This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange

Author:Michelle Orange
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pixelation Nation

Photography, Memory, and the Public Image

History is embedded in every inauguration-night image of President Obama, but for me only one says it all. Three years later, the original of this particular image was hard enough to turn up that I briefly wondered if I had imagined it. Cropped for clarity, it would look much the same as what you’re envisioning now: Barack and Michelle Obama, the first black president of the United States in the arms of his black wife, smiling and slow dancing as they are serenaded by Beyoncé—the world’s foremost pop star, who also happens to be black—on a proscenium that seemed to have lowered from the sky for the occasion. It’s a campaign manager’s dream, the very picture of hope and change. At last!

It’s the uncropped version, though, that vexed me. Granted, the margin of context in the Obama photo I’m talking about has more in common with, say, a moment-killing pan from Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift kissing in A Place in the Sun to the nearby grip wiping mayo off his shirtfront than it does the sinister element hidden behind Vanessa Redgrave in that Blow-Up shot, or Hitchcock’s camera showing us a knife rising behind a soapy, unsuspecting Janet Leigh. And yet, the scene beyond that proscenium seems like a pretty essential clue; without it you get a nicer picture but only half the story.

But then as trained aesthetic consumers we prefer our defining public images well composed and to the point. For instance, were it not similarly cropped for clarity, the most notorious image of the torture perpetrated at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison between 2003 and 2004—of local community leader Ali Shalal Qaissi balancing on a wooden box with his arms outstretched, his fingers wired for electrocution, his head hooded and body draped in black cloth—might have made an even more horrifying impression. Edited out of the shot that inspired its own Banksy stencil and landed on the cover of The Economist below the words “Resign, Rumsfeld” is the schlubby outline of some guy. Standing in profile, maybe three feet in the foreground and off to the right of the hooded, electrified prisoner, some guy is a brush-cut brunet in belted khakis and an olive-green golf shirt. The wedding ring on some guy’s left hand is poised just above his gently thickened middle, and he’s peering down into a digital viewfinder of his own, as though he’s just taken a snap of his four-year-old twins posing with Pluto on the Magic Kingdom promenade and wants to make sure everybody’s eyes are open.

On the morning after the January 20, 2009, inauguration, I was most struck by an image of the presidential waltz taken from deep in the crowd: Barack and Michelle embrace like lacquered wedding toppers in the middle distance; between our photographer and the first couple stand a phosphorescent crop of cameras, phones, and camera phones, all raised high in a kind of holy gesture of affirmation. The aliens might assume the cameras are part of a blessing ritual, glowing amulets bestowing good luck.

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