NO CAPTION NEEDED – Page 5 – PHOTOJOURNALISM, PUBLIC CULTURE, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

When Cotton Was King

May 31, 2016June 2, 2016
Lucaites
visual memory
0 Comments

Photographs serve many purposes, not least witnessing and memory. Here we have a photograph of a cotton field in the Mississippi Delta near the town of Money. But what is being witnessed or remembered?

You probably have never heard of Money, Mississippi, but you probably have heard of Emmett Till. An African American born in Chicago, he visited relatives in Money at the age of fourteen during the summer of 1955. While there he allegedly “flirted” with a married woman—a white, married woman—in a local grocery store. And for that “crime” he was stripped, beaten and shot in the head, his face mutilated beyond all recognition, and his bodied tied to a cotton-gin fan and deposited in the Tallahatchie River. Till’s mother insisted on an open casket funeral and the now famous photograph of the disfigured Emmett Till appeared first in Jet magazine before being picked up by the mainstream media. The two perpetrators—Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam—were found “not-guilty” by an all white jury who deliberated for less than an hour in a segregated courthouse in nearby Sumner, Mississippi.

One might imagine that a contemporary photographer seeking to memorialize the lynching of Emmett Till might photograph the dilapidated grocery store—or its historical marker—where Till violated the rigid codes of the Jim Crow South, or perhaps the spot on the river where Till’s body was eventually discovered. Or maybe even the Sumner, Mississippi courthouse. Instead, Andrew Lichtenstein chose to photograph a nearby cotton field.

It is hard to know if the sun is rising or setting here, but whether you imagine that the camera is facing east or west there is no question that cotton is cast within a metaphorical timescape. The sun is either setting on cotton and hence a reminder that by the 1950s the economy that relied upon it was in full decline, or the sun is rising on it, and a reminder of the new day soon to be be ushered in by the nascent Civil Rights Movement. In either case, the photograph of a cotton field in Money, Mississippi is a poignant testament to the fact that while Bryant and Milam lynched Till and tied his body to a rusted cotton-gin fan, it was truly cotton—and the economic and social order that it animated—that killed him.

Andrew Lichtenstein, Forgotten Moments

0 Comments

Seeing, Maybe, Another Bombing in Baghdad

We’ve seen it before.

I’ve even posted on it before. Not exactly the same photograph, of course, but one very much like it. Suicide bombings are on the rise in Iraq again, and so the news returns to the same crime scenes, the same wreckage, the same helplessness. The news that, like much else that was needed to prevent the bombing, arrives too late.

Maybe that guy in the cameo is an official of some type, and maybe the state has something to do–a bit of forensic work, perhaps, and some record keeping. To me, he looks more like the guy with the tow truck, and the only decision to be made is how he’s gonna get that metal carcass up on the flatbed. As for the rest of those present, well, what can they do beyond what they are doing? They mill about aimlessly, look for the odd remnant, look around to see who else is there, try to take in the scene as a whole (but what is that?), and generally rely on their presence and the passing of time to somehow bring the world that was there before back into focus. What else would you expect? After all, they are spectators.

Spectators like us. Another bombing, another photo of its aftermath, another moment where you arrive too late to be reminded that there is little you can do anyway. And what did you expect? The photo does not make an emergency claim–there are no ambulances, no heroic first responders, no valiant citizens resolved to fight on. Instead, we see trauma reduced to curiosity as a society, for want of any other option, returns to something like normalcy.

Nor does the photo make a call on our compassion or any other strong emotion. Instead the scene is emotionally diffuse, even deadening. Any dramatic actions or reactions are off stage. In their place is stasis, inaction, banality. The photo shows us how few options ordinary people have when living amid violence. The question remains, are the options any better for the person viewing the photo?

By this point, many writers would have laid the blame for any inability to do much else on the medium of photography. We’ve been told far too often that it makes us into voyeurs or tourists and exhausts or perverts our moral sense. That could be true, although frankly I think you are safe. Let’s consider instead how the photo from Baghdad is doing something else.

It’s not a great photo; it may even be unusually flawed, unless you can tell me what that inchoate white column is in the middle of the main vehicle. But that doesn’t matter. Whatever its “quality,” the photograph is a worthwhile realist statement: first, because of how is it one of many like it, all of them keeping the war visible–and I mean the war, not the abstractions that fuel it. Second, it shows how large-scale forces are experienced by ordinary people: experienced, that is, as disasters and as ongoing disruptions and as events that will never make sense even as everyone becomes more or less accustomed to coping. Third, it reminds us that spectatorship alone is an insufficient basis for an effective response to what is shown.

And I’m not just talking about the spectators in the photograph. If photography is to confront violence, speak truth to power, or meet any other noble aspiration of the public media, it has to be linked to audiences and organizations who can act where it counts. That may be in the legislature or the refugee camps or a thousand other places, but we have to be able to imagine doing something and then work with others to the same end. Photographic realism works through spectatorship, but the objective is something more organized.

As far as Baghdad goes, I don’t know if any good options are available within the city or elsewhere in that country. It may be that the photograph is disturbingly realistic, in the sense that it implies that there is no basis for those in the picture to organize themselves against the next bombing. They seem to have nothing but the inadvertent associations of a crowd at the scene of an accident. There are political and military organizations offstage, of course, but they are the problem, not the solution. In a photo of the aftermath of a bombing, there may be even less to see than we had thought.

As far as the US or other countries that are or could be involved, well, we each need to look in the mirror. The problem is not what is or is not being shown, but whether there exist any political organizations capable of doing what is needed to move from war to peace.

That said, one symptom of a lack of solidarity or political efficacy is that people acquire a habitual blindness on some topics. Topics like war, for example. When you’ve seen it before, and since there is nothing you can do, it’s easy not to see it again. And then the destruction and despair are sure to continue.

Photograph byKhalid Al-Mousily/Reuters.

2 Comments

Is It War or Is it Art?

May 12, 2016May 11, 2016
Hariman
visualizing war
0 Comments

You tell me.

Could be a play, right? An opera. Street theatre. A scene from an avant-garde movie. In any case, the hints of commedia dell’arte are there to be seen. And why else would a bloodied woman be smiling, if she’s not play acting? You tell me.

In fact, she is a woman injured in an airstrike in Aleppo. But is that news? Lots of women have been injured by airstrikes in Aleppo, and there appears to be nothing politically or militarily distinctive about this strike and this woman. Except perhaps that she got off much better than many, but that doesn’t seem to be the emphasis, either. It may explain the apparent smile, but that could be an illusion as well: she could simply have been caught in a tiny sliver of time on the way to another, more serious expression. So why show the photograph at all?

The answer to that question seems obvious: the image is aesthetically distinctive. The resonances with other arts are precisely to that point: there is a strongly artistic quality to the photograph, which is at once painterly, cinematic, and theatrical. The photo seems especially theatrical to me, but that may be beside the point. What is important is that we see it as a work of art. Only then can we consider what might be the artistic statement–or perhaps the artistic enigma–that is being presented to the spectator.

She is both a woman and a character, an individual person and a distinctive image, another data point in the statistics of violence and a compelling assertion of the vitality, beauty, wonder, and sheer good luck that is a human life.

Not everyone is so lucky. At the end of the day, difference between art and war is not between aesthetics and something else: it is between a celebration of life and another, all too human propensity to kill indiscriminately. Sometimes a photograph can remind us of what is at stake by showing us both at once, and how the difference between them can lie in a tiny sliver of time. The time, for example, between surviving the attack or not; the time between life and death; the time of photography.

Photograph by Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters.

0 Comments

Listen to the Ruins

April 6, 2016November 12, 2019
Hariman
catastrophe
0 Comments

For some in the US this week, the big event was the NCAA men’s basketball final. For others, it was opening day of the baseball season. Some have been focused on the presidential primaries and the endless spin and speculation that goes with that. Almost no one will have been thinking about the Nuclear Security Summit meeting that concluded last Friday.

Too bad. It was important–unless, that is, you don’t mind having Your Town looking like this.

The photo was taken at the abandoned city of Pripyat, Ukraine. That’s right–an abandoned city. And we are not speaking metaphorically: for example, “Detroit has been abandoned by the powers that be.” I’ve said much the same myself, but this photo is about something far worse that the typical stories of political or economic malfeasance. Pripyat had the bad luck to be located near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Thirty years ago this month the reactor exploded, and today the “exclusion zone”–the dead zone–covers 1000 square miles.

And what did it take to take down 1000 square miles? A mistake made during a routine test. Yes, it was the exception; there will have been millions of tests undertaken at the many reactors around the world that were conducted safely. But the relationship between the small scale of individual human action and the enormous consequences of nuclear destruction should not go unnoticed.

Just as the relationship between a small terrorist action and the enormous consequences of nuclear destruction should not go unnoticed. Even if it is harder than one might think, it doesn’t take an army–or a Manhattan project–to create a crude tactical nuclear weapon today. And there should be no doubt whatsoever that there are people and organizations in the world that would use it at the first opportunity. Not use it as a bargaining chip, not use it as a status symbol to join the nations in the nuclear club, but use it to destroy a city.

That’s why the Summit mattered. Convened in Washington and hosted by President Obama, it received precious little coverage. It was derided, of course, for being too small, too weak, all talk, etc. Some of that had the marks of what should be said by a loyal opposition, and most of it was the all too predictable Obama bashing and saber rattling by the usual gang of idiots.

Either way, there is need to listen to what the ruins have to say. Every summit matters, every initiative, all the talk, whatever money is committed or technical support provided. If there ever was need for Democrat and Republican to work together, and opportunity to be able to work together pragmatically and effectively, this should be it.

Tough talk may even have a place, but far more important will be building collaborative relationships and rigorous practices to protect all the available nuclear material. Even then accidents can happen, but no one should think that there is time to waste, or that the odds are on our side, or that ideology is more important than security.

Listen to the ruins. They know what people are thinking: how we don’t assume the worst, and how we are easily distracted.

And they know what can happen next.

Photographs by Gleb Garanich/Reuters and Efrem Lukatsky AP. For the Atlantic Monthly’s slide show on the exclusion zone, go here.

Cross-posted at Reading the Pictures.

0 Comments

The Last Modern Man?

March 21, 2016March 20, 2016
Hariman
the visual public
1 Comment

The caption says, “A man walks along the Cheonggye stream in central Seoul, South Korea.” I think that’s an understatement.

How about: A man in a three-piece suit walks on, under, and along the concrete infrastructure of a public space? Or a a man in a three-piece suit walks on, under, and along the concrete infrastructure of a public space sharply sculpted by bright sunlight and dark shadows along a stream that is part of an urban water management system?

Or perhaps this: A man holding a small leather wallet hesitates on an elegant white and grey platform between the abyss behind and the abyss before him, while a stream flows by without remorse.

Or, a lone man walks tentatively through an empty space amid abstract structures, as if uncertain of what will happen next.

Or, the official walked through light and darkness to carry out his duties, small as they were; the river awaited him.

The spy considered whether he was too late, even though he was too early, too visible, and already a dead man.

As the well-dressed man walked on the clean city sidewalk by the beautiful bridge, he thought about jumping.

You get the idea. The stream is barely visible; the street and structure could be in any modern city, and the man is the anonymous embodiment of a type. The scene captures key elements of 20th century modernism: a lack of ornamentation cues the dominance of functionalist design, uniform materials, abstract spaces, geometrical forms, and black and white contrasts. In fact, not much of the world looks this barren or this purely engineered, and not many men wear suits anymore, and the image of the “man in the grey flannel suit” alone in the anomie of the concrete jungle is a figure from another era. And yet, here he is again, and perhaps more remarkable for that.

Let’s be clear what this image is not. It is not news. It is not emblematic of a significant event or current controversy. It is not a sign of the times or a new fashion or trending activity. And yet it is photojournalism, and it was selected for the Photos of the Week at the Atlantic.

More to the point, the who, what, where, and when really don’t matter much here. (If you look closely, he might be wearing a sweater rather than a vest. I’m not sure he’s carrying a wallet, either. Note that we’re not told the name of the street, etc.) Which leaves us with the why. And the why is doubly important, because what the photograph certainly is, is enigmatic. Although quintessentially modernist, it’s no longer clear whether the world depicted has a future. For all the strength and inertia of the concrete structures, they already seem almost permanently empty, and he seems both wittingly and unwittingly vulnerable. Kafka’s K comes to mind, which takes us even farther back. And by the way, where are the women? Now modernism becomes an empty space that we walk through but would not want to inhabit; and enlightenment serves primarily to demarcate the dark places, which are larger than we knew.

He is caught in the light, but like his shadow, he will soon disappear. Take a look at the last modern man.

Photograph by Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters.

1 Comment

When Dreams Become Ruins

March 2, 2016March 3, 2016
Hariman
visual memory
0 Comments

It could be any abandoned basement, or subbasement, or back-lot reservoir of some forgotten rust-belt industrial zone. And it is–except that it also is the flooded room beneath Launch Complex 19 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Space Program, remember? Or maybe you read about it in school. Gemini, Apollo, the big rockets timbering upward amid gigantic columns of smoke and fire. Humanity was going to the moon, to the stars, into the final frontier. . . .

OK, so that final frontier stuff came from Star Trek, but it was all the same, really. Science and science fiction mashed up together. Dreaming big and making it so real the whole world could watch in awe.

And now? The rockets are ancient history, the space shuttles are museum pieces, and space is being privitized by those few billionaires who have hobbies other than collecting politicians.

Fortunately, photographer Roland Miller has captured what remains. His book Abandoned in Place: Preserving America’s Space History is out this month. I’ve only seen the images at his web site and the New York Times exhibition, but they offer a beautiful study of the complex relationships between dreams, loss, and memory.

If you liked the space program, it will be a mixed blessing, as the glory days are long gone, while rust, peeling paint, and cracked concrete testify to nature’s relentless wear. Indeed, earth seems to be reasserting the slow, sure bonds of gravity and inertia that the powerful launches seemed to defy.

If you like ruins, however, you will feel right at home. Which is why I want to feature this work. I don’t miss the space program, but its ruins can help us think about what it means to tie progress to a dream of escape.

The visible abandonment of the rocket sites is a sad reminder of what it would have meant to abandon this planet. The falling back into nature is another example of how we have to find more sustainable ways to thrive within our own ecosystem. The deteriorating relics of a great technological achievement provide mute testimony to the fate of any civilization that thinks it can rise forever.

The great challenge of the 21st century is not traveling into space, but rather renewing our covenants with the earth and each other. If that challenge is not met, perhaps some day travelers from another galaxy will arrive here, only to find a silent planet dotted with ruins.

Photographs by Roland Miller.

Cross-posted at Reading the Pictures.

0 Comments

Progress and Catastrophe at the World Press Photo Awards

February 19, 2016February 22, 2016
Hariman
catastrophe
2 Comments

The 2016 World Press Photo Awards were announced yesterday. As always, the awards are an occasion for marveling at the quality of contemporary photojournalism. And as always, they probably have prompted some controversy, although I would expect less of that this year. The winning photograph channels Robert Capa’s great D-Day photograph, while its black and white tonality and “you are there” action shot will allay concerns raised in the last few years about the presence of painterly or other explicitly aesthetic values.

A wide range of artistic inflection is still on display at the awards, however, and good thing, too. (Keep in mind that all the photographs are digitally altered–not least the black and white images, which have the color subtracted from the original raw file.) Photojournalism is a vital, vibrant public art, and the “82,951 photos made by 5,775 photographers from 128 different countries” will provide a rich archive of life on planet Earth today. Note also that this WPP quotation says the photos are “made,” not taken. The modernist assumption about transparent representation of the world finally is being replaced by recognition of the fact–and I would hope, value–of mediation.

From the look of the winners, it seems clear that the artistry that is on display brings us closer not only to the world as it is, but also to the world as it is unfolding from past to present to future. By putting two of the category winners side by side, we can see how this public art is challenging us to think about whether a global future will be one of progress or catastrophe.

The WPP caption says, “Chinese men pull a tricycle in a neighborhood next to a coal-fired power plant in Shanxi, China. A history of heavy dependence on burning coal for energy has made China the source of nearly a third of the world’s total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the toxic pollutants widely cited by scientists and environmentalists as the primary cause of global warming.”

Put text and image image together, and you have a problem. Coal-fired plants in China needs to be replaced for the common good, right? Yes, but it’s cold in Shanxi. And that massive plant is helping people haul themselves out of centuries of poverty.

The caption refers to a tricycle, but motorbikes are there as well. Progress is there, but hardly at the level of Saudi elites living lavishly in London. It’s still a slog in Shanxi. The fact that the province is now an exhibit for deplorable labor conditions is one measure of where it is on the developmental scale. One question that arises is whether this is a photograph of how rural China is climbing the stages of industrialization toward First World prosperity, or of how the “temporary” costs of industrialization are now unacceptable because of permanent damage to the global ecosystem.

Which brings us to the photo’s artistry. Is it a photograph or a 19th century genre painting? Is it a photograph or a Soviet-era poster promoting industrialization? Both the painterly hues and the modernist iconography are key elements of the composition. The artistic implication is that this is a photograph of the past.

In Reading National Geographic, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins made the astute observation that the ideology of progress sees the developing world is if “their present is our past” (p. 125). Many, many photographs have carried that message. With this photo, I’m not so sure. The the two men in the foreground are moving the non-motorized vehicle away from the power plants. The plants are being left behind, while the men are walking on a road that seemingly would become colder, harsher, more tiring. In place of electric heat, they will need that fur blanket that is draped over the trike. As in a genre painting, they become a portrait of a simple, agrarian life, albeit now one that comes after industrialization instead of before it. Progress is part of the picture, but it has become dangerous. The two men almost could be refugees. And perhaps they are.

But where might they go? How are things going in the advanced nations? The flip side of the Lutz and Collins observation is that those elsewhere could look at our present to see their future. But what if our present already contains another future, and one that no one would want?

The WPP caption says, “A massive ‘cloud tsunami’ looms over Sydney as a sunbather reads, oblivious to the approaching cloud on Bondi Beach.” Welcome to the affluent world: life is a beach, and better than that when you’ve also got your digital reader. Industrialization is somewhere off stage here, while global information technologies, consumer consumption, and warmth can be taken for granted. Taken for granted, that is, until you stop what you’re doing to look at what is coming.

Perhaps it’s just another storm. Weather, not climate change. A need to take shelter for awhile, not change the way you live. That is the difference between a literal reading of the photograph and seeing it as a work of public art. The photographs taken in 2015 record what is still a present moment, but they also can recall the past and reveal something of the future. A future, perhaps, that looms like a terrible, dark storm.

Photographs by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images (WPP 1st prize singles, Daily Life) and Rohan Kelly/Daily Telegraph (WPP 1st prize singles, Nature).

Cross-posted at Reading the Pictures.

2 Comments

Visions of the 1 % at Fashion Week

February 4, 2016April 9, 2016
Hariman
fashion/fiction
0 Comments

Tired of war, refugees, and Donald Trump? Take heart: Fashion Week is here. But although we might want diversion, escape, or vicarious indulgence of wretched excess, even the fashion shows are saying something about the news. One of the themes this year is that wealth is here to stay.

OK, that may be one of the themes every year, but what’s interesting is that the designers are tuned in to how the 1% will continue to rule. So far this year, there are at least two serious options. One uses the theme of a new feudalism.

This couture gown from Valentino took 1,300 hours to make. 1300 hours, and it still gets a lot of mileage from bare skin. Maria Grazia Chiuri suggested that the show represented “diversity, and freedom, and the chance to express yourself.” True enough, and certainly so if compared to ISIS. But actually the look is going in the same direction as the Islamic State: back into a premodern world.

I see a woman waking in an ancient courtyard. She might be a queen or a courtesan, and there aren’t too many other options. Her bare feet, flowing gown, and jeweled hair evoke movie images of Greece or Rome, and the bare feet and shoulders suggest a warm environment–whether in a past Mediterranean world or one remade by global warming. Like the model she is, she is likely to be doing what she is told: making an entrance to play her role, or an exit to meet her fate.

The dress is too expensive for most of us but the image suggests a common destiny: a world that is devolving–changing, despite all its technological prowess–back into a time of extremes and inequities, hoarding and scarcity, nobles and peasants. Many TV shows, movies, video games, novels, and other arts are exploring this vision. They are obvious acts of imagination, but they are representations of real tendencies in modern societies around the globe.

And they can be wrong. Not, however, because something like a reasonable social contract and shared prosperity will be restored. The fashion shows present another alternative, one that is just a bit retro, uncannily so.

In this tableau, the future is already here and it looks a lot like a modern past. Posh, preppy, call it what you will: the 1 % rule look as they have before, although perhaps even more explicitly entitled and insolent. The image also suggests that race and sexuality can be easily appropriated (as they always were) to reinforce class domination. But I digress. This is not the time to denigrate what progress has occured; not when the image is reminding us that nonetheless we might be slipping back into a social order made for the few and the very few.

As Scott Fitzgerald knew when he wrote The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Photographs by Miquel Medina/AFP-Getty Images and Kevin Tachman for Michael Kors.

Cross-posted at Reading the Pictures.

0 Comments

The Lesson of the Snowstorm

January 26, 2016January 25, 2016
Hariman
no caption needed
0 Comments

This is the photo that keeps coming up in the papers and the slide shows. “A resident shovels snow from the entrance to his home in Union City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan, after the second-biggest winter storm in New York history, on January 24, 2016.” That’s the caption, just in case you were wondering about the who, what, where, and when. But that isn’t saying much.

Snowstorm photographs can’t avoid being stock images: whatever they are, you’ve seen them before. This one is no exception, so novelty is not part of the appeal. Nor is it a particularly striking photograph. Whatever its features, I can think in every case of photos that displayed each one more directly: the undulations of white softness draping the furniture of the world, the gentle play of light and shadow on snow, the trees heavy with their winter foliage, the monster drifts, the daunting task of digging out. . . . This photo has them all, but each quality is stacked up with the others, and they seem to subtract from one another rather than produce a cumulative effect. So it really is an aftermath photo: emphasizing not the massive, magical inundation but instead the individuated labor of clearing a way back to the familiar routines of ordinary life. And yet it is in its own way captivating. Why?

The answer, I think, is that it provides a gentle reminder of just how good life can be. Can be: not in every case. That snowstorm will have caused car wrecks, heart attacks, and other bad news, and eventually we’ll be told how the costs for snow removal and lost business will run to the millions or billions. But there is another story that won’t be told, except perhaps through this photograph.

If a snowstorm is your big problem this week, you’re doing fine. If you have to shovel snow but can walk back into a warm brick brownstone where the heat is always on, where water always flows sure and clean at the turn of your hand, where you can look up and down the street and see everyone else having the same amenities. . . . . That is the good life.

The photo shows one kind of abundance–the unusually large covering of snow–to say something about another kind of abundance. What covers reveals. The snow temporarily removes all the cars, mailboxes, and much else from view, but we know that they are there. It features a man working with a blade on a stick, but we know that is the closest he gets to experiencing primitive scarcity and vulnerability. By showing how much can be temporarily stopped, it reminds us how much activity and prosperity are taken for granted.

And there is more. As the snow also slows us down, it reminds us how we allow some of our riches to diminish others. We have so much that we may forget to stop and marvel at the beauty of the world. A snowstorm is beautiful, but so is a cloudy day. It’s wonderful to curl up with a cup of coffee on an unexpected day off and look across a glistening landscape, and it’s wonderful to take a moment amid the morning rush any other day.

Come to think of it, that’s something you can do any time you look at a photograph like this one. And others as well.

Photograph by Rickey Rogers/Reuters.

0 Comments

Emoting with Panache at the Democratic Debate

January 19, 2016January 19, 2016
Hariman
no caption needed
0 Comments

There will be lots of photos from Sunday’s debate between the Democratic Party presidential candidates. I get a kick out of this one of Hilary and Bernie both letting it rip at the same time. We’ve posted regularly at this blog on how politics is a performance art–and how that can be a good thing for democratic politics. Of course, it also can be a bad thing, but this year it’s no secret that the demagoguery is all on the other side of the street.

So there are at least two reasons to like this photo: because it provides a comic reminder that political performances can be simply amusing rather than hideous examples of bad speech, and because it suggests that oratorical demonstrativeness really may add something to democratic deliberation.

To accept either argument, you have to grant me one thing: that these are two policy wonks who already have demonstrated exactly how debaters should speak: by answering most of the questions directly, demonstrating broad and deep knowledge of governance, addressing important problems and real needs facing the electorate, building coalitions while answering, and doing all this articulately, with concision, wit, and moments of eloquence. None of this denies that they also have dodged questions, answered with obvious strategic intention, and been adept at spin and spin control. But if you know anything about how reasonable speech is supposed to work, whether on in a meeting or a public forum, they you can’t do much better than go to school on these two.

Which is why it’s a hoot that they also look like a comedy team on Saturday Night Live. “Come on people–I WANT YOU TO CARE, DAMN IT!” And “Wheee! Look at me! Aren’t we having fun?” Completely different and completely the same; opposites and complements; raging seriousness and silly enjoyment side by side. Together they capture what is in fact a deep tension within our political culture: too much entertainment or too much principled rigidity can each be a bad thing. A well-functioning democracy needs some of each: at the least, it needs to appeal to ordinary people and get competing interests to work together, and in response to serious issues on behalf of our best values. And it needs political leaders who can do that, and audiences who can appreciate what is required.

Needless to say, there is some irony in the photo as well. Bernie Sanders is the one who is labeled an ideologue, while Hillary Clinton has a reputation for pandering. Surely there could be other photographs of them switching roles: something they should be able to do, frankly. And we can be confident that will, because of the emotional panache that is evident in this photo.

“Emoting” is a common answer in crossword puzzles. The clues include “orating,” “acting,” and variations thereof such as “making a speech.” That simple equation of public speaking and a theatrical performance actually captures an important truth. We need our leaders to emote on stage–sometimes to communicate what really matters, and sometimes simply to provide a good show. What they say and everything else matters, too, but let’s take a moment to see what is there to be seen. One public art has captured another.

Democracy needs them both: both seriousness and humor, and both photojournalism and oratory.

And who knows? Maybe even both Hilary and Bernie.

Photograph by Randall Hill/Reuters.

0 Comments