The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. - commentary
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“Just two days ago, Gordon Brown was urging us all to stop wasting food and combat rising prices and a global shortage of provisions. But yesterday the Prime Minister and other world leaders sat down to an 18-course gastronomic extravaganza at a G8 summit in Japan, which is focusing on the food crisis. The dinner, and a six-course lunch, at the summit of leading industrialised nations on the island of Hokkaido, included delicacies such as caviar, milkfed lamb, sea urchin and tuna, with champagne and wines flown in from Europe and the U.S.” (story)
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“My hands still shake and my heart pounds despite my fatigue. A combination of depression, fear, and adrenaline makes my thoughts race with the realization that a simple decision was the only thing that seperated [sic] me from a body count that grows daily. I look at the images I took on the 26th of June, and realize they do nothing to capture the emotion of being an eyewitness to the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda suicide attack in Karmah/Garma… the smell… the sound of screams and crying. I want you to observe and comprehend what others live through on a daily basis — to see what the Iraqi civilians and foreign soldiers see. I want people who follow my photography to understand that although I am able to bring images of war to the world in a form of art, what actually goes on here is horror. My message is not that war yields great photography. My message is: War yields human misery and suffering.” - Zoriah Miller (related: Journalist Charges Censorship by U.S. Military in Fallujah)
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“Two narratives bound our era and, by degrees but unmistakably, our predicament: the story of consumerism and the story of globalization. In recent years, the two have combined to produce a single and singularly corrosive narrative. Consumerism has meant the transformation of citizens into shoppers, eroding America’s sovereignty from within; globalization has meant the transformation of nation-states into secondary players on the world stage, eroding America’s sovereignty from without. In collaboration, the trends are dealing a ruinous blow to democracy - to our capacity for common judgment, citizenship, and liberty itself.” - Benjamin Barber
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“For most people, photographing something that isn’t there might be tough. Not so for Trevor Paglen. His shots of 189 secret spy satellites are the subject of a new exhibit — despite the fact that, officially speaking, the satellites don’t exist. […] Satellites are just the latest in Paglen’s photography of supposedly nonexistent subjects. To date, he’s snapped haunting images of various military sites in the Nevada deserts, torture taxis (private planes that whisk people off to secret prisons without judicial oversight) and uniform patches from various top-secret military programs.” (source)
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Yearly budget of the National Endowment for the Arts if latest budget increase makes it through Congress: US$160,000,000 Daily cost of the Iraq war (source): US$341,400,000
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“When Barack Obama achieved his historic victory on Tuesday night, the battle was joined between two Americas. Not John Edwards’s two Americas, divided between rich and poor. Not the Americas split by race, gender, party or ideology. What looms instead is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country, from the ground up. On one side stands Mr. Obama’s resolutely cheerful embrace of the future. His vision is inseparable from his identity, both as a rookie with a slim Washington résumé and as a black American whose triumph was regarded as improbable by voters of all races only months ago. On the other is John McCain’s promise of a wise warrior’s vigilant conservation of the past. His vision, too, is inseparable from his identity — as a government lifer who has spent his entire career in service, whether in the Navy or Washington.” - Frank Rich
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“Bill Henson is free to continue his internationally renowned photographic career without risk of jail but yesterday’s decision by NSW police to abandon its case against the Melbourne artist has done nothing to bridge the bitter divide between those who support his work and others who believe it is child pornography. […] NSW Law Society president Hugh Macken said the Henson photographs did not offend the Crimes Act because they did not show children in a sexual context. ‘There was never any prospect that these photos would fit the definition of child pornography and the decision of the DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] vindicates that position,’ Mr Macken said. ‘Nudity is not obscenity.’” - story (my emphasis)
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“The German newspaper Die Tageszeitung has a reputation for leftist social sensitivity. All the more bizarre then was its choice of a cover to mark Obama’s victory in the race for the Democratic Party nomination: a photo of the White House under the headline ‘Uncle Barack’s Cabin.’” (story) What the fuck? Liebe taz-Redakteure, was ist denn das für eine Scheisse? Seid Ihr jetzt völlig durchgeknallt?
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“Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. […] Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required. Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. […] Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?” - story
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I think it was former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt who described the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with rockets”. It’s tempting to apply this to Australia and its big scandal about the photography of Bill Henson (see my earlier coverage and this nice overview) - “Massachusetts Bay Colony with computers”, but then that might be not that funny for all those Australians who are appalled by what’s going on (and it seems there’s a fair amount of those), plus it’s not like Australia is the only country that has recently witnessed a scandals like this one. Today, I spent a bit of time looking for what was going on in the press down there, and here’s a small selection.
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As if the whole Guantánamo camp wasn’t enough of a travesty - a point well noted outside of the US - here’s something new: “Under the latest rules for ‘operational security,’ there’s now a three-tent rule for photos the public can see of the tents that house journalists and support staff at the expeditionary legal compound […] Broadly, the military explains the need for operational security, or OP-SEC, two different ways. First, they seek to shield from public view any details of this remote base that might help al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States stage an attack. Second, they want to shield from public view the faces of detainees because the Geneva Conventions prohibit the parade or humiliation of prisoners of war.” (source) That’s pretty rich, isn’t it? The first point is obviously ludicrous: Why would anyone want to attack the camp? For “al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States” Guantánamo is a PR gold mine. And the second one is equally absurd: The “detainees” at the camp are denied the protection of the Geneva Conventions (which is why they have to live in that legal black hole) except one: Their faces are not to be shown.
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“The opening night of an exhibition by the photographer Bill Henson featuring images of naked children was dramatically cancelled after police visited the Paddington gallery to investigate child pornography claims.” (story)
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I found this post at No Caption Needed today, which deals with racism and especially the kind of racism that people might not be aware of. Turns out I just read this excellent article, which mentions some research done on exactly this topic. Expect to see much more of this - and hopefully more smart discussions - over the next few months, given that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee.
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“Congress is considering a major reform of copyright law intended to solve the problem of ‘orphan works’ — those works whose owner cannot be found. This ‘reform’ would be an amazingly onerous and inefficient change, which would unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.” - Lawrence Lessig
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Duration of the ongoing war in Iraq that can be funded with the money my household owed the IRS: 0.43 seconds Number of rolls of Kodak Portra-160NC 120 Film (ISO-160) I could have bought for the money: 345 Yucky feeling lingering in this household tonight: Priceless
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“The abuse, rising to the level of torture, of those captured and detained in the war on terror is a defining feature of the presidency of George W. Bush. Its military beginnings, however, lie not in Abu Ghraib, as is commonly thought, or in the ‘rendition’ of prisoners to other countries for questioning, but in the treatment of the very first prisoners at Guantánamo. Starting in late 2002 a detainee bearing the number 063 was tortured over a period of more than seven weeks. […] The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a ‘trickle up’ explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration - by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees - lawyers - who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.” - story
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Another must-read: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib. Noteworthy this description of why the most well-known Abu Ghraib photo is iconic: “The image […] achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability - in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. […] The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure […] as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot - or do not want to - understand about how it came to this.”
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I’m sure by now everybody is sick and tired of the US campaign season (regardless of where you live). However, for anyone interested in studying the use of images, campaign season of course is one of the most fruitful periods, and TV ads are often most revealing (albeit not in the way the campaigns originally intended). Take this TV ad by the Clinton campaign and this response by the Obama campaign. In a sense, these ads neatly summarize the difference between Clinton and Obama: Clinton treats voters like children, who are clueless and who need a strong leader to protect them. Obama treats voters like adults, who can make their own choices based on information presented to them (and if you haven’t watched his speech on race, you might want to watch it to see someone talking to people like adults and then addressing one of the most difficult issues the country still has to face).
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Lynndie England’s bad luck is that the Abu Ghraib “abuses” (if we want to use such a meagre word for what amounts to torture and murder) are still mostly being investigated from the bottom up, with - so the official narrative goes - everything just being a case of a few “bad apples”. The official narrative, of course, is provided by the very same people who are responsible for Abu Ghraib, namely the people who ordered “harsh” treatment of prisoners and who drafted secret memos about how laws such as the Geneva Convention or the prohibition of torture simply didn’t apply any longer. It’s not clear whether we will ever see people like John Yoo in court, just like it is very likely that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush will enjoy the same kind of elder-statesmen accolades as Henry Kissinger. What is increasingly clear, though, is that the Abu Ghraib photographs will be the defining images of the Bush jr presidency. In any case, in a new interview, Lynndie England, the woman holding the leash in the image above, talks about her role: “Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, ‘Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up’, you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered.”
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I found this clip (along with another one) on Harper’s blog, and I’m somewhat torn about it, for a large variety of reasons. The use of the historical photograph at the end, I’m sure, will make some people quite uncomfortable; but I do think there’s a very valid point there.
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“An interest in a performing art leads to a high state of motivation that produces the sustained attention necessary to improve performance and the training of attention that leads to improvement in other domains of cognition. […] Correlations exist between music training and both reading acquisition and sequence learning. […] Adult self-reported interest in aesthetics is related to a temperamental factor of openness”, as reported by the Dana Arts and Cognition Consortium (with many more details and - as is the case in any serious scientific study - caveats concerning observed correlations etc.).
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… and vetoes a bill that prohibits “harsh interrogation techniques” (aka torture). A legacy - as the NY Times calls it - indeed.
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“Tensions are running high in Democratic circles between the supporters of senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - and nowhere is that more evident than on the internet. Some of the more explosive blog posts making the rounds today concern a charge from a couple of diarists on the Daily Kos that the Clinton campaign deliberately darkened Obama’s skin color in a recent television ad.” (story) As an update, “Daily Kos” (a site that I usually find extremely irritating) now posts a comment from an anonymous reader: “I work in advertising (copywriter, [Big national advertising firm]). […] Nothing in advertising is accidental. It is over-thought and then subjected to second thoughts and second guessing then over-thought and re-looked at again. I’ve been doing this ten years. It is my professional opinion that the film was made darker, and it has obviously been stretched. I will not comment on their reasons, as I can’t offer an informed case for that.”
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I mentioned Britain’s love with extreme surveillance before (see this story), which turns every citizen into a would-be criminal. If you decide to spend your vacation in London, say, you’ll find it next to impossible to miss the ubiquitous surveillance cameras, installed, as the story goes, to prevent crime (an almost unprovable and thus politically very useful assertion). And indeed the cameras are extremely useful to identify suspects in those very crimes they didn’t deter in the first place.
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“Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer interviews documentarian Alex Gibney about his 2008 Academy Award winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, a compelling examination of the circumstances that led Americans to commit torture.”
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People sometimes ask me why I’m a vegetarian, and even though there is a wide variety of reason, my main reason is simple ethics, followed by health reasons, which, as it turns out, are actually connected with each other (and they both tie in with an environmental dimension, too). You might have heard of The Biggest Beef Recall Ever (if you live in the US and eat meat, it’s quite likely you have actually eaten this meat), triggered by this video, taken by the Humane Society of the United States, which had picked a meat processing plant (a sickening word in itself, given what this actually means) at random. If you haven’t seen the video, note that it is extremely graphic and disturbing. Update: A long and good article about this on Salon.com
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“The White House on Wednesday defended the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, saying it is legal - not torture as critics argue - and has saved American lives. President Bush could authorize waterboarding for future terrorism suspects if certain criteria are met, a spokesman said.” (story) And more: “Bush personally authorized Hayden’s testimony, White House deputy spokesman Tony Fratto said. […] Fratto said waterboarding’s use in the past was also approved by the attorney general, meaning it was legal and not torture.” I’m no lawyer, but as far as I know what is legal is not determined by the attorney general (or the President for that matter), but by the laws of the country; and, in a similar fashion, whether waterboarding is torture or not is also not determined by the attorney general or the President.
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Germany’s conservatives - the people who’d later claim they never saw anything coming - allowed Hitler to form a coalition government with them, with Hitler as Chancellor. Lest we forget how this started. Update: A truly wonderful commentary with a bit of the bigger picture why/how this anniversary concerns us today by Scott Horton.
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“George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a ‘born again Christian.’ It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled ‘A Charge to Keep.’ […] in Bush’s view […] the key figure, with whom he personally identifies, is a missionary spreading the word of the Methodist Christianity in the American West in the late nineteenth century. […] Bush’s inspiring, prosyletizing Methodist is in fact a silver-tongued horse thief fleeing from a lynch mob.” - full story
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Conscientious’ correspondent in Dubai had this to say about getting a visit from Mr Bush: “The government closed down literally every bloody road, so that he could travel around safely without getting blown up. Then they realized that it would be chaos, so they declared a day off for everyone, which was great, apart from the fact that you couldn’t leave your house!”
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Scott Klag sent me this following story (thank you!), which contains quite a few interesting aspects: “A single newspaper photograph has triggered a debate over logging practices in the Northwest. The photo shows a clear-cut hillside that slid into a creek during last month’s Pineapple Express storms. Mud and debris in streams and rivers helped contribute to devastating record floods in Southwest Washington. A University of Washington professor and timber giant Weyerhaeuser faced-off Thursday at a legislative hearing.” (source)
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A few of weeks after embattled Hesse Governor Roland Koch, a conservative, decided to put some starch into the old brown shirt in an attempt to lift his prospects of re-election (ranting against “criminal young foreigners” - which promptly drew a round of applause from Germany’s neo-Nazi party), German immigration groups have now decided to fight back: “In an open letter addressed to Chancellor Angela Merkel and to Koch - both of the conservative Christian Democrats - an association representing some 100 immigrant groups in Germany expressed its frustration at the populist tones coming from Koch” (story). “One wonders how far along integration [of foreigners/guest workers] might be if the country’s politicians found a more constructive way to discuss those who helped build modern, postwar Germany.” notes Charles Hawley
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There is an interesting post about art and politics over at Ed Winkleman’s blog - my only concern being that if people/artists are presented with the option of either being “left” or “right” then they clearly will lose out - because the world consists of more than just black and white (even if politicians want to make us believe that’s not true), and art lives exactly where there are many, many shades of gray (good art, that is).
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“The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan’s Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay. […] The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them.” (story)
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“For much of history, water-boarding has been to torturers what cream is to apple pie. They go hand-in-hand. So, it seems odd that the United States is in the middle of a lively debate about whether water-boarding is an ‘enhanced interrogation technique’, as the CIA insists on calling it, or torture. Of course it is the latter, any hooded member of the Spanish Inquisition or executioner at Tuol Sleng could have told you that. […] if the debate [in the US] is to be honest it should be about whether torture is allowed in certain circumstances. […] The trouble is, we never know if it is a special case until we have finished the torturing and even then we cannot be sure. Torture becomes like an addiction, with uncertain results, that defiles the torturer as much as it haunts the tortured. The cost-benefit ratio is out of kilter. Which is why the administration has already supplied the answer to a question that America should not even be asking. We do not torture. Time to practice what you preach.” (story)
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“How would the national debate over torture have changed if we’d known about the CIA tapes all along? How would our big terror trials and Supreme Court cases have played out? Yes, this is also a speculative enterprise, but it’s critical to understanding the extent of the CIA’s wrongdoing here. And we have a benchmark. When the photos from Abu Ghraib were leaked in 2004, a national uproar ensued. Video of hours of repetitive torture could have had a similarly significant impact- the truism about the power of images holds. If we are right about that - and we think we are - this evidence that has been destroyed would have fundamentally changed the legal and policy backdrop for the war on terror in ways we’ve only begun to figure out.” (story)
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“The Interior Ministry of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia is taking a new tack in the fight against homegrown terrorism. It’s using a comic book - complete with colorful images and ‘youthful’ language - to battle nasty jihadism.” (story)
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You know, when I read stories like this one, I always imagine the problem suddenly reduced to a smaller scale, a scale that humans can proces. Imagine a doctor tells a patient: “I’m afraid I have to tell you that you have lung cancer. But this is a unique business opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry, and don’t worry about giving up smoking, the scientific community is still divided about whether smoking causes cancer.” What would we think of that doctor? And how come we don’t think the same way about people who either deny that global warming exists at all or who merely treat it like an opportunity to make money?
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“Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values. The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.” (NY Times editorial)
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“Up to 70 percent of first responders are ill as a result of 9/11 contamination. If a similar rate of illness holds true for those who lived and worked near the Twin Towers, the number of seriously ill New Yorkers could climb to 300,000 in the near future.” (story) Also don’t miss this photo series about the same topic.
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When I looked through Johannes Twielemeier’s photography of the region evacuated for brown coal surface mining, I was reminded of this excellent article about what they call “strip mining”. It’s a long and very sobering read.
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I hadn’t followed local politics too much lately, but when my wife and I got stuck in traffic today, we heard about this story, which immediately reminded us of this comedy sketch from one of our favourite comedy shows, Little Britain. Yeah, but no.
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“U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world’s 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.” (story) - c.f. my review of ‘Armed America’
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Errol Morris’s essay Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up is actually less about photography than about bad or sloppy journalism (and the NY Times, where it’s published, had its fair share of that during the selling of the Iraq war).
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I know, I know, every day there are species disappearing from this planet, so why make a big fuss about it? But then I can’t help but feel that every once in a while we need to be reminded of how our actions are destroying the living conditions of countless animals and plants and, as is becoming more and more obvious, our own species. Today, I found that the Yangtze river dolphin is now officially extinct.
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“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt… And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.” - Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, June 4, 1798 in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, p. 1050 (found here)
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New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has recently made quite the fuss about how he is a true independent, who doesn’t fit into the general Democrat-Republican mold. As a result, there has been quite a bit of talk about him running for president - kind of a Crassus of our modern times: A man who uses his considerable wealth to obtain political power. But maybe Mr Bloomberg isn’t quite so different after all. Take the new rules for public photography currently being considered by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, which would open the door to the kind of discriminatory enforcement the current occupant of the White House has been so actively promoting. It’s not hard to see how such a development would be an enormous loss (and a violation of the US’ First Amendment [don’t count on the new Supreme Court to agree with that, though!]) for one of the photography capitals of the world. If you want to do something about it, you can either leave a message for Katherine Oliver, the commissioner in charge, or probably better, get in touch with Mr Bloomberg directly.
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