brian Urich/New York Times.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the movie At First Sight, a story about a man, blind from the age of three, who recovers his sight. Because he had spent most of his life sightless his brain never learned how to translate the chemical and electronic impulses transmitted to it from his eyes in a meaningful fashion.  Like a child initially learning how to read has to figure out how to translate squiggles on a page into meaningful words and then sentences, the movie’s protagonist literally has to learn how to see: colors, shapes, textures, shadows, reflections … all the of the visual aspects of the world that sighted people take for granted, he had to learn, one dimension and one image at a time.  The most pertinent moment in the film occurred for me during a scene in which the now sighted man is walking around the streets of New York City with his girl friend, reveling in the cornucopia of images  available to him.  They come across a homeless person sleeping on a door stoop and he doesn’t quite know what to make out of it; his bewilderment is compounded when his girl friend fails to even see the person laying there.  When he points the homeless person out to her she admonishes him as if he were a child, “you’re not supposed to look at that.”  The scene is a poignant allegory of the the myriad ways in which we must learn to see, including the complex  network of social norms and conventions concerning what can and cannot (or should and should not) be seen.

I was reminded of this moment from the movie when I came across the above photograph in a NYT slideshow on November 27^th, the day after Thanksgiving  also known as “Black Friday.”  Cued by a number of symbolic markers, my first thought was that the camera was encouraging me to see seeming that was indecorous to look at: a homeless person—a barely recognizable individual sleeping in a public space, his face obscured and his body wrapped up in what appeared to be a grey and dirty blanket; surrounded by his few worldly goods, including the signature shopping cart, the only other person in the scene dutifully ignores him as if he isn’t there and shouldn’t be seen.  The awkwardness of the moment dissipated upon closer inspection, however, for there were things that didn’t make much sense, not least that we don’t typically see homeless people sleeping on the floor in grocery stores—after all, it’s not good for business.  And then I read the caption:  “Brian Garcia, 17, tried to nap on Friday at a Wal-Mart in Sugar Land, Tex., where he was first in line for a greatly discounted  plasma TV.”

It is possible that this photograph was intended as something of a visual irony, particularly when we consider that it was juxtaposed with other pictures in the same slideshow that implied something like an unrepentant, consumerist version of gluttony.  But there is a different and perhaps more important point to be made.  Stories and photographs about the frenzy of activity that took place in our stores and malls on Black Friday were ubiquitous across local and national media.  And for the most part what we were being invited to see was the world of commerce doing what it does.  Individual shoppers might be portrayed as going overboard in buying too much, or as being unduly cautious as they wait for “deep discounts” before they make their holiday purchases.  But in either case we were being encouraged to seeing consumers and businesses doing what they do.  What we didn’t see were those incapable of being consumer-citizens.  And most of all, we didn’t see the homeless.  To make the point take note of the fact that every year the week before Thanksgiving is National Hunger and Homeless Awareness Week.  This year that would have been November 15-21. If you rely on the major news outlets for your information—print or broadcast—you probably wouldn’t know that since, as far as I can tell, not a single national newspaper or network carried a story about it.  Not a one!  Apparently its not something we are supposed to see … or look at.

Photo Credit:  Michael Stravato/New York Times

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As the Thanksgiving holiday in the US approaches, preachers, public officials, teachers, counselors, and even advertisers will be encouraging everyone to give thanks for what we might otherwise take for granted.  Because this was not likely to have been a bountiful year for most people, the ordinary, unsung features of daily life are being elevated to the status of blessings (which they are).  One might consider what would happen if similar advice were given regarding the way we look at things.  The sentiment need not even be one of gratitude so much as simple curiosity, if we would but look at what we otherwise take for granted.

This photograph provides one example of what I have in mind.  It is basically a novelty shot: a wild turkey on the street in Buffalo, New York.  Even at Thanksgiving, one doesn’t see many wild turkeys, and they are not expected to appear in an urban, industrial setting, and what could it be doing there but–I can’t resist–crossing the road to get to the other side.  No more serious response seems called for: the turkey is a small, awkward figure, yet it can dominate a scene that is both dismal and distant.  This is not the time of year for a turkey to be walking into the city, but it seems safe enough, somewhat like an ordinary commuter trudging through urban isolation.  The image might as well be comic, if it is to be noticed at all.

What strikes me about the image, however, is everything other than the turkey.  Almost every part of the photo is focused on some part of what we ordinarily overlook: the electrical poles, lines, guy wires, and signage; the cracks in the pavement, crumbling curbs, and weeds breaking them down; the rusted rail line, the road bed, and rail cars; the industrial back lot of utility buildings, ventilation ducts, smoke stacks, and air conditioners and other rooftop machines; and, increasingly, the emptiness haunting industrial sites that have been abandoned or neglected or put to too little use for too long.

Seeing the world is something that everyone in the US now does through a camera, whether they know it or not, but not the camera that shows all.  Instead, most of the time we see the beautiful vistas and happy people of what might be called the retail side of life.  We habitually edit out the power lines in the tourist photo of a busy street or the weeds lurking in the news coverage, and few stop to consider how they rarely are shown the gritty reality of de-industrialization or the sad dispersions of people, possessions, and opportunities that accompany a declining standard of living.

Were people to really look at what is around them, they would still see much to be thankful for.  But they might see reasons to become alarmed as well.  To be truly thankful involves not only a feeling of gratitude, but also a resolution to preserve the good thing and pass it along to others.  If one looks closely, it may appear that Americans are overlooking a great deal, and that their inattention and lack of care for their cities, factories, and other infrastructure is a sign not of gratitude but rather of giving up.

Photograph by Brian Snyder/Reuters.

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