The COVID-AM blog is a partnership between the UMI 3157 iGLOBES and the Institut des Amériques, coordinated by François-Michel Le Tourneau, Deputy Director and Marion Magnan, researcher at the Institute. About the blog.

by Didier Aubert, Professor in American Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, member of UMR THALIM, and Fellow at the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion - MAVCOR, Yale University).

Though it's often been repeated that Trump does not read the reports he is given, does not listen much to his advisors, and essentially gets his information from television, he does however behave as if his own words were performing: nuclear disarmement in North Korea, an American economy on the rise, a vaccine for Covid, that's all him. At least that's what he says, and it's perhaps what he believes. The signature of various documents therefore becomes emblematic of a concept of power where the presidential word is personified in an edict. These ceremonies, abondantly photographed, aim to show an image of power in action, with no delays and no intermediaries. It must be remembered that, in the business world, Trump's signature could sometimes be found on bad checks.

2. TRUMP AS CLARK KENT

The photo of Trump with just a shirt strangely resonates as an attempt to "Obamize" the presidential figure. Through the eyes of Peter Souza[1], Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama's ex official photographer, Obama had been able to build a public image of relative casual wear and freedom of movement that suggested that the stature of the statesman was adapting to new codes: the modernity of this unique presidency retained a form of gravitas all the more profound in that it also moved in the spheres of empathy and normalcy. Numerous pictures showed Barack Obama having "dropped his jacket" to play with kids, work alone or with his teams, or converse with citizens who came to see him (fig. 4).

The staging of these two images, uncontested by the data, is not really surprising. And we can be skeptical about the political clout of this type of "revelation", for an electoral base that has integrated the "pseudo-events" for a long time as described in the 60s by the American historian Daniel Boorstin as unavoidable in the political debate.

On the other hand, it is rather surprising that the communicators neglected to erase the on-line files' technical data. This very simple operation allows you to publish images without revealing where, when and how they were taken. For the "leader of the free world", you would think it would be an automatic precaution (a lot of equipment, including cell phones, register the GPS coordinates of the location it was taken). Incidently, it would have made it more difficult, in this present case, to see the staging: it is obvious that it is not so much to show the president has been working as it is to offer the media two alternative "visuals" of Trump at work.

At a deeper level, we believe in fact that it is the cultural construction of digital technology that has come to make us even forget the idea of anchoring an image in the world. Photography is less a vertu of proof (the confirmed proof of the "real trace" that the photographic image is) than its ease of publication and instant proliferation. In a recent book, André Rouillé wrote that "the fluidity of digital images, the flexibility of their form and the volatility of their relationship to objects are the reverse side of the immobility of printed film, of their rigidity and their adherence to objects."[2]. More so than the continued ambiguity of the image content, the EXIF data can actually be seen as a contemporary version of the photographic trace, of the "adherence to objects" long considered as a specificity of the medium: they are likely to prove the anchoring of an image in a location and at a specific moment. That they were not erased by a communication team briefly tempted to construct a "new image" of the president could be due to forgetfulness or incompetence. We can surely see this as a sign (one more) of a serious disinterest from this administration in connections between word, image and the world.