Illuminations (4th of July, 2025)
A mood piece.
Today is the most vulgar, stupid day of the year. It is always the most vulgar, stupid day of the year, but this year, for some reason, the vulgarity and the stupidity feels even more oppressive than usual – perhaps because the summer heat, too, feels even more oppressive than usual. I suspect, however, that it will be even worse next year, on both counts. Anyone who cares to look can see that there are storm clouds gathering on the horizon. It’s hard to say, right now, quite how far away they are. But they look very dark, and very angry, and the wind is blowing them towards us. Of that we can be sure.
There’s this one Walker Evans photo I’ve been thinking about. Here it is:
In Walker Evans’s work the photograph as art piece is inseparable from the photograph as document, from the photograph as record of the world as it existed at one time. His work with the WPA, which this image is a part of, and which is what everyone talks about, but not without reason, is artistic and journalistic simultaneously. I don’t mean it seeks a middle ground between the two, a common tactic of his lesser imitators – I mean it is both, fully and concurrently. The title of this image, like all of them, is blunt and impersonal, purely descriptive in nature: “Child's Grave, Hale County, Alabama.” Subject and location. The date: 1936. A child born that year would have turned 89 in this one.
I do not think I need to point out the particular political resonance of a photograph such as this on the day when a bill is being signed into law which will strip millions of their healthcare and plunge untold more into depths of poverty which (in many cases) they, and their children, will never escape. There are no shortage of places online where you can read about that, if you want to, many, many articles from intelligent people who have spent their lives looking at numbers. My life and my energies, though, have been spent looking at words and at pictures, so that’s what I’m going to talk about here. Specifically, I’d like you to look at this picture with me, and while you do, try to hold the words “Child’s Grave” in your head, and try to think about what they really mean, what they really are.
The first thing I want you to notice is the fact that this is a picture of a grave. It is not a picture of a graveyard, although Evans certainly took pictures of graveyards. It’s not really a picture of a gravestone either, although Evans certainly took pictures of gravestones. No: the subject of this image, its sole focus, is the place in the earth where a specific person, a specific child, was buried. The perspective excludes practically the entirety of surrounding environment; the marker, seen in profile, is just a rectangle stuck in the ground, casting a shadow over its ward. Whatever is inscribed on it is unreadable. It is a single-minded image, like many, many Walker Evans images. It makes exactly one demand of the viewer: “Here is a grave. Look at it.”
This is, of course, not all that can be said about it. It is worth noting, for example, that this is not just a picture of a grave, but a picture of a fresh grave. The ground in this part of Hale County, Alabama is dry, sandy, and packed smooth by the accumulated efforts of man and nature. As is generally the case with gravesites, it does not look so heavily trafficked; some hardy weeds have sprouted up in the foreground, and to either side. The grave itself is not like this, though. The earth piled onto it is loose and coarse, dotted with upturned stones, veined with innumerable tiny ridges and canyons, all of which will melt away in the first hard rain, if they’ve not already been erased by the wind. It still has the shape of a mound, still rises up – the labor of the grave’s digging, and the labor of its filling back in, can still be seen; most importantly, it can still be seen that in the interim between these two processes, something was added which was not there before. This is what such a mound is: attestation that in this place, someone has been returned to the earth. Attestation that some others cared enough about this person, now departed, to open up the earth for them, and lay what they have left behind inside.
So, this picture is not really just about a grave, but about the act of burial. It is not about a site made abstract by historical distance; it is about something that happened in Evans’s own time, that was in a sense still happening when the photograph was taken. Those that buried this child, it is safe to assume, had only begun to grieve. That grief is not something that can be photographed, but the labor they have performed to make that grief into a mark upon the world – that can be photographed. The mound, which will, in time, be as smooth as all the ground around it, from which, in time, some hardy weeds will no doubt sprout as well – that can be photographed. And so that is what Evans photographs. He photographs it so that you will look at it. He photographs it so that it can be seen. Nothing more than that, and nothing less than that. It is for this reason that he is a great photographer, perhaps the greatest America has produced. He says perhaps the only thing of value a photographer can say, at least about America: Look. Look. Look at what is here. That small plate perched atop the mound of earth – it’s so smooth and clean and bright. It’s such a contrast to what it rests upon, to all the dirt and sand around it. And it’s been placed so carefully, with such attention, right in the center of the mound. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that everything worth knowing?
I’ve been listening to Illuminations of Vile Engorgement by Enmity recently. It’s one of those metal albums that everyone hates, except for the people that love it. I discovered it a few years ago, and while I won’t pretend it’s in regular rotation, it’s something I keep coming back to, because it sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard. On it, Enmity performs a kind of brutal death metal which many brutal death metal fans have argued is “too stupid” – which, if you have any familiarity with brutal death metal, or its fanbase, is saying quite a lot. It is wrong to call it “caveman music,” a descriptor often given to especially crude, aggressive forms of extreme metal, because it is actually too monotonous for that – every track, practically speaking, is about hitting one downtuned riff hit over and over, then another, then maybe the first again, while a couple triggers on a drum machine blast at a relentless, inhuman tempo that only sort of aligns with the riffing; a human being, even a “caveman” would, instinctually, perform with more rhythm. The closer analogy is something mechanical, a great, simple type of defiler, seen from below, turning some sacred place or other into sludge. The gore of the cover art, you’ll notice, is difficult to even parse.
Enmity are from Tucson, Arizona. They formed in 1995 (the year I was born), and released a handful of demos and EPs over the next few years, as metal bands are wont to do; Vile Engorgement, their first and last full-length album, didn’t come out until 2005, which is to say the thick of the Bush years, and the GWOT. I point this out because I cannot imagine this music existing in a world without the images of Abu Ghraib. To be living in a culture which had seen those images and, in one way or another, come to terms with them, decided it had no choice but to swallow them, accept that there would be no consequences for them, seems to me a prerequisite to compose music such as this, which is like the gutted skin of itself. When Obama took office, some people assumed we’d left that kind of culture behind. I used to think so, too. But these days, I’m more inclined to think we just don’t notice it anymore, in the same way we don’t notice the air around us, the air we’re always breathing. The images from Abu Ghraib, you’ll remember, weren’t meant to be seen.