We even got dressed up for this one.  And once again it is a time to say “Thanks” and to take stock.  Thanks to all our readers, and not least to those who comment on the posts.  If anyone would like to give us any advice about the blog itself, now is a good time to do it.  We can’t say we’ll follow that advice, especially given our limited resources, but it always is appreciated and sometimes one thing can lead to another.  You can comment below or email us at rhariman@gmail.com and lucaites@indiana.edu.

We won’t be posting for a few weeks, but we will continue to read our mail and hope that you will return on July 8th as we start another year at NCN.

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You might say that this image is all too conventional: the people’s hero bravely taking a stand on the barricades, right out of Les Miz.  Of course, it’s much better than that, but why?

All the elements of the Revolution in the Streets script are there: the people milling about (check); smoke from tear gas or guns (check); trashed furniture and other stuff piled up as a barricade (check); the hero at the center of the barricade (check); the standard held high precisely as the hero is being sacrificed (check); what’s not to like?  Well, someone might say, “He’s a real human being actually putting his body on the line.”  OK, but we knew that, and the drama never was entirely in the image: politics itself is a mode of conflict before spectators, and if you take away all the conventions of presentation, the scene becomes aimless, meaningless, incapable of being seen as action of any sort.  Like any photograph, this image has to draw on conventions of social behavior to be intelligible at all, and like many photographs it might be artfully compressing and coordinating those conventions to say something to a public audience.

But what is being said?  We can’t settle for something as banal as “Protestor waves a flag in Istanbul,” or even the more dramatic “Protestor waves a flag in Istanbul while being gassed.”  Let me suggest that two reasons I think this photo stands out above many others.  The first is the way that the man is framed, not by other protestors or the police, but by the wreckage being created by the conflict in the street.  Instead of merely becoming a symbol of The People, we see that he actually is having to contend with the destruction of his environment.  (Indeed, the willingness to accept that destruction is one sign of how fed up people are with the deeper destructiveness of the regime.)  While holding up the flag and covering his contaminated eyes, he also has to step carefully, each foot on a different level, obstacles that could trip him in every direction.  More to the point, the photo may be prophetic: suggesting that, as with other revolutions in the region, this one will end in the Pyrrhic victory of regaining one’s country only to find it gutted, looted, and reduced to rubble.

One need not come to that conclusion, of course, but the second distinctive feature of the photograph provides a context for doing so: now I am referring to its amazing color.  It’s much easier to see than describe, so look again.  Neither quite color nor black and white, it seems to create a dimension halfway between documentary reportage and artistic reflection.  Color can provide tone (in oratory, the speaker’s sense of the situation), and mood (the emotion offered to the audience as a means for thinking and feeling along with the speaker).  The tone here seems both candid about the dire situation and yet willing to believe in the cause.  The mood seems almost elegiac, as if they have already lost but should be remembered nonetheless.

To appreciate more fully what has been accomplished, let me briefly bring in another photo.

Amazing, isn’t it?  One might think that all these two images have in common is their similarity in color, tonality, and mood.  Or one might feature important differences: say, that the second places human action within an expansive natural tableau where serenity will persist long after these small creatures called humans have passed through the scene.  Either way, the comparison could be faulted for trivializing the political action in Istanbul.  That, however, is not what I have in mind.

Consider instead that the second image can extend some of the strengths of the second.  It can slow us down a bit to think more carefully about the nature of change. Note also that both images feature wreckage (the looming hulk is a supertanker being cut up for scrap in Bangladesh).  Perhaps wreckage is our lot, and therefore no reason to avoid change.  And perhaps regimes, no matter how large and powerful, will all one day be cut up for scrap.  (They will, as they always have.)

Perhaps the scripts don’t change much, but that need not determine how we feel about them.

Photographs by Daniel Etter/Redux and Lee Chong Kuang/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.  Etter’s photo was included in a guest post earlier this week on viral images in Turkey; Time Lightbox provides more on the photo here.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Yet another prize winning photographer has been accused of visual deception.  Subsequently, Paul Hansen’s World Press Photo of the Year passed the forensic review that was set up hurriedly–by WPP–to address the scandal, but it has become clear that the image was substantially “improved” in post-production.  All commercial photos are enhanced, and few news photos have ever appeared without some artistic manipulation, so there is at the least a sliding scale involved.  At some point, however, art becomes deceit, and with that the integrity of the press as an institution is at risk.  Thus, the press needs its own watchdog, and from the beginning of photojournalism there have been those who were happy to question whether the images in the news were telling the truth.

I’m fine with that, but what I don’t get is why captioning so often gets a pass.

This photo was captioned by Time as, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers, left background, near the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus.”  Now, the photographer and magazine were playing by the rules, carefully identifying who, what, when, and where in sufficient detail to place the photo within the event being covered.  We now know that the photo was not taken on April 29th and that it was near Yitzhar (the Jewish settlement) near Nablus (the Palestinian city) and not near some other settlement or city.  Given either forensic or historical questions, those could be crucial details.

Those are not the only questions that apply, however.  There also are political and moral questions, for example.  In respect to those questions, a very significant detail has not been identified.  Look closely: the man is double over in pain while trying to get something out of his eyes.  He is a large, well-muscled man yet unable to resist the two soldiers grabbing him, so the pain must be debilitating.  Now look closer still: the two soldiers are trying to spray something into his face. The one is spraying–you can see that he is holding and firing a spray canister, and that the foam or mist is coming out as white blur.  The other soldier is trying to hold and turn the man so that the first can hit him directly in the face.  Hit him squarely in the eyes, that is, and perhaps for the second time.

The caption did not say, “April 30, 2013. Israeli security forces try to force a second dose of pepper spray into the eyes of a Palestinian man during clashes with Jewish settlers.”  That probably would be the more specific, more accurate description of what is being shown.  It also would shift the sense of political blame: instead of a man being “arrested,” as if a criminal, we have Israeli soldiers siding with the settlers who rioted following a stabbing.  (The stabbing of a settler was of course criminal and should lead to an arrest, but ask yourself how rioting following a crime would be treated in your town.)   Instead of settlers violating the rule of law, here the Palestinian is the sole law breaker.  Instead of soldiers attacked a wounded man to deliver a second dose of punishment, we have merely an arrest.  Of course, I’ve had to make some suppositions here and may be mistaken, but keep in mind that this is a result of the caption not supplying key information.

The saving grace of photographs is that they can show what is happening contrary to the interpretation that is applied to them.  Even so, as many commentators have pointed out, captioning can significantly influence what is seen, what is remembered, and how it is used.  The caption tells you both what to see and what to ignore in the photograph.

Most of us would see a vicious beating.  The London Telegraph apparently wasn’t so sure, as it captioned the photo this way: “At least five people were killed when police fired on about 100 Muslim youths in the Kenyan capital who were protesting against the arrest of a radical Jamaican-born Muslim cleric whose teachings influenced one of the 2005 London bombers.”

Well. I guess we are to think that they guy on the ground is one of the lucky ones–after all, he’s still alive, isn’t he?  (Barely, I would guess.)  And if he is getting a good beating, perhaps we are to think that it might be deserved: after all, he is associated with one of the London bombers.  The paper is showing the violence, of course, but it also is coaching the viewer in how to look past it, minimize it, pretend that even though nasty things happen on behalf of homeland security one really doesn’t have to say that they happen.

So it turns out that there really are two sets of rules: the rules that guide reporting what is supposed to be said, and the rules that ensure that some things are not said.  That second list probably is longer than we would like to think (speaking of learned denial).  To give one indication, in my own not-scientific survey of documentary images, it seems to me that police brutality often is not mentioned.  To the credit of the news organizations, it is shown, but it it not mentioned.  That strategy probably is safer for the news organizations–they are less likely to be accused of being “political,” or of having their photographers beaten.  But the omission is not just a prudent division of labor: it schools the public in seeing and not saying.  In short, it encourages the worst form of bystander behavior.

Words were being manipulated long before photography existed. They still are being manipulated with all the power and subtlety that we expect of Photoshop.  When attached to a photograph, they can seem all the more innocent, as if providing nothing more than background information that can be checked instantly for its accuracy.  Except that those words often are not innocent, and they are persuading us to not see, not check, and not ask.

Photographs by Nasser Ishtayeh/Associated Press and by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters.  To read a better caption of the second photo, go here.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes and PetaPixel.

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Images like this one used to be depictions of the impersonality, alienation, and anomie of modern life.

Perhaps the retro chic and post-feminist nostalgia of Mad Men has changed the way we think about mid-century modernism, but the show is more likely to be a symptom than a cause.  For whatever reason, these completely uniform, featureless, rectilinear, steel and glass cages no longer have to carry the symbolic baggage of an earlier era’s popular sociology.  The Organization Man, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Lonely Crowd, Death of a Salesman, and other titles of sixty years ago documented the anxiety and desperation that hung like second hand smoke throughout the new society of imposing office towers and distant suburbs.

Individuals still have their preferences, of course, but modernism is now a period style rather than a dynastic order.  The technologies, architectural designs, and engineering have become ubiquitous and are used to support a wide range of artistic and political initiatives, while also no longer being directly coupled to either capitalist hegemony or authoritarian regimes.  (Le Corbusier once said the choice was between “Architecture or Revolution,” and, not to be outdone, the Soviet Union and China converted their revolutions into disastrous schemes for centralized, state-controlled modernization.) The modernism that was the leading edge of 20th century development has been relegated to the background in the 21st.

Just like the carpet at the office, you might say.  And with that demotion in status, it may be time to take another look.  Ironically, modernism’s abhorrence of decoration proved to be no safeguard against other kinds of excess, including hubris.  But cut back to scale, the functional simplicity, elegant abstraction, geometric patterning, subtle textures, and other characteristic features of modern design still are capable of evoking a sense of beauty and even of serenity.  Take away the imperial power, crushing hierarchies, and totalizing extension into all aspects of the lifeworld, and you are left with a sculpted space and muted tones that could nurture both comfort and creativity.

As with the two images above, modernism always was about radical manipulations of scale.  The same aesthetic could be found in a gleaming skyscraper and the chairs or staplers inside the building.  Usually it was about scaling up, however.  The sequence of images here provides a scaling down, much like the change in status that they represent.  One thing I like about the second picture is that the aesthetic is taken down yet another notch by the slight fraying of the wall covering along plastic baseboard.  Look closer still and you can see the line separating two swatches of carpet on the left.  Whether the original piecework or evidence of deterioration over time, these details give us a modern environment that isn’t so far removed from the human condition after all.

This corner, like the building above, will have become almost invisible.  Nothing distinctive to be seen either on the skyline or down the hall. They haven’t just faded into the background, they now are the background for another era still struggling to define itself–in fact, still struggling to even begin to become something other than another repetition of a culture hanging on past its time.  Perhaps one small way out of that dilemma is to see all of modernism as a useful backdrop to a future yet to be designed.  And when caught in one of those moments when the mind seems stuck, perhaps we might look a little closer at the surface of those things now taken for granted.  Things that, once the old urban angst no longer applies, we can see both for what they are and for how they might suggest better things yet to come.

Photographs by Michael Wolf, The Transparent City, and Lars Tunbjork/Agence VU, Office.  Both images are part of the slide show “A Major Case of ‘the Mondays’: Photographs of Office Life,” curated by Myles Little, Time Lightbox.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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There is no doubt that landscape photography is popular, but is it really important?  When people take photography seriously, they almost always are doing so to focus on the people who are being shown.  War, poverty, politics, sports–whatever the subject, the point is to show what people are doing and experiencing.  They are shown in specific circumstances, but there is no doubt that who matters more than where.

So why would we value an image that shows us only the land, the flow of light over a hill, and the ease with which the earth exceeds human scale?  Perhaps this photograph from Donglan county, Jiangping, Cbina isn’t the best example, as it allows a concession for admiring human handiwork.  The exquisitely fitted paddy fields are the result of many generations of careful agriculture, and if their beauty, as if fine jewelry, can’t be appreciated from the ground, they are no less artfully wrought for that.

Like any garden, most landscapes reflect human engineering of one sort or another–and not least the framing and other artistry provided by the camera–so perhaps it’s not such a bad example after all.  The landscape could be a subtle exercise in narcissism: Humans can pretend that they are looking at nature while actually admiring their own reflection.  Or these photos could be another form of vanity: suggesting an easy harmony between humanity and nature (and perhaps nature’s God).  Such photos rarely feature nature’s harshness, where animals will eat their prey before it dies, and in any case the camera will not let you feel how cold the desert gets at night or how flies can drive you mad.

Some landscapes have been put to very good use, and very serious use, in the service of the environmental movement.  With images from Ansel Adams’ portraits of Yosemite to the Earthrise on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog to the successive Sierra Club magazine covers to the many documentaries of environmental degradation, landscape photography has been a powerful means for political advocacy on behalf of a planet that cannot speak for itself.

I wouldn’t want to leave it there, however.  At some point, the environmentalism (which includes some posts at this blog) overwrites the images; they become merely means to an end, rather than something also capable of guiding other forms of reflection.  Let me suggest one such alternative, one that is consistent with an environmental ethos but not the same thing either.

Whatever else it is, the landscape photograph can be an image of abundance.  Whether capturing purple mountain majesties or the traces of the wind on a barren sand dune, the landscape shows a world that is immensely larger, more interconnected, more amazing than anything any human society will ever make.  Buddhism has tried to capture that immensity, and to contrast it to the paucity of human meaning-making, but I’m not sure the Abrahamic religions and the civilizations they are part of have an equivalent point of departure.  Sure, there are Biblical passages celebrating cosmic power, but that’s just the beginning of how one might marvel at the richness of this planet in this universe.

None of this denies the role of scarcity in nature or human affairs.  Indeed, the photograph above can be seen as a subtle meditation of how to build a sustainable relationship with scarcity on behalf of abundance.  But often abundance is misunderstood and under appreciated (“under theorized,” as they say on my side of the street).  A few have approached it–Georges Bataille, Paul Feyerabend, Anne Norton–but an abundance of writing on the subject is not yet the norm.

I don’t think complaints about over-consumption qualify as a sufficient account of abundance, as they presume a more beneficial scarcity.  And don’t conclude that this post a brief for obesity, gluttonous oil consumption, or other dysfunctional or non-sustainable habits that harm individuals, society, and the environment.  Both abundance and scarcity need to be understood apart from contemporary extremes, not least if we are to see how often those extremes are artificial rather than natural conditions.

Whatever has been said, I doubt that it begins to articulate how much we could learn, and how well we could live, if we were to really look at what landscapes can reveal.

 

Photographs by  Xinhua/Landov/Barcroft Media and Elmar Akhmetov/Sony World Photography 2013  award.

 

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