Friday, May 17

It’s All About the Caption


            In “Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: on the (Im)possibility of depicting historical truth”, Judith Keilbach argues that Holocaust pictures exist even though the depicting the Holocaust itself through images is impossible.  The existence of Holocaust images, however, is possible because of the connections between history, photography, and truth.  Keilbach best describes this relationship through her interpretation of Kracauer’s ideas:
            “while both photography an d historicist thinking record the appearance of events without considering their meaning, history itself tries to grasp their meaning and thus that which ‘has been perceived as true.’  As a consequence, photography might be able to illustrate ‘the spatial configuration of a moment’ but not its truth” (58).
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Knowing the history behind a photograph allows viewers to maintain some accuracy in assessing its meaning.  Although Keilbach uses the term “truth” here to describe a quality of reality that cannot be preserved or replicated, I will now refer to the truth of an image according to this undeniable physical, “spatial configuration of a moment” conveyed in images.  I now draw attention to the image of the soldier on the cover of Paris-Match magazine.  In Semiology, author Roland Barthes thoroughly describes the soldier’s features as indicators of pride in France and its imperialism.  While Barthes highlights the notion of national pride, I cannot ignore the historical implications of imperialism.  One of the most prominent historical results of imperialism is the expansion of slavery.  Looking at the image on the magazine elicits a feeling of national pride, but in historical context may have been a slave or former slave doing his duties. 
              This brings me to my next point about social context.  No matter under what conditions the photograph was originally taken, this image is put into context of society to depict French pride.  Keilbach discusses how “our imaginations of the Holocaust… are shaped by photographs that are part of our cultural memory” (55), a cultural memory that is shaped by historical context.  This next image is
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in fact a Holocaust photograph.
  It shows an American soldier coming to free Jewish people from a concentration camp at the end of World War II.  This photograph, taken from the American point of view, depicts the soldier as a hero for saving them from the Holocaust.  Other images like the one on the right (not definitively taken from an American perspective) illustrate suffering which cultural memory usually assigns to the Holocaust.  The number of faces visible in this photograph represents the magnitude and widespread affect of the
http://history1900s.about.com/
Holocaust on the European population.
  In this blog, I will apply Keilbach’s emphasis on an image’s historical and societal context to photographs I have taken and to photographs of others.  My close reading of these photographs will evaluate the importance of physical and societal context in terms of understanding and interpreting the images’ meanings or implications.
            I will begin by discussing the truth of photographs in a physical context, arguing that photographs require caption in order to be best understood.  This first photograph, or set of photographs, is my most meaningful football picture.  Just looking at the photograph on the left, at the surface it is a poor quality photo; it is blurry due to a combination of fast motion and low lighting, and half of a woman’s (blurred) head infringes on the edge of the frame.  Below the surface lies the context
By Lisa Sinow
in which I am proud of this poor quality image.  As a photographer, I have taken thousands of perfectly focused and perfectly framed pictures of football and other sports, but this one is still my favorite because of its story or context.  The string of Facebook comments is about the photograph to its left.  The player in the photo Donovan Ward comments to his teammate “I knew I caught that shit” alluding to events of the game.  During the game, the referee had called this pass incomplete but according to my photographs Ward caught the ball.  This incidence is best summarized by the idea that “[a]lthough photographs may confirm a past presence, it is often not possible from their depiction to make out the incidents captured or the situation in which they were taken” (56).  This picture means so much to me because it captures the truth that Ward did indeed catch the ball, but the importance of this truth is denied without knowing “the situation in which [it was] taken.”  A caption is necessary to express this story and clearly identify what the truth depicted is.  The photograph to the right of the Facebook comments merely shows “the next pic” that Ward refers to.
                      Another image that would be better understood with caption is the photograph showing students being pepper sprayed in Davis, CA, during the Occupy movement a few years ago.  The truth of this picture is simply what is there: an officer is pepper spraying a group of students while many onlookers take pictures of this unusual occurrence and other officers act as crowd control.  While the
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/
truth of the image is straightforward, revealing the context under which the photograph was taken nevertheless increases understanding of the image.
  Keilbach compare Barthes’ and Benjamin’s opinions in regards to the relationship between writing and photographs: “according to Barthes, who underlines their polysemic meaning and heir plenitude, photographs contain an overflow of information; according to Benjamin, photographs show too little reality, that is, they omit structures and context” (57).  Whether looking at images from Barthes’ perspective or from Benjamin’s perspective, either way both men run into trouble interpreting images.  With this image of Officer Pike, there is both too little and too much information.  There is too little information in that there is no guidance in how to interpret the image.  This lack of guidance allows for many possible interpretations.  Seeing only the uncaptioned image, as a viewer we have no idea what the students have done to provoke Officer Pike or if they even did anything to provoke him.  The infinite possibilities of how to interpret the image fall under the category of too much information.  A caption indicating the reasoning for pepper spraying students clarifies with whom the viewer is intended to sympathize.  Captions are “a way to select and anchor meaning” (57) of an image.
            My final example of needing context to clarify an image comes from the film Standard Operating Procedure by Errol Morris about the Abu Ghraib prison.  One of the pictures publicly released and shown on multiple occasions throughout the film is of England dragging a prisoner out of his cell by a leash.  What we see in the frame is England acting alone to abuse the prisoner.  Like the Paris-Match cover image and the Officer Pike image, a caption confesses the image’s context, both
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/
what is beyond the frame and why she does this.  England reveals through a series of interviews in the film that the original image has been cropped, concealing one of her peers from scrutiny.  She also explains that she agreed to be in the picture because her boyfriend
http://rajivawijesinha.wordpress.com/2012/02/
Graner had asked her to.  She effectively displaces much of the blame that is originally placed solely on her.  Keilbach summarizes Benjamin’s idea that written information is necessary in order to read photographs with a “claim to authenticity” (56).  In this case, England’s interviews act as the written information conveying authenticity.  This authenticity comes from the photographer, the subject, or both.  We accept England’s perspective as authentic, influencing how we perceive the image of her.
            Another context that influences an image’s perception is social context.  Because photographs are recognized as proof of a past existence, images shown repeatedly create a symbolic meaning understood as part of a collective memory shared with others allowing for mutual interpretations of certain events (54).  One such event is America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.  The first image
http://alphahistory.com/vietnam/vietnam-war-soldiers/
depicts a bunch of soldiers trying to protect themselves from an air raid around them.  Most notably, the soldier lying on the ground and the soldier in middle, who appears to be supported by his comrades, appear to be injured.  Just as “the landscape pictures…[which] illustrate the tracelessness of extinction, favor an ‘abstract’ discussion of the Holocaust without triggering an imagination of what had actually happened inside the concentration camps” (62), the image of the fallen soldiers elicits a sense of evil and suffering.  Because the traumatizing images from war are so widely dispersed, many people interpret them in a similar fashion.  This common interpretation among many allows these images to be entered into public memory.  The images of injured soldiers deeply affected many Americans causing them to speak out and protest the war.  
            Although pictures become part of public memory through widespread mutual interpretations, photographs can also be chosen to depict a specific societal belief.  In terms of the Holocaust, “[as official] pictures became part of the Allied information program, and their publication was done for educational, moral, and political reasons, they showed the situation in the camps in a specific way.  The pictorial motifs in them corresponded with the (subsequent) legitimization of the war, and so they present a picture of the inhumanity with which the prisoners had been treated and their subsequent rescue by Allied soldiers” (66-67).  This reaction to images also existed during the Vietnam War.  The second image from the Vietnam War shows a bunch of children running away from obvious destruction behind them.  The child in the center of the image is completely naked.  The image of
http://alphahistory.com/vietnam/vietnam-war-soldiers/
children, especially nakedness associated with babies, represents a weakness and innocence, allowing people to recognize the negative impacts of the war.  This image confirms and builds upon the growing discontent with the war among American citizens.  In the case of public images like these war photographs, mass media and public perception act as a caption which influences how we perceive them.  They provide us as viewers with the context we need to form an understanding of what is being depicted.
            Historical and social context is key in understanding the truth of an image and its implications.  Keilbach’s interpretation of the relationships between historical context and photography and between the societal interpretation and images indicate the necessity of a caption, or at least the additional information conveyed in captions.


Works Cited
Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (IM)Possibility of Depicting Historical Truth
Judith Keilbach and Kirsten Wächter
History and Theory , Vol. 48, No. 2, Theme Issue 47: Historical Representation and Historical Truth (May, 2009), pp. 54-76
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25478837


Verdicts Through the Lens: Rodney King and Oscar Grant


            April 29, 1992 brought forth a changing tide within the city of Los Angeles, California. January 7, 2009 marked a loud day of remembrance in the city of Oakland, California. Both days marked the beginnings of civil unrest in response to unjust and excessive violence upon African- American men at the hands of White police officers and law enforcement. Angelenos took to the streets in support of Rodney King, 27, a victim of police brutality after a traffic stop on the I-210 freeway in Los Angeles, a year after the violent encounter. The five Los Angeles Police Department (L.A.P.D.) officers involved in the case were acquitted of excessive force. Oakland residents entered the public eye in anger of 22 year-old Oscar Grant’s fatal shooting committed by a Bay Area Transit (BART) officer at the Fruitvale BART Station on New Years Day. In both cases, video footage surfaced of the violent acts and wildly incited national attention. In the case of King, extensive coverage arose both on television and in newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, which published over forty articles covering the civil disruption. The Grant controversy and public reactions did not reach the extent of the coverage in Southern California. Though, in the age of digital media, online journalists, bloggers, photographers and videographers-independent and affiliated- helped usher images and information into the public sphere.

While the events did make way for conversation surrounding racial relations in America and injustice within urban communities, the photographic representation of African- Americans remained problematic. In a study by Paul Martin Lester, it is noted that during and after the civil rights era the production of African- American images saw an increase in major newspapers and magazines. The images specifically “related to criminal activities and social problems as a result of the protests and riots in the streets in several U.S. urban areas” (Lester, 382). 17 years separated the two tragic cases, but did that change the light in which African- Americans and urban community members were represented in photograph? In places where there is minimal everyday representation, what does each photograph distributed say about the subject groups and spaces?

SOUTH CENTRAL LOS ANGELES: APRIL 1992

Image 1- Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times 

On April 30, 1992, a day after the riots, this photograph was captured. It displays a man running past a burning store with a shopping cart full of Huggies diapers. The caption labels the man as a “looter”. The photograph adds him to a list of African- American criminals. However, this photo also speaks to other social structures in action within urban America: economic accessibility and mobility. While looting occurred in large numbers, reasoning behind the act of looting varied. Aside from the fact that the man within the photo has looted a basket of diapers, it could be read that he is a father providing an absolute necessity for his family. Such lack of prosperity should be put into question when families lack the necessity of survival. Other photos bearing a similar message included a father and son departing from a grocery store with armfuls of grocery items and individuals fishing through heaps of canned and boxed food goods in a ravaged supermarket. There was an economic need that was not being met by the powers that be. This provides some context to one of the many other reasons that spurred such a destructive riot.
             
Image 2- kili-Casundria Ramsess / AP Photo
 Other photos in the realm of looting closely resembled this one of groups pillaging non-grocery stores for more expensive goods. This act may not be seen as done out of necessity in comparison to the previous one. However, economic gain could result of such action. After the riots, much of the pricier goods such as televisions and electronics, hardware items, and, in this case, shoes and clothing items, were sold at discounted prices throughout the community. For that matter, these “looters” were not seen as looters by their peers. Many who were considered as looting would not consider their actions as such a negative thing, but “instead regarding these activities as justifiable and legitimate” (Ginty, 859). It should also be noted that the act of looting, while seen as not as much of an affective form, is a form of political violence and demonstration. The context of which it is done is socio-politically motivated. However, without this scope on the issue it is “best categorized within the criminal sphere”, thus adding to the problematic gallery of bodies of color in mainstream media (Ginty, 861).  
Image 3- Kirk McKoy/ Los Angeles Times
            Flames and smoke engulfed the city for a week. Through the coverage it received, South Central L.A. was seemingly a dystopian environment. Citizens took to the streets in various fashions to promote the disdain and grievances felt for the actions of the five L.A.P.D. police officers. The rioting was surely a response to something much larger. Over the course of five years preceding the King incident, the Department had “lost or settled more than 300 police brutality lawsuits” (Rosenfeld, 485). So, why would this case be the one for such explosive action? Unanimously, media sources were outraged by the videotaped violence imposed on King and the ruled acquittals that followed. The general media were angered by the unorthodoxy of the actions taken, but for Black media, the events were viewed as a “part of a long- standing, intolerable tradition” (Rosenfeld, 485). The city immediately went up in flames, literally. Businesses were pillaged and set afire and racially targeted ones, most visibly Korean owned, resulted in gunfights between owners and rioters. Community members aimed their vocalized irritation towards lines of cops, and later, President George Bush’s lines of sanctioned National Guard soldiers. 53 people were killed and over 2,000 were injured as a result of the rioting. L.A. was definitely a war zone at the time and tension remained at the heart of urban issues for years to follow.
Image 4- Kirk McKoy/ Los Angeles Times
            These next three photos complement each other and provide clear messages. Protesters lined the street corners in Image 3, providing their sentiments towards the verdicts. “Burn Baby Burn!” reads a sign one protester is holding, supporting the actions of the enraged citizens. “No Justice! No Peace! This Time We Mean It!” and “It’s A White Man’s World” reads others as a woman resounds noise with a pot. Juxtaposing the image of the protesters in the foreground is the presence of a passing police car in the left background of the photo. While Image 4 does not contain the presence of a body of a protester, “Look What You Create[d]”, spray- painted on a building wall, provides an equally affective message as the businesses next door distorts in flames. The language of each photo builds the case for a city that felt the effects of neglected issues within U.S. social structures. Racial tension is clearly attributed to the workings White leaders of the nation- the government. With justice not being served in all areas, peace is withheld. “Those with naming power, or the ability to identify particular acts as deviant, are likely to possess other forms of power such as political control, access to media or a privileged position in a deeply divided society” (Ginty, 859). The population viewed as the subjects of the riots is one that is disempowered. The images of shattered glass, overturned cars, injured bodies, aggressive behaviors, flames, smoke, and ash are all symbolic of the turmoil faced by community members. It was only a matter of time before the internalized pressures of society would become embodied externally. Dishearteningly, the media sought photographic image of such chaos without critical representation of the issues associated.

Image 5 - Steve Dykes/ Los Angeles Times
Image 6- Lori Shepler/ Los Anegeles Times
Narrowly were the issues presented as Urban Los Angeles issues with King’s misfortune as a catalyst. L.A.P.D. worked to enforce proper “justice”, as seen in Image 5, and in Image 6 shows the presence of the National Guard, working to handle the situation where local law enforcement couldn’t sustain. The presence of law enforcement is evident throughout the spaces of the event and its responses. The eerie image of armed soldiers on decrepit and crumbling city streets with a backdrop of a charred building, still in flames, insists that Urban L.A. is something of a dystopia. The answer here seems to be to employ the troops. The pleas for social change were lost in such distorted images of minority communities, whose images are surely not underrepresented in times of disorder and criminal activity. The context in which these events are viewed need reformation. The portrayal of Black bodies and bodies of color are problematized and criminalized without question of power structures at hand. 17 years later these photos were produced.

DOWNTOWN OAKLAND: JANURARY 2009
Image 8- Photo by Joe Sciarrillo
            Protests ensued a week after the accidental shooting of Oscar Grant. At night, riots began to build. They ended the next day. Protests would occur at various moments throughout the year and another riot took place on July 8, 2010 after the verdict of the BART officer was read. That too ended after a short amount of time. The images presented here closely resemble that of the previous ones. Protesters, looters, flames, law enforcement. This time around, national newspaper and televised news lacked coverage of the events surrounding both the case and the following riots. Image 7 shows a group of cops detaining a Black protester. Image 8 presents a protest in the street bearing messages of racial injustice. Image 9 shows rioters setting aflame a dumpster. Image 10 focuses in on a group of looters breaking into a shoe store. The unchanged representation of urban civil unrest shows the unchanged state of the nation. A shift in information and image dissemination and analysis is a necessity for such progressivism to occur.
Image 9- AP Photo
Image 7- Photo by Joe Sciarrillo
Image 10- AP Photo

Works Cited

Antony, Mary G., and Ryan J. Thomas. "This Is Citizen Journalism at Its Finest’: Youtube and the Public Sphere in the Oscar Grant Shooting Incident." New Media & Society 12.8 (2010): 1280-296. JSTOR. Web.

Ginty, Roger M. "Looting in the Context of Violent Conflict: A Conceptualisation and Typology." Third World Quarterly 25.5 (2004): 857-70. Taylor and Francis Online. Web.

Amitava, Kumar. "Los Angeles Riots and Television." Economic and Political Weekly 27 June 1992: 1311. JSTOR. Web.

Lester, Paul M. "African-American Photo Coverage in Four U.S. Newspapers, 1937–1990."Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 71.2 (1994): 308-94. JSTOR. Web.

Rosenfeld, Michael J. "Celebration, Politics, Selective Looting and Riots: A Micro Level Study of the Bulls Riot of 1992 in Chicago." Social Problems 44.4 (1997): 483-502. Print

Twomey, Jane L. "Newspaper Coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising: Race, Place, and the Story of the "Riot": Racial Ideology in African American and Korean American Newspapers." Race, Gender & Class 8.4 (2001): 140-54. JSTOR. Web.