Shooting Wide Open

Anastasia Cazabon

While reading Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, I came upon the story of Kafka and the traveling doll. There is a more conservative telling of it at the The Kafka Project website, but I like how Auster tells the story:

It’s the last year of Kafka’s life, and he’s fallen in love with Dora Diamant, a young girl of nineteen or twenty who ran away from her Hasidic family in Poland and now lives in Berlin. He gets to Berlin in the fall of 1923 and dies the following spring, but those last months are proabbly the happiest months of his life.

Every afternoon, Kafka goes out for a walk in the park. More often than not, Dora goes with him. One day, they run into a little girl in tears, sobbing her heart out. Kafka asks her what’s wrong, and she tells him that she’s lost her doll. He immediately starts inventing a story to explain what happened. ‘Your doll has gone off on a trip,’ he says. ‘How do you know that?’ the girl asks. ‘Because she’s written me a letter,’ Kafka says. The girl seems suspicious. ‘Do you heave it on you?’ she asks. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I left it at home by mistake, but I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.’

Kafka goes straight home to write the letter.

The next day, Kafka rushes back to the park with the letter. The little girl is waiting for him, and since she hasn’t learned how to read yet, he reads the letter out loud to her. The doll is very sorry, but she’s grown tired of living with the same people all the time. She needs to get out and see the world, to make new friends. It’s not that she doesn’t love the little girl, but she longs for a change of scenery, and therefore they must separate for a while. The doll then promises to write the girl every day and keep her abreast of her activities.

That’s where the story begins to break my heart. It’s astonishing enough that Kafka took the trouble to write the first letter, but now he commits himself to the project of writing the letter every day. He kept it up for three weeks. Three weeks. One of the most brilliant writers who ever lived sacrificing his time – his ever more precious and dwindling time – to composing imaginary letters from a lost doll. Dora says he wrote every sentence with excruciating attention to detail, that the prose was precise, funny, and absorbing. In other words, it was Kafka’s prose and every day for three weeks he went to he park and read another letter to the girl.

The doll grows up, goes to tschool, gets to know other people. She continues to assure the girl of her love, but she hints at certain complications in her life that make it impossible for her to return home. Little by little, Kafka is preparing the girl for the moment when the doll will vanish from her life forever. He finally decides to marry off the doll. He describes the young man she falls in love with, the engagement party, the wedding in the country, even the house where the doll and her husband now live. And then, in the last line, the doll bids farewell to her old and beloved friend.

By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instad, and by the time those three weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness.

Susana Raab

Susana Raab’s Consumed and Off-Season projects frame recreational moments in our over-commercialized country in a strange and sometimes irreverent way.

Ashley Lefrak

I’ve been meaning to introduce my own work in this blog, and finally I’ve scanned some satisfying films of Big Chief in the solar observatory. The observatory is a bit of an anachronism – there are more useful, groundbreaking studies being done and technologies being used, but these observations are run simply to keep a continuous data set going. It’s been running since, I believe, the ’70s. There are boxes and boxes of data tapes and observation logs.

This is one of the mirrors used to reflect light back down into the control room where all the data sensors are. Running an observatory was not something anyone would’ve forseen for Chief, but he has a way of getting into these larks. He’s been helping out with operations for nigh on a year now, but sadly, this fall his ‘freelance’ stint is going to come to an end.

More to come eventually.

Ariana Page Russell

A lot of her design-oriented work is repetitive, but Ariana Page Russell’s skin projects are arresting. She has a sensitive skin condition and uses it to artistic advantage.

Tamara Rosenblum

Tamara Rosenblum has photographed, I presume (there is virtually no text on her website), different ethnic neighborhoods in New York City. Not an unprecedented project, but she does it very well.

Aron Gent

Last month I read that the SF Chronicle was likely to shut down. Now, it seems like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will do the same. Hopefully web-only versions will remain, and small community grassroots rags will pop up. Has the West Coast been harder hit than the East?

In that vein, Slate has started a Flickr group called Shoot the Recession and encourage readers to submit photos of not only closed storefronts but also silver linings and unexpected side effects:

We welcome photos of closed stores and vacant homes; they’re clearly part of this story. But we would like to encourage our readers to find surprising ways of recording this recession. Take a shot of the contents of the box you brought home with you when you were laid off. Take a shot of the handwritten sign at your local coffee shop apologizing for the price hike on two eggs, any style. Rather than shooting the empty storefront, take a portrait of the local druggist who just closed up shop. NPR recently reported on the brisk business mechanics are doing these days as drivers are holding on to their old cars longer — document the silver linings as well as the ominous clouds.

4 stores that have closed in my neighborhood in the past few months – a video store, CD store, chain grocery and a window store in an adjacent area. There must be more, but these are on my habitual rabbit trails. The closing of the chain market leaves the neighborhood without a major grocery. Word on the street is that the store was not really in the red, but at the same time not making enough of a profit to be worthwhile for headquarters. Strangely, people seem to eat out often enough in this city that I haven’t really heard too many complaints. Ever since moving into the city, I’ve shopped at a couple of small corner markets, so I’ve been immune to the effects of the closing.

It might actually be a good thing in the short term since there has been talk of the local Saturday farmer’s market adding a day during the week. Eventually, however, a Whole Foods is slated to come in. Despite convenience, I wish it wouldn’t.

Arguments in the California Supreme Court on Prop 8 reminded me of a little experiment in young people’s expectations of the division of labor in parenting. A few weeks ago, Harry Brigman posted the results from a very telling sociological exercise at Crooked Timber, a very lively collaborative academic blog.

For simplicity, let’s assume there are 3 main parenting arrangements:

F = father does most of the work
M = mother does most of the work
E = evenly shared work

Each year, Brigman asks his undergraduates to choose the parenting arrangment they expect in their own future family lives, and which arrangement they expect the majority of their 5 closest friends to fall into. He then tallies the percentages for male and female students. He claims that the numbers don’t vary much through the years:

MS = male students
FS = female students

Self
MS – F: 0%; M: 85%; E: 15%
FS – F: 10%; M: 25%; E: 65%

Friends
MS – F: 0%; M: 85%; E: 15%
FS – F: 0%; M: 75%; E: 25%

So in short, most young males expect their partners to shoulder much of the parental responsibility, expect their friends households to be exactly the same, and certainly don’t see themselves as the main care-giver, while most young women seem to believe that their own households will be egalitarian yet expect their friends to end up in mother led arrangements. Most interesting are the 10% who believe their own partners will shoulder the burden that nobody’s else’s would.

Brigman points out the inevitable conflict lying dormant in these differing expectations. I wouldn’t call myself a feminist in the very political sense, but one can only hope that couples discuss these things before deciding to form a household.

Matthew Pokoik

I love images which speak for themselves. There can be no doubt as to what specifically most of Pokoik’s Global City is about, at least in my mind. When I see our modern commercial world photographed like this, I automatically react with a tremor of fear for the future, but I don’t doubt that many people have a very positive reaction to this profusion of color and product. Visually speaking, I don’t blame them. What I worry about though, is the unavoidable glamorization of subject matter, regardless of how critical it is, through placement on wall, in a magazine, in any public form that has any hint of salesmanship and promotion to it. We might have a different reaction to these images if we found them in a textbook, which primarily serves the subject matter rather than itself.

Would our attitudes toward consumption and exporting consumerist habits to the rest of the world change if fashionable mainstream media were drenched in such imagery? Photographs like Pokoik’s are relevant in the most direct way, and I’d like to think that, displayed in the right places, they would make a difference. They deserve wider circulation than in the art world, which is, after all, more ambiguous, and focused on the aesthetic side of things and therefore work is somewhat at risk of being looked at in terms of style rather than subject matter. Call something an expose or document and it’s one, call it art and it’s a whole other ballgame, isn’t it? I suppose part of the blame falls on the mainstream journalism community which seems to stay away from work without a very clear message. Ambiguity is scary!

Makes me wonder how people reacted to Courbet or the socially-realist painters back in the day.

Lee Satkowski

Somehow, this blog made it onto the triangular diagram of the photo blog world on the DLK Collection blog last week. Thanks to Joerg Colberg for literally putting me on the map!