"Urban photography rewards amateurs. Whatever grandeur is lost in overexposure or an obvious angle is compensated for by lookie-loo enthusiasm, which charms locals on par with tourists. This is true of any beloved city, but since I live in Chicago my relevant example is Chicago, the Windy City, on a sea-size lake, with a skyline appreciable from a human vantage."
"Two hundred National Guard members lumbered in from Texas last month. ICE agents wriggle daily from their hidey-hole in the suburb of Broadview to terrorize and kidnap residents. The rhetoric justifying their presence and exonerating their violence is loud and unoriginal, echoing the way Chicago has long been spoken about, when it is spoken about, as a war zone in need of saving from itself."
"Trump, in September, posted an image to social media casting himself as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, the avatar of sanctioned bloodlust from Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." In the accompanying text, Trump had altered Kilgore's famous line-"I love the smell of napalm in the morning"-to suit his fantasy, replacing "napalm" with "deportations." (He also supplied a new theatrical title: "Chipocalypse Now.") The shoddy edit shows a fleet of Huey helicopters flying past the unmistakable skyline; the sky, meanwhile, is yellowed by explosions."
Chicago serves as an example of a beloved city whose image is being militarized. Urban photography rewards amateurs, whose enthusiastic images charm locals and visitors despite technical flaws. Recent federal actions have included deployment threats, arrival of two hundred National Guard soldiers from Texas, and daily ICE operations out of Broadview that terrorize and kidnap residents. Public rhetoric portrays Chicago as a war zone needing rescue, a portrayal that relies on ignorance or disregard for how real war zones form and the United States' role in creating them. Social media imagery by political leaders has glorified deportations with violent war metaphors and apocalyptic visuals.
Read at The New Yorker
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