How do you uproot entrenched oligarchies?

View across eastern Libya

 © David Degner

The problem the crowds are trying to solve in the Middle East with their repeated demonstrations is alot greater than installing democracy through a system of fair elections. It's the far trickier business of peacefully uprooting a political and economic structure that serves the vested interests of a tiny minority of people. If it were  a plant, the dictator is just its flowery head. It can be lopped off, though soon another very similar flower will bloom after a short spell as a demure bud. Having to dig around and uproot the whole thing, leaving a big messy hole in the ground is a completely different matter.

To extend this handy horitcultural metaphor, democracy even in developed counties seems to be not that much more than a process where through some clever grafting, you get a pleasing seasonal variation in the colour of the flower, while the plant itself largely remains the same. If they do find in the Middle East a way to remove the entire plant peacefully, fill the hole, and level out the terrain for a real fresh start then it would certainly be a great example for the entire world. I can think of few places where achieving this periodically without bloodshed would not be a good thing. It's a pity democracy as it is practiced currently cannot solve this issue, though maybe some kind of democratic process could. I wonder what that process might look like.

Discomfort with photos

I've had to cultivate a detachment from photos and other "things" in general to stop me from going crazy.

Only reality is worth investing emotion into.

"Never let anything 'artistic' stand in your way" has sort of become a motto for me, stolen from Bruce Chatwin (who got it from Noel Coward).

Some photos are far more engaging than others, but in the end each seems to offer just a quick emotional hit that rapidly fades.

Meanwhile, irrespective of its aritstic qualities, each one is asking for far more trust than it should be getting.

What bothers me is photography's uneasy, unsettled relationship with reality, how photographers often pose as witnesses when they're really manipulators - both on the field and in how they present things afterwards.

There would be a much more guarded response to images were this element of manipulation not all too easily ignored, because it interferes with the enjoyment of an image.

Meanwhile a photo still carries a segment (or burden) of objective truth that is unnerving and makes photography unlike any other art.

The photo's silence, moreover, gives the image a deceptively stern, grave quality, as if it offered a clear view "beyond the noise".

Each picture sucks you in, makes demands on your emotions. A little vacuum that can leave you drained if you're not careful.

Published pictures have so much authority that they seem to have the final word on the way something should be viewed.. (I think that's what many photographers secretly love about photographs  -  the authority of the published image.)

Once published, images can seem like the assertion of an unassailable objective wholeness.

Writing is made of components, words, and can be broken down or rewired. Pictures, meanwhile, cannot be - they supposedly just convey the captive instant. "Don't shoot the messenger!" each one squeaks when confronted.
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If Sharia law were imposed tomorrow and all images were banned, would a wonderful freedom from a degrading tyranny of archetypes and stereotypes not emerge?

To my mind anything of any importance that exists is outside the realms of the visible. The visible is only (and not always to the same degree) a manifestation or effect of what is important and invisible.

Photography helps place far too much emphasis on the visible symptoms, as if they functioned in lockstep with the invisible causes, which is rarely the case.

When, as a culture, photography makes us become fixated with the symptoms as if they were an accurate evocation of the causes and we start to think that what has no visible symptom has less importance than what does, we reach a point where we no longer understand the world so well.