Annals of Propaganda: Congressional Facebook

Karen Bass, California Democrat. A onetime physician assistant and
a Los Angeles native, Bass, 57, was the first African-American woman
to lead a state assembly in the United States, taking the helm of
California’s in 2008. Photograph © Christopher Leaman.

Billy Long, Missouri Republican. A longtime auctioneer and real-estate
agent in southwestern Missouri, Long, 55, has been voted the best auctioneer
in the Ozarks for seven years straight. Photograph © Christopher Leaman.

I stumbled across this story at The Washingtonian - mostly a set of portraits of some of the freshman class in the U.S.House of Representatives. Here, however, is how the folk at The Washingtonian introduce the photographs:

"The new class of the 112th Congress is the largest in years. Voter unhappiness in November swept in nearly 100 newcomers representing 39 states. As they begin work in January, their varied backgrounds and heritages underscore why the House of Representatives is known as the People’s House (stress supplied - JJ)."

Well, this seems partly true. There are some women here. And there are some non-Caucasians as well. And I concede that this is only a sample of the class. But if you look a bit closer you'll notice that the "varied backgrounds and heritages" have a distinctly partisan cast. Nearly all the Republicans are middle aged white guys whose incomes, I'd wager, place them in the top 5% or so of the distribution. Where are all those "varied" reps from the red districts? The "People's House" my keester! The class seems to be long on Billy and way too short on Bass. No surprise though, when the Republicans sweep into town.

Our Heroines: Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi, Politician and Nobel Peace
Prize Laureate, 65. Photographs © Platon (2010).

Hard Ground

According to this story in The Guardian last week, Tom Waits has collaborated with photographer Michael O'Brien on a portrait of homelessness. The book, Hard Ground, will be published in the spring.* Regular readers will know from my serial postings that I hold Waits in high esteem. I really don't know O'Brien's work at all (except for some of the images he's made for Waits album covers.) But this seems like an auspicious partnership, even if it might be setting expectations just a smidgen high to compare (as the publisher does) the collaboration to Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In any case, I've linked to the publisher's page below where you can find a sample of the images from the book.
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* Hard Ground. Photographs and Interviews by Michael O’Brien, Poems by Tom Waits. University of Texas Press. (March 2011).

Photography & Philosophy (again)

"I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions." ~ K. Anthony Appiah

Anthony Appiah, New York, 2003. Photograph © Steve Pyke.

On several occassions I have posted on and borrowed shamelessly from the work of Steve Pyke, primarily his portraits of contemporary philosophers. You can find those posts here. Yesterday, The New York Times published this post by Pyke on its blog 'The Stone' (as in Philosopher's Stone). Here is what he says about the preoccupation with making portraits of philosophers:

"Despite being unknown at a time, the philosophers of an era survive longer in collective memory than wealthy nobleman and politicians, or the popular figures of stage, song and stadium. Because of this disconnect between living fame and later recognition, we have less of a record of these thinkers than we should. Our museums are filled with busts and paintings of long-forgotten wealth and beauty instead of the philosophers who have so influenced contemporary politics and society. My aim in this project has been the modest one of making sure that, for this era at least, there is some record of the philosophers."

Of course, Pyke is assuming that Colleges and Universities will continue to teach philosophy into the future - a sketchy bet given the vicissitudes of intellectual fashion and dire academic budgets! Yet, unlike players in other market places, it turns out that philosophers who play with concepts and questions that are not labeled with a "sell by" date and so have some longevity outside of textbooks and museums.

Take a Picture goes to London

Robert dropped this into my in box this evening. His work - which you can find here - is important and, well, good. Please help him if you can. Thanks.

Glenn Beck, Nazi Hunter

Glenn Beck ~ Both Portraits
© Nigel Parry for The New York Times.

Today we are treated to the latest installment in the series of New York Times puff pieces on right wing ideologues. We already have had portraits (all by celeb photographer Nigel Parry) of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. This time the portraits are less scary, but they remind me of Richard Avedon's portrait of Karl Rove - the similarly buffoonish look on both faces is striking.

Karl Rove, Republican National Convention, NY,
2004 © Richard Avedon.

The problem, of course, is that Rove and Beck are no joke. They use their cleverness in more or less thoroughly malevolent ways. The Times reporter depicts Beck as genial and approachable and sensitive and so forth. The guy (Beck) is full of it. And instead of an argument he regularly simply closes off debate in the best way possible - accusing those he disagrees with of being Nazis.

ON THE AIR and in person, Beck often goes on long stretches that are warm, conciliatory and even plaintive. He says he yearns for the cohesion in the country after Sept. 11, 2001, and will speak in paragraphs that could fit into Barack Obama’s plea for national unity in his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “There’s a lot we can disagree on, but our values and principles can unite us,” Beck said from the Lincoln Memorial.

But “standing together” can be a tough sell from someone who is so willing to pick at some of the nation’s most tender scabs. Beck’s statement that the president’s legislative agenda is driven by Obama’s desire for “reparations” and his “desire to settle old racial scores” is hardly a uniting message. While public figures tend to eventually learn (some the hard way) that Nazi, Hitler and Holocaust comparisons inevitably offend a lot of people, Beck seems not to care. In a forthcoming book about Beck, “Tears of a Clown,” the Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes that in the first 14 months of Beck’s Fox News show, Beck and his guests mentioned fascism 172 times, Nazis 134 times, Hitler 115 times, the Holocaust 58 times and Joseph Goebbels 8 times.

In his quest to root out progressives, Beck compared himself to Israeli Nazi-hunters. “To the day I die I am going to be a progressive-hunter,” he vowed on his radio show earlier this year. “I’m going to find these people that have done this to our country and expose them. I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes.”

“Raising questions” is Beck’s favorite rhetorical method. Last year during the health care debate, Beck compared Obama’s economic agenda to Nazi Germany — specifically he paralleled the White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s statement that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” with how Hitler used the world economic crisis as a pivot point. Photos of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin then appeared on screen. “Is this where we’re headed?” Beck asked. He allowed that “I am not predicting that we go down that road.”

If you treat people as Nazis, then you hound them like criminals and dismiss (or worse, eliminate) them rather than, say, addressing them as a interlocutors to be taken seriously enough to disagree with. That's Glenn Beck, Nazi hunter.
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Update: Today, Michael Shaw, perpetrator of the terrific BagNewsNotes, poses this nice query the folks at The Times at HuffPost: just what is your puffery meant to convey? The problem with The Times is that when their ideology is not just blatant (as when they disparage any vaguely progressive politics), they tend to pretend that being objective means being 'non-committal' or 'neutral' (whatever that means). And they end up being irresponsible by giving right-wing nutters a pass.

Best Shots (126) ~ Dmitri Kasterine

(153 ) Dmitri Kasterine ~ Stanley Kubrick, 1969 (11 August 2010).

Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984)

Michel Foucault at home in Paris, France, 1978.
Photograph © Martine Franck.

Robert Bergman and "the democracy of universal vulnerability"

Untitled © Robert Bergman.

What could make a photographer happier than to have two high-profile critics arguing over her work in a high profile venue? Of course, the premise is that 'it doesn't matter what they say, so long as they are talking about you.' Have a look at this exchange between Andy Grundberg and David Levi Strauss occasioned by a review the former wrote for Aperture of a recent exhibition of work by Robert Bergman.* The exchange (which links to the original review) is located on the Aperture blog "Exposures." I doubt Bergman finds it edifying.

In his review Grundberg devotes many of his column inches to channeling Susan Sontag's moralism and directing it at Bergman. This is a critical approach that I wish Sontag had taken with her. Here is the gist of his criticism:

Nevertheless, there’s a temptation to dismiss Bergman’s pictures as latter-day Bowery Bum photography. Most of his ink-jet-produced, moderately sized prints show us the faces of people he encountered on the streets of major cities in the Midwest and eastern United States. They are posed portraits: the subjects gaze down or away into the distance, or else stare confrontationally at the camera. For the most par t, the people appear to be downtrodden or at least on the outs with conventional society; more than a few seem afflicted with a wasting disease. Unfortunately it is impossible to verify any of the questions a viewer might have about these people, since Bergman calls each image “Untitled” and provides it with only a date. No name, no location, no facts except those given by the lens—presumably Bergman wants his subjects to be open to whatever preconceptions and prejudices his viewers may project onto them. In the context of the gallery, though, this denial of extra pictorial detail seems less a social statement than an aesthetic position: we are forced back on Bergman’s compositions, his use of color, the consistency of his choices of framing, even his decision about which subjects to shoot.

[. . .]

Beyond this, though, it is really Bergman’s motives for choosing to photograph the people he does that remain the central question. Surely he can’t be concerned that these pictures in any way improve the lives of the people they portray, since we don’t know where or who they are. Perhaps the ambition is for our regard of the pain of others to make us more attuned to human suffering in general (come back, Susan Sontag, please), but this aim is attenuated by our prior experience of pictures in the same vein. We might expect anyone conversant with recent photographic practice to know this as an existing critical problem, which leaves us with a far less ennobled idea of what is afoot here: that Bergman is out to convince us that he is a great photographer.

Compare what Grundberg says here with the nearly identical complaints Sontag levels at Arbus in On Photography or Salgado in Regarding the Pain of Others. Pretty remarkable. Pretty banal. Moreover, in the current context this complaint is especially perplexing. Bergman hardly has been self-promoting, at least successfully so. Until recently (and he is in his mid-sixties) he has not sold his work or had gallery representation. This exhibition is, I believe, his first solo show at a prominent venue. As Levi Strauss points out, while his work is not "new," he has not been a denizen of the photo/art world.

Like Sontag, Grundberg seems to miss the point entirely. Maybe Bergman has, as he says, simply been trying to make great photographs. I recommend this interview in The Brooklyn Rail. That is different from trying "to convince us that he is a great photographer." Perhaps in his portraits Bergman is attempting to depict what, in a phrase he takes from a poet who was the mother of his late friend Danny Seymour, he terms "the democracy of universal vulnerability." Perhaps that is a naive view - we are not all equally vulnerable, after all. But still, we all are vulnerable. And it doesn't take much. What I am suggesting here is surely difficult to sort out. I grant that. But it seems likely to be considerably more useful than following Grundberg and Sontag's ghost down the path of moralism.
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* You can find other reviews of the exhibition, which ran last fall, here at The Washington Post, here at npr, and here The Wall Street Journal.

Photography & Philosophy

I have mentioned here several times before the portraitist Steve Pyke, among whose work you can find portraits of many famous contemporary philosophers. At his blog, lawyer & philosopher Brian Leiter has an interesting post, prompted by Pyke's work, on what philosophy is with lots of quotes and notes from the famous in the field.