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Seeing The Future in An Image From The Past
Seeing The Future in An Image From The Past
Ulrich Baer
1
Hannah Arendt (1959),
Reflections on Little Rock,
in The Portable Hannah
Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr.
New York, Penguin, 2004:
23143. Citations hereafter
in body of text.
Seeing
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202
Ibid. 232.
See Hannah Arendt,
What Remains? The
Language Remains. A
Conversation with Gnter
Gaus, in The Portable
Hannah Arendt 325.
7
The foregoing of empathy
in favor of dispassionate
analysis in Reflections on
Little Rock is analogous
to Arendts Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report to the
Banality of Evil, where she
insists that compassion for
the victims suffering should
be taken for granted but not
shape an assessment of the
trial. Pointedly, Gershom
Scholem had questioned
whether Arendt had enough
ahavat Yisrael, [love for the
Jewish people], to which she
briskly responded that love
for the Jewish people, as for
any group, seemed an absurd
position since the only kind
of love Arendt knew and
believed in was the love for
individuals. See Hannah
Arendt/Gershom Scholem,
Der Briefwechsel, 1939
1964. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp,
2010. Feeling sympathy for
oppressed blacks seemed
as obvious to Arendt as it
seemed preposterous to her
to turn this sympathy into
the philosophical or political
basis of an argument. Differing from her response to
Ellisons critique of Little
Rock, Arendt did not budge
from her position that clear
thinking must not be muddied by emotions during the
polemical campaign attacking Eichmann in Jerusalem.
5
inserted herself into the position of the students caretaker: What would I do if I were a Negro mother?4
She then proceeded to imagine herself in the position
of a white mother, assuming imaginary authority over
the teenagers in these photographs whom she felt were
unduly cast by parents and political activists into a political struggle in which children have no part. After
this initial empathic reaction to the photograph, which
also prompted Arendt to view the struggle over equality as a generational issue between parents and their
children, Arendt dispassionately argued that school desegregation ought not to be decided by federal courts.
Arendts incisive engagement with the question of
race in America rested on her empathy with the young
black woman in the middle of a racist mob.
As a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the
Negroes as for all oppressed and under-privileged
peoples for granted and should appreciate it if the
reader did likewise.5
Seeing
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After Ellisons rejoinders, in a rare instance where she allowed herself to be corrected, Arendt revoked her views
on school segregation. She recognized that her divisions between the public and the private did not fully
hold, and that actual lives in the world like those of
Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford, photographed
in their charming dresses while confronting soldiers or
a menacing mob, defied her conceptual grasp.
The point here is not to rehabilitate empathy in
favor of dispassionate judgment, or to marshall the
power of photography against the abstraction of political thought.9 Instead, I want to show that when
Arendt was moved to think by a photograph she inadvertently pointed to the particular and irreducible
role that photography offers to an understanding of
the world beyond thread-bare political definitions. Arendt had provided a useful definition of the world, but
Dorothy Counts countenance tripped up her thinking. We should use that occasion to clarify the relation
between photography and the world, and to honor the
unforgettable witness provided by these photographs
against violent and, as in the case of Arendt, intellectual opposition.
203
Arendt assumed that all viewers would be equally compelled to respond to this photograph. The photograph
impressed itself upon her as if against her will, the way
the jeering mob follows the girl in the photograph
10
204
12
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graph assures viewers that progress, embodied by Dorothy Counts passage through and ahead of the white
mob, can be achieved at a cost. The world of the top
image is divided by a white post into left and right,
black and white. With his raised hand the guardsman
directs Elizabeth Eckford away from school, and she
has to stay on the right of the picture, forever locked
out. But in the bottom photograph Dorothy Counts
finds herself on the side of the image that is defined as
off-limits to blacks by the compositional logic of the
top picture. The jeering mob, with its threatening hand
gestures that seem to amplify the guardsmans hands
above, seeks to divide her and her chaperone. But in
purely visual terms Dorothy has already passed over to
the pictures left, which according to the top image and
its strict visual demarcations and actual borders, is the
white side of the world.
Visually, the white post that divides the top image
into two worlds is echoed in the white ribbon that flutters down the front of Dorothy Counts pretty dress.
The white line of the military border barring black
students from school in Little Rock has migrated onto
Dorothy Counts actual body. The political and legal
struggle of the body politic may be resolved, The Times
says, but will now be played out upon the bodies of individual students. Dorothy has crossed into the white
school but now her body has become the lightning rod
of white aggression.
An additional element underlines this shift from the
political to the personal. The top photograph shows the
soldiers and white students only in profile, Elizabeth Eckford with large sunglasses concealing her face. This is a
scene of political conflict where people simply play their
assigned parts. The bottom image, by contrast, shows
everyone facing forward: Dorothys stoic expression, her
chaperones grimace of controlled anger, and around them
the toothy confidence of the white students that their violent and dehumanizing racism will outlast this conflict.
But The Times only identifies Dorothy Counts and Dr.
Edwin Tompkins by name. Perhaps the white students
agreed to be photographed but did not reveal their names
to a reporter; either way, by leaving out the names of the
Seeing
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white students, The Times suggests that these men are everymanthat they, in their nameless omnipresence, constitute the world of the contemporary American South.
The naming of Dorothy Counts and Dr. Tompkins is thus
a double-edged gesture: it bestows dignity and singularity
to the black people in the image, but it also singles them
out and isolates them from everyone else, from those not
asked to identify themselves. Even if the caption suggests
that private citizens might part the nameless sea of ignorance, it leaves the viewer with a sense that some people
are different and stand out, while others are simply part
of the world.
To be sure, the segregation of schools in the American
South is a thing of the past, much like black-and-white
photography. This reading by historical hindsight assumes
desegregation to be a foregone conclusion. But rather than
confirm the narrative of the inevitable march of justice
already hinted at in the layout of The Times cover page,
these photographs open up a contested moment: they depict a reality that is viewed in such incompatible ways by
the people pictured that they show not just a specific event
but a representation of the world as the infinite plurality
of life-worlds created by people with different agendas and
seen from different viewpoints. I would argue that it was
this dimension of these photographstheir way of showing the uncontainable plurality of the world beyond The
Times effort to fit them into a precise storythat unwittingly prompted Hannah Arendt to write her essay.
At the moment when these photographs were printed
the struggle had not yet been won, the issue had not yet
been resolved. The Supreme Court would have to revisit
the issues of Brown vs. Board of Education in several cases
to quicken the desegregation of schools, and end other
instances of discrimination in housing, transportation,
employment, and marriage. It was not until 1966 that
the Court declared laws against interracial marriage to be
unconstitutional; as the 45th US President Barack Obama
poignantly noted during his Inaugural Address in 2009,
his parents could not have legally married in the state of
Virginia at the time of his birth.
The struggle is not over. Dramatic inequalities in
education continue to exist for children from differ-
213
214
14
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up to everyone and that despite all differences between men and their positions in the worldand
consequently their doxai [opinions]both you
and I are human.16
219
16
220
17
Hannah Arendt, The
Human Condition. Chicago,
The University of Chicago
Press, 1998: 57.
18
Ibid.
19
Seeing
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It is a mistake to assume
that the majority of Americas population had been
white at the time shortly
after the Republics founding. The first US census in
1790 shows that in a total
population of 3,929,214
there were 757,208 Blacks
(19.3%) including 59,150
free African Americans.
20
21
222
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22
224
know how and from what position they will be seen. Arendt thought that black Americans were too visible. But
the real problem was that the white Americans who opposed integration refused to acknowledge that they could
be seen from another position. This is our world, they proclaimed in so many ways, because we see it this way. But
the photographs printed in The Times, Ebony, Look, Life,
and other media outlets during the late 1950s introduce
the possibility of another vantage point. They located the
navel of America elsewhere, in a space produced jointly
by an ever-swelling army of freelance photographers bent
on capturing the plurality of our nation. In many of these
images the photographers position marks the elsewhere
from which people are seen and which nobody, whether
white or black, can fully assume.23
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24
226
still today, half a century after these struggles were documented in photographs, there remain schools with
nearly all black or white student bodies, and such enormous discrepancies in funding and achievement that a
fully integrated education system is far from a reality.
It is a goal yet to be achieved, but not something that
anybody in these pictures could see from a position
outside of the events.
Photography, then, assumes a particular role in the
struggles over the integration of various worlds into a
shared social space. Photographs reveal the presence of
many worlds from a position that cannot be assumed
by any of the actors within it. Clearly the photographers intentions and their framing of each image shape
the viewers perspective. But because photography preserves a given scene for future viewing without revealing what happens next, it allows the future to shine the
light of possibility on the pictured scene.
Photography does not lift a veil of ignorance from the
world and permit us, as contemporary viewers, to gaze
neutrally at a scene that was divided into different worlds
for its respective inhabitants. Instead, photographs place
us in a position that remains fundamentally unattainable otherwise, even after the passage of time, whether by
imagination, empathy, or solidarity. The cameras technical program, which is never completely identical to any
photographers intention or point of view, affords us a position that remains beyond reach. The Civil Rights movement achieved tremendous victories for all Americans.
But when we look at images from that period we look at
the events from a position that does not afford a complete
view of the various life-worlds captured in these photographs. We see white students and black students, and
guardsmen and chaperones trying to keep them apart or
bring them together. But our position is not attainable by
any one person or group in the image. We see them from
a place that they cannot know since it is the position of an
undecided future, rather than the smug perch of historical
hindsight. For a moment, photography reminds us that
there is a place in the world from which we are seen, but
which we do not ourselves know.
The people surrounding Elizabeth Eckford and Doro-
Seeing
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thy Counts were fully aware that there were cameras all
around. Most remarkable about the boys faces in the
mob surrounding Dorothy Counts is their lack of
awareness that their behavior could be condemned.
They look downright innocent in their cruel jesting.
They posed for these images, and yet in this posing
they failed to imagine that they could be seen from
a position not governed by their world-view. In fact,
they imagined themselves fully visible in the sense that
nothing about them couldnt be seen. But it is precisely
the fact that they could be seen from a position not
imagined by them that turns them blind, blind to the
Photograph by Douglas
Martin. Image courtesy of
the Associated Press.
228
25
In Eduardo Cadavas
words, the failure to read
a photograph amounts to
the failure to recognize the
noncontemporaneity of
the present, the absence of
linearity in the representation of historical time, and
therefore the fugacity of
the past and the present.
See Cadava, The Image, A
Monster of Time, in Time
Expanded, ed. Sergio Mah.
Madrid, LaFabrica, 2010:
31.
26
Arendt, The Public and
the Private Realm, from Vita
Activa, in The Portable Hannah Arendt 200.
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27
230
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young man on the other side of the bench elicits a current of interest as if his presence, sprawled comfortably in his neat khakis on the bench, could twitch this
28
232
29
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30
234
31
32
Siegfried Kracauer,
Photography, in Alan
Trachtenberg, Classic Essays
on Photography. New Haven,
Leetes Island Books, 1980:
265.
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33
34
236
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