What's Wrong with this Picture?

 

The Pomona College class of 2025, photo-captured on the steps of Carnegie Hall on August 28th, 2021, image promptly shared on official Pomona social media accounts. 

ASSESSING risk is hard, and we can reasonably hope that setting up and photo-capturing the moment above did not result in any transmission of the COVID virus.  Precautions were in fact taken: the students were assembled while wearing masks and were told to remove them just for the photo—and then to re-mask afterward.  And admirably, Pomona requires that students be vaccinated.  Put simply then: the amount of heightened COVID risk for the sake of capturing this photo, while greater than zero, was probably moderate, not extreme.  

Yet this relatively happy assessment almost certainly misses this mark on the low side, since the consequences of taking and circulating the photo are not limited to the event itself, meaning to the staging and taking of the photo.  We must also consider the message conveyed by this event to the students and, more widely, to all who saw the photo on social media.  One imagines that both staging and circulating this image signals permissiveness about not masking—thus encouraging risky behavior and virus transmission in other contexts.  So too, we should worry that this image risks being used as support for anti-masking.  Isn't it all too easy for a display of non-masking, even if done carefully, to be read as anti-masking, in our fiercely polarized moment?  Certainly, the image seems an affront to caution, an affront to taking COVID seriously, an affront to sound protocols to mask when in close contact with others, even outdoors.  

All of which raises the question of why?  Why take any increased risk—even if it were only moderate risk—for the sake of taking and circulating this image?  What desire—what institutional desire—is expressed in the choice of unmasking for this photo-op, located temporally, as it is, in the second year of our pandemic?  

Let us, perhaps, re-formulate this question in this way: why produce a misleading historical record of our present circumstances?  Why not make a photographic record that reflects the truth that students have returned to campus but in a time of masking and, let us add, of physical (not social) distancing.  Simply put: was the institutional desire behind this photo-op a desire to document a normalcy that has not been attained?  Is this a photo of an escapist fantasy?  Of a denial that Pomona College, like the rest of the world, has not managed a full return to pre-COVID normalcy, notwithstanding Pomona's mega-billion financial might (and the institutional hubris that such financial might so often engenders)? 

Let's add here that the production of this air-brushed and misleading record of our moment involved a praxis antithetical to the critical thinking that liberal arts colleges such as Pomona claim they teach and champion.  The students were amassed and told just what to do by persons in and of college authority: Please walk to and gather on the stairs of Carnegie Hall; keep your masks on until we say to remove them; stand closer together please; ok, now we are ready to take the picture, so masks off please! Ok, we're done! Put your masks back on.  What was absent—what was pre-empted—was, in sum, any discussion or deliberation about whether the photo-op was a socially responsible activity.  Instead, the image was produced entirely by having students follow directions and go along with the crowd. We might even say that this photo-op was the very opposite of a "teach-in" precisely at a moment when an inclusive participatory education regarding COVID risks would have been innovative and genuinely important.

(Note, with this, that there was similarly no time taken for a discussion of the building that is the backdrop for the photo and its namesake patron, that is, for a discussion of how Andrew Carnegie became so fabulously wealthy from the labor of steel workers.)  

This set of observations can bring us, finally, to a question that would very likely go un-asked if the mass un-masking seen above did not make this photo so arresting—i.e., something that makes us stop, look, and think.  That easily overlooked question is this: why take such a photo of a college class at all?  What is the institutional desire, or project, behind that genre of photo-op, whether masked or mask-less?

Here briefly compare it to other common sorts of group photos in our social world.  Group photos at weddings, for instance, are often a record of specific social relations: a group of cousins, a group of childhood friends, and so on.  And too, the persons who are together in those standardized wedding shots typically share certain pasts or histories: the persons together in them are more than contemporaries, they are consociates.  

By contrast, what appears in the college class photo is a crowd, and not a crowd drawn together by a cause—to protest, say, the insistence of Pomona's trustees to keep the college's endowment invested in fossil fuels, the science of climate catastrophe and consequent human suffering be damned.  

All in all, we might then say that what has been staged and photographed is not a record of actual persons (identifying the students is only minimally possible--and certainly not the point), nor is it a record of social relations or persons with shared histories; it is, rather, a record of an institutional identity, an objectified collective Self—no doubt for the purpose of inducing affiliation, i.e., brand loyalty.  

Almost certainly, then, whatever the COVID risk from taking and circulating this photo, it all was worth it—for the health of the endowment at least. 

We can now answer the question, What is Wrong with this Picture?  What is wrong with this picture is that it is a scene of administrative decision-making in which the college's endowment is treated as more important than public health and student learning.  This is to say, it is a scene of business as usual.  

The question we are left with, then, is whether this is only disturbing and wrong in the midst of a pandemic, or something that, once seen in a pandemic, should be questioned and contested in general?