Known and Strange Things Read online

  Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. At a dinner party earlier this year, I was in conversation with someone who asked me to define photography. I suggested that it is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world but also the possibility of saving that image. A shadow thrown onto a wall is not photography. But if the wall is photosensitive and the shadow remains after the body has moved on, that is photography. Human creativity, since the beginning of art, has found ways to double the visible world. What photography did was to give the world a way to double its own appearance: the photograph results directly from what is, from the light that travels from a body through an aperture onto a surface.

  But when the photograph outlives the body—when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down—it becomes a memorial. And when the thing photographed is a work of art or architecture that has been destroyed, this effect is amplified even further. A painting, sculpture, or temple, as a record of both human skill and emotion, is already a site of memory; when its only remaining trace is a photograph, that photograph becomes a memorial to a memory. Such a photograph is shadowed by its vanished ancestor.

  I visited the Metropolitan Museum in early August 2015, at a time when the destruction of artifacts in Iraq and Syria was prominent in the news, to look at the museum’s collection of works from the ancient Middle East. Next to a selection of second- and third-century Syrian gravestones (many of them fresh with the pain of loss and inscribed with the names of the dead and the word “Alas!”), there was an old photograph reproduced from a book of the Temple of Bel, an important archaeological complex in Palmyra. About a week later, the iconoclastic fanatics of ISIS blew up this very temple. The photograph was unchanged; it was still there on the wall of Room 406 at the Met, but it was now filled up with the loss of what it depicted. The Roman-era columns of the temple still stand in rows in the grainy image—ravaged by time, but standing. In life, they’re gone.

  The Institute for Digital Archaeology, a joint project of Harvard and Oxford Universities, uses sophisticated imaging techniques to aid conservation, epigraphy, archaeology, and art history. One of the institute’s current efforts, the Million Image Database project, involves photographing artifacts that are at risk of being destroyed for military or religious reasons, a bleak necessity in a world in which the beauty or importance of an object does not guarantee its safety. The goal of the project is to distribute up to five thousand modified cameras, to professionals and to amateurs, and use them to capture a million 3-D images. Already, more than a thousand cameras have been distributed, and the 3-D data from them are being received (though the directors of the project, to protect their associates on the ground, are leaving a lag of several months before they make the images publicly available). In the event of some of the objects being destroyed, the detailed visual record could be enough to facilitate a reconstruction. Photography is used to ward off total oblivion, the way that the photographs of Courbet’s The Stone Breakers and Van Gogh’s The Painter on the Road to Tarascon accidentally made the lost paintings visible to future generations.

  But memory has a menacing side. Our own appearances and faces are now stored and saved in hundreds, thousands, of photographs: photographs made by ourselves, photographs made by others. Our faces are becoming not only unforgettable but inescapable. There is so much documentation of each life, each scene and event, that the effect of this incessant visual notation becomes difficult to distinguish from surveillance. And in fact, much of the intent behind the collection of these images is indeed surveillance: the government retains our images in order to fight terrorism, and corporations harvest everything they can about us in order to sell us things.

  Little wonder, then, that many people would like to be less visible or wish their visibility to be impermanent or impossible to archive. At the dinner party where I had been asked to define photography, I asked my interlocutor if Snapchat, the photo-sharing app that causes sent images to disappear after a set number of seconds, would technically be considered photography. The conclusion we jointly reached was that it certainly would: what was important was the possibility of retention, not actual retention itself. A technology that simply did not have the ability to save the images it was transmitting would be more revolutionary.

  I sent a friend a photograph of my face on Snapchat. She sent me one of hers. I sent a photo of my hotel room, its furniture barely visible in the gloom. She sent me one of her hallway, with its piles of brightly colored shoes. We sent a few texts. Over a poor network connection, we video-chatted for about a minute, discussing Demand’s Clearing. Afterward, the photographs, texts, and video were gone, leaving no evidence of who had done what, as in a meticulously executed heist. I am more familiar with Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, where long-finished interactions can be retraced and relived, and the voiding of the record on Snapchat was startling. But it was also a relief. Our real selves remained, but the photographs were no longer there, and something about this felt like a sequence more preferable to the other way around, where the image lives on and the model is irretrievable.

  But just as nothing can be permanently retained, nothing is ever really gone. Somewhere out there, perhaps in the Cloud or in some clandestine server, is the optical afterimage of our interaction: the faces, the shoes, the texts. In these all-seeing days, the traffic between memory and forgetting becomes untrackable. Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: we need it there for how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.

  Death in the Browser Tab

  THERE YOU ARE watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life—at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park—you are suddenly plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror. It arrives absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passerby, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. I watched it, sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, and was stunned by it.

  A video introduces new elements into the event it records. It can turn a private grief into a public spectacle, and set popular opinion at odds with expert analysis. Within the space of a year, I saw too many such videos. I watched the fatal shooting of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun in a Cleveland park. I watched a police officer choke a protesting Eric Garner to death. I watched Charly Leundeu Keunang tussle with police officers on a sidewalk in Los Angeles before one of them unloaded six bullets into him. And there was much I could have watched but opted not to: the ISIS beheading videos, the various other clips of deadly violence from around the world. Even so, just from the grim catalogue of what I’d seen, I felt that death had come within too-easy reach, as easy as opening up a browser and pressing play. I recognized the political importance of the videos I had seen, but it had also felt like an intrusion when I watched them: intruding on the sorrow of those for whom those deaths were much more significant, but intruding, too, on my own personal but unarticulated sense of right and wrong.

  For most of human history, to see someone die, you had to be there. Depictions, if there were any, came later, at a certain remove of time and space. The day after I watched the video of Walter Scott’s death, it so happened that I taught my students at Bard about a series of woodcuts by Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein’s woodcuts, designed around 1526 and entitled Pictures of Death, showed Death in the form of a skeleton arriving for each of his victims: a nun at prayer, a farmer plowing his field, a pope on his throne, a knight in full armor. Considering these prints made me understand something about videos like those of Walter Scott’s death: they are part of a long line of images of the moment of death, an engagement with that mysteri
ous instant in which a self becomes permanently unselved.

  The first photographs about death did not capture the exact moment of death’s arrival. They were postmortem pictures. The genre flowered in the nineteenth century, fostered in part by the technical limitations of photography: the dead don’t move, and a portrait of a corpse was easier to make than one of a living person. This was at a time when death still happened at home. The bereaved propped up their beloved dead, dressed them in good clothes, and had them photographed as though they were still alive. But postmortem pictures, with their melancholy grandeur and intimate setting, are different from images that capture the rude shock of sudden death. Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph of a Spanish militiaman purports to record such a moment: the militiaman falls backward on a sunlit battlefield, his body accelerating to meet its shadow. The photograph is contested now—was it staged, or was it truly caught, by serendipity and skill, in the heat of battle?—but it is an image that, for its time, is imaginable. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to make a picture like it a half century earlier. And by thirty-two years later, in a world full of small cameras and quick-loading film, there is no longer any doubt that death can be photographed candidly. On a street in Saigon, the American photojournalist Eddie Adams clicks the shutter and captures the precise moment at which Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese general, fatally shoots Nguyen Van Lem, a Viet Cong lieutenant, in the head. A second before the bullet hits Lem, his face is relaxed. Then the shot—the gunshot simultaneous with the snapshot—but there’s no blood, no splatter, only Lem’s face contorted in mortal agony. A second later he’s on the ground, with blood gushing out of his head. We know these things because the execution was also captured on film, by Vo Suu, a cameraman for NBC. Suu’s professional footage is invaluable, but Adams’s picture, more striking and more iconic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The picture was remarkable for the rarity of its achievement in recording the unscripted last moment of someone’s life. But when one sees death mediated in this way, pinned down with such dramatic flair, the star is likely to be death itself and not the human who dies. The idea that a photograph exists of a man being shot in the head in Vietnam is easier to remember than Nguyen Van Lem’s biography, or even his name.

  Having watched the video of Walter Scott’s death once, I watched it a second time, in an effort to figure out where exactly it had been made. I was in Columbia, South Carolina, for work, and friends there had driven me to North Charleston. Michael Slager had stopped Scott in the parking lot of Advance Auto Parts on Remount Road, and had asked him some questions there. At some time during the interaction, Scott had fled. Where to? We found the parking lot. I went on foot, taking a left down Craig Road, following the route of the chase, a minute’s walk, shorter if one were to run. Below a hand-painted sign for a Mega Pawn shop was a narrow, disused lot with a pale storage building on one side and a row of trees on the other, a scene both derelict and bucolic. At the entrance to the lot were a new chain secured by a new padlock and a bunch of flowers, now drooping, wrapped in plastic and wedged into the chain-link fence. This was the officer’s point of view as he steadied himself, raised his .45-caliber Glock 21, and fired eight times at the man running away from him. In the near distance, just to the left of the paved track that bisected the grass, was a small memorial at the spot where Scott fell.

  This was not only the scene of a crime. It also made visible certain things that were not apparent in the video: the last view Scott saw, the exit from the lot, the unnerving quietness of the area, the banality of dying in a small lot off a side street in an unremarkable town. But being there also revealed, in the negative, the peculiarities of the video, peculiarities common to many videos of this kind: the combination of a passive affect and a subjective gaze, irregular lighting and poor sound, the amateur videographer’s unsteady grip and off-camera swearing. Taken by one person (or a single fixed camera) from one point of view, these videos establish the parameters of any subsequent spectatorship of the event. The information they present is, even when shocking, necessarily incomplete. They mediate, and being on the lot helped me remove that filter of mediation somewhat.

  Later that day, back in Columbia, I had dinner with Tony Jarrells, a professor of English literature at the University of South Carolina. Jarrells suggested I read “The Two Drovers,” a story by Sir Walter Scott (whose name had come up because of the coincidence). The story, first published in 1827, was about a pair of cattle herders, or drovers, working in the borderlands of England and Scotland. Harry, a Yorkshireman, and Robin, a Highlander, had a dispute about pasturage for their cattle. Harry challenged Robin to a fistfight and, when Robin refused, knocked him down. Robin, in response, walked “seven or eight English miles,” got his dirk (a short knife), walked back, and stabbed Harry dead. This was the core of the story, Jarrells suggested to me: the stretch of time over which Robin intended his crime, those hours of premeditation. When there is premeditation—over hours or over a few seconds—the final moment is accompanied by the weight of the moments preceding it, moments necessary to establish that quantum of moral disregard out of which one person kills another. The video from North Charleston seemed to enact this disregard, this voiding of empathy, in seconds that felt like hours, seconds in which the shooter could have stopped and reconsidered, just as the murderous drover Robin could also have stopped and reconsidered, but didn’t.

  The videographic afterimage of any real event is peculiar. When the event is a homicide, that afterimage can cross over into the uncanny: the sudden, unjust, and irrevocable end of the long story of what one person was, who he loved, all she hoped, all he achieved, all she didn’t, becomes available for viewing and reviewing. A month after I went to North Charleston, back in Brooklyn and writing about the shooting, I find a direct approach difficult. I write about Holbein’s Pictures of Death, and about Robert Capa’s photograph and Eddie Adams’s. I write about “The Two Drovers,” about Robin tramping through the borderlands intent on murder. I write about my morning in North Charleston, the gloomy drive there and back, the wilted flowers on the chain-link fence on Craig Road. If you set enough tangents around a circle, you begin to re-create the shape of the circle itself. Finally, I start to watch footage of Walter Scott’s last moments. It’s the third time, and it makes me uneasy and unhappy. The video begins with the man holding the camera racing toward the fence. A few seconds later, Walter Scott breaks away from Michael Slager. Slager plants his feet and raises his gun. There is still time. He shoots once, then thrice in quick succession. Scott continues to run. There is still time. That is when I stop the video and exit the browser.

  The Unquiet Sky

  MUSING OVER A fireplace in Avignon in 1782, the inventor Joseph-Michel Montgolfier had a brain wave. What if the force lifting the embers from the fire could somehow be controlled and used to carry heavier things, even people? It could be a way for Spanish troops to finally take the hitherto impregnable fortress of Gibraltar. Joseph and his brother Étienne immediately set to experimenting with hot air, which they believed had a special property called levity, and by late 1783 Étienne was able to ascend in the Montgolfier balloon.

  Joseph’s idea for airborne assaults proved impractical. The weight and limited efficacy of munitions in the late eighteenth century, not to mention the ease with which balloons could be downed, delayed that form of combat. But his instinct was correct: human-controlled flight is now inseparable from warfare. The Wright brothers flew their fragile, shaky, and miraculous biplane at Kitty Hawk in 1903. By 1911 an Italian plane was dropping bombs on a Turkish camp in Ain Zara, Libya. War from the air: until the enemy can retaliate, it is an insuperable advantage.

  If aviation and militarism had a natural kinship at the beginning of the twentieth century, they entered an uncanny union at the start of the twenty-first. Until 2004 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, as they’re popularly known, were eyes in the sky; like fantastic periscopes, they ushered in new forms of farsightedne
ss. Then, in June of that year, an American UAV fired a missile in South Waziristan. Two children were killed, as were several adults, one of them a mujahid called Nek Muhammad. More strikes followed the next year, and by 2008 the strikes were frequent and the death toll high, in the thousands. The results of the strikes followed the pattern established from the first one: many of the people killed were innocent of wrongdoing.

  In the public mind, drones had rightly come to be seen as ominous machines tracking their hapless victims, harbingers of sudden death. But drones are gaining other, no less accurate meanings. They can be any size, and they can resemble planes or helicopters, or both, or neither. Someday they could deliver our packages or even come to play a role in commuter transportation. But the key expansion in the public understanding of drones is in the realm of popular photography.

  A view from a great height is irresistible. It is twinned with the ancient dream of flight. For millennia, we have imaginatively soared above our material circumstances and dramatized this desire in tales from Icarus to Superman. Things look different from way up there. What was invisible before becomes visible: how one part of the landscape relates to another, how nature and infrastructure unfold. But with the acquisition of this panoptic view comes the loss of much that could be seen at close range. The face of the beloved is but one invisible detail among many.

  When the French photographer Nadar leaned out of a hot-air balloon in 1858 and made a series of images of Paris, it was the beginning of a new age. Our eyes were carried aloft. Cities began to appear in photographic portraits that echoed maps, but with all the latest and truest information included. In 1860 James Wallace Black and Samuel Archer King made Boston, as the Eagle and Wild Goose See It. And in 1906 George R. Lawrence, deploying a complicated rig of kites, created enormous photographic panoramas of San Francisco right after the earthquake. Lawrence’s photographs gave the traumatized city a measure of its catastrophe. Three years later Wilbur Wright piloted the plane from which the first moving picture was shot. In the century that followed, aerial photography was used in archaeology, advertising, surveillance, and mapping. This precipitous rate of innovation also resulted in the technology that allows drones to fix their stares on those we deem enemies. And, higher up, satellites and geolocating devices have transformed our sense of the world itself.