Obama and American Gothic
an untrained eye, "America Face To Face With Itself," November 2nd, 2008 - Chicago, United States
I came across this photograph today during my daily Flickr research ritual. I’m interested in this image for several reasons but particularly because the photographer has situated an anonymous black man in place of Obama rather than appropriating Obama’s image. This was taken and and uploaded just days before the election. What’s more, he wrote that he didn’t find out until after shooting it that Obama refers to Grant Wood’s painting “American Gothic” in his memoirs, Dreams From My Father. Referring to both the painting and the photograph one blogger made an interesting observation about reader subjectivity noting, “What a lesson for me! When I’ve looked at Wood’s painting, I’ve always seen American insularity…and people to whom I attribute all manner of pettiness and prejudice. When Obama looks at them, he sees his family!” Referring to the painting Obama writes that it reminds him of “…a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”
Secondly, there’s the multiple intertextualities to consider that are carried through Flickr and other social media. This seems like an example, though not deliberately so, of Miwon Kwon’s explanation of the spatialization of discourses through “nomadic narrative” practice. (Kwon, 2004: 29).
Responding to a comment here’s what the photographer had to say about the shot:
I’d vaguely thought I’d like to post some topical image just before polling day, but I had no particular idea in mind. Then when I was in the Art Institute on Sunday morning, I saw a guy dressed from head to toe in black leather, hair dyed jet black, eyeliner – and I thought “I’ll try to catch him in front of the Grant Wood picture – I’ll call it ‘Who you calling gothic?’ or something like that.” I positioned myself on the conveniently placed bench right in front of the picture and waited. But when after fifteen minutes he finally came into the room he walked straight by the Wood, barely giving it a glance. I sat cursing him silently to myself for a moment, and had just decided to get up and head outside to the sunshine when this immaculately dressed black man came in – and miraculously all the other people in the room seemed to back away simultaneously, leaving me a clear shot of him all alone in front of the picture. The happiest of accidents.
Image: An Untrained Eye “America face to face with itself.”
Tags: Flickr, Obama, rhetorical mobility
