When Disaster Can’t Be Seen
As I checked periodically, the lack of news became increasingly ominous. Where was the plane–or at least the wreckage?
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Mainlining On Wall Street
The image accompanied a New York Times article in the Sunday Business section of the paper on “How Lehman Got Its Real Estate Fix.” The title and this stunning photo illustration are the only suggestions of addiction in the paper.
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Holocaust In The Furniture Business?
Holocaust In The Furniture Business? I’d understand if you think I’ve got a screw loose. Chairs are not people. Manufactured objects are recycled all the time, but....
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Traces of Everyday Life on Desolation Row
These photographs were placed on a Facebook page to provide continued documentation of the closing of the Rocky Mountain News. In the days of The Organization Man, the office was thought to be the source of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row. When you look at the shabby, barren, modernist decor,...
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Automotive Wreckage And Crash's Law
Although the crash explodes in an instant, it was developing well before: when people weren’t paying attention, when merely adequate brakes were installed, or barely adequate regulations enacted.... Emily Dickinson said it best: Ruin is formal — Devil’s work Consecutive and slow – Fail in an instant, no man...
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The Great Unraveling
Mary Ann Smith collects some belongings after an eviction team removed the furniture from her foreclosed house. This is a scene of personal desolation.
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Two Senses Of A Usable Past
Oval Office replicas are not going to shape history, of course, but historical analogies can shape the way we understand the world and evaluate leadership.
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Captioning The New Year
Faced with another year of violence, journalists and citizens alike have to make choices about how to depict and understand what is happening, and how to do so without becoming cynical or otherwise numbed to the obligations and possibilities for change. One place to begin is by looking at...
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The Hands Do Speak. (The Question Is, Who Is Listening?)
A Congolese government soldier lies dead in the road not long after having been shot in the head. It is easy to immediately think of him as a statistic.
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The Second Time as Farce
by Robert Hariman, No Caption Needed Shots of the "free speech zone" set up in a distant back lot of the convention may evoke some sympathy for those protesting at the DNC, but this photo reveals what really is at stake: not much. For all the supposed defiance, you...
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Fear In The Markets
by Robert Hariman Kafka’s Trial and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (for images, go here and here) were once touchstones for understanding the deep anxieties of modern social organization.... Both came to mind recently, and particularly Kafka’s depiction of K, the everyman caught in organizational processes that by turns snare, thwart,...
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Sleepwalking Out of Iraq
There has been something strange about the recent coverage of the war in Iraq... Guest blogger, Robert Hariman discusses the sense of disengagement emerging from both fronts in the terror war.
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Seeing The Enemy
It is easy to imagine the head of Blackwater as the Prince of Darkness, and the media have done a pretty good job of that. But what if Prince is a scapegoat for our collective sins and the all too easy willingness of the American public to allow their...
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The Image at the End of the Tunnel
What we see is a thoroughly fragmented Iraq, a world of disconnected moments in space and time; although we clearly see what is there, it is hard to know what it might mean. We have no sense of context outside the vehicle and no basis for response to what...
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