In contrast to the many images of right wing demonstrators disrupting town hall meetings, this photograph of elderly citizens listening to a discussion of national health care appears to be a model of thoughtful deliberation.

They are old, yes, but not incapacitated.  Indeed, this is just what an audience is supposed to do at a democratic forum: listen carefully.  The individuals here appear by turn skeptical, reflective, and (in the background) critical, and in every case attentive.  Isn’t this what everyone should be doing when thinking about the momentous questions of whether and how to reform health care?

Well, yes and no.  The problem is that, as a group, the elderly are tilting against reform, despite not being out of synch with the rest of the electorate on  other issues.  But is that a problem?  Obviously not if you oppose reform, but otherwise it is indicative of several ironies within the health care debate and at least one paradox within democracy itself.

Needless to say, all of the elderly have the government health insurance that some of them would deny their fellow citizens.  It’s called Medicare and not “the public option” or “socialized medicine” or “government interference in the doctor-patient relationship,” but it’s all of those things–and a good thing, too.  And, of course, the vast majority of those who have it like it and assume that they are entitled to it.  Nor do many of them know that those politicians and organizations that oppose the current reforms also opposed Medicare.  Most tellingly, this group watches more TV news than other voters (something that oddly is often described as being “more informed”), and some of them go so far as to claim that they oppose reform because then don’t want the government involved with Medicare.

A more vexing problem is that, because democracy depends on the secret ballot and aggregated decisions, any voter can behave with a very skewed sense of responsibility.  One can vote against government benefits while remaining assured that you will continue to receive government benefits.  So it is that Red States that vote against “big government” receive more government money than they spend in taxes.   Obviously, if the state’s net take was dependent on the political philosophy it endorsed, voters might think twice about their decisions; but, of course, they don’t have to.   Likewise, if those elderly voting against the public option had to give up their public health care, they might think differently, but that’s not an option.  This disconnect between political rhetoric and government policy has become second nature to all of us.  We accept that politicians can rail against the government while securing government contracts and services for the home district, and that you don’t have to be held personally responsible for your vote.

In other areas of life this would be seen as rank hypocrisy.  Imagine saying that everyone in the family has to eat vegetarian, except me; or that everyone in the congregation ought to pledge, except me; or that everyone in the office has to observe the dress code, except me.  Whereas in private life we take it for granted that pronouncements and actions should be consistent, democracy seems to make hypocrisy a virtue.  What is not readily acknowledged is that this hypocrisy is characteristic not merely of politicians, but of the voters as well.

Paradoxes exist for a reason, and this one probably leads to good outcomes as well.  What is needed, at least in the hear term, is more attentiveness and more imagination.  Look again at the photograph above.  One can see democratic deliberation, and also the frailty and mortality that is the core of our human condition.  One can see, in other words, not only a civic habit but also the fundamental purpose of government.

Note also how each of the individuals is in a defensive posture.  They are protective of themselves, and understandably so.  And keep in mind that none of the press reports defines the elderly in terms of experience or wisdom, but only in terms of the demographic power at the polls.  Given the lack of respect typical of a traditional society, they know that they have to mobilize according to shared interests.

What they, and we, must understand is that self interest can only be fully realized by taking care of others.  From that perspective, the problem is not that the elderly are in the picture, but that they are solely among themselves.  The better understanding will come not by carefully addressing their problems, but by putting those problems in a wider context, one that is at least wide enough to make the high costs of hypocrisy apparent to all.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

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The news on a slow news day is not like slow food–it’s often more like junk food.  But there is better and worse in junk food, and the same holds for what the press serves up during the summer doldrums.  Time Magazine recently put up a slide show about the zombie walks and related zombie festivals in various cities around the globe.  (There have been several events this summer, along with auditions for the London Bridge Experience staged for tourists, while some of the photos document choice displays in previous years.)  But I’m getting ahead of the show, which started with this beauty:

And he is gorgeous, isn’t he?  As much as I like The Night of the Living Dead, there definitely has been a fashion upgrade in the ensuing decades.  Purists might point out that there is little in the way of genuine corruption evident in this dude: the hair, piercings, beard, and bone structure are stylish in any case, while the make-up only highlights those bedroom eyes.  Romance or Romanticism, he’s got it down.

But why look at a walking corpse, or act like one?  As with the movie, these zombies might be providing a ghastly simulacrum of the “normal” society seen walking about during the day.   The undead can display bodily cravings that otherwise are kept under wraps, and the reactions of those still not buried can reveal social norms that mutilate and kill.  If so, this guy really is a model, because he suggests that fashion dominates modern life and that art is not enough to overcome the distance between one soul and another.

Unless, of course, you have the good sense to not take any of this too seriously.  And so my admiration for the first image was topped by the good laugh I had when I saw this photograph:

These zombies are waiting in a cafe before their auditions in London.  God, I love this tableau.  Even the zombie life can come to this, another day of deadening routine.  Worse, you have to believe they could be ordinary customers not in costume.  He’s shell shocked by another day in a job that is sucking the life out of him; she’s already so bored with the relationship that she could croak.  The living dead, indeed.

The moral of the second photo is that we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that ordinary activity is a sign of life, or that the living aren’t already succumbing to mindlessness.  The moral of the first might be that artistic attentiveness, which is the opposite of mindlessness, can both liberate and isolate.  Alive or undead, there are no easy answers in how to live your life.

Photographs by Johannes Eisele/Reuters and Stephen Hird/Reuters.their auditions.

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Recently USA Today ran a photo contest to answer the question, “Can a single image capture the essence of America?”  Of the 1,035 entries, this one was judged to be the best:

It’s a fine image, and one can easily concur with the judges’ statement that it has “gorgeous color, beautiful light and a killer reflection.  The visual surprise makes the eye move back and forth, and the subject is emblematic of the American West.”

But wait a minute.  There is a difference between the first half of that judgment and the second.  Color, light, and the reflection are one thing, while surprise and emblematic representation are another.  In fact, water reflections are standard stuff in nature photography, so there would be little surprise there (nor would viewers be likely to be confused about which horses are real).  And what about the idea that the landscape is the definitive image of the American West–and therefore of America?  Can you get more conventional than that?

My unease wasn’t helped by the paper’s claim that the contest photos “capture America the beautiful beyond obvious landmarks to its glorious landscape and spacious skies.”  OK, no Statue of Liberty, but the Western landscape is an equally obvious visual figure, and it is clear from the text that our perception is supposed to be shaped by the iconography of “America the Beautiful.”  Sure enough, the second and third place photographs are from Antelope Canyon, Arizona and Arches National Park, Utah: in other words, they are beautiful examples of familiar scenes in the photographic archive of Arizona Highways, National Geographic, and similar house organs of travel photography.

The fourth place photo is of an ocean sunset, and so it goes.  Most tellingly, of the top ten photos, only two–numbers 6 and 10–include people.  In the first of these, we see children practicing with lariats at a “cowboy training camp” representing “family fun vacations in the American West”; in the second, there are tiny figures in the background of a photo of kites at a beach.

Don’t get me wrong–some of the contest entries are fine photographs.  But what about the big question: do they picture America?  If so, we may have a problem, because then America is in some important sense essentially empty.

If you look at the rest of the submissions, it seems evident that America is the West, which is largely void of people.  As Richard Avedon, Michael Shapiro, and others have stated before, this is not an innocent idea.  The photo operates ideologically, whether by hiding the workers, implying that natural resoures are boundless, or reinforcing assumptions about American exceptionalism and providentialism (as if Central Asia didn’t have similar vistas, or lacked God’s grace).

To be fair, however, we also have to note that these photos also are negotiating other problems of political representation: by not featuring people, no one ethnic or social group is given the privilege of being the “face” of America, and showing natural scenes through conventional iconography does supply the typical places and common objects that are necessary for the shared seeing that is a vital element of democratic public culture.

That said, it seems to me that we could do better.  The dedication and skill of the amateur photographers in the contest needs to be augmented by critical discussion of how one might represent “the essence of America.”  One argument is that there is no such thing to represent; another is that no one representation could do so.  On the other side, the US is not simply a neutral aggregation of autonomous individuals having nothing in common, and collective living requires common images and ongoing judgments about what is more or less representative.

And let me say it as clearly as possible: America is not empty.  Nor is the natural order of things walking serenely in single file.  Nor can photographs represent a political community as neatly as still water reflects horses.   Public life needs many images–these and others as well.  America is beautiful, but not because the people are invisible.

Photograph by Joanne Panizzera/USA Today.

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Commentators on photography frequently claim that the image is a counterfeit of reality. Beware the image, we’re told, as it is not the real thing.  But it you look at what people do with images, you can see far more than people being mislead.  What I find particularly notable is how ordinary people are enlisting images as foot soldiers in public demonstrations.  Instead of displacing reality, images are being used to increase the scale and impact of democratic advocacy.

You could see it as Chinese parents held photographs of children killed when their schools collapsed during an earthquake, and you can see it now as Iranians protest their government’s attempt to fix the presidential election.

Here a protester is not only marching in the street but displaying a photo of another protester who was shot by a government thug in an earlier demonstration.  For an example using an earlier photo of state violence, look at the bottom of this post, and see others in photograph 9 at The Big Picture. That’s only part of the repertoire, however.

I doubt anyone thinks this guy actually is Mir Moussavi, so the protectors of reality can stand down for a moment.  He is doing something much more significant than imitation, anyway: by making the photograph a mask for this political theater, he puts the political leader’s face on the body politic that is the multitude of people in the street.  The leader, who actually is living on the edge of house arrest, is given the force of the people, whose identification with his cause and their right to a fair election is given specific statement.

There may be more going on as well.  This carnivalesque mashup may also be a response to the State’s attempt to mobilize the same means of persuasion on behalf of their theocratic regime, as they do here:

These women are holding photos in a demonstration on behalf of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  The stock portrait of Leaders with the Flag and corresponding production values are in sharp contrast to the dynamic documentary witness in the first image above.  If you want to communicate Order and Stability instead of change, however, this state-sponsored image will do.

It’s tempting to leave it at that: a contest between competing images that reflects the two sides of the polarized confrontation in the street.  The  disenfranchised people, their candidate, and a dynamic visual culture on one side, and traditionalist social orders, clerical leaders, and propaganda on the other.  But I want to tip the scales further on behalf of democratic public art, which, after all, should be too brash and ungainly to be easily categorized.  For that and other reasons as well, you really ought to get a look at this:

The photographs are from the slide show at the Huffington Post.  Photographs 1-3 are Getty images; I don’t have an ID on 4.

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One of the questions one might raise about coverage of the Middle East is how much to feature women under the veil.  Despite the range of positions in the region about body covering, the tendency in the US is to feature burqas (of whatever kind or name) when emphasizing deficits of rights and modernization.  But, of course, the matter is not so simple.

For the record, these women are wearing the Afghan chadiri.  If you look closely at this photo, you can see that it might confound several assumptions about living under the veil.  Instead of uniformity, each outfit is individually decorated.  Instead of a primitive society, the women are standing in a pleasantly modern setting.  Most peculiar, perhaps, is that they are standing to be photographed.  How, one might think, can a photograph matter when their faces can’t be seen? (To see how mistaken this question can be, go here.) They may expect to be recognized by what can be seen, or they may be indulging the request for a photo precisely because they are protected from public scrutiny.

These subtleties may be obvious inside their culture, whereas to the Western gaze the women are interchangeable: anonymous, uniform, and uniformly subjugated.  Given their confinement to private life, in public they are not citizens but merely women, interchangeable women.

Before anyone gets too righteous about the Western alternative, we should take a look at this:

These Florida State fans are definitely not under the veil.  They are, however, another example of cosmetic cloning.  (Let’s set the little girl aside, although notice that she is a Florida State woman in training, right down to the bracelet.) Sure, we can identify them as separate individuals: one belly has a navel stud, one doesn’t, and the third has a tattoo, what more do you want?  But they are more closely entrained than the three women in the first photograph: bare midriffs, identical shirts, hats, buttons, bracelets, hairstyles, makeup, and gestures.  Even their faces look like close copies of each other.

We could point out that they are free to choose how they display themselves in public, but this doesn’t seem to be a great example of independent decision making.  My point is that they might as well be in burqas–they are interchangeable women, as much under the sway of gender-specific norms for appearing in public as anyone else.  Their aggressive femininity is little different than the gender segregation of the burqa; both might be labeled variant forms of cosmetic fundamentalism.

None of this need be complicated: many people rightly oppose any gender rules that confine women to subordinate status.  But if  images of women are to be used to subordinate East to West on the grounds that a denial of visibility is a denial of rights, then it’s only fair to raise equivalent questions about how rights are being used to keep women locked into limited gender roles closer to home.

Photographs by Margaret Orwig and Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel.

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The coverage of Obama’s speech in Cairo continued this weekend with a slide show at the New York Times.  The slides essentially were all the same, with each showing Obama’s televised image in one locale or another.  The set of slides included photographs from India, Africa, and LA, but the majority were from the Middle East.  The point, I assume, was to represent both a global audience and the likelihood of varied responses in diverse settings.  Too many of them, however, might as well have been Orientalist illustrations.

This photo from Cairo was the first in the set and thus capable of setting the frame. Obama is on the TV placed above a Coke machine–the only two electrical machines evident without close study of the photo–while the scene is dominated by the hookahs and Arabic script on the worn wall.  The US is aligned with modern technology, all the better for global distribution of our products and ideas, while those watching in the Middle East are still living in a bygone world of mysterious inscriptions and exotic customs.

The young man in the center of the frame is a particularly nice touch.  Lithe boys were one element of Orientalist iconography, although this kid is fully clothed for the contemporary US audience.  Indeed, he might pass for a young Obama.  Thus, he is the central object of struggle in the drama being constructed.  Will he be influenced by the parochial Arab culture that surrounds him, or by the American president?  Will the TV and Coke machine, which are on the border of this scene, be able to break the spell of the culture represented by the drug paraphernalia surrounding him?  Obviously, we are to hope that he will grow up to become a good citizen like his newly available role model, Barack Obama.  The fact that he will grow up in a dictatorship propped up by billions of dollars in US aid is not mentioned.

Were a Black Panther around, it might be mentioned.  The image of that kind of African-American community organizer has been conspicuously absent from the Obama haigiography, but the following image can bring the Panthers to mind.

This photo was not part of the Times slide show, perhaps because it complicates both sides of the rhetorical transaction.  Now Obama is projected onto the sunglasses of what could be a stony auditor, someone quite different from the supposedly impressionable young man shown above.  And Obama becomes a small yet garish image of himself, someone distant from the kind of politics represented by black men wearing dark glasses and hard faces.  Perhaps the image still contains a fantasy of media influence, as if the TV image were being projected from the screen through the glasses directly into the eye and brain.  (Note how equipment figures significantly in each photograph.)  But we see instead how an image can be reflected back toward the sender.  Instead of persuasion, we are shown resistance.

The second photo is from Riyadh, and so we should note that he probably is not black and if there is resistance it could be on behalf of privilege and dogmatism.  Both images are studies in some of the problems of persuasion, however, and they provide a basis for thinking about how to think about global audiences.  The first photograph presents an all too comfortable conception of the Middle East; the second suggests a critical counterpoint.  Each is but one account, and far too many others remain ignored.

Amr Nabil/Associated Press and Hassan Ammar/Associated Press.

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“Liberal democracy” is a political paradox animated by the competing and often contradictory demands and interests of individual and collective living.  The liberal-democratic conundrum manifests itself in numerous civic contexts, but none more clearly than in those situations in late modern society that underscore the tension between the public and private spheres of life.  One solution to such quandries might be to balkanize our public and private selves—to perform one sense of self in public and another and different sense of self in the privacy of our homes—but of course the two are not so easily separated; indeed, insofar as “public” and “private” are dialectical terms, defined contra one another, one might imagine the relationship between our public and the private selves as opposite sides of the same coin: distinct from one another but nevertheless literally and inextricably connected.  The problem for  maintaining a productive liberal democratic life then is in learning how to enact a sense of our private self in full view of a public of  strangers while accommodating the demands of civic decorum.

There is perhaps no more mythic public setting in U.S. civic life than Times Square.  A carnival of commerce, signage, flashing lights, and more, it is often characterized as the “crossroads of the world.” It is also the site of one of the most famous and often reproduced photographs of American life, Alfred Eisenstadt’s “Time Square Kiss,” an image that embodies the key tensions between the public and private selves of the two kissers—sailor and nurse, anonymous man and woman—who spontaneously and yet decorously perform one of the key obsessions of private life in full view of an attentive public of strangers.  That it is a somewhat restrained kiss, and that it achieves the full support of all who observe it seems very much to the point as eros is present, but contained. We have written extensively about this photograph both here and elsewhere and I will not repeat what we have had to say about it any more than I already have.  That said, the Eisenstadt photograph came to mind recently as it was announced that Times Square had been converted into a pedestrian mall that provoked, in the words of the NYT, the sense of “being in a big public room.”

The photograph above was taken on May 25th, the day after the area was closed to traffic and it shows a wide range of individuals in various social configurations lounging in the middle of Broadway as if a day at the beach.  Apparently oblivious to the activity that surrounds them, each individual or group seems caught in and contained by his, her, or their own private universe.  The physical markers of public life are there, to be sure, including a curb, street vectors, pylons placed to identify boundaries, and stop lights in the distance, but none of this seems to have much social significance as a couple eats their lunch, a group of three engage in what appears to be nonchalant conversation, a man and woman (husband and wife?) sleep and read as if in lounge chairs in their own living room, and an isolated, lone man seems lost in self-contemplation; others simply walk about. The point, of course, is that there is no sense of a public here. Less a “big public room,” the photograph portrays a thoroughly fragmented social order, a setting in which the conventions of private living have completely colonized the most public space in America and where individuals have seemingly forgotten how to perform their private selves in public in a way that acknowledges others and  accommodates to the demands and decorum of civic life.

It is really hard to know what to make of this scene. On the one hand it is no doubt churlish to complain about a world in which individuals are given the freedom and safety to relax in a public thoroughfare, unhindered by the needs and demands of others.  And yet, on the other hand, one can only wonder what the effects will be of a social order that so completely reduces the norms and conventions of public life to the unrestrained habits of private living.

Photo Credit: Damon Winter/New York Times

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