On the Photography of the Trump Era

I have a collection of photos that I think of as some of the most striking images of the Trump era. You would probably recognize most of them: the pictures of migrant children wrapped in foil blankets in cages; torch-bearing neo-Nazis in Charlottesville; protesters in MAGA hats pounding on the doors of government buildings; men with assault rifles in and around statehouses. Lots and lots of photos of confrontations: MAGA vs. cops; BLM protesters vs. cops; lockdown protesters vs. nurses; Nicholas Sandmann vs. Nathan Phillips; migrant children vs. CBP agents.

I was reading this week through Teju Cole’s 2016 book Known and Strange Things and came across “Object Lesson,” his meditation on Susan Sontag’s book On Photography.

Cole is interested in striking images, too, the ones that become moment-defining. He starts “Object Lesson” by focusing on photographs from the 2013 Kiev protests against the Ukrainian government, which resulted in brutal police crackdowns. Like me with the Trump-era pictures, Cole is drawn to the photos’ dramatic depictions of conflict. “So epic and cinematic,” he writes, “were the photographs from the Maidan that it took some effort to remember that they were first and foremost news images, unstaged depictions of real, ongoing human suffering.”

Sontag, Cole writes, points out the dangers of these “cinematic” pictures. He writes:

Sontag understood photographs of conflict to be making a utilitarian argument — that they could bring us into a state of productive shock — and she showed that they seldom did what they claimed, or hoped, to do. The more photographs shock, the more difficult it is for them to be pinned to their local context, and the more easily they are indexed to our mental library of generic images.

Two images from this summer’s anti-racist protests stood out especially to me. In the more famous one, taken by Nick Swartsell, a group of young white people sit around a patio brunch table in Cincinnati while Black Lives Matter protesters march behind them. The diners’ looks are not just unconcerned but amused. They run their fingers through their hair and joke while they wait for their orders. A photograph with a similar theme from my hometown, Austin, appeared about the same time on Reddit. I admit I’m partial to this one, since I know its exact location: from the rooftop pool of an apartment building just east of I-35, a group of swimsuited (again) white people peer over the edge of a safety railing at Black Lives Matter protesters who are stopping traffic on the freeway. And I know what was happening on that freeway. Some of my former students were there; in one video I saw, a boy from my English class picked up a full water bottle and lobbed it at a line of police in riot gear. A day earlier, a student from another high school in the city was shot in the head with a non-lethal munition, causing a brain injury that required six hours of surgery.

I thought the two photos captured so much, about who was participating in the protests and who was sitting them out. Yes, the “utilitarian argument,” as Sontag put it, was a bit heavy-handed but, in line with all of the other striking images I’ve collected, didn’t they just capture the starkness of the moment?

Since the inauguration, I’ve been rethinking my ideas about how rhetoric can influence political change. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how much “starkness” characterized the rhetoric (including the visual rhetoric) of the past five years and whether or not that was effective. Did that starkness help enact change? Does it continue to serve political change in the post-Trump era?

I don’t know the answers, but I appreciate Cole’s thoughts on the subject. And, to almost perfectly reinforce “Object Lesson,” there’s this: before Spring Break I had my students analyze the much-mocked Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial from 2017. You remember the one: a vaguely BLM-ish protest marches past a spot where Jenner is doing a photo shoot. Dramatically pulling off her wig and wiping off her lipstick, Jenner leaves her shoot and pushes to the head of the march just as it reaches a line of stern-looking police. She hands one of the cops a Pepsi, he drinks, and peace and joy break out.

Rewatching the commercial I saw the same image I thought was so original, so striking, in 2020. There, 50 seconds into the commercial: two young, smiling women eat brunch on a patio as the march passes behind them. They smile and their Pepsis fizz on the table between them.