visual memory – Page 4 – NO CAPTION NEEDED

Photographer's Showcase: A (Southern) Civil Rights Memorial

We are pleased to introduce NCN readers to Jessica Ingram‘s “A Civil Rights Memorial,” a photographic exploration of the ways in which important moments in the struggle for civil rights in the American south are remembered—or perhaps more to the point, the ways in which such events risk being forgotten as they fade into the landscape of time or are otherwise awkwardly remembered as part of the local context in which they occurred. The above photograph is the contemporary, unmarked site of of the store in Money, Mississippi where in 1955 Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was accused of whistling at a white woman, an event that led to him being beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. To see the exhibit click here.

We first encountered Ingram’s work at the Visura Magazine Spotlight—a site designed to support emerging artists and students. It is a web resource that we strongly encourage NCN readers to visit.

2 Comments

The War in Iraq and The Return of the Repressed

The war in Iraq has moved on to Afghanistan and the (relatively few) pictures we are being shown from there lately, such as the one above, tend to depict a somewhat ordered and ordinary, workaday world—at least for what we imagine everyday life in Afghanistan to be like. The U.S. military seem more like police officers than an occupying force—delighting local children, gathering information, searching out bad guys, and so on. And for the locals it seems like business as usual, with weekly Shura’s, sellers pedaling their wares in the marketplace, etc. The Taliban is still a threat, of course, and has to be sought out and neutralized, but all in all, things seem to be going well for our troops who take out time to exercise, help locals with development projects, and look forward to returning home once the job of security is turned over to local police—or so the photographic record would seem to suggest. Of course, this all ignores the nearly 600 US and allied soldiers who have died in Afghanistan in the past year, including more than 40 in the last month alone—or for that matter the nearly $300 billion dollars we anticipate spending to support the occupation in 2010 alone—but there is a different point to be made.

The photograph below appeared on the front page of the NYT. One might imagine that it records a severe car crash somewhere in the western world. The car is an SVU and the girl, bloodied and in distress, nevertheless bears all the markings of a western, middle-class or higher existence—notice the clean blouse, stylish sweat pants, and colorful sandals. But there’s the rub, for we would almost never see such a photograph of a U.S. citizen, at least not in the mainstream press, and not of members of middling or upper classes (and certainly not of children). That fact alone should clue us to locating the image in another world—distant and distinct from our own, both physically and culturally.

The caption solves the mystery, as it notes that “A girl sought help on Monday after three bombs exploded within about 10 minutes during Baghdad’s afternoon rush, killing her mother.” The bombing was the result of a regular and coordinated effort by the insurgency to undermine the state’s authority in the face of upcoming parliamentary elections. From whom the young girl is “seeking help” is not exactly clear, but the photograph’s oddly prominent position above the fold without an accompanying front page story makes it seem that somehow a visual demand is issuing forth from the national unconscious – a vivid reminder not only that all is not well in Iraq, but forever how much we would like to move on from involvement there, we simply cannot. And perhaps this is as it should be, for there is no question but the U.S. must bear a large portion of the responsibility for the current political instability and insurrection in Iraq. And that responsibility does not abate simply because we chose to leave, having declared our mission a success.

The repressed, it seems, always returns. And that should give us pause as we witness the photographic record of how well things seem to be going in Afghanistan.

Photo Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP; Ayman Oghanna

0 Comments

A Crime With No Name

We have all seen images like this before. A photograph of photographs. A wall of missing or deceased men, women, and children remembered by little more than their photographic residues. Once they were here to be photographed, but now they are not. All that remains are these images. A visual aide-mémoire to what once was but is no more. The photographs here represent the thousands who were tortured, murdered, and imprisoned in Pinochet’s Chile, but it is no different in kind from the Holocaust Museum’s “Tower of Faces” and other such memorial installations. One of the things that distinguishes such photographs (and the installations that they represent) is the anonymity of the individuals being remembered. And even when a name is available, it is little more than a verbal marker that designates the face portrayed, but tells us nothing of the person being memorialized, of who they were: their successes and failures, their joys and sorrows, their personal conceits and virtues, etc. In an important and somewhat ironic way, that is precisely the point. What makes photographs such as the one above notable is how they aggregate a mass of individuals as a collective, not by metonymic reduction of the many into the one, but by underscoring the sense in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And the normative impact of that is palpable, all the more so since it marks a crime that has no name.

The torture and murder of any individual is unjust, to be sure, but here the injustice is magnified literally beyond comprehension. To begin with, many of the images are simply beyond the range of ordinary human vision, both too high and at an oblique angle from the floor, making it very nearly impossible to register the visual representation of any individual with any real precision. And yet, even though many of the photographs cannot be easily registered there is no doubt that they are to be seen, just as those recorded in the images were once there to be seen. But more, there is something of the quality of an optical illusion: Try to focus on an individual face and you are almost immediately lost in the collage of images that demarcate the sprawling but vaguely ordered mass, look to the whole so as to make sense of its collective order and your line of sight is drawn to individual faces, and then back again. The overall effect is to underscore the sheer impossibility of taking in, let alone understanding, the magnitude of the crime imagined and being remembered.

And therein lies, at least in part, the power of the photographic image: to help us show—and perhaps to see—when words are simply not up to the task.

Photo Credit: Aliosha Marquez/AP

0 Comments

The March of the Flag

November 16, 2009February 3, 2022
Lucaites
no caption needed visual memory visualizing war
2 Comments

November 11th was originally proclaimed Armistice Day by President Wilson in 1919 as a day for remembering those who sacrificed their lives in the first “war to end all wars.” In 1926 the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution in which November 11th was designated as a day for commemorating “with thanksgiving and prayer exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.” In 1954 Armistice Day was renamed “Veteran’s Day” by President Eisenhower in order to acknowledge and honor all veterans in the wake of World War II and the Korean conflict. The movement from commemorating a “war to end all wars” in the name of peace, good will and mutual understanding to a day for honoring Veterans of all wars without prejudice is not subtle, although we rarely if ever seem to acknowledge the difference. The point to be made here, however, is that this very shift in meaning correlates in no small way with the difficulty we have had in recent times in judging any national military aggression lest we risk doing harm to those who actually do the fighting.

The many slide shows at mainstream journalistic websites marking Veteran’s Day this past week make the point, as photograph after photograph presents visually eloquent and decorous displays of the sacrifices of those who nobly served and often died in the service of their country without any specific reflection on the particular wars being fought. This battle, that invasion, it doesn’t really seem to matter, as the reasons for fighting are visually trumped by an abstract, visual display of national sacrifice that, in the end, reduces the individual to the nation-state. The photograph above from the Wall Street Journal is a case in point. The hearse carries the flag draped remains of a soldier recently killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. There is nothing in the image that marks that fact, although the caption does give the deceased’s name and rank, but notice how the photograph itself works to deflect attention from the particular sacrifice inside the hearse to the wall of flags that extends to infinity reflected on the vehicle’s highly polished, exterior surface. The hearse is thus cast as a mirror, and as the photograph invites us to view it as such, what we see—as with any mirror—is a reflection of ourselves. And what that reflection reveals is not the individual per se, but the nation signified by an inexorable march of the flag. Whatever specific cause took the life of this soldier seems to pale in comparison, and certainly is not subject to question.

A second photograph from the same paper on the same day underscores and extends the nationalist implications of the first image above.

Here we have a boy who is described without a name as a “Junior Reserve Offices Training Corps honor guard” participating in a Veteran’s Day ceremony. Lacking a name, he takes on the quality of a individuated aggregate—an individual cast in the role of a collective. He stands for something more than himself. But what? The eyes, we are told, are the windows to the soul. But here, notice that his eyes are hidden from view; if he has an individual soul it is not accessible to us. What we have instead is his serious countenance defined by the set of his jaw balanced against the bright, mirror-like surface of his highly polished helmet, an instrument of war turned to ceremonial purposes. The helmet reflects both the deeply saturated colors of the national flag that he appears to be holding, and which shrouds his head and shoulders, as well as another flag, more difficult to make out, that appears to be in his line of vision. There is no hint of the boy here, let alone the individual veteran, but a connection between past (behind him) and future (in front of him) defined only by the national colors. His (and our) present is defined by a direct line from past to future and the trajectory is … well, fated. And once again, the flag marches on.

We can and should remember those who sacrifice their lives for the common good. But in doing so we are well advised to recognize and reflect on what is being sacrificed to what, and to avoid the temptation—however comforting it might be—to make a fetish of the flag and what it represents in the process.

Credit: Darron Cummings/AP; Nati Harnick/AP

2 Comments

Sight Gag: You're In Good Hands …

Credit: Branch, San Antonio Express

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture. We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible. Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

0 Comments

Remembering Apollo 11: Techno-Porn and Modernity's Gamble

The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing has been the occasion for commemorating a moment of national triumph—by some accounts “the” moment of national triumph in the post-World War II era—with slideshows of “remembrance” at many of the major media outlet websites (e.g., here and here). The photos at these slideshows display a ritualistic pattern of representation that features heroes (both the astronauts themselves, as well as the engineers and technocrats that made it all possible) and images of the earth as if shot from the heavens, a vantage that no ordinary mortal could ever achieve. But more than that, these slideshows are dominated by images that fetishize the technology itself, as with the photo above of the Saturn V rocket that hurled the Apollo 11 astronauts into space.

The photograph is a sublime display of raw and unfettered power. I am typically reluctant to concede the generally all too easy identification of a phallic symbol, but it is pretty hard to avoid the ascription here. The long, thin projectile is literally “blasting” off from the launch pad, powered by nearly 7 million lbs. of fuel (according to the caption). And it is not hard to imagine it as a representation of a nationalist (notice the red, white and blue color scheme) and technological orgasm, a physical expression of force further accentuated by the sheer size of the photograph itself, a 10 X 20 inch reproduction at the website where I encountered it, that far exceeds the dimensions of my 22 inch monitor and requires that I scroll up and down to see the entire image. Indeed, in its own way the photograph as such functions rather like the foldout in a “girlie” magazine that requires the viewer’s active participation in order to take in the somewhat “larger than life” object of desire.

The national media has been complicit with the promotion of NASA and the space program virtually from the beginning, and so I was not really surprised when, in the midst of all of the nostalgia for Apollo 11—and visual remembrances of what we might characterize as vintage techno-porn—I encountered a slideshow at the Sacramento Bee that once again seemed to make a fetish out of our more contemporary space technologies, this time in conjunction with the International Space Station and the recent launch of the Endeavour space shuttle. But what took me by surprise was the slide that ended the show:

The photograph is distinct in a number of important ways that warrant comment. First, of course, is the simple fact that the image features the technology of photography itself rather than the space technology. There is no way to know if those with the cameras are professional photojournalists or pro/am photographers, but in either case the point is clear that the spectacle we are witnessing—whether it is the blast off from a launching pad or a close-up of the space station floating ever so serenely in orbit—is not immediate to our ordinary human perception but rather is refracted through a lens that creates the appearance of closeness or distance, that can expand or diminish the magnitude of the object or event being observed, and so on. So, for example, compare the size and distance of the image of the Endeavour in this photograph with the image of the launch of the Apollo 11 above. What these photographers can see with their eyes and what they will capture with their cameras is not exactly the same thing. The photo is thus something of a reminder of both the fact and effects of technological mediation. And more, it is a reminder that the camera itself is complicit in some important respects in creating the objects of our desire; and this is no less so in observing the idealized presentation of technological wonders themselves than when we are gazing upon the eroticized body.

But there is a second and more subtle—perhaps even more important—point as well. Although the billowing plumes of white smoke indicate a powerful force, it is nevertheless a finite power, as we see that what rises must inevitably fall (pun intended). Indeed, the downward slope of the smoke is at least vaguely reminiscent of some images of the descent of the Challenger space shuttle after its disastrous explosion, and thus perhaps the image is a cautious reminder of the anxiety that seems necessarily to accompany modernity’s gamble—the wager that the long-term dangers of a technologically intensive society will be avoided by continuing progress: every step forward entails some risk, the bigger the step the bigger the risk. Put differently, for all of the positive effects and affects of our landing on the moon in 1969, our remembrances of that event have included virtually no consideration of the costs expended, including the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts, or those who flew aboard the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles. And to remember Apollo 11 in this way is to idealize the event that took place on July 16, 1969, to airbrush it, if you will, and in a manner that converts our memory of that day into something of a fetish.

I wonder if we can separate progress and the risks—the triumphs and disasters—of living in a technological society quite so easily. And if we do, we surely must ponder the ultimate costs.

Photo Credits: NASA; John Raux/AP

3 Comments

The Half-Life of Cold War Images

To the untrained eye, including many of us who grew up seeing annual photos of Soviet military hardware being paraded in Red Square, this could be an image from the 1960s.

The planes are flying over Red Square for the annual photo-op that the Soviet–oops, Russian–government provides each year to commemorate the end of WW II. A slide show at The Big Picture provides this and other photographs, many of which are picture-perfect renditions of typical images from the Cold War: massed soldiers tightly entrained as they pass the reviewing stand, and huge missile launchers, tanks, and other lethal vehicles passing in front of ornate, 19th century buildings. Russian might is on display–as the massive, industrialized concentration of disciplined masses serving an ancient authoritarian state.

That is one Russia, and perhaps one that still should be taken seriously, but other images provide evidence that the world is changing around the government’s stage. One photograph features a young couple kissing as they walk in parallel to the parade, indifferent to the public show providing a backdrop for their personal relationship. In another, the photo of the weaponry includes a TV crew, suggesting that the military is becoming relegated to a sideshow in the information age. In another, a young boy runs past a memorial, his brand-name athletic clothing and free spirit an obvious contrast to the stolid monumentalism of the national security state. The photographers seem to be saying that the parade comes out of the past, while the spectators are the future.

It would be easy to conclude at this point, as if the Russian government were the only remaining source of Cold War culture, as if they alone remain mired in the past while more liberal democracies were creating a global civil society of free markets, continuous media, and consumerism. But then I came across this image:

This photo offers a peek into Digilab at the Open University in the UK. The Guardian’s caption mentioned that the individual shown was working at a computer–as if that were something very special. To cut to the chase, this is another example of Cold War image culture. The public is given a glimpse of a technocratic elite who work in highly modern workplaces that are carefully guarded against more intrusive public access. The image itself is of an interface: the small, circular, specially sealed windows could almost double as gauges, or lights, or conduits for optical beams, or ports for flexible hoses. The flat, monochrome surface with its odd, supposedly pleasant color completes the composition. This is a world of uniformly managed surfaces to maintain a supposedly rational distribution of skills and risks.

In other words, Cold War imagery continues to be produced on both sides of the former iron curtain. And in each case the images can continue to legitimate different versions of the old dispensations. It wasn’t all bad, but I certainly hope that we can move on to better things. With that in mind, I find this last image particularly poignant.

Missile launchers are waiting their cue to enter the Square for a rehearsal for the Victory Day parade. The golden cannisters could be something completely different than weapons, and they could be to any scale–say, a child’s toys. The domed cathedral in the background looms Oz-like in the fog. The vehicles and the buildings each seem to have their own source of light, and their own secret purpose. The entire scene is dream-like.

As if the whole era had been a dream, a fantastical dream of beauty and terror, and one that you can’t quite get out of your head.

Photographs by Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP-Getty Images, Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images, Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press.

0 Comments

In the Interest of a Useable Past, Part II

By guest correspondent Patrick Wade.

As long as we are cataloging historical moments of American injustice, violence, protest, and trauma in early May–and their importance for ongoing memory-work “in the interest of a usable past”–we shouldn’t forget about the labor dimension of May Day, and its origins in the Haymarket tragedy of May 4, 1886.

On May 3, Chicago police officers killed two strikers in a fight at McCormick Reaper Works. In response to the killing, a meeting was called by August Spies and Albert Parsons at Chicago’s Haymarket square. As the meeting was winding down and Samuel Fielden, the evening’s final orator, was speaking, 175 Chicago police officers marched on the gathering and demanded that the remaining crowd disperse. An unidentified person in the crowd threw a dynamite bomb into the police ranks, instantly slaying Officer Matthias Deegan and wounding several others. The police began to fire into the crowd, and, in the aftermath, eight prominent anarchists and labor leaders were arrested and tried for murder. Five were executed by hanging, although Chicago Mayor John Peter Altgeld would later pardon the survivors and exonerate the executed, as none of the men could be proven to have taken part in any conspiracy to murder.

On May 15th, 11 days following the initial events, Harper’s magazine published the illustration that you see above. The image–like much of the editorial commentary at the time–blamed anarchists and labor agitators for violence. Samuel Fielden is pictured exhorting the crowd in spite of the melee unfolding below him. One crowd member is shown firing on the police. The image depicts a riot, one with villains (the crowd) and heroes (the police). The illustration is composing a useable past–for the state.

Photography’s realism doesn’t hinder depictions of “wild” crowds of protesters to paint dissent as illegitimate, blameworthy acts of violence against the legitimate guarantors of social order. We would do well to remember this as we look at contemporary news stories displaying the violent outcomes of May Day rallies across Europe. See, for example, the MSNBC.com article “May Day Turns Violent across Europe, or the New York Times article “Anger and Fear Fuel May Day Protests.”

Conventional images of protest such as this foreground the wild-eyed, long-haired, bearded anarchist as a threat to the social order. And are images like the one below, that represent the “pure” possibilities of peaceful protest, any less naive in their erasure of the inherent potential for violence in the gathering of crowds?

When the New York Times leads the online version of its story about European May Day protest with this image, the viewer is encouraged to see legitimate protest as serenely peaceful, which makes images of violent protest distressful, disturbing, and illegitimate by comparison.

But of course, we need not be trapped between these two images of protest. There is a third, democratic possibility, one that relies on a different strategy that falls outside of the play of guilt and innocence in the two photographs above.

Here we see a photograph of the community gathering together to engage in collective action to bring about change. The crowd is always potentially violent, and this is part of its strength. But this violence is always implicit, and it creates the possibility of a political demand–one that can best be represented in the gathering of bodies together in a collective, embodied argument, under a banner, in plain view of a seat of governmental power.

Can we not draw a further parallel to a different photograph, another image of a crowd taken from the civil rights movement in the US? One that draws upon all the aesthetic powers of photographic design to eloquently depict collective solidarity?

Yes we can.

Illustration by Harper/s Weekly/public domain. Photographs by Mustafa Ozer/Agence France Press – Getty Images; Fred Dufour/Agence France Press – Getty Images; Lucas Dolega/European Pressphoto Agency; Warren Leffler/US News and World Report. Patrick Wade is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University. He can be contacted at wpatrickwade at gmail.com.

0 Comments

In the Interest of a Useable Past

There are only a very few dates in U.S. history that are instantly recognizable by most citizens: July 4, December 7, June 6, September 11; for baby boomers, maybe, November 22. But beyond that, we tend to remember events more than dates; and when such events are no longer present to the collective mind’s eye they tend to fade into the dustbin of history—part of the academic historian’s palette, to be sure, but increasingly difficult to access as a usable past. Few people recall the significance of May 3rd in U.S. history. I didn’t, and I have studied and even published essays and books that speak to the momentous events of that day in 1963; or at least I didn’t recall the significance of the date until I literally stumbled upon the two photographs below while surfing the web and looking for something to write about yesterday morning.

The images were included in a slide show titled “This Week in History” and buried deep on the Camera Works page of the Washington Post beneath twenty three other slide shows on a potpourri of topics ranging from the swine flu crisis, the Chrysler bankruptcy, and President Obama’s first 100 days in office to the Kentucky Derby, a photo exhibit at the MOMA on the recent history of fashion, a retrospective on the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the visit of an eight year old beaver to a veterinary dentist, images of animals from around the world, and the top ten sports photos of the week. As far as I can tell, nothing else in the WP commented on the events of May 3, 1963 in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, nor for that matter was the topic addressed by any of the major news outlets or agencies, including the local Birmingham News. It is almost as if the events of that day have faded from collective memory, no longer necessary to a productive and usable understanding of our nation’s bloody racial past.

The point is accentuated some by the front page of Sunday’s NYT, which included two stories above the fold, one touting President Obama’s professorial pragmatism in thinking about the Supreme Court and the other titled “In Obama Era, Voices Reflect Rising Sense of Racial Optimism.” Replete with photographs, the later story featured polling data indicating that 2/3s of Americans hold that “racial relations are good” and illustrates the point with anecdotal data of blacks and whites “communicating” on the streets, at the gym, and so on. The article concludes with the words of an African-American auditor from Tampa, FL, “I’m not saying that the playing field is even, but having elected a black president has done a lot.” It would seem as if we have moved beyond the days of Bull Connor and the KKK; and if so, maybe it is time to let the images of water cannon and attack dogs fade into the recesses of our collective memory as the nation heals its wounds and moves forward.

Or maybe not … for buried within the NYT article is the report of statistics from the Southern Poverty Law Center indicating that there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of active hate groups in the U.S. since 2000. The Times barely recognizes the point, concerned more with the “sense of racial optimism,” but the significance of those numbers is underscored in last week’s edition of Newsweek, which repeated them as part of a feature story on the recent “rebranding” of white supremacist groups as “mainstream” political organizations. The online version of the article was accompanied by a slide show of images such as these:

What is disturbing about these photographs is not just that they put hateful symbols on display, but that they are happily posed—and by young people, the next generation of Americans—without the hint of public shame. Indeed, it is no stretch to imagine these individuals proudly posting these images on social networking sites like Facebook or You Tube with full expectation of their viral dissemination.

Walter Benjamin says that to “articulate the past historically” means to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” and thus to recollect the present (and one can only assume its implications for the future) in relationship to a prior moment in time. To fail to do this, he suggests, is to take the risk that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” I would like to think that the election of President Obama has put an end to the American Tragedy of racial discord and set the nation on a trajectory to an ever hopeful future. I would like to believe that we could securely tuck away the photographs of May 3, 1963 or to recall them with the same simple curiosity that leads me to wonder about Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural genius or the dental problems of aging rodents. I worry, however, that if we fail to articulate our image of President Obama’s election with our images of that fateful day that we do a grave disservice to ourselves and to the safety of future generations of Americans – and more, to the many who gave their lives in the name of racial justice.

Photo Credits: Charles Moore/Getty; Bill Hudson/AP; Bruce Gilden/Magnum and Newsweek

2 Comments

The Public Veil of Death

The photograph above is a haunting image of Sandra Cantu, an eight year old girl who was abducted, sexually molested, and brutally murdered, her lifeless body found stuffed inside of a suitcase in an irrigation pond near her home in Tracy, California. The image is part of an eight foot poster that emerged in a spontaneous public memorial outside of the trailer park in which she lived, along with candles, stuffed animals, flowers, balloons, etc. What makes the photograph so evocative is the way in which it underscores the function of the writing on the poster-sized photograph as something of a public shroud that veils the precious and innocent life so tragically cut short, even as it accents the vitality and penetrating demand of her eyes.

There was a time, not so terribly long ago, when post-mortem photographic portraits of loved ones—and especially children—were taken and cherished as private momento mori, reminders of the fragility of human life and of our own mortality. Such images today are considered morbid. Instead, now we remember deceased loved ones by photographs of them taken while they were still alive, and usually such images are the candid snapshots that fill our family photo albums, the nostalgic Kodak moments that seem to be the accoutrements of middle-class, private life. Indeed, it is not rare to attend a private wake in which digital slides shows of such snapshots become the center of attention, as much if not more than the casket or urn. In the photograph of Sandra Cantu, however, the private snapshot has been refashioned as a public image, albeit with a significant difference.

The snapshot in a private wake functions to invoke and reinforce the identification between the deceased and the bereaved in very personal terms. Here, however, the point of identification is more public than personal—more a demand for protection (and perhaps a public reflection on that demand) than a simple reminder of innocence and happier times—and as such it invites our consideration as a symbol of our civic and political relationships. Hence, what was once a candid snapshot has been reproduced as a larger than life portrait and fixed in a very public setting, its political voice announced and secured. But there is more, for note too how the collective public signature weaves a scrim that separates the viewer from the girl, almost as if to protect her from the voyeurs’ gaze. And yet, as in this case, such protection can only go so far. The photograph thus takes on the quality of a civic momento mori, an allegorical reminder of both our civic responsibilities as well as how fragile public efforts to protect one another—and especially our children—can be.

Photo Credit: Michael Mccollum/AP

0 Comments