The most insightful essays on photojournalism typically have included keen attention to the social and political implications of the photographic technology itself. The ideas and attitudes that become influential often persist despite technological change–sometimes rightly so, but not always. One item of conventional wisdom that needs to be either updated or shelved is the anxiety about media spectacles.

This image is a lovely vignette of the digital age. The caption stated that the woman in the center was showing “passers-by a photograph that she had taken of President-elect Barack Obama’s motorcade.”

We don’t see what they are seeing, but we do see how they are seeing it. Clustered together on a busy city street, focused as one on the small screen, blending their distinctive reactions, these strangers have become civic friends for a moment though an act of shared spectatorship. The remain individuals with distinctive modes of response–curiosity, pride, studiousness, and wonder, and with that four variations of a good feeling–but they obviously have been pulled together, however briefly, as if they they had other things in common as well. Though still strangers, they are also citizens defined by their comfort with each other while looking together at one sign of political representation.

It is significant that we see only her camera, not the picture taken. The content of the image does not matter as much as the fact that she can take it and share it. This everyday event thus reflects major social realities: it is understood that no guard is going to come along and confiscate the camera, that people can interact casually on the street as equals, and that the photograph typically is taken to be shared. It also is evident how digital technologies are inflecting the conventions for taking and interacting with images: cameras are everywhere and no longer tied to special occasions such as travel, the photograph is immediately available for review and other use, any place is a suitable place to view the image, and it could end up just about anywhere. The passers-by can look over her shoulder because they all have already done something like that many times before. Indeed, one consequence of affordable cameras and especially of the ubiquity of digital cameras may be that they prompt and normalize interactions among strangers. Whether asking someone to take your picture to holding up the camera phone image for all to see, one is crafting a public in miniature.

It also may be significant that the image is so small. Although the viewers’ reactions suggest an aura of political authority, the camera is also cutting it down to size. Likewise, the phantasm of Big Brother on the giant screen dominating all consciousness is seriously out of place here. There still are big screens, of course, and billions of dollars poured into major media productions, but digital technologies also are radically democratizing visual culture. In place of the mass media spectacle, there are small moments of shared seeing. To understand that well, we need to get beyond high anxiety about the media spectacle. Less attitude and smaller concepts doesn’t sound like a prescription for academic stardom, but it might be just what is needed to understand visual democracy.

Photograph by Ozier Muhammad/New York Times.

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The worldwide celebration of Obama’s victory has made it clear that this election was about much more than turning out the vote. Nothing less than the nation’s soul was on the line. Individual voters need not have seen it that way, but this was one of those moments when the collective significance of the outcome went far beyond any individual interest or conventional political preference. The US was at a fork in the road, and only one candidate even knew that was so. Because he won, the election brought people together again on the best of terms: committed to equality, justice, freedom, and a better future for all. Democracy in American seems to have proved itself once again.

I think that the outcome is even more remarkable yet. Here’s one reason why:

This photo is a particularly good example of the hundreds of shots that were put up on November 4 and the day after. The slide shows featured long lines of ordinary people with their coffee cups and other paraphernalia of everyday life, all waiting together as if one community. But they weren’t a community pure and simple, and this image shows why. The silhouettes capture habits that might be overlooked when seen directly: each person is standing apart as a single individual. The sharp shadows also feature details of individual preoccupation that emphasize the point: a cellphone, book, or magazine are in each case technologies for avoiding interaction with the person next to you.

There are good reasons not to have to talk to a stranger for three hours, and I’m not going to knock any of the things people do to pass the time. But we ought to note that photographs such as this one record the social habits of a liberal democracy, that is, a democracy that has developed sufficiently to make individualism second nature. These people typically will be strangers to one another, gathered together for only a few minutes every several years. Otherwise they live their own lives and, as Tocqueville noted almost two centuries ago, sever themselves from the community and willingly leave society at large to itself (Democracy in America, vol 2, Bk 2, chapter 2). According to Tocqueville, modern democracy doesn’t drive people to become a multitude, but just the opposite: to individuate to an extent that first “saps the virtues of public life” and eventually “attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in selfishness.”

Tocqueville’s claim can explain a lot of the habitual practices of American society, but not the election. The miracle of November 4 is that the majority of the voters affirmed a return to public virtues. They did so as individuals, as they is what they are, but they voted more than their individualism.

Our awareness that Americans are individuals rather than one people in shared solidarity leads to a second reason to appreciate what can be accomplished in a voting booth. Another of Tocqueville’s insights was that individual autonomy both elevates and dwarfs the individual. “When the inhabitant of a democratic society compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows . . . he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness” (2.1.2; and my apologies for the gender specific diction in the Reeve translation). In short, it is easy to recognize that your vote doesn’t count. A rational voter wouldn’t vote, and especially when one factors in not only the other voters but the enormous size, complexity, and power of the modern state.

I think this photo captures the paradox perfectly. Each of the voters is small, isolated, and surely incapable of matching the institutional power and inertia represented by the wall of the building behind them. That wall–complete with flag high above the rest, not to human scale–has all the features of governmental authority, impersonality, and indifference. And yet they vote as if they don’t know any better. Because they vote, democracy happens. It happens among strangers, among individuals devoted to living private lives, among people who have no power to speak of otherwise. It’s a miracle.

Photographs from huffingtonpost.com and Chang W. Lee/New York Times.

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There are thousands of photos today of people throughout the US and around the world celebrating the Obama victory. These come on top of the hundreds put up yesterday of Americans standing patiently in long lines to vote. I finally stopped my search for the elusive photo that would capture it all. That photo doesn’t exist, but I kept coming back to this one:

The celebration is there, like the patriotism that was always there, but the joy of having finally overcome one great barrier should never erase the pain that lies within that story. This is a time for smiles and cheers and the renewal of hope that is so essential to democratic life–but it also is an occasion that can only be truly comprehended through tears. The sob welling up in this man’s face speaks volumes about how much he and so many others have suffered quietly, painfully, their grief and frustrations hidden away form public view lest they be made worse yet. Today, however, a great transmutation is taking place, and pain can finally be converted into joy.

This transformation in the individual heart can occur only because democracy worked as it is supposed to work. For all the flaws and demands and sheer theatrical excess of the electoral campaign, the election made official what are real changes in American society. Look at the others in the photo: not only the diversity but also the comfort level of those being crowded together. This new, good vibe has been evident in the Obama campaign all along, and the fact that it was able to prevail over proven tactics of fear-mongering, character assassination, and a vicious nativism is one of the great achievements of this election.

Forty years ago Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the cities went up in flames, and the democratic process itself seemed to break apart as Chicago police brutally clubbed hundreds of people gathered in Grant Park to protest the Vietnam War. Forty years later, Barack Obama was elected president as Grant Park filled with over 200,000 people celebrating real change within the cities and across the nation. What may be most remarkable about this victory is that it was achieved without revolutionary disruption. Look again at the photo above and at the thousands of other photographs of this election: They record nothing but the ordinary procedures and rituals of an American election, and they do so using nothing but the regular conventions of photojournalism. And that is enough. There is no need for revolutionary iconography or artistic innovation. Ordinary people standing in line, recording their vote, gathering for a speech, celebrating in the living room or bar or street or park–just like you’ve seen before. But with a difference–and it is that combination of historical change with ordinary democracy that provides real hope.

Photograph by Damon Winter/New York Times.

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You are likely to have seen many photographs from China recently, but probably not this one:

Here models and student designers stand side by side during a fashion show at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I’ll let you guess which ones are the models. Of course, the drastic contrast between female models and designers who look like ordinary people occurs at any fashion show, but here that difference is accentuated by ethic polarization.

This post is not about the Olympics, except that this week everything is about the Olympics. Despite smug predictions in the Western press, the Chinese are pulling it off. The events are going smoothly, the bad news is not happening or quickly forgotten, and you have to admit that the place looks great. (I’d like to see a marathon course in any US city look half as nice as the one I saw Saturday night.) It looks like Beijing will achieve its objective–again. One result is likely to be a more widely held realization that China has become highly modernized. And so the question arises: On what terms are we likely to imagine Chinese assimilation into modernity?

The photograph above provides the conventional idea: the West is obviously higher, more sophisticated, and literally the model to be imitated. Likewise, modernity is thoroughly raced: the ideal is Aryan, and one acquires all the benefits of modernization by forming oneself along those lines. If there happen to be obvious disadvantages, well, just be patient and they will be overcome in time–the shorter women in the photo are not going to get any taller, but their children could surpass them. And even though fashion is all about hybridity some of the time, here it is clear that the transmission of culture is entirely one-way.

Even so, the image also contains another story as well. The Western women are there only to be draped and displayed, while the brain work is being done entirely by Asians. The West is a model, but passively so, and rendered passive by its own sophistication. If you had to pick three women to take to the moon, or the office, or the future, I don’t think there is any doubt which three should be given the job.

If a conventional image of catching up to the West contains its own internal caveat, that still falls short of more robust ideas of cultural change. Nor do we have to go too far down the road to get a glimpse of what that might involve:

This is a portrait of Li Shurui, a contemporary Chinese artist whom the New York Times says is “quietly emerging” as a talent within the male-dominated Chinese art world. Although the mask could double as a muzzle, there is nothing quiet about Li Shurui in this photograph. The story emphasizes gender equalization–currently, something featured as a sign of the West’s continued lead in the modernity Olympics–but Li is a study in conflated binaries: She is both male and female, Asian and Western, and organic and mechanical. As a cyborg she performs an important moment in modern feminism; with slanted eyes and blond hair she is actively hybrid, and her intensely focused look makes it damn clear that there is nothing passive about this woman.

Most important, perhaps, is that she can represent an alternative model of Chinese modernization–one that includes key elements of Western society and culture without being mere imitation and gradualist assimilation toward a homogeneous ideal. This is likely to be the real China. Nor should anyone be surprised–it also is the likely to be the real West.

Photographs by Alex Hofford/European Pressphoto Agency and Natalie Behring/New York Times.

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Public life involves seeing the faces of strangers. Often they are but a blur, yet they can create a unique emotional experience. Ezra Pound captured that experience in his famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd/Petals on a wet, black bough.

The faces are of individuals yet unknown save as part of an unconscious pattern; ghostlike in their sense of social presence and yet vividly present in aesthetic space; beautiful yet ephemeral. Pound was able to create this masterpiece of emotional discernment and poetic compression by imitating Japanese haiku. One wonders what he would have thought of this face:

Actually, there are two faces, neither one quite what Pound depicted. The large image is a work of art by Kaho Nakmura on display at the Tokyo Express exhibition in London. The woman in the foreground, a dark smudge on a bright background, is someone walking through the gallery. Though seeming opposites–large/small, bright/dark, art/life–the two women are tied together by the photographic composition and the color red. The reversal of foreground and background makes each a commentary on the other. Thus, the red of her coat is exposed by the bloody glob on that tongue. In actual display, what should be inside the body is imitated on the surface, while what would seem to be on the surface–our expressiveness–is in fact hidden behind a mask, say, the flat expression and dark glasses of the onlooker.

So it is that the artwork is transgressive. This young woman is so out there, and so in your face. She exposes her inner self, which includes being pierced with a tongue stud. Eyes, mouth, face are open and illuminated for public view. She is not receptive, however, but aggressive, larger than life, projected into our world. A signboard, not a flower petal. She exists not as a moment of beauty, but rather as a beacon of desire that always will remain unnamed and unsatisfied because created entirely through the circulation of images.

At this point it would be easy to fall into a blanket dismissal of public imagery as having become too commercial, empty, loud, and otherwise degrading. That’s not my point, and Pound’s vision has not gone out of date either. To take a step in his direction, let’s look at another image from Japan, this one probably taken on the street:

This beautiful work by Hiroh KiKai is not of Pound’s apparitions, but there is something haunting about it. The young, hip father is so gentle, and so worn. He is holds the boy so lovingly, but the child’s weight is a load on the man’s slight frame. Look at this face, hands, every part of him suggests that he is steadily sacrificing his youth for this child. Youthful affectations remain, but I suspect the only dancing in his life right now is the sign on the bag. Not to worry. The beautiful realism evident in his face is matched by the sense of sheer, imaginative flight in the boy. He could be in a dream, on a magic carpet ride, flying high above the world and yet completely secure in his father’s arms. Dream and reality are face to face, cheek to cheek, in this remarkable image.

There is no need to choose between the painting and either of these photographs. Like Pound, each of the artists is showing us how we can see, value, and think about the faces that we see when walking down the street, through the terminal, in the mall, or at the summer festival. Art and life are there to be seen, face to face, in the gallery of public culture.

Photographs by Ben Stansall/AFP-Getty Images and Hiroh Kikai, from the New York Times slide show on Japanese Photography at the ICP. The show at the International Center of Photography is entitled Heavy Light.

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In democratic societies political leaders serve (and derive their legitimacy from) a collective master. In U.S. style liberal-democracies the collective, legitimizing sovereign force goes by the name of “We the people …” Of course, “the people” is a metaphor for the “body politic,” itself an abstraction which lacks any objective material reality. Lacking objective material reality however, does not mean that it lacks influence or force; following the terms of the metaphor, that influence is typically cast as “the voice of the people.” And so the problem for political leaders who want to retain their legitimacy to serve/rule is to be able to claim to be the material embodiment of “the people,” literally to speak for “the people.” I call this a problem, but of course it is as much an opportunity as anything, for since “the people” lack an objective material reality it is difficult to countermand a duly elected leader’s claim to speak for “the people” in any objectively verifiable or decisive way. Think, for example, of how difficult is was to contest President Nixon’s claim to speak for the “great silent majority.” Of course, being difficult and being impossible are two different things.

The photograph below made me think about this political dynamic:

It appeared above the fold on the front page of the NYT as part of a story concerning popular protests against recently elected South Korean President Lee Myung-bak’s decision to “resume imports of American beef.” The image is an aerial view of “thousands of South Koreans” massed along a major avenue in Seoul. Shot at dusk and from both a long distance and an acute, high angle, no individual person is identifiable in any sense at all. What we see instead is a vibrant and speckled mass—later described in the accompanying article as “South Koreans with candles”—that appears almost to pulsate with its collective energy as it surges like flood waters between and among the buildings for as far as the eye can see. And indeed, what appears initially to be a beautiful expression of unity resonates as well as a sublime, natural force totally beyond control. 1 or 100 or even 1,000 protestors might be seen as malcontents or perhaps as a small minority whose concerns will be duly noted before being ignored. But hundreds of thousands of individuals (the estimates range from 100,000 to 700,000) collected in one place, appearing to be animated by a common cause, make it much harder—and far more dangerous—for a leader to discount or ignore. And so it should come as no surprise that Lee’s newly appointed cabinet members offered to resign in recognition of their failure to meet the needs and expectations of “the people” (or whatever the comparable moniker is for the collective sovereign source of political legitimacy in South Korea).

What is particularly interesting here is how the above photograph operates as an allegory for the democratic process. On one hand it helps to create the illusion that we can see “the people” as an objective material reality—a collective body with mass that is not easily reducible to the individual, even though the flickering candles call attention to the fact that the individual is in there somewhere. On the other hand, it serves as a reminder that however beautiful such a representation can be, nevertheless, “the people” can be a sublime democratic force and leaders who toy with its will or interests do so at their own peril.

Photo Credit: Dong-A Ilbo/AP

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We have written previously about the photojournalism coming out of China with regards to the recent earthquake, noting the powerful images of a government mobilized to help its people in times of need.  And as the imagery has demonstrated, those efforts have been a model of efficiency and effectiveness that put U.S. efforts to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina to shame. But, of course, what we should not forget is that Beijing continues to house a repressive governmental regime that refuses to endorse the most basic tenets of democracy such as freedom of speech and the right to protest.  And, of course, the western media is quick to call the tune and to remind us of China’s totalitarian tendencies.  The point was driven home more recently by state efforts to intimidate the parents of school children killed in the earthquake who were protesting “shoddy school construction.”

The above photograph, which anchored a story in the NYT, features the parents of school children killed in the earthquake in Dujiangyan (in the Sichuan province), as they are being confronted by the police (dressed in black).  And one can see why the western media would be attracted to it, for the image is an almost perfect representation of occidental perceptions of the  difference between totalitarianism and democracy as it portrays a black clad and masculine force quieting and controlling a feminized people (literally “brought to its knees”) clad in a wide array of colors that mark its pluralist and individualist identity.   But there is, I think, a more interesting point to be considered if we focus more directly on the parents themselves and the fact that they are all clutching photographs of their dead children.

The question, of course, is what are the parents doing? If one were to crop the parents’ faces it would be hard – at least to western eyes – to discern whether they are expressing mournful grief and sorrow or protesting a political or moral wrong.  But, of course, their faces are not cropped and they all embrace photographs of their dead children, a posture which frames the meaning of the image even as it complicates the relationship between mourning and protest, imbricating the two in a single mode of social and political action.  This relationship is accented by a set of photographs that appeared in the NYT and elsewhere of  parents posing with pictures of their dead children in more or less private and physically isolated settings and locations.

The tension in such images between the controlled but sorrowful gaze of the parent and the smiling faces of the children is palpable, producing a visual hybrid of more traditional photographic conventions that operates at the conjuncture of “offer” and “demand.”  As with most of these images, the setting records a private world turned upside down—notice the overturned bookcase in the above photograph—which, when combined over and again across a series of such shots, is emblematic of a larger public disorder. And indeed, it is the repetition of the form in photograph after photograph that animates the affective force of the image.  At some point in time the aesthetic might become a cliché, subjecting such photographic representations to theories of “compassion fatigue,” but here at least their inventional novelty seems to avoid this result.

Such photographs are interesting for what they tell us about how protest might operate in political regimes where voices cannot be spoken with impunity, for they acknowledge the threat and potency of repressive silence even as they assert the power of something like a “public screen” to challenge and subvert controls on free speech traditionally understood. The people in such images recognize that they have little status to “speak” out in protest, even if such efforts did not put them at personal risk, which they obviously do.  But, of course, being seen is a different matter. The point is especially pronounced in the above photograph of  Zhao Xiao Ying and her twelve year old son Ji Qing Zhen, which foregrounds and underscores the political performativity of posing for such images; notice, for example, how the subjects in this photograph are visually thrice removed from the political present, even as as their political presence is accented by the photographic frame: what we have is quite literally a visual representation (a photograph) of a visual representation (mirror image) of a visual performance (posing for a photojournalist) that is equal parts private and public, and thus simultaneously an expression of personal grief and collective, political protest.

The individuals in such images do not speak per se, and thus in one sense they are “seen and not heard,” but in a much larger sense their collective visual presence—as displayed in the photograph at the top of this page—demonstrates the capacity for the performance of visibility to “speak” truth to power by affecting what we might call a “visual public sphere.” 

Photo Credits:  Ng Han Guan/AP, Shiho Fuakada/NYT; For discussion of the concept of the “public screen” see Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Pepples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” in Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 121-51.

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