The New York Times presents exceptionally fine photography on its front page. The pictures provide information that furthers the story being illustrated. The pictures also are composed in ways that rely on principles drawn from the Old Masters: chiaroscuro, draping, complex arrangements and posing of characters, and so on. The same holds for many of the photographs on the inside pages, a particularly prominent example having appeared a few days ago on the page that covers the Presidential campaign. John McCain is seated in an airplane across the aisle from Steve Schmidt, at the moment his top strategist and media guy. They are looking at one another and what you see is the left profile of one and the right profile of the other. The aisle between them breaks the picture into two symmetrical halves.

You can draw information and meaning from that. These two guys are now traveling together and sharing their thoughts, so it is no good saying that McCain is not in control of the media campaign now going on to associate Obama with celebrities and high gasoline prices, even if McCain had not recently said that he was proud of his advertising campaign. Moreover, these two white haired and bejowled individuals, the candidate and his adman, look remarkably alike, which is a way to buttress the point that people in those two positions become one another’s alter egos, it no longer clear which one is influencing which one, and that one can only hope that the candidate will be able to separate himself from his campaign team once he becomes President—which is rarely the case, because however much we want to say that candidates become beholden only for the length of time they have to go through the dirty business of campaigning, the truth of the matter is that campaigns pretty well identify the kind of President a candidate will be. Reagan would smile about America while giving it away to rich people and letting professionals run his foreign policy, and Bush 41 would make his peace with rich people so that he could run his own foreign policy. You knew that from “Sunrise in America” and Willy Horton. You also know it from McCain making fun, at first, of people properly inflating their tires.

There was, though, more to the photograph than that. Behind the two and between them and slightly out of focus so as to serve as background was a flight attendant demonstrating how to use an inflatable vest, a ritual with which even an irregular flier is quite familiar. Like most passengers, McCain and Schmidt were not paying attention but focused on what the other one of them was saying. The flight attendant, however, transforms the nature of the photograph, because the eye of the viewer moves back and forth between her and the politicians, and each of these eye movements can generate a new insight about the relationship of what she is to what they are. Background becomes the stimulus for commentary that is not supplied by the background or drawn from the photograph but by what the viewer can bring to the occasion. Consider some of the reverberations of seeing these two politicians against the backdrop of the flight attendant.

The stewardess is standing in that typical posture, hip thrust to the side, short skirted legs slightly separated, that is so wonderfully parodied by Mary McCormick in the current Broadway revival of Boeing Boeing (McCormick is quite an actress. Here she does a farce version of the authoritarian German woman; last time out she was the National Security Advisor on The West Wing. Does Condi have that range?). What does that make one think about the serious minded men in front of her? She could be a temptation always lurking in the background, and so part of what we know is the case in Presidential campaigns. She could be an image of falseness, of what advertising did to flying when it portrayed stewardesses as the people who would ask you to “fly with me” when what they meant was only “fly with my airline”, which suggests that political campaigns are also given to hype and altering the bare truth of matters, which makes McCain and Schultz similar to rather than different from the background. She could be representing the possibility of a crash, and that reverberates back to the politicians as people who can crash figuratively, if they don’t handle their campaign right, or crash literally, which is what happened to Paul Wellstone. Politicians sure fly a lot-- too much, I would think. Why do they have to appear all over the place rather than video it in? The people across the nation wouldn’t care if the networks reported on a teleconference with voters rather than an in person meeting. Why are we so hard on our political leaders? Well, in that case, if the picture is about flying, then we can think of the candidate and his aides being only human, cramped up in a plane cabin for too much time, breathing in the bad air, eating awful food, just so they can continue this mad dash to become an icon, just like the airline stewardess already is. They have to deal with the materiality of life while they try to embody the greatest spirituality that our secular culture can imagine: to be the leader of the nation and of what used to be only the free world, and now, until the Chinese catch up, if they do, to be the leading political figure in the entire world. Quite an ambition for a person who is merely mortal, much less for one who, like McCain, claims that his opponent is the one who is arrogant.

I will leave the reader to work out other reverberations. I note only that photography and other forms of art in this post-modern era do their work by culling forth meanings from the viewer rather than by encoding them within the piece itself, as was understood to be the way art worked when Irving Panofsky required an art critic to have access to an endless catalogue of mythological and Christian images and adages if he were to do his job of identifying what was going on in a painting. The present understanding of the relation of art to its viewers seems to me a more accurate and active sense of the relationship: we bring to it what we have, and we enrich the photo to the extent we can, which is not to neglect the power of the photo to do its thing by finding a way to provoke associations concerning some set of specific matters, such as is provided here by the association of a stewardess with a politician. Erudition helps but is not required and so there are more people who can appreciate art rather than just the few who have been properly prepared by their art appreciation courses to know what they should be looking for and what they should supply.

I wonder if this is also a post-modern age of politics. We don’t have to know a politician’s programs or biography in detail to know what he is up to or what he will be like in office. We don’t have to load up on Tim Russert gotcha questions to test a politician’s mettle. We just have to sense the general drift of what he is out to convey as that can be appreciated on any number of the many occasions when he presents himself to us, his naked face hanging out there for anyone to read, even absent the stewardess as a prompt to cue us into extending our awareness so as to include this political creature, to get a sense of him at least as accurate, God knows we see him enough, as that we have of people we see multiple times a week, like a boss or a relative or a teacher. That is the judgment to be trusted, and then you take the candidate who strikes the chord you like, even if others don’t like that set of notes. You might be wrong in your judgment and your sense of what is appealing may be perverse or merely self-flattering, as might be the case if you are a white guy who votes for Obama only because it makes you feel less prejudiced. But, hey, it’s a free country. Nobody can tell you what to do at the ballot box (even if they don’t count it right) and the future is a history book whose pages are for the moment blank. You, the voter, not the pundit nor the historian or the philosopher, are the viewer who fills it in with events and meanings that weren’t there before you writ what you wrote.