What images make good myths?

"What the concept distorts is of course what is full, the meaning: the lion and the Negro are deprived of their history, changed into gestures. What Latin exemplarity distorts is the naming of the lion, in all its contingency; and what French imperiality obscures is also a primary language, a factual discourse which was telling me about the salute of a Negro in uniform. But this distortion is not an obliteration: the lion and the Negro remain here, the concept needs them; they are half-amputated, they are deprived of memory, not of existence: they are at once stubborn, silently rooted there, and garrulous, a speech wholly at the service of the concept. The concept, literally, deforms, but does not abolish the meaning; a word can perfectly render this contradiction: it alienates it."

I was rather intrigued by the idea that in a myth, the signification is deprived of the original historical context of the signifier. Professor Chung touched on this in class. She showed us three images from presidential campaigns. The image of John McCain standing casually with some anonymous "local law enforcement officials," all of whom happened to be black, functioned well as a myth because of the anonymity of the image-- the people in it and the specific place did not seem important, so it was easy to focus on its message. The same went for the image of Obama, looking friendly and posing for a snapshot with two elderly, white women. But the image of John Kerry in Vietnam did not work so well to convey the message of Kerry as a soldier, precisely because it was too easily placed back into its original historical context. It sparked a debate about what was actually going on at the time the photo was taken, and what was Kerry's career as a soldier actually like.

This got me thinking about what kinds of images make good myths, and what we do to images to deprive them of their historical context so that we might use them more effectively as myths. The first image that came to mind was this ubiquitous one of Che Guevara.

Here, the signifier is Che Guevara, and the signified has to do with communism and the Cuban Revolution (although, lately, the image has lost a lot of its power due to overuse-- I'd go so far as to say that in our particular historical moment, seeing Che on a t-shirt is more likely to evoke thoughts of counterculture and anti-capitalism). The signification, therefore, is Che seen through this lens of communism and counterculture, or Che as a symbol of revolution and communism. The cropping of this image, seen not just on t-shirts, but on posters and all sorts of other things as well, not only cuts him off at the neck and deprives him of background, but also sort of washes out the details of his face with heightened contrast.

The original photograph from which this famous image was lifted looks like this.


This image sends a completely different message. To begin with, his face has all the detail of a human, as opposed to an icon, and he is given back the rest of his shoulders. But, more importantly, there is a palm tree in the background, and there is someone else in the photograph. Whether or not you know that this photograph was taken in 1960 by Alberto Korda at a memorial service in Havana for victims of the explosion of a freighter ship in Havana harbor, Che is immediately placed in an historical situation. He is standing in front of a palm tree. There is someone next to him. He is looking at something, not just into the distance.

The image of Che as we think of him functions well as a symbol of communism and revolution because its historical significance was literally cropped off the sides.

Anyway, I hope I haven't strayed too far from the original reading. This was just something that popped into my head while I was reading about images functioning as myths.