Best Shots (36) ~ Tod Papageorge

(31 July 08)
That Papageorge selected this photograph makes me want to meet him. You can find my prior remarks on his work here.
Labels: Best Shots, Papageorge
“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: Best Shots, Papageorge
Labels: Hedges, Political Not Ethical
Labels: Israel, Palestine, Peace Activism
Labels: Africa
Labels: Africa, Pieter Hugo
Labels: torture
Labels: blogs
Labels: Political Theory
Labels: AACM, Enthusiasms, jazz, Music, Myra Melford
Labels: Aric Mayer, katrina
"I leave it to those more qualified to decide what can be expected . . . "from above" - that is from what is happening in the sphere of power. I have never fixed my hopes there; I've always been more interested in what was happening "below," in what could be expected from "below," what could be won there, and what defended. All power is power over someone, and it always responds, usually unwittingly rather than deliberately, to the state of mind and the behavior of those it rules over." ~ Václav Havel (1986)In The New York Times today is this profile of Václav Havel ~ play write, former anti-communist dissident and officially proclaimed "public enemy," former President of Czechoslovakia, former President of the Czech Republic and, once again, play write. (The Financial Times ran this interview with Havel earlier in the month.) A good many of Havel's views are quite foreign to me, as I've mentioned here before. But, as this profile I think makes clear, the world could use more odd-ball leaders like him. It surely could use many fewer of the mercenary types we are burdened with now and seem destined to endure into the future. Perhaps, as Havel suggests, it is a mistake to look too hard for anything like leadership in the halls of power.
Labels: Václav Havel
Labels: Africa, embedded, Political Not Ethical
Labels: Best Shots
Labels: Women in Photography
Labels: Our Criminals
This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals’ lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captorsYou can find the entire report, as well as an executive summary, here; it was published in June (2008) and details the medical evidence PHR gathered relative to 11 former detainees who were tortured while in U.S. captivity in Iraq, Afghanistan and/or Guantanamo Bay.
The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted—both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.
After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.
The former detainees in this report, each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life, require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.
But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.
And so do the American people.
Labels: BushCo, Conservatives, Our Criminals, Petraeus, torture
Labels: Conservatives, Media Politics
Labels: Mandela, Our Criminals
Labels: Back Talk, Food Politics, interviews, Political Not Ethical
Labels: Inequality, political economy, Political Not Ethical
HOME TO ROOST*__________
Kay RyanThe chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small —
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.
Labels: poetry
“A key issue in the interaction between visual culture and the practice of democracy is the ways and the means by which our popular aesthetic forms frame, address, and resolve the expectations of the audience. The dynamics of this interaction, both its promise and its problems, is made vividly explicit in the large-scale events that move the entire country into action of opinion. Hurricane Katrina is one of the most significant events of this kind in recent memory. By examining aesthetic positions available and deployed in depicting that catastrophe, we can see how the aesthetic positions themselves can at times work in opposition to the content of the work.”Aric then goes on to discuss the uses of photography in circumstances of catastrophe and the their consequences. His remarks on the sublime and its uses [1] [2] are especially provocative. I recommend the entire essay.
Labels: Aric Mayer, katrina, Landscape, Sublime
I have written critically about the antics of animal rights groups such as PETA [1] [2]. I still find most of what I know about them dripping in self-absorption. So I must admit that I find the political approach to protecting animals more persuasive. I do not buy the notion of rights as "fundamental" in part because, like Hannah Arendt, I believe them to be largely useless absent an entity (think 'the State') charged with, willing and able to monitor and enforce them. I do not buy talk of the "community of equals" precisely because the alleged community is insufficient to enforce rights. (And of course, any real community, is as likely to violate individual rights as enforce them.)We demand the extension of the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.
The community of equals is the moral community within which we accept certain basic moral principles or rights as governing our relations with each other and enforceable at law. Among these principles or rights are the following:
1. The Right to Life
The lives of members of the community of equals are to be protected. Members of the community of equals may not be killed except in very strictly defined circumstances, for example, self-defense.2. The Protection of Individual Liberty
Members of the community of equals are not to be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty; if they should be imprisoned without due legal process, they have the right to immediate release. The detention of those who have not been convicted of any crime, or of those who are not criminally liable, should be allowed only where it can be shown to be for their own good, or necessary to protect the public from a member of the community who would clearly be a danger to others if at liberty. In such cases, members of the community of equals must have the right to appeal, either directly or, if they lack the relevant capacity, through an advocate, to a judicial tribunal.3. The Prohibition of Torture
The deliberate infliction of severe pain on a member of the community of equals, either wantonly or for an alleged benefit to others, is regarded as torture, and is wrong.
Labels: Animal RIghts, Human Rights, PETA, Political Not Ethical
Labels: Legal, NYC, Rights of Photographers
Labels: Obituaries
"The benefits of the market economy can indeed be momentous, as the champions of the market system argue (on the whole rightly). But then the non-market arrangements for the sharing of education, epidemiology, land reform, micro-credit facilities, appropriate legal protections, women’s rights and other means of empowerment must be seen to be important even as ways of spreading access to the market economy (issues in which may market advocates take astonishingly little interest). Indeed, many advocates of the market economy don’t seem to take the market sufficiently seriously, because if they did, they would pay more attention to spreading the virtues of market-based opportunities to all. In the absence of advancing these enabling conditions for widespread participation in the market economy, the advocacy of the market system end up being mere conservatism, rather than supporting the promotion of market opportunities as widely as possible. The institutional requirements of an equitable use of market efficiency go well beyond the confined limited of simply 'freeing the markets'."This is one conclusion to an editorial by economist Amartya Sen that I read this morning in The Daily Times (Pakistan). The bottom line is that, if they are to work well, markets presume a considerably higher degree of equality - both procedural and substantive - than most hard core proponents on globalization are interested in promoting. That is why the cry for freeing markets typically sounds so much like "mere conservatism." It is. So, while Sen may find it astonishing (I suspect he overstates this here) that proponents of market reforms pay little attention to the "enabling conditions" needed to make markets work in normatively attractive ways, a little attention to the politics of development and less reliance on moral arguments would be useful.
Labels: Inequality, political economy, Political Not Ethical
"I have asked myself how this controversy over a photograph became international news. Clearly, there are many reasons. But at the center of them all is this question: Are we on the brink of another war? I remind myself that the war in Iraq started with bellicose posturing and photographs. At the United Nations, Colin Powell displayed several photographs of Iraqi sites showing incontrovertible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Of course, we now know that this incontrovertible visual evidence was false. We don’t need advanced digital tools to mislead, to misdirect or to confuse. All we need is a willingness to uncritically believe."The point is to not be credulous, to ask - as several remarks in my sidebar remind us to do - who is using this photograph and for what purpose? The answers may not always be immediately apparent. But it usually is possible to discern the liars and bullshitters if we can suspend belief for just a short while.
Labels: Dyer, Legal, Rights of Photographers
Labels: My Boys
Labels: Academic Follies
Labels: Obituaries
The problem with what passes for journalism in the U.S. is that there is no concept of what might count as honest, critical writing. There certainly seems to be few venues for such work. Either something is a "hit piece" or it is fawning (the latter posture of supplication struck in order to secure 'access'). Well, how about having someone write a vaguely honest piece on Limbaugh and then offer to sit down with him and discuss the thing. If he refuses, too bad; run it with that caveat stated. It is not as though Rush would not have ample chance to whine and complain about how oppressed he is."I understand that Beltway media players routinely play nice with Limbaugh and his fringe brand of conservatism. Spooked by his liberal-bias charges, the mainstream press corps has for years treated Limbaugh with undeserved respect, worked overtime to soften his radical edges, and presented him as simply a partisan pundit. ...
The lengthy Times profile took that trend to a whole new level, because unlike most previous half-hearted attempts to outline, in very general ways, what Limbaugh says and explain why he's controversial, the Times clearly never had any intention of shedding even the dimmest light on the content of Limbaugh's program. Instead, it hired a conservative writer to wistfully dismiss Limbaugh's critics in two or three sentences. And in exchange for playing dumb, the Times was granted unusual access to the talk-show host.
That kind of obvious quid pro quo is the type of thing that's practiced on a daily basis at celebrity magazines, where editors angle for access in exchange for puff pieces. It's not journalism, and it ought to be beneath The Times."
Labels: Limbaugh, magazine covers, Media Politics
Labels: Johnny Cash
Labels: terrorism
case354736@support.flickr.comThe Reason piece uses this case to illustrate the complexities and vulnerabilities of posting on Internet sites like Flickr which is owned by Yahoo. It seems pretty outrageous to have corporately based morals police deciding what counts at appropriate or not. (In the Dors case, for instance, he points out that there are other images in the same series showing young kids sniffing glue. The Flickr-folk did not object to those.)
Hi Maarten Dors,
Images of children under the age of 18 who are smoking tobacco
is prohibited across all of Yahoo's properties. I've gone ahead
and deleted the image "The Romanian Way" from your
photostream. We appreciate your understanding.
-Terrence
Labels: Censorship, child porn?, Legal, sex
"The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966. ... But here is the bottom line: the global art world's burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime's efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love."
~ Jed Perl. "Mao Crazy" The New Republic (9 July 08).
Labels: New Magazines
Labels: Bill Henson, Censorship, child porn?, Legal, sex
Labels: embedded, Zoriah Miller
Labels: Chris Jordan