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Eyes on the Prize

The NYT published this diptych in a story titled “Race and Gender are Issues in Tense Day for Democrats.” The story is a “he-said, she said” tale that is implicitly about who gets to play the race card in the on-going democratic primaries. Apparently Barack Obama should be able to, but doesn’t want to (because presumably he doesn’t have to in order to preserve his base); Hillary Clinton apparently does play it, but in an allegedly backhanded way that allows her to underscore her own marginalized status as a woman (thus, presumably to energize her base). The issue comes down to a debate about the relationship between race and gender, as if, at the end of the day, we should decide our votes somehow on who is more marginalized than the other. The photograph that accompanies the story – and is nowhere remarked upon, and thus might appear to be something of an excess – tells a somewhat different tale.

The key here is in understanding how the stark tension between race and gender is muted by attention to more complex generational differences. To see how, envision one set of hands as white and female, the other as black and male. How would each be inclined to vote? The lines of identification would seem to be pretty obvious, driven by both race and gender in each direction. And indeed, it is this stark and uncomplicated dialectic that the NYT exploited on Sunday when it juxtaposed images of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass in a story that featured what Michael Shaw at BAGnewsNotes called the “pink-black divide.” But notice that the demographic put on display in the above diptych is much more complex, as the images feature the much harder case: How do African-American women who share identities with both candidates choose? Will they be guided by their racial identity or their gender?

And the answer we get is a study in ambiguity that takes the false essentialism of identity politics to task—or at least it complicates it in ways that bear consideration. Thus, while both sets of hands are clearly female and African-American, there are nevertheless important and notable differences that mark something of a subtle, but complex and significant generational divide. To begin, take note of the fact that these are neither young nor inexperienced hands. Each pair is clearly weathered by the passage of time and the accumulation of experience, but they wear their experiences differently. The hands on the left bear a feminine style that associates them with the feminist politics of the 1970s, where the cosmetics that we traditionally affiliate with female sexuality were somewhat muted. Notice how the fingernails are carefully trimmed and without polish. They are adorned by rings that mark them as female, to be sure, but they are folded in a somewhat pragmatic, masculine fashion that underscores the attitudes about gender equality that animated many women in the post-civil rights generation of the 1970s. Indeed, they seem to be protecting the poster, a symbol of the political world and the public sphere that was opened to women by the efforts of second wave feminism.

The hands on the right present a somewhat different, older, feminine style, with more rings, and long, painted fingernails. The pose is more traditionally feminine as well, as the hands rest in the woman’s lap, gently holding a snapshot. And unlike the poster, the snapshot signifies the private, domestic sphere – the world of family photo albums – to which women have traditionally been relegated in a patriarchal order. In a world of cultural stereotypes then, these are the hands of a woman who, in all likelihood, comes from an earlier generation than the woman on the left. She is perhaps old enough to have participated in a sit-in in Mississippi or to have marched in Washington, D.C. From this perspective, the snapshot she holds may well be the cipher for an emotional aide de memoire to her youth, as the picture of Obama recalls the eloquence and charisma of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr., young, men whose uplifting appeals to a color blind society no doubt resonate with her candidates’ eloquent promises for a changed world. Indeed, his very candidacy may serve as the evidence that the struggles of the civil rights generation were not for naught. In this register it is little wonder why some might have interpreted Clinton’s recent comments about Dr. King’s role in bringing about the Civil Rights Voting Act as derisive.

If experienced African-American women can be so divided over their support for Obama and Clinton, then it should be clear that there is something more complicated going on in this political campaign than a simple race-gender opposition. Here that complication is a somewhat subtle divide between maturing generations, but in other contexts it is no doubt something else. The diptych underscores the centrality of such impediments to the interpretive process, however, by forcing the viewer to negotiate such complexities and instabilities of meaning as a condition of even the simplest reading of the images. Note in this regard how the poster on the left is designed to be displayed in a horizontal plane, but here it is out of kilter, held on a slanted, vertical plane that is further obscured by the hands. The photograph on the right is even more askew. The effect is to force the viewer to have to strain to figure out what it is that they are seeing, tilting their head to the left to decipher the poster (and to guess at what the missing hidden letters might be) and then squinting to take account of the snapshot. One has no choice but to be an active reader/viewer.

The ultimate point I want to emphasize here is that the diptych calls to our attention a more important and complex tension in the current democratic primaries than the simple, faux battle between race and gender being crafted and preached by those who would prefer to see two historically marginalized groups doing battle with one another rather than working in solidarity. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t differences that have to be negotiated here, or that there isn’t a great deal at stake in the various generational divides (and there is clearly more than one) that seem to vex the democratic party at this historical juncture. But what it should also remind us is that we need to keep our eyes on the prize rather than to be distracted by reporters with time on their hands.

Photo Credits: Todd Heisler/New York Times; Eric Thayer/New York Times

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Public Mourning

November 27, 2007
Lucaites
the visual public visual memory visualizing war
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This photograph was taken by photojournalist Peter Turnley and published in Harper’s in August, 2004 as part of a photo-essay titled “The Bereaved: Mourning the Dead in America and Iraq.” It shows an open-casket funeral for Army SPC Kyle Brinlee, killed by an IED in Iraq on May 11, 2004. The memorial service was held in the Pryor, Oklahoma High School auditorium and attended by 1,200 mourners, including Governor Brad Henry. Brinlee’s family subsequently sued Turnley and Harper’s for violation of privacy, infliction of emotional distress, fraudulent misrepresentation, and a number of other torts. The district court rejected the suit in summary judgment, noting additionally that the event was both public and newsworthy and thus protected on first amendment grounds. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the finding of summary judgment, noting that the publication of the photos was arguably “in poor taste” but that there was no basis for an actionable claim. The case made its way to the Supreme Court where it was recently denied a writ of certiorari, thus confirming the finding of the lower courts.

Legal issues aside, what I find most interesting is the Court’s aesthetic judgment that the publication of the image was arguably “in poor taste.” The conclusion here is qualified by the assumption that the family had expressly requested that no pictures of the open casket be taken. Whether that request was ever conveyed to Turnley or not is a fact in dispute, but even if it had been, the question of taste remains: What renders this a tasteful or tasteless image and what interests are served in making such a judgment?

We might begin by noting that it is an arresting photograph, doubly unique amongst the hundreds (thousands?) of photographs of military funerals that have been reported in newspapers and magazines over the past several years. The most obvious distinction, of course, is the open casket. Military funerals are not particularly rare, especially during times of war, but they do not typically feature open-caskets; and even on those few occasions when they do, there seems to be a standing photojournalistic convention against taking or publishing open-casket photographs. Turnley challenges that convention, and in a manner that subtly requires the viewer to acknowledge what is otherwise neatly hidden (or is it erased?) by the closed casket.

Contrary to the aesthetic judgment of the Court, then, what we have here is a photograph that is crafted with a deep and abiding sense of decorum and respect. Indeed, in my judgment it treats the event with far more reverence than might otherwise attend the depiction of such funerals where the ordinary conventions of representation are followed simply as a matter of form or habit.

Shot from a moderately long range that is neither overtly intrusive nor violates the conventional distance of personal space, the deceased is nevertheless recognizable as a soldier and a person. His uniform and white gloves lend an air of military formality to the occasion; the coffin, reverently dressed in the American flag, adds the mark of national honor. Cast in the yellowish hue of indoor lighting, the casket also catches rays of natural light from the doorway behind it and through which it will soon exit the auditorium, thus invoking both a sense of communal warmth and movement towards a brighter and purer light. Framed from a high angle and looking down upon the scene, one might even imagine an omniscient viewer monitoring the ceremony.

A second distinction, arguably more significant, is the setting for the photograph. Military funerals memorialize the death of individuals, and as such they are typically photographed at graveside, featuring family members and close friends. They are private ceremonies that take place in public, and the grief and mourning that they display is fundamentally domestic and personal even if it is of interest to and observed by a larger public. It is this tension between private ritual and public observance that no doubt contributed to the Brinlee family’s sense that its privacy had been violated despite the fact that they had invited the public and the press to attend the memorial service. Notice here, however, that the photograph is not shot at graveside, but in a recognizable, public setting. Indeed, in many locales the high school auditorium is a communal gathering place used for a variety of public rituals including voting, convocations and town meetings, the annual rite of passage known as “graduation,” and, as here, to honor and remember one of its own, a citizen/soldier who sacrificed his life to the common good. Note in this regard that the photograph does not appear to feature family and close friends so much as a fairly large slice of the community. Indeed, the only easily recognizable individuals in the photograph other than Brinlee are the police officers posed between the coffin and the exit, and their uniforms both overshadow their private selves and accent the very public and communal quality of the ceremony taking place. And so what we have is the representation of a community that has come together as one, as a public, to mourn its collective loss.

In Pericles’ Athens the entire citizenry would annually attend funeral orations designed for the community to grieve collectively as it to bore witness to those who had sacrificed their lives fighting for the common good. In our own time Memorial Day purports to serve a comparable purpose, but truth to tell, it functions more as the “official start of summer” than as an occasion for public mourning. And in the interim from one year to the next we too often represent military deaths either as nameless and faceless numbers designated by abstract body counts, or as private individuals whose loss is felt and mourned primarily by family and friends. Neither seems adequate to the task of addressing the communal grief that attends such losses. In his important book, Achilles in Vietnam, Jonathon Shay emphasizes the importance of the “communalization of trauma” – the collective sharing of the pain and responsibility for war in public acts of communicative interaction—for helping to heal the psyches of those who leave their families and friends behind and risk their lives in the name of the community. The communalization of trauma through localized, public acts of grief and mourning might be no less essential to advancing a productive and sustainable species ethic during a time of war. Peter Turnley’s photograph of the public mourning of Army SPC Klye Brinlee invites us to consider one way that might be accomplished with a great deal of taste.

Photo Credit: Peter Turnley/Harper’s

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The Problem with Veterans Day

November 14, 2007
Hariman
visual memory
1 Comment

For many of us, Veterans Day has come and gone. That was, let’s see, Monday, right? Working parents knew if their kids were out of school, and others missed getting the mail, but whatever the inconvenience, the day was just that–a day. Even among those few who attended the commemoration ceremonies, the time spent there will have been brief. And so it is that a well-intentioned civic ritual perpetuates a lie. For those who grieve, there is no Veterans Day. To understand this painful truth, we need look no farther than this photograph:

The caption read, “Terry Giannoni (right) found names of friends of the wall of dead at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Plaza in Chicago on Sunday.” (The official day of commemoration was Sunday, November 11, with Monday the 12th becoming the federal holiday.) I’m not sure which is more revealing, the simple statement that he found “the names of friends” or the heavy sadness in his grim expression and hunched, protective posture. Those soldiers have been dead for over thirty years, and yet they are still remembered as friends. Their deaths still weigh down the heart. Those who once were laughter and good times and the simple pleasure of being together, have lingered long after as loss, regret, and who knows what other difficult emotions. And if friends still grieve, imagine how parents and lovers have suffered. War never lasts a day; it lasts forever.

The photograph is eloquent because of how it draws together simple things to reveal the truth of war’s continuing harmfulness. This is a local memorial with ordinary people–no national site, color guard, or officials–and so the emotional tone is honest and direct. Those feelings are the more deeply sensed for not being highly expressive, and that mute recognition is reflected in the simple decor and design of the memorial. The numbing isolation of grief is communicated by the distances between the two men in the picture and between Giannoni and the panel of names, while the black/white divide on the wall reminds us of the terrible finality of death.

There is one more thing: the way that time saturates the image. Giannoni’s grey/white hair and craggy features mark the years since the Vietnam War. The man in the left rear reinforces this passage: long hair now comes with a bald spot, and the blue jeans and jacket now are worn on a middle-aged body. On the panel behind them we can see two dates: 1969 and 1970. These were the first two years of the Nixon administration, the first two years of the “secret plan” to bring us “peace with honor,” a plan that brought an additional 20,000+ American deaths and somewhere around a million Vietnamese deaths to secure disengagement on terms very similar to those available in 1968. Time was not on anyone’s side in Vietnam. Since then, it has carried grief and anger relentlessly through the years.

Photograph by Chuck Berman/Chicago Tribune.

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"Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered"

The picture is of a life size statute of “Samantha Stevens,” portrayed by Elizabeth Montgomery in the 1960s television show Bewitched, and arguably America’s most famous witch. Witches are typically cast as ugly and scary beings, and hence their prominence on Halloween. But Samantha Stevens was a beautiful and loving witch (as well, we might note, as an excellent housekeeper and the perfect wife and mother). For my generation, “Sam” Stevens stood in stark contrast to Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the “The Wicked Witch of the East” in The Wizard of Oz, and even to this day she maintains a fairly large fan base supported by websites, collectibles, and the like.

As a photograph the picture is really quite unremarkable. An altogether ordinary, slightly off-center “snapshot” of a statute; precisely the kind of image we might find in a private photo album documenting a family vacation. What makes the photograph notable here is that it was shot by a NYT photographer and that it appears in a NYT travelogue feature that regularly promotes places to which members of the upper middle classes might “escape” the rigors of everyday life, such as Aruba, St. Lucia, and Jamaica. Titled “The Ghost’s of Salem’s Past,” this slideshow promotes the devil may care attitude of Salem, Massachusetts, a quaint and quiet New England town that is represented by the NYT as operating at the juncture of the sacred and the profane, part historical landmark and part theme park. These attributions may not be inaccurate, as Salem relies almost exclusively on tourist traffic for its economic survival. And so it not only has to trade on its history, but it has to make witchcraft desirable – literally a commodity that consumers are willing to buy. And therein lies the problem, for the truly important lesson of Salem’s “history” should be addressed to its visitors as citizens and not as consumers.

Salem, of course, is the home of the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, generally understood to be the most notorious (if not actually the first) “witch hunt” hysteria in the nation’s history. By the time the hysteria had ended over nineteen men and women had been hanged on Gallows Hill for allegedly practicing the dark arts, and another, octogenarian Giles Corey, was pressed to death under heavy stones, defying his executioners to his very end by taunting them to use “more weight!” The trials are regularly acknowledged as one of our darkest moments and are frequently pointed to as the first and most enduring challenge to what eventually emerged as the promises of civil liberty and social justice grounded in a commitment to religious toleration. Put differently, its legacy as a “usable past” is as a reminder to what can happen in the face of mass hysteria and the irrational fear of others within in our midst (which is not to say that all fears of the other are by definition necessarily irrational).

However much Salem attempts to retain a sense of its usable past, and thus to altercast its visitors as citizens with a responsibility to the sacred demands of civic democracy—and there are important efforts to do so, such as with the Salem Village Witchcraft Victims’ Memorial in neighboring Danvers—it nevertheless is confronted with powerful economic realities that animate its profane, consumerist, theme park sensibilities. So it is, that when the Samantha Stevens statute was dedicated in 2005, the television show being memorialized was described as “timeless” without even a hint of irony, let alone recognition for how its prominent placement in Salem risked overshadowing and domesticating the towns’ truly timeless and tragic history. It is as understandable as it is regrettable, at least for the residents of Salem.

But look at the picture one more time. Although shot by a professional photojournalist, it actually looks like it could have been taken by an amateur. Indeed, studiously so. The framing of the image—whether the statue or the man and child in the background—is off-center. Shot with a long lens but at a moderately wide angle, and with the shutter stopped down, the foreground and background are both in relatively sharp focus; the effect is thus to emphasize how cluttered the scene looks to be. And the exposure is all wrong as well, highlighting strong contrasts between the statue and the multiple backgrounds, and thus emphasizing shadows that make it very hard to know where one should direct their gaze. In short, it perfectly imitates what we might imagine to be an amateurish snapshot found in a personal photo album designed to document a family vacation. And as such, it invites the viewer to identify with it as a private consumer and not as a public citizen; come to Salem, it beckons, not to reflect upon your nation’s tragic past, but indeed, to “escape” that past by experiencing a “timeless” and happy fiction. What seems less clear are the stakes that the NYT has in all of this. Indeed, what is somewhat understandable, even bewitching, in Salem, MA, is both bothersome and bewildering when valorized by one of our leading institutions.

Photo Credit: Robert Spencer/New York Times; and with thanks to Stephen Olbrys Gencarella for introducing me to the carnivalesque atmosphere that pervades Salem, MA, and not just on Halloween, where it is the site of one of the largest public parties in the land, but to the ongoing struggle within Salem to negotiate the tension between economic survival and social justice.

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"… the World is Yours!"

You don’t need to have a passport in order to be a U.S. citizen. But, as the brochure included with the new passport I recently received in the mail announced, “With Your U.S. Passport the World is Yours.” Well, sort of anyway. The first thing we learn upon opening the brochure is that this is an “Electronic Passport.” It’s not exactly an ankle bracelet, but “the information stored in the Electronic Passport can be read by special chip readers from a close distance.” One can only wonder what that last phrase might mean. The Department of State website assures us that it is “centimeters” and that the process is further secured by the latest “anti-skimming technology” (a fact that will no doubt impress every fourteen year old hacker paying attention). One less skeptical about how the current administration uses language and executive authority in the interest of national security to monitor its citizenry would probably not be paranoid, but then, as the saying goes, “just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Truth to tell, however, it was not the electronics that made this new passport stand out for me, but its visual presentation.

There is much to comment on here, not least the story of America’s “manifest destiny” that is told in monochromatic drawings and photographs on every page, captioned with quotations that extend from George Washington to John Kennedy and include scriptures from the “Golden Spike,” the Statute of Liberty, and a Mohawk “version” of a Thanksgiving Address. I will revisit this archive in the weeks ahead. Today, however, I want to take a look at the inside front cover of the passport as an allegory that contains and directs the iconography of the whole.

The first thing one encounters is a lithograph of Moran Percy’s 1913 depiction of Francis Scott Key gesturing to the garrison flag flying above Fort McHenry on the morning of September 13, 1814, following a massive, twenty-five hour long bombardment by the British Navy. Two weeks earlier the British Army had ransacked and burned down portions of the White House in Washington, D.C. Defending Baltimore Harbor was vital to repulsing a full scale British invasion and the 1,000 troops garrisoned at Forth McHenry proved to be up to the task.

The script written across the image is from Key’s poem “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” and as most schoolchildren learn, it was subsequently set to music, renamed “The Star Spangled Banner,” and finally designated as the National Anthem in 1931. All of this might seem like trivial information but for the fact that references to the flag as it “yet waves” over the “land of the free and the home of the brave” became a fairly common trope in the wake of 9/11. There is no explicit mention of the more recent aerial attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, of course, but the linkage between past and present is activated by a complex allegorical semiotic.

To see how, begin with the letters “USA” embossed in gold and placed on the lower left corner of the page. They stand apart from the painting and the script written across it, and yet they are very much one with both, a thoroughly modern caption for what purports to be a 19th-century imagetext. Indeed, boldfaced and uniformly blocked, the three gold letters stand in stark contrast to the pen and ink scroll that cuts across the image and bleeds onto the antique, elliptical matting of the painting. The aesthetic thus marks both the differences and continuities between then and now. Then we fought to secure our place among the world of nations, a newly birthed and independent nation-state emerging out of old world Europe, just as today we assure our continued sovereignty and security in (some might say hegemony over) a globalized, late modern world, now the gold standard among nations which, as the quotation from Abraham Lincoln on the right page intones, “shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln’s words operate in several semiotic registers. First, they are written in a contemporary font and in all capital letters. They thus function aesthetically to triangulate the relationship between Key’s 19th-century script and the modern typography of the golden inscription of the “USA.” As it was then, so it is now, and so it shall always be. The point is further reinforced as we realize that the entire two pages are printed across the image of the “Star Spangled Banner,” a flag tested in battle, and punctuated beneath Lincoln’s words with the imprimatur of the national seal. The eagle looks to the olive branch of peace and not the thirteen arrows of war, but we know how quickly that can change. Thus note how Lincoln’s words from the “Gettysburg Address” situate the overall image within the traces and contours of the U.S. Civil War, another challenge in a progressive history of such battles that have tested the sovereignty and resolve of the American nation. And thus the image that announces the U.S. Citizen to foreign lands, seeking passage “without delay or hindrance,” functions less as an introduction and more as an allegorical warning: for just as “confederates” were subdued then—and here one has to think of Sherman’s scorched earth policy—so now those who threaten the nation risk the wrath and retribution of all out war and occupation.

One might need to know a fair bit in order to develop this reading, but it is all common knowledge for anyone with the rudimentary understanding of U.S. history that one gets as part of their secondary school level high school education. We might wonder then who the primary audience for all of this is? Is it the heads of state implicitly identified by the Secretary of State’s “request” to “all whom it may concern,” repeated three times in English, French, and Spanish (what happens when one travels beyond the boundaries of these three Romance languages)? Or is it the “American people” who will have been “educated” to appreciate and perform the pious celebration of national strength and bravado as a ritual of national public memory—and to what particular ends? After all, as the brochure accompanying and explaining the passport declares, “With Your U.S. Passport the World is Yours!”

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9/11, the Continuing Tragedy

September 11, 2007October 19, 2012
Hariman
visual memory
24 Comments

US 9/11 deaths. US military deaths. Iraqi civilian deaths.

And Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. . . .

Photographs by Spencer Platt/Getty, Denis Poroy/AP, James Nachtwey/National Geographic, Khalid Mohammed/AP, Kim Komenich/Chronicle.

Update: For educational resources, Hannah Edwards offers this site.

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Remembering to Forget … Vietnam

As we prepare for General Petraeus’s report on Iraq later this week, we should perhaps recall earlier times when Generals have addressed Congress in the interest of an embattled admistration seeking to prolong a contentious military engagement. Here, of course, we have General Westmoreland who had just travelled from Vietnam to “brief” the U.S. Congress on “military gains in Vietnam” in 1967, six months prior to the “Tet Offensive” :

Of course, for Bush the Elder one of the significant outcomes of the First Persian Gulf War—Desert Storm—was putting “Vietnam syndrome” to rest. It is at least somewhat odd then, if not wholly ironic, that Bush the Younger would seek to revive the specter of Vietnam as a point of comparison to the current war in the Persian Gulf, particularly given how contentious it has become at home. Nevertheless, the current administration has made a concerted effort of late to use our experience in Vietnam as an analogy to support our continued military occupation of Iraq, lest a precipitous withdrawal of troops animate the middle east equivalent of the “killing fields.” It is an odd argument that seems to reverse the terms of George Santayana’s famous “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it.” Here, by reliving the past, it seems, we put ourselves in position to forget it. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson makes the case as well as anyone:

“Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney and the other principal architects of the Iraq war never served in Vietnam … [but] I’m less concerned with their hypocrisy than their distortion of history. To say that the US should not have withdrawn its forces from Vietnam is to say that there was something those forces could have done—something beyond napalm, carpet-bombing, destroying villages in order to save them—that would have led to some kind of victory. Of course, Bush and others don’t say what that special something might have been, because they don’t know. They’re seeing nothing but a historical mirage ….

“George W. Bush wants us to remember Vietnam? Fine, then let’s remember those iconic images – the Viet Cong prisoner being executed in cold blood with a pistol shot to the temple, the little girl running naked and screaming from a napalm attack. Let’s remember how little we really understood about Vietnamese society. Let’s remember how wrong the domino theory proved to be. Let’s remember how much damage prolonging an unpopular war did to our armed forces and our nation, and how long it took us to recover”

For our part, here are the iconic images that Robinson invokes:

And lest we forget the effects of a government that actively strives to limit and demonize public dissent from a policy of war, there is this poignant reminder:

Photo Credits: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images, Eddie Adams/AP Photo, Nick Ut/AP Photo, John Filo/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. The phrase “remembering to forget” comes from the fine book by Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye.

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The Way We Were

The first day of school. It is a bourgeois, middle-class ritual. New clothes. New backpacks. A new start on a new year. And, of course, photographs; lots and lots of photographs, usually taken by parents and grandparents trained to recognize a Kodak moment when they see one—snapshots that celebrate the normative and gradual transformation of childhood to adulthood, marking it for future use and consumption with the tinge of nostalgia. “This,” the photograph says, “this is the way we were.” My family photo albums are filled with such images. And I cherish them, even though I know the many crises and unhappy moments that they help to repress and erase from memory and family history.

Capturing the first day of school is also a photojournalistic ritual, especially in local newspapers that regularly mark and celebrate the various cycles of the calendar: fall harvest, winter holidays with families meeting in reunion and engaging in spiritual observances, spring break renewal and the planting of new crops, summer fun on the beach, and on an on. And, of course, in an analogy with the photographs in our family photo albums, they frame and feature the habits of sociality and collective living that we want to observe and remember. The picture below appeared in a Washington Post slide show titled “Starting a New School Year” and consisting of eighteen photographs of elementary school children returning to school in the Washington D.C. area.

The photograph is in many respects typical of the other pictures in the slide show and of similar images one might find at many other newspapers. According to the caption they are a group of children “march[ing] to class” in a new school in suburban Maryland. Clean and orderly, they have learned early to walk in line at a common pace and to maintain their distance from one another (“no touching” is one of the rules we learn in kindergarten), and yet they are not automatons as each displays a somewhat unique personality in dress, attitude, and gesture. They are different and yet unified, obedient but not rigidly or obsessively so, and thus they evidence the habits of communal living a liberal democracy might want to inculcate among its citizens. And, of course, they are all African Americans being educated in a brand new school.

What caught my attention in the picture was the second girl from the left, dressed in a white blouse and taking what seems to be a playfully long stride, nipping at the heels of the boy in front of her. Where had I seen this image before? It took a few moments to register, but eventually I realized that it was vaguely reminiscent of Norman Rockwell’s “T he Problem We All Live With.”

This painting first appeared in Look magazine in January 1964 but it depicts a scene from four years earlier when six year old Ruby Bridges was escorted by U.S. Federal Marshals to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans following a court order to integrate the schools in accord with the mandate of Brown v Bd. of Education (1954). White parents removed their children from the school and only one teacher—Barbara Henry—was willing to instruct Ruby. And for much of the next year Ruby was a class of one.

It is a painting, not a photograph, but in all likelihood it was artistically derived from one of several AP photos that show Ruby and her escorts entering the school. It is marked by strong contrasts of color: her dark skin and white dress, shoes, and hair ribbon stand out against the drab, muted colors of the suits and the wall. Notice in particular how the color of the suits connect the headless and anonymous marshals to the wall and the vicious word scrawled across it; the composition thus subtly identifies the institution now protecting Ruby with the institution that built the walls of segregation and contributed to her oppression and stigmatization. The wall is stained with the red of a tomato, the color of heated passion and blood, and thus a sign of the threat that abides outside of the frame of the picture. But amidst all of this is Ruby, pure, innocent, and, of course, looking forward to a new day–the first day of school with a new notebook and ruler in her hands. Note too that her stride is natural, but she walks faster than the escorts behind her, riding up on the feet of those in front of her. She is thus anxious to get to her destination, but she also holds herself in reserve, her emotions contained and constrained, another strong contrast with the scene around her. She is also an individual. And though there were hundreds of persons who orchestrated this moment in history, it is the lone individual standing up against the much larger forces of oppression that is featured (and remembered). It thus functions as part of the standard liberal antidote to political trauma, and in its own way it anticipates the photograph of the lone individual stopping a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square many years later.

There is no doubt a great deal more that can be said about this image. But it is its relationship to the contemporary photograph from the Maryland suburbs that most warrants attention here. For now we have seven children not one. We can assume that there are teachers directing the parade even though we don’t see them–a sign, perhaps, of established authority and effective leadership. Indeed, the photograph purports to be an ordinary (bourgeois, middle-class) first day back at school. It depicts an orderly scene in an open and brightly lit modern building. There is nothing that suggests even the hint of a threat; the vicious “n” word has been replaced by an affectively neutral and abstract term: “primary.” That the children are exclusively African American seems almost incidental—and more so when seen in the context of the entire slide show—as if the problems of equal educational opportunity among the races has been solved; and maybe in this school district they have, as this is a picture of a brand new school. But one has to wonder if there is not also a sense in which the photograph works to erase the image of the Rockwell painting from public memory, a substitution of the “real” for the “mythic.” Or if the word “erase” seems too strong, then perhaps the photograph mutes the mnemonic force of the earlier image, suggesting “that was then and this is now.” In either case, its reference to the conventional first day of school frames both images in a somewhat nostalgic register that underscores a myth of social progress: the idealism of the lone individual standing up to the forces of oppression (then) and the appearance of the happy-go-lucky first day of school (now).

If only that’s the way it truly was.

Photo Credits: Marvin Joseph/Washington Post; Norman Rockwell Estate

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Labor Day

To the American worker:

Photographs by Charles C. Ebbets/Bettmann Corbis; Lowell’s Restaurant and Bar, Seattle, WA; Daily News, Los Angeles, CA (Dept of Special Collections/UCLA Library, A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library); Gordon Parks; unknown.

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Back to the Future

August 28, 2007June 20, 2012
Lucaites
visual memory visualizing war
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A few weeks ago I called attention to how the attempt to institutionalize the “rule of law” in Iraq was encoded in practices and narratives reminiscent of the conquest of the American frontier. The trope of the conquest of the American west, complete with its allusions of manifest destiny, has been used with both sledge hammer subtlety and various degrees of finespun nicety since virtually the very beginning of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The theme is eloquently and poignantly inflected in this image from Nina Berman’s 2004 “Purple Hearts” art exhibit, which was recently reprised in the NYT. “Purple Hearts” is a book/exhibit/DVD that includes pictures and interviews with six American veterans who were seriously injured in Iraq. This photograph is of Pfc. Adam Zaremba, a 20 year old “wounded in Baghdad when a mine blew off his leg.” The matter of fact objectivity of the caption reads like the conventional title in a family photo album – “Uncle Joe fishing at Lake Erie, 1923” or “Sally, 7, sits on Santa’s lap, Xmas 1952”—and contrasts with the evocative content being shown. The only thing missing, of course, is the date, which marks the scene as timeless. The formal minimalism of the caption contrasts as well with the intricacies and artistry of the image, the effect being to magnify the everyday relationship between the simple and the complex.

What we are looking at is a little hard to say—a fact that belies the unsayability of the picture. The image thus calls our attention to the capacity of the visual to help us see things that can’t be put into words, or can’t be verbalized with ease or efficiency. Indeed, a large part of the power of the image is in how it layers multiple transcriptions of meaning upon one another so as to complicate both the relationship between viewer and viewed, as well as the relationship between past, present, and future. The first thing to note is that Zaremba appears to be sitting in front of a television screen, and what we see is not his unmediated image, but rather his reflection in the monitor. The reflection reverses his orientation so that the viewer of the photograph loses the sense that Zaremba is watching the screen and, instead, is literally part of the scene being enacted, albeit looking away from the chaos behind him and past us to what we can only imagine is a future anterior moment. Though we know he is only a spectator here (and given his injury he can only be a spectator), nevertheless he is implicated in the action being projected outward. The difference between spectator and actor is thus elided, and so just as Zaremba as viewer is implicated in what is happening on the television screen as an active agent, so too are we as viewers implicated in the action, albeit once removed.

The scene seems to be part of a fairly traditional chapter from the received narrative of America’s manifest destiny. Modern progress, marked by the locomotive on the right hand side, required a transformation of the landscape, which threatened the indigenous and native cultures. Rather than to embrace the modern world, native Americans fought back, often in terrorist raids, and had to be controlled and eventually contained by the military and various and sundry mercenaries. Many good Americans sacrificed their lives to the cause, but as the saying went, they “died with their boots on.” Zaremba fights in a modern war where injuries are in some ways more horrifying than death (and so, ironically, he lives without legs), but there is more than a simple analogue to the war in Iraq operating here as the image functions in a more complex, allegorical register. Notice how the received narrative is complicated by the ghostlike apparition of native Americans flying through the air, a haunting of the image that simply won’t go away, even after a century of freedom and progress. And in this context, note too that Zaremba’s image is only slightly less spectral than the native Americans, projected equally backwards into the past and forwards to the future in what appears to be an almost straight line.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” But according to this image it may well be George Santyana who has the final word when he reminds us that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The emotionless and stone cold look on Zaremba’s face implies a zombie-like existence as he glares beyond the present to an eternity that will be “irretrievably” haunted by the specter of our involvement in Iraq, just as we have been haunted by the specter of Vietnam, and before that the Trail of Tears, all wars fought in the names of “progress” and “freedom.” The overall effect is thus one of looking “back to the future”—or perhaps more accurately, looking forward to the past.

Photo Credit: Nina Berman

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