Let’s start with one photo.

The caption reads, “Human remains are seen during the exhumation of a Stalinist-era mass grave on the military cemetery in the heart of the Polish capital Warsaw. The grave is believed to contain the remains of around 200 victims of a post-war campaign of communist terror.”

Perhaps the victim was screaming at the moment of death, but the gaping jaw could be an accident of decay or excavation.  Perhaps the lost individual will be identified, and perhaps the family can be notified.  Perhaps the remains will have forensic value, and maybe some remnant of justice can yet be done.

But, OMG, what an image.  The accidents of time have produced a howling, shrieking cry of pain and rage.  The body emerging from the earth is still shrouded with dust, as if still more ghost than material thing.  The immobility of being long buried is still binding the corpse, but it seems to be straining to be released, to rise up in glorious, savage revenge.  A revenge that will never come, as instead it will be interned again in a bureaucratic process constrained by a decided imbalance of power.

And so it has to settle for a more academic symbolism: there lies The Past, or Terror, or the Human Condition.  These are not small things, but they can have other emblems as well.  Yet, even so, I can’t help but think–or hope–that this image might haunt whatever idea is brought to it; that it might arise again in the night or at an odd moment, and that it might disturb, trouble, bring one perhaps to tremble for this lost soul from history’s slaughter pen.

OK, and now add a million more photos.  Start with the 10,000 that were sent to photo editors on the day this one was published.  Add another 10,000 for the many days before and every day after that.  Add also all the other images that you see every day in the news, advertising, and entertainment, and on Facebook, Flickr, and other social media.  Then add in what everyone else is seeing: the 200,000 photos that are uploaded to Facebook every minute, and the 27,00 at Instagram, etc.  And while you are at it, drop by a museum and see an exhibition of photographs.

Were you to do any of this, you might feel like Chloe Pantazi, who went to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum on war photography.  Pantazi came away feeling “numb,” as if she had been anesthetized, and, not surprisingly came to the conclusion that “Susan Sontag Was Right” when she condemned photographs for dulling our ethical capacity.  Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so I guess it could happen, but the declaration also provides an opportunity to think for a few seconds and say, “Really?”

I haven’t seen the exhibition, nor do I doubt for a minute that Pantazi had the experience she reports, so we need not disagree about her review on those terms.  That said, Pantazi’s reaction is not surprising for several reasons: First, it is a very understanding reaction to over 400 photographs about war taken in a single experience of dedicated viewing.  Indeed, I would expect the same result from reading 400 essays, or 400 pages, on the horror of war.  What most of us would not do in that case, however, is conclude that words were the problem.  And yet that is the point of the photography review, as the subtitle declares: “A troubling new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art throws into question the medium’s very purpose.”

Which leads to the second reason her conclusion is so familiar: it is exactly the reaction one is primed to have after reading Sontag, not to mention John Berger, Allan Sekula, Martha Rossler, and others who have crafted the conventional discourse of photography theory along the same line.  (See the first chapter of Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance for a provocative exposition on this point.)  What might be a normal–and temporary–reaction to intensive consumption of any medium becomes redefined as a universal failing of a single medium.  Once primed to be misused and disappointed by photography, it is easy to code one’s experience accordingly.  Let me add that putting the exhibition in a museum doesn’t help, as the fine arts context dominant there (as it is in Sontag’s work) interferes with correctly understanding a public art.

Again, the point here is not to reprove Pantazi for what might be a spot on review of a flawed exhibition.  But her reaction, the size of the exhibition, and even Sontag’s interpretative biases all point toward what is a very real condition of the image world today: excess.  And where there is excess, there will be exhaustion.

And as Pantazi rightly assumes (more so than the early Sontag, by the way), the emotions that come to be exhausted by images of horror are crucial for moral response, reflection, and engagement.  So this is no small problem.  But if we could set aside Sontag’s censorious tone, it is a problem that could lead to many creative solutions.

I’m out of time tonight, but let me close by suggesting that there is much more to excess than the likelihood of overwhelming us.  (And be sure to see David Campbell’s corrective argument about the much more manageable circumstances of actual practice.)  Indeed, photography as always been an abundant art: cheap, expansive, and ending up in every corner of the world.  (I have a bit more to say on rethinking abundance here, here, and here.)  What does need to be done is to take more seriously the curatorial function, which includes not only actual curators or editors, but also critics and citizens as they sort, select, and share images as part of their participation in the virtual world of public culture.

And we need to remember that at the end of any given day, what may be needed is not 400 photographs, but just one.  Like the one above, for example.

Photograph by Wojtek Radwanski/AFP-Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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By one measure, at least, we might say that 2013 was the year of the gun.  The year began in the wake of the slaughter of 26 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School by a single individual wielding the weaponry and ammunition displayed in the disturbing photograph above.   This was not all that he carried—note that the yellow evidence markers extend into the 40s— but its stark presentation, cast in the language of criminal forensics, underscores the fact that we are witnessing weapons of death—for surely automatic weapons serve no other purpose—and invites the question so often asked: why would any single individual need so much armament?  And surely there is something that we can do as a society to manage and regulate access to such weapons … particularly the automatic weapons marked by the bullets and  cartridge clips? But of course we have done nothing.  And while the numbers vary, even the most conservative estimates indicate that nearly 10,000 people have died in the U.S. from gunshot wounds since the Sandy Hook massacre (some estimates range as high as 32,000).  By some counts half of those deaths were by suicide, and while I’m not convinced we should ignore those for this fact alone, that still leaves us with 5,000 deaths that were violent and  transgressive—the heavily reported Navy Yard Killings in September only a fraction of the overall total.  5,000 lives tragically and precipitously cut short.

I say above that we have done nothing, but really we have moved backwards.  Congress has stubbornly refused to reinstitute the lapsed federal assault weapons ban or to even consider stricter regulations on gun registration—and please look closely at the photograph above as you ponder that fact and the 32 victims of Sandy Hook.  And the reason is clear, for those who govern the gun culture have aggressively vilified even those within their own community who dare to consider the possibility of moderation when it comes to interpreting the meaning of the 2^nd Amendment, recalling legislators and banishing those working for gun magazines who challenge the absolutist “gospel” of the NRA.

The photograph above, however, only tells part of the story.  Its stark representation of the facts point to a tragic and palpable past.  But photographs also help us to imagine possible futures.  And so we have the image below.

The young girl being taught how to hold an imitation automatic weapon is attending “Youth Day” at the annual NRA Convention in Houston, TX.  One can imagine passing on the traditions of hunting with weapons from one generation to the next or even training our youth as to how to handle a handgun safely and responsibly without serious concern, but that is not what we are looking at here.  This young girl is being indoctrinated into a gun culture through automatic weaponry—who hunts with automatic weapons?—and that projects a very different kind of future.  She doesn’t appear to be particularly interested in the weapon, her attention seemingly distracted by other things, and this may give us some hope that she doesn’t identify with the toy gun in her hands, or with the future it projects; at the same time, however, her index finger seems to be poised all too consciously on the trigger and that should leave us somewhat concerned that she has learned her lesson all too well, projecting a future in which weapons of death become all the more natural accouterments of everyday life.

One past.  Two possible futures. And what the photographs ask is, which will we choose?

Photo Credit:  Handout/Reuters; Adrees Latif/Reuters

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Like every snowflake, many images are unique yet much like many others.  Snow and photography are both repetitive, and with each accumulation can become a burden.  With snow, accumulation also can create a distinctive sense of serenity.  Winter solitude can be a blessing, and one that is needed again every year.  We hope that this single image, unique and yet seen before, can bring a moment of repose during this busy time of the year.

Best wishes for a peaceful holiday.  We’ll return to our regular schedule on January 6.

Photograph from Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada by Victor Liu/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest.

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John Minchillo/AP (2013)

AFP/Getty Images (1961)

AFP Getty Images (1964)

Peter Dunne/Getty Images (1968)

Juda Ngwenya/Reuters (1990)

David Brauchli/AP (1994)

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images (2013)

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Writers on photography typically emphasize the importance of the still image.  This immobility twice distinguishes the medium: first, from the other distinctively modern visual media of cinema and television; second, from the temporality or ephemerality of whatever is the subject of the photograph.  Only the photo stops time, holding everything caught in 1/500 of a second unchanged for all time.  Only then can one really look at what was there, then; only in that time out of time can one really see and carefully reflect on what is being shown.

The writers of this blog are among those who have relied on this definition, not least because it does argue for the relative value of the medium while identifying one of its resources for understanding the world.  Unfortunately, like the other writers, we were wrong.

Or more precisely, not wholly wrong so much as subject to overstatement.  I say this because the time has come to consider the contrary thesis, which is that there are no still photographs.  Likewise, we should consider how the temporal immobility of the photograph that we do experience is an illusion, perhaps one of those illusions that grow up around any medium as one of its effects and part of its distinctive habitus.

Such illusions become part of our common sense, and not least because they prove to be useful, so let me be clear that I am not trying to dismantle all of that.  Of course, any photograph seems to be still, just as any movie seems to be moving while actually being a succession of still images.  Likewise, I really do value the reflective space that is created by the photographic event, and a sense of having the time to look is an important part of that experience.

But what if we considered just how many ways the photographic image is already moving?  One way to start would be to take a seemingly difficult case, like this one.  Nick Brandt has taken photographs of animals that have become calcified after immersion in Lake Natron in Tanzania.  As they attempt to air dry, the extremely high levels of soda and salt immobilize them.  The result is at once horrific–they are buried alive in their own bodies–and aesthetic–they become ghoulishly “lifelike” statues.

So here you have an image where form and content are almost perfectly fused: both the bird and the photograph are forever fixed, still, incapable of movement.  (As Aristotle would say, they can be moved but they cannot move themselves.)  Although the water and sky at Lake Natron can change, they cannot change in the photograph, and the photographer’s skillful use of his black and white stock and tonal values support that sense of the scene.  Like the bird, everything that once was capable of movement seems forever frozen by the medium–a medium created in a chemical solution that, like the lake, can harden time itself as it turns life into image.

But look at that bird.  (After all, we have the time.)  Can’t you see the flow of the water as it drained off the body, and the subtle air currents that wafted across it?  Can’t you see the great wings poised as if for flight, and feel the powerful muscles ready to flex and contract?  And doesn’t the pathos of the image come from that sense of flight and life interrupted?   Without that sense of potential movement, the image would not be news; it would not even be an image, but only a unique particularity having no reference outside of itself.  (Some would say that’s a definition of art, and there is an affinity there that I’ll not go into today.)

I’m running out of time today, so let me cut to the chase and summarize several senses in which I think the image always is moving.  First and most obvious, the photograph always does refer to an ongoing eventfulness outside of itself.  We call this the larger narrative or flow of events, or the situation or context, or the other images on the roll or otherwise taken before and after the single moment, etc.  Sontag insisted that this was the only way in which photographs became meaningful, and that their tendency to stop time and fragment reality was a sure cause of all manner of cognitive, moral, and political problems.  I think there are a great many problems with that formulation, but (as usual with Sontag) there is an important insight there: the photograph is never really apprehended in narrative isolation or out of time.  Thus, there really are no still images, and to insist on the unique or transcendental character of the still image is to succumb to a characteristic illusion.

Another obvious and more recent sense of photography’s mobility is that the way in which images are used: whether material or virtual (and any one is both, in varying degrees), images are put in wallets, on phones, on walls offline and online, and they are shared, shuffled, liked, lost, found, repurposed, and otherwise used in varied ways that keep them moving in time as they acquire specific histories.  The image can be temporarily fixed by the act of looking, an act it solicits, but that, too, is part of larger practices of selecting, substituting, discarding, and otherwise organizing and making sense of a continuously expanding archive.

A third sense of the never still image is that its meaning always depends on interpretation, and not least by multiple viewers.  (Even if only one person sees the photograph and then burns it, the seeing and the burning alike depend on a sense of how others would see it and see it differently.)  More to the point, the photographic image is inherently imaginative: even in its more realistic modality, it requires imagining others’ intentions, other ways of looking at the scene, as well as possible causes and possible consequences.  The immobility allows time for such consideration, but that active shuttling between past and future is absolutely essential to the medium and particularly to how it is used as a medium for public culture.

Finally, and I really am running out of time here, photography is part of modernity’s continuous unfolding.  Yes, that sense of modern civilization is itself a myth, but a powerful one.  (Even getting “bombed back into the stone age” does no more than reinstate the myth: we might have to start over, but there is only one direction to go.)  Like modernity itself, any photograph is a slice of time that is projected into the future: by becoming a record of what instantly is past, it can in fact be moved forward into the next moment and the next, always still present in a world forever pitched toward a future just beyond the now.  After all, why else take the picture?

So there is more than one sense in which there are no still photographs.  I would say that each of those definitions of the image can serve some of the same purposes that were handled by emphasizing its temporal immobility.  The next step might be to endorse a dialectical movement, but let me suggest something else instead.  Whether still or never still, immobile or ever activating, any revelation will come not from that fact alone but rather how it can be the basis for artistry and insight.  Whatever the theory, everything still depends on who takes the photograph and what we do with it.

Photographs by Nick Brandt and Wojtek Radwanski/AFP-Getty Images.  Brandt discusses the images in an interview at the Huffington Post.

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We’ll be immersed in traveling and other obligations for the next two weeks, to return on December 2.  In the meantime, you might try to guess what these guys are doing.  First one to get it right will receive a year’s free subscription to nocaptionneeded.com.

Photograph by Francois Xavier Marit/AFP-Getty Images.  We’ll update with the correct answer when we return.

Update: The photo is of competitors in the men’s 10-meter synchro platform preliminary diving event in the FINA World Championships at the Piscina Municipal de Montjuic in Barcelona, July 21, 2013.

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