Week 3: Survival

I came at the concept of survival from many different points this week, shooting everything that crossed my path. I saw obvious images in the pictures of the Union Station McDonald’s counter with its harried and underpaid workforce and the group of people huddling in the cold on a Chicago street, cowering past a “Caution: Falling Ice” sign. There’s survival and there’s survival. I feel that the concept of fighting for survival only gives half of the tale. There are also a host of influences that intrude in our survival, affecting our lives in many unseen ways.

The most blatant way that I saw this concept was in the first picture here, the Che Guevara bag. History gives a form of immortality to humankind, allowing individuals to live forever through texts left behind. Individuals are not able to dictate the form of that survival. So, while our popular culture is saturated with texts of the recently and distantly deceased, at what cost is that survival secured? Che would likely have been mortified, possibly furious over the branding effect that his image has invoked.

Che’s image tells us something about you. The bag has the iconic mug shot coupled with the “Revolucion!” slogan down its side. The only colors visible beyond the black and white scale is the red of the symbols over the drab, faux-fatigue canvas of the bag. Che stood for revolution, yes, but for branding and product placement? Che survives in our modern pop culture in an appropriated, disjointed fashion. The platitude of revolution (I can’t believe I just called it a platitude) is slapped onto a school-bag, a sign of hierarchy, conformity, and intellectual commodification. Che’s image survives, but not as he would have intended.

The next image takes a turn from the survival of the individual and considers that of the institution. Again, the concepts of branding, marketing and sales are involved in a differing twist. Looking down from the L platform at Quincy street, I was confronted by a blur of movement and activity writhing through the city streets. With my headphones in, I could shut out the noises and the roar and focus my thoughts on the visual. With my randomized function on, Weezer slipped to Sepultura turned to The Notwist, giving me the separation from the sense whirlwind below to truly look.

I took this picture more out of amusement than anything at the time. It looked funny to me, like infant pigs crowding around a sow (not to call the gentleman on the street pig-like, it’s just a simile for the boxes). This bank of resources reflects survival on two scores, and more if I extrapolate. First, these boxes all ensure the survival of the parent company. Each news outlet is offering the same basic product to the population: information. How this information is presented, packaged, and priced dictates the survival of each respective corporation.

The second view of survival looks more broadly at the state system of democratic capitalism. Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying, “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” Media outlets and information sharing are the lifeblood of the democratic system. This symbolic line-up of news outlets shows (on the surface) the fruition of news outlets. The trouble with survival’s compromises comes out again as it did with Che. Are these outlets truly free and independent? Are all citizens able to read with equal access to information? Do all citizens have equal opportunity to participate in the construction of news and in information dissemination? Can democracy as it was envisioned survive without these elements? Here history shows us inevitable compromises. Our system of government survives after a fashion, but is it the form that the founding leaders intended? Questionable. (I say no, but there’s too much political debate around this to say anything definite.) This image shows the facilitation of survival and the evidence of the survival of a form of democracy.

Finally, I looked up the same street and merely shot down the length (image at the end of the document). Who knows? If I can’t use the images this week, maybe they’ll come in handy for a future journal or project. However, looking back at the image I see survival in hints and clues that point to larger social structures behind the image. Unlike pictures of streets from other cultures, this street shot shows Chicago in all of its rigid glory. All the traffic is lined up, following the rules of traffic (outside of the errant lane-changers here and there; parking is done along the near side of the street; pedestrians generally stay on the sidewalk in clear streams of traffic; lights overhead offer simulated day even when the sun goes down; signs and signals throughout the environment give further direction to all as to appropriate conduct in the streets. Masses of people aren’t crowded haphazardly in the streets on bikes, mopeds, foot or other modes of transportation. This society and cultural pattern stresses order, separation and authority.

This creates another bifurcated view of survival. By obeying, all the people depicted are legitimating the social structure, granted Western civilization life and continuity through the years. An ordered and planned system of rules and technological innovation reigns in this picture. The scientific impulse in this society has birthed transportation, electricity, automated water transportation, and innumerable other advances to make survival easier and more comfortable. Everyone participates in following rules, laws and “common sense” order in this frame. This segues to the other aspect of survival: the individuals within this system are able to survive because of the systematic organization of life. People aren’t being run down on the sidewalks because everyone else is following the same set of rules. The vehicles and mass transit systems pictured here get individuals around the city to their homes, jobs, or other pursuits in a timely fashion.

Looking back over my work, I seem to present a largely ecological view on survival. Everything survives at the expense of something else; nothing survives unchanged. Society is the ultimate eternal compromise. It’s never so simple as just staying alive and intact. How do things survive? Adaptation, either conscious or not.

And, the runners up:

The don't walk one's better in large size. You can see the expression on her face and the Don't Walk sign pretty clearly. And the guy's face in the ice picture cracks me up.

Week 2: How does race operate on Loyola's campus?

This week’s work found me very perplexed from a methodological point of view. Primarily concerning me was the artificial construction of the random when assigned a topic on campus. How many variations on the random picture can we conceive of within the confines of the Loyola gates? I feel that my time spent searching for “random” pictures has the feel of as much artificiality as any planned or manipulated shot. The readings for this week only further underscore this inherent methodological problem. I am unable to randomize my shooting of pictures; I choose where, when, and how to shoot. Some sort of cue sets me to snapping an image at a particular time and place with particular things in the frame.

While I am stewing with all those internal dilemmas, I randomized my images as much as I could (paradoxically). I wandered all over campus shooting from the hip, trying to capture the sensation of randomness in my semi-planned shots. I roamed from the student union to class to the library to the sidewalks to the information center and even to the chapel. I was struggling the entire time to keep the concept of race/ethnic relations out of my head as I struggled to find representative images.

Part of my struggle with this project is the frame of reference that I have for race relations from my own background. I’ve spent all my life in the most whitebread areas of the country, insulated from race interactions at nearly every turn. I grew up in a small Dutch community in Western Michigan where the only people of color in my high school (less than 5 out of 800 or so) were adopted by pious white families. This was only further compounded by my teaching years spent in small, white, Christian enclaves. My lack of experience with race relations likely shows in my images as well as in my interpretations of them. This also made my randomizations hazier due to my ignorance on most matters racial and ethnic. Are the only pictures that illustrate race relations on campus those with members of minority groups in them or is there more freedom to work among different settings and objects?

In light of this then, how do race/ethnic relations happen on campus? In summary, awkwardly at best. Nearly all of my pictures involved a largely white population with marginalized minorities. A couple of images stand out as illustrating the sort of marginalization I saw happening. When I took the first image I was trying to get a larger frame of the corner of the cafeteria where students were hard at work and I thought the busser had blocked my shot. Then, the next day when I re-examined the image, I see how perfect it really is. Work in the cafeteria isn’t being done by former students of Loyola, or, for that matter, any of the affluent white families sending their children to study up to “lead extraordinary lives” after college. The cafeteria workers are all uniformed members of differing minority racial and ethnic groups operating in anonimity on the sidelines while the students work through dinner on whatever earth-shattering occupation they are set to.

The second image I just stumbled into this very day. As I walked into the student union to use the restroom I was confronted with this scene: highly amped mariachi music in the center of the auditorium. I quickly shot from the hip, trying to get at the experience from the side of the room to capture object and audience at once. Thinking back, shooting from the perspective of the band would have been fascinating, but would likely violate the spirit of the assignment. I saw the thin, sparsely populated room of people going about their regular routines in the room with no audience for the band. One woman’s back is turned, another girl checks her phone, only one in four people in the frame is actually looking at the performance. Around the room, people looked momentarily bewildered when they walked in, some laughing, others mocking a little dance (mainly a group of white girls by the steps), but largely taking little notice outside of standing in the back of the room. The image that I am left with is a band all dressed up with no one to entertain. This also looks like a school sanctioned cultural offering to try to offer differing experiences for students on campus. Is there a more stereotypical, B-movie representation of Latino culture than the mariachi band? This flaunting of a “foreign” culture in the face of indominable apathy might be funny if it weren’t so damn sad.

Loyola is an overtly religious institution as well, and Catholic at that. I was hoping that the single most racially/ethnically wide-reaching religious institution on earth would mitigate the content of my other images. A quick trip to the chapel after dark told me otherwise. The picture that I included at the end is more symbolic than anything and actually came to me as an afterthought. I initially took it to capture a really cool moment of lighting and symmetry, but closer inspection spoke to me about racial and ethnic relations at the school as well. What images populate the mural behind the baptismal font? It’s a collection of white faces (if anything, they are vaguely Mediterranean) looking toward a glowing savior. Our very cultural conception of good vs. evil symbols rests on a color line. Black is obscuring, wicked, and symbolic of base human nature while white represents clarity, purity, and transcendent redemption. Try postulating the concept of an Middle-Eastern looking (or black for that matter) Jesus and watch the fireworks. The very religion, the collected salvation of humankind is colored (couldn’t resist the pun) by concepts of hierarchy, race, and dominance reinforced by symbol and myth. (P.S. There’s a great gender discussion implied in that last photo too…)

It’s this very cultural base of symbology that limits our thinking and lays a foundation for the social actions and relations that the other images attempt to convey. This marginalization is only the end product of underlying hierarchy and dominance that these collected images highlight succinctly.

And again, this week's runners up:

That's the student diversity office crammed by the loading docks.

And that's the entrance to the new information commons, tricked out with gates, electronic entrance and "guards" at the info desk.