I had a difficult time selecting a photograph for today’s post, as everything I looked at couldn’t help but be about the bloodletting in Gaza.  The images of the day either were from that war zone or seemed to be a way to avoid thinking about it.  Since these obviously are subjective reactions, let me add that neither option seemed acceptable.  The latest escalation is producing wreckage across the board: in the streets and homes of Gaza, in Israel’s identity and reputation, and in the prospects for dialogue anywhere.  Apparently this is what the extremists on each side want, and they seem to always get what they want, don’t they?

If they live long enough, one side or the other might be able to win, to triumph, to rise to great heights as they reveal the full potential of their glorious civilization, and then if they really go the distance they could come to this:

The photograph is from the Wells of Memory, a story in the July National Geographic magazine about a journey through back country Saudi Arabia.  The ruin is the remnant of a tomb at Madain Salih created by the Nabataeans, an ancient people who have left few traces of their once proud culture.  Ruins are object lessons, and one lesson here may be that both the Palestinians and the Israeli’s have done better than many other peoples at staying on the surface of history.  Perhaps it is better to fight than assimilate, and to persuade outsiders to fund you as you do it.  Except that the Nabataeans did all of that, too.

What strikes me about this image of a ruin is how devoid it is of melancholy.  That mood doesn’t have to accompany the fragments of ancient civilizations, but it often does and for the good reason that it has been an important resource for thoughtful reflection on the course of history and human finitude.  But something else is being offered here.  The building looks almost like a movie set: not some part of a previous whole, but rather something constructed to create an illusion of monumentality when seen from the right angle.  It looks massive, but also mobile, as if it could be moved around as needed for the shoot.  The sharp edges and strong contrasts in the lighting enhance this sense of instrumentality, as does the lone figure peering within.  This may be a matter of curiosity, not melanchony; a footnote to history, not its endlessly recurring story.

The shift away from romanticism need not stop there, however.  There can be more than one kind of ruin, as there is need for more than one type of allegory.  I’ve posted recently on how the material production of ruins is continuing, and perhaps changing, in ways we should find troubling.  Any time a photographer creates an image of a ruin, whatever the age of the object photographed, we are provided with another opportunity to think about the relationship between past, present, and future.  In that light, the achievement of this image might be that it has replaced melancholy with a sense of objectivity.  This is a stronger epistemological attitude than curiosity, and one that can offer something to those thinking about a real time tragedy.

This objectivity asks that we place the furor of the present against the full historical record, in order to recalibrate the political and moral discourses that have come to dominate a controversy.  Against the long succession of regimes in the region, against the continual mixing of cultures, much of what passes for reasoning becomes so much nonsense.  Admittedly, one response that remains is sheer Realpolitik: interstate politics provides no alternative to the struggle for survival in a state of nature, which requires the use of power and especially military force without regard for morality.  As some of us have argued elsewhere, that argument is simplistic and often self-defeating.  (For the record, that doesn’t rule out all use of power.)  In any case, one can at least consider that another lesson might be available and perhaps even pre-emptive.

Perhaps the Nabataean ruin suggests that the only time we are actually here is now.  Keynes’s observation that “in the long run, we’re all dead” applies to politics just as much as it does to economics.  For all the effort put into permanence, the record is one of continual change.  Ironically, peoples and religions can persist, but their involvement with states and other powers is not necessarily the source of that achievement, and where it does contribute it also corrupts.

The question the ruin raises, then, is whether political actors might behave better, trying to get more for their people in the short term, if they realized just how unlikely the long term was.   It’s hard to say, but I do note that the enemies of peace in the case at hand, on both sides, seem to be resolutely committed to a long view.  How much they will sacrifice for that illusion remains to be seen.

Photograph by John Stanmeyer/National Geographic.

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Governments are still in the business of producing posed photographs, and many of those look posed, but not many look as if they were posed 60 years ago.  For that, you have to go to North Korea.

It’s no secret that North Korea is living in a relative dark age–literally, when you see satellite photos of it at night, and in many other ways as well, not least in having a gulag of prisons in which hundreds of thousands of people have been tortured, murdered, and worked to death.  But nobody’s perfect, right?

I can hardly believe that I’m posting on this photograph, which is a standard propaganda image that puts a smiling face on a brutal totalitarian regime.  Most of the time, this blog tries to feature photojournalism as it is an artistically and politically significant public art.  I select the images almost solely because of how they stop me, grab me, speak to some part of me.  I begin with that intuitive, emotional reaction, load the image into the WordPress software, and try to figure out what the photo has to say.  No art can avoid repetition, and journalism couldn’t exist without it, but for the most part you won’t see me spending my time ruminating over stock photos taken by a government news agency.  Of course, when the photo is of Kim Jong Un, the door is wide open for ridiculing the Dear Leader, and there are plenty of examples of that around, but cheap satire hasn’t been our thing at NCN either.

So there must be something to this photograph after all.  I’ve seen many others of the Dear Leader–he seems to be stock figure, or running joke, in the slide shows–but none caught my attention.  So what is it?  Let me suggest several answers that reflect various dimensions of the photographic encounter.  Perhaps the first hook is the contrast between the smiling figure in the center of the group and everyone around him.  He’s having a ball; the others, not so much.  That simple distinction comes out of photography’s most basic elements: its combination of focus and frame to depict the behavior and relationships of vernacular life.  Those relationships often are layered, as here we see the conventional groupings of the posed photograph, the work team, a celebrity mingling with the little people, and the political leader visiting the provinces.  Each of these in turn suggests that additional information or insight may be available: we can see modern image culture, the less than impressive soldiers in what looks like a make-work group, the fact that Un actually has picked up a thing or two from the Western media, and an allegory for the distribution of happiness in North Korea.

The next dimension of the photo becomes evident if we step back to consider a sense of historical context, as then the retro look is particularly obvious.  The photo’s composition goes right down the checklist for Taking Good Pictures: vertical interest on the right, horizontal interest on the left, etc.  The green gun mount and boxy/baggy uniforms have 1950s written all over them.  As does the setting: coastal defense, who does coastal defense today?  Artillery, that’s your high tech?  And look at that blue water: shouldn’t they be putting up a seaside resort?  North Korea is not exactly a leader in resort development, so we are left with something else: a photograph of the way the world used to be.  As with much else in that sad place, photography in North Korea can be a trip down a worm hole into the past.

This is not photography as an aide-memoire, but rather an image of what still persists even though we would be better off without it.  The world today is a mess, but at least the relative “innocence” on display in this photograph from North Korea is rarely an option.  It’s just a photograph, but consider how much repression has to be in place for it to exist as it does.  From this perspective, the photo becomes a form of documentary evidence, a valuable addition to the archive.  This is how a nation looks, when it shouldn’t look that way at all.

Photograph by the North Korean Central News Agency.

 

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Once again it is a time to say “Thanks” to all our readers, and not least to those who mention, retweet, or favorite us on Twitter.

We won’t be posting for a few weeks.  We plan to return on Monday, July 7 to begin another year at NCN.

Photograph by J. Sander/plainpicture/Corbis.

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A frame is always a specification: look here, not there; inside, not outside this space.  Photography’s framing of the world seems to be essential to both its success and its liabilities.  It allows specific persons, places, things, and events to be seen, and always without most of what surrounds, constrains, qualifies, or otherwise defines them.  So it is that captions are thought to be essential: only they can say what lies outside the frame.

But that doesn’t mean they would tell you much, or that the additional context contributes to perception.  Let me suggest that this photo will be diminished, not enhanced once you learn that it is showing steam rising from a thoroughbred horse in Kentucky.  That caption has widened the frame, but only to make the image less distinctive, less focused, less intense, and less suggestive.  It has displaced what are acutely aesthetic properties, substituting instead a common sense understanding of a routine world.  In that world, horses and steam are very familiar things, and things rarely seen without some larger interest controlling perception.  What is the temperature?  Will he run well today?  You might as well ask What’s for lunch?  Whatever the answer, it comes with a very wide and very conventional sense of context.

Photographs are so useful in so many settings because of how they provide neatly framed perceptions.  “Here, look at this?” can be a very pragmatic and efficient act.  The uniformity of the physical framing is an important part of that pragmatism, even as it sets up the medium for easy criticism.  (Hint: reality is not prepackaged.  Why that isn’t said about painting is beyond me.)  What may be under-appreciated is how the framing works in concert with a deep tendency toward formalism.  Framing still is tilted toward specificity, but it also can, in some cases, transform perception from being focused on objective subject matter to being attuned to formal patterns.

Patterns, of course, are never merely specific.  They generalize.  They come from somewhere and extend, if only in the imagination, through continued replication.  But to do that, they have to be interrupted.  A continuous pattern soon becomes a blank wall, an empty horizon, a long stretch of ground.  Hence, the importance of the frame: by cutting off perception, it brings form into view.  What remains to be fully explored is how these two elements of all artistic expression combine in photography to create a distinctive capacity for abstraction, or perhaps for something that is no longer merely specific but not quite abstract.  Something that may go without saying in language, but that could perhaps have additional power in a visual medium.

If nothing else, photography at least provides a distinctive availability.   In the right hands, all you need is an iPhone:

 

 

Photographs by Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images and David Sutton/Sutton Studios.  For an excellent study of abstraction in fine art photography, see Lyle Rexer, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (New York: Aperture, 2009).

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One of the standard criticisms of photography is that it produces an idealized conception of reality.  Framing, depth of field, and many other techniques are used to feature what is attractive and ignore everything else.  Much of the time we see single events, not the surrounding confusion or complexity; clean surfaces, not inner turbulence; smiles, not heartache.  Of course photojournalism and art photography alike strive to escape these conventions, whether to document what is going wrong in the world or to explore extraordinary modes of perception.  But for every one of those images, there are thousands from commercial photography, advertising, public relations, travel and snapshot photography, pornography, soft news–in fact, just about everything else, including those great pictures of distant galaxies from NASA.  And did I mention sunsets?

If I had a dollar for every photograph like this one. . . . . Yet they continue to appear, and not only on Flickr and Facebook.  The more conventional they become, the easier it is to disdain them.  So, we can point out that this “real” sunset is also a highly idealized portrait of nature.  And of a nature that, like the dog waiting for the stick to be thrown, has been thoroughly domesticated.  Except that you can’t domesticate the sea and the sky, not least on a planet becoming less hospitable to humanity due to modern resource consumption, so we have only a delusion of control and reciprocal beneficence.

The photo also assumes that the woman (and dog) can easily escape any bad turn in the weather, and that she can take the leisurely stroll because she doesn’t have to depend on actually finding enough to eat along the shore.  Her leisure and ours in enjoying the image depend on a prior, taken-for-granted surplus; without it, the photo could only be a weather report or a guide for foraging.  Any thought that somewhere, somehow, sustainable food, shelter, and other protections might be at risk is put to rest by the vision of natural harmony.  Human, animal, and inanimate nature share a common beauty, what more do you need to know?

I think that is one reading, but not the only legitimate reading of the image.  In other posts, I’ve suggested how landscapes and other seemingly superficial images and conventional emotions can provide important resources for living together: for example, by inviting us to a more abundant life than we might think possible.  I will say, however, that until recently I was much less likely to see just how idealized many images were.  And then I saw this photo:

The caption said, “A crow eats it’s [sic] prey sitting on the roof of the Chancellery in Berlin on May 6, 2014.”  That’s a model caption–who, what, where, when–which doesn’t begin to capture what is being shown.  On reflection, of course, we are seeing nothing unusual.  How do you think all those birds you see stay alive?  (They don’t all eat sunflower seeds.)  This is nature up close and personal.  There may still be a small measure of buffering, as at least in this instance the prey is not being eaten while still alive, but I’d say we are close enough, thank you.

The image is remarkable in its close depiction of predation, but even more remarkable for its rarity.  This is a very unusual photograph, yet one that could be taken every day.  It presents a very different vision of nature from the sunset.  Here survival is front and center, nature consists of killing and being killed, and while there may be pleasure there is no room for remorse.

By focusing without flinching on a single meal by a single bird, the photographer has exposed the pervasive idealization that saturates so much of our mediated experience of the natural world.  It would be a small step from there to conclude that the second image is superior to the first: showing us reality as it is, not as we wish it would be; reminding us that we, too, are animals who kill to eat, not pretending that we treat all animals like pets; showing that nature is wholly indifferent to whether any animal lives or dies, not assuming that we fit seamlessly into a natural order of transcendental beauty.

It would be easy to stop there.  Let me suggest, however, that doing so would be mistaken.  A vigorous realism has to go beyond the claim that life is harsh, and idealization might be one way that we rise above that condition, however precariously.  Consider for example, what it would be like if the second photo were the norm: that we saw thousands of images like it every day.  (One could say we do but don’t know it, because they involve humans preying on other humans.  Let’s leave that for another day.)  Imagine that photography’s consistent message was that nature was cruel, that life was only a struggle to survive at others’ expense, that fairness and every other social value had nothing to do with it, and that there was nothing to be seen that suggested any other way of being in the world.  Of course, that message is being promulgated from one end of the political spectrum, but fortunately they don’t have photography on their side.  (TV and film are another story.)  The consequences probably would be gruesome.

So it is that idealization may not be so bad after all.  Not all of it, and not without criticism and other reminders of how it can be misleading, but compared to a severe insistence on the struggle for survival, visions of a beautiful, peaceful world might be worth having.  Better yet, perhaps they could be inspirations to create such a world in reality.

Photographs by Larry Steagall/Kitsap Sun via the Associated Press and Odd Andersen/AFP-Getty Images.

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I won’t mess with you: he’s alive.  They’re just kids playing at the beach.  “Hey, cover me with sand, OK?”  “Sure, you wanna be a mummy or a zombie?”  And it was a beautiful day, with lots of  kids and some adults all having a fine time.  And nothing terrible happened to wreck the day.  In much of the world, that wouldn’t be news, but this was in Somalia.

It’s a remarkable photo, of course, even if you don’t know the locale.  Zombie, mummy, initiation rite, mud pack, body cast, bombing casualty, burn victim, corpse, death mask, burial rite, . . . . The photographer has captured something like spontaneous performance art in everyday life: a moment of theatrical technique in the time out of time of a vacation day, and to register some deep sense of the uncanny.  The boy is both alive and dead, whole and maimed, playing in the everyday world and exhibiting the ghastly iconography of a war zone.  It seems that even his pal is starting to sense that something strange is happening.  And something strange is happening: an interlude of play is being overtaken by the possibility of a horrific future.

Somalia is one of the more dangerous places in the world right now. This photograph provided the visual coda for a story on Mohamed Abdiwahab, a freelance photographer who has been taking hundreds of images of the carnage for the past several years.  It’s a small miracle that he’s still alive, and living means that he has to deal with both the trauma of conflict photography and the near total indifference of most of the world to whether Somalians live or die.

Which is another reason that the photograph above is remarkable, for it documents what is most likely to be forgotten and most surprising when brought back to our attention.  Thus, it is a both reminder and a statement of hope.  We are reminded that Somalia is not just a war zone, and that the people there, like people everywhere, continue to do what they can to enjoy life, not least the simple pleasures of a day at the beach.  The point here is not to celebrate the human spirit, but rather to understand that people don’t have to be asking for the moon when they ask for peace and stability.  A normal life will do, thank you very much, and is that really beyond the reach of those who rule them, sell them their Samsung t-shirts, or are otherwise invested in Somalia?

The hope is, as it often is, invested in the children.  They can play, God bless ’em, even as Death stalks them.  More to the point, the photographer is giving them their day in the sun.  They are not to be seen or remembered only if they are victims, but rather for what they are: kids who, like all kids, deserve a shot at having a future worth having.  As the view stretches beyond them to shimmering beach and blue sky, one can at least imagine that the solution to pulling Somalia back from anarchy need not be impossible.

But then we get back to that mock corpse.  Mocking, insistent, it says the scene holds not one future but two: a future where kids grow up to have kids that play at the beach, and one where younger kids watch their older playmates turn into casualties.  We owe it to the kids, and the photographer, to hope for the first, and to recognize which one is more likely if hope is all they have.

Photograph by Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP-Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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We’re traveling to conferences this week and next, to return on June 2.

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This is one for the big screen.  Beautiful, eerie, menacing, it could be a sci fi movie.  (Stylish woman, mechanical system; all you need is the narrative.)  But I also meant the big screen in a more literal sense: the full effect of the image comes through when it is blown up to dominate your desktop.  Only then does the magnificent steel trellis suggest a cathedral vault, and the woman’s silhouette evoke a sense of foreboding, and the viewer sense that they are not far behind her on the ascending staircase.  The light overhead is in a space of surveillance, and an uneasy fate seems to await her at the end of the hall; nor are we far behind.

One thing it certainly is not is The News.  If you must know the literal details, the caption tells us that “a woman walks through Brookfield Place off Bay Street, on the day of their annual general meeting for shareholders in Toronto, May 7, 2014.”  A shareholders meeting is not often a general news story, and this was no exception.  Nor was it provided for expert analysis.  For example, if you were doing an anthropological study of Brookfield Asset Management, perhaps there would be important insights or representative details to be gleaned from this image–I certainly would not rule it out–but that was not the reason that the photograph was provided at several slide shows for public viewing.  Thus, this is an image without a story (a displacement that horrifies some critics of photography).  So why should it be featured?

One answer is that the image allows the artistic side of photography to come to the fore.  Any photograph is both record and artifact, and much of the time the artistry remains relatively hidden.  That’s the aesthetic norm for photojournalism and a principle for public art since at least Aristotle.  But both sides need to be expressed, and just as people will occasionally accept very grainy images for their sheer documentary value, they also at times will enjoy artistically intensive images without paying much regard to their news value.  Extremes here range from the Zapruder film to examples of so called “eye candy,” but short of those extremes there have been many remarkable images across the spectrum.  This would be one of them.

I don’t think that is a complete answer, however.  Consider how this photograph is about at least two general conditions: modernity and photography.  That is, it is not only a study of and in visual form, but through that lens the camera is focusing our attention on characteristic features of what it means to live within a modern technological society.

She could be Max Weber’s “man” in the iron cage, or the last organic trace once the machine has overtaken the garden (an anxiety identified by Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden), or a victim facing hideous mechanization in Metropolis.  These and other literary and cultural statements are each attempts to capture something fundamental about modernity, and they don’t so much explain the photograph as suggest what it is doing; it belongs in their company, albeit with the limitations and distinctive qualities it has by virtue of being a photograph.

The social theory and the artworks might provide important clues for further discussion, however: drawing on Metropolis, and noting how the spectator is almost looking up the woman’s dress, one can see both the tension between mechanization and eros, and consider also how well they can fit together for good or ill, and also why some modernists have celebrated an erotics of metal.  An initial invitation to the male gaze can lead to a form of aesthetic excess, which then pushes back and asks when the gaze was ever pure.

But I’m going farther afield than I had intended.  (Eroticism will do that.)  Let me suggest that the image does more than reprise familiar anxieties about modernity.  Very briefly, I think it offers two insights.  One comes from yet another comparison: she almost could be walking through the Crystal Palace that opened in London in 1851.   Let me suggest that the photograph hints at a different sense of time than the liner time of modernity: instead, it suggests that modern culture is always mashing up its inheritances and its dreams: cathedral or crystal palace, hall of mirrors or space ship, classical atrium or prison cell block, the choice doesn’t matter because they all are there.  And what is truly distinctive then remains to be seen, not least because it will be not familiar, but rather strange even to us.

Which is why it also is an image about photography.  I’ve suggested before that the single most important characteristic of photography is that its distinctive content is modernity itself.  This photograph is a particularly good example of that.  But it says more as well, and here the clues come from the human subject being a silhouette that is encased by a metal and class structure suffused with both darkness and light.  Consider, that is, how she seems to be an image inside of a camera, or how she could stand for the human subject passing through the machine of photography.  The silhouette is a distinctive type of abstraction, and its use here has a specific orientation.  We use the camera to see modernity, and thus to understand how we see modernity only from within: from within modern social structures, and from within the technology of photography.

Which makes this photograph’s question particularly interesting: Where is she going?

Photograph by Mark Blinch/Reuters.  A larger version of the image is in a recent slide show at In Focus.

 

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Welcome to Donetsk, Ukraine, May 1, 1984.

Technically, it’s 2014.  She is one of the pro-Russia activists who had just taken over this government building.  She is wearing a riot police helmet.  I’m not sure what she is holding, but if it isn’t a club, it certainly could double as one.  Her face is a hard as that helmet, which may be why her brutalist clothing and the institutional decor appear so Orwellian.

Of course, we haven’t see the mise en scene of 1984, save in our imaginations, but now we know what it looks like.  And like the historical discontinuity of the book’s title–which is behind and yet still ahead of the present–the photo also seems to be the product of a strange temporal warp.  Consider how the scene is not perfectly consistent: for example, her contemporary knock-off of a high fashion purse sits uncomfortably with that Soviet-era orange sack of a dress.  The guy behind her looks like an ordinary dude looking for an office where he can take care of some mundane task such as getting a license, which would be fine except that the lower half of door to his left has been demolished.  The flooring looks nice in the middle of the corridor–which should get the most wear–but looks degraded along the wall, and it’s unclear whether that’s due to the ordinary condition of the building or its seizure and occupation.  We can almost imagine that two figures in the photo are in the same place but from completely different moments in time.  Or consider that they could stand for a characteristically modern life in 1984, the year in ordinary time, and in 1984, the dystopian novel.

What is interesting about the troubles in the Ukraine is that these and many other historical alternatives all seem to be present.  Any number of past dispensations, resentments, and fantasies are tangled up with any number of possible futures, and no one seems to know what is likely to prevail.  Take your pick: revanchism, anti-Semitism, European union, Russian empire, democracy, oligarchy, kleptocracy, failed state, 21st century federalism, World War III. . . .  And take another look at the photo: her face suggests that now it’s time to settle old scores, but she may be taking a longer view instead.  Whatever the decision, the one thing that seems sure is that it will be harsh.

In the current New York Review of Books, Tim Judah remarks that Ukraine is in “that strange pre-war moment whn the possible future overlaps with the present.”  Not to take anything away from his emphasis and insight regarding the specific situation, but the present always overlaps with possible futures.  The genius of photography is that it can capture how possible future paths are already present, already available to some degree, and real enough that their  traces already appear on the surface of things.

Some photographs do that better than others, and that is why I found the image above to be stunning.  I think it captures Judah’s specific insight: that is, that in the Ukraine today may be a particularly tangled and unstable example of historical contingency, a moment when many futures are present–those of the past that still are striving for realization and many others as well.  It is a moment of extreme futurity, when the present is an inchoate palimpsest of alternatives, some having more power than others but all of them up for grabs.

Which is why the photograph is so disturbing.  Surreal juxtapositions (helmet and dress, history and fiction) are one thing, but the will to power is another.  If the photo is prophetic, it suggests that in a time where anything can happen, the advantage might lie with those who are single-minded, ruthless, and willing to degrade themselves in order to dominate others.

Welcome to Donetsk, Ukraine, May 1, 1984.

Photo by Sandro Maddalena/NurPhoto/Sipa USA.

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