I’ve written recently about the need to dial down aesthetic expectations in order to document the reality of the current economic catastrophe. A photograph from the cover of this week’s New York Times Magazine provides an eloquent example of how a humble image can capture the consequences of an economic disaster.

You are looking at a boarded-up doorway of an abandoned house in the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. The neighborhood’s name might evoke the Immigrant Dream and so heighten the significance of the image, but I don’t think that is needed. The visual surface of the image presents an unrelenting litany of decline and disruption.

The plywood board, which looks like the cheapest stock you can get, has been hacked roughly with a saw to be cut to the frame and door handle. The cutting obviously was done sloppily, because what the hell does it matter for a job like this? Cutting like that also can be done quickly, as if the crew has a lot more to board up. (Cleveland has at least 10,000 abandoned homes.) The padlock is rusty–real old, as if bought as part of a shipment of thousands of used locks, or maybe it’s the lock the family assumes they’ll never see again. The one piece of new equipment is the hasp attaching the plywood to the door frame; not something most homeowners or real estate companies want to have on hand.

The materials are cheap as can be. And can be so, as they really are not much more than “keep out” signs. Anyone over age ten can break through that door if they want to. The house is not in great shape either. Flaking paint, the door frame unpainted after pulling off a hinge, the flimsy outer door, all suggest that this wasn’t a high end development to begin with–certainly nothing that would drive the imagination of those frenzied to bail out Wall Street firms, big developers, and others “suffering” because their McMansions have temporarily declined in value. By contrast, this photo is a study in how those near the bottom can still have far to fall.

And then what? The photo’s final effect comes from being an image of foreclosure–of literally shutting out, closing early, stopping. We see layers of blockage: the board, hasp, lock, closed door, frame–every part of the image says you might go forward but can’t. Even the shingles jut forward but recede to wall, and the trace of an old hinge reminds that the current hasp also could be removed instead of locked. Likewise, the viewer’s gaze, which is pulled toward the vanishing point in the middle of the picture, is continually interrupted by the closed surfaces. The close cropping insures that no windows, yard, or neighborhood view soften the effect of hitting this wall. The image might be described as adding insult to injury, as it stops any attempt to take the long view, larger perspective, or other means for rationalizing away the actual destruction. Instead, it says, look at this shuttered house, up close, in all its sad particularly. This is the texture of decline.

Photograph by Reuben Cox for The New York Times. The photograph was part of a slide show about the housing disaster in Cleveland; the slides accompanied the story, “All Boarded Up.”

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Today the Rocky Mountain News will publish its last edition and go out of business.

The closing was announced to employees of the paper yesterday afternoon. Like the pros that they are, they had the story up on their website immediately. Not everyone gets to report on losing their own job, and I doubt it is an experience to savor. The coverage included a photo essay with these pictures.

There may be some irony in a storied newspaper reporting on its demise with an online digital slide show, but the explanation of the paper’s collapse is not that simple. Nor will I go into it here. Let’s dwell instead on what it means to face the death of one’s job.

That stunned look is the face of someone who has just lost his livelihood, who works in an industry where re-employment may be impossible, and who has to somehow make all that not matter to the child in his arms. He is one of many in this awful spot, but I would bet that he feels almost completely alone.

The pictures tell the story of individual lives, a spreading economic disaster, and perhaps the death of an institution. The Rocky Mountain News was closing in on its 150th anniversary this year. American democracy is older than that, but its future has been secured for a long time by the press. Of course, it also is true that everything is changing, and the horizon is not uniformly dark, and the digital media are abounding with democratic energy while reformatting and extending much of what was good about journalism. But the faces in the Denver newsroom show what happens when you stare into the future and see nothing there.

Photographs by Darin McGregor, Judy DeHass, and Joe Mahoney for the Rocky Mountain News.

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Today I came across a photograph that could be a picture-perfect illustration of how aesthetic judgment depends on context. I also discovered a photograph that could be a picture-perfect illustration of how political judgment depends on context. Fortunately, the two photos are identical:

This photo of an oil refinery in Edmonton, Alberta could be placed on a Petro-Canada promotional brochure. Surely for many of those in the business, and for a majority of those in North America in the last half of the twentieth century, this could be an image of progress. The sun is setting but that doesn’t matter as hundreds of lights wink on at the refinery that is a vital node in the great industrial system that has all but eliminated darkness in the modern world. The plant (note the word) seems to be a substitute for nature itself: electric light replaces sunlight, the steam from the towers plumes like beautiful clouds across the night sky, and all this because subterranean power is being drawn out of the deep earth.

The stacks, towers, and other structures are the work of civilization, of course. The industrial complex seems to be a city rather than one factory for powering distant networks. This seamless fusion of the natural and technological sublime is one source of the photograph’s appeal. We are brought to a limit condition–the setting of the sun, the outer edge of civilization–and yet can gaze safely on the power emanating from the other side. Awesome power that is contained by the machinery of civilization, from refinery to camera.

But that is only half of the story. The same image will have looked quite different to those who saw high-volume pollution instead of billowing vapor, and consumption of a non-renewable resource instead of production, and a massed concentration of corporate power instead of economies of scale creating mass prosperity. Likewise, the design and tonal values of the image can reveal not beauty and power fused together but instead an allegory of the decline of the industrial society. Now the sun is setting on both the landscape and the refinery. The orange glow along the horizon reveals what was always true: that this was an infernal place that could only end in self-destruction. The lights now look like torches that cannot hold off the impending night when the oil runs out, never to be replaced for hundreds of millions of years. Instead of replacing nature, this place is returning to nature as sure as night follows day.

I’m writing this at night, the computer screen aglow in a house illuminated and heated by power plants that draw on resources thousands of miles away, day and night, year in and year out, continuously, reliably, without my doing anything other than writing a check once a month. That has to be acknowledged. The oil does no good to anyone if never used, but it would be one of history’s great crimes to exhaust the supply before a sustainable alternative was available. Likewise, it seems foolish to deny that the image can be a symbol of progress, but the wiser choice might be to see it as an allegory of decline.

Photograph by Dan Reidhuber/Reuters.

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I’d like to consider why this is a good photograph:

We start by noting how it is a bad photograph: a dull, static, poorly lit shot of a dull, featureless, commercial building in an unknown location on a cloudy winter day. The building itself is of no obvious significance, and the image does nothing to elicit and direct our attention. Even when a caption is supplied–this is the plant of the Manchester Tool Company in New Franklin, Ohio that has been shuttered for ten months–nothing remains of visual interest.

In fact, the photo actually diffuses the viewer’s gaze. Your eye might be caught by the bright colors on the large sign, but it then is pulled along the left-to-right diagonal to the next sign that is smaller and less legible, and then instead of converging on a point it spreads out along the shadowed wall of the building, and from there it wanders right and left trying to draw things together into a coherent whole except that the building continues beyond the frame in each direction. Worse yet, the flag lifts the gaze up on the left but then leaves it hanging there, looking above everything else in the picture to the empty sky, and what is the purpose of having a flag waving over an empty building?

Even if you were one of the perhaps two readers worldwide who might be interested in buying a plant in Ohio at this time, this photo wouldn’t grab you. And it certainly is not one likely to be seen on someone’s desk or in a family album or even in the newspaper. So, what is it doing?

At some point last year a friend got in my face and said that I needed to be posting about the economic downturn. I gave a grumpy reply to the effect that doing so was easier said than done: a fragmentary medium such as photography wasn’t suited to depicting structural problems, and the news media limited themselves to a few stock images such as executives before Congress and workers at factory gates. But I knew he was right, and since then John and I have put up a number of posts on the economy. What I’ve noticed, however, is that the best photos have been uniformly bland images. Examples have included customers leaving a restaurant, an empty auto showroom, furniture dumped along a sidewalk, and others as well. They provide visual parables, but they do not feature the art of photography.

By contrast, the visual archive contains many images of both economic power and economic catastrophe. Think of the World Trade Center or famous images of the Great Depression such as Dorothea Lange’s White Angel Breadline. Even government response to the Depression was captured in monumental imagery, as in the photograph of Fort Peck Dam on the first cover of Life Magazine. But it seems that the economic mudslide we have experienced so far requires a different iconography.

What I like most about the photograph above is how the building seems to be withdrawing from view, receding into its minimal state of dull banality. Of course, it wouldn’t look much different in good times. Commercial real estate like this is not built for looks. But the “For Sale” sign wouldn’t be there, and the windows might be open and the walk shoveled, and, most important, the photograph wouldn’t have been taken at all. The image seems dull, cold, and aimless, but that is exactly what it is documenting: how the plant closing leaves nothing but an empty building, forlorn signs, and workers who are left out in the cold without work or opportunity when they need it.

Recession may include not only cutting back on luxuries but also cutting back on the optical extravagance of towering skyscrapers and dramatic action shots. The photojournalist’s task now includes documenting dispersion, retraction, erosion, and sad quietude. In doing so, it may bring us to dwell on the dull surfaces of ordinary life. Those surfaces were easily overlooked when driving down the road in an SUV using cheap gas to get to the mall. Now, however, they may be all that remain.

Photograph by David Ahntholz for The New York Times. See also the Times article, Months After Plant Closed, Many Still Struggling.

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Descriptions of the current recession often feature terms of constriction: “cutting back,” “downsizing,” “retrenchment,” “shrinkage,” and so forth. Companies are reducing inventories as people are eating in instead of going out, all because bubbles, markets, and sectors have collapsed. With the Dow at a fraction of its former value and the global economy cooling like a dying star, it seems that drawing inward is a universal law of hard times. Until you look at photographs such as this one:

A woman is standing among her possessions after having been evicted from her house. She is seen at the back of the photograph, at the end of the bare concrete sidewalk leading to the street, on the line to the vanishing point. The wind blows her hair across her face, adding insult to injury. She stands as if at a loss. What to do? How can she gather this all up and put it somewhere safe, much less back where it belongs? How can she hold onto anything of value?

The garbage bag in front of her makes the question seem particularly futile: she could put something in it, except that it’s already full and likely to tear anyway when she tries to carry it, if she can carry it far at all. No wonder that she looks as if she is having an exasperated conversation with the bag. Who else can she talk to?

The rest of her stuff is strewn along the sidewalk and out into the street. It’s in no order save the haphazard mess made by the eviction team (they have jobs). Drawers are pulled open, a table overturned, the cabinet stands empty and precarious at the curb, boxes are piled helter skelter, a plant dies in the winter air. . . It would look much the same if it had been done by vandals, but then she would know whom to blame. In any case, she isn’t likely to see the people who helped her get into this mess.

This is a scene of personal desolation. It also is a sign of collective danger. The economic implosion does not lead only to the frugality and togetherness celebrated in nostalgic memories of bygone days. Economic disasters also release terrible centrifugal forces: winds of dispersion that tear lives apart and scatter people across places that will never be called home. Paul Krugman put it well when he spoke of The Great Unraveling. To see what that can mean, you don’t have to look too far.

Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images.

Update: Thanks to the cross post at BAGnewsNotes, you can read an extended caption to the photograph and additional comments by readers there.

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Yesterday Senate Republicans refused to support a bill to aid ailing U.S. auto makers. The New York Times report was accompanied by a photo of concerned pols, but I think this image gets to the heart of the matter.

This car dealership in Fort Wayne, Indiana had been vacated when the dealer moved to a new location. The photograph captures far more than the local news. A large, empty shell of building, surrounded by vacant space and cracked asphalt, reflecting pale light and a dull sky–the scene is an allegory of inertia, mismanagement, vanishing markets, and lack of vision.

Don’t expect to see it re-opened any time soon. The empty desolation of the photo captures the impact that shuttering the auto industry has on the economy. Each affected community is left with a big hole to fill and no obvious replacement.

I have no doubt that the bill, despite being endorsed by both the White House and Congressional Democrats, was not the best solution. I also doubt that the best solution was actually available at this time. Let’s hope a viable agreement can be crafted soon. No industry has ever deserved help less, but the Republicans shouldn’t blow up three states and put a hole in the side of the U.S. economy just because this is a good time to lean on the unions.

If there is a teachable moment here, it certainly includes several lessons about bad management. It also is yet another demonstration of the danger of minority rule. The Senate requirement of 60 votes for significant legislation seriously hampers the ability of the U.S. government to respond to important problems. The Senate Republicans can lecture the unions all the want, but their use of the supermajority rule exemplifies an inability to respond effectively to change–exactly the attitude that led the auto industry to their sorry state.

Photograph by Noah Gage/Flicker.

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The recent economic “downturn” is being treated as a world historical event and that means that photo editors have been searching furiously to find the iconic image of the event, a problem made somewhat difficult by the fact that economic traumas are not nearly as easy to visualize as wars or natural disasters.  And the result is somewhat amusing as one after another the various newspapers emphasize an almost endless parade of images of stock brokers and fund managers from around the world depicted in various degrees of emotional distress, mute witnesses to a roller coaster of numbers scrolling across black and green screens and monitors. Elsewhere, and at the same time, news stories wonder when the effects of the most recent “bubble” to burst will be felt in the “real economy.”  To be sure, the effects of the current economic situation are palpable; many who don’t deserve it face serious financial hardships in the years ahead, and I don’t mean to diminish the significance of that in any way. And yet, two photographs that appeared in tandem as part of a slide show at The Seattle Times this past week (10/17/08) put it all in a perspective that it would be good for us to think about.

The first image is of a young child in Lagos, Nigeria playing in a dirty and rusted out oil drum in what appears to be a garbage dump of some sort.  The picture is used to promote World Poverty Day and it channels all of the pathos of images commonly used by NGOs to encourage charitable contributions—perhaps you can’t solve all of the poverty in the world, such ads typically intone, but surely you can save this child for only pennies a day.  The power of the appeal is simple and direct: the child is looking directly at the camera in the manner of a demand and all we have to do is substitute the image of our own child (real or imagined) to understand the pattern of identification that is being encouraged.  

The problem, of course, is that we encounter such images so frequently that it is easy to become inured to their appeal or simply to look past them as if they were not their at all.  And I might have done exactly that but for the photograph that followed it:

What we are looking at is a man smoking a “Golden Zeus,” a cigar that has been dipped in pure gold and is “on display” at the Millionaire’s Fair—a luxury goods and trade show “open to the public”—being held in Munich.  Unlike the photograph of the child in Lagos, there is no demand made here upon the viewer; the smoker is completely self-absorbed in his own private desires, a decadent pleasure offered up to the “public” (by some accounts over 40,000 people paid the $50 admission fee to attend the show and we can only assume that most were not millionaires) for its own perverse consumption.  It is, in a phrase, an exhibition of “class voyeurism.”  Left on its own, the photograph would operate in a pornographic symbolic economy, but of course when placed in direct contrast to the earlier photograph it is hard to imagine it as anything but obscene.

We could go on at some length about the fundamental contradictions of global capitalism captured in the opposition between the two images, and there certainly would be some value in doing that.  But there is a slightly  different point to be made, for the juxtaposition of these photographs at this moment in time stands as a potent reminder of two key facts: (a) for all the bubbles that burst in the financial sectors, and for all of the claims that capitalism will be fundamentally transformed in the process (and it might well be), nevertheless, the desire that animates the underlying value system of a capitalist economy is far from diminished—and no amount of government regulation is likely to change that; and (b) while much has been lost by many as a result of the current crisis, and while more still is likely to be lost, the  measure of that loss is best calibrated against how much we actually had to lose.

As we search out the impact of our current economic woes on the “real economy” it is perhaps prudent to keep both facts in focus.

Photo Credit:  Sunday Alamba/AP; Christof Stache/AP

 

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