Kifissias Av., Athens, 08.11.2010
One needs to know Greek in order to fully figure out the content of this picture, so here it is. This is the day after the 2010 Regional and Municipal elections. A bus stop still bears a political advertisement, claiming, among other things, that “nobody [should be] alone in the crisis.” The words nobody (κανένας), alone (μόνος), and crisis (κρίση), are visible in the picture.
In an older comment I had said that occasionally I come across pictures as I am simply walking in the street, and suddenly everything seems to be there – the frame, the angle, the light. This is one of these pictures. I was standing next to the bus stop that evening, leaning outwards to see if a bus was coming or not, and as I turned around it was there. I could see the foreground and the background in terms of an opposition between the left and the right side of the frame, as if I was already holding the printed picture in my hands.
In an older comment I had said that occasionally I come across pictures as I am simply walking in the street, and suddenly everything seems to be there – the frame, the angle, the light. This is one of these pictures. I was standing next to the bus stop that evening, leaning outwards to see if a bus was coming or not, and as I turned around it was there. I could see the foreground and the background in terms of an opposition between the left and the right side of the frame, as if I was already holding the printed picture in my hands.
What I would normally do in this case is switch on the camera and take the picture. But this time I didn’t. I just sat there. I sat there thinking if I want to take the picture, if I have the right to take it, and what on earth am I supposed to do with it if I did. Would anybody actually want to see it, does anybody really care? I sat there for about half an hour, maybe more, while the buses kept passing.
And then I took the picture. And the reason why I did so is that it was unbearable. I had already seen it, and I thought that maybe if I took it I could at least manage to get it off my head. But of course I couldn’t; and as time passed, I didn’t want to either.
Crises are an integral part of capitalism; it is better to look them in the eye. David Harvey has traced the development of neoliberalism, and offered a particularly insightful answer to the question of how the current debt crisis has come about. Governments, however, seem more interested in bailing out banks than sustaining the people’s living conditions.
The European Union has not yet been able to contain and stabilise its debt crisis, let alone in a manner favorable to the interests of the European citizens; this would require a bold change in economic policy, as well as a higher degree of political unification and increased democratic control over its financial institutions. In the meantime, the recession deepens, while rigid austerity measures severely damage the vast majority of the people, workers, low income employees and pensioners, as well as radically increase the population of the unemployed and push them further into the margins.
I suppose this is how pictures get to be unbearable to take, and political claims get to miss the point. But apparently there are other kinds of pictures as well – here’s one I found in The Guardian. Do have a look at the links below it as well – I put them there in the hope that there are alternatives. The first link leads to a video in which a protestor says that there has been an Arab spring, a Spanish summer, and an American autumn, and that now there will be a global winter.
I sure hope so, and it depends upon us all.
Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images The Guardian
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