Overreach

A problem which infests a great deal of tha academy, but which is absolutely SOP in the photographic academy, is that of intellectual overreach. Let us examine a case!

Here we have a couple pictures:

The one on the left is a detail from the Normal Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges being escorted to school as part of a desegregation effort in New Orleans, in 1960. The painting itself was published in 1964. The picture on the right is US Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, with her shadow digitally replaced (by graphic designer Bria Goeller) with a "shadow" derived, obviously, from the painting.

The model for the original painting was Lynda Gunn, who was a local girl handy for Rockwell's work (to say nothing of the fact that Bridges was a couple years older by the time he was painting.) The shadow is several steps removed from Ruby Bridges, but we should agree neverthless that it represents her.

You can see Bridges in this photo:

Ok, so let's think about this picture on the right there. There's a juxtaposition of an iconic image, broadly recognizable, of a notional "first" for black girls, black people with a photograph of a real person who is also in the throes of another "first" for black women, black people. Yes, it's true, we've never had a non-white, or a non-male, Vice President in my country.

The juxtaposition is probably inarguable. One might not recognize one or another of the figures, but once they're identified, the juxtaposition is clearly deliberate and the intention of equating them in at least some loose sense is difficult to escape. We should probably take "Kamala Harris is like Ruby Bridges" as read. As with any analogy, we can expect it to be imperfect, although we can likewise expect anyone with an axe to grind to jump on any imperfections in the analogy.

There was a Tweet Thread by Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD (who is a health services professional) which has been applauded by the usual blowhards. Summarized into what I feel are the salient parts, it goes like this:

Absolutely not.

I'll spell out what's wrong here:
  - Ruby Bridges is still alive, & she's writing her story
  - This ahistorical iconography freezes her in time as a child, & creates a false temporal (& moral) distance to call upon narratives of "progress"

Ruby Bridges is 66 years old, and she comes from the same town that my maternal family members were born in.
She is close in age to my mother. And she is only 10 years older than Kamala Harris.
And, again, she is writing her story

The middle bit, where Ruby Bridges is "frozen in time as a child" is exactly the kind of intellectual overreach that the academy so loves. It sounds so convincing, right? It's this big fruity sentence that sounds powerful and whatnot, but if you look too closely at it, you realize that it's just gibberish.

In no meaningful way has Ruby Bridges been frozen in time. This is a picture, it can't actually freeze people. Sure, I know that it's not about literally encasing people in ice, rather that it does something culturally to make us visualize Ruby Bridges eternally as a child. Ok, sure, that could be a thing. Insofar as it is a thing, though, it is Rockwell's painting that does it..

There is no way that making a connection between Bridges in 1960 with Harris in 2020 has the effect of, culturally, psychologically, literally, whatever, freezing Bridges into that 1960 role. If anything, the opposite. I suppose you could make that case that by dragging the child-figure forward in time to the present there's something? Nothing that I can really articulate, though, and it's a damned tenuous effect if it exists at all.

Normal human beings have come to terms with the fact that a picture of a little girl in 1960 probably doesn't look a lot like her now. People get that people in pictures live on after the picture, and sometimes have full and rich lives. People get that kids who appear in paintings grow up.

As for the "ahistorical iconography" I can't even. It's iconography sure, in that it's a friggin' picture, but there's nothing ahistorical about it. It's absolutely historical. The analogy between Bridges and Harris is not perfect, but it ain't bad. It's totally reasonable to place those two next to one another. These are two events that actually happened, and there are historically relevant similarities between them.

My take on this is that what Planey is interested in here is to read into the picture a narrative of "progress," and then to contest that narrative. You could certainly see it as "in 1960 we'd just managed to get into elementary schools, and in 2020 we're getting into the White House!" if you liked, as therefore a narrative of progress.

You could also see it as the far more neutral "this thing is like that thing" and leave it there. Both work fine. Planey, and the usual blatherers, are very much in love with the idea that there has been no progress, so they very much want to spike any narratives that they see as teaching that progress has occurred.

Well, OK, I guess.

Not everyone agrees with the "no progress" story, though to be completely fair, the "no progress" story is also pretty broadly repeated in one form or another. I contend that it's not completely insane to propose that elementary schools, followed by the Vice Presidency is in fact progress, of a sort. It's among the reasonable ideas in play.

Anyways, what we have here is an extension of a fairly straightforward picture into the realm of, ultimately, personal politics. What Dr. Planey thinks when she sees this picture is not, in the end, a definitive or even particularly insightful analysis of the picture. She sees a pretty innocuous picture with a pretty simple and innocuous meaning and chooses to read it through the lens of her politics, a lens so powerful that it largely obliterates the picture leaving only the politics behind.

Now, you're allowed to do that, obviously. You can make whatever meaning you like out of a picture. That Dr. Planey chooses this meaning is not something I care to contest, and she's welcome to it. It is the doltish acceptence of this singular, and fairly idiosyncratic, reading as the "correct" one that I object to.

This is the kind of overreach the blatherers so love. Everything is merely grist for their mill, everything is, essentially, a restatement of whatever their politics are. No reading, however outré, is out of bounds if it supports one's politics. Which, unfortunately, reduces "analysis" and "criticism" to simple recapitulations of personal political positions.

Which, once you know what their politics are, becomes a little repetitive.