Trump rages on about a broken America. America is raging about a broken Trump. Among the many memes and earworms the Whinger-In-Chief has provided, “American Carnage” is the one that sticks, for me. As long as Trump can convince his base that other people, other milieus and other communities are in carnage, his base will happily cede logic and allow the White House to enact its politics of division. As soon as Trump bellowed “American carnage” during his inauguration speech, the foreboding inevitability of a belligerent, smarting, testy, bickering presidency came to bear. Do images of social blight carry a different message under a fascistic executive?

Of his series Slow Blink, Open Mouth, Jordan Baumgarten says, “With apparent lawlessness, chaos is inevitable. The world comes alive with bits of magic, bits of darkness, and the inability to discern which is which. In this world, private moments are public, animals and humans roam free, fueled by id, and always, somewhere, there is a fire burning.”

 

While Slow Blink, Open Mouth is difficult for its content alone, it is also difficult because it might provide the ammunition for both sides of the political battle of rhetoric, fought from distance, over the health and feasibility of the nation. In We Look At The Same Photos, We See Different Things, published on Vantage, I investigate the difficulty inherent to images, in the Trump era, of addiction and social stress.

To quote:

When I view these images I think of failed manufacturing, job loss, modern alienation, big pharma pushing painkillers, crimes of need, and cycles of profit and predation that cannot, will not, be broken by the will power of addicts alone. I see the result of decades of inadequate public education, mental and medical health care and viable addiction treatment. I see the legacy of the failed War On Drugs, mass incarceration, and policy and policing that has criminalised poverty. I see the cracks in society through which individuals have fallen and I know the cracks used to be smaller, and fewer and farther between.

I do not discount, however, the fact that others may see a society that’s lost its way; a society that fell from grace decades ago and needs a short, sharp reset. I know viewers might reason they have nothing in common with Baumgarten’s subject(s) and are moved to do nothing but judge. Trump has fueled the aggressive judgement of others. Perversely, though he hasn’t done this by avoiding the topics of poverty and addiction. Instead, he’s pointed (from distance) to problems in inner-city America (Chicago being his preferred bogeyman) and yelled about carnage, wastelands and the opioid epidemic. Trump is correct in identifying the opioid epidemic as specific to our times, but he’s more invested in stoking dangerous rhetoric about *dangerous* cities than he is listening to, or implementing, nuanced policy and social care solutions.

 

 

Read and see more: We Look At The Same Photos, We See Different Things

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Slow Blink Open Mouth will be published as a book by GOST. Please consider buying a print from the series to help support the production costs.

Follow Jordan Baumgarten on Tumblr and Instagram.

 

 

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