Images and the Discipline of the Classics

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• Images and the Discipline of the Classics
• Patrice D. Rankine (bio)

No one in the Global North alive in 2016 can forget the haunting image of the young boy with disheveled, dusty hair, his hollow stare into the camera as blood obscures half his face. The boy was five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, a Syrian caught in a Russian air strike on the al-Qatarji neighborhood of Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War. The picture had been staged, a gesture of grand significance, given the realities of mass media Guy Debord described long ago in The Society of Spectacle (1967). Anthropologist Rania Sweis (Paradoxes of Care: Children and Global Medical Aid in Egypt [2021]) sets the viral image within a global obsession with humanitarian aid, which belies the paradoxes of the industry, the questions of who the recipients of such care are and whether these (mostly children) are getting the resources they truly need. Half a century earlier, the leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States seized upon the spectacular truth of images (worth thousands of words) in the promulgation of the 1955 photograph of Emmett Till's open casket, revealing a face so disfigured that anyone seeing it would have to consider the horrendous violence enacted upon Black people in America during segregated times and beyond.

Those committed to academic disciplines, in my case the Classics, can learn about relevance and impact from the ubiquity of these images. Within a society of spectacle, control of the image is a specialty, to whatever extent the Kim Kardashians of the world are self-conscious about the power they wield (although Kim undeniably is). The compulsion to compose and promulgate pictures propelled Darnella Frazier to fame in 2020. At seventeen years old, she captured the horrendous murder of George Floyd on her cellphone camera, an act that uncannily enclosed her trauma: the continuous recall of the event, and later, her recital at the 2021 trial of Floyd's murderer (former police officer Derek Chauvin) of what she saw the previous year. For the use of her cellphone camera as a craft, Frazier has received several commendations, including a Pulitzer special award in 2021, kudos somewhat countervailing to her grim experiences. Frazer's ubiquity is one lesson, and the personal impact of her tool is an even more intimate reminder of the purpose of a discipline. [End Page 42] Although there is little internet trace of Frazer after 2021, from her Instagram page, she loves photography, it brings her joy, and it provides a window from herself to the world, or a bridge "between the world and me," as James Baldwin might put it. As a tool, the camera has immediate relevance, and its control and deployment are meaningful from a variety of standpoints: evoking emotion, prompting actions or reactions across the social and political spectrum.

Would it ever be possible for young people to engage with the Classics in this way, for it to be ubiquitous, casually picked up, and impactful emotionally? What shifts in the discipline would it take? How would it change its image? The mastery of images (even deepfake or falsely generated ones) is among the foremost technologies of our time, although mastery itself can be problematic. Classicists often use technical knowledge as gatekeeping. Lack of expertise does not hinder access to the world of images, to the beaten and bruised back of Peter, an enslaved man of African descent whose image the Union army used to show the horrors of slavery. With the proliferation of images, it has become hard to distinguish between the novice and the professional, as praise of Frazier demonstrates. The tools behind appearances are rendered invisible in photographs or film, but mastery is always possible. Although Frazier used her cellphone camera in the casual way that most people do, the fact that it served the pursuit of justice cannot be lost on her, any more than it was on Omran's photographer, Mahmoud Raslan, who said he wished every photograph of a suffering child would go viral.

From the example of images, we see that a discipline can serve several purposes at once. First, craft completes the human being. Novelist Ralph...