NO CAPTION NEEDED

Well, you tell me.

The short answer is San Francisco Bay.  Or as the European Space Agency put it rather poetically, “An urban sprawl engulfs San Francisco Bay in a sea of lights.”  The inversion of making the land mass a “sea” is a license we readily give to words, while pretending that our vision should be anchored more firmly to reality.  According to the conventional wisdom, that anchor is supposed to be provided by the caption–the verbal description, which can be so easily or subtlely metaphoric, and you might want to think about that.

But I digress.  The question remains whether you are seeing The Bay Area.  Now that you’ve been told, perhaps, but could you pick it out of a lineup of other cities at night?  Those who live there, sure, they might be able to zero in a bit as if on Google Maps, but most people would have to take it on faith.

And so we do, and that may be a problem.  Not the problem that usually is promoted at this point: I really don’t think there is an epistemological issue here.  Yes, it could have been faked or there could be a mistake in labeling, but here as in many other places we can rely on institutional practices and social norms, not to mention the fact that most people have enough to do just telling the truth.  (I fall into the latter category, so save your breath about me making it up.)  It is what they say it is.

But is it?  The problem I want to raise is that once you’ve been given a literal description of the image, your imagination may shut down too soon.  The image is also an optic–a way of seeing–and we can think of the imagination as an extended way of seeing.  Thus, any image might prompt imaginative extension, elaboration, or transformation of what is being shown, an extrapolation into the realm of metaphor, you might say.  And why would one want to do that?  Not merely to play with possibilities, although there is no law against that, but rather to get closer to what really is there to be seen.

Fortunately, the ESA caption wasn’t strictly literal.  There’s another deviation in that regard beyond the “sea of lights.”  We are seeing, we are told, “an urban sprawl” (my emphasis).  That’s not standard American English usage, and so it opens a crack in the door of possibility.  “Urban sprawl” would have been more typical, and it would have implied that we are seeing a general phenomenon, one that can be found and that would be much the same in other cities and countries.  Such captioning is actually an exercise in abstraction, not direct reference to the hard ground of reality, and you might want to think about that as well.

“An urban sprawl” sounds more like a single thing–like an organism, for example.  An amoeba.  A virus.  A radiant life form, a body electric humming with energy.  Something that can pulsate, grow, replicate as it directs more and more energy through its neural pathways to become more intelligent, vital, beautiful.

And that can go dark in seconds, collapsing into a chaos of darkness as its energy disappears, systems crashing, gasping for the terawatts of power that no longer are available because the unseen earth has given up the last of its oil, coal, and gas.  Or because another virus has emerged, this one too strong and predatory to be stopped, whether digital or biological, all that is needed to make the darkness sovereign.

Or perhaps something else.  Pick your metaphor and try to see what the image is telling us.  Think about it: it’s not really needed to do what governments do with visual technologies: surveying, surveillance, and propaganda could each be there, but weakly so, and they have far better options elsewhere.  No, I think it’s provided because it’s beautiful and enigmatic, which is enough to intrigue and awe many people inside the space program and without.  Best of all, it’s what you need if you want to see what really is there.

Photograph by ESA/NASA.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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Let’s start with one photo.

The caption reads, “Human remains are seen during the exhumation of a Stalinist-era mass grave on the military cemetery in the heart of the Polish capital Warsaw. The grave is believed to contain the remains of around 200 victims of a post-war campaign of communist terror.”

Perhaps the victim was screaming at the moment of death, but the gaping jaw could be an accident of decay or excavation.  Perhaps the lost individual will be identified, and perhaps the family can be notified.  Perhaps the remains will have forensic value, and maybe some remnant of justice can yet be done.

But, OMG, what an image.  The accidents of time have produced a howling, shrieking cry of pain and rage.  The body emerging from the earth is still shrouded with dust, as if still more ghost than material thing.  The immobility of being long buried is still binding the corpse, but it seems to be straining to be released, to rise up in glorious, savage revenge.  A revenge that will never come, as instead it will be interned again in a bureaucratic process constrained by a decided imbalance of power.

And so it has to settle for a more academic symbolism: there lies The Past, or Terror, or the Human Condition.  These are not small things, but they can have other emblems as well.  Yet, even so, I can’t help but think–or hope–that this image might haunt whatever idea is brought to it; that it might arise again in the night or at an odd moment, and that it might disturb, trouble, bring one perhaps to tremble for this lost soul from history’s slaughter pen.

OK, and now add a million more photos.  Start with the 10,000 that were sent to photo editors on the day this one was published.  Add another 10,000 for the many days before and every day after that.  Add also all the other images that you see every day in the news, advertising, and entertainment, and on Facebook, Flickr, and other social media.  Then add in what everyone else is seeing: the 200,000 photos that are uploaded to Facebook every minute, and the 27,00 at Instagram, etc.  And while you are at it, drop by a museum and see an exhibition of photographs.

Were you to do any of this, you might feel like Chloe Pantazi, who went to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum on war photography.  Pantazi came away feeling “numb,” as if she had been anesthetized, and, not surprisingly came to the conclusion that “Susan Sontag Was Right” when she condemned photographs for dulling our ethical capacity.  Well, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so I guess it could happen, but the declaration also provides an opportunity to think for a few seconds and say, “Really?”

I haven’t seen the exhibition, nor do I doubt for a minute that Pantazi had the experience she reports, so we need not disagree about her review on those terms.  That said, Pantazi’s reaction is not surprising for several reasons: First, it is a very understanding reaction to over 400 photographs about war taken in a single experience of dedicated viewing.  Indeed, I would expect the same result from reading 400 essays, or 400 pages, on the horror of war.  What most of us would not do in that case, however, is conclude that words were the problem.  And yet that is the point of the photography review, as the subtitle declares: “A troubling new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art throws into question the medium’s very purpose.”

Which leads to the second reason her conclusion is so familiar: it is exactly the reaction one is primed to have after reading Sontag, not to mention John Berger, Allan Sekula, Martha Rossler, and others who have crafted the conventional discourse of photography theory along the same line.  (See the first chapter of Susie Linfield’s The Cruel Radiance for a provocative exposition on this point.)  What might be a normal–and temporary–reaction to intensive consumption of any medium becomes redefined as a universal failing of a single medium.  Once primed to be misused and disappointed by photography, it is easy to code one’s experience accordingly.  Let me add that putting the exhibition in a museum doesn’t help, as the fine arts context dominant there (as it is in Sontag’s work) interferes with correctly understanding a public art.

Again, the point here is not to reprove Pantazi for what might be a spot on review of a flawed exhibition.  But her reaction, the size of the exhibition, and even Sontag’s interpretative biases all point toward what is a very real condition of the image world today: excess.  And where there is excess, there will be exhaustion.

And as Pantazi rightly assumes (more so than the early Sontag, by the way), the emotions that come to be exhausted by images of horror are crucial for moral response, reflection, and engagement.  So this is no small problem.  But if we could set aside Sontag’s censorious tone, it is a problem that could lead to many creative solutions.

I’m out of time tonight, but let me close by suggesting that there is much more to excess than the likelihood of overwhelming us.  (And be sure to see David Campbell’s corrective argument about the much more manageable circumstances of actual practice.)  Indeed, photography as always been an abundant art: cheap, expansive, and ending up in every corner of the world.  (I have a bit more to say on rethinking abundance here, here, and here.)  What does need to be done is to take more seriously the curatorial function, which includes not only actual curators or editors, but also critics and citizens as they sort, select, and share images as part of their participation in the virtual world of public culture.

And we need to remember that at the end of any given day, what may be needed is not 400 photographs, but just one.  Like the one above, for example.

Photograph by Wojtek Radwanski/AFP-Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BagNewsNotes.

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By one measure, at least, we might say that 2013 was the year of the gun.  The year began in the wake of the slaughter of 26 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School by a single individual wielding the weaponry and ammunition displayed in the disturbing photograph above.   This was not all that he carried—note that the yellow evidence markers extend into the 40s— but its stark presentation, cast in the language of criminal forensics, underscores the fact that we are witnessing weapons of death—for surely automatic weapons serve no other purpose—and invites the question so often asked: why would any single individual need so much armament?  And surely there is something that we can do as a society to manage and regulate access to such weapons … particularly the automatic weapons marked by the bullets and  cartridge clips? But of course we have done nothing.  And while the numbers vary, even the most conservative estimates indicate that nearly 10,000 people have died in the U.S. from gunshot wounds since the Sandy Hook massacre (some estimates range as high as 32,000).  By some counts half of those deaths were by suicide, and while I’m not convinced we should ignore those for this fact alone, that still leaves us with 5,000 deaths that were violent and  transgressive—the heavily reported Navy Yard Killings in September only a fraction of the overall total.  5,000 lives tragically and precipitously cut short.

I say above that we have done nothing, but really we have moved backwards.  Congress has stubbornly refused to reinstitute the lapsed federal assault weapons ban or to even consider stricter regulations on gun registration—and please look closely at the photograph above as you ponder that fact and the 32 victims of Sandy Hook.  And the reason is clear, for those who govern the gun culture have aggressively vilified even those within their own community who dare to consider the possibility of moderation when it comes to interpreting the meaning of the 2^nd Amendment, recalling legislators and banishing those working for gun magazines who challenge the absolutist “gospel” of the NRA.

The photograph above, however, only tells part of the story.  Its stark representation of the facts point to a tragic and palpable past.  But photographs also help us to imagine possible futures.  And so we have the image below.

The young girl being taught how to hold an imitation automatic weapon is attending “Youth Day” at the annual NRA Convention in Houston, TX.  One can imagine passing on the traditions of hunting with weapons from one generation to the next or even training our youth as to how to handle a handgun safely and responsibly without serious concern, but that is not what we are looking at here.  This young girl is being indoctrinated into a gun culture through automatic weaponry—who hunts with automatic weapons?—and that projects a very different kind of future.  She doesn’t appear to be particularly interested in the weapon, her attention seemingly distracted by other things, and this may give us some hope that she doesn’t identify with the toy gun in her hands, or with the future it projects; at the same time, however, her index finger seems to be poised all too consciously on the trigger and that should leave us somewhat concerned that she has learned her lesson all too well, projecting a future in which weapons of death become all the more natural accouterments of everyday life.

One past.  Two possible futures. And what the photographs ask is, which will we choose?

Photo Credit:  Handout/Reuters; Adrees Latif/Reuters

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