This photograph may be one of the more ordinary images in recent photojournalism, and all the more eloquent for that.

The caption stated that “A labourer rests near his makeshift tent home in a park” in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Attentive readers will have noticed the British spelling (and usage), and the image did come from an online slide show at The Guardian.  My guess is that American papers weren’t so quick to run the photo, but can you blame them?  There is nothing dramatic or otherwise notable anywhere in the frame.  The focus is diffused from the man in the foreground across the darkened, nondescript scene and then up into the spare stand of trees and the vague sky.  The area on the ground is littered with generic consumer items, while the background vista is a mess of random tree trunks, scrawny branches poking every which way, and brown leaves not yet scattered. The scene is utterly without visual interest, while nothing is happening–or likely to happen.

Attentive viewers may have noticed another dimension to the scene, however.  There are several tensions, subtle yet troubling, that can guide reflection.  First, there is more to the man, if you will look for it.  He is brooding it seems, an attitude that resonates with the long shadows from the late afternoon sun.  And that sunlight gilds his face and his hand: the face is taut with interior life, and the gesture and veins of his hand suggest strength and skill.  Together they may signify the dignity of labor, and so this photograph can channel the realism and progressive sentiments of genre painting.  He is not at work, however, or have enough of a job to afford shelter, and so the worker’s capable hands (and strong back) are immobilized.

Note also the contrast between his personal possessions and the unkept woodland.  His clothes are clean while laundry is draped on a clothesline, there is a symmetrical order to the campsite, and it looks as if a calendar and similar items are tacked to the tree trunk on the right.  What should be natural setting has taken on the look of domesticity, and what should be a temporary site–a campground, as if for a weekend getaway–is becoming the place where he may spend the winter.

So it is that the banality of the photograph is the vehicle for its documentary truth.  What we are seeing is a man settling into a “new normal.”  He is homeless, even if he is working he won’t have any job security, and his ability to cope, adapt, keep his shirt clean, and otherwise be ready to move up may do no more than keep him from slipping lower yet.

Photograph by Carlos Barria/Reuters.

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Reuters and MediaStorm have collaborated on a multimedia history of the current financial crisis.  The online project is entitled Times of Crisis.  In their own words, “The project has two parts – a short web documentary and an in-depth visual timeline. The latter contains hundreds of entries woven together into a visual stream of information to show how the crisis has touched lives everywhere.”

It’s a savvy project, and the interactive time line is a good example of how photoj0urnalism has become woven deeply into public communication.  The images are not the whole story, but they clearly provide resources for thought, association, and action.  The project also provides a case study in perspective: if you hang back and look at the thumbnails, you remain disengaged from a radically fragmented world; if you enter the individual panels and move from place to place, you begin to recognize both the many different injuries suffered around the globe and the deep continuities in need, anxiety, and adaptation.

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“Falling through the cracks” is a common expression for something being neglected, forgotten, or otherwise subject to errors of omission in organizational life.  The same can happen in journalism.  We might even consider how a “news crack” develops: a series of events in several areas of interest will lead to a succession of stories that seem to cover a lot of ground, but one result will be that a genuine subject of concern will be forgotten, not least because a similar concern has been taken up elsewhere.  Thus, the news might cover the recession, health care, the war in Afghanistan, a sex scandal (or two), the rising stock market, and the war again, and one might think that leading issues of the day are being reported much as they actually happen.  In fact, if the public is told that the economy is rebounding and more people likely to be covered by health care, then they could be excused, perhaps, for thinking that the major question remaining is whether we are going to “abandon” Afghanistan.  So it apparently seems to recent proponents of military escalation in that country (note for the younger reader: “escalation” is a word that was used a lot in the Vietnam War).

Let me suggest, as long as we are talking about abandonment, that something is missing.

This is one of the photographs from Kevin Bauman’s collection of 100 abandoned houses.  I didn’t choose it because it was more striking or sad or poignant or provocative than the others in the collection.  The house is one of many such homes–thousands upon thousands in Michigan, Florida, California, and all around the country.  We are still in the midst of the most damaging foreclosure crisis in US history, and the news still could get worse before it gets better.  In any case, it has been surreal in some areas: At one point the Chicago Tribune reported that the median home price in Detroit was $7500.  Now it has rebounded to a remarkable $15,000.  I guess it’s good news when houses once again cost more than the cheapest new car (maybe), but I’d say we still have a ways to go.

And then there is the house in the photograph.  Spectators often resonate to a genuine pathos in these images of abandonment.  We never knew who was there and it is obvious that there is no one to relate to now, and yet the structure seems haunted with the ghosts of forgotten lives.  Houses have stories, and they are full of stories. Each of us can remember some house–it need not even have been our own–where we were running through the doors, gazing out the windows, and gasping with delight or shock while experiencing the many twists and turns of family life.  in place of that, the boarded up house offers only a shabby mausoleum.

There also may be another, less familiar reason for feeling the sadness in this photograph.  America is the most thoroughly liberal nation–in the original, Lockean sense of liberalism that, to put it baldly, has “liberty” deeply entangled with “property.” What is less often recognized is that John Locke (and others) defined property not merely by possession but also according to use.  So it was, they claimed, that the original inhabitants of the Americas didn’t really own the land as they had done so little to maximize its productivity.  I wonder if the sense of failure that pervades images of desolate houses doesn’t tap into that subterranean current of ideology?  If a house–or apartment complex or office building or factory–is shuttered, it isn’t being used productively; and, to Americans, at least, it then follows somehow that the place is returning to the wild.  And if an empty building can suggest that nature is encroaching due to an absence of productive labor, one might sense that the economy and the entire social order–and, with that, the ground of liberty–is being eroded.

Curiously, the photographs of abandoned houses demonstrate that the property is still there, right in front of your eyes, in the sense that the thing to be possessed exists.  But that is not enough, it seems.  Instead, a sense of failure looms, and not merely the failure of someone to pay a mortgage.  Frankly, I think this odd sense of collective danger, despite being based on a dubious idea of rightful use, may be, well, useful.  The house is not just the record of an autonomous individual’s loss in a rational, albeit heartless marketplace.  These houses are empty because they had been abandoned many times over a period of many years: by the banks, the corporations, Congress, various elites, and the press, to name a few.  There is no need to intervene in another country when so much of this one is being abandoned.

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Credit:  Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2009

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American journalism’s vaunted self-image as a watchdog apparently stops at the curb of Wall Street. Instead of investigative journalism, the public is fed executive hagiographies and paeans to entrepreneurship and productivity. Even after the downward spiral of the last few months, the analysis often is devoted too much to praising the intelligence of the players and the complexity of the deals. The accompanying photos of gilded office towers and middle-aged guys in sharp clothes hardly diminishes the luster of those supposedly being scrutinized. And then, in a single stroke, an image appeared this weekend that stabbed through to the truth.

The image accompanied a New York Times article in the Sunday Business section of the paper on “How Lehman Got Its Real Estate Fix.” The title and this stunning photo illustration are the only suggestions of addiction in the paper. By contrast, in the article we learn of the keen intelligence and deeply reflective character of Mark Walsh, the financier who “pioneered” the practice of repackaging real estate debt to produce huge short term profits–and a massive backlog of toxic debt. But read all you want, as long as you look at the image and the truth exposed by its visual artistry.

Drug addicts can be smart, real smart, and also well educated and highly creative. They’re still addicts. A culture that is based on addiction can be dazzling and also incredibly destructive. The rest of the world is now waking up to the fact that we’ve been living with unchecked addiction, and the savings account has been looted, the future mortgaged, and trust destroyed.

And finally someone said so. The image doesn’t speak directly, of course, but a statement has been made. The image manipulates available iconography and our sense of scale to create a powerful sense of dislocation and abuse. How could that building be there? Well, how could trillions of dollars in wealth be shrunk to next to nothing, isn’t the entire debacle about losing any reasonable sense of proportion, any sense of natural limit or appropriate restraint? Why the Chrysler building? Well, wasn’t the damage done by some of the classiest firms on the Street, and weren’t they willing to use anything–anything–to feed their habit? And shooting up? Well, they were tough guys willing to take any risk, right?

If the image is scandalous, it is because that is what is needed to expose a culture of enabling and denial. Think about it. You don’t deal with addiction effectively by taking away the drug–or by giving the addict money and another chance at self-regulation. The life of the individual and of the family has to be re-examined and restructured to some positive end. The artists at the Times have revealed the true nature of the problem. That’s as much as they can do. Now we need to see if the current administration is willing to admit to what is wrong, and what needs to be done.

Photo illustration by the New York Times, May 3, 2009.  Cross posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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By guest correspondent Megan Bernard

When I was seven I saw a picture of a little girl and a machine that I have never forgotten.

The vivid incongruity between her and her surroundings gave me an uneasy sense of disproportion and wrongness. She was a child like all others—like me—but something was not right. Her eyes and shoulders showed deep fatigue and her ragged, dirty dress sagged on her frail, brittle-looking little body. All that mysterious metal in front of her was menacing but she reached to touch it almost casually–it was clear that she was familiar with the thing. She was not alone— a blurred figure hovered in the background—but she was isolated, her downcast eyes turned away from the light and focused on the machinery. Although I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing, intuitively I recognized that I was a witness to a thing that should not have happened. The picture was a striking glimpse of a realm of routine hurt and unfairness; it revealed a chronically vulnerable kid in a place where she did not belong.

Lewis Hine took this photo and many others as he systematically documented exploited children in America from 1908-1912. Hine was an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee and his pictures circulated widely as part of the Progressive movement to ban child labor. Hine’s vivid photos contributed significantly to this cause by revealing American child laborers to the public, and his legacy as a prominent, active, socially conscious artist is secure.

That legacy includes the work of G. M. B. Akash, a photojournalist who is documenting living and laboring conditions for dispossessed people in India, Pakistan, and Nepal.

Like Hine’s images, Akash’s photographs foreground big, rigid machines against small, soft children. And as with Hine, a sense of disproportionate scale and incongruous textures emphasizes the wrongness of such scenes. That sense of irreducible impropriety is amplified when the century-old photographs reverberate through their modern echoes: the problem of child labor has not yet been solved.

Does this repetition of visual themes suggest that child exploitation cannot be eradicated? That the ills of industrialized labor will persist because of our human greed, thrift, need, and ignorance–and the mobility of capital? I take a more hopeful view. These pictures, photographers, subjects, and viewers are separated by continents and a century, but images in this style have not lost their power to establish connections across profound social, geographic, and temporal distance. Such exploitation thrives when it is hidden, so exposing it is a crucial step to fighting it, but the mode of exposure also matters. Not all pictures of child laborers are equally powerful, and Akash’s repetition of established masterworks is a strong strategy. Echoes of Hine’s photos visually spotlight similarities between casualties of the second Industrial Revolution in Vermont and the global economy in Bangladesh. Concerted progressive activism helped in the first case. Those same efforts are called for now.

Photographs by Lewis Hine, 1908-1909 (estimated) and G. M. B. Akash, 2009. Megan Bernard is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University. She can be contacted at megan@northwestern.edu.

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Exhausted emergency crews and volunteer workers building the dikes in Fargo, North Dakota had their spirits lifted today as hundreds of executives from Wall Street arrived to save the city from the worst flooding on record. As the grateful residents looked on, one financier after another picked up shovels, sandbags, and whatever else was needed to hold back the mighty river.

After he had slogged knee deep through ice-clogged water to hook a towing chain to a semi that was stalled in a flooded parking lot, this hardy banker said that he was happy to be able to help. “We couldn’t stay home when we saw people just like us having to struggle. Besides, I like to get my hands dirty.”

Fargo residents have become used to offers of help in the past week, but they were impressed nonetheless by the crew from Wall Street. “These guys have a lot of practical know-how,” said Jim Johnson of Johnson and Johnson Motors, “and they make really good decisions–especially about managing risk downstream.”

The bankers were a bit surprised by the fuss being made over their contribution. “We really couldn’t do otherwise,” said one, “because this was such an obvious call on our commitment to the common good. We have been fortunate lately, and we really appreciate the opportunity to give something back to the community.”

“After all,” said another, “that’s what it’s is all about, right?”

Photograph by Michael Vosburg/Fargo Forum Photo Editor, March 27, 2009. You can see additional photos of the flood control effort at the Fargo Forum and The Big Picture.

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The following photographs were placed on a facebook page to provide continued documentation of the closing of the Rocky Mountain News. The photos were taken on March 19, several weeks after the paper went out of business. This picture could be from more than one corporate office today.

You are looking at the hardware of the white collar workplace: computer, phone, other electronic paraphernalia, ergonomic chair, files, wastebasket, paper littering every surface. . . . . Welcome to my world. On the good days, a place like this is humming with energy, activity, and deadlines, and, of course, arguments, delays, and frustrations, but also coffee breaks, conversations, and jokes. Places like this becoming living communities where people spend a lot of their time, give a lot of their talents, and find an important source of meaning, identity, and self-respect.

In the days of The Organization Man, the office was thought to be the source of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row. When you look at the shabby, barren, modernist decor, the label seems to apply again. But times had changed and now work looks pretty good, and the desolation comes not from the work but from business shutting down. When only the hardware is left, there’s nothing there.

Nothing there, except for a few traces of personality. I love the way that people decorate their desks and cubicles to remake the impersonal space into something richer. Usually you see signs of those other important sources of personal meaning, family and friends, and you learn something about the individual. The gaping, empty shelves in this cubicle shout out the fact that the work has been taken away, yet the little dog, the trinkets stuck on the bulletin board, the book, photograph, ball cap, and even the box of tissues remind us that a real person worked here. The unemployment statistic was created in an instant, and someone will have taken a few hours to box up some things and then walked away from the rest, but the signs of a past life linger on.

Material signs of a missing spirit–could this figurine be any more apt? She was someone’s small homage to the imagination–a fairy the same color as the impersonal office decor and yet evocative of another world. She sits precariously on the cubicle divider in front of a stack of papers, a symbol of vulnerability and crash that reveals just now fragile newspapers are today. And not only newspapers.

Though obviously an inexpensive bit of kitsch, it’s sad that the figurine was abandoned along with the old editions awaiting recycling. But perhaps it wasn’t abandoned, and left instead as a good luck charm. A promise that spirit and creativity can return to desolation row.

The photographs were taken by Dean Krakel and put up at his facebook page as What They Left Behind; the link was sent to me by photographer David Sutton.  An earlier post on the last day at the Rocky Mountain News is here.

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