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Special Exhibit in Gallery I: Human Beings

One reason I enjoy art galleries is that they enhance the way I see the people around me. I begin to look at strangers with the same intensity given to the art on the walls. This gaze involves more than an eye for detail: people become at once universal and more perfectly unique. They become types yet acquire a distinctive aura. I see each one alone in existential space and yet rich with meaning and mystery. Above all, they become idealized. The beautiful people become more beautiful; those who look interesting become even more so; even those seemingly trapped, whether in low end jobs or their own stories, appear to be treasures of human experience and possibility.

That is not the only way to see, however, and two photographs in the same week seem to challenge exactly this attitude to idealize when seeing life as art. The first photo shows gallery visitors together with a sculpture by Juan Munoz.

The visitors are the ones in color. I can imagine a space alien having to ask and perhaps being disappointed on hearing the answer. Perhaps the grayscale figures suggest a statement about uniformity or collective happiness, but they do look better off than those around them. And not by accident. Munoz is quoted as saying that “The spectator becomes very much like the object to be looked at, and perhaps the viewer has become the one who is on view.” But not prepared to be on view. The spectators here each look as if unaware of being seen and the worse for that. The two women are pensive at best and perhaps depressed. The two guys appear to be studies in corporate indifference (on the left) and self-interested calculation (on the right). And whereas the statues are dressed in clothing that looks both comfortable and styled for being in public, the male spectators look dressed to code while the women look somehow uneasily thrown together.

This contrast between life and art is inflected further by this photograph:

The photo was taken at an exhibition in Athens, Greece of contemporary Chinese artists. The work on the right is no smiley face, but neither is the one on the left. The one on the right at least has the excuse of being a commentary on itself, not least on the effect of being pulled in opposing directions. Having no aura and holding herself protectively, the one on the left is several times diminished by contrast with the larger, stylized fashionista. If at this point someone were to retort, “yes, but she’s a real person,” well, then the game really is lost.

These photographs achieve exactly the effect that Munoz hoped to create with his art work: “the spectator becomes very much like the object to be looked at.” It’s a small step from there to imagining ourselves on display in a museum gallery. What would other viewers say? “They were a sorry species, weren’t they?” “Do you think their artists were as depressed as the rest of them?” “Maybe they were different in private, but you think it would show. . . .”

It would show, wouldn’t it? Or is it just that museums are depressing? Or are the photographs unfair? It is easy to answer no, no, and yes. These are real people with rich inner lives and many moods including the inward reflection rightly activated in a gallery and easily misread. But art is there to help us take a careful look at ourselves. If we really looked at one another, what would we see? What would the spectator’s gaze reveal if taken out of the gallery? What is there to be seen in public? Depression, fatigue, loneliness, exhaustion, failure? All of the above.

Photographs by Vincent West/Reuters and Louisa Goullamak/AFP-Getty Images. The work “Many Times” (1999) is comprised of 100 figures in a single room. A Tate retrospective on the artist earlier this year generated a number of reviews that are available online. The painting in the second photograph was not identified in the caption accompanying the image in a Manchester Guardian slide show.

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The Many Shades of Racism

I learned to read at the age of five because of the tireless efforts of my grandmother who would spend hours teaching me how to sound out words and then sentences after working a full shift on a factory assembly line.  There wasn’t much money to buy books and so all that we read came from the public library.  Each Saturday we would get five new books.  And the books that I loved the most were a series of tales about a mischievous monkey by the name of Curious George who had been “rescued” from his native Africa and taken to live in a big city by “The Man in the Yellow Hat.” I would check the same ones out over and again, never tiring of reading about George’s adventures. I was reminded of all this recently when I encountered the image above and the recent controversy it sparked in Marietta, Georgia.

By now you probably know the issue.  Bar owner and ultra-conservative Mike Norman was selling the t-shirt displayed in the above photograph.  When challenged that the image was offensive to African-Americans he recoiled, claiming that he was “no racist” and that he had simply “seen” a resemblance between Senator Obama and the monkey while watching a cartoon movie.  In his words, “Look at him … the hairline, the ears, he looks just like Curious George.”  According to Norman, the comparison to a monkey was simply coincidental.  Watching Norman on CNN I initially considered the possibility that he was simply an uneducated redneck who really didn’t know how truly offensive and racist the image was.  That assumption was quickly proven false when it became clear that Norman was a notorious local provocateur (one sign outside of his bar announces, “I wish Hillary had married O.J.; another reads “INS agents eat free”) and he later acknowledged that he understood the connection between the image and racist stereotypes of the Jim Crow South, averring, “this is 2008 … not 1941 in Alabama, so get over it.”  But the question for me was whether someone could identify with the image of Curious George and not know that it was a racist image.  Was my grandmother a racist because she had allowed me to develop a close attachment to Curious George in the 1950s?  Was I? 

The answer to these questions, I fear, is yes.  Or at least a qualified “yes” with the acknowledgement that racism comes in many shades and that some are much easier to see (or to veil) than others.  As an example that seems less obvious to the sight, consider columnist Kathleen Parker’s recent endorsement of those who “would be more comfortable with ‘someone who is a full-blooded American as president’.”  Her argument is that politics is now driven by a “patriot divide” animated not by race or gender but by “blood equity, heritage, and hard-won American values.” And lest there be any confusion as to the target of her argument, she notes “Hillary has figured it out.  And the truth is, Clinton’s own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to.  She understands viscerally what Obama has to study.” 

It is hard to know where to begin here.  But surely it is difficult to imagine an appeal to “blood equity” that isn’t fundamentally racist at its core.  And that one candidate can know America’s underlying core values “viscerally” while the other can only “study” it would seem to make the point.  Or maybe, like Mike Norman’s claim that his comparison of Obama to a “cute” monkey was only coincidental, so too, perhaps Parker’s contrast is simply a matter of happenstance. But I think not.  Norman, after all, is a caricature of himself, a local character that we might find in an episode of The Dukes of Hazard seeking out his fifteen minutes of fame; Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist whose reasoned missives are featured nationally as part of the Washington Post’s writer’s group.   Norman, it would seem, is really just trying to make a buck by selling parodic t-shirts and beer to his local constituency, and so perhaps he has an excuse (i.e., racism sells, or as he puts it, “it’s my marketing tool”), but what is Parker’s excuse?  I’m really curious to know.

Photo Credit:  Thinh D. Nguyen/AP

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Private Grief and Public Life

I’m not sure why, but the photos from China that have been devastating. Disaster coverage is familiar to everyone–whether it’s twisted wreckage or a bloated corpse, long lines of refugees or supplies stacked on the tarmac, we’ve seen it before. And we’ve seen people crying over lost homes, villages, loved ones. But somehow not like this:

Can a photograph be more tender, or more heartbreaking? The contrasts only make everything worse by underscoring deeper similarities. He looks as if he still could be alive, but he is as dead as the hardening body shrouded next to him. His covering is colorful, alive with color, but that only marks the vitality that has been lost. She holds him so lovingly, as if they had fallen asleep in each others’ arms, but she will never hold him again.

Nor is she alone in her loss. There are many images of parents, sisters, friends, stricken in their grief. Like this:

This woman has just identified a loved one. The shock is palpable–a heavy body blow driving her into herself. (The English word “grief” derives from the Latin gravis, heavy.) Her hands claw at her face, as if to scratch out her eyes. Other friends or family are with her, holding her, yet she is inconsolable.

This photograph is less elemental than the first. Instead, it is cluttered with signs of the public character of the disaster. A uniformed emergency worker fusses with tarps and other material while overseeing the body bags. The background suggests some public venue (a stadium?) and a stranger walks by on his own business. The informal masks, which are an indication of mass death, also signify the anonymity that divides private lives and public interaction. And that’s where we come in: anonymous spectators far away from those whose lives are being ripped apart in full view of the world press. Some writers on photography are appalled by the visual mediation of suffering, and they could describe these images as a voyeuristic indulgence in false sentiments that deaden genuinely ethical relationships.

And they would be wrong.

Second photograph by Mark Ralston/AFP-Getty Images; I misplaced the credit for the first photo but hope it will turn up.  (If anyone can let me know, it would be much appreciated.)

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Eye Walkers and Animal Reflections

Public space is designed for seeing and being seen, as the performance group Medaman-Medaman demonstrated in Tokyo recently.

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Here you have Benjamin’s flaneur but without invisibility or empathy–as if the transitory spectator of public life had evolved into a hypertrophied version of itself: the enormous eye, engorged with the urban spectacle, no longer needs the other senses (note that the hands are gloved) or any mental acuity other than raw encompassing vision. Nor does it worry about being seen–this is a creature of optical interaction.

The girl is fascinated, but she’s young. The adults, more accustomed to the spectacle of urban life, go about their business. Why shouldn’t they? Look at all the windows looking down on the open vista of the street–this is a place where everyone is constantly transecting lines of sight, so much so that to be seen becomes little different than not being seen.

There are other reasons to take the walking eyes in stride. The idea that a mediated world is a world of extended vision has been second nature for decades, and I’m not talking about 1984 but rather things like this Old Media logo:

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Things have changed, however, The CBS eye was abstract, centralized, and otherwise godlike enough to be at once omnipresent and no part of everyday experience on the street. The eye walkers, by contrast, are directly accessible and obviously individualized. If standing here, they can’t be somewhere else; if looking one direction, even they don’t have eyes in the back of their heads. In other words, they are much closer to the new media that are widely distributed because woven into the fabric of everyday life. As this photograph suggests:

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The big eye is aligned along the same line as the camera, two organs of viewing especially active in public spaces. As the eye walker mimics a typical visual practice we are invited to reflect directly on the ubiquitous yet still personal nature of the visual public sphere. And amusingly so: instead of the imposing figures of the first photograph, this one gives us an entertainer playing his part in the everyday carnival of the urban center. The attitude is comic, as everyone is secure in a world of shared vision and civil interaction.

And when weirdness becomes familiar, it’s time for another jolt. Lest we think the eye walkers are all we need to see ourselves, take a look at this:

 

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Another photo of an eye, and yet this is everything the first is not: nature, not culture; enclosed, not in public space; marked by the flesh of mortality, not masked for whimsical performance; evoking the empathy of a fellow creature, not mirroring the hard surfaces of the city. The eye walkers awaken one kind of self-awareness, but not the only kind. Living in highly mediated environments, we need to be attentive to seeing. Living in highly mediated environments, we also need to be attentive to what else we share with others beyond intersecting lines of sight.

I’m anthropomorphizing, of course, but that single eye and wrinkled brow look so mournful. It is not hard to imagine that he somehow knows that he should not be on that truck. Pigs and humans have many physiological similarities, so it can’t hurt to reflect on how we also are often not free, fated for suffering, sure to die, and before then seen only in part. That, too, is part of city life, even if it can’t be seen so easily.

Photographs by Yoshikazu Tsuno for AFP/Getty Images and Casey Bhristie for The Bakersfield Californian/Associated Press.

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Seeing Democracy, Imagining Russia

If you type “democracy” into Google Images you will see one of the more motley and uninspiring slide shows possible. Bad editorial cartoons, messy posters, conventional book covers, not so snappy bumper stickers, a video game, an Internet TV platform, a monument in Bangkok, and my personal favorite: the king of Nepal wearing a floral garland. Most of these are not images from photojournalism. The two iconic images from Tiananmen Square each put in an appearance, along with a few snaps of protesters holding signs, but, again, the record is not distinguished.

This poor showing may be an oddity of the search engine but should not be surprising. Democracy is a set of beliefs, practices, and institutions each of which includes assumptions about the world that are partially metaphysical. I can show you a traffic light, but not “rule of law.” People voting, but not “the will of the people.” A flag, but not “liberty and justice for all.” So it is that we are drawn to documenting political and ethical failures, and to relying on iconic images and other symbols. One can document crime, privilege, and injustice, and a monument or photograph can evoke reaffirmation of our democratic ideals.

These thoughts were brought to mind by an image accompanying a Sunday New York Times story on the erosion of democracy in Russia during the Putin regime. Interestingly, the story was published in Russian on the previous Friday at a Times Russian website, and some of the 3000 comments were translated for a story in the US on Monday. The comments suggest that democratic debate is alive and well in the Russian blogosphere, with the added value of having devotees of authoritarian rule being able to voice their sentiments directly rather than code them as family values. But I digress.

The question I want to raise was provoked by the first photograph in the 13-photo slide show accompanying the article:

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This stunning image is captioned as “Nizhny Novgorod, an industrial center with 1.3 millian residents, was known as Gorky during the Communist era, when it was closed to foreigners and was home to the dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, who was sent into internal exile here. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, it became a hotbed of liberalism. Today, authority flows from the Kremlin to a regional governor appointed by President Vladimir Putin.”

If you read all of that without having your eyes glaze over, you’re ahead of me. I can’t help but note that the 66 words fail to identify the specific place being photographed or the subject of the the large statue in the center of the frame. Likewise, there is no evident reason to believe that what is being shown has anything specific to do with industrialization, Gorky, Communism, or Sakharov. I believe that we are looking at the statue memorializing Valery Chkalov, a Soviet test pilot killed in 1938, but you wouldn’t know it from the Times. In any case, that allusion to Soviet engineering is topped visually on either side by the Orthodox crosses and deer immortalized in ice.

So, what are we being shown with this photograph? One answer is merely aesthetic: it’s a visually striking image, what more do you need to know? I don’t doubt that had something to do with its being selected for the slide show, but it will not account for the full range of effects. We think with images, and this image will make it easier to imagine one Russia rather than another. Apparently, the news is not good. Although technically a color photograph, the scene seems a natural grayscale. The cold, hard, metallic monument sets the tone; its black sheen is the most vital thing in the picture, as if it were a monument to Darth Vadar on the Ice Planet. Inanimate objects surrounded by a vast, empty, public space and a featureless winter sky: Welcome to Nizhny Novgorod.

The “new city” was founded in 1221, and the photograph’s symbolism all but keeps us there. Nature and the church–a bastion of traditional pieties–surround a lifeless monument; Mother Russia envelops a hard core of authoritarian metal. The people are represented by a lone worker and his tools, which appear antiquated. So much for the people’s republic, vanguard of progress, and one has to wonder if a democratic people could fare any better in such a frozen place.

Unlike his counterpart in the US, I haven’t looked into Putin’s soul, but I wouldn’t trust him with the garbage. Even so, those committed to democracy should do more than point to its threats. If democracy is to succeed in Russia, it may need help from citizens elsewhere. (The US did.) We may not be able to see democracy, but it does require imagination. If we have already concluded that Russia is fundamentally cold, harsh, and naturally authoritarian, we do them no favor. Images such as the one above are visually distinctive, but they may be a political mistake.

Photograph by James Hill/New York Times.

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A Season for the Passions

As you no doubt know, today is St. Valentines Day. Most of us in the United States are first introduced to it in kindergarten or the 1st grade where we are encouraged to give valentines to all of our classmates. Eventually we learn that Valentines Day is something of a romantic holiday, to be shared mostly in private with that “someone special,” but even at that it retains its communal quality as an occasion for the expression of the passions by virtue of being marked as a public holiday. Like most such holidays it has become grossly commercialized and it is thus easy to be cynical about it (even as I mark on my calendar the need to buy a valentine for my beloved), but what we too easily forget is that Valentines Day occurs during the mid-winter season that includes an array of holidays and festivals—Mardi Gras, carnival, the Lunar New Year, etc.—all of which feature some version of a public and communal expression and release of emotion.

Public displays of emotion are often seen as undermining collective judgment and putting democratic polity in peril, and certainly emotional reactions can get out of hand (just like obsessive and blind adherence to rationality), but at NCN we believe that public emotion is nevertheless essential to a vital and vibrant democratic public culture and thus needs to be nurtured and cultivated. And so we celebrate the mid-winter season as a time for the communal expression of affect and emotion—a season for the passions—by bringing you pictures of the season that have been featured by the mainstream media who seem implicitly to recognize its importance both at home and abroad.

 

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Lunar New Year, Chinatown, New York City

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Tet, Hanoi

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Mardi Gras, St. Charles St., New Orleans

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Carnival, Rio de Janeiro

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Carnival, Basel, Switzerland

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Congos y Diablo Carnival, Panama

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653rd Anniversary of the Birth of Bawa Lal Dyal, Amristar, Pakistan

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Up the Helly Aa Festival, Shetland Isles, Scotland

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Valentines Day, West Bank city of Jenin

Photo Credits: Chris McGrath/Getty Images, Chitose Suzuki/AP, Ted Jackson, Times-Picayune, Daldo Galderi/AP, Andreas Frossard/AP, Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images, Arnulfo Franco/AP, Danny Lawson/AP, Saif Dahlah/AFP/Getty Images

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Dutch Cabinent Bans Burqas

According to the Chicago Tribune, the Dutch Cabinet has asked parliament to ban burqas from all schools. “‘I value being able to look somebody in the eye,'” Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said, referring to the fact that the robes cover a woman’s face. “‘I find it unpleasant.'” The PM may be referring to the Afghan chadiri, which, unlike many burqas, covers the eyes:

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I have to admit this habit spooks me too. It even was too much for libertarians, who banned one of their own from the US national convention. (She’s the one behind the veil in this photo.) At least the PM was honest enough to say that it bothered him, rather than pretend that he cared about lending support to a cultural practice that restricts women. After all, what’s more important?

I post on burqas from time to time because of how they raise important questions about the relationship between liberalism and norms of transparency. The PM’s comment may seem idiosyncratic but carries a set of common assumptions about how civil interaction presumes some openness to others’ scrutiny, how social trust depends on being able to assess character, how the eyes are sources of information about a person, and how good judgment includes aesthetic reactions. These notions can each be debated at length, but that is not where I’m going today. Instead, let me suggest an alternative headline for this post:

Dutch Cabinet Bans Sunglasses

The problem is that the reason given by the PM for banning burqas applies equally well to a widely accepted practice of veiling in the West. I am referring to wearing sunglasses when in public, like this:

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The caption read, “New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress listens to a question during media day for Super Bowl XLII.” Wide receivers probably don’t have eye problems, so I’ll bet this was a matter of choice, just as it was for Antonio Pierce:

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So it’s not a black or white thing, either. It can get bright outside in Phoenix, but the first photo has clouds in the background and the same slide show had photos of other players not wearing shades. No, these dudes chose to cover their eyes and the reason probably had a lot more to do with “media day” than the weather. They are withholding visual access to their eyes, an act of resistance within a liberal social order. And it would not be news that wearing sunglasses makes people uncomfortable; indeed, that is one reason to do it.

Now this may not mean much to the Dutch cabinet. Some might say that the comparison doesn’t hold since the players haven’t really attended school, but that’s beside the point. The question is, why can pro athletes, rock stars, movie people, and anyone who wants to imitate them cover their eyes in public, while women who have little choice to do otherwise are punished for it?

Photographs: unknown; Julie Jacobson/Associated Press; Harry How/Getty Images.

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My Vote, My Valentine

The Super Tuesday elections were reported yesterday with stories and graphics and victory celebration photos, and for once the hype may have been matched by the results and the good vibe. Perhaps the turnout will help the media move on from their theme of the week, which was fretting about the “arcane” primary process–as if monarchy would be more rational or bureaucracy more transparent. In any case, we all can take a breath, plug the answering machines back in, and get back to our less than super-sized routines. As one last look back, however, I’d like to put up a couple of images from the slide shows at the major papers that were part of yesterday’s coverage.The slides depict the considerable variety and common shabbiness of the places where America votes. Schools, churches, laundromats, garages, you name it–we haven’t moved up much from the days when Americans voted in taverns. Any one of the slides would do, but this one caught my eye for several reasons:

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By cropping the photo to feature people from the waist down, the trope of metonymy is put in play. John and I write about this focus on “boots and hands” from time to time because, first, such images are everywhere despite their individual peculiarity, and, second, they push forward a particular idea of the body politic. This image is a case in point: voters are known by their anonymity but assumed to have walked the walk and taken a stand on behalf of the polity. They are inherently fragmentary and so needing to be aggregated, but also inevitably plural and otherwise part of a society in which their are many walks of life. (If you don’t like cliches, even when used to make a point, this is not your day.)

The photograph elaborates this conception of democracy. By cutting out the markers of personality, we are left with a social scene and social types. The scene is totally functional: voting machine with wheels and handles for being moved in and out of storage, bare floor, warning pylons for when the floor is being washed, folding chairs and tables in the background. This is never going to be a personal, intimate place but rather a place where people congregate to do something in common. The clothes of the two figures take it a step further: jeans, dark coats, boots or worn shoes, these are the clothes of the mythical common man. She is a bit more stylish, he compensates for that. Their clothes are unconsciously coordinated with each other, as is her bag with the cloth on the voting booth. The only really garish color is the weird aquamarine of the machine, as if it were something for a party, which it is.

This last suggestion that democracy is somehow both routine and festive is taken a step further in the second photo.

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Again we have a functional scene–the wood floor and brick wall of a recreational center–and a social type–the elderly. There also is the visual irony, which contrasts the seriousness of voting with the frivolous decor of a holiday, and the bent postures of old age with the frizzy excessiveness of young love. The visual grammar places the elderly in the space of the real, with the decorations in the place of the ideal. Their complete lack of attention to the decorations makes it seem that whatever cupid symbolizes, its completely irrelevant to the preoccupations of old age.

There is a third contrast as well. I doubt that those in the picture are oblivious to either romance or decorative arts, but they are paying attention to their ballots. Thus, the photograph depicts not only youth and age but also romantic love and love of country. The photograph’s ironies are superficial but pose an interesting question: Can one have two loves? This is a fundamental question in a liberal-democratic society, where we regularly experience the tension between the right to a private life and the value of government by the people. The answer to the question is a choice. You can see the two loves as existing only side by side and ironically so, or you can see them as different but ultimately compatible. And on that question, the polls are always open.

Photograph by Nathaniel Brooks and Monica Almeida for The New York Times. The first was taken at Saint John the Evangelist church in Barrytown, New York, and the second at the Belvedere Park Recreation Center in East Lost Angeles, California.

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Fred Thompson, Trouper

The papers of late have been full of pictures of the front runners in the presidential nominating races surrounded by throngs of near delirious supporters eager to touch the hem of the political celebrity who has come to their otherwise inconsequential state. (OK, I’ll retract that last remark in respect to South Carolina, which has started a war.) These photos are full of the energy of massed bodies, close encounters, and the charismatic touch. They are representative of important features of our political process, for better or worse, but they don’t tell the whole story. To get closer to that, we have to look elsewhere, like here:

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You are looking at a photo from last week of Fred Thompson stepping onto a stage in Prosperity, South Carolina. The long view allows us to see the candidate as part of a scene, rather someone around whom everything else is compressed. The view also isolates each part of the scene: candidate, bunting, handler, local supporter, and wife-and-kid are each identifiable as if pieces of a grade school diorama. What is most revealing, however, is that we see both stage and backstage in a single view. What would have been The Candidate framed by the Red White and Blue becomes instead a tacky stage set–hey, don’t trip on that cord! And instead of those gathered in his name, we see instead wife-and-kid waiting in the wings, or waiting to make their entrance, but either way now bit players that make Thompson no more than the lead in the school play.

I suspect that this image is presented to remind us that Thompson’s campaign remains a non-starter. One reason I think so is because the shot above called to mind another taken last year:

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Now we’re in Anderson, South Carolina. Not much has changed. Again, the key element of composition is that we are shown both stage and backstage. And as before, the difference between front and back is only a flimsy curtain and our customary inattention to political stagecraft. This photo may be a bit more grim in that we see Thompson just before he puts on his theatrical mask. And we see a bit more of the area behind the curtain–enough to really know that backstage is a cold, harsh, functional place of calculation and paying the bill.

Again, the message is that this guy is not going to win. He’s playing on far too small a stage in too small a place to what barely counts as an audience. (Pop Quiz: how old will Thompson by the time that kid on the left votes?) That’s not exactly news, however. I think the real value of these images is that they show us what every candidate experiences and endures. The big winners only get there by playing before small houses like these in the community theater of American politics. And when some of them make it, the stage gets larger, but there is always a stage.

Photographs by Jim Wilson/New York Times and Mary Ann Chastain/Associated Press.


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Seeing We the People in New Hampshire

There will be a lot of photos in the papers today following the New Hampshire Primary. These will include professional photojournalism as well as the Polling Place Photo Project and other examples of vernacular photography. I’m going to add one from the recent past:

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This is from the 2004 New Hampshire primary. I haven’t seen it reproduced anywhere.

I love this photograph, which could be labeled Poll Dancers. There is a lot going on, including the expressions of the poll workers, the color and texture of the setting–look at that beautiful table–and the formal relationships in the visual composition of the scene. The basic design is what was called a chiasmus in classical rhetoric. The formal pattern for chiasmus in a verbal text is ABBA: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” In a visual image, the equivalent figure would be a crossing pattern that carries a change in meaning or joins opposing concepts. In this photograph, this pattern is cued by the legs of the two poll workers: each are crossed, front foot toward the other. This unconsciousness entrainment is mimed by their arms and turned heads, and by the spontaneous entrainment of the two voters stepping out of the booths. The symmetrical alternation by gender links the two pairings, who together form a large X if you draw lines from head to toe, male to male and female to female. Each of the two couples has nearly identical expressions on their faces, and the seriousness of the citizens who are voters is complemented by the good vibe of the citizens who are tending the polling place.

The smiles cue emotional response to the rest of the scene, even though it is obvious that those smiling could not be reacting to those behind them. Likewise, it doesn’t matter that the viewer will never know the joke being shared by the two volunteers. Their smiles, along with the informal clothing of all four figures and the fact that all are acting as if no one is watching, make the scene a celebration of the beautiful egalitarianism of democratic elections. This more complex sentiment is shaped by the red, white, and blue cloth draping the voting booths. Wrapped in the national colors, the voters’ accidental choreography symbolizes that elections can aggregate private decisions by strangers to produce social harmony. The woman on the left and the man on the right are different individuals, but they unconsciously move in unison on election day.

Note also that the photograph has no news value. We know that thousands voted, that many voting stations and voters look very much like these, and so forth. Instead, the photograph crafts an emotionally rich performance of democratic life. The vernacular life of small town democracy temporarily is given national significance and emotional resonance; likewise, the social form of citizenship, which often is disembodied, standardized, and abstract, becomes more embodied, familiar, and particular. Aesthetic judgments have to be specific, particular judgments, just like voting, and so there is yet another continuity offered: the act of voting, which only a few were able to do yesterday, is extended to all who are able to view the photograph. One act of citizenship becomes multiplied many times by public spectatorship.

The cynic could point out the virtual citizenship is a long way from political power, and for that voting and viewing often are about equally useless. My attachment to the photograph is not nostalgic, as I see it as a still present reality, but it certainly is sentimental and idealistic. Just like voting.

Photograph from the New York Times.


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