I probably spent more time that I should have on Thursday debating the likelihood of whether this photograph was staged or genuine.
It’s an arresting, sexy picture, as if an American Apparel ad had been airbrushed into a scene of civic unrest. The pair who are kissing look beautiful, like models called in to perform for this one moment, and the eye cannot help but fall to the supine woman’s leg. Her skirt is hiked up and the leg is exposed, curving up to the point where her thigh meets and the dissolves into the concealed possibilities of her hips. It’s erotic, and looking at it you can almost feel the blush of sexual passion that must have animated the couple.
But is just looks a little too artful, a little too beautiful to be real.
It’s easy for me to imagine in this era of the instant multiplication of images, somebody with a mind toward art direction spontaneously staging this shoot. The perfection of the image and it’s juxtaposition to the riotous action of the night seems positively theatrical, and given the vagaries of the human condition, it’s surprising that the people engaged in the kiss are beautiful instead of, well, not so beautiful. It is, in fact, almost as if they were cast.
The image that precedes it, this one:
Taken from an entirely different vantage point, almost as if by a surveillance camera, it reveals a different narrative than love conquers all. On a Facebook thread, most people seeing this image saw a sexual assault about to take place, whereas I saw evidence of the intentional staging of ephemera art. This is instructive, of course. As images pour toward us we grab them and create symbols that suit our purposes, the stories we want to tell, thus reducing the original images to cyphers ever open to interpretation.
The vast majority of people at the riot were spectators. Hoping to situate themselves in the midst of a great narrative, they hung-about, amateur documentarians taking pictures with their iPhone and Blackberry’s. Well meaning, sort of, they probably imagined they were guardians of the truth, creating a wall of accountability, but it’s just as likely that they created a soft, yet impenetrable flank that the police could not pass through, enabling rather than deterring the rioters.
* The couple in the picture have been identified, and the story as it unfolds is that they were knocked over by the riot police. The girl was shaken-up and some people wandered over to see if she was alright. (second photograph) The boyfriend, a 29 year-old from Australia, described by his mother as “not always connecting with what’s going on around him,” ( Thanks mom!) decided to give her a comfoting kiss, and so it would appear that the photograph is in fact entirely genuine and entirely beautiful, if ever open to our interpretative needs.