Anonymous, Portrait of Henri IV, 17th century.
(picture credit 8.2)
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Henri IV Receiving the Ambassador of Spain, 1817.
(picture credit 8.3)
If photo editors can seem a little defeated, it is because they have daily to confront the fact that the photographs demanded and paid for by their industry almost always fall into the first, cheaper and less useful of these two categories.
2.
A SIMILAR DICHOTOMY between images that corroborate and ones that reveal can be found in the fine arts, and particularly in portraiture and history paintings. We might compare, for instance, two rather different pictures of Henri IV, king of France. In the first, by an unknown seventeenth-century painter, the monarch looks kindly, stiff and opaque. We can take it on faith that this is a fair enough likeness, but the portrait does little to enhance our knowledge of the king’s nature. Contrast this with an early-nineteenth-century painting by Ingres in which Henri is shown sprawled on the floor with his children, pretending to be a horse or perhaps a donkey. On the left side of the canvas, the Spanish ambassador has just arrived to see him, but the king is asking for a few minutes more to finish his game. Ingres’s image goes beyond just confirming that Henri existed and that he had a beard: it invites us to consider a statesman’s soul.
3.
EVERY GREAT NEWS image should likewise enrich our otherwise deficient and prejudiced pictures of reality.
Stephanie Sinclair, Tahani and Ghada, Yemen, 2010.
(picture credit 8.4)
For example, I thought I knew about child marriages, but until I saw a photograph taken by Stephanie Sinclair, I had never realized that the young brides involved aren’t really children. Marriage swiftly turns them into diminutive old ladies, with expressions at once resigned, solemn, betrayed and infinitely sad. In tandem, their husbands are not the mature brutes I imagined them to be. They look guileless, innocent and confused, seemingly still children themselves. It is almost beyond imagining that these poignant, absurd, cursed pairs of spouses could even begin to offer each other comfort.
Manu Brabo, A Syrian Man Cries While Holding the Body of His Son, Killed by the Syrian Army, near Dar El Shifa Hospital in Aleppo, Syria, 2012.
(picture credit 8.5)
I thought I knew that war wasn’t generally a good idea and that innocents sometimes got killed in crossfire, but I didn’t realize quite how much I also believed in every attempt at diplomacy and quite how much I wouldn’t mind if some rather important strategic interests were lost so long as war could be avoided – and fathers didn’t have to mourn their blood-soaked sons.
Stuart Franklin, Streetlife, Kinshasa, 2004.
(picture credit 8.6)
I thought I knew about the world, but I realize now that despite the countless photos I have seen and the many publications I have read, I retain barely a single image in my imagination of most countries around our planet. I struggle to summon up any visual associations whatsoever with Chile or Peru, I have no clue what Burundi or Niger looks like, I can’t picture Burkina Faso or the Solomon Islands – and so I am fascinated by a photograph that at least teaches me that in Kinshasa shops sell household goods, people speak French (‘Vente des Appareils Electroménager’) and young men, whatever troubles they may have seen, still know something about laughter and play.
Pete Souza, President Barack Obama Pretends to Be Caught in Spider-Man’s Web as He Greets the Son of a White House Staffer in the Outer Oval Office, 2012.
(picture credit 8.7)
I thought I knew about President Obama, too, because I have seen him in a great many photographs giving speeches against the backdrop of the presidential eagle. I knew that he was capable of faking certain things to get elected, but I didn’t realize that he could also, in his better moments, fake a thing or two to please a child. I therefore stare for a long time at an image taken by the White House staff photographer, Pete Souza, thinking that Obama, like his counterpart Henri IV four centuries back, may be at his most touchingly powerful precisely when he lets himself be the playmate of a child.
4.
AS READERS OF news stories, we have seen so many bad photographs that it is unlikely even to occur to us that it might be rewarding occasionally to stop and look properly at a few of their good counterparts. It would seem bizarre to interrupt the reading of an article in order to contemplate an accompanying image for as long as we might study a painting in a museum – say, thirty seconds or more – and with an expectation of learning something distinctive. We have lost any sense of photography’s potential as an information-bearing medium, as a force with a crucial job to do in terms of properly introducing us to a planet that we keep conceitedly and recklessly assuming that we know rather well already.
IV.
Economics
M2 and Utopia
South Korea’s M2, a narrow measure of the money supply, rose 4.6 percent on-year to 1,827.3 trillion won in October, slowing from a 5.2 percent on-year gain in September, according to the Bank of Korea (BOK). On a seasonally adjusted basis, the country’s M2 grew 0.2 percent in October from the previous month, picking up from a 0.1 percent on-month gain in September. South Korea’s liquidity aggregate, the broadest measure of the money supply, grew 7.8 percent in October from the previous year, down from the 8.9 percent on-year gain in September, the BOK added.
Yonhap News, Korea
1.
IN ITS MORE serious moods, the news seeks to explain the world to us, which means attempting to sift through the dramas, hyperbole and clamour of every new day in order to direct our attention to the handful of developments that could turn out truly to matter. There is so much we might find engaging (a couple has jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge; several bits of Tasmania are on fire; a Mexican industrialist has shot and killed a rival), but what in the news is really worth focusing on?
We are the inheritors of an idea, endorsed by both the right and the left wings of the political spectrum, that the most fundamental reality of nations is their financial state – and that economic reporting should therefore be recognized as the most important facet of all news output.
2.
IN THE MORE ambitious news outlets, our eyes are regularly directed towards a variety of key indicators on the economic dashboard, including the money supply (M1, M2, MZM), central bank reserves, factory orders, the consumer price index (CPI), building permits, jobless claims, the deficit, the national debt and, most significantly of all, the GDP.
The numbers can be disorientating. To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re-envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test, whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base, where it really counts, a creatinine level of 3.2, a lactate dehydrogenase of 927, a leukocyte (per field) of 2 and a C-reactive protein of 2.42.
Like blood to a human, money is to the state the constantly circulating, life-giving medium in which some of the most telling data about the future is carried in encoded forms. Sampling it is the task of the great government financial labs: the Office of National Statistics in Britain, the Department of Commerce in the United States, L’Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques in France and the National Statistical Office of South Korea. Every week, their statisticians will survey the economy; in the UK alone, taking in data from 6,000 companies in the manufacturing sector, 25,000 service firms, 5,000 retailers, 10,000 construction businesses and 4,000 government projects in agriculture, energy, health and education. With gigantic computers helping them to process their harvest of information, the statisticians will publish some astonishingly abbreviated yet deeply resonant findings. The GDP figures might, for example, inform us that the financial value of all work done across the entire country over the previous quarter had risen 1.1 per cent or (heaven forbid) dropped 0.5 per cent, figures beneath which will lie tens of thousands of meetings, anxieties, quandaries, ploys, boardroom discussions, early morning commutes, sackings, initiatives, launches and disappointments, all now harnessed to and confined within a mere two digits.