Photographers are finding it harder and harder to make a living while print journalism is being pulled deeper and deeper into the undertow of history, but photography is experiencing a renaissance.

I don’t have the time today to say much at all, but consider two related examples of how photography is thriving as a public art: the rise in highly accessible distribution and in high quality curatorial work, all of which is coming to be taken for granted.

The distribution is amazing.  Life and Look are long gone, but the slide shows at In Focus, The Big Picture, and many other online newspapers and magazines are becoming increasingly prominent and sophisticated, and the images are relayed and given added value through the commentary and discussion at any number of photography blogs, all of which of course then flows through social media as well, which also is circulating billions of vernacular images while sending some of them up the media chain, and so it goes on day after day.

This media swirl could be a maelstrom, but in the midst of it all major media are investing in photo editors who are doing amazing work.  Sure, cliches still abound, as we are talking about mainstream media in mass societies, thank you very much.  People want some of that, and the press has to make a living, and frankly every day isn’t so unique as the Hallmark card might want you to believe.  (Speaking of cliches. . . . )  Even so there is plenty of curatorial work, not least by Alan Taylor at In Focus as well as other sources alluded to above, that is remarkably good.

And there is one source that may be an index of the changes that have occurred.  Time was never the gold standard in photojournalism (the division of labor with Life probably accounted for a lot of that).  But Time’s online LightBox just keeps getting better and better.  I used to go to Time for examples of what not to do, and now I kick myself for what I’ve been missing.

The addition of Mikko Takkunen is the most recent example of how Time is making a strong investment in photojournalism.  But there is much more going on as well.  Just today, I noticed their 365: The Year in Photographs, which I hadn’t seen yet for 2012.  The concept is as cliched as it gets, and yet the selection is outstanding: one that reflects a rich aesthetic sensibility that still serves reporting and reflecting on the news.

They aren’t perfect, of course, but the trend is definitely in the right direction.  And you can’t say that about a lot of the news business these days.  Let’s hope that investing in quality can become part of the business model again, and not just for photography.

Photograph by Narciso Contreras/Associated Press.  Dec. 1, 2012. Smoke rises from buildings due to heavy fighting between Free Syrian Army fighters and government forces in Aleppo, Syria.

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One of the many things that photographs do is to function as mirrors, reflecting ordinary and everyday human behavior.  And because they have the capacity to stop action, they invite us to contemplate what we regularly take for granted.  Sometimes, however, they capture the exotic, or the down right bizarre, inviting us to meditate on the ordinary as it is “reflected” by the  extraordinary. Nonhuman animals, whether wild or domesticated, often stand in for humans, embodying and performing all manner of emotions (like compassion), affects (like raw fear), and norms that invite a more complex or revealing understanding of the “human condition” than we might get by looking at humans alone.  The photograph above is a minor case in point.  The scene is in Kuala Lumpur; the monkey, who is the focus of the image and wears the flag of the People’s Justice Party, rests on a motorcycle and attends to a speech by Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Malaysian opposition.  The monkey wears the flag of the opposition party, so we can assume he (?) is a supporter, but more to the point, is that he is altogether other-directed, respectful of and attentive to the speaker.  A somewhat rare thing in this day and age.   And not just attentive, but contemplative, as he appears to listen with care, weighing each and every word spoken. While only a domesticated animal he nevertheless seems to be a mature model of civic decorum.

By contrast, the photograph below tells a different story.

Here we have Aaron Schock, the representative from Illinois’ 18^th District and the youngest member of the House of Representatives.  He is intently reading the April issue of Washington Life magazine, which advertises itself as “D.C. Metro area’s premiere guide to luxury, power, philanthropy, and style.” There is no way to tell what in particular has captured his attention, but one of the featured articles this month discusses how to beat the stress of tax day and perhaps that is what has him so entranced.  Or maybe it is the fashion report on “Barbie’s new Swag.”  Whatever it might be, it must be pretty important given that just outside of the frame of the picture Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is testifying to the House Ways and Means Committee on Medicare spending.  Given that Schock serves on the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security one would think that he would be concerned about issues related to health care spending for the aged—particularly given the prevailing attitude of House Republicans towards budgeted funding for social welfare programs—and thus would attend carefully to the testimony before engaging the Secretary in dialogue; or at the least we might think that he would show some respect for the speaker as a matter of civic decorum in the most important legislative assembly in the nation.  But apparently we would be wrong in making either assumption, or at least that is what the photograph would invite us to consider. What the mirror here reflects is a self-indulgent and rude individual who appears to show no concern for the gravity of his office or those he serves.

Placed side-by-side the two photographs mirror the extraordinary and the ordinary. Upon reflection it is not clear which is which.  But the only real question is: with which are we willing to identify?

Photo Credit:  Mohd Rasfan/AFP/Getty Images; J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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Spring is a season of festivals: Chinese New Year, Carnival, Mardi Gras, and many, many more around the globe.  A recent example is the Holi festival, which you can see in slide shows here and here.  Such celebrations are photographic attractors, and for obvious reasons: brightly colored costumes, outlandish floats, dazzling light shows, and other displays of over-the-top theatricality in ordinary settings provide ritualized departure from winter’s humdrum routines, as well as plenty of eye candy.

And once in a while, a moment of profound visual art.  This stunning photo is a powerful example of how the camera can do more than capture the color and excitement of another culture.

Holi is a festival of color: individuals festoon themselves with paints while great crowds of people are drenched in colored powders of every hue.  Colored water bombs explode, people sing, dance, and surge through the streets, and not a few may be imbibing intoxicants along the way.  There also are vernacular theatricals replaying mythic stories, which is why, in the photo here, “Indian villagers from Nandgaon wait for the arrival of villagers from Barsana to play Lathmar Holi at the Nandagram temple famous for Lord Krishna and his brother Balram, in Nandgaon, India.”

Despite its aesthetic fidelity to the festival, this photo is quite unconventional.  Many festival images feature thick washes of color, the energy and excitement of people in motion, and displays of massed exhilaration.  By contrast, here we see the riot of color framed and subdued by the blue grey building, static poses instead of movement, individuals instead of a crowd, and attitudes ranging from bored to indifferent.  And instead of being in the middle of the action, they and we are waiting for something to happen.  And while that isn’t happening, we can sense that what is yet to come already is on its way being over: the red/orange/yellow/green stains look more messy than festive, and it is easy to imagine how the clothes will be washed, the walls washed down, and the bodies scrubbed to return everyone and everything to the ordinary time and business as usual the extends beyond the ritual celebration.

So the photographer isn’t showing us the festival that we would expect to see–an expectation determined by ideological habits that locate culture in the premodern present of a developing world known for being more colorful than productive.  (See Reading National Geographic for a thoughtful account of how these habits are formed.)  And when you think of it, the virtual experience that is being communicated by the typical photographs is a bit of a sham.  Instead of all the noise and sounds and physical sensations of being pulled along by a crowd, intoxicated with sensual overload, freely yelling and laughing gleefully, we get—an image.  Mute, and also lacking taste, smell, sound, or touch, two-dimensional, static . . . there isn’t much to get excited about.  Of all the media that one might use to capture the experience of being caught up in a moment of collective delirium, photography probably is the worst choice you could make.

And that should tell us something.  Several things, in fact.  One is that the photographs that we do have must be working not merely in respect to the event being recorded, and not merely to reproduce that event, but rather in respect to a larger economy of images, one where they provide visions, or reminders, of social relations that are needed to fill out a larger conception of the world as picture.  Another is that the visual encounter, and the virtual festival, might be doing more than we realize, for example, by stimulating imaginative reconstructions of events as if we were experiencing them through our full sensorium.  (This is in part a psychological question, which I’ll leave to the scientists, but it also could be an interpretive claim.)  A third point is that a specific image may seem more profound to some viewers (me, for example) as it comes to approximate the conventions of the Western fine art pictorial tradition.  Most important, however, photography’s limitations when it comes to festivals could also provide a way of thinking about the role of ritual in human affairs.

And so we get back to the photograph above.  It gives us a more institutional sense of theatricality, and with that, a basis for serious reflection on the relationship between drama and life.  The guys in the picture are not merely villagers out of role, but rather acting like experienced troupers long accustomed to waiting backstage.  And they are backstage, which provides a reverse shot on the explicit theatricality of the festival while miming a type of social theory developed by Erving Goffman and others.

And there is more: they are arrayed as if on stage, but in the sense of being posed for a painting.  The four arched spaces could have been taken from a renaissance alterpiece, one now updated to include Hindu saints.  Or they could be statues on a cathedral, giving us apostles, angels, and perhaps a defiant gargoyle on the inner left.  Krisha has no need of a cathedral, of course, but some of his viewers might need a little help in seeing what is right in front of their eyes.

If you go back through the slide shows on Holi and the other festivals, it turns out that there are quite a few backstage shots.  The photographers are doing what they have to do to file the story to compete in a marketplace of attention, but they are doing more than that as well.  Precisely because the photo above is so static and composed, it gives us some insight into the carnival’s celebration of excess, play acting, and role reversals.

Or perhaps more than one insight. On the one hand, human beings are always on stage, always acting, always in character even when no one is supposed to be looking.  And if waiting is part of the frenzy, then likewise the madness that is supposed to be released during the festival is always with us, no matter how mundane ordinary life may seem.  On the other hand and at the same time, we retain an ability to step back, be still, carefully look at one another, and marvel at the strange, beautiful, fallen angels before us, just as they look and marvel at us.  Indeed, all the distractions of color and action might be there in part to avoid seeing how much can be seen in ritual repose.

So look again.  Notice that those in the photograh are not only being looked at, they also are looking: at others outside the frame, inwardly, and at us.  As we study them, they study us, each mirroring the other.

Photograph by Manish Swarup/Associated Press.

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The “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart,” aka The Berlin Wall, perhaps the preeminent icon of the Cold War, came down officially in 1989.  Photographs at the time featured throngs of individuals standing on the wall and around it, many using hammers and pick axes to destroy it.  Images of large scale demolition followed and as time has passed we have seen photographs of the wall converted into relics of a distant time and place—who would like to buy a piece of the wall for display in their living room?—or of specific locations such as the famous Checkpoint Charlie paved over with hot dog stands and tourist attractions.

The largest remnant of the wall is a nearly mile long section along the Spree River known as the East Side Gallery on which artists have painted murals—105 paintings in all—marking Germany’s history and the movement to freedom that culminated in 1989.  It is by some accounts the largest outdoor gallery in the world and something of a memorial to its own creation, its vibrant colors a marker of individualism and freedom and a stark contrast to the drab gray of the walls that it covers and which served as the institutional aesthetic of the Soviet Bloc authoritarian political culture that it supplanted.

But alas, the forces of progress known no bounds, as in the recent image above in which heavy industrial equipment is being used to eliminate a large section of the wall to make way for an access road to luxury apartments that are being built nearby.  Where once “the people” thronged to tear down a drab, authoritarian wall in the name of democracy—and, one might assume, the ideology of free markets—the forces of democracy and free markets now conspire to eliminate the colorful vestiges of the freedom that animated it in the first place.

And so we have the photograph below.

Portions of the wall that contain the East Side Galley have been torn down, only to be replaced by drab, industrial grey barriers that gate the pathway to the development of capitalist development.  The only colors that stand out are those of a  woman wearing a red beret and a colorful scarf.  She holds a yellow rose, an international symbol of friendship, but in Germanic cultures also a symbol of jealousy and the fear and insecurity attendant to an anticipated loss.  Individual freedom and a different version of institutional control are once again at odds with one another   And one can only wonder if she isn’t contemplating the opening lines to Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice.  He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Photo Credits: Britta Pedersen/DPA via AP; Carsten Koall/Getty Images

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I spent much way too much  of the morning yesterday listening to the Sunday talk shoes where the primary topic of discussion concerned the role that government should play in regulating our lives.  Gay marriage, sugared water, and guns were the focus, but at its heart the real concern was whether the state should guarantee liberty and freedom or public order.  What all seemed to forget (or ignore) was that this is not a simple opposition that can or should be resolved easily or once and for all in one direction to the exclusion of the other.  A world in which all are free to do whatever they want has a name (anarchy), as does a world in which there is total order and control (fascism) and neither is particularly salutary.  Indeed, what makes liberal democracy such a difficult and precarious political institution is that it sits on a rather narrow precipice between the two, its success dependent on the necessity of maintaining equilibrium between liberty and order and predicated on some measure of public trust in the institutions that administer that balance.  And therein lies the real problem, for at the current moment our political institutions suffer from a deficit of public trust.

The photograph above appeared randomly in one of the daily slideshows yesterday afternoon, and in its way it displays a simple model of how government regulations often work effectively in the background and how they rely upon public trust to manage the tension between liberty and order.  Without stop lights our public thoroughfares would be both chaotic and a hazard to vehicles and pedestrians alike.  The regulation of traffic through alternating signals to “stop” and “go” make it possible for all to use the roads equitably and in a manner that is both orderly and safe.  Shut at dusk and in a snow storm tinged haze that otherwise makes visibility problematic, the alternating red and green lights mark the normal rhythm of the thoroughfare, designating zones of free movement and public safety.  And as the image above indicates, the traffic seems to move pretty well.

What makes the system work, of course, is the trust that one has in the system itself: a trust that the regulations maximize both the flow of traffic and the safety of all; a trust that the regulations recognize and address the competing interests of all in more or less equitable terms—or when equity is sacrificed that it is done for reasons that serve a compelling public interest; and perhaps most importantly, a trust that pedestrians and vehicles will both honor the regulations, yielding to the other as the rule of law dictates.  Without such trust the regulations themselves will fail and the legitimacy of the system itself will be at risk.  The potential problem is gestured to in the above photograph as we see pedestrians who appear to be crossing against the light and thus challenging the rule of law. There is no traffic in the foreground and so it would seem like they are safe and that, at least in this instance, they do not impede the public order.  Perhaps they have good reasons for their transgression and we should certainly be willing to take that into account.  That, after all, is what we have the courts for.  Still, the presumption is against them, and their refusal to follow the rules is both a clear threat to the prevailing institutions of law and a reminder that we need someone to be responsible for making sure that the regulations are upheld in order to secure the public trust. Without both our streets would be neither free nor orderly.

The point to be made is that the problem of government regulation writ large, rather like the problem of regulating traffic, is never as simple as the relationship between stop and go.  It also requires a profound trust in the rule of law that animates such regulation as well as those who work to manage and maintain the complex tension between liberty and order without sacrificing one to the other—or imagining that such a sacrifice could ever be in the best interests of the larger society.

Photo Credit:  Charlie Riedel/AP

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I have been reading a good bit about “big data” lately (e.g., here).  The basic assumption is that when you expand the scale large enough last century’s concern with sampling as the basis for prediction becomes irrelevant, the value of accuracy or “rigid exactitude” is mitigated by the overall messiness of large data sets, and correlation becomes more important than causation.  The result is a capacity to see things we could never see before, such that algorithms based upon 45 carefully calculated search terms arrived at after processing 450 million mathematical models and based upon what individuals were searching related to “coughs,” “fevers” and the like allowed Google to pinpoint the path of a flu epidemic much more effectively than all the doctors in the world with tongue depressors and mouth swabs or the CDC with its wide ranging national networks of information.  We have always relied upon data, but “scale” it seems is the operative principle of the brave new world of judgment and decision making.

Scale, of course, has always been one of the things that photography marks particularly well. Animated by a technology that presumes a realist aesthetic, the photograph can call our attention to the relationship between large and small through the presentation of provocative comparisons and contrasts.  Consider the photograph above.  The caption notes that we are viewing the silhouette of a small jet cast against the background of a rising moon in Arizona.  The contrast in scale—the enormity of the moon and tiny speck of a jet—invites the viewer to consider the hubris in claims like “man is the measure of all things,”  or at the least it encourages us to recognize the irony in such claims.  But the photograph enables other considerations of scale as well.  As large as we know the moon to be, and as small as we know even the largest jet to be, the moon here might be seen to pale in the comparison; large, yes, but not so large that we can’t imagine blocking it out its view completely with relatively small number of jets.  And the point is, of course, that the value of scale is riven by the usages to which we put it and the questions we seek to answer.  This seems to be an attribute of the emphasis on scale that is always put on display by the particularity of the photograph, but is somehow too often  ignored or forgotten in the more abstract, quantitative representation of data.

And there is more, as the photograph below indicates:

Once again scale is the operative principle as large and small are juxtaposed with one another, as the large, former NBA basketball player dwarfs the little prince.  Or is it the other way around?  Does North Korea’s Supreme Leader dwarf the fading sports celebrity?  In the end, both readings of the image operate simultaneously such that the photograph challenges the particular meaning of scale by calling attention to the carnivelesque relationship between two public figures in ways that suggest that the stature of neither is very considerable.

Scale is important, to be sure, but it is best not to lose sight of the ways in which it always operates as an optic of critical judgment and in that register the data—big or small—is always subordinate to a more complex register of interpretation and usage.

Photo Credit:  Charlie Riedel/AP; North Korean Central News Agency via European Pressphoto Agency

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It would seem that photography could not have a theory of anything: a theorem is a proposition or set of propositions that can explain a process, while a photograph is not a proposition at all and records only a single place in a single moment of time.  Theorems can be proved to be true or false, and if true they account for some pattern, relationship, or regularity that can occur more than once.  Photographs always show what they show, even if faked, and they are tethered to particularity.  The image below is not a theory of diving or swimming or falling bodies or winter rituals or anything else; it is a photograph of a man diving into a lake on a winter’s day.

Unless, that is, you want to actually think about what is in front of your eyes.  This remarkable image has captured something essential about the nature of action.  Whether defined as intentional motion, conduct to achieve a result, performance of a function, military encounter, or legal initiative, action involves throwing oneself forward into a space that is both known and unknown.  There is prior deliberation, the decision to act, the action, the experience that ensues, and the result, and all can be occur in a single rush of consciousness–something like entering the water of a winter lake.

Photography stops time to reveal each separate moment in the logical unfolding of an action.  Here the man is caught in to sheer act of acting: of throwing himself forward, suspended between past and future—between the prior time that led to this bold, decisive point from which there is no turning back, and the moment when consequences will suddenly, irrevocably exist.

As with the man’s silhouette, this sheer act is mirrored by the serenity of the smooth surface of the water, with just the faintest ripple of his leap beginning to show.  The calm surface will cease to exist in an instant, but in this moment it is a mirror that reveals not only the ephemeral nature of the act itself, but also the ability of the camera to create a silhouette above the water, and one that lasts long after the act itself have disappeared.

Of course, the man leaps to enter the water, and so the first image shows us something about to happen.  This second photograph is remarkable not because of the amazing physical skill of the man on the beach, but because of how it uses his yogic power to expose action in the moment that it is happening.  Paradoxically, his immobility shows us the soul of intentional motion: instead of being merely a falling body, he arrests motion to demonstrate bodily control.  The contrast with the beach chairs makes the point all the more clear.  They can stand there much longer than he can hold his position, but that is all they can do and they can’t even decide to do that.  They are inert matter, while he is the demonstration of embodied spirit.  Natural forces suffuse the scene, but his repose demonstrates a unique capability for action that is more than any natural force.

The photograph also works paradoxically: it’s ability to freeze movement seems unnecessary, as he will be almost perfectly immobile, but the ability of the camera is mirrored by his action, and so we are more than usually aware of how the moment of action can be extended, how long it can seem from within, how much concentration and effort can be present within what seems to be all flow.

This next photo takes us to what follows: the instant through which what is happening includes something unhappening.  The man is acting, moving forward, and although he seems to be surging through the fourth wall into our space, the camera has caught what is only a relatively routine activity.  He acts by rowing a boat on the Ganges, but the marvelous, world changing reality of action is revealed by the birds exploding off the water. They may be just reacting, but in doing so they and he together reveal the charismatic property of action.  It undoes whatever stasis that was, creating a second burst of energy.  He could be an eternal figure, but not Charon on the river Styx; no, he reveals how acting is a simultaneous making and unmaking of the world.  Like the diver, he moves into what is both known and unknown, but now we are more aware of how changes lie behind him as much as they are in the future.

And so we get to the last photo or a protester kicking in the glass of a commercial building in Barcelona, Spain.  This photo exposes everything at once by capturing a moment of perfect equipoise from which ferocious energies are being released.  This is the world shattering moment when the actor is both exploding into the future and being thrown back into the past.  This act of force acquires a multiplying factor, for action and reaction are perfectly paired processes, much like the protestor and his mirror image, joined at the point of impact and already falling away in opposite directions.  There was an ordered world, and then this moment of radical change, and then everything will continue to fall forward and backwards, into continual change not yet foreseen and past circumstances that may change very little except to be forgotten.

Photography is a medium that documents people acting and being acted upon.  The action itself often can be taken for granted while attention rightly turns to its motives or effects.  But action itself is a profound form of being in the world.  It may not be limited to human beings, but it defines them nonetheless.  Understanding action remains an unfinished task for philosophy, but it also might benefit from paying more attention to photography.

Photographs by Petar Kujundzic/Reuters, Ariel Schalit/Associated Press, Zach Gibson, Juanfra Alvarez.  Gibson and Alvarez are the first two photographers featured in an excellent Big Picture exhibition of Photojournalists Under 25.

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