Shooting Wide Open

The Tokyo Bling blog has pictures of the Nikon D3 cut in half, lens, batteries and all.

Richard Mosse‘s Airside

It’s strange that almost all people accept arranged still life as an uncontroversial subject for a photographer, but are angered when “real life” is arranged in a similar way. I suppose people get angry whenever they believe they’re being fooled or taken advantage of. I’m reminded of something I read on Amy Stein’s blog: A Few Questions For Graham Miller.

AS: Sometimes people are downright angry when they learn my Domesticated photos are staged. Do you feel any push back from people when they discover your images are constructed? Why do you think people have such a hard time allowing for the personal vision and imagination of a photographer compared to a painter, musician or writer?

GM: I’ve not got the downright angry reaction…more like a kind of knowing, dismissive sigh. I guess the reason people have such a hard time with the constructed image is that for them it somehow feels like cheating. They still believe that because the photograph so closely resembles reality that somehow it must also be “true”. For me photography is much like writing- in the sense that you can approach writing about a subject or photographing it as fiction or non-fiction. Both are equally valid, and both are able to speak of the human experience in a moving and profound way. It does puzzle me when people go on about it. It just doesn’t feel the right approach for me to work in a traditional photojournalistic sense.

Damion Berger

Thin, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary on girls with eating disorders, was harrowing. I knew that eating disorders were a rising problem, but I had no idea how prevalent they are and how serious they can get.

It also hadn’t occurred to me that insurance coverage for treatment was an issue – at least two of the girls had to leave treatment prematurely because their insurance ran out once they reached a certain level of treatment. It does make me wonder why the Renfrew Center doesn’t do away with the concept of levels and simply assess their patients’ progress on a more binary basis focused on whether they are ready to handle their problems independently. Maybe the positive reinforcement is more important? Maybe the insurance companies actually require it?

Perhaps coverage is difficult ot get because treatment, at least for the most serious cases, is so depressingly ineffective. Patients had been hospitalized multiple times, suffered heart and liver damage, attempted suicide, yet they are so psychologically attached to their disorders that they’re unable to see that they are already thin, that it’s not worth it to die trying to impossibly thin. In fact, several of the girls irrationally prefer dying to being “fat.”

I’m going to get a secondhand copy of the companion book. If you want to find out more, you can read an interview with Greenfield about Thin and watch video interviews on Greenfield’s website.

Thomas E. Gardiner

Looks like I jumped the gun when I said we don’t remember lessons. I was reading more of Errol Morris’ blog when I found this post: Photography as a Weapon. Morris interviews Dartmouth Professor Hany Farid about the faked photo of the fourth missile, and it turns out we remember mistakes in the worst way. Farid says:

When you put out a fake… you start putting it out there and saying, “Oh look, this picture? It’s a fake. This picture? It’s a fake.” But you know what people remember? They don’t remember, “It’s a fake.” They remember the picture. And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it is incorrect. They only remember the misinformation. They forget the tag associated with it.

They did these great studies, especially with older people. They give them information about health, Medicare, Medicaid, that kind of stuff. And they say, “this information that you heard? It’s wrong.” And what ends up happening is, that information gets ingrained into their brains, and even if they are subsequently told it’s wrong, they end up believing it.

Bad news in our world of soundbyte reportage!

Sage Sohier

I watched a Masters of Photography episode in which Edward Steichen comments on the truncated truth of a still image:

No one has ever made either in painting or in photography, a complete portrait of a person. I don’t think that’s possible in any one picture. For example everyone has the capacity for laughter and tears, and there’s no place in between that captures the whole thing.

Then I read (more appropriately, looked at) John Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye. In the introductory essay, he quotes art historian William Ivins Jr. to make the point that photography is an interpretation, not a true record of reality:

the accepted report of an event is of greater importance than the event, for what we think about and act upon is the symbolic report and not the concrete event itself.

It’s true, not just of photography. The bulk of our working knowledge and perception of the world is acquired through written and visual accounts rather than direct experience. We learn through textbooks, see other parts of the world, other peoples, in videos. When a bomb goes off in Gaza, we trust the papers, trust television to relay what’s happening. That our reality is filtered and shaped by books and media is something so obvious I’m shocked I’ve realized this only now.

Last Wednesday I had a conversation with an acquaintance much older than I am who remembers the Cold War about how we inexplicably forget historical lessons despite how painful it was to learn them. At the moment, it seemed to me that “we forget” is a fairly vague way of describing what happens to our relationship with articles from the past when time passes, but in light of Szarkowski, clearly we forget because once those with direct experienced die, we’re left with only an indirect record which is less evocative, less real, somehow less trustworthy.

This makes sense. Of course our own direct experiences are more reliable than any secondhand account. We’ve come to rely on secondhand sources for information about contemporary events, but what about the past? There’s less of the past on the web, and when keeping up with current events is already like drinking from a fire hose, most of us don’t bother to dig through past lessons anyway. In the modern globally-connected world, when our decisions now have such an accelerated and far-reaching impact, maybe this is hurting us.

And there’s another problem. Visual information is at once more eye-catching and more ambiguous. Szarkowski also points out how terrible still photography is at factual narrative independent of text simply because it’s a frozen moment infinitely prolonged and will never rival video/audio and text for chronology. This is partly the result of a photo’s inability to call a thing by its name. We can’t affix labels, denotations and clear connotations to photos without text or audio. News photos, after all, always have a caption.

This is exactly what Jim Bourg, head photo editor of Reuters, says to Errol Morris as they talk about a photo of Bush standing in the rubble of the towers after 9/11: “That photograph is not the most compelling picture visually unless you know where it took place and when. The caption on that photo is certainly crucial.”

This is part of a larger conversation (Mirror Mirror on the Wall) on Morris’ Times blog with the photo editors of three wire services about photos they selected as representative of Bush and his administration. All three editors selected a version of a photo of the expression on Bush’s face the moment Andrew Card informs him of the 9/11 attacks, which is the perfect illustration of Bourg’s (and Szarkowski’s) point.

Paul J. Rrichards/AFP

The photo itself is not descriptive. If you didn’t know the historical context of the photo, it would just be an unremarkable shot of two men. Bourg is the only one out of the three who refuses to read anything into it. Vincent Amalvy (AFP) thinks the expression is blank, indicating confusion. Santiago Lyon (AP) thinks it’s just a picture of a man listening intently. Coincidentally, earlier in the conversation, Bourg had said:

It’s interesting to see how differently people will interpret the same picture, how a strong supporter of the president will see a picture one way and a critic of the president will see it a different way. There have been some pictures of President George W. Bush where the reactions have actually gone all over the map, where some Bush supporters see interpret the image as taking a cheap shot at him. Other Bush supporters see that same moment as endearing or showing off his character, showing that he’s a regular kind of guy.

~

I rather expected more from Morris in terms of analysis and questioning, but it’s worth a look if only for what the editors say about access to politicians. Lyon says at one point:

In America when you are part of the presidential pool, you move everywhere with the president. It’s not that way in other countries. When Barack Obama became the president-elect, there is the same access, same obligation as from the president to be as transparent as possible. He can’t decide, “No press now, yes, no.” In France or in Spain or in Germany or in the Middle East or whatever, it is different. The president decides where the press can go and where they can’t go. Here it is different. It’s one of the good points about your democracy. The power of the press is a reality in this country.

Jim Young/Reuters

I first saw this ’60s (?) Bollywood video as a snippet and extra in the movie Ghost World. I didn’t want to take the time to figure out how to extract the chapter, so I never watched it much even though it’s my favorite dance video, but now that Youtube’s exploded, I can watch it over and over again! If I could dance at all, this is how I would dance:

Penelope Umbrico

Guess what these are!

Brad Moore (via Lenscratch)

They are very interesting, but I’m not sure that the images really reflect his statement:

These photographs were shot in modest, well-worn, suburban cities in central and inland Southern California. Built in the 50s and 60s, these cities provided a new home and future to a post-war population. While Southern California’s coastal cities flourish, cities in these inland counties struggle. Future prosperity and civic health seem to come primarily from growing ethnic populations, which are reviving and recreating these cities for their communities.

Speak of content and form, I found a conversation between Bill Jay and David Hurn on choosing a photographic subject (PDF) while digging around in Alec Soth‘s old blog. Jay notes that the role of photography is essentially to show what something looks like, yet curiously, many photographers don’t know what to photograph, photograph randomly. Hurn replies that those photographers are drawn to the medium either because of the impressive figures cut by famous photographers or because of a fixation on gear, but ultimately, they do not choose photography as a profession. He says:

The reason is that photography is only a tool, a vehicle, for expressing or transmitting a passion in something else. It is not the end result. The photographer is, primarily, a subject-selector. Much as it might offend the artistically inclined, the history of photography is primarily the history of subject matter.

I’m not sure I agree with this entirely, but it’s interesting to think about this while considering, say, Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces. Would be considered groundbreaking if all those scenes were immaculately lit and composed more conventionally? If the idea itself wasn’t to document mundane details in an ‘unpretentious,’ informal, almost haphazard way? In quite a bit of contemporary photography, form and subject seem inseparable.

In most instances, the artist’s intent also has a huge effect on how his photography is considered. If Shore had said nothing about his intent or said that he’d taken all those photos in one town, would we look at them the same way? Would it make any difference if he had taken those photos in one town and simply said they were from across the country? Maybe those are trivial questions.

On a bit of a tangent, I’d really like to see a book, show or website that place the work of recognized artists alongside photographs taken by the general public. It’d be interesting to see the influence trickle down over time. Ultimately, I’m more interested in how a photographer changes the way ‘ordinary’ people rather than professional photographers, see, and it’s difficult to take critics at their word and accept the statements in sweeping retrospective essays without any evidence of how the images actually changed people’s perception of art or the role of photography.

Or do we consider the work of subsequent photographers to be representative of public influence? To me, this also highlights the fact that the history of photography is the history of selection curation.

Pieter Hugo

Pieter Hugo of Hyena Men fame is now showing Nollywood. In light of African history – genocide and colonialism – these photos take on a whole other level of spookiness that’s very unsettling.

I’ve been thinking about the differences between photography and other mediums quite a bit over the past couple of weeks, and it occurs to me that though video gives viewers a much better immediate sense of a person’s mannerisms, voice and quirks, photos are much easier to live with on a daily basis. I’d look at videos of someone I want to remember on occasion, but a photo could sit on my desk indefinitely. Photos are less intrusive, and trigger more memories and reflection than a video, which, for me, demands attention to the present recorded in the video.

One memory I wish I had set down in silver is a random conversation I had with a woman named, if memory serves, Lisa on a train from Toronto to Montreal years ago.

She sits down next to me and can’t figure out how to turn on her brand new CD player because it’s the first one she’s ever owned, a gift from one of her children. I help her. She has a slight ambiguous accent. She scribbles in the margins of a newspaper as she listens to her CD, then spills her coffee. As she cleans up, we talk. She is learning Spanish on CD. She is on her way to babysit for a sibling in Montreal. She loves to read and recalls secretly reading many of the books on the Catholic Church’s banned books list, though she could never understand why those books (for example, Moliere’s plays) were bad. Was she boring me? No no, we have a bit of a train ride ahead of us.

Girls don’t do math

So she begins to tell me stories from her childhood in the ’50s to the time of her father’s death. She tells me about how girls and boys took separate math classes – the boys would learn the fundamentals and be encouraged to pursue science and engineering, while the girls simply practiced calligraphy and were told that when they helped their husbands or bosses with their mathematical and scientific studies, their handwriting must be neat and legible. They were told in no uncertain terms that men would not marry a girl who knew math. I tell her about a study I learned of while tutoring elementary school kids. The results showed that paternal approval and encouragement is very closely linked with girls pursuing science and engineering rather than the humanities.

She tells me about the fights she had with her father when she wanted to go to college. He disapproved, insisting that all she needed to learn was how to “clean house and use a mop.” So Lisa didn’t get to go to college. But she decides, at 16, to leave home (Montreal) for Toronto and move in with a girlfriend with similar ideas. Being French-speaking, she starts to learn English on the side while attending typing school. I don’t know much about jobs available to women in the ’50s, but according to her, it was a good job for a woman at the time.

In Toronto, she sees girls dating casually, promiscuously, and she has retained enough of her traditional upbringing to disapprove. She marries early at 17 and gives birth to a daughter, who is now in Africa living with tribal peoples, and a son, who has his own children now. Since she loves to read, she buys them books, something that their parents do not do. This year, she is bringing them Harry Potter.

A Pynchonian episode

Her husband often travelled for work, and one year, she flies with him to Italy, where they check into a hotel with his colleagues. That night, he leaves for a dinner she does not want to attend, and she stays in the room to read. After about an hour, someone knocks and she sees through the spyhole that it’s one of her husband’s colleagues. He is full of smiles and compliments, but something about the things he says and the way he acts alarms her, so when he asks her to let him in, she refuses, claiming to be tired.

He tries the door. He continues to try the door. Now she is sure he is up to no good, so she throws the dead bolt and moves a dresser in front of the door to block it. He is still jiggling the door knob and oozing persuasion. Not sure what to do, she pulls out her suitcase, strips down and puts on every article of clothing she has packed – a jacket over layers of sweaters on top of dresses on top of 5 layers of underwear and pantyhose. He ceases eventually, leaving with a curse, but she sits up the entire evening, nervy and afraid. When her husband returns, she is still dressed as Oedipa Maas. She tells him what happened, but he simply looks at her strangely, saying nothing. She removes all her extraneous layers and they never speak of it again, not that night, not in the morning, not ever.

The Void

Years later, they divorce, and she is happier single. She loves to travel, though she has never been in the US: “I’ve always meant to; it’s just so big!” Traveling alone is much more comfortable for her. She joins a social group for “second-time singles” and finds herself attracted to Asian and Southeast Asian engineer types. One night, one of these engineers is driving her home on the highway when he suddenly passes out in a narcoleptic fit and remains unresponsive to her shakes and screams. She grabs the wheel and tries to get her foot on the brake. The car weaves all over the road. She is crying hysterically.

“My life didn’t flash before my eyes, but I had a near death experience. There was nothing. You know how people see a light at the end of the tunnel? Well, I looked and saw nothing. There was a blank, dark void. I knew for certain that there was no afterlife. Death is the end.”

Luckily, there is no one else on the road, and the front seat is a bench seat rather than two separate bucket seats. Eventually, the car comes to a stop and so does that relationship.

She is not religious, but when I tell her I study biology, she expresses doubts about Darwinian evolution and asks for my opinion. I try to explain, but her conceptions are stubbornly colored by Social Darwinism. I’d just finished reading Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch, so I recommend it and she writes it down on her scribbled-over newspaper. I hope she read the book, that the title wasn’t forgotten in that sea of scribble and recycled. I should have asked for her address and sent her my copy, not the least because the year that we spoke, a fire at her house burned down her entire book collection.

Death

That was also the year her father died. On his deathbed in the hospital, he tells her a simple “I’m sorry.” She takes it to mean that he regretted the things he said to her, regretted not putting her through college. “Even though he will always act as a traditionalist and expect the same things from my mother, I think over the years he realized how that way of thinking could be wrong. That was a big admission for him. At the time I was still too angry and bitter to forgive him, but I thought about it afterward and I accept it. I can’t expect anything else from him.”

In the next weeks, she and her siblings will have to divvy up the inheritance and, her mother having already passed away, figure out what to do with their houseful of possessions.

So that is the story of Lisa, who loves books and has seen the void. I don’t think about her often, but when I do remember, I’m amazed by how much she told me, and wish I had been serious about photography back then. Instead, I’ll have to settle for the verbal record.

I may have confused some of the facts with the story of a woman I met on Greyhound who was going to a family reunion in Cleveland, but I believe this is essentially Lisa’s story. Ironically, if my notes had been more legible, I would be more certain.

NextArt in San Francisco organized a live simulcast of inauguration events in front of City Hall and not far down the road, a small group of people had set up a game booth called Throw a Shoe at Bush. This city is not fond of Bush to say the least, and everyone who wished that shoe had found its mark in that pressroom lined to live out a fantasy redo. Some people got up close and personal to hit the cutout as hard as they could, and others yelled insults as they let the shoes fly. (“The only one term president to serve two terms!!”) The crowd cheered and giggled every time a shoe found its mark. The loud THUNKs of shoes bouncing off the cutout were rather cathartic.

But it’s not quite over, is it? The Harper’s Index for Jan. lists much of Bush’s legacy. Some highlights:

Factor by which an Iraqi in 2006 was more likely to die than in the last year of the Saddam regime: 3.6

Factor by which the cause of death was more likely to be violence: 120

Minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home: 25

Estimated amount Bush-era policies will cost the U.S. in new debt and accrued obligations: $10,350,000,000,000

Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4

Increase since 2000 in the number of Americans living at less than half the federal poverty level: 3,500,000

Percentage change since 2001 in the average amount U.S. workers spend on out-of-pocket medical expenses: +172

Percentage change since 2001 in U.S. government spending on paper shredding: +466

Percentage change in U.S. discretionary spending during Bush’s presidency: +31

Percentage change during Reagan’s and Clinton’s, respectively: +16, +0.3

You know there’s something wrong with your legacy when old ladies are throwing shoes at you.