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ABSTRACT
This essay consists of a critical and creative encounter with WWI visual propagandist Arthur Mole’s “living photography,” a technique to create images by configuring thousands of subjects to form silhouettes of culturally relevant symbols only discernable from an elevated vantage point. I argue that Mole’s visual rhetoric offers important equipment for public dying, which in this case refers to rhetorical resources for managing collective mortality amidst the lethal concoction of pandemic, anti-Black racism, and war. As I theorize how living photography inventively encapsulates the enormity of multiple pandemics via anamorphosis, I make frequent departures between 1917–18 and 2019–21 by foregrounding Mole’s most technically sophisticated image – a human assemblage resembling the Statue of Liberty taken at Camp Dodge in Des Moines, Iowa on August 23, 1918. Mole’s rhetoric remains an aesthetically innovative, ethically perplexing, and historically neglected case that vivifies the opportunities and challenges of collectivist aesthetics to democratically address global cataclysm.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Michael Vogt and Bill R. Douglas for their archival assistance and encouragement throughout the project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Robinson, “The Coronavirus is Rewriting,” para. 18.
2. Boyce and Katz, “The 1918 Influenza,” para. 3–10.
3. Watts, “The Primal Scene,” 18.
4. Erni and Striphas, “Introduction: COVID-19,” 212–4.
5. Oliviero, Vulnerability Politics, 38–40.
6. Finefield, “Formation Photographs,” para. 3.
7. Mole and Thomas, “Human Statue of Liberty.”
8. Maltzman, “They Stood,” para. 7.
9. Burke, The Philosophy, 295.
10. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 103.
11. Azoulay, Civil Imagination, 10-45.
12. Finnegan, Making Photography Matter, 5.
13. Hardt and Negri, Assembly, 179.
14. Butler, Notes Toward, 8.
15. Schnapp, “The Mass Panorama,” 245.
16. Le Bon, The Crowd, 124.
17. Conway, The Crowd, 26.
18. Ibid, 36.
19. Ohl, “Seeing World,” 115.
20. Trotter, Instincts, 216.
21. Haraway, Simians, 189.
22. Kaplan, “Dead Troops,” para. 5.
23. Rees, The Cyclopedia, 214.
24. Söderlind, “Illegitimate Perspectives,” 215.
25. Žižek, Looking Awry, 3.
26. Ott, Aoki, and Dickinson, “Ways of (Not),” 235.
27. Collins, “Anamorphosis,” 81.
28. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 274.
29. Arthur, “Writing Pandemic,” xiv.
30. Weixel, “Trump on Coronavirus,” para. 2.
31. Hawhee, “Looking Into,” 139.
32. Ewing, “Measuring Mortality,” para. 3-12.
33. Farrell, “The Weight,” 472.
34. Camus, The Plague, 38.
35. Bump, “Putting 500,000,” para. 4.
36. Sharing is Caring, “18,000 Soldiers”; and Newsner.com, “18,000 Soldiers.”
37. Murdock, “Widest Row.”
38. Kim, “Massive WWI.”
39. Deluca, Image Politics, 6.
40. Deluca, “The Speed,” 85.
41. Myer, “Letters.”
42. “Dodge Soldiers,” para. 4.
43. “From the Archives,” para. 36.
44. Carson, “Photographer Arthur Mole.”
45. Tierney, “My Mind.”
46. Burke, “Great.”
47. Wood and Brumfiel, “Pro-Trump,” para. 1.
48. Sullivan, “Jim Jordan,” para. 3.
49. Keillor, “The Living Flag.”
50. Smith, Age of Fear, 26.
51. Gomez, “Temporal Containment,” 189.
52. Sherritt, “Magnificent!”
53. Douglas, “Wartime Illusions,” 111.
54. Michel Foucault, Society Must, 254.
55. Ibid.
56. Mbembe, Necro-Politics, 33.
57. Beach, “Calm Procedure,” para. 2.
58. Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 32.
59. Ore, Lynching, 135.
60. Brooke, “Soldiers Convicted,” para. 4.
61. Ibid.
62. Engel, “The Day,” para 2.
63. Campt, Listening to Images, 34.
64. Bennett, Emphatic Vision, 10.
65. Brooke, “Soldiers Convicted,” para. 26.
66. “Negro Subversion.”
67. Kaszynski, “‘Look,’” 71.
68. Campt, Listening to Images, 5.
69. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, 54.
70. Poggi, “Mass, Pack, and Mob,”186.
71. Ang, “Beyond the Crisis,” 604.
72. Burgess, “On a Different,” 235.
73. “Craig Alan,” para. 1.