amanda rivkin, photographer

They all say the same thing, the first in French, the second in Catalan and lastly English, perhaps the most useless of the languages accept for this week during Visa Pour L’image, as English maintains its credibility as the language of international media still. It is my first trip to the city, to the south of France (previous trips to the country have taken me only to Paris and Bretagne, where my dearest and oldest friend claims deep ancestral roots and where half of her family resides) and to the annual photojournalism festival, likely and perhaps the biggest in the world in its 23rd year.

An editor once confided quite privately that the media was so late to catch the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and project images of the destruction of New Orleans worldwide not because President George W. Bush’s response left much to be desired but because the photo editors were on a working vacation in this city, Perpignan in the south of France. In other words, even if you think this annual gathering of photojournalists, their photo editors and the French public (who tend to treat journalists like rockstars) is irrelevant to current events and world affairs, guess again.

As a first time visitor to Perpignan and Visa Pour L’image, my duty is ostensibly to take it all in and to live and learn. I have also managed to arrange a steady series of meetings with many of the editors at many of the precise publications I have long hoped to show my work too, especially as I prepare for a move to Baku, Azerbaijan where I will be working with a Fulbright grant on three primary projects: 1) the social and cultural role of women in a country at the crossroads of East and West, 2) the country’s development in preparation for its role as host of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012 and 3) a continuation of my previous work documenting the socioeconomic transformation along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline route.

Over the course of the coming week, I will be answering the following question from editor after editor: what work do you have to show? Here, in a few brief images, project titles, and captions is a preview:

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BAKU-TBILISI-CEYHAN OIL PIPELINE

Young girls dress themselves appropriately for prayer upon entering the Shi’a Icherishahar Djuma Masjid or Innercity Mosque for Friday prayers in the old city of Baku, Azerbaijan on July 2, 2010.

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HUNGARY’S TOXIC RED SLUDGE INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENT

The rupture in the toxic red alumina sludge reservoir as seen from the top of a remaining piece of the reservoir’s wall at the MAL plant in Ajka, Hungary on November 22, 2010, that sent a torrent of toxic red alumina sludge pouring into the surrounding countryside, several villages including Kolontar and Devecser and resulted in the death of ten individuals, including a 14 months old baby, injured hundreds and left several families homeless.

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NEW WORK: PRAGUE STAG NIGHTS

Angelo Eleveld, 22, of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, a stag tourist celebrating the impending marriage of his friend Michael Klos, 23, dances with stranger and fellow stag tourist, the soon to be married Blair Skadden of New Zealand in the “mankini” made famous by British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen in the “Borat” film at the Beer Factory on Weneslaus Square in Prague, Czech Republic on August 12, 2011.

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CHICAGO POLITICS PORTFOLIO

President Elect Barack Obama waves to a crowd of 250,000 in Grant Park, Chicago through bullet proof glass after becoming the 44th U.S. President on election night on November 4, 2008.

Final note: If you are an editor, or photographer hoping to reach me this week, I will be available on my Czech cell at +420.774.037.084.

I received three honorable mentions this year at the Lucie International Photography Awards for work in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Hungary, and Chicago. The entries are below with brief descriptions. You will have to scroll down pretty far in the same “Honorable Mention” gallery to find these entries in the environmental, political, photo essay and feature story categories here.

From the entry description:
Entry Title: “Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline“
Name: Amanda Rivkin, United States
Category: Professional, Photo Essay and Feature Story
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline traverses three nations, skirts five conflict zones, and covers land held by believers in at least two of the world’s great religions. A major post-Cold War victory for the West that sent one million barrels of oil a day pumping from the oil fields of Azerbaijan with room to expand to transport energy from elsewhere in the Caspian and Central Asian regions, the BTC pipeline – as the project is known – has helped to redefine energy security in the early 21st century.
(This work has previously appeared at National Geographic.)

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Entry Title: “Hungary’s Toxic Red Sludge“
Name: Amanda Rivkin, United States
Category: Professional, Environmental
On October 4, 2010, a reservoir containing toxic red alumina sludge in Ajka, Hungary ruptured and resulted in a serious industrial accident affecting numerous surrounding villages. In part, the accident was the result of a much larger region-wide disaster that has resulted from decaying communist-era industry and lack of regulation in the aftermath of the transition to capitalism and a private sector economy following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and communism across the former Eastern bloc. There is no perfect storm man created.
(This work has previously appeared at Bag News Notes.)

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From the entry description:
Entry Title: “Mayor Not Daley: The Rise of Rahm Emanuel in Chicago“
Name: Amanda Rivkin, United States
Category: Professional, Political
When Richard M. Daley announced he would not seek reelection for the office of mayor of Chicago, a position he held for 22 years and a post previously held by his father, Richard J. Daley, an elaborate game of political exchange brought Rahm Emanuel home from Washington to become mayor of Chicago. Formerly the White House Chief of Staff under President Barack Obama, Emanuel left the White House and Richard M. Daley’s brother, Bill Daley, soon took up the job. Emanuel’s close relationship with the president is something many Chicagoans hope the city will benefit from.
(This work has previously appeared at Fortnight Journal.)

The New York Times page A16, June 28, 2011 includes, “In a Retrial, Blagojevich Is Found Guilty of Corruption,” by Monica Davey and Emma G. Fitzsimmons with photograph of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich by Amanda Rivkin.

Mr. Blagojevich with his wife, Patti, arriving at court on Monday.

Former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich leaving the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago on Monday after being convicted of 17 counts.

Mr. Blagojevich and his wife, Patti, leave court after the verdict. (Credits: Amanda Rivkin for The New York Times)

Jury Finds Blagojevich Guilty of Corruption
By MONICA DAVEY and EMMA G. FITZSIMMONS
Published: June 27, 2011

CHICAGO — A jury on Monday convicted Rod R. Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, of a broad pattern of corruption, including charges that he tried to personally benefit from his role in selecting a replacement for President Obama in the United States Senate.

Mr. Blagojevich, a Democrat who former aides say once envisioned himself as a future presidential contender, was found guilty of most of the 20 federal counts against him: 17 counts of wire fraud, attempted extortion, soliciting bribes, conspiracy to commit extortion and conspiracy to solicit and accept bribes.

As the verdicts were read aloud in court, one “guilty” following another, Mr. Blagojevich, who has always proclaimed his innocence, turned, his jaw clenched grimly, to look at his wife, Patti, in the front row. By then, she was already slumped back in the arms of a relative, eyes closed, wiping away tears.

The verdict appeared to be the conclusion, at last, to the spectacle of Mr. Blagojevich’s political career, which began its spiraling descent shortly after Mr. Obama was elected president in November 2008. A month after Election Day, Mr. Blagojevich, who was in his second term as governor and under state law was required to name a senator to replace Mr. Obama, was arrested, and federal agents revealed that they had secretly recorded hundreds of hours of damaging phone calls by him and his advisers.

Mr. Blagojevich, a lawyer and former state and federal lawmaker, was accused of trying to secure campaign contributions, a cabinet post or a high-paying job in exchange for his official acts as governor — whether that was picking a senator, supporting particular legislation or deciding how to spend state money. Mr. Blagojevich was acquitted on one charge of bribery, and the jury deadlocked on two counts of attempted extortion, but convictions came on the bulk of the counts and on those related to the Senate seat — the claims that had drawn international headlines.

The outcome came as a victory for federal prosecutors, whose earlier trial resulted in a deadlocked jury on most counts and led people to wonder whether Mr. Blagojevich’s behavior would ultimately be deemed crass political deal-making or a lot of wishful, blustery talk, but not rise to the level of crimes.

Issuing their verdicts on the 10th day of deliberations, jurors said the accusations related to selling the Senate seat had been the clearest and easiest to resolve, in part because of the audio recordings of Mr. Blagojevich’s telephone calls. In the end, the jurors — 11 women and 1 man, all of whom declined to provide their names to reporters — said they believed they had sent a loud signal to corrupt Illinois politicians, past and future.

“There’s a lot of bargaining that goes on behind the scenes — we do that in our everyday lives, in business and everything,” said the jury forewoman, a retired church employee from the Chicago suburbs. “But I think in the instances when it is someone representing the people, it crosses the line. And I think we sent a pretty clear message on that.”

And she had her own conclusion about the unseemly political world she had seen close-up through about six weeks of testimony: “I told my husband that if he was running for politics, he would probably have to find a new wife.”

For Democrats here, in a state government they almost entirely control, the final chapter could not come soon enough. By turns, Illinois residents had been mortified by the saga, amused by its circuslike antics and, most recently, weary of the whole thing.

Mr. Blagojevich’s impeachment, removal from office and evolution into a punch line on late-night television threatened the Democratic Party’s political hold on the state, created an outcry to overhaul lax state campaign finance and public records laws, and led to added scrutiny of some of this city’s best-known politicians, including Mr. Obama, Rahm Emanuel (the president’s former chief of staff and now Chicago’s mayor) and Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr.

The scandal also reaffirmed an image that Illinois has long wished to shed: Mr. Blagojevich appears likely to be the fourth governor in recent memory to be imprisoned (one for acts committed after leaving office).

Read more at The New York Times

“Cordoba had the edge in dissent,” begins Pakistani writer and commentator Tariq Ali in a section devoted to the one-time intellectual capitol of Al-Andalus, the once Muslim southern half of contemporary Spain that is home to one of the most spectacular works of Islamic architecture, The Mezquita, in his larger post-September 11 work, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. Much has happened in the ever-complicated relationship between mine and Ali’s country in the last week since U.S. Navy Seals raided, killed and then buried at sea Osama bin Laden, who it turns out has spent several of the past fugitive years in an elaborate compound just off Kakul Road, the drive leading to Pakistan’s elite military academy equivalent to Sandhurst in the U.K. or West Point here in the U.S. The compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was just 40 kilometers from the capital Islamabad. Not even former President and Head of the Pakistani Army Pervez Musharraf received such treatment, although he did assert he had gone jogging in the area in the past. The diplomatic dance has begun with as much precision as the diplomatic duel, much of it not resembling the relationship of cooperation and mutual satisfaction embodied by Cordoba’s golden age, depicted in the center of the National Geographic illustration above of Alexandria, Cordoba, and New York, three cities at the crossroads of the world in their time, from “Tale of Three Cities” published in the magazine around the time of the millennium.

In an intelligence coup, the U.S. Department of Defense has released excerpts without audio of video captured during the raid. One of the video stills shows that the formerly most feared terrorist/heralded Islamic jihadist in the world “looks like a schnook” with a dyed beard during a rehearsal, in the words of one internet commenter on the Bag News Notes site dedicated to analyzing contemporary imagery in mass culture. For those outside New York unacquainted with the Yiddishism, a shnook is someone to be pitied more than feared whose mistaken self-conception, often of grandeur, diverges from the greater reality.

Not sure it fits Osama entirely, although he looks silly – but as Bag News Notes chief writer Michael Shaw points out, so did Obama earlier in the week as he performed a redo of his May Day address to the nation, the effect of which was to say, “We got him!” if not quite in those words. Shaw leans into the Department of Defense (although the Obama press operations would fall on the White House) for not seeing such a strikingly obvious parallel in their image making and image operations:

Let me just be clear. I’m not ripping the DoD for propaganda, I get that’s a big part of their business. What I’m ripping them for is weak propaganda, each failed effort having the effect of undermining the effective stuff.

The effective stuff falling somewhere between this and puppies. In any event, after several failed efforts (including former President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on May 1, 2003), taking down Osama bin Laden on May Day means President Barack Obama took down two enemies with one stone: the communists and the terrorists. May Day is once again safe for democracy, or at the very least the Democrats. It also means that for this year at least, I can no longer refer to the Eurovision Song Contest as “the most important geopolitical event of our time“.

When people took to the streets in celebration in Lafayette Square outside the White House, and Ground Zero formerly the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, many different media outlets showed up to dutifully record the fervor as true USA! patriots shouted their three favorite letters: U-S-A! U-S-A! and some clever people had the good idea to play one of my favorite songs, the kitschy jingoistic “Party in the USA!” by an extraordinarily scantily clad and underage Miley Cyrus. In the music video, she appears wearing just a little more than very little in an outfit replete with booty shorts, push up bra, cowboy boots and a big American flag in the backdrop. Yeah, it’s a party in the USA!

Despite most media portrayals of victorious Americans fist pumping with the flag and a Miley Cyrus soundtrack, most Americans my guess is are pretty detached at this point, almost 10 years on from where we started, as was the case when I past through this southern New Jersey rest stop the following day:

Patrons at the food court at the Walt Whitman rest stop along Interstate-95 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey react to news of Osama bin Laden’s death the morning after American President Barack Obama announced his death at the hands of US Navy Seals in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than 1,000 meters from a prominent Pakistani military academy on May 2, 2011.

As the people in the picture above certainly know and know well, these are the times we live in and nobody has to like the modern world, only live in it. Despite the detachment from the events of September 11, the events of that day remain as relevant as ever as one question is carefully avoided both in the American media and among the political and diplomatic elite: did anyone in the Pakistani Army or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have any foreknowledge of events that transpired on September 11? No one in the American media has said the word Kargil, perhaps in deference to the fact that most Americans would likely not recall the 1999 India-Pakistani nuclear standoff over Kashmir. What role might the resolution at the Blair House Summit [PDF] between Clinton and former Pakistani President Nawaz Sharif (subsequently overthrown by Army Chief Pervez Musharraf after Sharif returned home) have had in the shaming of Pakistan and the desire for a humiliating form of revenge? This is not a question that can or necessarily ever will be answered; in part, the diplomatic dance begs that it not be, but out of such ambiguity lay the future patterns of deception and interpretation. Sometimes asking the question alone is the best one can accept for the moment.

In the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden, the diplomatic contortionist’s act between the U.S. and Pakistan has evolved. In the words of one Pakistani analyst, Mosharraf Zaidi:

It is even less likely that, as U.S. counterterrorism czar John Brennan claimed in a press conference today, Pakistani authorities did not know about the military operation that killed bin Laden until it was over. Abbottabad’s Bilal Town neighborhood where bin Laden lived and died was virtually around the corner from the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul — Pakistan’s West Point, where future General Kayanis and General Pashas are learning to be officers. It doesn’t take 40 minutes to start to scramble planes, or get troops to Abbottabad, and there is no getting into the town by land or air without the expressed consent of Pakistan’s security establishment. This may not have been an official joint operation, but it was almost certainly a collective effort.

Maintaining these two fictions requires a great deal of creativity from both parties involved. In the first instance, Pakistan has to lie to enable the U.S. government to avoid looking like a first-timer in Las Vegas, getting hustled by a pro. In the second, the United States has to lie, to avoid implicating its chief partner in the dishonoring of Pakistani pride and the violation of Pakistani sovereignty.

I do not think this is what the legacy of Cordoba in our time, National Geographic or Tariq Ali had in mind with regard to “the edge in dissent” at the crossroads of the world; preserving an ideal or the very image of utopian peace in our mind requires that we contemplate other possibilities. We must remind ourselves rather of what was, of encounters tinged with idealism and intellectualism. Such historical reflection not only serves to bolster our moral appetite for “The Lies They Tell Us,” as Zaidi’s piece is titled, but courage to continue because thanks to the memory of these earlier civilizations, we can remember that “Islam had always prospered through contact with other traditions,” (except of course when it did not, such as during the Crusades or in the last century after the decline of the Ottoman Empire or Sultan Abdulhamid II forward) in the words of Tariq Ali, as “Its origins lay in close contact with Judaism and Christianity.” From Cordoba, some images:

The exterior of the Mezquita in Cordoba, Spain on July 28, 2007. Cordoba is often cited as a historical model of peaceful coexistence among Christians, Jews and Muslims when the city was the capital of Moorish southern Spain and the Umayyad caliphate for nearly 500 years. Today Cordoba attracts tourists from around the Middle East and North Africa as well as the West because of the city’s shared cultural patrimony.

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Inside the courtyard of the Mezquita in the heart of the old city in Cordoba, Spain on July 28, 2007. The Mezquita (“mosque” in Spanish) took nearly 200 years to build and was the centerpiece of the capital of Al Andalus, as the region was known during nearly 700 years of Arab rule under the Umayyad caliphate when Jews, Christians and Arabs peacefully coexisted. When Christians seized the city in 1236, the mosque was converted into a cathedral and remains a popular tourist attraction among all three communities.

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Belen, a Catalan belly dancer who trained in the southern Spanish city of Granada, performs for an audience of mostly tourists at the Arab-themed Hammam Restaurant in the old Jewish quarter of Cordoba, Spain on July 28, 2007.

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Locals at the Hammam shisha cafe and Arab-themed restaurant in the old Jewish quarter of Cordoba, the one-time capital of Moorish southern Spain and the Umayyad caliphate, on July 28, 2007.

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The hot tub at the Arab-themed Hammam Restaurant and Spa in the old Jewish quarter of Cordoba, Spain on July 28, 2007.

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The Mezquita in Cordoba, the one-time capital of Moorish southern Spain and the Umayyad caliphate, on the evening of July 28, 2007.

World’s Largest Laundromat in Berwyn, Illinois on July 7, 2008.
Included in the exhibit, “Obamaland” at The Coop in Chicago, May/June 2009.

China is blocking Gmail in China right now in an effort to stymie internet activism against the regime (given that it is an information war, seems most appropriate to link to the Voice of America story). Last year for Foreign Policy I wrote about the experiences Xu Zhiyong, a public interest lawyer and member of the Beijing City Council representing the Haidan district, a voice of dissent who has sought to work within the system to advance the causes of human rights and civil liberties. He was arrested in August of 2009 and held incommunicado for nearly a month in Beijing. A day following the arrival of former American Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Xu Zhiyong and two other activists were released. Below is my article for Foreign Policy published under the title “Raging Against the Machine” on January 19, 2010 (free subscription required for access on Foreign Policy’s website):

Xu Zhiyong was watching the 2004 Democratic convention in a shared common area at a Columbia University dormitory when we first met. After just a few words, I knew he could understand little of the speeches on television. It is so different from China, he said. Political conventions in his home country were pageants: Officials waited their turn, sat erect in their seats, and clapped only on cue and never too wildly.

Last July, my friend was the subject of a different form of high stakes political theater when he was arrested, detained, and held incommunicado for one month. As a young and extremely enterprising attorney in Beijing, he has represented a slew of disadvantaged clients in China, from a newspaper owner beleaguered by the authorities to the victims of the contaminated baby formula sold by the Sanlu company. When he disappeared, the first news I received appeared on the New Yorker’s website in the form of a headline that questioned directly, “Where is Xu Zhiyong?”

With Google’s threats last week to withdraw from China amid suggestions that the Chinese government was behind recent cyberattacks on its corporate infrastructure that specifically targeted the email accounts of prominent Chinese human rights activists, I was reminded again of my friend. This episode sheds light on the obstacles faced by those struggling to improve civil liberties within China and the consequences of Google’s potential withdrawal from that country.

In the summer of 2004, we lived across the hall from each other at Columbia University. A few nights a week, we held impromptu English lessons to improve his conversation skills. We began by reviewing formal pleasantries, one of the first steps in English language courses for foreigners. Toward the end of our first week, I realized he had only introduced himself with an English name, Sunny, and that I knew very little about him. He typed the English spelling of his name, Xu Zhiyong, into my laptop.

He told me he was a lawyer, but he struggled to describe his work in English so he reached for Google. A few articles had already appeared on his work and career, including a profile in the New York Times covering his campaign for a seat on Beijing’s city council from the prestigious academic district of Haidian. He also worked as an advocate for China’s disenfranchised petitioners who convene in the capital on the basis of an ancient tradition that allows citizens to petition the state for redress of grievances.

While we continued our formal classes, the conversation continued on the weekends, in nearby restaurants and bars. We watched gavel-to-gavel coverage on C-SPAN of both American political conventions. I will not forget how my new friend’s eyes grew wide when Bill Clinton spoke. When Clinton finished, to raucous applause, he offered just one reflection, “Wow!”

Originally from a rural village in the impoverished interior region of Henan, Sunny moved to the largest local city, Kaifeng, with his mother and brother as a young teenager. His mother was illiterate, and, as the issues that he tackled became increasingly sensitive, he resisted telling her about his work. He was concerned that she would fear for his safety and could be harassed due to his choice of career. His brother is a regional police chief.

Over time, his roster of sensitive cases, including the Sanlu melamine baby formula milk scandal, transformed him into something of a public-interest icon. He appeared on the cover of Mr. Fashion, the Chinese equivalent of Esquire. However, as he sat in an unknown Beijing jail, his name was not searchable by Google within China.

His release from detention in August was, in many ways, a greater surprise than his arrest. But he was still forced to contend with severe restrictions on his ability to communicate freely using modern technology. My friend abandoned one tampered Gmail account for another. For some time after his release, the authorities denied him access to an email account, blocking most all methods of communication but his cell phone, which we used to talk in those first few days after his detention suddenly ended.

For several years, we have communicated by Gmail accounts, knowing perfectly well that messages may be read, intercepted, and occasionally blocked. There is also nothing better; for now, we are able to communicate. If Google vanishes from the Chinese landscape, there might be no available alternative to such communication.

Google is learning a lesson my friend did years ago: There is no easy way to take on China’s ruling apparatchiks. If Google withdraws suddenly, as it has threatened, it will be abandoning China to authorities whose claim to power must be challenged, an outcome not in the interest of Google or the Chinese people. If there is a way to triumph over the authorities in China, Xu Zhiyong’s life and work reflects the need to vigorously challenge a system that has sought to fortify itself against internal and external attacks on its own terms. In the end, Google would do well to follow his strategy: displaying deference when the alternative is to be completely shut out from the country, but also pushing back hard when it is threatened.

Qaddafi is a topic of conversation in and of himself, and his family an entirely separate discussion as well. He is the center of gravity of his own regime, naturally. The U.S. has announced it is not engaging in regime change (although not quite in those words), but has struck the compound where he resides with a missile.

On another war front, Der Spiegel has announced to an e-mail list of its subscribers that in its print edition to hit news stands tomorrow, it will publish three images of U.S. soldiers posing with dead Afghan civilians. The Washington Post writes, “The photos are among several hundred the Army has sought to keep under wraps as it prosecutes five members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, for the alleged murders of three unarmed Afghan civilians last year.” The consequences may prove more devastating than the Abu Ghraib scandal. The Guardian follows up with additional details about a dozen members of the unit, already on trial in Seattle and confronting life in prison or the death penalty if convicted:

Some of the activities of the self-styled “kill team” are already public, with 12 men currently on trial in Seattle for their role in the killing of three civilians.

Five of the soldiers are on trial for pre-meditated murder, after they staged killings to make it look like they were defending themselves from Taliban attacks.

Other charges include the mutilation of corpses, the possession of images of human casualties and drug abuse.

All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.

Interestingly, rounding out the debate on military secrecy and press affairs in the past week is the rumblings at the State Department with spokesman P.J. Crowley’s resignation in the wake of comments he made at M.I.T. criticizing the military’s treatment of Private Bradley Manning, accused of leaking U.S. diplomatic cables.

All of this brought me back to a simple moment and experience of being with the demonized “other.” As a photographer, I have had the experience twice of being with a person cast as the other for a period on a day when the demonization meets its high tide. My first experience was meeting Bill Ayers, former member of the Weather Underground and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), on election day 2008. The second time was following former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich his final day in office for The New York Times. Below my favorite images from both shoots and a bit of back story below each image:

Backstory: “My editor at my agency suggested I might give obtaining a hard to get portrait of Bill Ayers a try. ‘A local kid might have a better shot,’ he advised on the phone a few weeks before the election. I sent Ayers an e-mail and to my surprise he responded not too much time before election day, writing that he had been out of the country and traveled back the Sunday before election day from Asia. We figured out a time to meet mid-morning, near a vacant lot on the near West Side. The first thing he asked me was where I went to high school. We played a few rounds of do-you-know-so-and-so but came up blank. Perhaps a bit more time would have materialized better results, afterall Chicago is the greatest small town on earth, a veritable village. After I took his portrait, he repeated over and over, ‘I am not a terrorist, I am not a terrorist…,’ appearing visibly shaken by the accusation made repeatedly by Sarah Palin in particular with regard to his past as a member of The Weather Underground and the group’s attack on a Pentagon lavatory. The accusation snowballed into an unsuccessful effort to link his past to the candidacy of Barack Obama, which failed in part because Obama was much too young to have taken any role in the bitterness of the Vietnam era.”

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Backstory: “Blagojevich was a talker but his neediness was of the most predictable sort, the vanity trap of the political class. You would never have to interrogate Rod Blagojevich. He gave me a pen, perhaps one of the last if not the last he could give out that said ‘Governor Rod Blagojevich’ while he was still Governor Rod Blagojevich. When we returned from Springfield and arrived at his house, I asked if we could go inside and he said he did not think Patti, his wife, would like that. When he got out of the car, we stayed parked a few minutes and watched as he enjoyed the stake-out, the crush of reporters, photographers, and videographers that surrounded the stairwell to his home as he walked at the pace of a crawl up the steps. He was riding out the publicity to the last moment. Little did we know that would hardly be the last moment.”

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One last note. The Libyan government is currently believed to be holding four New York Times reporters, among them photographers Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks, despite promises of their release made by Saif Qaddafi to ABC News’ Christiane Amanpour. Lynsey’s work has long been an inspiration since I was first introduced to her portfolio. Tyler’s book “Histories Are Mirrors” is an extraordinary visual study in comparative war and the final days of failing regimes. Anthony Shadid and Stephen Farrell are the two reporters; Farrell is British, the others are American citizens. Like many in the journalistic profession and readers of The New York Times, I hope for their release soon. UPDATE: The four New York Times journalists were released to Turkish diplomats in Tripoli, while 13 reporters remain missing according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Chicago Way
Fortnight Journal
February 14, 2011

I.

The Chicago Tribune arrived on the ledge outside my family’s kitchen. It was December. I was home for the holidays from graduate school. On the front page, the Tribune featured an early poll of 721 likely voters in the Chicago mayoral race. This was the first real contest in 21 years for the highest office in the city; The Fifth Floor; the mayor’s executive suite at Chicago City Hall.

The poll showed a clear and early divide had emerged: There was Rahm Emanuel. And then there was everyone else.

Or rather, there was Rahm Emanuel with a double-digit, 32 percent lead, and then a fragmented spread that delegated mere single-digit percentage points to the other six candidates, in alphabetical order: Roland Burris, Gery Chico, Danny Davis, Miguel del Valle, Reverend James Meeks and Carol Moseley Braun.

As of this writing, the race has dwindled considerably. Davis and Meeks bowed out and endorsed Moseley Braun, making her the de facto black candidate in the race. Burris announced he was never running for mayor. Chico and del Valle continue to fragment the much coveted and talked about key to victory, the Hispanic vote. As of December 14 2010, and very much to this day, the race remains Rahm Emanuel’s to lose.

My Papa came into the kitchen a short while after I brought the newspapers in from the hallway of his apartment building. He took one look at the front page. More than that was unnecessary. Whereas the papers liked to call the mayor’s race a special election given the newly open field – open to machine candidates only, but nonetheless open – Papa liked to think of it as “a once in every other lifetime” election.

“Let’s see. We have one, two, three, four,” he counted with his finger, “Four black candidates, two Hispanic candidates, and one white candidate,” he paused. “This machine might be cold, it might be cruel, it might be calculating… but you sure have to admire its efficiency.”

II.

I come form a generation of Chicagoans that have really only known “the Daley regime,” as we call it amongst ourselves. There is only Daley. Before Mayor for Life Richard M. Daley, there was his father, the original Mayor for Life, Richard J. Daley. Between them, there was an interregnum. Five mayors filled the 13-year void of Daley family leadership at the helm of Chicago. Two were interim mayors (David Duvall Orr and Eugene Sawyer), therefore unelected, and three were elected (Michael Bilandic, Jane Byrne, and Harold Washington).

Bilandic is most famous for losing his reelection bid by not having the plows out on the streets in time before a major blizzard. The woman to whom he handed that victory, Jane Byrne, is most famous for winning because her opponent Bilandic did not get the plows on the streets in time before a major blizzard. One of the t-shirts I wore frequently as a teenager in a small act of defiance against the Daley regime was a Jane Byrne campaign t-shirt ,with stencils of the skyline and the Picasso statue in the Daley Plaza. The shirt had been procured from a Lincoln Park thrift store.

Most notably, though, Harold Washington made history as Chicago’s first and only black mayor to-date. The legacy of his term, and the bitter fight between Harold (as he was known throughout the city), and the City Council (spearheaded by Alderman and Finance Committee Chairman Ed Burke, the longest-serving and most powerful alderman, who remains at the head of the City Council to this day), effectively created the echelon by which city politics in large measure operates to this day. There remain ground operatives in the city for whom Burke is better known as “The Chairman.”

Mostly though, just as the postwar twentieth century has been called the American century, it was the Daley century in Chicago. I was five years old in 1989, a historic, revolutionary year elsewhere in the world, when Richard M. Daley seized power on The Fifth Floor. Some winds of change.

The truth, though, is a bit more complicated. As prestige, international attention, and even an American President have grown out of Daley’s Chicago, few have raised questions. Those who have raised questions (and of those questions that have been raised) have nearly all evaded the younger Mayor Daley, although flirting close with his inner circle. There have been scandals, but the Kremlin is not much moved one way or the other by them.

A sample of some of the more salacious scandals suggests money more than anything else is at play. There was the scandal concerning the sweetheart $68 billion deal to invest city employee pension funds that nephew Robert Vanecko received. Daley knew nothing, or so he told inquiring reporters. There was also the “Hired Truck” scandal in 2004 where private trucking companies were hired through what were politely termed “selective hiring processes” to do city work. More recently, there was the scandalous 75-year lease of city parking meters that has residents now paying more to park in downtown Chicago than in downtown Manhattan, in exchange for a one-time $1.15 billion payment to the city. That money is now gone. Daley anticipates a comfortable retirement later this year in his South Loop condo.

My work as an international photojournalist has made me sensitive to the narrative of totalitarian dictatorship. Some motifs include the domination of one-party rule, the imposition of rent-seeking tariffs and an oligarchic business-political class. And as with the standard, almost encyclopedic biography of a lasting third-world dictator, Daley is both king and a king-maker. But in fact, Daley, Our Daley, is much more than that. The cohesion Daley represents is not unlike Tito’s role in unifying the disparate ethnicities cobbled together under the banner of communist Yugoslavia in the Balkans.

Chicago is just 237 square miles of pure Balkans in the heart of the Midwest.

III.

Sure, Daley might be a feudal prince, but he is at least one who has sought to reconcile the blemishes of his father’s record in his own time. By Chicago standards, this is progress that cannot quite be discounted. Besides, almost anyone older can point to the inconveniences that came with the interregnum: council wars, garbage strikes, the grass in the park uncut.

Instead of stacking the poor into public housing units like Old Man Richard J. Daley, the younger Daley would dismantle these very units. In the good old days of Machine Rule, these public housing high-rises, “the projects,” were better known as so-called vote farms since their cohesion made for easy Democratic Party canvassing. Canvassing has been a notable pass-time of Chicago ward bosses, precinct captains and aldermen in Chicago for generations–a position customarily passed down for generations.

One of the finer details of Mike Royko’s study of The Old Man Daley, Boss, is where he lists, by ward, the names of the aldermen in the city and charts the progress from father to son over the course of a generation, demonstrating that politics in Chicago is indeed a family sport.

The outcome of the younger Daley’s “Plan for Transformation”–or, more accurately, the demolition of Chicago Housing Authority projects–would hand over large swaths of prime Chicago real estate on the Near North, Near West and South Sides to for-profit developers at the height of the housing boom. Local newspaper articles would first be largely positive of the effort, extolling the virtue of correcting euphemistic “blight.” The same papers would later deride the large number of unsold units and absence of so-called “mixed income” (read: ghetto people) units in the new luxury complexes.

To anyone who had paid attention, this last development was seemingly surprising only to the local newspapers, that clearly had not been paying very much attention. Nobody asked what happened to the people that used to inhabit the high rises who had vanished, somehow, seemingly overnight.

In fact, in a moment of unusual candor on the topic, Bruce Dold–editor of The Chicago Tribune editorial page and moderator of a mayoral debate on January 27 at WGN television studios–asked Rahm Emanuel, Daley’s all-but-assumed successor, if he felt he had earned the $320,000 he received from attending half a dozen meetings over the course of 14 months on the Freddie Mac board.

Emanuel responded that President Clinton had appointed him to the board as Vice-Chair of the Chicago Housing Authority at the time of the city’s restructuring according to the Plan for Transformation in the late 1990s. The reason Emanuel gave for his appointment was that “we were doing innovative things here in the city of Chicago with regard to mixed-income housing.”

What did it mean to tell a population of public housing residents, in effect, to go back to where they came from? Valerie Jarrett, the Obama aide and former Chicago Housing Authority chief, was Mayor Richard M. Daley’s go-between for the city and public housing residents as the wrecking ball’s timetable ticked. Emanuel, as Vice-Chair, was not so far behind.

But the “Plan for Transformation,” is not heralded as Daley’s greatest triumph because of its success in scattering the urban poor, once gathered around the city’s highly developed urban core, to its perimeter. Rather, the experiment signals the success of a far greater transformation in the alignment and allegiance of power in Chicago, and the largely successful and enormously financially beneficial integration of the city’s white and black elites.

IV.

The Chicago political arena is still very much a blood sport for any contender in theater. Its very parochial character is in large measure what makes it so fun. But parochialism is not the only key ingredient in the formation of an oligarchic power structure; so are larger-than-life personalities of an iconic stature, who demand an almost cult-like reverence. In this regard, Chicago consistently delivers. The cast of political characters, skeletons and obscurantia in Chicago represents an almost Fellini-esque space in American public political life.

In its fullest elaboration, a clear structure emerges; a hierarchical enterprise in which Daley and Obama currently sit at the top. Medvedev is Robin to Putin’s Batman, but it is not always so easy to strike the same analogy where Obama and Daley are concerned. There appears, much as is Obama’s disposition and mien, to be far greater collaboration, cooperation and opportunism on both sides. The appointment of Mayor Daley’s brother, William, to the position of Chief of Staff in the White House–after Rahm Emanuel’s departure from this position to run for mayor of Chicago, following Mayor Daley’s announcement that he would not be seeking reelection in October 2010–suggests much more of a revolving door attitude. In fact, it suggests downright orchestration.

While the game can be opaque, some moves can be delineated by bloodlines.

V.

My greatest education in the values of The Machine probably came as a child, before I knew much about The Machine or its values. It is hard to describe the moment or time when the values of this particular machine – protect your own, fight for your own, stay close to your own – became ingrained.

It is only possible to remember the moment that I first heard these words articulated aloud by long-time Chicago broadcast news reporter Carol Marin, describing for a CNN reporter former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s early reaction (before he became the larger-than-life media and reality TV star of “The Apprentice” alongside Donald Trump) to his December 9, 2008 arrest on corruption charges.

But where did I learn these ethics? And why did they have to sound so lousy, nepotistic, and tribal when stated aloud? But tribalism is not merely about corruption–better defined as merely the power or ability to do something. American cities are not governed by tribalism; Orientalist tradition dictates that only Central Asia, Africa, and select jungles of the Pacific and Americas be allowed this indignity of misclassification.

But Chicago is evidently a very tribal place.

Yesterday, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned after 30 years at the helm of Egypt following 18 days of protests across the nation. Over 300 people are estimated to have died for Egypt’s revolution to succeed. The protests turned violent at times as Mubarak clung to power, yet in the end once the fear barrier was crossed and blood was shed, there was no turning back for the Egyptian people. After 30 years, no Egyptian was prepared to return to living as they had once lived.

In my lifetime, the world has witnessed few such truly revolutionary moments. Nineteen eighty nine is the natural crutch or starting point for discussion in the twenty-first century; this is a mistake. Timothy Garton Ash, author of The Polish Revolution, rightly reminded readers of The Guardian that this is not 1989 and nor is it Tehran 1979. Nor is it 1917, 1848, 1789. It is Cairo in 2011. Today, Egypt will wake up with a profound hangover and Egyptians will slowly come to the realization that democracy not only takes time but requires a level of responsibility that blaming a dictator for every national problem never afforded. The times, they are a-changing.

Yesterday I was asked about the most exciting moment I have ever covered as a photojournalist. Irrespective of one’s political affiliations, it is relatively safe to say that the reaction of the American people to the presidency of George W. Bush was to swing the pendulum very much in the opposite direction and elect not only a black president but one named Barack Hussein Obama, just five years after the U.S. military had overthrown Iraq’s former dictator who happened to share a last name with Obama’s second name. With events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square occasionally echoing Obama’s own youth-driven presidential campaign, the moment of change can be a profound albeit fleeting moment.

The picture above first appeared as a doubletruck in The London Sunday Times Magazine in the special “Spectrum” section dedicated to photojournalism the week following Obama’s election as 44th President of the United States. From Obama’s speech of November 4, 2008 (video):

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that’s on my mind tonight’s about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She’s a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

[...]

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves — if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

Mabrouk, Misir. (Congratulations, Egypt.)

—
Full disclosure: In August-September 2004, I worked briefly as an opposition research intern at Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters for U.S. Senate.

This week saw the Obama administration distance itself from a U.S. partner of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, as street demonstrations transformed into street clashes between anti-government protesters and pro-government supporters in Cairo and other Egyptian cities. The consequence of nearly 30 years of ruling Egypt with an iron fist and over $1 billion in security assistance a year from the U.S., the revolution on the streets of Egypt appears to have taken Washington by surprise. Just last week, Vice-President Joe Biden stated that Mubarak was not a dictator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Sunday morning shows that the longstanding relationship was something the Americans were balancing closely with contemporary events.

By mid-week White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs bolstered Obama’s demand that “change must begin now,” more of a faint echo to Obama’s own presidential campaign of 2008 than it was reminiscent of the last time an American president issued an ultimatum to a dictator, by suggesting that “now means yesterday.” In between last week and this week, Foreign Policy ran a series of photo ops on its website entitled, “Everybody Loved Hosni,” an embarrassing photographic trail that should leave any dictator recipient of Western assistance nervous about the absence of true friendships in the cutthroat world of geopolitics.

The image below was taken on May 27, 2008 in Jericho in the West Bank. It shows a Palestinian Authority police training exercise at a desert base as officers train in riot control. Several Western observers were present as well as international media for the demonstration that was supported with European Union security assistance funds. While not quite as dramatic as the images emanating from Tahrir Square in Cairo, this image is far more reflective of the official face of the status quo, stability and order, as Western leaders and backers have sought to preserve it for 30 years in Egypt and elsewhere in the region for far longer.

More images from “Jericho Police Training,” May 27, 2008 on PhotoShelter.