Guest Correspondent: Brandon Thomas

There is no shortage of potent imagery from the Gezi Park movement, which has evolved into a pseudo-1960’s around-the-clock “Be-In” where spaces and resources are shared communally. Though victorious and celebratory, the police-free zone that currently surrounds Taxim Square still carries the scars of the weekend’s turmoil. Overturned cars have become in situ art installations. Vendors peddle corn, simit, and beer on the streets. One bus, its windows smashed out, has been repurposed into a library. And every day thousands of supporters, revelers, and tourists make the pilgrimage to what has become the epicenter of Turkey’s biggest peoples’ movement in years.

In many ways the protest today is unrecognizable from the sit-in it began as in the last days of May, before the bulldozers, riot gear, and international attention. Despite this, a photo produced on the fourth day of the protest has emerged as the movement’s first signature image. Dubbed the woman in red by Alexandra Hudson of Reuters News Service, the picture immediately went viral in Turkey before being snapped up by multiple news agencies and acclaimed by many as the symbol of Occupy Gezi.

What is it about this image that makes it so compelling? Looking at the key elements in the frame, we see two people, a male police officer with a gas mask and a hose that appears to be spraying a female with what we surmise is pepper spray. Her face is a contorted grimace and her hair bizarrely on end. In the left foreground, another female faces the camera. Though she is perhaps unaware of the action behind her, her furrowed brow confirms a physical reaction to the spray. Behind her, a third female covers her mouth and nose with apparent distress.

Juxtaposed with the key figure of the woman in red, these women’s intense reactions to second-hand contact with the spray heighten the viewer’s awareness of the anguish that the woman in red must feel. Though this human suffering is certainly enough to invoke viewers’ empathy, additional signifiers convey more subtle meanings which make the image more powerful within the social context from which it is viewed.

For starters, the girl’s youth, her red summer dress and her purse or book bag evoke a myth of “the girl next door,” a girl we are at once familiar with and unthreatened by. Indeed, the power of this image lies in just how ordinary the girl looks. She does not fit the stereotypical image of a political activist, but rather appears as a bystander caught up in someone else’s conflict. Perhaps she took a wrong turn on her way home from school or work. Even her body position is inoffensive; with one hand on the purse strap and another at her side, she seems surprised, even defenseless.

The subtext of these signifiers – her body language, youth, attire, and gender – make the girl an object of innocence that is instantly relatable and sympathetic. That such a character is subject to such extreme violence without provocation moreover invokes a narrative of victimhood that heightens viewers’ empathy for the girl and provides moral high ground to the protesters.

Contrasting with the main officer’s gas mask and the police squad’s tactical riot control gear, the woman in red’s fate appears further unjustified. The heavily armored police squad does not appear to be restoring order to a hostile protest, but stands like a row of pawns in a chess game. Indeed, the absence of provocateurs from the image’s frame, enriched by the empty green space behind the woman in red, suggests that police are the true aggressors, unconcerned and unfettered by the operational standards of proper use of force.

These polarizing symbols of innocence and abuse of power imbue the image with an iconic presence. Through an emotional and ethical appeal to viewers’ sense of right and wrong, the woman in red successfully mobilizes public opinion. By simply viewing the image, we begin to root for the woman in red and, by default, the protesters themselves.

Photograph by Osman Orsal/Reuters.

Brandon Thomas is an MA student currently living in Istanbul, Turkey.  He can be contacted at kingblt@mail.sfsu.edu.

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Guest Correspondent: Jens Kjeldsen

Is it a fake? Is it photoshopped? Is it real? Paul Hansen’s winner of the 2012 World Press Photo competition is just the latest example of more than 100 years of continuous discussions about the manipulation of photographs.

However, instead of asking only if prize winning images are manipulated (and of course in some way they all are), we should also ask why are they changed to become the way they are?  Or, to put it differently: what kinds of photographs win awards?

When we look closer at the changing styles of the winning photographs since the beginning of the World Press Photo competition in 1955, we see that Hansen’s picture is part of a cinematic form of expression that has emerged in the last 6-7 years.

The image portrays family members from Gaza carrying the bodies of a two small children to their burial after being killed in an Israeli air strike. It is no coincidence that it has been called a movie poster. However, the photo is more like a still; a story frozen in time, but condensed with motion and movement, inviting us into a narrative of what has happened before, and what might happen next.

This new trend is different from other dominant styles among the WPP winners. Some of the winning pictures hold what we can call news moments (similar to Henri Cartier Bresson’s decisive moments). Most of the news moments are from the 1960s. A prime example is Eddie Adams’ 1968 picture of the execution of a suspected Viet Cong member, showing the exact moment of the bullet’s penetration of the brain. The impact of the picture lies primarily in capturing a certain news event in a fraction a second.

The closer we get to this century, the fewer pictures we see of such news moments.

Instead we see more feature-like photographs capturing – not a moment, but a general situation or condition. Take this winner from 2004 portraying a woman mourning a relative after the Asian tsunami of December 2003.

The photo is constructed around a juxtaposition between the dead body, represented by only an arm in the left of the frame, and the bereaved, represented by a woman lying face down on the sand in the right part of the frame.

This kind of explicitly artistic visual rhetoric prevailed from 2000-2004. The 2001 winner portrays how the body of a one-year-old boy who died of dehydration is being prepared for burial at Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan.

It is a very rare example of a picture being taken in a full bird’s eye perspective, directly from above.

The picture is dominated by the white color of the draping sheets, covering the body of the little boy, so we only see the left side of his face. He seems at peace, and the picture exudes calmness, giving it an almost ethereal dimension. Combined with the angle of the arms draping the sheets, the picture is more an aesthetic moment than it is a news moment.

Hansen’s picture is neither a news moment nor an aesthetic moment – not to say, of course, that it does not have style. All images do. Instead the aesthetic tendency exhibited in this picture is a more of a kind of movie realism, a sort of photographic cinema verité. We see a similar tendency in the winners from 2007, 2008, and 2009.

The 2007-winner shows a US soldier sinking onto an embankment in a bunker in Afghanistan. The 2008 winner depicts a policeman entering a home in Cleveland, USA, in order to check whether the owners have vacated the premises. In 2009 we see women shouting their dissent from a Tehran rooftop following Iran’s disputed presidential election.

These images are not colorful, there are no close ups, no clear, simple or stylized compositions, and no conspicuous juxtapositions or an obvious use of some part to represent a whole. They give the impression of the fictional realism we sometimes encounter at the cinema.

While the beginning of the decade presented photographs that have their main rhetorical appeal in their compositional and aesthetic organization, these photographs appeal more through story-making.

The first kind invites the viewer inside the frame, encouraging exploration of the elements in the visual moment, captivating us through visual design. The second kind invites the viewer outside the frame, encouraging participation in the construction of a narrative, engaging us in speculations of what has happened and what will happen.

This kind of neo-realistic press photography seems to be more open to interpretation than the more obvious symbolic photos.

The strange thing, though, is that the more the pictures draw us into a story of mostly our own creation, they seem to draw us away from the events they are depicting. They are all fabulous images, but even when provided with the backstories I remain a spectator immersed in the story, in awe of the artwork, waiting for the movie to premiere.

 

World Press Photo award-winning photographs by Paul Hansen, Arko Datta, Erik Refner, and (clockwise from the upper left) Tim Hetherington, Paul Hansen, Pietro Masturzo, and Anthony Suau.

Jens Kjeldsen is professor of rhetoric and visual communication at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen (Norway), and Professor of rhetoric at Södertörn University (Stockholm, Sweden). He currently is visiting Fulbright professor at the Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University.

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Guest Correspondent: Emily Dianne Cram

 

A fair skinned white woman pivots casually in the middle of a crowded urban sidewalk, her hands tucked away inside mint green shorts.  Her thumbs steadily line the top of her hips, as she casts a flat look somewhere beyond the frame of the photograph.  And even though she occupies the center of the image, adorned with vibrant colors and tight fitting summer chic, her body is not necessarily the curious object of the photograph.  We might keep our focus on her as we imagine what circumstances created this moment of pause—perhaps she’s a tourist taking in the sites or maybe even a fashion model.  After all, her pose in this moving public space breaks with the uniform walking of the crowd behind her, dressed in black business suits and other muted tones.  Yet, even though the camera invites our attention to her body, it also calls attention to the grimaced look on the face of the spectator to her right who fixates her disapproving gaze on the woman’s body.  It is difficult to identify the valence of her expression.  Perhaps she disapproves of such a bold aesthetic on a female body that violates norms of slender and seamlessness.  Or perhaps it is a look of disgust generated by a body’s excess and its inability to be properly contained by standardized clothing.

I encountered Hailey Morris-Cafiero ‘s photograph series “Wait Watchers” after a Facebook friend shared a blog link describing her project.  “Wait Watchers” relies on the photographic potential of everyday life, and documents the encounters Morris-Cafiero’s body has with strangers in public spaces.   After staging a camera in crowded public scenes, Morris-Cafiero waits to be looked at as the camera documents policing glances like the one above.  As I scrolled through a number of photographs, I felt a stunning sense of familiarity in each scene, as a fat woman who also often catches the looks of others in public policing my muffin top.*  The photos created a strong sense of identification with the experience of being looked at in such a way, and encouraged me to share the photos with my own Facebook network.  Others “liked” and shared the blog as well, drawing comments from others ranging from the need to reflect on their own practices of public looking to the ethics of such an artistic project.  But more, I was caught by repetition in the claim that the stranger in each image could be looking at something else, not necessarily directly at Morris-Cafiero’s body, and thus, not engaging in an act of ridicule with certainty.

The desire for certainty of the alignment between relations of looking and being looked-at evokes what Ariella Azoulay terms a professional way of engaging with photography.  The professional gaze seeks little more than to identify and categorize.  However, even though Morris-Cafiero’s photo series asks for public witness to her experiences, to say the photos simply seek to shame the particular individuals caught looking on camera misses the project’s power.

In this photo, one not featured in the initial blog, we gain a different sense of the stakes of the project.  Here, the camera’s presence is manifest: two young teens moving through what seems to be a tourist space stare directly at the camera witnessing a crowded sidewalk.  Here, their movements are as much on display as Morris-Cafiero, who seems to be adjusting the lens of her camera or bending her body towards the ground below her.  Meanwhile, another young tourist looks in the direction of Morris-Cafiero, covering a smirk and an emerging laugh with her sleeve covered hand.  The gesture demonstrates the limits of performing bourgeois propriety, as she attempts to contain and privatize what is likely to be an act of publicly shaming Morris-Cafiero.

Both photos featured here draw attention to habits of looking that make bodies appear strange in public.  More broadly, the project lends focus to encounters with bodies constituted as out of place because they violate aesthetic norms or because they violate dominant logics of how bodies should properly occupy public spaces. Morris-Cafiero’s body interrupts the efficient flow and movement of others on sidewalks or in alleyways as much as she violates fashionable gender regimes.

And so even as the question of certainty animated by the professional gaze might motivate us to contemplate the motive of onlookers (is she really being mocked?), those questions matter less than how the photographic spectator is asked to intervene in the problem that the photo series suggests: how does one engage with the social relation of looking and lookism? Morris-Cafiero’s project illustrates how relations of looking can operate as both sites of surveillance of strange bodies for their laughable deviance and as a mode of looking back, making these disciplining gestures the object on display.  By making relations of looking visible to photographic spectators, Morris-Cafiero’s is both spectator and actor. How one intervene in these two fields depends on the spectator.  Because the photographic spectator is also witness to these acts, the question is, what is our obligation?  The professional gaze is a possibility, yet it diminishes the potential of the civic as a mode of transforming the social conditions that make these looking relations possible.  And so do we pity Morris-Cafiero?  Empathize with the sheer banality of these moments?  Shame the watchers?  Seek compassion?

We will have to wait and watch.

*NOTE: “Fat” and “fatness” are often evoked as derogatory ways of describing bodies in gendered, raced, and classed terms.  My use of these categories operates in tandem with writers, thinkers, and activists working to understand fat embodiments beyond the registers of medicalization and aesthetic norms.

Emily Dianne Cram is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.  She can be contacted at emcram@indiana.edu.

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By guest correspondent Chris Gilbert

It is difficult to remember that times of chaos can also be times of clarity. Let me put it differently: it is easy to forget, amidst endless reports of political turmoil, that we are in a season of carnival. Above is a photograph from the 2011 Vevcani Carnival in the Republic of Maceodnia.

The image typifies the comic spectacle of the carnival tradition: the flouting of everyday decorum, the licensed (and licentious) freedom of excess, the transformation of violence into grotesque sport, and the unhampered celebration of sarcasm, irony and satire, all of which define the “carnivalesque” and defy the “seriousness” of officialdom. The caption indicates “[a] disguised reveler…in a carnival procession.” Considering the leather strap embracing his neck, the idea of revelry is jarring. Of course, the frontal angle levels our perspective and invites us to view from within the procession and, despite the obvious and potentially repulsive nature of the man’s captivity, let alone his grubbiness, we are drawn in by the gaping grin on his face. He laughs, but we get a sense that, if he can laugh at his own imprisonment, so can we.

Although the background is a blur, we can see that everyone is reveling—even, presumably, the erect figure in black who is barely visible and who likely clutches the chain linking the loose collars around the men’s necks. A man on his knees gestures at an unseen audience member (a child, perhaps?). A huge man, who evokes the giant Gargantua himself, balances his girth in glee. Together, they reveal a wending procession of interconnected actors and in it we find a peculiar ritual performance, reliant on an equally peculiar logic of liberation. But in all its debasement, in all its irony, it depicts a certain peace. Citizenship, which is defined by at least some measure of restraint (if not constraint), is momentarily defined by the erasure of boundaries. Individual bodies merge into a larger collectivity, and the tensions that build up and beg for release are expelled. Furthermore, bodily expressions and social excesses are given time and space to simply be.

This is not to say that carnival is free from political consequence, or that it affords itself the luxury to simply watch without being watched. Everyone in the village participates, and, as SETimes notes, “[o]ne of the main parts of the carnival is to act out the major news of the past year.” As such, carnival mocks prohibition, terror, authority, violence, but only insofar as life and death are metaphors for hope and renewal. At the end of carnival, shackles are removed. Mimicked pain dissolves into relief. And true (at least metaphorically) to carne vale, people bid “farewell to flesh.”

It is said that the Vevcani carnival owes much of its popularity, not only to the actors, but “to numerous journalist teams, cameramen, and photo reporters.” It is telling, then, that there is such a relative dearth of carnival images in U.S. popular media. Perhaps we in the U.S., think of carnival only as Mardi Gras or the popular cruise line. Still, many civic carnival traditions persist. Few, however, retain the customary excesses of Vevcani and its 1400-year history. We might ask ourselves then: are we too overtaken by the “serious”? Shouldn’t carnival be an important aspect of civic life? Donning their masks and costumes, many carnival participants say they become themselves while in character. Perhaps we under-value the clarity that might come from more carnivalesque ways to commune.

Photo Credit: Robert Atanasovski/AFP/Getty Images.

Chris Gilbert is a graduate student of rhetoric and public culture in the Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University.  He can be contacted at cgilbie@gmail.com.

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