[Here's a story from this week that recounts the events that lead to Lytle and Emilie's arrests (see below), but also provides a global perspective of the Baghdad Snapshot Action.]
by Alexander Zaitchik
There are anonymous wedding pictures plastered on trashcans around Tokyo and Warsaw. On lampposts in Berlin and Melbourne, you will find stills of children riding a merry-go-round. Watch the newspaper boxes in Manhattan for a captionless image of two friends with their arms around each other, smiling.
This cryptic smattering of portraits from Palo Alto to Yukon seems to be a globally coordinated art project, but it’s not. The spreading phenomenon is an antiwar meme hatched by the Baghdad Snapshot Action Crew, a New York-based collective that’s been bombing the city with pictures of happy Iraqis since the middle of February. Their website, nationalphilistine.com, offers 30 of the images for download, and so far activists in 43 cities in nine countries have brought the faces home.
"We’re getting twenty emails a day from everywhere," says Tarikh Korula, a BSAC founder. "People are still using the pictures. It’s growing."
Like the New York-based Lysistrata Project, which inspired dozens of international solidarity productions of the Greek antiwar comedy, the BSAC started small. Korula got the idea when his friend Paul Chan returned from a two-month stint in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team, an humanitarian group. During his work, Chan took hundreds of images with his digital camera, all of ordinary people doing ordinary things in their home city: hanging out, playing, laughing.
Chan’s friends were so moved by the snapshots that they decided to turn them into an antiwar message in the run-up to the Feb. 15 protests. Inspired by the photo memorials to the dead that peppered Ground Zero after 9/11, Korula helped narrow Paul’s picture collection down to thirty images and then printed 9000 copies for postering around Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The only text they placed beneath the images is the word "Baghdad" followed by the date the picture was taken.
"They reminded us of our friends and family," says Korula. "The people are just playing around, being normal. This is still possible in Iraq, but it won’t be when the bombs start falling. We didn’t want to add spin. The meaning is obvious: Come April 20th, could you find this person again? During a ‘shock and awe’ campaign, this woman isn’t going to be getting married. These kids aren’t going to be laughing."
The pictures are a departure from most antiwar imagery distributed on the left. Standard-issue antiwar agitprop tends to focus on mutilated Iraqi children dying from simple diseases (presumably a fault of the sanctions) or cancer patients made sick by the use of depleted uranium shells in the first Gulf War. "Those images [of suffering] are real," says Korula, "but it’s not the whole story. We wanted to restore some dignity to the people of Iraq, to humanize the people we’ll be bombing."
Korula and his friends began recruiting volunteers in late January. On the February night that the crew first hit the streets, it felt like 20 degrees below freezing, and the organizers were stunned when dozens of strangers turned out. "Even with the cold, 75 people showed up," says Elise Gardella, a photographer and crew organizer. "We started emailing our friends, then they emailed their friends and it just took off."
Volunteers were given a stack of pictures and clear packaging tape–not buckets of messy wheat paste–and assigned to a neighborhood. Most cops didn’t know what to make of the pictures, and volunteers experienced little harassment from authorities and passers-by.
Except for Lytle Shaw and Emilie Clark. While taping a poster to a lamppost at the corner of Mercer and Prince Sts., three plainclothes cops emerged from a nearby car and charged them with a "quality of life" infraction. Illegal postering is a criminal misdemeanor in New York, and offenders are usually given a court summons and a nominal fine. But Shaw and Clark–who is seven months pregnant–were instead handcuffed and taken to the First Precinct on Varick St., where they were booked and, after seven hours in jail, given a March 13 court date.
During their incarceration, the two were questioned about their antiwar activities and warned not to attend the protests that weekend. "The police emphasized that many of [the cops at the protest] would be rookies, and suggested that they’d be looking for violence," says Shaw, who is organizing a protest for his arraignment. "They said they wouldn’t want to read our names in the deaths column of the newspaper."
Despite the arrests and intimidation of Shaw and Clark, the Baghdad Snapshot Action Crew plans to keep postering. To help organize future missions, they’ve enlisted a veteran poster campaigner for Queer Nation and Dyke Action Machine. Although most of the pictures put up around the Upper East Side and Soho were taken down immediately, these wealthier neighborhoods remain earmarked for saturation bombing runs as the war drums grow louder.
By posting their pictures without comment, does the Baghdad Snapshot Action Crew run the risk of having their posters interpreted as prowar? Proponents of invasion argue that ordinary Iraqis–the very faces highlighted by the group–will be the beneficiaries of a war that topples Saddam Hussein, not its victims. But the group is confident in the clarity of its message and doubts observers could take the posters as showing the hopeful faces of the hawk position.
"In a war, they’ll be given liberty and death," says Gardella. "We should all know from the experience of the first Gulf War that there’s nowhere to hide in Baghdad. The shelters aren’t safe."
As the BSAC continues to poster and activists here and around the world follow their lead, Gardella stresses the importance of numbers in a successful postering campaign.
"Even 9000 pictures is just a drop in the bucket," she says. "New York turns over very quickly, that’s just the nature of the city."
Volume 16, Issue 11 - 3/12/2003
NYPress - New York City - Alexander Zaitchik - Vol. 16, Iss. 11 - 3/12/2003
Posted by Brian Stefans at March 12, 2003 09:46 AM