Two Photos
There’s something pathetic about contemporary attempts to paint the present as an opportunity for art. Too late! If all it takes to “change” art is a change in the American president, there’s not much there to change. This is indeed an opportunity, but it is a shallow opportunity. If change might so easily be had, why was this opportunity not posed in 2020? Better yet, 2016?
In 2016, the art world became totally subservient to the Democrats, producing mountains of now-forgotten anti-Trump art. The entire Biden presidency was devoted to acting like this never happened. Trump’s new ascendancy now poses a big fat question mark for art. Art’s relationship with politics has become fraught and tendentious, so one might as well look where things are the most fraught and tendentious: political photojournalism.
Two photographs stood out prominently from this year’s election cycle: the Evan Vucci photo of Trump with his fist in the air after being shot, and the Todd Heisler photo of Kamala speaking with her little niece in the foreground looking up at her.
These photos were exemplary in that they seemed to express the breakdown of something that you yourself, dear reader, have seen. Grab a copy of The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, LA Times, and you’ll see it. You’ve seen it on social media. Someone you know might even be doing it. It’s not fentanyl — but you might see it alongside an editorial piece on the opioid crisis.
I am referring to that strain of Democrat-aligned photography that emerged in its contemporary form alongside Trump’s election and the outbreak of his eponymous syndrome in 2016. These photos seem to dispense “meaning” easily, self-cancelling the experience of them in immediately affirming the Democrat prejudice of their viewer. In this way these photographs are “closed.” The viewer is not rewarded for seeking to advance their experience beyond their first glance.
These photos trade in subject-matter like red-faced mobs at Trump rallies, high contrast photos of Republican politicians in the style of Bruce Gilden, Bible Belt towns, “sympathetic” images of sad looking Appalachians, and abandoned strip malls. It seeks to give an image to that mysterious subsect of the population most unknown to the middlebrow literati who find themselves reading the NYT, New Yorker, WaPo, et al: Trump voters. Whether these images are sympathetic (read: condescending) or rancorous, nearly all of them are hostile to an experience of them which is not consonant with the intent the editors had in publishing them.
These photos are propaganda servicing the self-described “media literate,” those supposedly above propaganda and manipulation. What is often misunderstood about propaganda is that in its most typical form it does not seek to deceive. Instead, it affirms what is already believed. The manipulation of propaganda is self-manipulation.
This year’s election may prove to be the wake-up call that 2016 should have been — a late awareness of the entrance into post-neoliberalism. What our two candidates came to represent is properly expressed by the aforementioned photographs by Evan Vucci and Todd Heisler.
The Heisler photograph first: the leeches of popular journalism immediately tried to staple meaning to the photo from implications glossed from its composition. To quote a CNN article about the photo titled “A photo captures what Harris’ nomination could mean for young girls”:
For Vice President Kamala Harris, her Thursday night speech accepting the Democratic nomination marked one of the most high-profile moments of a rapid rise to become the first Black and Asian American woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket.
One image, however, has captured what the moment could mean for young girls.
. . . the photo features Amara Ajagu, one of the vice president’s young grandnieces, staring on as Harris delivered her address to the convention. More so than most little girls, Ajagu can say that Harris could be the first president who looks like her.
This is Democrat slop high off its own supply. Fortunately, good photographs don’t end with what journalists have to say about them. There’s something else to the photo which seems undeniable to anyone willing to give it more than a passing glance.
Todd Heisler, from “The Next Generation.” New York Times
Kamala sits above her niece like an action figure or doll sitting on a shelf. Her posture and facial expression are puppet-like, her hand raised as though a string has pulled it up, her mouth agape like a nutcracker doll. She does not come across as heroic: she looks like a play-thing. The white line of the stage clearly divides the picture plane into two zones, as if it is two different photos collaged together, like Kamala and her niece are in two different worlds. Despite the immediate formal implications of a little girl looking up at a figure of authority, clearly this first determination is not at all final.
Looking for this photo online, one will find that there was another choice that editors could’ve used. This version uses a slightly more offset angle. The back of the niece’s head is in focus and Kamala out of focus, but her form is still recognizable. For the immediate goals of Democrat journalism, the latter actually seems more appropriate. The out of focus image of Kamala is still recognizable, meaning viewers can more smoothly project whatever they’d like onto it. But this is also a worse photograph, and the former isn’t just better because it’s more composed. There is something about seeing Kamala’s demonic expression. Though it doesn’t necessarily play into what Democrat photography would like to be, this may be its truth as a photograph. Does the little girl know what to do with the strange rigidity of the plastic-molded world of “serious adults”?
It’s undeniable that the overinvestment of meaning that the media gave this photo gives it a smirking irony in retrospect — bitterness for some. Its previous “meaning” has transformed into something much more ambivalent. This is not a photo for the history books, and that’s what makes it historical.
Evan Vucci’s photograph of Trump after narrowly surviving assassination is very different. Guiding lines form a kind of triangle that loop back in on itself. All of Trump’s secret service detail’s faces are visible, they’re thoroughly absorbed with getting Trump out of danger. Everything guides your eyes to Trump, blood streaking down his face, looking out to his audience, his fist in the air while the American flag blows in the wind behind him. It’s an awesome photograph — a heroic photograph. An Atlantic writer made a guilty conscious confession that it made him feel pangs of “nationalism.” A New York Times article could not help but compare it to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. It’s remarkable that a photograph can blow open the whole history of bourgeois art for us, whose experience of art has become like the experience of Nature — spontaneous and without a history — exactly how Trump was painted by the media for the past eight years. But art and Trump are historical.
Evan Vucci, Attack on Trump. Time Magazine.
The aforementioned Atlantic article called the photo “a badly needed window into the MAGA mindset.” This is really a misrecognition of their seeing Trump for the first time for what he is: a bourgeois hero. Our heroes are not like those of antiquity which embodied virtue. Our heroes embody history. Hegel called Napoleon history on horseback: despite his apparent undoing of the Revolution, he spread it to all of Europe. Trump forced post-neoliberalism into the realm of politics. The 2016 election was between post-neoliberalism and the Democrats’ status quo. This election between him and Kamala became a competition of who could be the more effective post-neoliberal candidate.
Vucci’s photo is the reversal of the press’s past eight years of making Trump out to be a historical aberration. It does so by a spontaneous arrangement of objects which link Trump up with a history of bourgeois art. Suddenly someone like Jon McNaughton doesn’t feel so ridiculous for having the pretense to paint Trump as Washington.
At the level of vulgar meaning, it’s as though the Democrat-sympathetic press corps now can’t help but make Trump look good and their candidate look hokey. This is not just about the photos themselves but the experience of viewing them. Conditions have changed in such a way that the Democrats' lies are no longer so easily swallowed. Messaging has become ambivalent. What do these figures really mean? Vucci and Heisler’s photos aesthetically objectify this rediscovered ambivalence about politics — the heroism of politics.
So there are such things as modern beauty and modern heroism!
— Baudelaire
What was registered in politics in 2016 might finally be registered today in culture. If photojournalism no longer has to kowtow to TDS, maybe (MAYBE!) a more interesting photography can emerge. Prestige journalistic photography could become more than showing the badness of one subsect of the population. Of course, if the world was beautiful there’d be no need to photograph it. But an art which insists upon the ugliness of its subject matter has no right to exist. The aesthetic objectification of the ugly is its miraculous transformation into its opposite. Aesthetic objectification is the wink of a world which this one seems to promise but always fails to deliver.
