Seeing the Future in an Image from the Past

SEEING THE FUTURE IN AN IMAGE FROM THE PAST

HANNAH ARENDT, GARRY WINOGRAND, AND PHOTOGRAPHING THE WORLD

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.

Early on September 5, 1957, in an apartment building in Morningside Heights, New York City, the world arrived at the doorstep to Han-nah Arendts post-war American home in the form of The New York Times. Arendt stared at the face of a black girl, in a black dress adorned with a long white ribbon down its center, surrounded by a taunting, menacing, jeering white mob. A photograph that would make his-tory, the picture of Dorothy Counts in the newspapers [was] the point of departure of [Arendts] reflections on the question of race in America. Triggered by look-ing at this image by Douglas Martin, Arendt would write in the essay Reflections on Little Rock that the young womans face bore eloquent witness to the ob-vious fact that she was not precisely happy.1 Regret-tably, the image in the newspapers which brought the reality of racism into Arendts home and prompted her to engage with the affairs of the world only resulted in a deeply flawed and highly controversial argument where Arendt failed to see how the world was set up to the detriment of some and the advantage of others.

In spite of her immediate, almost impulsively em-pathic response to this photograph and one taken the same day by Jack Jenkins of another young black

Seeing the Future in an image From the PaSt 201

student, Elizabeth Eckford, the truth of these images remained all but invisible to Arendt. But her failure, I would contend, results not only from her much-criticized narrow interpretation of the legal concepts of private rights of congregation and public rights to education; Arendt missed, as this essay will explain, nothing less but the promise of the future held in all photography.

As eloquent witness to black suffering at the hands of the white racist mob, Dorothy Counts face was the punctum of Arendts s analysis, that detail of the image that due to its poignancy pricked and bruised Arendt, what she could not simply dismiss and discard with the rest of the morning paper on September 5, 1957.2 The picture stuck in her mind, and it took all of her mental prowess to ultimately erase and bury this original wound in a legalistic argument that failed to address the lived reality of black Americans. Unless we show why and how she failed to see these photographs, however, her flawed thinking might persist or others might overlook the import of similar photographs in a similar vein. It is possible to pursue Arendts original instinct and, against her conclusions, bring the faces of both Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford back to light. Strangely, however, it is precisely by drawing on some of Arendts categories that we may honor pho-tographys eloquent witness to the heroism of the Civil Rights movement.

THE CONTROVERSY OVER ARENDTS ESSAYArendts Reflections on Little Rock was published in Dissent with several months delay, as the editors dis-agreed with Arendts views. The essay unleashed a fire-storm from critics who objected to Arendts opinion that education is a private rather than a political right, and that school desegregation was not a matter to be ordered by the courts.3 Arendt made a case against the court-ordered racial integration of Southern schools which she viewed as a (private) matter of free associa-tion, rather than a (political) matter of equality. Ar-endt also criticized the use of children by their guard-ians and activists for political ends. As if to compensate for what she regarded as a failure in parenting, Arendt

2 Ibid. 27. On the notion of the punctum (that dimension of the photograph that is not encoded, and affects the viewer due to his or her experience), see Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981.

3 A veritable cottage industry of Arendt critics has sprung up around the controversial essay, with very few men-tions of the role of photogra-phy in it. An important dis-cussion is found in Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Educa-tion. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.

202 The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Volume 55

inserted herself into the position of the students care-taker: 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 po-litical struggle in which children have no part. After this initial empathic reaction to the photograph, which also prompted Arendt to view the struggle over equal-ity as a generational issue between parents and their children, Arendt dispassionately argued that school de-segregation 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

But Arendts solidarity did not lead her to demand an end to school segregation as demanded by Civil Rights leaders and her intellectual peers. She had experienced anti-Semitic harassment as a Jewish schoolgirl in pre-war German territory.6 But her empathic identification with the black girl in the photograph was ultimately eclipsed by her intellectual opposition to the legal en-forcement of school desegregation.7

Arendt responded to some of her critics in print but it took several pointed letters from novelist Ralph Waldo El-lison for her to eventually change her mind. Ellison admon-ished Arendt for failing to grasp the complexity of growing up as a black American and faulted the political theorist for not understanding the world in which she lived. American blacks, Ellison instructed Arendt, do not use their children when they enroll them in previously white schools as a form of social climbing, as Arendt had superciliously suggested.

She has absolutely no conception of what goes on in the mind of Negro parents when they send their kids through that line of hostile people. Yet they are aware of the overtones of a rite of initiation which such events actually constitute for the child, a confrontation of the terrors of social life with all the mysteries stripped away. And in the outlook

4 Arendt, 1959: 244.

5 Ibid. 232.6 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, 19391964. 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. Dif-

fering from her response to Ellisons critique of Little

Rock, Arendt did not budge from her position that clear thinking must not be mud-

died by emotions during the polemical campaign attack-ing Eichmann in Jerusalem.


of many of these parents (who wish the problem didnt exist), the child is expected to face the terror and contain his fear and anger precisely because he is a Negro American. Thus hes required to master the inner tensions created by his racial situation, and if he gets hurtthen his is one more sacrifice.8

After Ellisons rejoinders, in a rare instance where she al-lowed herself to be corrected, Arendt revoked her views on school segregation. She recognized that her divi-sions 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 po-litical thought.9 Instead, I want to show that when Arendt was moved to think by a photograph she in-advertently pointed to the particular and irreducible role that photography offers to an understanding of the world beyond thread-bare political definitions. Ar-endt had provided a useful definition of the world, but Dorothy Counts countenance tripped up her think-ing. 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, intellec-tual opposition.

THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE

I think no one will find it easy to forget the pho-tograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, ac-companied by a white friend of her father, walking away from school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters.10

Arendt assumed that all viewers would be equally com-pelled 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

8 Ralph Waldo Ellison, in Robert Penn Warren, ed., Who Speaks for the Negro? New York, Random House, 1965: 344.

9 Arendt devoted much of her later work on a theory of judgment that deconstructed this opposition. See Eliza-beth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006.

10 Arendt, 1959: 236.


into bodily proximity. This immediate response to an image was directly in keeping with the Civil Rights leaderships strategy of using photographs to shape public opinion.11 In the 1950s the Civil Rights leader-ship realized that many northerners, including gener-ally well-disposed and progressive people like Hannah Arendt, considered the color question or race ques-tion (Arendt uses both terms) to be a southern prob-lem. Many northerners like Arendt refused to visit the South as a form of passive disapproval of Jim Crow re-alitiesand as a convenient way to avoid confronting a reality they could criticize from afar. The Civil Rights leadership realized the power of photographs to eclipse that distance and bring the struggle of American blacks into the homes and minds of northern whites. They understood that [photography] was also an adept mes-senger of ideas, able to illuminate the causes and effects of a problem, give a human face to abstract thoughts, and illustrate complex realities.12 They considered photographs of well-dressed black children, stoically enduring the victimization of white mobs and south-ern policemen, to be particularly effective. In 1955 the mother of Emmett Till, a teenage boy from Chicago who had been brutally lynched by whites while visit-ing his family in Mississippi, decided to allow major magazines to print images of her sons mutilated body. The images prompted outrage and sparked political ur-gency among many viewers. The appearance of photo-graphs of children in the school desegregation struggle was part of an explicit campaign to sway people like Arendt, who had refused to see the racism that they imagined occurred only very far away. Photography put white viewers closer to the position of Dorothy Counts being followed into bodily proximity by a hostile mob.

But Arendt, after experiencing it as a call to con-science, ultimately viewed this news photograph in direct opposition to the effort to end school segre-gation. Photographs, as this makes clear, can sup-port diametrically opposing views on the same situ-ation. Thus Arendt, the Civil Rights leaders, and many Americans including some of the individuals

11 See Julian Cox, Bearing Witness: Photography and

the Civil Rights Movement, in Road to Freedom: Pho-

tographs of the Civil Rights Movement 19561968.

Atlanta, High Museum of Art, 2008: 1946.

12 Maurice Berger, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Human

Rights. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010: 111.


shown in the images, disagreed fundamentally on the meaning of these photographs. Once she had re-covered from being bruised by Counts eloquent face, Arendt viewed the figure of Dorothy Counts as a minor whom she could protect from a political reality beyond her control by first imagining herself first in the role of Counts mother, then in the role of the white students mothers, and finally as a politi-cal theorist. But for Arendt this meant recommend-ing that Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford be kept out of the schools where they would be exposed to the mob. She failed to read in these images that Counts and Eckford, even prior to the forced deseg-regation of schools, were already embedded in the world of politics. Americans lived as political beings long before reaching adulthood, even if adulthood remained for Arendt a criterion for full participation in the public sphere.

Arendt regarded these photographs as direct re-sults of the court order to integrate the schools. She was not entirely wrong: the events shown in these photographs resulted from a concerted cam-paign, including legal maneuvers, to get these is-sues to the Supreme Court and turn desegregation into a national cause. But Arendt erred in think-ing that without court orders such scenes would not have occurred: the camera only brought to light what was already happening all over America, what most of white America, like Arendt, wanted to keep in the dark.

What remains perplexing in Arendts inability to read these images is that she had created some con-ceptual tools that could have prevented such a glar-ing failure. Arendt had developed several concepts and categories that greatly aid in a more general un-derstanding of photography beyond the example of these pictures. If Arendt had applied these concepts of world, visibility, and the in-between to the im-ages of Elizabeth Eckford and Dorothy Counts, she would have discerned something remarkable in these two photographs.


The New York Times, cover page, September 5, 1957.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Fur-ther reproduction prohibited

without permission.


THE MEDIAS USE OF PHOTOGRAPHSThe dresses. These wonderfully proper, carefully sewn, knee-length dresses. I imagine Elizabeth Eckfords beautiful white dress with a pale pink trim, and I see her standing with her mother in a fabric store in down-town Birmingham, fingering the checkered pink mus-lin while an amply bosomed, gum-chewing, and termi-nally bored saleswoman stands by with a wooden ruler in hand. Zip, the saleswoman slides the shears through the bolt of salmon-colored fabric to mothers precise instructions, and a few minutes later with a bit of bounce in their steps for having made such a fine pur-chase mother and daughter leave the store. Elizabeth spends long evenings tracing, marking, cutting, stitch-ing and finally sewing a dress after a pattern in Womans Digest. At the swiftly approaching end of the sweltering Alabama summer, even her father takes an interest in the cut, design and color of the dress, his eyes passing over the cloth which his daughter has chosen to face the nations fundamental self-contradiction of simul-taneously legislating liberty and inequality. The official letter admitting her to Central High School rests in an envelope in the kitchen, its crease deepened from repeated un-foldings.

You will be the most beautiful girl in school, her aunt says when Elizabeth shows off the finished white and pink dress on a hot August afternoon. Unspoken is the fact that she will be one of only eight African-American students in the white high school, the boys in white shirts and dress pants, the girls in dresses, all carrying their books and the mountainous burden of representing an entire race.

While Elizabeth is getting ready on the morning of September 4, 1957, several tense and exhausted com-munity leaders in another part of Little Rock fear vio-lence upon seeing the mob that has formed outside the school. After some deliberations they telephone the eight admitted African-American students homes to call off the planned integration for that day. Seven of them stay home. Only Elizabeth Eckfords parents do not own a phone and, as agreed upon so as not to pro-voke violence, send their daughter to school without an


13 Interview with Dorothy Counts on the 50th an-

niversary of her first day at Harding High School, 2007.

Available on youtube.com.

adult chaperone. She arrives alone, is denied entry by armed soldiers, and is ultimately rescued from a threat-ening and increasingly hysterical mob by a journalist who helps her onto a public bus. Her courageous at-tempt that morning is chronicled by the national me-dia as a milestone in Americas slow and sacrificial path to social justice.

On the same day some 800 miles to the North in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dorothy Counts decides to add a bit of style in the form of a long white ribbon to the maroon gingham dress that she made from the de-signs of a different issue of Womens Digest. After the first horrible day, so much worse than anything she had expected, Dorothys mind is focused only on getting through this ordeal. The white ribbon flutters around her neck (though she will not surrender!) and she strides forward, out of the school and away from this pack of wolves in the form of school boys that shes seen many times around town. Her teeth are clenched in anger, determination, and fear. She had made a choice to put herself in the middle of this scene and yet she was un-prepared. Dorothy Counts remembers that day:

It was a choice, but there had not been a plan at place here at Harding [High School]. If there had been a plan in place some of the things that hap-pened to me wouldnt have happened.13

By Friday of the first week, Dorothy withdraws from Harding High, where no authority figure will vouch for her safety, Her fathers explanation is that it is with compassion for our native land and love for our daughter Dorothy that we withdraw her as a student at Harding High School. Dorothy Counts moves to Pennsylvania to finish high school.

Counts and Eckfords brave acts that day would ul-timately be seen as important victories among the many skirmishes, setbacks, and deaths in the bloody struggle for justice and equality in America. They both knew that they had stepped into a media-prepared political drama. Regardless of the outcome of their actions, their pictures traveled the country and the world. And pre-cisely because neither Counts nor Eckford could know the extent of their role in this historical moment, their


Detail, The New York Times, cover page, September 5, 1957. Images courtesy of the Associated Press


photographs contain something that is yet to be seen. As for the dress, Counts cannot bear to even lay eyes on it; it will only live on in these black-and-white pho-tographs, its white ribbon and maroon fabric carefully folded in tissue paper and packed in a box not to be opened for years.

On the cover of The New York Times, September 5, 1957, the two photographs of school desegregation were vertically aligned. This layout told a particular story about the forced implementation of the Supreme Courts 1955 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The top photograph showed Elizabeth Eckford being blocked from following a white student into Central High School by National Guardsmen in Little Rock, Arkansas on the first day of school. The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, had defied federal orders of school desegregation, and ultimately prompted Presi-dent Eisenhower to send in federal troops: this became the lead story in The New York Times that day. The bot-tom photograph showed Dorothy Counts surrounded by a jeering mob of young men and boys in Charlotte, North Carolina on the first day of school.

The Times organized these two photographs, taken in the moments before and after school that day, into a single story that played itself out over several days. What gets lost in this story, however, is the instant when two young women are at the brink of stepping into worlds to which they were denied access. These steps are also metaphors of the steps that America had not yet taken toward either freedom or the continuation of inequal-ity. And with these step the world was transformed from within, transformed in ways that nobody in these photographs could fully imagine, though everyone in these pictures inhabits the same physical space. The photographs let us see the same physical space, but it is seen in radically incompatible ways by the people in the image. For us today, this incommensurability in the same shot turns these photographs into images not just of political conflict, but into photographs of the world itself. For the world is nothing but our latent aware-ness that we all see reality from different perspectives, and that this reality never coincides completely with


the physical space around us, nor to our own way of looking at it from just a single point of view.

The Times, in the interest of telling a story, laid out the images as illustrations. The top photograph in The Times, shot by Jack Jenkins, begins the story of deseg-regation as a potentially violent conflict between state and federal powers. Visually, it is a scene of strict de-marcation by force: all four individuals are shown at an instant when they are spatially isolated from one anotherthe armed Guardsmen, the black student being barred, the white student who has been permit-ted to cross the barrier. The picture subtly evokes the armed conflict of the Civil War when a hundred years earlier the United States was nearly torn apart by the Southern states refusal to follow federal directives. By way of its composition the photograph assigns to the black student, the white student, and the guardsmen in profile (none of whom face the camera head-on) the roles of actors in a historical drama that exceeds their individual actions. The soldiers in the background and the military trucks add to the pictures overall mood that these individuals are caught up in a drama beyond their control.

The bottom photograph continues this story. Taken at the end of the day and selected by the Times edi-tors from several images shot by Douglas Martin dur-ing Dorothys first arduous day at school, it suggests that the struggle over schooling may yet be resolved. But it focuses concretely on the costs incurred by black students who are supposed to benefit from this victory: Dorothy Counts and her chaperone march toward the photographer and it is a scene of private citizens, rather than uniformed soldiers, in conflict. The photographer chose a moment when the individuals were arranged in a way such that the threatening mob, blocking literal and political progress, looked as if it were already past.

The Times vertical top-to-bottom sequence tells a story through these photographs before anyone has read the article printed on the papers right. The top photograph, with the soldiers standing guard, warns that desegregation might trigger a rift in the Union reminiscent of the Civil War; but the bottom photo-


graph assures viewers that progress, embodied by Dor-othy 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 flut-ters 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 in-dividual 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 Eck-ford 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 vio-lent 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


white students, The Times suggests that these men are ev-erymanthat they, in their nameless omnipresence, con-stitute 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 igno-rance, 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 de-pict 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 show-ing the uncontainable plurality of the world beyond The Times effort to fit them into a precise storythat unwit-tingly 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-


ent racial backgrounds, and there are other struggles yet to be won, in schools, in the streets, in city halls, in police precincts, and in the courts. Each victory or defeat changes the landscape of political struggle in unexpected ways, because nothing less than the entire world is at stake in such fights, if we understand the world as the reality that people see from radically dif-ferent perspectives. No single victory in the struggle to change the world results in a unified perspective from which everyone sees reality in the same way.

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL CONTEXTUpon seeing these pictures, Hannah Arendt thought she had grasped it all. The pictures show the situation in a nutshell because those who appeared in it were di-rectly affected by the Federal Court order, the children themselves.14 Indeed, the situation appears to us today as if it fit into a thimble. In Southern states whites did not want blacks to attend the same schools as their chil-dren but the federal government thought such a stance was incompatible with constitutional rights. So what did Arendt get wrong?

It turns out that no amount of historical context, in the form of newspaper accounts, eyewitness testimo-nies, or legal documents can fully explain these images. This is because these photographs, contrary to a com-mon understanding of photography shared by Arendt, do not show the past as frozen. The moments of time captured here do not become fully comprehensible by consulting the historical context through other sourc-es. Instead these images keep open several outcomes that never unfoldedin the sense of the future as the dimension of hope and promise itselfrather than documenting the particular story that we now know as history. These photographs offer no indication of what might happen before or after. Indeed the two images lead to different futures, since Elizabeth Eckford could not enter school on the first day but ultimately gradu-ated from Central High, while Dorothy Counts with-drew after four unbearable days and moved to another state.

The images also do not freeze time in the historical past. The photographs of Elizabeth Eckford and Dor-

14 Arendt, 1959: 244.


othy Counts do not settle the question about school segregation and declare the court-ordered integration a failure or success. I am not viewing these photographs as proof that Arendt was wrong; instead I read these pictures as preserving the possibility of an unimagined futurewhich is precisely that dimension of photog-raphy that no amount of contextualized knowledge or historical hindsight can provide.

In her analysis Arendt relied on a conventional un-derstanding of photography as offering up frozen sliv-ers of the past. But this still prevalent conception of photography limits images to the role of capturing the past and drains the potential for an alternative future from these images. Photographs, contrary to this domi-nant understanding, do not only capture the living as already deadthey do not simply freeze the past, but keep the present open to different outcomes beyond the depicted moment. The historical context accounts for one such outcome; the inevitable death of the de-picted subjects at some future time is another. But these are not the only ones. Each photograph exposes us to the very possibility of the future rather than simply lead-ing us to outcomes that are known from other sources.

Thus the photograph of Dorothy Counts pursued by the white mob shows more than a frozen moment from the past. It does not lock in the past but opens up the future still nesting inside that image as its unre-deemed, unrealized potential. Photography captures an excess of time, or time as excessive to a single moment. From within the picture Dorothy Counts looks out at us, and no matter how much we want this image to sig-nal a great step forward in the Civil Rights struggle her gaze wins out. Her eyes are focused not on the bright, desegregated future we presumably inhabit; her gaze is still searching, still today, for a spot just beyond us that trembles with an uncertainty, a hope, a fear and a con-fidence that we can only imagine.

None of the iconic photographs from the Civil Rights movement shut down these eyes. None of them show the end of segregation. Instead, each photo-graph shows a world that is in the process of changing from within itself into another world.


THE FUTURE NESTING IN AN IMAGEHerein lies the significance of these photographs. They document a past that is over, surely. But these photo-graphs also let us see how a long-gone moment, or a specific moment, could have led into a different pres-ent. These photographs preserve a particular moment in history but, more importantly, also the possibility of a different outcome. These photographs hold open the promise and the threat of a different future from the one weve come to accept as the present. These pictures are so powerful not because they document the past but because they keep open for the viewer the possibil-ity of another future. And it is this possibility to think of a different future, and to imagine the future differ-ently, that is the condition of political action.

To look at the Times photographs as historical docu-ments that chronicle a step toward the known outcome of our present negates their power. Even when dis-played on museum walls it negates these photographs power to allow us to imagine our history as other than inevitable, and by implication our present as other than ineluctable.

What is critical about photography is that it sus-pends and thus opens up timenot that it freezes it. Photographs allow the future to be imagined as a time worth waiting for, even if history went in a particular direction known to us today. If we accept the photo-graphs of Elizabeth Eckford and Dorothy Counts as chronicling moments in a long march to victory, we might momentarily feel superior to Arendts flawed understanding of the question of race in America. But when we regard these photographs as simply frozen moments from the by-gone past (including Arendts superseded views), we fail to see how uncertain the struggles outcome was, how enormous the sacrifice Dorothy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford endured, and how many of its visions went unredeemed. If we fail to see the images in this way, we betray the acts of Doro-thy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford, and we give up on hope itself.

The point of this essay is thus not to correct Arendts lapse in critical thinking. Ellison already achieved this.


Instead, by reinterpreting these images it is possible to allow the pasts undecided momentsof which Arendts lapse offers curious testimonyto inform and inspire actions in the present. Since photographs preserve a moment as radically open to a future yet unknown, they allow us to track the ways in which history evolved. History, when viewed from within a photograph, never appears as the inevitable succession of recorded events but as the result of forces and acts by individuals and groups.

So how do we view these photographs correctly? It is not enough to say that Arendt failed to read these images properly. These images teach us how the world, as the network of relations that allows us to establish meaning, does not coincide with our physical sur-roundings. These photographs reveal that there is no absolute relation between the world as the environ-ment around us and the shared worlds of meaning that are different for all of us.

In several works written before and after her mis-guided analysis of the events in Little Rock, Arendt provided concepts that are highly germane for an un-derstanding of photography. Especially in The Human Condition, Arendt adumbrated existing definitions of the world, particularly those developed by her teacher Martin Heidegger, by defining the conceptual pairs of visibility and obscurity, permanence and in-be-tween, and humanity and inhumanity. In addition, all of Arendts thinking about politics relies heavily on the notion of natality as the promise of a future make-up of the world that is not yet known to us, and on the figure of insertion as the possibility of mans action altering the course of the world. With these concepts Arendt provided the tools for understanding photog-raphy as a way of preserving the future. By relying on Arendts categories we can shed light on photographys relation to the world.

Regardless of the legal, political, educational and moral arguments for or against court-ordered desegre-gation, these photographs show Elizabeth Eckford and Dorothy Counts at the border of a world where they are unwanted. If it were up to the inhabitants of the


15 In terms of my under-standing of photogra-

phy (though not in my understanding of the

intellectuals task of critical reading) I here differ from

Ariella Azoulays claim that the space opened up in

photographs is the space of political relations between people. I think it is possible

for photographs to capture a space that is not governed by

political relations, and that photography challenges us

to imagine the possibility of relations rather than assume them. See Ariella Azoulays

important The Civil Contract of Photography. Cambridge,

MIT Press, 2008: 16.

white world of the South, these women would neither enter nor belong there, and Southern states indeed de-vised different methods of Massive Resistance to fed-erally ordered desegregation.

Photography powerfully registers such forms of ex-clusion from a world, some of which might be per-fectly benign. Something or someone is out of place, unwanted, unwelcome, scorned and rejected. A pho-tograph with apparent neutrality captures this extra-neous presence in the juxtaposition of people who do not seem to belong together: the shutter clicks, a scene is framed, and suddenly peoplesome of whom wouldnt want to be caught dead in the same placeare preserved in one spot, together forever. Thanks to the mediums capacity for capturing contingent objects without integrating them into a setting (as a painting would), photography most effectively exposes this state of non-belonging.

The photograph of Elizabeth Eckford being kept out of a social setting reveals the invisible limits of a particular world. But how do we define the visual space into which Eckford, Counts, the soldiers, and the screaming mob are placed? It is not an inherently neutral place, where all people may occupy the same positions at different times.15 But neither is it simply our physical environment.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE WORLDTo understand how there can be different worlds in the same picture, it is helpful to return to Arendt. Going back to Aristotle, Arendt defined the world as that which opens up to an individual without being either the product of that individuals personal imagining or fantasy, nor something absolute that is equally valid for everyone.

This doxa comprehended the world as it opens itself to me. It was not, therefore, subjective fantasy and arbitrariness, but also not something absolute and valid for all. The assumption was that the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it; and that the sameness of the world, its commonness or objectivity (as we would say from the subjective viewpoint of modern philoso-phy) resides in the fact that the same world opens


up to everyone and that despite all differences be-tween men and their positions in the worldand consequently their doxai [opinions]both you and I are human.16

The world is not someones personal invention, and yet it is also not something the individual receives from the collective. The world opens up to everybody dif-ferently, depending on his or her position in it. It is not the aspect of what in particular opens up, but this aspect of opening up to everyone differently and from a position that can never be occupied that constitutes the world. But somehow we all know that the same world opens up to us, despite these differences. This, accord-ing to Arendt, is what makes us human. But how do we know that the same world opens up to everyone from their respective position? Why not simply assume that one and the same worldwhich is my worldopens up the same way for everyone else?

In the context of the Civil Rights era photo-graphs, it seems that the whites in the photographs assumed that certain physical spaces, demarcat-ed with barriers and signs, were their world only. Eckford, Counts, and others viewed things differ-ently. They saw the same physical space differently as also the setting of their world. Since their world happened to be in the same location as the whites world, there was conflict. For Arendt, what makes us human is the awareness that others see the world open up from different positions but that this open-ing up of the world is the same for all. So where does the failure in the American South occur? Why dont the whites recognize that the world of the American South may open up differently for American blacks, but that ultimately the fact that it opens up at all obligates the whites to recognize the blacks as fully human with their attendant rights to fully partici-pate in that world?

The failure has something to do with the relation between visibility, recognition, and humanity. Before we turn to these concepts, let us consider another as-pect of Arendts definition of the world. The existence of a world, Arendt writes, depends on

16 Hannah Arendt, Philoso-phy and Politics, in Social Research 57, 1990: 80.


things [to be] seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those gath-ered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity.17

Put another way, the world is not the totality of our physical surroundings but instead the way in which we ascribe meaning to those surroundings as a whole. The sameness of the world is not reducible to its objec-tive reality or physical presence, but consists in the same experience of the world opening up to us in dif-ferent ways, depending on our position. Arendt calls the world the common meeting ground for all, where everyone occupies a different position.

The common meeting ground for all, those who are present [and] have different locations in it, and the location of one can no more coincide with the loca-tion of another than the location of two objects.18

Arendt stresses that the world opens up to being seen in a variety of aspects. It is neither the fact that we all coex-ist in one space, nor that we occupy different positions in this space, but the fact that we know that others see sameness in utter diversity. But it is not a matter of the actual seeing that is important here, for this could still lead me to assume that others see the world the same way as I do. What is critical is the experience of seeing the world, not the act of seeing something actual. We have an experience of seeing the world, and from this experi-ence we can infer that others have similar experiences, even if they exist in different locations. We know that others also see the world because they see us. This aware-ness that others see us is critical for an understanding of how different worlds can exist in the same space.

VISIBILITY AND HUMANITYIn the same essay where Arendt so blatantly failed to see what was happening in these two photographs, she emphasized the challenge posed to the very survival of the Republic of the [United States] by the way the Negroes stand out because of their visibility.19 Her claim rested on the erroneous and strange assumption that Americans all looked alikea strange assump-tion especially for a woman who had endured racial

19 Arendt, 1959: 233.

18 Ibid.

17 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. Chicago,

The University of Chicago Press, 1998: 57.


discrimination as a Jewish child in pre-war German territory.20 But let us consider her argument as a more general claim about the role that visibility plays in our experience of the world.

In this respect, [black Americans] somewhat re-semble new immigrants, who invariably constitute the most audible of all minorities and therefore are always the most likely to arouse xenophobic sentiments. But while audibility is a temporary phenomenon, rarely persisting beyond one genera-tion, the Negroes visibility is unalterable and per-manent. This is not a trivial matter. In the public realm, where nothing counts that cannot make it-self seen and heard, visibility and audibility are of prime importance. To argue that they are merely exterior appearances is to beg the question. For it is precisely appearances that appear in public, and inner qualities, gifts of heart or mind, are political only to the extent that their owner wishes to ex-pose them in public, to place them in the limelight of the market place The point at stake, [since equality is of greater importance in the political life of the republic than in any other form of govern-ment], is not the well-being of the Negro popula-tion alone, but, at least in the long run, the survival of the Republic.21

What is visible in the world attains political relevance only, Arendt here contends, once someone decides to exhibit it deliberately. What allows individuals to par-ticipate in the political and public life of our world is a matter of something becoming visible and thus being created, or emerging from a fundamental obscurity or invisibility. The visibility of black Americans, in Ar-endts flawed reasoning, is permanent; in her thinking blacks lack the possibility of emerging from a funda-mental obscurity (of not being political actors in the world) into visibility. They are visible whether they are engaged in a political activity or not, Arendt contends, because they already stand out. Other Americans, in Arendts view, can pass into the political arena by mak-ing their attributes known and noticed by becoming visible and recognized, and it is this process of becoming visible that matters for a democracy where citizens can play political roles.

Arendt failed to imagine an America where black-

20 It is a mistake to assume that the majority of Amer-icas population had been white at the time shortly after the Republics found-ing. 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.

21 Arendt, 1959: 233234.


ness might no longer be particularly visible but where the populations overall diversity makes everyone look equally distinctwhere everyone looks different, and therefore difference is no longer noticed. But the con-cept of visibility in Arendts thinking should hold our attention nonetheless.

For the world to be a space shared by all, some-thing about us has yet to become visible. This becom-ing-visible rests on the basic assumption that our fundamental humanity (our inner qualities rather than our actions in the world) is hidden to us, and that it depends on others for us to recognize it. Being human, for Arendt, and being in the world with oth-ers means not being fully visible in all of our qualities. Only by showing this obscured part of ourselves as something visible do we enter the world. For Arendt, black Americans do not lack inner qualities or human-ity (which would be the Southern racists claim), but in an America construed as homogeneously non-black they lack the possibility of entering into visibility. For this reason American blacks are deprived of the world that they inhabit with others in a deeper sense than being barred to enter places such as schools, hotels, or neighborhoods. The world beyond these particular locations is the common place where a persons invis-ibility can become visible through actionwhere we see each other, in all of our difference and potential disagreement, as different and therefore human. In a sense, we are invisible until we assume a position in the world, and only then, when we claim our position in the world as a position that nobody else can oc-cupy, do we become visible as fully human.

We live in the world precisely to the extent that we step from our private perceptions into what Arendt de-scribes as the common meeting ground shared as a world with others. The commonality of this world is nothing specific (it is not an objective reality) but is rather the possibility of becoming visible to others.

But we do not render ourselves visible to others: others see us regardless of all of our actions. This is as true for white as for black Americans, and Arendt fell prey to her own prejudiced belief that blacks are per-


manently visible in American public life. Visibility in the larger sense as world-constitutingand not simply as something that can be seenis not only a matter of rendering oneself visible. As Arendt writes, American blacks visibility is unalterable and permanent where-as any foreign immigrants audibility, in the form of ac-cented speech, disappears with successive generations. Arendt may be wrong about black Americans but she is right about the way visibility is not something we control. We may choose not to speak (and thus remain inaudible) but we know that we will be seen by others.

When we combine Arendts comments about vis-ibility with her thinking of the world, it becomes clear that the world is constantly opened to a position from which one is viewed and which one is not given in ad-vance. The world is anchored in that place from which we might be seen, but which we also know we can nev-er occupy. Being human in the world thus means being open to view from a place that is not our own. This place, in our modern world, is not a supra-historical or transcendent position but every possible location [that] can no more coincide with the location of anoth-er than the location of two objects.22 And it might just be that this position becomes most poignantly available to us as the place of the photograph.

With the aid of Arendts comments about the world and visibility, we can deduce that the world is the open-ness into which we are placed and where we can be seen. To be in the world means to be seen from a place we do not occupy. And being in the world means being aware that we cannot simply conquer that position, and then see ourselves, as it were, from the vantage point of someone else. The world is the common meeting ground for all not because we see the same world but because we have in common the experience of being seen from a position that we do not occupy.

In the photographs on The Times cover, the white Americansthe smoking National Guardsmen, the gri-macing and smiling boys harassing Dorothy Counts, and the women surrounding and harassing Elizabeth Eckford on her failed attempt to enter the schoolall take their own visibility for granted. They defiantly assume that they

22 Arendt, The Human Condition 57.


know how and from what position they will be seen. Ar-endt thought that black Americans were too visible. But the real problem was that the white Americans who op-posed integration refused to acknowledge that they could be seen from another position. This is our world, they pro-claimed 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

23 See, for instance, the essay by Clarissa Sligh on her

understanding of photo-graphs of herself used in the

press during the Civil Rights movement. Clarissa T. Sligh,

The Plaintiff Speaks, in Deborah Willis, ed., Pictur-

ing Us: African American Identity in Photography. New York, The New Press, 1994:

89105.

Photograph by Will Counts. Image courtesy of the

Associated Press.



The photographers chose their position to make various points about the scenes in front of them, as The New York Times cover illustrates. But the cameras point of view in these shots is ultimately what Arendt described, in another discussion not related to photog-raphy, as the location of one [that] can no more coin-cide with the location of another than the location of two objects.24 The photographers position could be assumed by neither the jeering whites nor the coura-geous blacks. But neither was it, as Arendt mistakenly assumed in her reaction to these images, the position of an all-knowing judge. Instead the camera is located in a place from which knowledge is yet to be born. Photog-raphy reserves a viewpoint for the future as the instance of the world that is never available to anyone and from which we are incessantly being watched.

Look at the faces of the girls screaming in ha-tred at Elizabeth Eckford. She wore sunglasses as if to emphasize that the white students did not truly see her, if we understand true seeing in the sense of recognition. When black students attended white schools, they became visible in the sense defined by Arendt as taking political action, and they emerged from the paradoxical and pernicious invisibility of being trapped by the label of a marginalized and po-litically disenfranchised group.

Eckford became politically visible precisely by emerg-ing from the ineluctable actual visibility that Arendt deplored as the plight of black Americans and which was really an invisibility or non-recognition: that of be-ing of a minority in a place that had legally and socially defined this status as unwanted.

As todays viewers of these images, we see the scene from a perspective that was unimaginable back then, one that is opened up by the camera. It was a perspec-tive that could be assumed neither by whites nor blacks, since nobodyneither the fear-mongering Southern-ers nor the visionary Civil Rights leadersknew what an integrated America would truly look like. This does not mean that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not have precise political notions about the countrys future, or that his metaphor of a Dream was mere fantasy. But-


still today, half a century after these struggles were doc-umented in photographs, there remain schools with nearly all black or white student bodies, and such enor-mous 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 photogra-phers intentions and their framing of each image shape the viewers perspective. But because photography pre-serves a given scene for future viewing without reveal-ing 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 unattain-able otherwise, even after the passage of time, whether by imagination, empathy, or solidarity. The cameras techni-cal program, which is never completely identical to any photographers intention or point of view, affords us a po-sition that remains beyond reach. The Civil Rights move-ment 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 photo-graphs. 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-


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

fact that the viewers of these photographs will judge them, that their world will soon be too small to last.

From a political perspective, the world of Southern whites who opposed integration was too small to survive. Its smallness was not a matter of physical limitations but of the failure of these boys to imagine themselves as being seen from a position they cannot occupy.

Arendt knew how worlds are constituted. She urged the individuals need to harmonize the private and the political dimensions of ones self, and she identified our incessant emergence from invisibility to visibility as a fun-damental component of participation in the public realm. Though armed with these critical concepts, Arendt failed to see what was right in front of her eyes.

Photograph by Douglas Martin. Image courtesy of the Associated Press.


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 representa-tion 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.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS THE PROMISE OF THE FUTURE: GARRY WINOGRANDInstead of belaboring Arendts missed opportunity to put her concepts to good use when seeing photographic evi-dence of injustice, I will here insert another photograph. This image by Garry Winogrand usefully counters Ar-endts wrong-headed analysis, even if this optimistic im-age does not completely counteract the harrowing pho-tographs of racial strife. Winogrands image powerfully affirms photographys potential to show the future as the advancement of life along divergent and unknown vec-tors, as our capacity to emerge from our essential invis-ibility in unexpected ways. Winogrand looked at the same world inhabited by Arendt, but unlike Arendt he did not succumb to the temptation of trying to understand. In this way Winogrands ways of image-making provide a much-needed corrective to Arendts failure to read.25

In the late summer days of 1957, Winogrand roamed New York City, including Spanish Harlem where Ar-endt lived, to express his particular vision of the world. At the same time that Arendt chain-smoked in her study and pondered the photographs of racial strife that had struck her conscience, Winogrand was making his own observations on race. Ultimately she turned her eyes and mind away from these photographs, buried their impact in a flawed legalistic argument, and penned more politi-cal theory. Meanwhile Winogrand used his Leica to find a personal vision of the world as never quite coinciding with itself, as continually giving rise to new worlds from within. He was armed with a burning faith that by render-ing visible the crazy mash-up called New York, the whole world would open up and allow an ever-greater future.

In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt described the world in words quite close to the images Winogrand cre-ated with his camera:

Our feeling of reality depends utterly upon appear-ance and therefore upon the existence of a public realm into which things can appear out of the dark-ness of sheltered existence, even the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate lives is ulti-mately derived from the much harsher light of the public realm.26

26 Arendt, The Public and the Private Realm, from Vita

Activa, in The Portable Han-nah Arendt 200.


Though not giving two cents about philosophy, Winogrand photographed people in New York by cap-turing them at the moment, as Arendt described it, when out of the twilight of private and intimate lives something burst into the much harsher light of the public realm. This something, in his photographs, was the potential for the lives of the depicted people to take tiny yet unexpected turns and thus proceed along an invisible vector into a different direction.

Masterful at capturing juxtapositions, Winogrand caught people at the edge of their respective worlds when they tumbled, often unaware and with varying degrees of grace, into what Arendt calls the much harsher light of the public realm. He photographed them in their worlds (created by community, family, or way of life) when others who were not at all part of that world nonetheless were present in the same space. But Winogrand created a vision of the world where everyone had an equal right to occupy a space, even if no two spots are interchangeable. Many of his images of couples or individuals accrue their mean-ing from witnesses, bystanders, and spectators already included in the scene, positions later doubled by the pictures viewers. The world, as seen in Winogrands work, is borne out of this variety of different view-points on the same occurrence.

With no knowledge of Arendts work, Winogrand shared intuitively her insight that the world becomes real to us when things emerge into the public realm, or to use Arendts vocabulary, when our humanity emerges from its essential invisibility. By photographing people at the moment when their private selves became visible in the public realm, Winogrands work created what Arendt would define, in her later work, as the miracle of a new action.27

WORLDS FAIR, 1964In 1964, alongside 50 million total visitors, Winogrand prowled the New York Worlds Fair in Flushing Mead-ows, Queens. Industry leaders and urban planners had designed the parkland with the iconic Unisphere sculpture to showcase an optimistic future strategically located half-way between Manhattan and its major air-

27 [T]he passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senselead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance. The most current of such transforma-tions occurs in storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experiences. The Public and the Private Realm, from Vita Activa, in The Portable Hannah Arendt 199. We can count Winogrands work among such artistic transpositions of individual experience into a shape fit for public appearance. I am also referring to Arendts notion of the figure of insertion in The Gap Between Past and Future, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, Penguin, 2002) where Arendt uses a parable by Franz Kafka to explain how our actions insert themselves into the otherwise uniform flow of time and thus create the pos-sibility of true change and of an unknown future. Creative work has this potential of slightly changing the direc-tion of life, as if such work halted time for a moment and forced its progress along a new vector that had not existed before.


ports, LaGuardia and JFK. The Fair projected a time in 2024 where smooth roads would course through jun-gle, deserts would become pastures, and peace would reign over a shrinking globe in an expanding uni-verse. Ford introduced the Mustang here, and under the slogan Challenge to Greatness the U.S. Pavilion outlined the ambitions of Lyndon B. Johnsons Great Society project to eradicate poverty and racial inequal-ity. But not all was well in the land.

By opening day in November 1963, President Ken-nedy, who had broken ground for the Fair in 1962, had been assassinated. The Fair, which was designed to be a defining moment for the baby-boomer generation, fell short of its lofty goal of providing a crisp road map for America in decades to come. Members of the Congress of Racial Equality were arrested during a protest at the Fair and Johnsons aspirations of a fully integrated and peace-promoting society were not uniformly shared.

In 1963 Dr. King gave his famous I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The bitter struggle of the Civil Rights movement was far from over. Victory was uncertain. Various lawsuits wound their way through state appeals and ultimately to the Supreme Court to challenge the legality of ra-cial segregation in transportation, accommodation, marriage, and to enforce school desegregation in the South with more promise of success than guaranteed by all deliberate speed.

In this climate of a vast upheaval in American so-ciety, Winogrand came upon a bench at the Worlds Fair, packed by weary women with flattened hair and flat-soled shoes. One womans youth and beauty, some-thing that surely caught Winogrands eye, seemed lost on an older man reading the paper to one side. A bit worse for wear, just starting to relax, and glad to have secured a temporary spot to rest, the women stretched their feet and nobody, as far as we can tell, was aware of being photographed. It was a tangle of limbs and craning necks, and in between this silent choreography emerged the potential for new alliances, separations, groupings, losses, even new loves.

From the young, tired, slightly sweaty bodies, a


young man on the other side of the bench elicits a cur-rent of interest as if his presence, sprawled comfort-ably in his neat khakis on the bench, could twitch this

weary line-up into life. It would be a life not yet legal in all states and still frowned upon, two years before the Supreme Court would declare the ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional, barely a year after Sidney Poitier had won an Academy Award for Lilies in the Field, and years before he would star in the race-rela-tions films A Patch of Blue and Guess Whos Coming to Dinner? On this bench Winogrand glimpsed a reality that many still considered impossible though countless had lived it, even if outside the law: that of a life where blacks and whites could be together in peace.

Winogrand captured a moment at the Fair for which no proper visual grammar had yet been estab-lished. Worlds Fair, 1964 offers us time and space to contemplate and envision several outcomes to a partic-ular moment. It is an unguarded instant when from the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate lives the possibility of a yet-unseen future between the young woman and the man on the far side of the bench cautiously emerges into the much harsher light of the public realm.28

The people in Winogrands image opt out of the stream of people surging through the exhibits of the

Garry Winogrand, Worlds Fair, 1964. Image cour-tesy of the Estate of Garry Winogrand.

28 The Portable Hannah Arendt 200.


World Fair. They opt out of the world, so to speak, and Winogrand catches them in this odd moment of detachment from the world when they do not pay at-tention to him. His widow Eileen Hale described her late husbands practice thus:

I think part of the aim was to unsettle peoples ideas, whether his own or other peoples. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit.

On the bench at the 1964 Worlds Fair, Winogrand found such a less settled space where the script of ones life could be altered. In between the people on this bench, social and other relations could be unset-tled and rearranged for brief momentsor for life.

Unlike Arendt Winogrand did not engage in meta-physical speculation. He photographed a bench as something that was there before we came and [that] will outlast our brief sojourn [on] it.29 He showed the space between people as a fragile in-between that could be negotiated and bridged or kept apart, and that had no particular power to shape these outcomes. His genius consisted in choosing a park bench as an allegory for the potential world in which the au-thority of rules and structures was broken up a bit. Things were possible on such a bench that could upset the social order.

Winogrands pictures contain these unimagined futures with humor and optimism. In this particular image the young black man is engaged, interested but relaxed: he is open to the possibility of chatting but also at ease and full of self-control. The woman with the white headband next to him is also engaged but, while more animated than the man, is still guarded. Winogrand also catches possible opprobrium and dis-approval to this interaction on the benchs periphery, with the two gossiping girls in the center.

Can you believe shes talking to him? And we just sat down a second ago?

What can she be talking to him about? And to just chat him up like this, right here next to us



30 Cited in Pierre Bouretz, Quappele-t-on philosopher? Paris, Gallimard, 2006: 164.

But Winogrands non-judgmental eyes moved right along without leaning in to hear the gossip. Theres a girl resting her head in her friends lap, and in addition to this weary indifference to the way the world could change remains the older man whom Winogrand did not crop from the image precisely to show that not everyone is looking. And then there are the two posing graces who look elsewhere for what will happen next, whether its the end of Amer-ica as anybody knew it then, or just another guy to check out.

And ultimately, its only a bench which nobody will sit on forever. Its a metaphor for the world as a place though which you can move without constant explanation or justification, without philosophizing. It is a scene at once languid and yet bursting with possibility, of limbs and lives shifted and unsettled through the minutest alterations and producing un-heard of new configurations.

Both Arendt and Winogrand aimed to show in their respective genres that the world arises beyond the things that outlast us. Regrettably Arendt re-mained blind to the great potential of America after the photograph of the face of Dorothy Counts had pricked her old-world conservatism. But like Win-ogrand, Arendt realized that the world is a shared world only through our awareness that we can be seen from a position we may never occupy. Put in the language of philosophy, the world is not what is given, but what we create so that it will outlast us. In the iconography of photography, the world is the setting for a multiplicity of futures that will never be fully known but which are contained in an image as its unrealized potential. Like the in-between that links and separates people in a common world, this uncanny preservation of the future inside the photo-graph has its own and objective reality that cannot be grasped.30

Arendts failure to read the photographs of Doro-thy Counts and Elizabeth Eckford are striking in-stances of an academic who could not apply her intelligence to the world around her. It is also an ex-


ample of someone who chose not to do her research when she boycotted the South out of disgust over the Southern states treatment of blacks, instead of visiting there or even simply looking from her win-dow to witness inequality in the reality of Spanish Harlem. It is also perhaps an instance of a European who was stymied by Americas stubborn refusal to let the world be completely ordered by laws.

But Arendt nonetheless provides remarkably use-ful tools for an understanding of the photograph as holding the promise of an unknown future. When we rely on Arendts concepts of visibility, in-between, and world, photographs can be seen as more than icons of death, mourning, and loss. Photographs hold open a possibility of the future as a time worth living for that extends beyond our present position. This promise at the center of photography is, for in-stance, the moment captured when it was uncertain whether Elizabeth Eckford, or any other student, would be able to attend Central High School, even if we know that President Eisenhower ordered the National Guard to assist in desegregating schools. This captured moment creates an opportunity to think about the way progress is never assured, how political action must aim for a future that cannot yet be imagined. Photographs do not freeze the past, but are instead, in the words of Walter Benjamin, loaded to the bursting point with time.31 But this dimension of the image remains closed to viewers who look at the image as evidence of the past. Pho-tographs attain historical significance when their excess of unrealized time is recognized. This unreal-ized timefor instance the morning of September 4, 1957 in Birmingham, Alabamadoes not coin-cide with historical time, which is how we organize events into a pattern of past, present and future. It keeps the photograph open to the fringe of in-distinct multiple meanings32 that surround each photograph, since no photograph can guarantee only one outcome to the scene. These multiple meanings are not random events but the vectors along which life may unfold in yet unknown directions from the

31 Cited in Eduardo Cadava, The Image: Monster of

Time, in PhotoEspaa 28.

32 Siegfried Kracauer, Photography, in Alan

Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography. New Haven,

Leetes Island Books, 1980: 265.


moment when the picture was taken. The great hope of the Civil Rights movement was that inequality in education would be ended through Court orders. Today, in 2011, lawsuits have been filed in 40 states claiming that the existing legally desegregated sys-tem continues to disadvantage black students, over 56 years after national troops secured Elizabeth Eck-fords right to fair education.33

Only if we believe that history happens to us and if we relinquish our option to take action, only then do photographs look as if they freeze a moment in time. The photographs of desegregation in the South are filled to the bursting point with time, filled with the unrealized potential to imagine other struggles that will allow the world to give rise to new worlds from within.

The way we experience time as if placed into the present, according to Arendt, creates a gap where we fight against the past bearing down and the future pushing in. Tellingly, Arendt resorts to a metaphor of sight when trying to conceptualize this gap that is at once outside of time and yet strangely right in the middle of time itself.

Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point that is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time.34

Especially creative acts, in Arendts understanding, keep this gap open even though it is empty and out-side of time, being pinched on both sides by past and future. Photographs offer us privileged access to this emptiness. For with their capacity to keep both the past and the future at bay, photographs plunge us into the boundlessness of the present and allow us to look from this otherwise unattainable vantage point, an interval in time when the past is not all-determining and the future forever unknown. The photograph of Dorothy Counts being harassed after school offers time where none was giventime for reflection and thinking, time for communication,

33 See Linda Darling-Ham-mond, The Color Line in American Education: Race Resources, and Achieve-ment, in Du Bois Review, Vol. 1:2: 213246.

34 Arendt, Between Past and Future 10.


and time for action today. Remember that Counts said some things would not have happened had there been time to prepare. Her photograph allows us to go back to that moment and imagine different strat-egies and outcomes, rather than treat the shot as evi-dence of the lost past. The face of Dorothy Counts in that photograph allows us to see the future and the past as subject to transformation, because it sus-pends and holds us momentarily in the otherwise unattainable fullness of time.

Winogrand happily rid photography of the pathos that often colors pictures of ambiguous social situa-tions. He opted instead for humor, irony, and sheer wackiness in his approach to some of the pressing social questions of his day. When he shot Worlds Fair, 1964 Winogrand did not interrupt the flow of time. He inserted himself into a time that he expe-rienced in bursts of intensity: risky and thrilling like the little flirtation thats starting on one side of the bench; unstable and menacing like the girls jealous whispers in the center; languid like the girl resting in their lap; glued to the past like the man reading the paper to the side. Winogrands shutter revealed the human experience of time to be not a step into the ever-changing Heraclitean river but a dance in the Democritean multi-metric rain where the next thing thats going to happen is radically uncharted.

Hannah Arendts disheartening failure to ap-ply her own concepts to photography constitutes a teaching moment. Her influence is too great and her insights too valuable to dismiss this moment. But we do not honor such a moment by imagining ourselves emphatically into a photograph, nor by attributing the power of an image exclusively to the photogra-phers technique or artistry, or context and conven-tion. We come closer to honoring the great promise of photography when we understand photographs to shelter unredeemed moments. Every photograph remains addressed to a beyond that remains open to transformation. This beyond extends past our present time when we, the belated viewers, weighed down by the past and pulled toward the future, look


at the image. Photography affords us the occasion to claim this space for thinking, communicating, cre-ating, and does not cede this in-between to mere representations of what we already presume to know. To look critically at a photograph means to maintain the possibility that any photographs future may be something different from its known outcome. Pho-tographs suspend time and, when we seize this sus-pension as a political opportunity rather than an oc-casion to go numb, they allow us to be in the world more consciously, more fully, and more alive.

New York University

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Seeing the Future in an Image from the Past