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Shards of Memory After 9/11

Yesterday most of the world didn’t stop to commemorate the loss of life at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  That’s OK: it’s a big world, and there is suffering enough to go around.  Perhaps that’s why I found many of the images from New York to be somewhat garish: crowded, busy, cluttered with symbolism, and ultimately self-absorbed, they were awkward photos of a scene that already is more about the present than the past.  So let me offer another image in their place.

This isn’t New York, but rather a street in Kabul.  That’s one way that 9/11 is still a global event, and one where the loss of American lives and treasure continues.  The splintered glass is from a school that was lacerated by a suicide blast next door. The blood—well, that didn’t come from the masonry.  Those shards will have flown like shrapnel.  Terrorism, like torture, like any war in a civilian environment can traumatize not only with the weapons themselves but also by turning the furniture of everyday life into instruments of horror.

For the same reason, scenes such as this can lead absurdly in the other direction to normalize violence.  Step back (figuratively) just a bit, and the image looks like a plate prepared at some tony restaurant: the small entree, a detritus of smaller pieces strewn casually as if nature’s work, and then the delicate drizzle of sauce to give it that aesthetic touch, framing the composition as a serene moment of transitory elegance in the art of living.  “Lovely presentation, isn’t it?”  (No way that is going to fill me up.)  “One can see the Japanese influence.”  (Perhaps I can grab a burger on the way home.)

The joke is lame, but it points toward something better.  The abstraction in this composition provides important elements for serious remembrance and reflection.  Lives were shattered and can never be put back together again.  Rich, red blood continues to be spilled, many times over the death toll of eleven years ago.  The closely cropped image reminds us that just about everything else is outside the frame, part of a much bigger world where life goes on regardless of what happened to you and yours, or to those who died this past week, month, or year because the root causes of terrorism still haven’t been addressed adequately and the unintended consequences of US military actions still haven’t been remedied.  The image is both elemental in its concentration on the ground-level facts of violence and comprehensive in its suggestion of how much goes unseen, misunderstood, and mishandled.

The abstraction works in another way as well.  Glass is an optical instrument, like the camera taking the photograph. Perhaps the lens supplies a missing wholeness, a restoration of order in the aftermath of its destruction.  One can indeed trace lines, a vector, an organic outline in the array from lower left to rear center, but that is a small consolation.  Better, I think, to see each sliver of glass as a fragment of perception or experience or memory.  Violence attacks not only individuals, but also our collective resources for remembering and empathizing and understanding, that is, for seeing a good life held in common.

Each piece of glass stands for some small part of a larger understanding of the events of that day and of the long decade behind us.  Every time a bomb goes off, more lives are broken.  Every time violence expands, the bonds of community are damaged.  Every day the blood-letting continues, the world’s collective capacity for peace is diminished.

Photograph by Johannes Eisele/AFP-Getty Images.

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Hiding the Cost of War

The photograph above is of Tammy Duckworth, a candidate for U.S. Congress in Illinois’ Eighth District, speaking at the Democratic National Convention this past week. She is also a war hero, having been among the first women to fly combat missions in Iraq, losing both of her legs when a grenade landed in her lap while piloting a Blackhawk helicopter north of Baghdad.  Her opponent for Congress, the incumbent Republican Joe Walsh has accused her of not being a “true hero” because she makes a point of discussing her military service in her campaign.  To quote former President Clinton in a different context, “that takes some brass,” especially coming from someone who has never served a day in the military in his life.  But the photograph above is not about Congressman Walsh’s Neanderthal attitudes nor even about Tammy Duckworth’s heroic service and sacrifice to her nation—or at least not explicitly so.

Shot from behind the podium and at a high angle that crops her body at the waist and accents her prosthetic legs, the photograph emphasizes what the viewing audience could not see—at least not while she was speaking. Viewed from the front we see a face, the marker of the liberal individual, a person.  And any person who can make their way onto the national stage to address a live audience of thousands and a mass mediated audience of millions can’t be doing all that bad.

Viewed from the back, however, the photograph invites a different story.  It reminds us of the terrible price that this individual paid—and now note that she is anonymous, faceless, another casualty of war but not one that we have to address directly.  In short, the photograph is an aide memoire to what we desperately don’t want to see, to what we want actively to forget: that we sent her into battle and the price she paid is really our debt, but it is a debt we have no way of paying.

In a sense, the photograph is a comment on the hundreds of images we see of the more than 1,200 veterans who have lost limbs in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and yet, through the wonders of modern medical technology (ironically made possible because of advances in “war medicine”), survived to live what appear to be so-called “normal” lives.  And indeed, it is the emphasis on appearance that is very much to the point, for in the end we rarely learn very much about the ordinary lives that such people live and pain, trauma, and hardships that they face.

Consider, for example, this photograph that appeared recently in a slide show dedicated to the recovery of war veterans at Brooke Army Medical Center.

What you are looking at here are not real arms and legs, but rather “life-like covers” designed to slip over prosthetic limbs so as to masquerade a disability and to hide it from public view.  Note in particular the customized tattoos on the arm that make it appear to be individual and personal. There is every reason to believe that an amputee would want to be “seen” as normal, to hide his or her stigma, and thus to mask their prosthesis with a “life-like cover.”  Or rather there is every reason to believe that this is how someone who does not share such a disability—a so called “normal” person—might imagine how an amputee would want to cover-up his or her “shame.”  But really, the shame is ours and such “life-like covers” function, at least on par, as a veil that makes it easier for us to forget or to ignore our complicity with the sacrifice such men and women have made and the real debts that have to be paid.

Photo Credit: Charlie Neibergall/AP; John Moore/Getty Images

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Petrochemical America: Exhibition and Book

Petrochemical America
Photographs by Richard Misrach
Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff

Exhibition: August 25 – October 6, 2012, Aperture Foundation 547 West 27th Street, 4th floor, New York, N.Y. 10001

Petrochemical America features Richard Misrach’s haunting photographic record of Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor, accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas—a series of “speculative drawings” developed through research and mapping of data from the region. Their joint effort depicts and unpacks the complex cultural, physical, and economic ecologies along 150 miles of the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, an area of intense chemical production that first garnered public attention as “Cancer Alley” when unusual occurrences of cancer were discovered in the region.

This collaboration has resulted in an unprecedented, multilayered document presenting a unique narrative of visual information. Petrochemical America offers in-depth analysis of the causes of specific environmental abuses in the region, and expands into an extensively researched study of the way in which petrochemicals have permeated every facet of contemporary life in America.

What is revealed over the course of the book is that Cancer Alley—although complicated by its own regional histories and particularities—may well be an apt metaphor for the global impact of petrochemicals on the human landscape as a whole. Misrach and Orff’s collaborative examination of Cancer Alley points to the past and into the future, implicating neighborhoods and corporate states. It also aims to participate in new thinking about how we can best divest ourselves of our addiction to petrochemicals, and to sketch the outlines of a more hopeful future.

Richard Misrach (born in Los Angeles, 1949) has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his latest published monograph, shows a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, which garnered Aperture a nomination for a 2010 Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the Year, and won the award for Best Photobook of the Year 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Another standout success was his 2007 large-format Aperture book On the Beach, a sublime visual meditation on the relationship between humankind and the environment, which is as spectacular as it is unsettling. Earlier, Aperture published Violent Legacies, which addressed, in part, the contamination of the desert due to nuclear testing. Richard Misrach’s other books include Golden Gate, released by Aperture in spring 2012, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the iconic bridge.

Kate Orff (born in Maryland, 1971) is an assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work weaves together sustainable development, design for biodiversity, and community-based change. Orff’s recent exhibition at MoMA, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process and an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.

The book can be purchased here.

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The White Party National Convention

Sometimes the facts are right there on the face of things.

I don’t mean to make light of what is almost a touching moment as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is being made camera ready by his wife, Maureen.  (Nice Scottish name, McDonnell, and Maureen is a fine Welsh name as well.)  They will have the skills, and the stress and strain, of any political couple, and this is not about them.  But does every woman in the picture have to be blonde?

Photographs are not logical arguments, and any one image is an extremely small, partial view of reality, so there is no need to remonstrate that some Republicans are people of color.  We know that, and if there is one black swan then not all swans are white, and if the convention speakers include a Hispanic or two then there is more to the Grand Old Party than a country club of blondes.  But when people gather for a specific purpose, the camera can do a good job of identifying how basic tendencies are there to be seen on the surface of things.  And because photographs do capture whatever is in front of the camera, they can be very good at revealing what is taken for granted or generally assumed or tacitly required for membership in a social group.

And at least since Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy, there do seem to be some basic demographic tendencies in the GOP.  Tendencies regarding, say, race and gender, as you can see in this photo of convention pages.

Nor are those biases likely to go away, as the pages will become leaders for subsequent generations of the party.  If there is a party.  (I could joke about an all-male party having trouble reproducing, but not all women are alienated yet by its program of gender hierarchy, and the Democrats still have a way to go on that point as well.)  Obviously, blonde is in fashion here as well, and in any case a narrow range of cultural conformity is already evident.  And if a great many Americans wouldn’t feel comfortable in this crowd, I don’t think their absence would be noticed.  With the Romney/Ryan (English/Irish) ticket, the Republicans have doubled down on whiteness.

That’s not how I would build an institution for the 21st century.  But I have this crazy idea that America’s beauty emerges from its diversity, and particularly so when everyone can work together to do their part for the common good.  When a major political party willfully ignores that idea, their campaign rhetoric can become even more obnoxious than usual.

The letters are colored white, as if to emphasize just who “we” is.  But that we didn’t build America or the Tampa Times Forum or the stage sets for the convention; nor do they clean the building at night.  Photographers have been challenging this arrogant delusion at least since Gordon Park’s “American Gothic,” which this photograph echoes.

It may be that the Republican Party core commitment goes beyond transferring wealth upward, but it certainly does not yet deserve to become a majority party.  To do that, it would have to learn how to live with the rest of the country, not just employ them.  The prospects are not good, however, because that would require changes that are more than skin deep.

Photographs 1 & 2 are by Lucian Perkins/Washington Post; no. 3 is by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

Update: I had forgotten about a previous post that provides more context, verbal and visual, for this one.  So, you might want to also read America in Black and White.

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“I Guess, You Know, Stuff Happens”

You might have heard that there was a shooting in midtown Manhattan late last week.  It was in all of the papers and on the nightly news. Of course, then again, such events seem to be routine so maybe you missed it.  The perpetrator got off five rounds, all aimed directly at his target; the police got off seventeen shots.  Nine bystanders were hit with bullets.  Do the math.

The photographic record of the event ranges from the somewhat clichéd representation of yellow and blue police line tape and numbered crime scene markers shot from on high and at a distance to mark the official response to a somewhat voyeuristic image of a dead body resting in a sea of red blood to the absolutely bizarre snapshot of smiling tourists (from France, no less) posing in front of the scene where the carnage too place.  But it is the photograph above that tells the story that really needs to be told.

The woman, Madia Rosario, is one of the nine innocent bystanders hit by police bullets (that’s right, all nine were wounded by police bullets or ricochets).  She is thankfully in stable condition, as are apparently the other eight bystanders who were wounded. But what should concern us is that she and the others were shot at all.  There have already been calls to investigate whether the officers were following regulations when they discharged their weapons with bystanders at risk, but there is a different point to be made.  Or maybe two.

The first point is that this is just one more of a continuing—weekly if not daily—litany of such shootings, each of which is treated as if it were an entirely individual and isolated event.  A disturbed individual goes berserk and shoots up a school yard or a campus or a church or a movie theater. As one of the bystanders hit by a police bullet put it, “You know, stuff happens.”  But of course these  are not isolated events, for what connects them quite palpably is the simple fact that in each case the perpetrators all had too easy access to automatic or semi-automatic weapons.  There is no easy way to represent that connection photographically, and so we resort to commonplaces that individuate the problem by emphasizing the perverse psychology of the perpetrator and/or visualizing the official response.  But of course  in countries with more restrictive access to such weaponry events like this happen far less frequently. On this point the facts are incontrovertible.  Once again, do the math.

The second point is really a response to those who claim that everyone will be safer when we all have guns and can thus protect ourselves from such violence and bloodshed. But the photograph of Madia Rosario suggests perhaps otherwise.  The police are enjoined never to “put civilians in the line of fire.”  And more, they are trained in how to respond to crisis situations in which chaos reigns and human behavior is animated more by fear and the rush of adrenalin than reason or common sense. And on par they do a pretty decent job.   And yet for all their training and preparation, “stuff happens.” One can only imagine what stuff would happen if bystanders not trained in crisis management of any sort were carrying weapons and started shooting.  Just do the math.

Photo Credit: Uli Seit/New York Times

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Todd Akin’s Right-Wing Science

If Congress had a committee on stupidity, we know who would be this week’s nominee to chair it.

The Huffington Post nailed it with this headline, and the triptych of images nicely captures how a blindly idiotic mentality can be hidden within the otherwise scripted demeanor of public performance.  (There are very few news photos of Akin that are not typical head shots of the Serious Public Official.)  Whether due to an offhand remark or the camera freezing a momentary blink of the eye, it’s only by accident, it seems, that we can see how a politician’s blue shirt, red tie, and white lies might be masking genuine stupidity.  After all, and I’m not making this up, Akin is a member of  the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Except that no one should be surprised, and not only because of the many well-documented examples of conservatism’s renewed commitment to the subordination of women.  The larger truth of the matter is this: Akin’s understanding of biology is no worse than the Republican party’s understanding of economics, climatology,  or the other sciences that are essential resources for sound policy in the 21st century.  Furthermore, he has provided a remarkably clear example of how the Right finesses the difference between rhetoric and reality: they just make stuff up.

Paul Krugman at the New York Times has been doing a masterful job of exposing the lies on economic policy being pushed by those who obviously must know better.  (You can see the most recent example here.)  But Krugman remains America’s Cassandra, while Akin has been subject to instantaneous and comprehensive scorn.  So, what’s the difference between being flat wrong about conception during rape and austerity measures during a recession?  The difference is this: false claims about rape and pregnancy directly contradict the experience, education, and common sense of almost the entire adult population, whereas economics and other sciences are encountered only very indirectly.  Few adults haven’t had to think about pregnancy as a real consequence of their own actions, while only a very few can connect the dots between Congressional Budget Office projections and their personal well-being.

For better or worse, the public discussion about the presidential campaign is likely to swing back to matters of economic policy. When that happens, the GOP will once again be able to safely deny the obvious, contradict scientific knowledge, ignore decades of hard-earned experience, and promise sheer fantasy.  And like stupidity–and rape–it will be difficult or morally impossible for photojournalism to show the public what really is at stake.  In those all too familiar circumstances, it might help to remind people that Todd Akin sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology–and the Committee on the Budget.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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NCN on Vacation: At the Beach

There are many marvels, are there not?  We’ll hope that you can get away from the workflow for a few weeks.  By coming to see less of the usual routine, perhaps we can see more of the world in all its strangeness and beauty.

NCN will resume posting on August 20.

Photograph by Damien Meyer/AFP-Getty Images.

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Figure, Ground, and Self-Awareness

It’s not easy to take a distinctive photograph at the beach.  They’ve all been seen already, except perhaps for this one.

At first glance, I wondered what I was seeing.   Was it some strange species from the liminal realm between earth and sea: gooey, nearly featureless, and dumb, but able to survive for millions of years as something almost as much plant as animal?  On closer inspection, the correct species definition locked into place: toes, paired feet, human being (as Aristotle put it so aptly, a featherless biped).  And only later did I also notice the legs emerging from the sandy ooze in the background.  One fragment now was two having some figural continuity (although the line was still partially obscured), and it became easier to imagine not just the rest of the body but the person, someone not buried but rather soaking in the cool waters pooling along the shore, enjoying a day at the beach.

Now maybe you got that right away.  My obtuseness may be the problem.  Whether due to the fact that my beach time has been rather limited, lifetime, or that I’m easily smitten by surface effects such as the sheen of the watery sand, it may have been too easy for me to not see the obvious.  But if you weren’t mistaken, try to see it as if you didn’t know.  Look at that image as if it could be documenting another species, or as if it were a work of art where what mattered most was the way the smaller, darker, firmer shape emerged out of the lighter, liquid substance suffusing the visual field.

This figure-ground inversion may not be possible: as in the classic drawing, when you see the two heads in profile, you can’t see the vase.  But what you can do, I hope, is look again at the photo and see how the photographer’s adroit use of figure-ground composition has created an opportunity to see the human species as something a bit strange–as if it were not the “rational animal” but rather defined primarily by its ability to stay out of the primordial ooze by blind adaptation for sheer biological continuity.

Humans don’t often define their species by its feet, which are not seen as the basis for an exalted view of ourselves–but here they look almost sentient, if barely so.  Perhaps we should spend more time pondering them, and not just as one way to idle away the time on vacation.  And one might ask how odd the human body could appear when seen only as, say, an elbow, ear, or back.  And how is self-consciousness itself a protrusion amidst a bodily, behavioral field that is itself arbitrarily defined?  Which leads to another photo from the summer slide shows.

Again, the composition features a strong contrast between figure and ground.  The small fish protrudes out of the much larger body of the ray, which encompasses most of the visual field.  Like the liquid sand, the ray’s body is a subtly modulated light surface carrying  the power of nature.  There also are significant differences, however.  The figure of the fish is the more familiar sight than the closely cropped ray’s body, and the portion of the fish that is not seen is evidence of disintegration, not wholeness.  The fish is going into the maw, not peeking out, and if it is sentient–one can imagine a last shock of biological awareness that life is ending–that is about to end.  Consciousness, like any life form, can emerge, and it can be swallowed up again.  The photograph brings one to consider how the most ordinary of processes–animal eating animal–is also strange, violent, awful perhaps, while also being completely routine, natural, like gliding through the water and breathing.  The smooth, uniform body of the ray covers the digestive processes, just as the smooth, liquid surface of the shoreline covers the struggle for life that leads each species to find its niche or die.

Human beings are the strangest animals in that they have survived without yet finding their niche.  One might think of that as a figure-ground problem.  In any case, artworks such as those above provide one basis for rethinking self-awareness against the background of nature.

Photographs by Jeon Heon-kyun/European Pressphoto Agency and Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press.

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War’s Longue Durée

At a time when the quarterly report is becoming the long view, there is need to remember that some events will continue to be felt long after they have ceased to be the news of the day.  This recent photograph from a Bosnian reburial program seems suffused with sadness despite the bureaucratic uniformity of the victims’ coffins.

These green capsules contain additional victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre that were discovered this year.  Unfortunately, Bosnia has had to learn how to handle large-scale funerary responsibilities.  The coffins seem to stretch out behind the frame endlessly, as though part of some industrial process.  Or perhaps a similar operation in agribusiness: the green coloring and slight variations give the scene a ghastly similarity to some sort of hydroponic production facility.  The remains contained within will already have given much back to the earth, so the analogy may be more apt then we’d like.  No matter how you look at it, dignity is not easily restored to those who were butchered by the thousands.

And yet dignity is possible–as long as there is the sorrow of individual loss.  The lone woman provides that sense of proportion and more.  She could be a worker, but even so one who has become pensive by virtue of those around her.  More likely, she is a relative, for nothing needs arranging and she is empty handed, with one finger touching the box to her right.  That single gesture speaks volumes, saying at once how much we want to touch the loved one, and how impossible that is.  She can only gesture, and so her sorrow remains contained, as if her heart were in one of those green caskets.  And yet she is there, and they are restored to the human community, however belatedly, by her presence.

And by ours. The photograph is part of the memorial.  And memory needs to include not only the names of individuals but also the history that they suffered.  More yet: there is need to realize how that history is still unfolding.  The term “the longue durée” comes from an historiographic method that emphasized structural factors over events, and I’m not about to settle that argument here.  One might note, however, that for moral judgment “long” is defined in part by the span of a human life, and that war is one of those events that creates a harvest of sorrow for generations.  By looking at the photo above, one can begin to realize how nothing in modern society changes any of that.

Photo0graph by Dado Ruvic/Reuters.

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Photography’s Asylum of the Artificial

Mannequins typically are designed to serve a smooth process of consumption, so it’s a bit odd to see them behaving like madmen.

Of course, it’s a bit odd to see them behaving at all, much less as wildly emoting actors.  One can almost see the classical masks of tragedy and comedy, except that each is twisted in the direction of the other to become grotesque.  The bodies themselves are more familiar, but something is off there as well: they are both visibly pieced together and organically, athletically posed.  Beautifully molded and thoroughly expressive, yet obviously inanimate, and well muscled yet neutered, these human models are disturbingly uncanny.

The rest of the tableau is equally strange.  An antique robot and a plastic skeleton set out two variations of the theme of human modeling: the hidden structure of a person and an obvious substitute for the outer form.  These two are neutered, but also not gendered (unless you see sexual dimorphism in the pairing), unlike the other two pieces.  And I do mean pieces: the female body is present but never whole.  As each torso is cut along a different axis, you can’t even put the two parts together. A least one is clothed, so women still get to be decorative–that must be a relief!

There is just enough reflection in the window to indicate that the six actors in search of an author are behind glass.  They may look crazy at best, but at least they are interred, set apart, under surveillance, and otherwise locked up and off the street.  You can’t even hear the wailing, and so the asylum has done its job.  And that about wraps up the story.

Oh, yeah, except for the guy in the corner.  He adds another reflective element to the scene.  Were this a museum rather than a street in Shanghai, you might wonder if we were another statue.  Short of that, he must be human.  Like other people, he is both not alone and alone.  Positioned between the enclosed copies behind him and the viewer looking into the display case of the photograph, he becomes a representative figure, but of what?  Dominated by the alien species towering over him while cut off from anyone else, he seems merely human, not triumphantly so.

Sixty years ago, when The Family of Man exhibition was traveling the world, photography created a particular form of humanism–one that had its problems, but for all that was still egalitarian, pluralistic, and intentionally progressive.  By gazing at the ordinary person amidst the common routines of ordinary life, you could see humanity.  That vision has been criticized, co-opted, worn out, and displaced, but photographers continue to prompt reflection on what it means to be human.  Equally important, they do so in response to the emerging challenges that modern civilization presents to human dignity.

Photography is suited to this work because it is tied up so closely with both technological change and social consciousness.  The camera both records and prompts interaction, and does so through processes of mechanical duplication.  You might say it makes mannequins of us all.  Instead of capturing the human essence, it reveals the deep artifice dominating the human world.  But not completely: photography is not the camera alone, and so there we are, like the man in the corner of the image.  He’s a real person, an original, and all the more strange and sad for that.

Photograph by Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press.  For review of the debates about The Family of Man exhibition (and book), see Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America.

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