The Pencil of Nature

Gets Stuck in Your Face

By AZ

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The press and the photograph are two revolutions that belong to and articulate one enormous revolution that occurred in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century: the invention of modernity and modern life. Here was the first mass press daily, La Presse, devoted to theater and book reviews, murders and crime stories, whose editor's simply numbing motto was "sell cheap, sell a lot; sell a lot, sell cheap." And here, at popular culture's birth, were the familiar calumnies: the death of literature, the sensationalist articles, the avarice and mendacity of the owners and editors.

From the beginning, photographs and newspapers were linked, not only in their massive popular appeal, but also in the fear and worry they inspired among intellectuals. One contemporary observer lamented that the newspaper is "a photograph drawn from life; ugly, stupid, brutal but utterly sincere in its stupid reality." Baudelaire, the spleening poet of modernity, was deeply ambivalent about photography. He saw it as a mechanical product that was rapidly supplanting the imaginary, anything, in fact, "whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul." Photography was a craze for Baudelaire; one that was swept along like the popular press by the "stupidity of the masses" who "rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal."

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We began and continue to look at newspapers as mirrors of our everyday lives. But as Walter Benjamin observed so astutely, the bricolage of the newspaper, its jostling collage of columned articles and captioned photographs and advertisements, is a fractured and often-alienating mirror of the individual's place in modern life. The schizophrenic structure of the newspaper conditions the way we see—and so much of what we see, or what we should see, is the violence and suffering that define modern life for much of the world. In an article on the searing images from Abu Ghraib prison that leaked to the press in 2003, the late Susan Sontag wrote, "words alter, words add, words subtract." She was writing about the US government's refusal to call what those photographs depicted by its name: torture. But what Sontag wrote applies equally to the images of suffering we have seen in the last weeks and months in two, albeit very different, places: in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in the ongoing war Iraq.

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The images of Katrina shock us, as Baudelaire observed, by what they tell us, or force us to ask, about ourselves. How could thousands of people be starving in the Superdome while we watched or read in this, the most civilized and industrially advanced of countries? Why were the levees allowed to fester and break? And where was President Bush while the people of Louisiana suffered? On their faces, these photographs summon memories of other photographs, of Iraq and the destruction that the US's war has wrought in that region. As headlines about Katrina and its victims dominated the headlines in recent weeks, it is tempting to say that we can only contemplate—only fit into columns and boxes—so much destruction. In reality, the war in Iraq has been banished, with few exceptions, from the front covers of our nation's newspapers for some time.

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What, taking Sontag's cue, do we call what we see in Iraq when we see it (as we did last Wednesday when over 150 people were killed in a single day)? Does the difference between an insurrection and a rebellion and an insurgency change the way we see the burned-out shell of a car, or bodies strewn outside of a Mosque? In contrast to Katrina, we clearly do not see ourselves in Iraq. The sand and bomb blasted photographs of Iraq have no reality, no referent, for Americans. Baudelaire, it turns out is wrong for being right, for in the ultimate perversion of his fear, reportorial photography in the context of this war has become a non-representational art.

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Newspapers are posited as reflections of real life but they are often disturbingly opaque recorders; they offer up the day's news, every day, after which they are garbage, to be tossed and forgotten. "The true name of the press," an editor once remarked, "is oblivion." Forgetting is a part of the ritual of consumption; it is little wonder then that we are so easily distracted from the difficult questions that underlie our horrific pictures. For some of us, to print a photograph—as absurd as it sounds—is still to imply that what it captured happened. Americans, perhaps with some justification, do not want to know about that.

—AZ

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