Hungry But Chic

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Just as someone would like to think that the zero-size sick trend of the previous decade was almost over, it strikes back again, but this time with a big difference, as it is not addressed to a specific social group, namely women, but to society as a whole. The picture above (unfortunately, I do not have any info on who took the image and therefore it is not credited) was taken a few days ago in Ermou St., Athens, Greece, one of the busiest shopping streets in the country and what ‘used to be the 10^th richest shopping street in the world’ in capitalist terms. On the right side of the picture we see the shop window of FOKAS retailer company (some of its employees have not been paid since the summer), where the slogan ‘HUNGRY BUT CHIC’ is being displayed with bold capitals (as part of KOOKAI’s current advertisement campaign). David Bate states in Photography: The Key Concepts that ‘ In the field of advertising a product requires social meanings to make it attractive’ (p. 112). One could easily note then, that the aforementioned ad slogan has not only failed to make a product attractive, but perhaps most importantly and taking into account the hardships that the population of the country is experiencing, it could be seen and read as both provocative and of bad taste.

But let us go a step further. Isn’t the motto ‘HUNGRY BUT CHIC’ a confirmation that the human essence has been reduced to a mere image? Is it not that our times are driven by how things look like, rather than how things Really are? The slogan offers the consumer a way of veiling and displacing her Real condition and need, by dressing herself up in a ‘chic’ way. In real life conditions, if you are ‘hungry’ and dress in a ‘chic’ (or ‘warm’ or any other) way, you will still remain ‘hungry’, even though both food and clothing belong to our basic needs. Yet, the satisfaction of one need will not substitute the demand or urge to meet the other.

Furthermore, a closer reading of the motto leads us to a paradox, something that characterises capitalism inherently and proper. Beyond the obvious goof of the campaign, what it actually does is to reaffirm what defines the Real situation in Greece today; the motto underlines today’s political agenda of the Greek pro-European Union and Euro currency coalition government (ND, PASOK and DIMAR). In an effort to ‘save’ the country, large amounts of money are being ‘borrowed’ by the troika, while at the same time unpopular austerity measures are being introduced to society. With the release of every new sum of billions of Euros from the foreign creditors, the coalition government is voting new austerity measures and vice versa, something that has resulted a large part of the population being unable to make ends meet. As the Greek Minister of Finance, Yannis Stournaras recently put it: ‘With 500 euros, you cannot live’, obviously reffering to the new cuts on the minimum wage (the minimum monthly gross wage has been reduced from 751, 39 Euros to 586, 08 and the unemployment rate exceeds 25%).  

A comparison between the zero-size models and the socio-political situation in Greece is anavoidable. It seems that the models had to do anything the industry requested them in order for the former to be able to fit in the designers’ dresses and to make it on the catwalk. It was the only way to reach ‘success’, no matter the threat of anorexia hitting the female models. The same applies today to the population of Greece. Greece’s fashion designers, troika and the country’s political elite demand from the people to be ‘hungry’, but in style, in other words to be deprived of every dignity and right, but still be able to be on the European Union’s catwalk. This was actually the dream of every government that took power in recent years, to be in the EU and Euro Zone at all costs, supported with notorious statements that have already made History, such as that of former Prime Minister George Papandreou, who was claiming in 2010 that ‘There is enough money’ (‘Λεφτά υπάρχουν!’). (According to reports, he had already asked for the intervention of the IMF since 2009...).

What we have to deal with here then, is not just an ad campaign which generally provokes the popular sentiment, but the reproduction of the ideological stance of capitalism in general and the greek coalition government in particular. The ideological and political ‘deal’ was that any sollution other than what the troika had to offer, would bring the country in absolute chaos and poverty (remember the fear of the European political and media establishment had to face in the possibility that reformist in Marxist terms -and not radical left as its name has it- SYRIZA would take power). That was the motto and climate of terror of last June’s elections, mediated by mainstream media worldwide and the coalition political parties, which were obliged to the troika. What was actually achieved was to continue propagating the illusionary European Dream, sometimes apropos and others in line with the American one, which up to date has achieved in putting the people of all southern european countries (Cyprus has also been recently added to the list) in a labyrinth of uncertainty and dispair.

The political situation therefore echoes loudly KOOKAI’s slogan ‘Hunger, but Chic’ (Of course, I do not equate or compare here the hunger a Greek or other southern European is facing, with that that millions of people in developing countires have to affront everyday for years now for very parallel reasons). That was the fixed bet, that Greece would by all odds and at all costs stay in the Euro Zone, as a ‘proud’ member of the ‘holy’ European family. The Portuguese, Italians, Greece, Spanish (the derogatory acronym PIGS is often used to refer to those countries) and Cypriots are on the catwalk and the world stares with apathy, while the flashes are now directed towards Oslo, where the European leaders collected yesterday night their Nobel Peace Prize. However, the more the time passes, little is left from their chicness, as you cannot have peace, without justice...

On List's 'Goldfish Bowl'

Can you by any chance recall the picture Herbert List did about freedom?

Or was it about the human condition and its limits? Or maybe about our subjective realities and how we experience them? In any case, I am referring to the picture where a fishbowl containing a goldfish has been placed with great irony overlooking the Aegean Sea.

What poetics!

What aesthetics!

What a statement!

The picture was taken on an island, famous for the beautiful, breathtaking and idyllic view it has to offer to its inhabitants and visitors. And List did not go against this fact, but rather conformed accordingly; he embraced and played by the rules that nature had set up for him. It seems however, that he wanted something different, something ‘other’ of what was merely apparent and ‘simply there’ in front of his lens.

He wanted to set up his own little theatre of the absurd and to quickly direct his piece, an untold story, an idea whose meaning would burden the viewer.

Both the goldfish and the fishbowl entail a rather mundane and simplistic cultural nature, but as they are used here they manage to destabilize and disturb my ‘normality’ and the way I am used to read, consume and digest images. That’s probably because my mind is driven far beyond the very image that I see.

Time stops and it feels as if I am looking at myself in the mirror for the very first time. Soon after, a senseless procedure of self-reflection, exploration and thinking begins, through a rapid unwrapping of connotations that extend from philosophy and ethics, to politics and power. However, this interplay between the literal scene and the metaphors hidden in the multiple layers of the image bring me to an even greater confusion, making it hard to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘symbolic’; where does the one stop and the other begin? And although the image disseminates a calmness and tenderness, at the same time it exposes a cruelty and madness, where the oxymoron has lost its character and has become the norm.

What drama takes place in front of the lens! Like an ancient Greek tragedy, but with no peripeteia, without a sudden twist of plot, where the Earth has become the mourner and humanity as the spectator simply realizes its nothingness and voidness. I really wonder where Poseidon and Nietzsche are hidden…

(From Objective Eggs photo-zine).

Objective Eggs-a DIY Photo-Zine

On Jörg Colberg's Photography and Manipulation: Defending History

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I have never met Jörg Colberg in person. What I know about him is from his remarkable and notable blog effort ‘Conscientious’, which is a source of contemporary photography from around the world. However, I was very disappointed to read his recent article titled ‘Photography and Manipulation’ (05/01/2012) and I feel the need to answer to him. For one, this is not a personal attack, but rather a deconstruction of his essay and also it is not an effort to defend communism, but to defend History.

In his article, Colberg, tries desperately to connect the recent manipulated picture of Kim Jong-il’s funeral march in North Korea with ‘creepy’, as he puts it, communism. Echoeing like ‘Ich bin ein Amerikaner’, he repeats the usual and tiring discourse that the institutional media uses when referring to ‘communism’.  ‘Communism’ has been long portrayed in the West as a synonym of evil, as hell on earth, as the worst possible system that a country could have or in its best as something that is too good to be true, an utopia. In recent years however there has been a growing attack towards the History of communism, even an effort to equate it to Hitler's Nazi regime and Colberg is no exception as he is pointing the finger at the North Korean regime in a ‘look, what the bad communists are doing again’ kind of way.

As it is well known, during the Stalinist era many images containing supposedly state enemies were manipulated and figures such as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Yezhov were erased from photographs, before they were ‘erased’ from life as well. But to take an image, a manipulated image, as an example in order to prove your point against ‘communism’ is rather a naïve way to go and most importantly it is against History and Collective Memory. Image manipulation is neither a characteristic of ‘communist’ regimes and nor did it start or end with them. It is rather a characteristic of every ideological and state apparatus in an Althusserian sense no matter their ideological, cultural, ethical, political, economic, philosophical differences. And it all comes down to Power (who, where, why, when and how is an image distributed and circulated) and the integrated force an image has as a form of knowledge.

We are accustomed to believe what our eyes see and even when we look at a photoshopped image in print, although we might know that it is not representing 100% reality we want to believe that it somehow relates to it. Moreover, culturally, we expect and demand news images to be as close to reality as possible (i.e look at the guidelines that the ‘big’ publications request from photojournalists when submitting images). However, one thing is to alter an image and another to manipulate History.

Regarding this particular image, it seems that the retoucher did not try to alter History through her/his manipulation. Yes, the retoucher did manipulate what was in front of the lens, but in this instance she/he does not try to manipulate Reality. I see it more as an ‘aesthetic’ effort, an effort to 'beautify' the scene and through this to pay her/his respect to the death of Kim Jong-il. Perhaps Colberg’s argument would have been more strong if the image was in such a way manipulated that it would interfere with an ‘objective’ depiction of the event. But, what I, the western viewer receive as a final mediated product, is the usual, polished, cropped, photoshopped image that the media have made the norm and I am accustomed to. This does not mean that I agree with the practice, but every photographer knows that from its very nature a photograph is a priori manipulated from the very decisions the photographer takes while composing her/his image.

Finally, if we are seeking ‘messed up state ideology’ as Colberg states, we do not need to look for it at the other side of the world, nor look for it at the ‘Other’ side. Let us just switch on our TV sets on the 6 o’clock news and it will all be there. Every line of speech and every image carefully manipulated to serve the interests of those who own the means of production. This is creepy and not a funeral in North Korea or this particular manipulated image. What is also creepy is an article like ‘Photography and Manipulation’ that not only tries to make a point out of nothing, but to manipulate collective consciousness. 'And we could connect that to the long history' ... of the bourgeois.

NOTE: My apologies to Jörg Colberg for previously misspelling his name.