Giphantie Journal

Pre-pandemic, I went to a sale at Dashwood Books where I found the perfect photo book pair: A Day in the life of America and A Day in the life of the Soviet Union. I’d been fixated on an idea centered around the maxim: everything is propaganda, nothing is propaganda. I was curious about the disdain Americans feel towards state crimes in China, Russia or Cuba. What happens if this disdain is flipped onto America itself? How is this flipping successfully blocked? Most important, to me, was the role propaganda - or what some would consider postmodern propaganda - played in suppressing a consciousness of state and private suppression of America and the world’s citizens.

   My initial plan was to compare Soviet photojournalism, which was explicitly filtered through the state, to American photojournalism, which was/is also explicitly filtered through the state, but in addition to private forces. The idea being that both used photojournalism and culture more generally as a form of propaganda. So if all culture is propaganda, it’s natural that when one is living within it, it appears as though nothing is propaganda. It all seems ‘natural’: culture is just culture. As the paralyzing American saying goes, ‘it is what it is.’ Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman once wrote that ‘all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.’

The book duo was perfect for starting this project, so I spent what little money I had on the $10 pair.

   Surprisingly, the books aren’t too starkly different. Both show daily life in their respective countries on a single day in the late 1980s, the differences almost seem to be limited to cultural and aesthetic ones (the school children in the USSR wear red scarfs, Americans don’t; the politicians in the USSR wear military uniforms, the Americans don’t, etc.). The only more obvious difference is the larger number of very wealthy people in the American book paired with our homeless population, whereas the Soviet book showed a more evenly distributed lower-middle class population with no homelessness (maybe the party officials make a significant amount more, but they might not compare to even the famous magician shown in the American book). But I never wrote anything on the topic. Instead, I’ve become more interested in the importance that daily life plays in political and economic projects and the photobook pair is just as, if not more, important from this angle.

A Day in the Life of Everyday Life

   If one wanted to understand the centralized Soviet bureaucratic state then simply look at the daily lives of its citizens. For neoliberal capitalism, do the same. This involves the contrasts between daily life experienced by different classes, which is illuminated in A Day in the life of America and A Day in the life of the Soviet Union. Most of the debates about happiness under communism vs capitalism are more so a debate about the qualitative gains in everyday life for a country’s poorest and working class citizens. As the famous Thomas Paine quote goes:

   When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government.1

   It seems like common sense to emphasize the importance of daily life in judging governments and economic systems, but the 20th century French philosopher Henri Lefebvre wrote three volumes of books on the topic. Critique of Everyday Life is dedicated to the importance of daily life to Marxist theory and practice and therefore the importance of critiquing daily life under capitalism.

   Since the book mostly concerns daily life in capitalist countries, one of the first topics in the Forward to Critique of Everyday Life addressed the Soviet Union of that time and the everyday life of socialist countries. Lefebvre asked, ‘is alienation disappearing in socialist society? In the USSR or the countries which are constructing socialism, are there not contradictions indicative of new – or renewed – forms of economic, ideological and political alienation?’2

   In a conversation I had in Havana with a Cuban close to my age, he told me about his monotonous factory job and how it felt as though he’d been stript of his individuality; like he was just a cog in a machine. It’s as though the same alienation is experienced in both capitalist and socialist countries where industrial and post-industrial production fill daily life. Lefebvre continues, ‘We ask ourselves: ‘What is socialism exactly? How does it intervene in everyday life? What does it change?’ And the answer is unclear.’3

   This is of course the contradiction which exists for pre/under-industrialized countries that implement socialist policies: in order to evolve past capitalism, one has to go through it first. This contradiction was highlighted in the Soviet poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky’s visit to America (Mexico, Cuba and the United States). Mayakovsky was a futurist who welcomed industrialization and was a Bolshevik since infancy, but when he went to America and saw everyday life in New York, it became clear that industrialization for the USSR, although done in the name of socialism, might involve the same kind of alienation and misery that he witnessed in his trip. As a political artist, this was something he had to confront. Mayakovsky wrote on his ship ride home that Soviet art shouldn’t ‘eulogize technology’, but should instead ‘harness it in the name of humanity’s interests. Not aesthetic slobbering over iron fire escapes on skyscrapers, but the straightforward organization of living space.’4

   It’s not saying much that Cuba can’t tout an alienation-free island considering an embargo blocks their economy from evolving past a 1950s level economy (other than their medical industry, which continues to develop drugs like their own covid vaccine and cancer medications that even America hasn’t been able to make). But nonetheless, looking at the two photo books of daily life in the USSR and America, they both offer different experiences for me. I feel as though I’m nonetheless rooting for the potentials of communism looking at the daily struggles of everyday life in the USSR. America simply tells me, ‘hey, it is what it is’. When I look at the two books, I ask myself what is America striving for when it comes to addressing the failures of capitalism other than more capitalism?

The Americans

The Jennings family

   In the 2013 American TV show The Americans (the same name as Robert Frank’s legendary photo book), the contrasts between daily life in the USSR and the US are highlighted. Two KGB agents are trained from childhood to go to the US and start a family as undercover US citizens. The husband, Philip Jennings, early on is inclined to defect to the US. He points out when he first arrives that the electricity stays on, the food’s pretty great, and was infatuated with a working AC window unit. It clearly illuminated the differences in commodity production for the two countries - the US had to manufacture scarcity while the USSR sometimes scarcely manufactured.

   But this illuminates a problem for us looking back at the USSR, which, like America, is judged by quantitative growth as a measure for the development of a society. Lefebvre asked if ‘continuing to identify socialist revolution and growth, without even clearly distinguishing between quantitative growth and the qualitative development of society – did this not lead to a crisis of the idea of revolution?’ He adds, ‘Did theory and practice not stand in need of redefinition?’5

This is echoed by Jameson in An American Utopia when he argues that the left needs to reject ‘efficiency’ as measurement for societal development. He argues that, ‘[e]fficiency as a “value” is one of the forms taken by the logic of capitalism,’ which effectively ‘fans out into a rationale for austerity as a politico-economic program and a belief in progress as a mode of temporality.’6

Could the same not be said for Cuba, which although it’s been stripped of all capacity to trade by the 60 year US embargo (limited to very little quantitative growth), has retained a publicly funded healthcare system, education and radical policies like keeping rent at 10% of one's income (maintaining a high qualitative existence relative to the economic constrictions and compared to their Latin American counterparts like the debt-ridden American territory Puerto Rico, for example). And is this not the quarrel many viewers had with Robert Frank’s The Americans, which exposed the qualitative shortfalls of everyday life in a quantitatively booming post-war capitalist America?

   But even with the failure of the USSR to effectively address alienation or quantitative shortages, I nonetheless feel as though I’m rooting for an ideology that at least attempts to imagine a future past capitalism when I look at A Day in the Life of the USSR. And this is the same thing that is taking place in The Americans. It might be the first Western show that centers Soviets as the ‘good guys’ who the audience is most invested in. It does so slowly, at first flirting with defecting to the almighty US, but only to break down our Cold War barriers to sympathize with the characters. Contrast this to films like The Trial of the Chicago Seven which gave the state prosecutor (played by Joseph Gorden Levitt) almost a main character’s agency and Judas And The Messiah which explicitly focuses on the informant who got Fred Hampton killed as the main character. The FBI agent in The Americans, however, is sympathized with, but not over the KGB. If anything, we want him to become a double agent for the KGB.

Photo Illustration by Mike McQuade.

   This is what Mark Fisher talks about in his piece ‘Rooting for the Enemy: The Americans’, saying that ‘the Soviets are transformed into our likeness.’7

He goes on to argue that part of the appeal is not just aesthetic or formal through the show’s story telling, but also the central theme of what the KGB characters refer to as ‘the cause’. What could maybe be called communism, but isn’t - whether it be for practical reasons (in case the FBI is listening) or intentionally from the show’s creators to keep it distanced enough from trigger words like communism and Marxism - the reality is that any ‘cause’ is appealing to the Americans of today who are devoid of any purpose past a failing capitalism.

   It’s perhaps this American show available on Amazon Prime that is the first to respond to Lefebvre’s question, ‘[i]s it surprising that, apart from a few short stories and novels which broach the theme [of alienation], there is no equivalent critical analysis to inform us of the specific alienations in the socialist countries? Such is the fate of Marxist thought in the twentieth century…’8

   In the two books A Day in the Life of America and A Day in the Life of the USSR, the show The Americans, and Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America, I find myself cheering for the other side. The side which had a project for the future, a cause, even if it abruptly ended. As Mark Fisher put it:

  In conditions where capitalism dominates without opposition, the very idea of a Cause has disappeared. Who fights and dies for capitalism? Whose life is made meaningful by the struggle for a capitalist society? (Perhaps it is this devotion to the Cause that gives the Soviet characters in The Americans their glamour.)9

   Everyday life in America in its current context is, as Jodi Dean put it, just ‘another way of saying capitalist social relations.’10 But looking at the potentials of everyday life in both the United States and the USSR, new futures can be imagined. The communist horizon lies dormant in A Day in the life of America and A Day in the life of the Soviet Union. ‘Rather than remaining stuck in the ruins of communism, we can scavenge the ruins for past hopes and old lessons and put these remnants to use as we organize and build.’11

1. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791.

2. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life one-volume edition, (New York: Verso, 2014), 27.

3. Lefebvre, Critique, 69.

4. Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America, (London: Hesperus Press, 2005), 103.

5. Lefebvre, Critique, 706.

6. Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, (New York: Verso, 2016), 48.

7. Mark Fisher, K-Punk, (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 240.

8. Lefebvre, Critique, 507.

9. Fisher, K-Punk, 241.

10. Jodi Dean, Comrade, (New York: Verso, 2019), 22.

It was the summer of 2016 and I was driving my grandmother’s 2008 Toyota Camry to Cleveland where the Republican National Convention would formalize Donald Trump as the republican nominee. It was the online discord that motivated me to make the journey with the intent of photographing what would unfold. People were claiming that the skirmishes on the streets of Cleveland would be the start of Civil War II. The city was surrounded by fencing and occupied by masses of police. Of course there ended up being little violence and the events that week amounted to little but a farce (I remember walking by the comedian Eric Andre after he embarrassed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on an outdoor stage). The protesters protested, Trump supporters clapped for police, yelling matches took place between all parties, and by the end it all felt more like an interlude than Civil War 2.0’s spark. But it is in this farce where the very real tragedy took place, where the seed was planted.

Christian demonstrators outside the Republican National Convention, 2016. Photo: Taylor Dorrell.

   Marx famously corrected Hegel’s idea that history necessarily repeats itself when, in his Eighteenth Brumaire he claimed: ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’1

But the way in which fascism unfolds would seem to flip Marx’s theses. The history of fascism appears to repeat itself first as farce then as tragedy with Trump, like Hitler, being treated as a joke at first. Trump’s presidency seemed as though it started in the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner when Obama and others made fun of Trump for thinking about running. His official announcement years later was met with the same mockery. This was matched by so much of the photographs being taken that made Trump supporters look like stupid caricatures (although this is organic and not necessarily intentional). Then once 2016 winded down things got a little too serious after he won the nomination, the presidency, and his regime began implementing fascist policies. He was eventually taken seriously, but with a grain of salt since these fascist policies were ushered in by a reality tv star.

Outside of a Trump rally, Cincinnati, OH, 2016. Photo: Taylor Dorrell.

   But was not the real tragedy the fact that Trump was treated as a joke and the subsequent fascist regime was the farcical lesson to the world that the Trumps and Hitlers should be dealt with at the beginning? It was the mocking of Trump by the Washington elites that spoke to the working class white voters fed up with the “elites” (excluding Trump). There is a well known quote from the 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Keirkegaard who tells a brief story: “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.” In many ways Trump and the neo-fascists who tend to be former actors or non-serious seeming individuals are the farce following the tragedy of 20th century fascism that could only be considered as tragedies after the fire had developed beyond control. Of course in these cases it is the clown who started the fire and knows that yelling about it will only lead to laughter. Most are scared of clowns anyway, they [Trump and neo-fascists] much more closely resemble the clown from Stephen King’s IT than of a comic relief.

Andrew Harnik | Credit: AP

  In his introduction to a new edition of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire Marcuse reminds us that sometimes the historical repetition under the guise of farce can be more serious than the original tragedy. After defeating fascism in the 20th century, the Marshall Plan sought to prevent the next Hitler through addressing the very real economic circumstances that created him. The decades of austerity measures in the U.S. have bred the same resort to fascism and the question should be whether or not this will be addressed by Biden’s administration. Bernie Sanders has already addressed this concern in recent interviews, reminding Americans that Obama didn’t mobilize early in his administration to provide Americans with the change that Obama promised. Will Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, make the same mistake and spark an even more radical turn to fascism in the elections to come?

Rioters enter the US capitol Building on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. © Win McNamee, AFP

   The images of the storming of the Capitol are hard to take seriously as the fur hat guy breaks through police barriers next to a small cross-eyed man and a vaping woman sits at a congresspersons desk. The overwhelming number of memes that have followed signal this dialectic of tragedy and farce. Even the deaths of rioters have become travesties - one man accidentally tazed himself in the balls leading to a heart attack, a woman carrying a “don’t tread on me” flag was trampled to death, a woman who retweeted that traitors should be shot was subsequently shot herself, and rioters (many who proclaim that “blue lives matter”) killed a cop by throwing a fire extinguisher at his head. While many on the left are able to navigate this terrain (they take it seriously, calling for impeachment, but also make the memes), many on the right are stuck within cynical conspiracy realm where anyone who can screenshot a random conspiracy theory typed in their notes app suddenly create a new belief system for millions.

Trump supporters gesture to U.S. Capitol Police in the hallway outside of the Senate chamber after breaching the halls of the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

   Sen. Cory Booker rightly made a parallel in American history claiming that there were two times “where individuals laid siege to our capitol”: the War of 1812 and today. He goes on to compare the 2021 rioters to the British, both wanting to destroy democracy - in 1812 in favor of a monarchy and in 2021 for Donald Trump. While the fascist connection appears to flip Marx’s formulation, but ultimately supports it dialectically (Trump is the farce of Hitler and the real tragedy is treating fascism as a farce), the connection to American democracy is a much tighter fitting glove in Marx’s formulation. While many Trump supporters continue to squirm with conspiracy theories justifying what happened, some are more aware of their ideology, supporting the idea of a Christian monarchy headed by Trump. All of course fall into the funnel of farce. But perhaps the real farce exists in a future in which another “smarter” version of Trump rises to power and exploits the farcical and cynical nature of Americans. It’s hard to imagine where media and memes will be in 10-20 years, but it doesn’t seem as though we have learned from history and it will continue to repeat itself, first as tragedy then as farce.

Walter Benjamin is perhaps best known for his formulation of the concept of aura and the place of art in the age of photography and mass reproduction. His formulation spans over the course of his work, most notably from his essay Little History of Photography to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin develops aura as being a quality that does not necessarily lay in a piece of art’s visual aesthetics, but its relation to the viewer’s perception through the reproducibility and commodification of the context art exists within as well as its transcendent nature. However, this is not how the term is often understood. The definition is blurred in Benjamin’s uses of the concept in different essays and leaves readers confused with contradictions. However, after going through these different uses, we arrive, not in a broken state of contradiction, but at a more complete definition.

Misconceptions of Contradiction and the Dialectic

  In both Little History of Photography and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Benjamin defines aura as something of a romantic experience that can be experienced in nature:

   “A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer's noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance—this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935

   This introduces a broad definition of aura that transcends art and photography. In addition, Benjamin also observes in Little History how earlier photography held a certain degree of aura back when the final product of a photograph was a single plate. He notes the limitations, time, and effort taken to make a photograph. However, this earlier essay is often read as contradicting his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Here, Benjamin points to mechanical reproduction, or the ability to reproduce and distribute a work of art to the masses, which includes photography, as a dent to aura. Benjamin is painted as being anti-photography in his diagnosis of mechanical reproduction as a kind of ‘arbiter of death’ upon aura. This appears to be the first of two misconceptions in Benjamin’s definition of aura.

   The first, that he completely disavows photography in his definition of aura (his essay is often oversimplified as a single statement as a disavowal of photography: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”), and the second, that he is set against democratic forms of art (even his essay has been discredited as elitist in form as “a deep fog of art historical mysticism”). The second is simply an exaggeration of the first, so let’s quickly dispel the oversimplification that Benjamin is anti-photography by acknowledging the complexity of his definition of aura (these misunderstandings also highlight a success of larger structures to obscure Benjamin’s formulations).

   By observing that anything can have a certain degree of aura (Benjamin mentions nature, painting, and photography) and through reading his essays we see he constantly speaks of photographs in support of defining aura (observing how Atget photographed the neglected scenes of Paris, not the tourist destinations, and speaking at length of a childhood portrait of Franz Kafka). Benjamin is of course not as black and white as some seem to think, as he claims, “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” We see that Benjamin is not making a moral claim about photography, but something much more foundational. This acknowledgement that Benjamin presents us a more complete definition of aura through his process of what seems like contradictions, giving us an expanded definition instead of a broken one, is where Carolin Duttlinger arrives in her essay Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography:

   “Benjamin’s general theoretical claims are thus inseparable from a particular interpretative practice which lends his writings on the concept of aura depth and complexity. In this respect, Benjamin’s “Photography” essay forms the centerpiece of his theory of aura, not simply because it contains the earliest definition of the term but because it gestures beyond a narrowly historical definition of the term toward a more flexible and universally applicable model of aura as a phenomenon bound up with the act of viewing and reception. [...]

   Rather than simply positing photography in clear-cut opposition to his concept of the aura, Benjamin’s writings thus bring photography and aura into constructive interplay. Not only is the notion of aura first developed in relation to early photography, but this historical model is subsequently revised and expanded in line with the evolving focus of Benjamin’s thought. In Benjamin’s memoirs and later essays, photography emerges as a medium of imaginary encounter despite, and indeed because of, the medium’s complicity with uniformity, conventionality, and reification. Within Benjamin’s childhood memories in particular, the model of a photographic aura facilitates a mode of literary engagement which, while arising out of theoretical reflection, is founded on a deeply personal, emotive form of photographic interpretation from which neither viewer nor image emerge unchanged.” Carolin Duttlinger, Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography, 2008

   Duttlinger’s observations of Benjamin’s texts over his lifetime expand the definition of aura. Instead of seeing Benjamin’s two essays (Little History of Photography to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) as somehow canceling out his ideas, Duttlinger expands the pool of work to include Benjamin’s personal essays and reflections on photography and specific photographs. Duttlinger illuminates how aura cannot be limited to an oversimplified understanding of aura as ‘photography=bad’. We see that aura has not had a fair shot at being defined in all its complexity.

   Here we are exposed to a dialectical definition of aura that does not see contradiction as the paralysis of a subject, but the support of one. Aura is defined in its totality, through Benjamin’s reflections on photography and his defining photography as the moment that fractures aura. We see the misconceptions of aura falling victim to the fracturing of his work instead of a dialectic reading of the totality.

   “It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive development of truth as much as it sees only contradiction in that diversity. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter. Likewise, through the fruit, the blossom itself may be declared to be a false existence of the plant, since the fruit emerges as the blossom’s truth as it comes to replace the blossom itself.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807

   While the blossom comes after the bud and the fruit after the blossom, the two seem to conflict with each other while at the same time are a part of the same whole, “their fluid nature makes them into moments of an organic unity in which they are not only not in conflict with each other, but rather, one is equally as necessary as the other, and it is this equal necessity which alone constitutes the life of the whole.” The same should be said of seeing Benjamin’s definition of aura conflicting with his reflections on the aura of photography. The two are a part of the same whole, the same totality, of the definition of aura.

   Through defining photography as a means of reproduction establishing a relatively deductive, yet expansive, effect on aura (not a conclusive one), we see aura as a kind of spectrum that slides in intensity relative to the perception that’s affected by the degree of reproducibility available to the masses. With the reification of means of reproduction (images and reproductions overtaking even the notion of an original), aura finds itself at different intensities scattered across a new world of simulacra (copies without originals).

   In talking of earlier photography, Benjamin establishes a definition of aura that slides in intensity relative to the degree of reproducibility available to the masses. It is only after the wet plate is surpassed by faster and more reproducible/affordable photographic methods that Benjamin holds earlier photography as having more aura than the forms that sought to simulate aura through artificial means (back then it was gum prints, today it is film and film filters, the same could be said for early photography and it’s reference to painting). Today, the mass production of smartphones and other devices with cameras and images have us looking to 35mm film as holding more aura in our current context.

The Spectrum of Aura: Kant and Zero Intensity (All Aura is Surplus Aura)

   Benjamin’s definition of aura exists between his notions of cult value and display value. Cult value is the experience essential to the sense experience of something in its limited and ritual nature. Spirit, in all its complexities, is held higher than the availability to the largest number of people.

   “We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function… One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view… The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men, but in the main it was meant for the spirits.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935

(A lifesize replica of the Lascaux Cave in France) Another room in the Lascaux 4 museum (Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty Images)

   The intent is not in its ‘exhibition value’, but something more. The creation and presentation is not meant to be witnessed by the most amount of people possible, which changed with the marketized spread of mechanical and technological reproduction. The cave paintings were meant more so for the spirit than mass human consumption. This is made apparent in the 1963 closing to the public of the Lascaux Cave in France, where prehistoric paintings were found preserved until opened to the public when carbon dioxide and other factors caused by the thousand daily visitors started to damage the paintings. This led to the closing off to the public and restoration of the paintings, but also the creation of replicas of specific paintings for galleries, of course we can now photos online, and even a guided tour on the website.

   “...the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935

   As we see, Benjamin is not taking sides here, but observing that an increase in display value in art can affect the cult value and degree of tradition or spirit. Benjamin’s definition of aura is an observation of what’s taking place and not an endorsement of one side or the other. Examining this complexity, John Berger said, ”For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free”. As Benjamin observes, film is a medium that minimizes aura that would be more abundant in theatre.  Today with online streaming, we see how the availability and reductions limit the degree of aura in experiencing film. But with the withering of aura is also an illumination of the higher degree of aura now experienced in prior forms. Going to the movie theater today, while still might hold less aura to the perception of those who lived before Netflix, nonetheless holds a higher experience of aura in its ritualistic and limited nature than watching the film on a laptop at home.

   Benjamin was writing about photography in the early 1930s, only 90 years after the Daguerreotype process was announced. The first time direct representations of reality were stored on physical plates to be looked at anytime. The technology at the time he’s writing is limited to the first editions of the Leica and a few decades after the brownie, but 35mm film and brownies were vastly different and more available than the first processes of early wet plate photography. We see the intensity changes based on the accessibility and implementation of mediums, which highlights an important point. Aura does “wither” in the perception of the viewer as society develops and implements new forms of mass reproduction, but it doesn’t disappear (as Benjamin highlights by speaking of photography’s aura so often).

   Today for example, we are constantly engaging with reproductions of reproductions of reproductions. I heard a quote from one of those internet entrepreneurs who said, “I don’t engage with the thing, I engage through people engaging with the thing”, referring to never watching sports or other live events, but only looking at the tweets about the events. Art is increasingly experienced through mediums of accelerated display value (books, google images, instagram, etc.) so that we are distanced farther from the Thing when we are at the same time, most close to it (sitting at home watching the commentary version of our favorite film, behind the scenes, 4K quality, etc.). “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.” (Benjamin)

   So we see that aura is a spectrum that shifts based on the technological reproducibility of art. When reproducibility is more effective and available, there is a loss of cult value and tradition, but at the same time established the former techniques as holding more of these aspects than the newest form. It’s clear that aura, even when it withers, is then never completely absent. This is the same Kantian notion of Anticipations of Perceptions, which gives us a better understanding of how to gauge aura.

   “In all appearances the sensation, and the real, which corresponds to it in the object, has an intensive magnitude… every sensation, thus also every reality in appearance, however small it may be, has a degree, i.e., an intensive magni­tude, which can still always be diminished, and between reality and negation there is a continuous nexus of possible realities, and of possi­ble smaller perceptions. Every color, e.g., red, has a degree, which, however small it may be, is never the smallest, and it is the same with warmth, with the moment of gravity, etc.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781

   Kant sees the intensive magnitude as “flowing” based on the time and experience. The only universal promise beforehand is that there is a degree, but experience is required to measure the intensive magnitude at that moment. The individual, or the particular, experience is the gauge, but is dependent on the bigger picture (the forms of reproducibility and impact on the particular). Since it can only be measured at a moment in time, it is constantly flowing and never ending. Flowing between the particular, universal, space, time, and perception in relation to all. To tie it back to Hegel, the process is a never ending synthesis as it constantly changes and blossoms into something else.

   Following Kant’s line of thought, it is impossible for us to find a complete lack in our perception as we could not, by definition, perceive it. While there are higher degrees of aura that have withered and dragged by mediums founded on display value, there is always an intensive magnitude of aura. The degree of perception sets the intensive magnitude of aura. Since there is no real base or normal that can be experienced, all aura having a degree, we see that all aura is surplus aura. Slavoj Zizek arrives at this same conclusion in terms of all enjoyment being surplus enjoyment:

   “It is this paradox which defines surplus-enjoyment: it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some 'normal', fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitu­tively an 'excess'. If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it 'stays the same', if it achieves an internal balance.” Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989

   Aura, as with capitalism, is constantly revolutionizing itself, constantly shifting the intensity, always as surplus. There is no resting point for aura, yet the constant evolution, in its inherent surplus, is the ‘normal’. Any attempt to rupture the constant flowing would then be subsumed into the spectrum itself. Revolution is absorbed to form a larger definition and the intensive magnitude is shifted.

Specters of Aura: The Fetishism of Images

 In speaking of perceptions of objects that possess this transcendent intensive magnitude that is more than just the object, we are following what Marx called commodity fetishism, or the fact that concealed under art and commodities is the mystery of its value and the labor process involved with it. An absolutely fundamental aspect of what effects aura is the attributes that affect its market value. Underneath the reproduced piece of art, a Mona Lisa poster for example, is the labor and machinery involved in mass producing a poster of the painting. Whereas the painting formally existed as a single art object, which only concerned the hand of the artist, the poster anonymously conceals the hands of hundreds if not thousands to make the reproduction available for purchase online or in the Louvre’s gift shop for a rather affordable price. What is concealed under the perception of aura is this same process. It is invisible, yet haunts the way that we experience art in its democratic forms. In a way, what is hidden underneath looks back at the viewer. The work of art looks at us with a gaze of its own. Aura is a part of this gaze, a kind of specter. Jacques Derrida observes (and we have observed by establishing there is never a total absence of aura), a specter that haunts is in no way dead. Derrida calls this hiding of the gaze, a visor effect:

   “Nor does one see in flesh and blood this Thing that is not a thing, this thing that is invisible between its apparitions, when it reappears. This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us. Even though in his ghost the King looks like himself (“As thou art tothy selfe,” says Horatio), that does not prevent him from looking without being seen: his apparition makes him appear still invisible beneath his armor (“Such was the very Armour he had on...”).” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, 1993

   The visor effect for the specter of aura conceals the fact that the age of mechanical/technological reproduction has drastically changed the field of perceiving aura. Aura must remain mysterious. Underneath these forms of mass reproduction are of course corporations selling your data, monitoring your moods to know when to advertise you what commodities, etc. The visor is the tool that is constantly shielding the specter. It is essential for the specter of aura to stay mysterious in order for the structures that promote and accelerate mass reproduction to maintain their status over cult value. As Zizek has pointed out, although we can expose what’s underneath, our actions tend to then disavow the acknowledgement (after the Snowden revelations, Cambridge Analytica, every leak exposing big tech as misusing our data, etc. we change nothing in our daily lives), establishing the power and utilization of the visor effect. It can look at us, we can think that we see it, but then do absolutely nothing to change it. This is why misunderstandings of Benjamin’s contribution of defining aura supports this visor effect and hides the fact that we have done nothing to bring real change, because we cannot in the first place acknowledge what is happening.

Screenshot of Christie’s website selling Andy Warhol’s prints of Mona Lisa for $56,165,000

   Benjamin’s definition of aura establishes a vocabulary for confronting art in the age of modernity and whatever we call our current times. Aura is withering today, even while technology can garner a higher appreciation, or a perceived ‘passion for the real’, for traditional forms and mediums, they are already affected by their relation to images of images. The Mona Lisa can only be experienced behind layers of bulletproof glass and hundreds of tourists taking photos and we can only see it in relation to all of the reproductions we had seen beforehand. We are left standing in this mosh pit of tourists thinking, “hmm, I thought it would be bigger”. Aura is an invisible, constantly shifting specter that moves with the never ceasing flow of capital. All is subsumed and shifts our perception.  

   “So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. [...] Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935

“... society was dramatically changed from something that was more community orientated to something that revolved around the cult of the individual. How much money you made and what you could buy to represent this wealth; a house, a car, fine holidays etc, all these things came to be the measure of success in life.“ -Anna Fox

“The overall effect was to transform the UK into a country of relatively low wages and a largely compliant labourforce… Alan Budd, an economic adviser to Thatcher, later suggested that ‘the 1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending were a cover to bash the workers’.” David Harvey, History of Neoliberalism, 2005.

The visceral closeness of photojournalism can often feel too close and subjective in form - these images are often used as subtle propaganda or detested as being overtly graphic to generate more viewers and profit. The background of the photographer, their intention, etc. is questioned. In regards to generating a consensus of truth and meaning, this can be problematic, leaving a gap that can be filled with mundane overhead satellite images like the ones of the recent missile attack by Iran on a US airbase. 

The statement by Trump claiming that the attack was ‘minimal’, trying to establish a symbolic image of Iran as being incompetent, was the only way in which satellite images which contradicted this statement would garner attention - for example if he didn’t mention the damage was ‘minimal’, nobody would’ve cared to see overhead images of destroyed buildings inside the base, if the images were close up, they would be considered exaggerated as they ignore the rest of the base being in tact. We were essentially ready to be presented evidence which contradicted his statement, the meaning was seemingly presupposed. 

In the images coming to light after Trump’s statement, it would appear that the intent of Trump’s attempt to prove Iran incompetent backfired. The images instead act as a support for the symbolic lack of truth in Trump’s administration - which we now can say ‘this is how it’s always been’ (Trump continuing to lie even in the face of Real evidence contradicting his claims). However, this is just scratching the surface of examining the meaning of this event and the use of satellite images to play a part in media today.

Distance and the Sublime Object

    To take satellite imagery and dissect it in the context of mass media and journalism is to acknowledge the image and image selection as a symptom. A symptom of larger structures that filter and quilt meaning of everyday events. To take this satellite image of the Ain al-Assad air base and examine it in relation to something like psychoanalysis is to reinforce the original implication of importance from publications posting the image in the first place. To reinforce the idea that there is something sublime, yet hidden, which raises the image on a pedestal. Slavoj Zizek says that the sublime object

… is an object which cannot be approached too closely: if we get too near it, it loses its sublime features and becomes an ordinary vulgar object - it can persist only in an interspace, in an intermediate state, viewed from a certain perspective, half-seen. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989 P 192 

The distance and mechanical nature of satellite photos not only communicate a kind of objectivity - which reflects today’s data and science driven society, often prioritizing the use of facts and science (although concealing the increasingly privatized version of space)  - but also a symbolic distance from the event. If on-the-ground photojournalism is too close, the lack filled by satellite photos comes with a lack of its own - a lack of a visceral closeness. As this distance communicates a symbolic distance, a lack of understanding in meaning, we also don’t know what to make of these events taking place. Similar to Lacan’s object a, we must maintain a distance, a limit, to keep the cycle going. We don’t yet know what the missile strike on the US airfield means and the only images we have of this event, the satellite photos, communicate this same distance. 

There is a similar distance in the meaning of the Iran flight. After the Iranian commercial flight to Ukraine crashed, killing all 176 people onboard, the initial cause was considered mechanical. It shifted to accusations and then an admission that Iran accidentally shot it down with anti-aircraft missiles. As of now the images of the debris lie scattered across the barren landscape as the cleanup and investigation take place. While the meaning of these events are currently spread out and lack symbolism, we nonetheless anticipate that this process and application will take place in the future. As of now we maintain this seemingly distanced position in relation to the meaning of these events.

Timing of Symbolization

...the Truth of a thing emerges because the thing is not accessible to us in its immediate self-identity Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989 P 243

As articles are written and countries make statements, there’s an attempt to pick up these pieces in the now. However, by attempting to prescribe this meaning as soon as possible we never quite capture it. 

The distance of symbolism is not just a case of solving the mystery, but a process of applying meaning in which meaning is transforming, never fully crystalizing. The meaning of both the satellite images of the US base and scattered remains of the Iran plane will not be given their meaning today, but in the future. 

If we are prepared to consider history as a text, we can say about it what some modern author said about a literary text: the past has deposed in it images which could be compared to those retained by a photographic plate. 'Only the future disposes of developers strong enough to make appear the picture with all its details. More than one page of Marivaux or of Rousseau attests to a meaning which their contemporary readers were unable to decipher completely.' Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schnfce 4 Volume I, Frankfurr:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955, P· 123

    We only can only say retrospectively that something was presupposed (Trump lying). To fill in this gap of meaning, we will see images that fill the gap of the distanced satellite images or the basic facts of the event: Today a story was posted about a couple who flew to Iran for their wedding and ended up being on the flight which killed them, Trump has now announced sanctions and seems to be stepping back from his original intent of continuing to bomb Iran into submission, there are already narratives which claim Trump’s actions as an attempt to distract from the impeachment and improve his chances of being reelected. Will these satellite images act as the aerial photos of the Cuban Missile Crisis did and lead to a real change (the removal of nuclear weapons - the removal of US troops) or will they fall into a symbolic void with the other million images posted that day? What will become of the scattered remains of the current events as meaning is retrospectively applied?

Starbucks on the breath, fast paces collide with, and yell at, the slow and average. It’s here where the street photographer finds their subjects, where culture is collected. In such a seemingly inorganic social environment, the objectification of rushing subjects transforms the landscape into a representation of contemporary culture. However, the lack of stylistic change in popular street photography and the recycling of the past is at odds with a changing backdrop. What relation does this collection and presentation of culture contribute to the culture they reflect? Are we trapped in a cycle of lost futures? 

    The commercialization of struggle, war is ephemeral, poverty is romantic, the streets are beautiful, but different. Marville and Atget’s urge to preserve the changes that Bresson and Doisneu utilized, even with the old European air remaining, highlighted an awareness of the transitioning spaces of Paris. Very different from the US, which was creating itself, ‘the first new nation’. While Atget was preserving what was, New York was building what would be, Steiglitz catching the conception, fully realized in the transition from WeeGee to Meyerowitz as we look back from 2019. Today, New York can almost be considered post-preserval, as Robert Frank put it “for the yupees” (the gentrified landscape). Yet, today’s context of the post-fordist workplace, the blending of life with the internet, the hyper-consumerism, and overabundance of events, has placed us in an unprecedented condition which transcends the ability to capture on the streets with a camera. A new perception, new quiltings of meaning, sense perception. However, where else would a depiction of the real be more accurate? Martin Parr’s anthropological images of the excesses of neoliberalism in the 80s do exactly what photographers had been doing for decades, but have now grown away from in the supermodern age. Just as Marc Augé calls for, turning the focus on the seemingly mundane backyard. Today’s street photographers in New York City fight to remain in 20th century New York, striving for that nostalgia on 35mm, satirically critiquing the excess of selfie sticks and cell phones, yet contributing to the cycle that stabilizes their place in culture. 

Genuineness is the word Walter Benjamin uses to describe art mediums prior to technological reproductions and photography, the word a street photographer might use to distinguish between ‘natural’ (non/pre-consensual) street photography and posed documentary photography or more commercial forms (fashion, editorial, etc.); an awkward facial expression, an unappealing pose, more importantly, opposition to the preferential presentation of individuals in images. To be able to see how others want to be perceived, the street photographer now searches to fill the gaps in the market, to contrast the status quo, to go against what individuals want to see themselves as. Showing people in the same unveiling light as the new journalism movement, but in the context of selfie culture. To do this, the street photographer takes to the streets. However, the spaces, and the notion of spaces (phones transforming place to non-place) are changing, not just with the acceleration of technology and social media, but with the increase of what Marc Augé calls non-places. 

The anthropologist Marc Augé wrote the book Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, which is essentially a manifesto calling anthropologists to look at their own cultures. Naturally, Augé proceeds to do just this. Observing that during the period he wrote the book in 1992, there’s been an increase in ‘non-places’ (usually inorganic social spaces, guided by signs: banks, highways, grocery stores, airports, etc.) where we find ourselves more and more frequently in daily life. While Augé considers this recognition of place vs non-place less of a black and white process (“Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed…” for example a mall could be considered a non-place to some and a genuine social meeting place for others, as Marco Lazzari argues), this is nonetheless a prominent part of our culture.

“But non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified - with the aid of a few con­versions between area, volume and distance - by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called 'means of transport' (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway sta­tions, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself.”

What Augé calls supermodernity, which he sees as “...three figures of excess which we have employed to characterize the situation of supermodernity - overabundance of events, spatial overabundance, the individualization of references”, has transformed our landscape and how we interact in spaces. This is especially prominent in the US where landscapes are being built and rebuilt in this image, relative to Europe where they are being integrated into, or built around, the past. Small towns are forced to compete for the attention of those on the highway, their only appeal being their gas stations and chain food, forced to “rebrand”. It is this dance that takes place on the streets, in the workplace, at home. 

As Walter Benjamin saw the art evolving in the age of mechanical reproduction, a battle rages between distraction and immersion. With an increase in these neoliberal non-places, we are increasingly less likely to find ourselves immersed. As we have a need to find meaning (another aspect of Augé’s supermodernity), the process of quilting meaning in daily life and what Benjamin calls our ‘sense perception’, becomes more and more affected by these larger structures, even if, perhaps especially when, they do not explicitly espouse it. If we accept these observations, how do they hold up today and what effect does the process and presentation of images taking place in these non-places?

In street photography, the environments of non-places are often utilized as backgrounds and hunting grounds for subjects. The street photographer is not only photographing in these spaces, but presenting them online, in books, and galleries. The presentation is then experienced in their own forms of place vs non-place. For example, cellphones have the potential to transform every non-place into an internal place via engaging deeply in social media, however the effect on the physical space they occupy is the opposite, making it more of an inorganic environment based on how people are interacting within it. As we view photography that is saying something about the world we live in, we are also contributing to the space we inhabit while viewing the work. As Benjamin put it, “The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one”. Thus contributing even more to the battle between distraction and immersion. Phones shift spaces towards this dichotomy of place vs non-place. 

Street photography, especially in its instant presentation on cell phones, magazines, and websites, then contributes even more by blending the real (photographing people in non-places and on their phones, looking at images) with the presentation. New Yorkers look at images of New Yorkers while on the train, traveling, waiting, existing in places and non-places. The loop of photographing, presenting, and consuming are welded together, causing street photography to not just be the collection of how society and culture looks in the street, but a medium which contributes to the transformation of place to non-place and vice versa. This being true for most forms of photography, it’s the cycle of simulation (similar to Baudrillard’s blending of reality with simulation and simulacra). 

Street photographers today are faced with this contribution to the culture that is being observed, apart of the blending. Taking place in a world which is constantly transforming, the photographer attempting to be no more than a collector of culture, yet being at the center of it. Projecting it into the devices that project a form of reality back into the culture that’s collected and presented. The non-places are no longer exclusively in the real, seen in the backgrounds of street photographers images, but now can shift through the social aspects of engaging with technology. Creating a pseudo-place, where social media is considered social interaction, which is much more likely to happen in non-places, but also happens in organic social environments to share with others what you’re doing. We are, as Augé says, “...in contact only with another image of himself”. Guided by notifications, images, links, taking place inside and outside of the smartphone, the notion of place vs non-place has drastically shifted and those presenting this, whether intentionally or not, are contributing to it.  

Not necessarily culturally or socially, as many projects’ main focus today is to escape the tropes laid out in the late 20th century. Even NGOs have strict Stalinist-like guidelines and approval processes to make sure that images are both respectful to the subjects and ‘on-brand’. It’s not social and cultural issues, but larger ones. Photography faces a problem of ignoring the larger networks that photography exists under, specifically capitalism, neoliberalism, and post-fordism. This is exacerbated by the lack of writers on the topic in general, As Alan Trachtenberg observes in the introduction to Classic Essays on Photography, 1980:

A common lament among photographers and their admirers is that the medium lacks a critical tradition, a tradition of serious writing. It is true that photography has seemed to inspire as much foolishness in words as banalities in pictures, and especially true that we cannot name a single writer of significance who has devoted himself or herself entirely to photographic criticism and theory. 

Even for those who have written on the topic, the primary focus has been dissecting the medium without confronting it as a symptom. Why is this the case? The why is a matter of ideology, however, what is missing will be summarized in this article. 

While photography is its own network with elements existing under it (what most photo theory encompasses, although addressing of course the relation to things like art and technology), it’s more importantly an element within larger networks, such as the news media industry, photography industry, the tech industry, and larger networks like post-fordism, neoliberalism, and capitalism. To speculate on the current and future states of the medium, recognizing the medium as a symptom is essential. 

To expose photography as an element within a network is to reveal the transcendence of the medium. Photography as a commodity (as Walter Benjamin claimed) displays what Marx called the fetishism of commodity (the process of a commodity disclosing the networks involved in its production and distribution). Like a commodity, the processes that bring this medium to the point in which it can be criticized and theorized are there even if there’s little acknowledgment of them. The obvious example is the photo and tech industry. Obviously the camera you shoot with was made by low paid workers in factories throughout Asia, then the people in companies that make decisions about labor and tech are at the mercy of the market and competition, the market and competition are dependant on consumers and investors, as photography shifts towards including smart phone images, it of course includes the practices of Apple/Amazon/Google etc… 

Looking specifically at photojournalists, if they hope to make a living shooting images of current events, they are of course at the mercy of news media platforms who are of course also driven by the market. The current state of the news media industry exists as a product of neoliberalism (implemented by Reagan/Thatcher era deregulation) that led to the acceleration of globalized and hypermarketized news media companies. Neoliberalism’s not only a series of policies enacted by Reagan’s administration, but a global consensus, a hegemony, that the free market can solve problems and the government only disrupts prosperity (unless of course bailing out private institutions). 

As full-time photojournalists continue to be laid off, the overall trend can be observed as a symptom of multiple factors: technology and the overabundance of images/events that implode the meaning and monetization of photography, news media losing money and influence, but also the evolution of the workplace, from fordism (working in a factory, but being paid a living wage) to post-fordism (the ‘gig economy’/’be your own boss’, low wages, less full-time jobs, less benefits). This is easily seen in photography as there’s a predicted continued decrease in employed photographers and an increase in self-employed, outlining the current and future state of the field¹. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise that major news companies, after becoming the giants that they are, would be challenged and replaced by something new. This is of course an essential aspect of a market based system, summed up in the famous 1848 pamphlet by Marx and Engels:  

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify… All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations… (Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848 p 63). 

This is illuminated in most industries today as the rate of technological advancements and automation threatens every industry when automation becomes the more profitable alternative to human labor, echoing the industrial revolutions. As Uber and Lyft drivers protest for higher wages and benefits, Uber is becoming closer to replacing drivers altogether with self driving cars. High quality phone cameras and dslrs have demonetized the career photojournalists. Small online news platforms are doing the same to larger news media companies. None of this technology would necessarily force industries to die if it were not for the larger networks it exists under. 

 The news media, a form of presentation which has caused a desensitization, a ‘war fatigue’ that spreads to all current events, has led many to believe that the medium as a vesille for change has lost its place altogether. However, there are many artists and photographers today who attempt to bypass the ineffective aspects of the news media through new processes, most of which are illuminated in Fred Ritchin’s books. Although Ritchin might not specifically address photography as a symptom of these larger networks in his writings, the projects he lists nonetheless illuminate an implicit intent to bypass profitability to spark change. Although they are subject to their own forms of market drives (most try to get the images posted on publications and displayed in galleries), specific projects seemed to have realistic goals set and their effectiveness seemed to be greater, especially with a lack of profitability. 

One of the projects Ritchin lists is the project Basetrack in which a team of photojournalists and artists followed the deployment of 1/8 – 1st Battalion, Eighth Marines, during their deployment in southern Afghanistan, posting iPhone images on a Facebook group where the public and family members could engage. The photojournalist Teru Kuwayama describes his frustration with the military, who needed to approve and censor all posts, and the media who wouldn’t feature the images or project:

It wasn’t just the military that was discouraging us from making meaningful pictures...  The magazines we worked for - or gave our pictures to - clearly didn’t want them, either. We would come back from an embed, where we’d been in the fight of our lives, and we would get these absurd reasons about how that wasn’t interesting enough to publish or wasn’t right for that week. p64

Ritchin goes on to say that while the media and military weren’t receptive - the military uninvited the team before the end of the tour -  family members of the soldiers deployed or elsewhere in the military engaged with the project on an impactful way. One mother saying “It has truly saved me from a devastating depression and uncontrollable anxiety after my son deployed. Having this common ground with other moms helped me so much and gives me encouragement each day.” 

Although Ritchin’s point is that maybe larger news companies should implement these alternative forms of presentation that utilize technology to more effectively illuminate current events and news, contributing their lack of implementation to publication’s taste (“The reluctance of other media outlets to contrast photographs in a similar manner may be a sign of a limited taste for visual adventure in the press, or a sign that such juxtapositions may be considered too politically charged…”), their implementation could warrant the opposite of what’s necessary for utilizing photography as a medium for change. Ritchin brings to light many of the issues and potential steps to solutions for reigniting the medium through utilizing technology, even if not acknowledging why. If we acknowledge where photography stands as a symptom, it’s clear that offering a new form of presentation to be exploited either by big companies or by becoming the new popular form of media presentation, this isn’t necessarily as glamorous as it sounds. These alternative forms of presentation would quickly become the ‘new meat’ which would quickly be commercialized and dried out just like the newest meme trend. More importantly these effects should be seen through this wider lens enveloping the larger networks such as the market driven news media whose place is a product of neoliberalism and whose future will be challenged by demonetized forms of presentation, just as photojournalism is now.