The Times Square Kiss: Iconic Photography and Civic Renewal in U.S. Public Culture

Abstract

Two decades ago Thomas Bender called on historians to incorporate many new forms of social explanation into an expanded conception of political history. Distinguishing such inquiry from consensus history and cautioning against a narrative hegemony, Ben der proposed that focal point for this work be the making of a culture. That culture would be both site where social groups contested for power to define nation, and product of that dynamic, contingent process of representation. By exploring how power is made manifest in, flows through, and assigns meaning to cul tural phenomena, one could again fulfill the social role of historian, who seeks, as novelist Henry James and historian Henry Adams understood so well, to create images of that become 'the mirror in which looks at itself.'1 It seems that Bender was swimming against a very strong current, and we doubt there is much interest today in narrative synthesis on behalf of our common life as a people and as a nation. Likewise, studies now references three decades of work in many disciplines on cultural phenomena as sites for domination, resistance, and negotia tion. The concept of public however, remains a vital idea that has just begun to be developed. By focusing on public, it features a democratic understanding of political that goes to center of modern norms of legitimacy; by emphasizing culture, it features media, arts, and other communicative practices that shape identity and agency throughout modern societies. As Bender wished, culture is distinct from mere social collectivities or cultural pastiches; it also must include a stronger emphasis on media than he imagined if historian is to grasp how a democratic works in practice.2 When Adams, Bender, and others speak of images by which society looks at itself, they are likely to be using terms metaphorically. But how does see itself? Much of time, by seeing. People form, maintain, and continually revise their conception of themselves as a people by looking at images in media. They look at presidents, big league hitters, hurricane victims, and voters; terrorists, soldiers, talking heads, pro