President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration … IN 3D!
Movie Premiere, Hollywood 1955.
Robert Frank
As Bokonon says: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God. Also that pineapples are very peculiar.
The Dunmore Pineapple in Dunmore Park, Scotland.
Brassaï, Sculptures Involontaires, 1933
art history error / dating technique
looking up at the Hagia Sofia
This originally appeared on the SIP blog.
Photograph by Pete Souza, The White House (via Flickr, Public Domain)
1.
I have been trying to figure something out since I first saw this picture: are all those officials gathered around that table looking out onto the other side of the War on Terror?
Because the War on Terror, which Charles McGrath points out “manages to empty both ‘war’ and ‘terror’ of much their meaning,” was something that was started without the ending in mind. It was impossible, thanks to the name, to imagine the End of the War on Terror. We started it with dust from the Twin Towers in our eyes and with the increasingly constant fear that it might happen again at any moment.
Terror was a famously illusive foe. It could be anywhere, after all. It could be anything. It could be someone’s underwear on an airplane on Christmas, for chrissake. It could be as benign as a sneeze. So it’s oddly appropriate that the photograph which signals the end of a particular war – or, in any case, a change of course – is one in which the clear focus of the scene is hidden in the wings, is one in which there is no clear focus.
Sure there are things we focus on: Obama’s icy death stare and a Caravaggio look on Hillary’s half obscured face. But those are not the same focal points as what is holding the gaze of those in the picture at the helm of the U.S. ship of state.
Pete Souza‘s highly dramatic image from the White House Situation Room is photography in the passive voice. A photographic voice used to portray emptiness; a photographic voice that is contemplative where photojournalism is so often acting on the moral imperative to “bear witness.” It’s a passive voice photo because the subject is doing the action that should be done to it. Obama and his Cabinet are bracing for news like hard rain. They are looking to a screen for an important outcome. And to me the fact that this photograph reads as so dramatic seems to suggest that we are at a place in our culture where one of the most dramatic things we can do is watch people watching.
General suspicion commingled with the anxiety of terrorism’s unpredictable nature to produce a vigilant paranoia: “if you see something, say something” – a phrase that so encapsulates the zeitgeist that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which maintains and operates the New York City Subway, has actually trademarked it. Yet here is a photograph with nothing much to see.
In the years since September 11, advances in communication technology allow an ever greater number of people to say something if they saw anything, anywhere. What constituted “saying” something has also broadened. With the advent of multimedia messaging and social media utilities like Twitter, Facebook, and flickr (none of which existed before about 2003), things are “said” or communicated visually as often as they are uttered verbally. This is how we tell our stories these days, everywhere and with anything at all about whatever in particular.
2.
Often when a politician appears in a photograph, the photographer has framed the picture to establish the story. This is the President talking with the rhetorician’s trained and roving eye, which never fails to meet yours. Or this is the President diligently examining the fruits of American labor. Or this is the President visiting a hometown, ravaged by disaster.
In each case, what is comforting is the way in which the photograph and the narrative confirm one another: they tell the same story. The photograph shows the President looking at the camera during the speech, inspecting complex machinery, or bearing witness to livelihoods destroyed with a face that promises reconstruction. When the narrative and the photograph harmonize, the outstretched arm appears as the very arm of government itself. It is there to take up tools. It is there to offer whatever the distressed need.
The expectation is that the photograph will confirm the same story recounted in the narrative. Yet the Situation Room photograph conceals more than it illustrates. It avoids the story altogether, pushes it out of the frame. All eyes in the photograph stare into something hidden from the viewer, who looks at them and asks what are they looking at?
As this photograph began traveling in many shapes and sizes across networks of electronic distribution, rumors circulated that the people shown in it were watching helmet cams. These were their reactions to the kill moment. More details emerged. The moment shown shifted. It became a picture of the White House crew as Leon Panetta’s audience. The President and his staff watched while, like Homer reciting his lines about the Trojan Horse, Panetta verbally narrated events witnessed on a helmet cam, or relayed by phone, or stood silently on screen, awaiting the same news as everyone else.
The news, as told by Nicholas Schmidle, was that “Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull away from ending bin Laden’s life.” And here are the people who get shit if anything goes wrong.
The photograph, in short, had become a mirror on which the nation saw its emotions reflected. People looked to it for clarification, for the terra firma of an objective truth, but all they found was a collection of familiar political characters – mixed with some less familiar ones – in thrall for something unseen. And Hillary.
Whatever the case, the photograph broke free of the narrative. And it could do so because it seemed to contain an entire story when the words Osama bin Laden is dead were appended to it. The story was in Obama’s stony stare; it was all over the desk, cluttered with mundane looking laptops, drained coffee cups, and censored documents; it was whatever the hell they were looking at; and, of course, it was about Clinton’s gasp, which she later dismissed since she was “somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs” – a claim that diminished any documentary validity left in the photograph, which, it turns out, “may have no great meaning whatsoever.”
blank slate
Clarke’s Desert Boots
Purchased: August 23, 2010
Approximate days worn: 150
Number of times the laces had to be replaced: 0
Approximate miles covered: 600 (conservative estimate)
States they’ve walked though: CA, CT, DC, IL, LA, MA, NJ, NV, NY, PA, RI, VT.
