On the Legibility of Military Power and Political Authority.

From BagNewsNotes, this incredibly important, smart post by Robert Hariman on the frightening anonymity of Russian Troops in Crimea ...

Juvenile In Justice

A 12-year-old juvenile in his windowless cell at Harrison County Juvenile Detention Centre in Biloxi, Mississippi, operated by Mississippi Security Services, a private company. There is currently a lawsuit against MSS that forced it to reduce the centre's population. An 8:1 inmate to staff ratio must now be maintained. Photograph © Richard Ross.

I've lifted the image above from this slide show at The Guardian of recent work by Richard Ross. I have posted (in pretty much wholly complimentary terms) on Ross's work several times here before.  This is powerful work - once again. It raises obvious questions. How many rich white kids are here? Why are these kids being stored away? The likely answer to the first question - not many, if any - largely answers the second.

No need to be naive. Many of these kids are troubled and need considerable, ongoing help in dealing with their troubles. Some might well be incorrigible. We'll never know if tossing the kid in a cell is our default option. There has got to be a better, cheaper (whether financially or in terms of life prospects for kids) way to address ten-twelve-fourteen year old kids and their troubles.?

On Avedon Portraits of Power (again)

"Avedon never made any pretence to objectivity; the notion of the dispassionate lens he wrote off as delusion. [. . .] Like a caricaturist, he thought that lies and cruelty settled like a crust on the physiognomy. All he had to do was to supply a lit exposure of the particular features in which moral intelligence or its absence had been inscribed." ~ Simon Schama

"I try to allow the people really - if that's possible - to photograph themselves." ~ Richard Avedon

"The pose is a photographic dimension which goes beyond the intention of the photographer and suggests the independence, asserts even the very existence, of the subject. The pose is the key to catch the independent, socially ignored, unsaid unacknowledged i the photographic act." ~ Murat Nemet-Nejat (The Peripheral Space of Photography, Green Integer, 2003)

Avedon's portraits, of course, prompt us to think about the sorts of encounter - actually, of interaction, "encounter" makes it seem too passive on both sides - between photographer and subject. I've commented on this topic here (you can find a link to Schama's essay there too).

In looking at Portraits of Power one of the essays in the book - Frank Goodyear, III "A Brief Intense Intimacy: Avedon & His Subjects" - makes clear that Avedon hardly considered his studio (or any other location in which he made a portrait) neutral territory. He prepared - doing background reading, making sketches, and so forth. In other words, his lack of objectivity or neutrality - whatever that might mean - was studied. But, while preparation might give a photographer like Avedon an edge in his interactions with subjects, even Goodyear, cannot sustain the claim that the photographer managed or even tried to assert what he refers to as "ultimate control." Indeed, the essay makes clear that the relation between portraitist and subject is an interaction, often a contested one. This lead me back to some observation that photographer Jerry Thompson has made about the "struggle for control of the picture" - between photographer and subject - as his teacher Walker Evans made his famous 1936 portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs.

Thompson talks about how the way Evans set his camera so close to his subject prompted a response (discomfort? resistance?) from her, thereby inviting "a truth beyond his prediction or control." As I re-read this section of the book I realized that Thompson is talking about the uses of verisimilitude. But here he is helping us make sense of the sort of intimate interactions that Avedon had with those whose portraits he made. In those interactions there is a struggle for control.

This leads to a final connection I'd like to make, this time to the argument that Murat Nemet-Nejat makes in his terrific little book. He calls attention to the persistent "tension ... between pose as something imposed by the photographer on the subject and pose as something asserted, defined by the subject." He claims that insofar as it trades on the notion that the photographer ultimately is able to assert control of her subject through framing, composition, lighting, and so forth, the pretension of photography to the status of art falls flat. He goes so far as to suggest that in some instances photography is a medium of reflection in which the relationship between viewer and subject succeeds ore or less in "pushing the photographer aside." I want to take this idea up in another post. For now it is enough to refer you back to the comment from Avedon I've lifted above. Perhaps it is possible.
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* Jerry L. Thompson. 2003. Truth & Photography: Notes on Looking and Photographing. Ian R. Dee, especially pages 36-45.

Thinking About Power

"So far as photographs with the most solemn or heartrending subject matter are art - and this is what they become when they hang on walls, whatever the disclaimers - they partake of the fate of all wall-hung or floor supported art displayed in public places. That is, they are stations along a - usually accompanied - stroll. A museum or a gallery visit is a social situation, riddled with distractions, in the course of which art is seen and commented upon. Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually the specificity of the photograph's accusations will fade; the denunciation of a particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer's intentions are irrelevant to this larger process." ~ Susan Sontag

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Among the several disadvantages of residing in Western New York, is that I do not get to see a lot of the exhibitions that turn up even in places that are relatively close by. At the moment in DC, this exhibition "Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power" is up at the Corcoran Gallery. It seems like it would be fascinating. Yesterday, though, while I was killing a bit of time, I looked through the accompanying book and it is pretty astounding. Here are a handful of the photographs that stood out right off the bat:

The Chicago 7 (1969) ~ Photograph © Richard Avedon.

Donald Rumsfeld (1976) ~ Photograph © Richard Avedon.

Jerome Smith & Isaac Reynolds (1963) ~ Photograph © Richard Avedon.

Karl Rove (2004) ~ Photograph © Richard Avedon.

I find it it pretty astonishing how consistently wrong Sontag is about photography. Why presume from the outset that what is at stake in viewing images is "strong emotion"? What, if we use photography to think with? And what if we think with words, so that actually talking about images is useful and productive? What if the matters, the problems, that photographers can get us to think about are not restricted to the "specific" or the "particular," but are general - or at least, while perhaps visible only in one or another particular instance or incarnation, are not tied to any single one of them?

Avedon, it seems to me, is extremely instructive in this regard. His portraits prompt us to ask broad questions. He hardly is alone in this respect; for a much different sort of prompting see Richard Ross on "The Architecture of Authority." I've commented on Ross here. But the images I've lifted above all, in one or another way, ask us to think n more general terms about power, its availability and its uses.

Powerlessness and Power: Shows to See in D.C.

The International Herald Tribune today has run a story on a new exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. The exhibition "Access to Life" is meant to impress upon viewers "the positive impact that free antiretroviral drug treatment is having on the lives of millions of AIDS patients around the world." As you can tell from the banner, the exhibition is sponsored by The Global Fund to Fight AIDS and Magnum. From a distance, the show seems to focus on relatively powerless people who suffer from HIV infection and the extent to which their well-being depends on the beneficence of donors.

Coming up at the Corcoran is another exhibition that should prove interesting from a political perspective ~ "Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power".