I scanned this image from the front page of this past weekend's Financial Times. Being in Denmark last week (more on that in later posts) gave oa and me the opportunity to see how Europe was responding to and visualizing the global economic crisis. Judging from this picture at least, Europe's crisis "looks like" what we are seeing here in the U.S.: reaction shots of individual capitalists expressing anxiety, shock, and disbelief, captioned geographically to suggest the breadth of the crisis.
While I have not systematically tracked the visual representations, I have in recent months noted a few trends here on the blog. Images illustrating the subprime mortage crisis didn't visualize people, they visualized property. Gas price imagery visualized numbers and alternatives. Once the crisis broadened and hit global proportions, we started to get the "economic gesture" images like the one above. The face of the crisis at present seems to be the individual trader on the floor, watching the numbers fall on the screen, powerless to do much to stop market forces. These representations are notable in part because they mute an easy assignment of agency to the crisis.
But one recent image foregrounds agency quite explicitly:
This is a painting of Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, made by New York artist Geoffrey Raymond. According to this Associated Press article, about 4 weeks ago Raymond placed the painting outside of Lehman Brothers' headquarters and encouraged passers-by to write on it; Lehman Brothers' employees were encouraged to use green ink so their comments would be differentiated from others'. For a close-up version of the image and some of the comments, see here. Here we get a direct, and multi-vocal, sense of agency - not only Fuld's as an ideal scapegoat for the crisis but also the participation of those who wrote on the painting.
Raymond set up a blog called The Annotated Fuld, which he created explicitly for the purpose of selling his painting (interesting way to critique capitalists, to be sure, but that's for another blog post). Raymond has not only targeted Fuld, but other prominent New Yorkers, capitalist and otherwise - his "Annotated Spitzer" and "Annotated Fed" are also for sale. As of last Friday The Today Show had interviewed him and images of his paintings displayed on Wall Street sidewalks have appeared in a number of newspapers, including at least twice in the New York Times. Here's its Sept. 16 version, in a photo by Tina Fineberg:
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