If asked to select the iconic photograph of 2014, the single memorable image that epitomizes the past year, what would you choose?
Here in metro Atlanta, for example, a photograph of flash-frozen interstates clogged with thousands of cars last January would capture both the biggest news event of the year and also symbolize the frozen nature of transportation policy in this state, stuck in our cars and awaiting a thaw.
Internationally, you could select from thousands of heartbreaking scenes from places such as Ukraine, Syria, Gaza, Pakistan and Iraq. The image of an ISIS terrorist preparing to decapitate a prisoner would capture the human capacity for inhumanity, but photographs capturing the bleak horror of those infected with Ebola in west Africa are at least equally moving.
Here at home, the relationship between government and the governed is increasingly strained, with the reputation of Congress and the federal government at all-time lows in polling data. So an image from the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada back in March might be appropriately iconic. After all, what says “America 2014” better than a photograph of heavily armed, self-styled “militia members” confronting local, state and federal officials at gunpoint, in successful defiance of federal court orders?
However, you might want to juxtapose that image with something taken later in the year, in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner controversies. Once again, we saw citizens confronting law enforcement over perceived official misbehavior, and government firepower was once more on display, this time including tanks, riot gear and armored personnel carriers. Yet the differences between the two events — differences in media coverage, outcome and public response — were far more profound than their superficial similarities.
In the legal world, a photograph of a state-sanctioned gay wedding in a place as unlikely as South Carolina, Utah or West Virginia — but not yet Georgia — would document the stunning denouement of a generations-long fight for marriage equality. As the year ended, roughly two-thirds of Americans live in states where sexual orientation is no ban to legally recognized marriage.
In the political world, the biggest story of the year might be captured best by a shot of a grinning Mitch McConnell on election night in Louisville, celebrating not just his election to a sixth term in the Senate but also his ascension to Senate majority leader. With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress in 2015, we cannot yet know whether McConnell’s triumph represented the high-water mark of GOP success, or whether it will become the foundation of more long-standing accomplishments.
My own choice, though, would be the image of nurse Kaci Hickox, home after fighting Ebola in west Africa. In the photograph, she stares out from an an isolation unit hastily erected in the parking lot of a New Jersey hospital, where authorities had incarcerated her. The image captures the decline of American political life into a theater of the absurd, and the price that is paid when so-called leaders offer fear and pandering as substitutes for political courage.
We ought to know better, but as a people we have lost a sense of proportion, so we do not.
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