Oct 24, 2008
Jun 11, 2010
Apr 15, 2009
Oct 26, 2012
Dec 23, 2007
Mar 13, 2008

Jackboot Ballet

Photography is faulted for creating what it reveals: the aesthetic dimension of social reality. This image is so good it almost looks rehearsed:

The caption at The Guardian tells us that a member of the Palestinian security forces is kicking a protester in Bethlehem, West Bank. That’s the language of professional journalism, and you can see how it misses exactly what is distinctive about the photograph. There can be both athleticism and artistry in violence, and here both art and agility are on display.

The casting is perfect: a beefy adult male pivots on one boot while swinging the other with the full force of experience; the young man leaping nimbly to avoid the kick is lean, graceful, and yet vulnerable. The costumes have been made to character: top-of-the-line clothing and accessories for the well-heeled professional, and basic black jeans and jersey topped off with a dash of red for the young artiste. Behind them the more awkward, uniformed stooge with club in hand reprises the attacker, while the graffiti smeared on the wall backs up the artiste. Against this background of force without style and resistance without clarity, the two actors in the center play out the drama of youth and authority with consummate elegance.

About ten months ago I did a post entitled The Olympics of the Street. Subsequently the Beijing Olympics got more attention, even at this blog, and then the American presidential campaign dominated everything else. Now the news is slowly settling back into some of its old rhythms. If you read my older post, you’ll see that there is no news whatsoever in the photograph above. I try to avoid repeating myself even though the news is repetitive, but today’s image was too good to pass up. More important, however, is the realization that this scene is part of a long running show—one that has gone on much too long.

Photograph by Eliana Aponte/Reuters.

 2 Comments

What if God Counts?

So Hamas and Israel both wanted war and each got their wish. The war was no surprise when it came and the outcomes are predictable as well. Israel will use its overwhelming military superiority to smash enemy infrastructure while also killing many civilians, which will allow Hamas, broken but not destroyed, to claim moral and political victory. The international community will broker another truce, the band-aid of humanitarian aid will be restored, rocket attacks on Israel will diminish for awhile, and the occupation policies that have turned the West Bank and Gaza into prisons will continue. A rejuvenated IDF will claim that it did indeed, as the Defense Minister promised, restore “peace and tranquility,” a phrase notable for not including the word “justice.” Then the rocket attacks or suicide attacks will resume, Israel will again be given the worthless admonition that it should allow itself only a proportionate response–which, technically, would be firing rockets at civilians–and so it goes. It is tempting to simply say, “a pox on both your houses.” But then there is this:

A child’s arm protrudes from the rubble of a building destroyed by an air strike. This is one death among many–500+ civilians and counting–including perhaps the woman whose half sandal also is in the picture. It is one picture among many, and one of of the least dramatic, but I can find no other that so eloquently communicates the crushing sorrow of war’s devastation. The mass of concrete crushing the child also completely crushes any hope. This is not a scene of rescuers digging frantically in a race against time. Instead, the several adults simply stand there, helpless. It’s as if they are granting the child a last moment of dignity before they have to tear the broken body out of one grave only to return it to another.

This is why we shouldn’t turn away or throw up our hands in disgust. Each death is a separate tragedy, not merely another datum to be aggregated into the geopolitical assessment. But it is not enough to mourn the individual loss of life if that does not also include a commitment to facing the deep causes of this war and the other wars now underway–most of them killing far more people than will die in Gaza. Precisely because each death is so wasteful, unnecessary, and immoral, it should be counted in another sense: as a measure of collective political failure.

Let me put it this way. What if God counts? (I realize that belief in God is rather difficult these days, but let’s at least consider the idea a useful fiction.) What if, that is, God judges not so much by weighing reasons but simply by how many are harmed? It makes sense, if you think about it. God (for example, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, just to name a few religions) is supposed to see through our social identities, our many rankings and all the aggrievements they involve. God calls on us to transcend social ascription and avoid false pieties and idolatries, all on behalf of living in justice and compassion with one another. Nor has divine judgment ever given points for wealth or firepower, or for sacrificing children for one’s cause. The more I think about it, the more clear it seems: God would put great weight on how many were harmed, and what was done on all sides to prevent harm, while being much less concerned about who had the better rationale on any particular day.

Think about it: not what you intended, and not whether you were right, but simply how much damage you caused. Relentlessly counting while turning a deaf ear to our many arguments, no wonder God’s judgment is said to be so terrible.

In the short run, it would seem that God’s judgment should fall on Israel: a handful of deaths on one side and hundreds on the other, not to mention the continuing toll taken by the occupation. But that may be too simple. Surely God also follows the money, which goes back to the U.S. on one side and sources throughout the Arab world on the other side. And this is a small war by comparison with the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and even more so compared to the wars raging across central Africa. Again, war is a collective failure, and ultimately the judgment rests on us all.

Photograph by Mohammed Abed/AFP-Getty Images.

 6 Comments

Captioning the New Year

The new year has started very much like the old year: renewed war in the Middle East, exceedingly uncivil civil wars in Africa, spasms of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Asia, drug wars in Latin America, and economic decline everywhere. That’s not the whole story, of course, but it is a continuing story.

Faced with another year of violence, journalists and citizens alike have to make choices about how to depict and understand what is happening, and how to do so without becoming cynical or otherwise numbed to the obligations and possibilities for change. One place to begin is by looking at this photograph.

Recently I got somewhat lyrical about two images of “Hands of Death.” Now we are looking at the foot of a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Rather than speak about the photograph directly, let me ask you how it might be captioned.

That’s a real question. What are we to make of this awful, pathetic, powerful image? How should we label it to use it well–that is, to provide material for public thought?

I’ll suggest several captions that occurred to me, along with their implications for framing events to come. First, “Picking up the Pieces.” Cute, isn’t it? But that is what has to be done. After the dramatic cataclysm of the blast and perhaps heroic efforts to save the wounded, someone has to pick up the shards of material, bone, and flesh that remain. At the same time and for much longer, someone has to pick up the pieces of shattered families, broken communities, a damaged society. The violence that has occurred is still occurring, not only in the continuation of political struggles, cycles of violence, martial habits, and the arms trade, but because the harm already done lasts for decades among the living. Whatever will come to pass, surely one of the tasks facing governments and individuals today is to pick up the pieces still strewn about, the sorry fragments of past destructiveness that have to be gathered up and put to rest as part of moving forward.

I also thought of labeling the photograph as “The Human Remnant.” Although we don’t typically look at the soles of our feet, much less think of them as emblems of humanity, that foot now becomes expressive. It looks capable, vulnerable, well cared for, and generally a sign of how humans are a distinctive species. The top of the foot has been seared by the blast, leaving the soft, fleshy underside as the only trace of the human being who existed before ideology, socialization, self-immolation. Perhaps that foot could have walked down another path; indeed, isn’t that true of everyone? Thus, the image reminds us of how war wastes human potential. But let’s not get too sentimental. He killed three other people, and the soldiers, munitions makers, and strategists also are human, as are the torturers and those who authorize torture. It is not enough for humanity to endure.

Other captions include: “Putting Your Best Foot Forward” and “Adding Insult to Injury.” The first ranges from contempt to cynicism, while the second plays off of the cultural significance in the Middle East of showing the soles of one’s feet. I could go on, but you get the point. One question we face in the new year is how to represent, understand, and react to a world riven by violence. This is not an academic question.

Photograph by Ahmad Masood/Reuters via The Big Picture.

Update: Thanks to the double post at BAGnewsNotes, you can read additional comments there.

 5 Comments

Hands of Death

Photojournalism is vexed by the problem of how to portray degradation and death without harming the dignity of those being photographed. The medium’s capacity for evoking emotional response and moral judgment cannot be separated from its ability to add insult to injury. With that problem in mind, one can appreciate why this photograph is not only striking but also an ethical achievement.

A Congolese government soldier lies dead in the road not long after having been shot in the head. He is one of many who have died or will die in the continuing violence in central Africa. It is easy to immediately think of him as a statistic. Another distant victim in yet another civil war, one about which the viewer probably has no interest, no knowledge, no connection. A war that becomes merely another example of the seemingly endless violence spreading through the jungles and across the deserts and up into the mountains around the globe as poor people are recruited to maim and kill one another for the benefit of unseen warlords.

Thus, it can be easy to dismiss him, except for that hand. There is something achingly beautiful about it. It seems so alive, or if we know otherwise, so etched with life. It is a particular hand, not the abstract symbol of labor, but the hand of an individual whose lifetime of experiences, however common, were encountered with all the particularity evident in each crease of skin, the line of each cuticle, the smudge of dirt. More than that, the image evokes all the skill of a hand, its capability for craft and communication. Caught in a last gesture, this hand seems to still want to communicate, to reach out or up, to plead, perhaps, or to touch and say goodbye.

We know that he is dead, however, and so the raindrops on the fingers become poignant. They course down his limb, set in rigor mortis, as they do on any other inanimate thing, and yet they still seem to signify life. As if he were still capable of bleeding, or of washing, as if he could perhaps be revived with cool water. But the point is not to keep hope alive. Rather, the hand offers mute testimony to the value of the life that has been lost. It presents him as an individual person but not merely because he had a name or a personality. And it records his death with dignity, suggesting how much has been lost without showing the devastation of the head wound.

Photojournalism can not be satisfied with avoiding habits of dehumanization, however, as it also has to confront and expose those practices in their worst forms, which are not done by shooting with a camera. This second photograph was in a number of slide shows recently, perhaps because it captures so well the gross destructiveness of war.

These are the hands of men executed near San Ignacio, Mexico. They are among the latest casualties in the border wars between Mexican drug cartels. (For a current report on the violence, see “Day of the Dead” in The Observer/The Guardian.) The photo documents the practice of tying up the victims, which in turn implies that this was a planned execution characteristic of high level gang warfare. It also captures the fact of murder without revealing the identities of the victims or the full violence done to their bodies.

These hands in this image accomplish something different from the work done in the first photograph. Where before dignity was salvaged from chronic violence, now the shameful nature of mass killing is exposed. These men were left this way to demean them, while the photograph exposes where the shame really lies–with those who kill, and with those could try to stop the killing but look the other way.

Equally important, now the implicit metonymy of hands signifying labor is rightfully in play. These men could have been productive laborers (and managers) had the work been available. Whatever bad choices they might have made, the narco-economy and its attendant carnage involves a terrible waste of human potential. The drug trade, like the arms trade, is a global business, and globalization can spread destructiveness just as easily as it can generate wealth. If hands could speak, these would beg to be given a second chance, one with real work that could lead to a better life.

The hands do speak. The question is, who is listening?

Photographs by Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters (via The Big Picture) and the Associated Press.

Update: Thanks to Michael Shaw for the double post at BAGnewsNotes, where you can read additional comments by readers there.

 9 Comments

Terrorism: The Day After

The terrorist attack in Mumbai may have been unusual in the scale of the assault and the firepower involved, but it soon was folded back into a familiar succession of images: smoke and fire billowing upwards from tall buildings, trapped individuals looking out of windows for help, soldiers and other emergency personnel converging on the scene, survivors being taken to hospitals, . . . and then images of assailants, victims, grieving families, and candlelight vigils. Now, as the attacks slide into the past for most of the world, we are left with shots of the physical destruction and initial efforts at restoring a sense of normalcy. These, too, are conventional, but I found two of them to be deeply evocative.

You are looking at a room in the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel in Mumbai. By peering into the rear of the picture, one can pick out security personnel, but they might as well be receding into the vanishing point. This image is the portrait of a room. More precisely, of the wreckage of what was once a room but now has been reduced to space and debris. There is something at once majestic and terribly sad about this ruin. The alternation of light and shadow could be the work of an Old Master, but that aesthetic reclamation only underscores the pathos of other human work having been torn down. The large fixture now laying on the floor near the center of the frame is a globe within a globe–the fitting symbol for how a hotel becomes a small world within the world of the city, itself a sphere within the human cosmos. Terrorism, like its older brother War, tears down worlds.

One small irony behind this poignant image is that the decor of the room before the attack might have struck one as garish or otherwise not to one’s taste. We can afford to be discriminating and judgmental, or inattentive and unappreciative, when things are not disrupted by violence. Amidst the wreckage, we are confronted with larger questions of loss, and so of what really should be loved.

This is an interior view of Nariman House, maintained by the Chabad Lubavitch organization. This image of the devastation caused by combat is perhaps even more disturbing than the one above, as it hits closer to home. Instead of the scale and decor of a grand hotel, we see the small spaces and frame doorways found in houses and apartments. Instead of a massive fixture for a public space, we see bedding and a broken bedframe, and, on the right, even a roll of toilet paper untouched by the carnage. The cumulative effect is awful. In place of what had been a familiar simplicity, there now is only an ugly mess. What should be a place for rest, repose, and taking care of the self, and for dreams, love, and creating a life with others, has been trashed, torn apart, violated.

Terrorism is one of the seeds of war, and like all war, it makes a mess of the world. What takes years of commitment, creativity, and effort can be ruined in minutes. These photographs of devastation remind us that war doesn’t just kill individuals, although that is horrible enough. The real target is civilization itself, that is, the built world that sustains communities, commerce, art, science, politics, friendship, families, and everything else that people find necessary for human life.

Photographs by Julian Herbert/Getty Images and the Associated Press.

 0 Comments

"Shane! Come back!"

I have written previously about the regularity and profusion of photographs of children in the Middle East—Israeli, Pakistani, and Iraqi children in particular—playing with toy guns. Such images operate in a somewhat allegorical register as they invoke one or a number of ironic, dialectical incongruities between child and adult, innocence and maturity, play and reality, the pleasure and horror of war, plasticity and steel, “their” present and “our” past, and so on.  This photograph seems to capture all of that and something more.

The caption reads: “An Iraqi boy holds a toy gun during a joint American and Iraqi military security sweep in the neighborhood of Sariyah in Baghdad, Iraq.”  The key to the image, however, is in recognizing that the toy gun is incidental to the scene that that we are witnessing.  The boy holds a toy weapon, to be sure, but he does so awkwardly as if he doesn’t quite know how to use it, and in any case he does not hold it in a manner that might be thought of as threatening—or  even effective.  Nor is it the toy itself that draws the viewer’s attention—the caption to the contrary notwithstanding—but rather the young boy’s gaze.  But what could he be looking at?  What does he see?  And where have we seen this image before?

Of course, we cannot know for sure what he is looking at.  But the soldier standing behind him is Iraqi, and the boy is clearly not looking at the photographer, who is positioned at an oblique angle to the field of vision.  Given that the caption identifies this is a joint Iraqi-American “military security sweep” it stands to reason that the boy has fixed his gaze upon the American soldier—or at least that is what the interaction of image and text invites us to imagine. And what he sees there is clearly something that pleases and inspires him.  Indeed, it is the look of a child’s wonder, perhaps even hero worship, as if in the presence of a powerful and incorruptible majesty. One might discount it as the misdirected gaze of youthful innocence and naiveté but for the fact that the family members in the background giving their smiling approval to the scene that unfolds before their eyes as well.   

The young boy’s gaze is not new to us, at least not to those of us who were raised with the myth of the American west, where physical strength and a skill with six-guns (and the resolve to use both when necessary) served as individual virtues necessary to taming an otherwise dangerous frontier and to making the world safe and secure for democracy and domesticity.  Indeed, the boy’s gaze almost perfectly mirrors the look of Joey Starrett in the 1950s western Shane, the young boy (played by Brandon DeWilde) who worships the title character—a somewhat mysterious stranger with a gunslinger past that he is trying to forget nevertheless draws upon his strength of character to save the homesteading community from a brutish cattle baron—for precisely these virtues.  At the end of the movie, after having completed his work, Shane moves on, even as Joey cries “Shane! Come back!” for he knows that there is no place for him in the world that he helped to make safe.

It is highly unlikely that the photographer knew of or was modeling a sluice of U.S. popular culture circa 1950, but given the ways in which the Bush administration has framed the intervention in Iraq from the very beginning as an extension of our history as a gunfighter nation, the analogy—what biblical hermeneutical scholars might call an anagogical relationship or “in spirit” comparison—is apt.  And the current situation in Iraq makes the Shane myth all the more attractive as an interpretive frame for those who think of the U.S. military as the western hero carving out a path for civilization in the wilderness, leaving behind a feminized and domesticated community beholden to the those with the character and resolve to do the hard work at great personal expense.  As the U.S. allegedly prepares to leave one can hear this young boy’s plea to stay.  We can only hope that the incoming administration has the same good sense of Shane to realize that he has to move on

Photo Credit:   Hadi Mizban/AP

 0 Comments

The Beauty of War Through a Child's Eye

This past week we honored America’s veterans, but except for a few conventional news stories and ritualistic photo ops the day passed with little notice or fanfare, eclipsed in the national consciousness by trying to figure out who President-elect Obama will appoint in his new administration and political wrangling over how to address the so-called “financial crisis.”  And what has been missed (or is it repressed?) in all of this has been the 150,000 U.S. troops who continue to occupy Iraq (and who are likely to continue to occupy Iraq until at least 2011); the 278 U.S. military deaths and 1,500 + U.S. military casualties that have occurred in Iraq since January of 2008; or the astonishing admission by the Veteran Administration that on average a staggering 18 veterans commit suicide everyday.

It is against this background that I was stuck by this AP  photograph that showed up in a number of on-line newspaper slide shows this past weekend.

The image is of a young girl as she “looks at a life-size painting of  men from the Columbus-based Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division” that is part of the Lima Company Memorial at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  Lima Company suffered some of the heaviest casualties of any unit fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including the death of 22 brave marines in a very short period of time in 2005.  There is no question but that their service and sacrifice needs to be sanctified in public memory and yet there is something altogether unsettling about this photograph. Part of this (dis)ease is no doubt a recognition of how an innocent child—and a young girl at that—serves as the cipher for orienting the model citizen towards the nation-state as a gendered and infantilized spectator.

Children, we are told, “should be seen and not heard.”  Notice here how the young girl silently directs the national gaze upon the marines even as she holds their attention.  The colors of her hair, sweatshirt, and pants coordinate perfectly with the red, white, and blue of the flag that she holds and thus cast her as the metonymic (and fetishistic) embodiment of the nation-state.  Her shadow marks the corporeal distance of the passive spectator from the painting no less than the candles, boots, and photographs that frame it.  There can thus be no mistaking that the young girl is a passive spectator clearly separated from the scene in the painting—seeing and not speaking or acting.  And so, we must wonder, is she a child citizen or the citizen-as-child?

There is no final answer to this question, of course, but the smiling and approving gaze of the marines seems to suggest a paternal protectiveness of the child/citizen/flag that resonates with normative assumptions of the public as an innocent and passive child and all of that is troubling for those who might imagine a vibrant democratic public culture.  But what if the child was not in the photograph? How else then might we understand the painting as part of a public memorial?

This life size canvas, it turns out, is one of  eight panels portraying all 22 marines from Lima Company painted by Anita Miller, a liturgical artist motivated  “to paint images that open the viewer’s eyes to the beauty of the world.”  In each of these eight panels we have portraits of two or three of the deceased marines and in each instance we are presented with a smiling and caring countenance.  And there can be no doubt that the images offer comfort to those who knew and loved these men as friends and family members within the contours of private life. But when cast as a  war memorial the appeal to the spiritual beauty of the individuals doing the fighting diverts attention from the sheer ugliness that is combat regardless of the cause. War’s “beauty”—if that is the right word—is terrible, and that is a lesson that we forget at our peril.

And so, once again back to the photograph and the young child who gazes upon the scene with what we can only imagine is beatific awe and admiration.  And the question here must be, is this the best way to transport the civic virtues of sacrifice and service from one generation to the next?  I am not so Pollyanna as to believe that wars will never be needed—though hope springs eternal— but I never want my children to think of war as “part of the beauty of the world” or that those who do the fighting do so with a “smile” upon their face.  We owe the men of Lima Company more than that.

Photo Credit:  Ernest Coleman, AP Photo/The Enquirer

 

 5 Comments

For Sale: The Bush Years

With six days until the election, the hope is so strong that I can taste it. Soon the final, mad rush of campaigning and reporting will rise to its final crescendo, and then there will be the day of reckoning. After that, a party or two, but then the sober realization of just how much needs to be changed. Where to begin–with a long, dazed look backwards at what actually happened, or all around to assess just how bad the damage is? What will it mean to take a hard look at where we are and what habits are still in place?

Well, it might mean looking at how artists from around the world have depicted Bush’s America.

This bubble-head figure is from an exhibition by Phillip Toledano entitled “America – The Gift Shop.” Toledano asks, “If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?” His answers involve an uncanny fusion of criminal government policies and commercial brick-a-brack. In a stroke, Toledano captures the enormous gap between day-to-day experience in the US and the terror perpetrated by the Bush administration in Iraq. Equally disturbing is his demonstration of how the crimes might be miniaturized or otherwise diminished by those whose lives are defined by retail consumption. I’ve seen many appropriations of the iconic image from Abu Ghraib, but this is the only one that really drained it of most of its moral force. What might be disregarded as merely clever artistry in fact does something much more difficult: it reminds us that human beings can get used to anything.

It is imperative that Americans not become accustomed even in part to the policies of the past seven years. The clock needs to be turned all the way back at the justice department, state department, treasury department–just to name the obvious–and elsewhere, even as the government and the society move forward to do better than that. Until that happens, the change that is needed will be too little, too late.

Bad habits die hard, and there always will be those at home and abroad trying to use them to their own interests. Too many people have made a lot of money or acquired a lot of power off of the War on Terror. All the more reason to turn to those artists and intellectuals who can reveal just how much went wrong and why one can’t assume that wrongs will be righted and habits changed as a matter of course.

America the Gift Shop is an exhibition at The Apartment, a design agency in New York City. Abu Ghraib Bubble-head; moulded resin, 7″, 2008. Regions destablized while-u-wait; neon, glass, 20″ x 30″, 2008. Thanks to Conscientious for finding this great work.

 1 Comment

Vernacular Photojournalism in the War Zone

For all the excitement of the US presidential election, Iraq and Afghanistan are still war zones where people are struggling to live in conditions that fall far short of the American Dream. You wouldn’t know it from the American media, however. Fortunately, there are other reminders of both the damage done and the people still there–in short of obligations that remain.

Baghdad Calling, by Geert van Kesteren, is a remarkable collection of images taken by ordinary citizens in Iraq and elsewhere in the Iraqi diaspora across the Middle East. The photo above has strong resonance with professional war photography. Coverage of the Iraq war has included many scenes framed by a car window, and of dead bodies on the ground which harken back to the famous photograph by Mathew Brady of “Federal Dead on the Field of Battle of First Day, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” But the photo above is hardly a study in artistic allusion. Knowing that this is a scene from daily life gives it a special fascination and horror. This is not “the war” but somebody’s neighborhood, a place where kids might be scrounging around looking for cool junk. Or worse, the car could be driving through the back lot because those inside are hoping they won’t find the body of a loved one.

That emotional response to the photograph is supported by a realism that makes it a worthy heir of Brady’s image. Brady showed the world that “the fallen” become corpses that bloat in the heat. Now look closely at the photo above. The man on the right has his arms tied behind his back. One of those on the right may have been dismembered. Despite our familiarity with photographs of destruction, this is not what one wants to see while riding in the car. Welcome to Baghdad.

And what would you do if you had to live amidst violence? Well, one solution is to get a hot car.

This photograph may be more jarring than the one above. It certainly is not what one expects to see coming out of coverage of the war. Nor would you see it at an automotive fair or a fashion show. This guy is not rich and not cool, neither sleek nor fast, yet he’s doing what he can to to make that small car into something beautiful, and his life into something of his own making.

The scene is perfectly still–perhaps even more so than the first, which carries the sense of the interrupted motion of the car and the transitoriness of human life. Yet the motionless pose contains a cascade of contrasts. This is a domestic scene, not men at war; his casual clothes are further diminished by the sheen of the car; the car is diminished by the ideals of automotive power and design it evokes; he appears clownish by comparison to the Hollywood fashions implied by the hat, sunglasses, and car. The result is a complex emotion of both the vicious derision within all social hierarchy and astonishment or even admiration at his being there at all. Isn’t he supposed to be dead, or killing someone, or at least staying out of sight behind the imperial guard?

This image documents reality just as deeply as the first does. Where one exposes how war terrorizes people while turning them into trash, the other documents the sheer persistence of the desire to live a normal life. The image captures a triumph of self-respect, and precisely because he can stand up even though everything he has is less than ideal. That is exactly how each one of us gets through the day.

The problem, of course, is that some people have to do so against much worse obstacles than others. And what is needed is not sentimentality, but political accountability.

Van Kesteren’s work is also part of an exhibition “On the Subject of War” at the Barbican Art Gallery through January 25, 2009. Note also the commentary by Geoff Dwyer at The Guardian. You can link to the book at Amazon.com here, or to his earlier book on the Iraq war, Why Mister, Why?

 4 Comments

Dulce et Decorum est, Pro Patria Mori

I’ve written previously about my eighth grade teacher, Abraham Elias, who taught me to memorize poetry when all I really wanted to be able to remember were things like batting averages and shooting percentages.  I did it because he inspired me to do so, but I was never really sure how well the exercise would ultimately serve me.  And yet, as the years have passed I’ve found myself returning to those poems over and again—almost as if I can’t help it—as I try to make sense of the world around me.  And so it is today with this photograph of two “Russian military officers tak[ing] part in a Flag Day Holiday in St. Petersburg” that appeared last week on-line at the Washington Post.

The words that billowed forth from consciousness when I saw this photograph are originally from the Odes of Horace (iii 2.13): “Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.”  In English: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”  But truth to tell I’ve never read the Odes.  Where I encountered these words was in Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poem, “Dulce et Decorum,” written in 1917 during the Great War, the first of “the war to end all wars.”  Owens’ point, of course, was that Horace’s aphorism was a lie told to boys and young men in an effort to nurture a desire for military glory and to mobilize their bodies to national interests without regard to question or cost.

What is most striking about the photograph is the uniform intensity of the youthful faces staring straight ahead, teenage boys trying ever so hard to look like the men that they want to be, strong and in control.  Note the cold and emotionless expression on their faces.  It is perhaps what we might call the look of a killer, and thus altogether out of place on young boys who we might otherwise imagine playing soccer on a school field or trying to steal their first kiss.  But here that stoic look is legitimated and glorified by the adornment of military regalia and the national flags that simultaneously cover and substitute for their bodies. It would be hard to mistake these boys as anything but interchangeable instruments of the nation state.  And indeed, the very proportionality of the image, with their faces barely peeking out from behind the unfurled and flapping flags, underscores the sense in which they stand behind the nation in a doubled sense, both subordinate to it and propping it up at the same time.

The photograph here is from an eastern European country, and it would be easy to deride and dismiss it as the artifact of a once and future totalitarian nation-state, but of course the image is less about Russia than it is about the apparatus and mechanisms of nationalist desire, which seem always and everywhere to feed upon its youth regardless of its particular geographical location.  Those could be young American faces and US flags, and of course we have encountered such images all too frequently.  What remains is for us to see them for what they are. 

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori, indeed.

Photo Credit:  Sergei Kulikov/AFP-Getty Images

 2 Comments