In 2002, Pat Tillman made headlines when he turned down millions of dollars to continue as a highly regarded NFL linebacker in order to enlist in the Army. Two years later, he was killed in Afghanistan. What followed was perhaps the most shocking, crass, and disrespectful display of U.S. government-sponsored propagandizing to occur in recent memory. Despite knowing nearly right off the bat that Tillman was killed by friendly fire — by at best recklessness and at worst intent (the inconclusive facts of the investigation remain in dispute) — the Army declared his death the result of enemy fire and arranged for posthumous medals and a full military memorial, despite Tillman’s family’s insistence that it’s not what he would have wanted. And that was before they discovered that the Army’s whole story was a lie.
Chronologically, one of the last images in Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, is a portrait of Bob Dylan taken in New York’s Tompkins Square Park in 1992. This one photo demonstrates what’s great about this exhibit, but also what’s problematic about it. On the one hand: it’s a picture of Bob Dylan made by Allen Ginsberg, one of the great voices of the counterculture as seen by another, a pair of aging veterans of a scene which by then had become positively mainstream, if not thoroughly commodified. But is it the visual art, or the cultural gravitas, that makes this an great photograph?
