Syracuse University SURFACE Theses - ALL January 2017 Reading Between the Pictures: Documenting Economic Hardship in a Neoliberal Age Pamela Ann Barker Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.edu/thesis Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Barker, Pamela Ann, "Reading Between the Pictures: Documenting Economic Hardship in a Neoliberal Age" (2017).edu/thesis/136 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact surface@syr. ABSTRACT: This thesis is interested in the ways that documentary photojournalism of economic hardship has changed in response to a neoliberal context.
Analysis is centered on photographer Anthony Suau’s photo essay “Struggling Cleveland,” captured for TIME magazine in 2008. Suau’s photographs of economic hardship break from a tradition of photojournalism that focused on drama and emotion. I consider what appears and does not appear in the photographs, with particular attention to how the neoliberal context influences the content and mode of address of the photos. The photographs are analyzed independently for the ways that neoliberalism appears within each frame and collectively, allowing for a critical viewer to gain an understanding of how discrete events might be connected via an interactive reading practice.
Suau’s sociological and narrative approach for covering the housing crisis allows the viewer to construct their own meaning and judgment of the event. Reading Between the Pictures: Documenting Economic Hardship in a Neoliberal Age By Pamela A., Pacific Lutheran University, 2014 Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of the Arts in Communication and Rhetorical Studies Syracuse University June 2017 Copyright © Pamela A Barker, 2017 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements First and foremost, to Dr. Rachel Hall for helping me figure out what this project was. Your guidance as I sorted through different objects of study and theory was both generous and helpful as I figured out what I wanted to say.
You worked patiently with me to revise and refine my thoughts and arguments and you have helped me become a better writer and scholar in the process. To the rest of my committee, Drs. Amos Kiewe, Kendall Phillips, and Jennifer Stromer-Galley your support and guidance have been invaluable to me as I worked on this project. Thank you for pushing me to be precise in my goals and focused in my research.
To the CRS Community- faculty, staff, and graduate students, thank you for everything over the past 2 years. You have made the experience so worth it: challenging me, allowing me room to grow, and encouraging me. A special note of thanks to Professor Lynn Greenky for lively political conversations and encouraging a dedication and passion for teaching. Melissa Franke- thank you for confidence in me all those years ago and thank you for your editing skills as I worked to finalize this project.
Thank you for the text messages telling me that I could do this and offering tips to keep writing even when I felt discouraged. To my family for always having my back. To my Mom, who previously worked as a mortgage officer, for answering all my questions about the logistics of mortgages and for the reminders that a cup of tea can make everything (at least seem) better. To my Dad, who understood the trials of writing a thesis, and empathized and listened every time I phoned.
To my brother, BJ, for your confidence and support all the way from sunny L. Finally to Chris, for everything. Your love and support as I chase my dreams means so much. Thank you for all the extra things you did around the house so I could have a few more minutes to write.
Thank you for listening to me ramble so I could figure out how to organize a chapter and for your copy editing skills. I can’t wait for our wedding and everything else the future holds for us. iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Documenting the Housing Crisis. 1 What is the Housing Crisis?.
2 From the Welfare State to Neoliberalism. 5 A New Civic Visual Discourse. 20 Chapter 2: The Pain of the Houses: Photographing the structures impacted by the crisis .28 Exteriors of Houses. 41 Emotion and Photographs.
46 Chapter 3: Seeing the People Impacted: Civic Relationality in economic crisis. 51 Civic Relationality in Photographs. 54 The Simple Reality. 63 The Drama of Purpose and Agency.
71 Conclusion: Reading Between the Pictures .77 The Photo Essay. 77 Sociology and Narrative. 80 Allowing Judgement, Making Meaning. 82 Area(s) for future research .92 v 1 Chapter 1: Documenting the Housing Crisis The look of documentary photographs of economic hardship has changed.
As one commentator noted of the most critically acclaimed image to emerge from the housing crisis of the mid-aughts expressed it, the image looks like it could have come out of Iraq. That is, it resembles contemporary war photography more than it recalls earlier, iconic images of economic hardship. This thesis describes how the appearance of economic hardship within the frames of documentary photography has changed of late. It explores what this shift in appearances (what can appear, how it appears, and what cannot appear) reveals about changing concepts of citizenship and corollary changes in civic modes of address.
The study focuses these intellectual pursuits through the case of Anthony Suau’s interactive online photo essay on the housing crisis in Cleveland, Ohio. His work breaks with precedent both in terms of how he pictures economic hardship and his mode of address. Within the frames of his photos and, indirectly, through his mode of address (which invites viewers to read between the photos) the viewer has access to models of citizenship that depart from those we are accustomed to seeing in documentary photographs of economic hardship from the twentieth century. Ultimately, I argue that changes in the appearance of economic hardship within the frames of documentary photography and corresponding shifts in civic address, which invite viewers to read between the pictures, are attributable to major historical shifts in how Americans understand the relationship between economics and governance, from the welfare state model of the twentieth century to neoliberalism in the twenty-first century.
This chapter will first unpack the limits of the housing crisis and introduce the object of study, Anthony Suau’s photo essay “Struggling Cleveland.” I 2 then explore how shifting contexts can change photographic meanings. Finally I conclude by comparing a previously famous photograph of economic hardship, Migrant Mother, to an award winning photograph from Suau’s essay. What is the Housing Crisis? As I began research for this project, I was struck by the distinct lack of powerful images. A quick google-images search of “the housing crisis” reveals many political cartoons, but few documentary images.
The photographs of the housing crisis that are available appear mundane, ordinary, even boring at times. The few images that did appear in my search were of suburban houses with real estate signs in the yard featuring words like short sale or foreclosure. There was nothing iconic about the photos. Many of them seemed trivial.
After digging further into the photojournalism of the crisis, I discovered that the context of the photographs was most often understood not by the images themselves, but in the information offered in the accompanying captions or between the frames of individual photographs. I further struggled to find photos that captured the housing crisis alone, and not also the global Great Recession. Nailing down a precise, one sentence definition or date range of the housing crisis proves difficult. It was a long, drawn-out process that was marked by a series of events that together constitute a national crisis.
I have more questions than answers when it comes to defining the beginning of the crisis. For instance, does the crisis begin the first time someone defaulted on their subprime, adjustable-rate mortgage? After 10 people did? After 200? At what point should the crisis be considered a crisis? Some investors predicted the crisis as early as 2005, and event bet against the big banks (as famously depicted in the movie ‘The Big Short’). Did the crisis begin when those investors recognized there would be one? When they cashed in on the banks losses? 3 I have the same difficulty in identifying an end date. This is largely because the Housing Crisis rolled right into the Great Recession.
However, in my opinion they are two are distinct events that require independent analysis, with the acknowledgment that they did influence each other. There is more of a consensus that the Great Recession began in mid-2008. However, defaults and foreclosures of mortgages on a large scale continued well into 2010. Does this mean that the housing crisis was happening concurrently with the Great Recession? Did the Great Recession subsume the housing crisis? After 2008, the housing crisis becomes entangled with the Great Recession in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between one crisis and the other.
For this reason, in my thesis, I have attempted to locate the housing crisis and my objects of study in 2008 and prior. Important events happen in 2007 that signal a significant number of journalists understood the crisis before the Great Recession of 2008/9. In August of 2007, Countrywide, the number one provider of mortgages at the time, narrowly avoided bankruptcy by taking an emergency loan from the Federal Reserve. The crisis was severe enough in 2007 to warrant Presidential action.
In December of 2007, President Bush gave a speech announcing an emergency freeze on the rates of qualifying adjustable rate mortgages. The housing crisis is a complex series of events that together constituted a national crisis. The housing crisis cast doubt on the real estate industry which had been previously understood as a fundamentally American and relatively low-risk investment. The effects of the housing crisis led to the global Great Recession which had far-reaching impacts.
It is critical the aim of this thesis to describe and understand how the complex series of events that constitute the housing crisis were visually recorded, with attention to what appears and does not appear in the pictures. 4 My analysis for this thesis is covers one photo essay for TIME magazine by Anthony Suau, “Struggling Cleveland.” 1 The photographs were captured in Cleveland, Ohio in March of 2008. Suau is one of the early photographers to document the housing crisis. His photos are taken in early 2008 before the effects of the global Great Recession become entangled with the effects of the housing crisis.
Suau’s photographs are of only the housing crisis, and his approach allows a more complete understanding of the event because of the diversity of subjects and places photographed. A renowned photographer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and the World Press Award Photo in both 1988 and 2009, Suau has experience documenting numerous world events over the past 30 years, spanning from protests to war to famine to genocide. His diversity of experience gives him a variety of visual strategies. In many ways, Suau is an innovator of visual storytelling for the neoliberal age.
His sociological approach covers a variety of different scenes, people and moments across the city of Cleveland to provide a comprehensive understanding of how people are living with and responding to the crisis. It is up to the viewer to do interpretive work to understand Suau’s photography. A viewer can accept the law-and-order solution presented or a more critical viewer can consider the ramifications of viewing the housing crisis from a similar perspective as a war or crime. His photographs are able to be understood as both indicative of the neoliberal context, but also questioning the neoliberal context, by highlighting how problems are framed and the types of solutions that get generated as a result.
Neoliberalism can sometimes hide its effects because of compartmentalization.