Image and the concept of the meme

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Figure 1 - Cute cuddley (yummy?) puppies. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Cute cuddley (yummy?) puppies. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Today, I want to speak about images as memes.  The subject is a little abstract, but actually kind of fun, not to mention revealing.  The term meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.”  When we look at an individual: a person, animal, or plant, what makes them an individual is their particular make-up of genes.  Biologists call this defining make-up a phenotype.  A meme is meant to parallel the gene, but to refer to human culture.  Just as genes define an individual’s biological make-up, memes  define an individual’s cultural make-up.  They are the elements of culture.

If you haven’t come across this concept before, it can sound a little strange; but let’s consider a meme in relation to photographs.  If I show you a picture of some puppies then you might say; “Aw, how cute!  Show the same picture to someone in a different culture, they might say: “Yummy!” (Sorry dog lovers.)  And if I show the picture to an alien from another planet they might not have anything to say at first.  They just don’t know how to relate to puppies.  The concept has no cultural context or meaning to them.

Figure 1 - Albert Einstein, 1947, From the Wikicomons and in the public domain because copyright not renewed. Photograph by Oren Jack Turner, Princeton, N.J. - Modified with Photoshop by en:User:PM_Poon and later by User:Dantadd.

Figure 1 – Albert Einstein, 1947, From the Wikicomons and in the public domain because copyright not renewed. Photograph by Oren Jack Turner, Princeton, N.J. – Modified with Photoshop by en:User:PM_Poon and later by User:Dantadd.

To the alien, the puppy picture is something new.  As a meme it starts out as a question mark.  However, it quickly evolves and changes in the alien’s mind.  How, depends upon whether the puppies try to befriend him, or bite his finger (if he has fingers), or even if the alien tries to eat the puppies.  He communicates to all his alien friends (ET phone home!) that this is something sweet, or something scary, or something yummy.  And all the alien’s friends associate these qualities first with the picture and then with the real puppies that they encounter during their sojourn on Planet Earth.  The important point is that the meme is shared.  One person or alien has the experience and he passes it on to everyone else.  It, the meme of puppiness, becomes an element of the alien culture.

If I say the words “Albert Einstein”, they have an immediate meaning to us, and we conjure up in our minds a picture like that of Figure 2.  Your brain starts firing away all of the things that it associates with Albert Einstein.  Funny looking genius physicist with wild white hair.  You might reflexively think “theory of relativity” or “E=mc2 ” even if you don’t really know what they are or mean.  It’s culturally memetic.  The man is long gone.  His meme lives on in our minds.

Of course, photographs and images are not the only form that memes take on.  If I say to you cinnamon, what does that conjure up?  An image of a brown powder, or a rolled reddish brown bark? More likely it conjures up the smell of cinnamon and the reassuring sense of cuddling up on a chilly fall day with hot mulled cider or apple pie. 8<)

Indeed, the photograph itself is not the meme.  The meme is what is stored in your head and in the head of the other members of your culture.  But the photograph is very important to the meme.  It serves to accelerate the spread of the meme and it serves as a filter to keep the meme to a certain extent pure.

We’ve talked about the fact that the human eye is not a camera, and that the human brain is not storing JPEG files.  Cover up the picture of Einstein for a moment.  Now tell me whether his top button is buttoned.  Tell me about the nature of the fabric.  Is he looking left or right? There is a furrow that runs up his forehead.  Is it centered?  You might not  notice any of these details.  Adrian Monk would.  Sherlock Holmes would.  But you might not.  These details are not culturally significant. They do not contribute to the meme that is Albert Einstein.

OK, so look at the picture closely again.   Is there something disconcerting – something that Mr. Monk or old Sherlock would certainly pick up on?  The picture violates another mime.  Albert’s coat buttons right to left.  This mime, in western culture, tells us that he is wearing a woman’s coat.

The meaning of photography – are we more or less connected?

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On Sunday, I spoke about the bombing of the Boston Marathon and of the capture of its perpetrators in the context of shared and collective image.  This touches on the profound question of what is the fundamental meaning of photography and imagery.  And perhaps not surprisingly, this takes us, in turn, to the profounder still question of what it means to be human.  This seems like a good jumping off point to take on these deeper questions; so I will attempt to address them over the course of several posts.

For me, these questions relate to an ongoing discourse (argument) that I have been having with a dear and brilliant friend about whether people (the word young is silently implied as a modifier to the word people – those whipper snappers!) of today are more or less connected than in the past.  If you see someone in a store not interacting with the people immediately around him or her, but instead texting and exchanging images with a cadre of distant friends has (s)he become abstract and disconnected or is (s)he more connected by virtue of his or her cyber network?

To ask the question differently, is the cell phone ruining the young people of today?  My immediate response is reflexive.  Well, we’ve heard that question before.  Before the cell phone it was the internet, before the internet it was the video game, before the video game it was television, before television it was radio, before radio it was the bicycle.  Yes, you heard me right – the bicycle ruining the moral fiber of society, corrupting young people to a life of decadent intellectual stagnation and decay.  Somewhere between accusing my friend of being a Miniver Cheevy* and pointing out that science and technology do what they have always done – namely present expanded options, I suddenly realize that this is really a pretty profound question, deeply engrained in our biology, and touching on our very meaning.

So, let’s consider this question of greater or lesser connectivity in the context of photography and the meaning of image, and image as the meaning of mankind.  We have previously discussed the very important point that the human eye is not a camera and the human brain is not storing a RAW, TIFF, or JPEG image.  Photographs and images in general must be considered in the context of human neurobiology. To proceed further with these questions of meaning, over the course of several postings I need (want?) to consider.

  • Image and the concept of the meme
  • Image and memetic evolution
  • Image and the meaning of the sacred

Dangerously, this all sounds complicated.  However, like all elegant knowledge, we in the end recognize it as pretty straight forward.  Oh, and please remember that this is my opinion and perspective.

* Miniver Cheevy

BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
   Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
   And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
   Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
   And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
   And Priam’s neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
   That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
   And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
   Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
   Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
   Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
   But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
   And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
   And kept on drinking.

 

 

 

When words fail, a picture is worth a thousand words

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Over the last couple of weeks, as I wrote about some pretty awful subjects: terrorism, crushing poverty, devastating fires, I was struck by the fact that words fail. After terrible, horrible, horrific, gruesome, awful, miserable, devastating; where do you go?  Of course, I’m not an award winning writer or reporter.  I say that because I heard some truly amazing reporting by local news last weekend.  It wasn’t cliché, hackneyed, or overwrought; just real, raw, and in your face, by people on the scene.

I am thinking that “in your face” may be key here.  Another important point is that after the age of radio, in the television era and now in the digital era, commentary is a backdrop, a complement if you will, to image.  Even in the radio era and before when all to be had were newspapers with first hand accounts, people clamored for images.  Whenever disaster occurred, people wanted photographs.

This is not to say that photographing terrible events is any easier than describing them or that it is not just as easy to fall into the trap of the cliché.  Indeed, there are special issues associated with photographing the tragic.   Many of us find it difficult enough to photograph random people on the street, how then do you abstract yourself to violating privacy to the point of shoving a camera into the face of someone suffering deeply.  And then there are special moral issues associated with photographing tragedy.  The first, is one that we have discussed previously – isn’t your first human responsibility to give aid rather than to photograph?  The second, is that in a civilized society there are unspoken rules and some things that are beyond the socially acceptable to photograph.

It is in all of this context that when writing yesterday’s blog about the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that I was particularly struck by AFP photographer Munir Uz Zaman’s* image of a woman being rescued by sliding her down a bolt of fabric from the crumbled building.  This single image tells everything that you need to know about the tragic event.  It is a building collapse, the bolts of fabric suggest the building’s purpose, the desperation in the people’s faces defines the situation, and the woman being rescued tells the personal story.  Nothing is cliché.

*If you are interested in this subject it is well worth searching the web for other images by Munir Uz Zaman.  A deeply moving example is his photograph of “Rohingya Muslims, trying to cross the Naf river into Bangladesh to escape sectarian violence in Myanmar.”  This is again photojournalism at its best.

 

Déjà vu – images of sweatshop disaster

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When New Yorkers woke up on Sunday morning March 26, 1911 they were greeted, if you can call it that, by the terrible images of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that we discussed yesterday – horrid, raw, and heartbreaking.  “Never again!” people shouted and, as we discussed, this led to serious reform in the garment trade.  Or was it merely to outsourcing?

When we woke up this past Wednesday (April 24, 2013) – that’s 102 years later – still reeling from the Marathon Bombing news, we were greeted by the headline (this from CNN) “Bangladesh building collapse kills at lest 123, injures more than a thousand.”  An overcrowded garment industry sweatshop had literally crumbled in Bangladesh.

Take a look at these images from NBC News.  Again horrid, raw, and heartbreaking. They take us back again to March of 1911 and to lessons never really learned.  A haunting aspect of such photographs is that they bring associations to mind.  That is what images are meant to do.  You hear briefly the songs of 1911 – songs like “Daisy Bell, A Bicycle Built for Two.”  – “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true.  I’m half crazy over the likes of you.”   This is the music of young love and premature death.  I can also hear the jingle: “Look for the Union label,” from the ILGWU in the ’70’s.

Terrible photographs and events like this invariably raise in my mind literary quotations.  In this case it is Dickens’ confrontation between Scrooge and the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol.”

“But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.

“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!

We see in this this the power of image to raise social consciousness and, in a sense, to break down barriers of time, place, and culture.  They unite us in our common humanity.  To the people “Uptown” in 1911, the garment workers were invisible.  They wanted cheaper clothing, and it was easy to look away.  The message of these powerful images (both those of 1911 and those of 2013) is that we need to look beyond the price tag, when buying clothing, indeed when buying anything.  We need to see the invisible minions, and we need to ask who really pays the price?

 

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire – America transformed by image

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Figure 1 - Alice Roosevelt in shirtwaist, "The ideal Gibson Girl," from the Wikicommons and the Library of Congress in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Alice Roosevelt in shirtwaist, “The ideal Gibson Girl,” from the Wikicommons and the Library of Congress in the public domain.

In John Thompson‘s and Jacob Riis‘ photographs we see two important forces for social progress.  The first is the developing social awareness of the injustice of the industrial age.  The second is the ability of the then relatively new media of photography to spread that message – or as we say today to “take that message viral.”

In the Northeast (of the United States) poverty fueled the garment industry.  If you have the opportunity I strongly recommend a visit to the National Historic Park in Lowell, Massachusetts.  Immigrants poured into America in search of “the American Dream,” and were rapidly sucked up into the vacuum of the garment industry.  Not surprisingly, this lead to a new radicalism, which drew on the socialist movements of Eastern Europe.  In 1909 there were massive strikes in New York’s garment industry, demanding living wages and safe working conditions.  The police were under the control of the Tammany Political machine, in turn under the thumb of management.  Strikers were brutalized and imprisoned.

Sad, terrible, and yet pivotal events occurred on March 25, 2011 when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (or sweatshop) on Washington Square, now New York University’s Brown Building went up in flames.  In less than a half an hour 146 people, mostly young girls aged 14 to 23, died of smoke inhalation, fire, or from jumping to death from window ledges or down the elevator shaft.  The emergency exit had been blocked by management, so that the workers could steal scraps of material, and fire rescue ladders could not reach the eight floor were the fire took place.

Figure 2 - New York City firemen attempt to controll the Washington Place fire, March 25, 1911 from the LOC and the Wikicommons in the public domain.

Figure 2 – New York City firemen attempt to controll the Washington Place fire, March 25, 1911 from the LOC and the Wikicommons in the public domain.

Vivid photographs of the scene were taken, and these are now archived particularly at the Library of Congress and Cornell University’s School Of Industrial Labor Relations.  Fueled by these striking, vivid images, which to our generation presage the “World Trade Center bombings,” people demanded action.  The Tammany bosses saw the opportunity to turn response into votes and started investigations.  Al Smith, who eventually ran for President in 1928 was a leader in these investigations.  It was a pivotal moment in history, one that led to the emergence of the Democratic Party as the progressive pro-labor American political party.

In these tragic events the role of photography as the collective eye of society emerges.  I think that we can tell this story with three images.  At the turn of the twentieth century, the Edwardian Period in England, the height of women’s fashion, the shirtwaist, was in high demand.  This was romanticized by artist Charles Dana Gibson and his “Gibson Girls.”  Figure 1 is a photograph of Alice Roosevelt (Longworth)(1884-1980), believed by many to be the quintessential Gibson Girl.  Figure 2 shows New York firemen desperately trying to extinguish the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.  Figure 3 shows bodies of the victims being placed in coffins for transport to a makeshift morgue.  As in all such events, the true tragedy is to the lives of the victims and their families, whose lives are ended prematurely or shattered forever.  Their American dream was over, really before it began.

Figure 3 - Bodies of the victims from the Washington Place fire being placed in coffins fro the journey to the morgue, March 25,1911, from the Loc and the Wikicommons in the public domain.

Figure 3 – Bodies of the victims from the Washington Place fire being placed in coffins for the journey to the morgue, March 25,1911, from the Loc and the Wikicommons in the public domain.

Jacob Riis – Images of the slums of New York

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Figure 1 - Jacon Riis, "Children Sleeping in Mulberry Street, 1890," from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Jacon Riis, “Children Sleeping in Mulberry Street, 1890,” from the Wikicommons and in the public domain.

Very much the American counterpart of John Thompson as a documenter of life in the urban slums and crusader for social reform was Jacob August Riis (1849 – 1914).  We see this so vividly in Figure 1 – “Children Sleeping in Mulberry Street, 1890,” which rivals Thompson’s “The Crawlers,” in its raw and gripping social message.  There are three filthy, yet innocent, children, barefoot, and sleeping huddled together above a grating – perhaps some small warmth emanates from beneath.  They are below street level, unseen – or if we see them, turn the other way.  It is as if they are prematurely buried.  They are certainly dead from the perspective of the megalith industrial city – then in its gilded age, that has consumed them.

Riis was a Danish immigrant himself.  He had learned of poverty directly, at one point sleeping on a tombstone in New Jersey, his only food apples that fell fortuitously in his path.  A carpenter by trade, he became a police reporter and this introduced him to the nameless poverty of the slums of inner New York City, acquainting him with the worst places like Mulberry Street where China Town met Little Italy and where police headquarters was.

Riis tried his hand at sketching to illustrate his exposes, but was no good at draughtsmanship; so he turned to photography instead.  Still he was thwarted by the slow lenses and emulsions of the 1880’s.  However, Riis learned of the invention by Germans Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke of flash photography.  Miether and Gaedicke  mixed magnesium with potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide to add stability.  The was stuffed in a pistol-like device that fired cartridges.   The pistol was both dangerous and threatening to the subject; so Riis soon replaced it with a frying pan in which the powder could be ignited.  The process was simple, albeit frightening.  Remove the lenscap and ignite the flash.  Riis survived and became one of the first Americans to practice flash photography. An eighteen-page article by Riis, entitled How the Other Half Lives, with nineteen of Riis’ photographs rendered as drawings, appeared in the 1889 Christmas edition of the them widely distributed Scribner’s Magazine. This was soon expanded into a book of the same title.

As the images of modern photographer-social reformers testify, Riis work did not eliminate crushing poverty in America.  It did however lead to very serious reform and to the development of America’s progressive movement.  Progress occurs by degrees.  Riis became a life-log friend and colleague of Theodore Roosevelt, himself a campaigner for social reform.  Roosevelt said of him; “Jacob Riis, whom I am tempted to call the best American I ever knew, although he was already a young man when he came hither from Denmark”.

 

“You are not a sketch” – more on body image

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In response to my recent post about the Barbie doll body image, reader Suzy has sent me a very graphic article from the Huffington Post.  The article profiles the Brazilian model agency, Star Model, and its campaign against anorexia.  The campaign is “You are not a Sketch” and shows first a fashion sketch of three models and then photoshopped images of the actual models in the featured fashionwear.  To conform to the sketches the models need to be morphed into an starving and anorexic state.  Some of these images are rivetting in their grotesqueness.  This is significant in two ways.  First, as powerful and vivid images that make an important point.  And second, as an example of how image manipulation can be a powerful and positive tool.

More on John Thompson’s “The Crawlers.”

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Figure 1 – John Thompson, The Crawlers, 1876-1877, From the Wikipedia posted by catus.man and in the public domain.

This past Wednesday, I posted about John Thompson’s important photography about poverty and namelessness in Victorian England and I found myself very much haunted by the picture shown there, and reposted here as Figure 1, entitled, “The Crawlers.”  What exactly were “The Crawlers,” what was the miserable story of the old woman shown in the picture?

To find out, I found a copy of John Thompson’s, “Victorian London Street Life.”  My first thought was that a crawler must be a beggar, the people at your feet  begging pennies.  But the despair is worse than that,  In Thompson’s own words:

“Huddled together on the workhouse steps in Short’s garden, those wrecks of humanity, the crawlers of St. Giles may be seen both day and night seeking mutual warmth and mutual consolation in their extreme misery.  As a rule they are old women reduced by vice and poverty to that degree of wretchedness that destroys even the energy to beg.  They have not the strength to struggle for bread and prefer starvation to the activity that an ordinary mendicant must display.”

In other words they are beggars, who no longer have the will to beg.  We learn that the mother of the child shown was such a crawler, but that she managed to find employment and, of course, her worked demanded that she be absent most of the day.  So she has trusted her baby to the old woman, who does it in exchange for a bit of tea and bread.  Sustenance that doesn’t always come.  And we learn also that the baby has a cough and we are left to wonder whether it will survive.  We already know the answer.

Like Dickens, Thompson’s goal was to raise the awareness of the English Middle Class.  Even a hundred and fifty years later, he succeeds brilliantly.  Next, I would like to discuss the person and work of the person who raised the same banner in America, Jacob Riis.

The Marathon Bombings: Images of terror, heroism, and resilience

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I am adamant that I keep the focus of this blog on photography and image and not venture into public events or politics.  Still I cannot help but comment on the images of the Marathon Bombings and their aftermath that have literally bombarded us for the last week.

I woke yesterday at five AM to learn that Watertown, Massachusetts, the town where I work was under police siege; that Boston and all surrounding towns had been ordered into lock-down.  These are bizarre and incredible events.

People know that the Boston Marathon occurs on the holiday Patriots Day – conveniently scheduled on a Monday.  The actual events that started the American Revolution in Lexington and Concord Massachusetts, occurred on April 19, 1775.   So as I staggered downstairs into my kitchen in search of my morning coffee, contemplating the unfolding events of this April 19, I was greeted by musket fire as the Sudbury Minutemen reenacted the events of that April 19th.  The effect was surreal and thought provoking.

For the past week images of horror, of mayhem, of heroism have been played over and over again, seeming endlessly.  For those fortunate enough not to be directly involved, such events are a parade of images that will stay with us throughout our lives.  I can recite a list of mine: the Kennedy assassinations, the King assassination  the War in Vietnam, Kent State… The list plays on inescapable.  You may recall my discussion of Howard G. Davis’ collection of the photographs that haunted him and defined his life. I emphasize that these nightmares are for those fortunate enough not to be directly involved.  Their horror is firsthand; ours shared and collective.  None of the platitudes or aphorisms help the murdered, wounded, or maimed.

In the terrible events of this past week we have seen the power of image unfold in two ways: first in the creation of a common social consciousness and second in the way that peoples mementos, such as photos on an IPhone and photos from robotic eyes all around the city ultimately led to the identification of these terrorists.

I return to the contrast between April 19, 2013 and April 19, 1775.  The President was correct when he said that as, clearly seen in the videos and still images of the events of last Monday, terrorism failed in the first instance as law enforcement, medical personnel, and ordinary citizens rushed to the aid of the wounded, oblivious to personal danger.  I have gone many times to Concord Bridge to watch the reenactments.  It’s usually cold and windy, sometimes wet. And I have wondered what special kind of person could stand on that bridge, armed with a flint lock rifle, and be ready to take on the greatest army in world, oblivious to personal danger and even iminent death.  I understand that a little better now.