Shooting Wide Open

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In a more ominous use of animals, apparently the CIA tried a project called “Acoustic Kitty” (CIA PDF) in the ’60s. I kid you not:

One of the CIA’s most bizarre Cold War efforts was Operation Acoustic Kitty. In declassified documents from the CIA’s super-secret Science and Technology Directorate, it was revealed that some Cold-War-era cats were surgically altered to become sophisticated bugging devices. The idea was that the cats would eavesdrop on Soviet conversations from park benches, windowsills and garbage containers. They slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up. The tail was used as an antenna. They tested him and tested him. They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that

The CIA drove the cat to a Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., and let him out of a parked van across the street. The cat ambled into the road, and was struck by a taxi almost immediately. Five years of effort and over $15 million in spending were reduced to roadkill in an instant..

Like the Russian Tank dogs?

A dog was supposed to carry a bomb, strapped to its body, and reach a specific static target. Then the dog would release the bomb by pulling with its teeth a self-releasing belt and return to the operator. The bomb would then be detonated either by a timer or remote control. A group of dogs practiced for half a year, but even the smartest ones could not master the task.

The first group of anti-tank dogs arrived at the frontline at the end of the summer of 1941 and included 30 dogs, 40 trainers, 6 cooks, 6 drivers and 10 miners. Their deployment revealed serious problems — to save fuel and ammunition, dogs had been trained on tanks which stood still and did not fire their guns. In the field, dogs refused to dive under moving tanks. Some persistent dogs ran near the tanks, waiting for them to stop, but got shot in the process. Gunfire from the tanks scared away many of the dogs. They would run back to the trenches, often detonating the charge upon jumping in, injuring Soviet soldiers. To prevent that, the returning dogs had to be shot, often by the people who had sent them. This made the trainers unwilling to work with new dogs.

Out of the first group of 30 dogs, only four managed to detonate their bombs near the German tanks, inflicting an unknown amount of damage. Six exploded upon returning to the Soviet trenches, killing and injuring soldiers. Three dogs were shot by the Germans and taken away, despite furious attempts of the Soviets to prevent it. This gave away all details of the detonation mechanism to the Germans.

Another serious training mistake was revealed later – Soviets used their own diesel-engine tanks to train the dogs rather than German tanks, which had gasoline engines. As the dogs relied on their acute sense of smell, the dogs sought out familiar Soviet tanks instead of strange-smelling German tanks.

It sounds too dumb strange to be true, but you can never overunderestimate the military, can you?

I watched a couple of historical dramas, both involving politics to some extent. First was Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn, about the methodical execution of about 12,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia during WWII by the Soviets in the forest of the same name. When the Germans came in, they uncovered a mass grave and used the event in their anti-Soviet propaganda. Then, when the Soviets emerged victorious at the end of the war, they recut the propaganda newsreels with a different narration and blamed it on the Germans. It wasn’t til 1990 that they actually officially owned up.

There is, I swear, not a light moment in the film (they got Penderecki, for christ’s sake), so if heavy, heavy shit is not for you, do not go near this film. It’s too heavy even for me, and that is pretty damn heavy. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good film in its way – you can see the entire thing on Youtube if you wish. I must warn you though, that Parts 12 and 13 are just about the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen on film. There are more graphic moments caught on film but after the relatively slow pace of the first 2/3rds of the movie, which plods a little, it’s a kick in the gut. And there’s something about the way he shoots it that makes you think about what it’d be like to be in those men’s shoes, on either side, and at draws you into the situation far more than any sane person wants to be drawn into that sort of thing. The only thing left to do is pray, and, considering what you’re seeing on the screen, that very pointedly makes you wonder if there is a God.

For me, the only film that had a similar viceral effect was Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, though you could argue that half of that was an effect of the queasy shooting style, quick edits and heavy use of bass. I vowed to watch that one again, though I never did, but this one, good film or not, I couldn’t wait to get out of my computer. No way I’m watching this one again. I literally get the feeling of something festering inside me. In most massacre/war/sad films there is a thread of sacrifice or redeeming lessons learned or something along those lines. None here. One character says, “There will never be a free Poland.” It makes you realize how different, how fatalistic attitudes about life in other countries that have experienced serious wartime trauma can be.

Hope you weren’t about to sit down to eat…

Far lighter (well, at least relatively speaking) is Il Divo, which is about Italian Premier and cabinet minister Giulio Andreotti, who had purported ties to the Mafia, which would explain why his opponents would conveniently die. Paolo Sorrentino is, it turns out, the child of Tarantino, Ritchie and Coppola, so there is a lot of black humor and quirky visuals. I tried and failed to find a clip of the scene where Andreotti stares down a cat, so you’ll have to settle for the opening titles. I know, the cat scene sounds utterly ridiculous, but you have to see it to appreciate its asburd silliness.

(You can get captions on the first clip by clicking on the arrow in the bottom right of the clip window and selecting from the CC menu, but the second one doesn’t have them. Suffice it to say that he is giving a narration on all the people who’ve predicted his death and ended up preceding him to the grave. Subtitles are rather unnecessary for the rest of it.)

I have to admit that I take some perverse satisfaction in injecting some real morbidness into Halloween Day, which seems to me to be much more bubblegum than it should be. I’d like to see a bit more eerieness! However, Katyn might be going a bit far… Though it is true that the dead are constantly among us in the form of all these inherited grudges and hates and cultural sensitivities, isn’t it?

Chris McVeigh

The discovery of Vivian Maier seems to have brought up this idea of the artist who works in obscurity, undiscovered not because of a lack of talent. The internet makes these discoveries easier, it’s true, but I wonder if the long tail of the internet doesn’t also make it easier for non-career artists to get a work or two out occasionally. Maybe not though. I wonder if so-called “high art,” and especially art that lasts, will always remain the realm of career artists, or whether at some point a small portion of what we see in museums will be one-offs.

It’s hard for me to talk about the net in a negative way, partly because I’m young enough that I don’t have any established interests at stake in any old models, but mostly because the net is what hooked me to photography. Not to mention, it’s just a technology of communication. It’s people who decide what to do with it, to use it for good or for cheese. Any praise or criticism of the net is really praise or criticism of people’s actions and intent.

I do believe it’s raised visual literacy. The learning curve is so much steeper with film, what with the extra note-taking you have to do to make technical progress and the time lag between taking and seeing a photo. Nowadays if you don’t understand some technical thing or can’t get your camera to work, there are hundreds of people who can answer your questions from a dozen different perspectives in the span of a day. All that stuff you’ve heard before. The bottom line for me is that this facilitates learning. How can you not get excited about that? Say what you will about the work on social sites and the problems with display, but you can’t browse these places and not see that people are picking up, trying out techniques, and others are learning from them. The chatter on my radio station mailing list recently turned to using the net to learn musical instruments – how the tons of Youtube tutorials out there are making it much easier to learn by watching than by parsing a tab.

Chris McVeigh

You could say that this makes everyone think they can make money off photography or results in an unholy orgy of kittens and sunsets, but there’s this from APE:

APE: haven’t there always been a huge group of people who wish some day to make their living as a photographer and it’s just that we can see them all now thanks to the internet?

SM: Yes, and how many of those people are doing something about it verses how many are just talking? Words without action. Photography is a field that’s competitive in numbers only. When you look at the percentage of photographers who truly take the advice that you really need to develop a vision, that’s maybe 10% of all the photographers selling out there. So, there may be a lot of prosumers coming into the market but a small percentage will actually be successful.

APE: When you say photography is competitive in numbers only. What does that mean?

SM: It means that there are tons of people hanging out the shingle with the title photographer attached. However when you look, the number of photographers who understand the vision selling equation and have taken the time and effort to build a deep body of work based around a specific style and then have created the sales trails needed to competitively market their work, the competition is slim. So, while there are many, many photographers a very small percentage are actually prepared to compete.

Maybe there are a lot of people who think they can make a buck off photography, but that’s an indication of how powerful and deep-seated our attachment to visuals is. And c’mon, there have been and always will be a lot of people who think they can make a quick buck off everything. (Otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to make a living off “How to Make Yourself a Millionaire in a Week” books!) For most, I think the net is a starting point to learn about photography, not as aspiring professionals but as consumers of visuals. In my opinion, the best way to get people interested in photography is to get them interested in taking photos and socializing with other people in the context of photography. And I mean actually encourages rather than simply make it possible for people to interact with instead of passively view the work of other photographers.

We don’t all pop out of the womb able to deconstruct images and use them to communicate ideas or emotions – gotta start somewhere. Unless you’re Szarkowski’s or Robert Frank’s kid, I think we all go through the phase where we’re obsessed with photographing everything we see and use words like “creamy bokeh” while learning the technical aspects before becoming more discriminating about what we want to look at. That phase is just public now. But so what? It’s not like anyone’s forcing you to navigate to those pages and stare at babies in cute animal hats til you weep. And if you like babies, sunsets and kittens, then all the better for you! Enjoy your orgy! Flickr certainly seems to know what it is and revel in it – recall that (discontinued?) photo tag-you’re-it feature on the blog in which they ask featured users: “Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers? Pick one.”

Chris McVeigh

Of course, you knew I was talking about Flickr, which, by the way, has launched a new Galleries function that allows users to collect and, more importantly, display photos by others in way more oriented toward public viewing (as opposed to private collecting) than their old Favorites function. </walking billboard ad> It’s an interesting idea – is it the equivalent of encouraging people to publicly curate? You can assemble things that are somewhat edifying, like T-Rex or crank out Star Wars Chipmunk to amuse and delight.

I really think there’s no reason not to embrace the net. In class, I’m reading about Stieglitz and his distinction between the professional photographers who are just out to make money and the true artists, about museum curators as elite taste makers, and about photography’s slow acceptance into the art world. One thing that occurs to me is that if we aren’t interested in how the general public uses and perceives photography, if we keep putting down supposedly low brow incarnations of photography, how can we possibly expect the majority of the public to look at the art photography that we find interesting or to increase funding for the arts? Why is it that arts funding is not a priority in this country? What do the arts offer the average person by his own reckoning, rather than what an artist, curator or critic tells him he should get out of it?

Edward Burtynsky

There are new photos on Burtynsky’s site. These are Australian mines. That first photo reminds me of Diebenkorn. The series in general recalls Maisel, of course.

Not long after I wrote about how tired I was of large scale photos, my art history professor, knowing of my interest in Burtynsky, sent me a link to an interview with him in The Morning News about his newly finished project on oil.

Edward Burtynsky

He talked about the project itself:

I started thinking about oil as a theme in ’95 and actually started shooting it in ’97. The thing that occurred to me was that everything I was photographing before was somehow linked. All roads led back to oil as a source of energy that allows this kind of scaled expression to occur: our cities and our roadways and our bridges.

It’s been a difficult project to try and get the photographs. There’s been a reluctance to let photographers into these worlds, but there’s nothing that you couldn’t just go on Google Images, look for oil industries, and see all you want to see, whether it’s oil rigs or oil fields or whatever.

I think that the people working in these places are always fascinated by the process because, generally speaking, nobody goes and photographs these places. So they rarely ever see anybody, you know, paying that kind of attention to the thing that they do. They want to see my Polaroids, they want to talk to me, they want to know what I’m doing and who I’m working for. I’m not working for a magazine, I’m not working for a paper, I’m not working for the company. I’m doing it all on my own initiatives and that’s often very interesting to them.

Edward Burtynsky

He also talks about where he sees himself on that false polarity of art/documentary, which was a particularly interesting read for me:

Editorial expressions of that work through other media and the web are all surrogates, experiences of the work, which also disseminate, but it’s not what I work towards. I work towards the prints in galleries which people can experience for as long as they want, absorbing the image.

I do share some moral things with journalism. I think I tell stories, but they’re not current events. There is no news flash here, nor is it a documentary. I’m not trying to make an exhaustive documentary on every oil country in the world. I’m trying to have these images stand in for a larger kind of thing going on up there. That makes it not journalistic or documentary, but more of an artist trying to bring home a bunch of ideas into existence through the use of photography.

I disagree with him about his work not being documentary. His photographs may not be documentary in the strict sense of the word, but in my mind they certainly have a documentary element that is partly what gives them their impact.

Edward Burtynsky

Then he ended with a few words on emissions reduction and sustainability:

It can only happen with government intervention. I think that through smart policies and through incentivization it can be done without destroying what we built. You still have to be hopeful though. It’s just a question of whether we get there fast enough; things are moving much quicker than expected in terms of climate change.

I’m an advocate for sustainability, because otherwise it’s a pretty cynical view of the world — it’s just, “I want to take care of myself” and “I don’t give a shit about the next generation.” It’s not very nice, especially if you have kids yourself.

We hear this over and over, don’t we? Funny how having kids makes you actually care about the future.

Speaking of which, apparently he is now tackling the subject of water and, to my chagrin, has finished shooting California. I am interested in water in California too – talk about intimidating. But the more I think about this, the more I believe that the more people working on an issue, the better. Practically speaking, it’s not great for the market value of your work, but I think if you care about the issue, more exposure means more public awareness (given that publications don’t tire of it) and that is the whole point. Even if your photos are seen by a very small group of people, I still think it’s significant and worthwhile, a good step forward. The burden, as ever, is on you (me!) to create something stand-out. Good lord, I’m no Burtynsky, but what can I do except try to feel out my corner of the world in my own way. The least I can do is try!

from Articles of Faith

from Chanute AFB

Last week I saw Dave Jordano‘s work at Verve Photo and really loved the Artices of Faith project. It’s rare that I like every photo in a series, but I liked everything I saw in Articles of Faith – personal and public spaces for worship, little messes and striking traces. I usually like a mix of interiors and portraits and landscapes and whatnot in a project like this, but this time the traces say a lot about the people who worship in these places, and I like that it is not about individual characters but about group belief and group action. A book of this work has just come out, and I’m curious to see if these first impressions change at all when I see them pictures in print.

Dave has been working on a project, called Prairieland, which contains a mix of portraits, interiors and exteriors, but I still like the telling little interiors the most. He says:

I do see it as a similar project to the church work, being culturally based and bordering on the idiosyncratic, but on a larger scale and more complex. I’m definitely drawn to subject matter that I am unfamiliar with which drives my curiosity and my need for understanding.

A book is not on the horizon yet, as he is still shooting, but I hope it happens eventually. It’d make a great little book. I’ve had my fill of large scale, highly proportionate industrial scenes for the moment. Anyhow, do check out his work on his site; as you can see from the AFB photos, there’s more to see!

It could be said – it doubtless has been said – that such pictures often bear a clear resemblance to the Kodachrome slides of the ubiquitous amateur next door. It seems to me that this is true, in the same sense that the belles-lettres of a time generally relate in the texture, reference, and rhythm of their language to the prevailing educated vernacular of that time. In broad outline, Jane Austen’s sentences are presumably similar to those of her seven siblings. Similarly, it should not be surprising if the best photography of today is related in iconography and technique to the contemporary standard of vernacular camera work, which is in fact often rich and surprising. The diffference between the two is a matter of intelligence, imagination, intensity, precision, and coherence.

This from the intro to Eggleston’s Guide. It kind of makes me think of Flickr. I wonder to what extent the “educated vernacular” has been derived from the canonical works and styles of the past – will we at some point be capable of charting something like the dialogue between the canon and the vernacular over time? I’m endlessly fascinated with the prospect. I also wonder if those last qualities really comprise the difference. As with anything, it seems that means, politics, chance and what have you invariably intrude a bit.

Later in the essay, he says: “If our concern is for the meanings in pictures, verbal descriptions are finally gratuitous.” I don’t know about that! Maybe this is true when we’re talking about a very personal meaning, but even then, who knows.

Paul Schiek

Thanks to a heads up at Horses Think, last Friday I saw Mitch Epstein and Paul Schiek talk at a PhotoAlliance event at the Art Institute. Jim Goldberg and Kenro Izu are next on the Calendar, if you’re interested. $10 for the general public, half off for students. Looking back at the archive, it looks like I missed Eirik Johnson and Bill Owens. Dang! And it turns out that a couple of my professors have given talks there this year too. I’ll have to keep my calendar updated in the future.

Schiek “opened,” as it were, for Epstein, showing his digital point and shoot snapshot work that he made as a student at CCA and his second project utilizing blown out highlights to create a ghostly, ethereal effect which he referred to as a kind of reductive information removal. I like the idea behind his blown out work, but I’m not sure that I like the execution. Some of them just seem to be offhand experiments of pushing digital to an extreme. His recent work as turned toward direct “sculptural” manipulation of the photos themselves to remove info – ie cutting portions out. He also talked briefly about TBW books, which he runs, publishing works by Todd Hido and Alec Soth (the current subscription edition) among others. All the books are a signature white and he showed a photo of himself dressed in all white on shipping day to send them out with “good vibes.” He concluded with a photo of his mom, recovered from cancer and flipping off a seal in an aquarium. Maybe a star in the making?

Mitch Epstein

Epstein’s work was less overtly personal. Power, for him, is like a set of Russian nesting dolls: nuclear power cracked to reveal political power, within which you find corporate power, then consumer power, religious power and so on. What I liked was his range – landscapes, interiors, portraits, a newspaper photo he found on a wall – and his inclusion of the act of photographing (or not photographing) in the significance of the pictures. For example, in the instance of being denied entry to the DNC and RNC, he says, “not getting in is just as important,” delivers as much of a message as getting in to shoot the brouhaha would. Or in the instance of the DOE rep who did not allow him to take a picture of solar panels because an air conditioning vent was in view, but who had no problem with him photographing a missile.

Mitch Epstein

He talked about his own process – how the project started out of environmentalist concerns (he gets the NRDC magazine) and out of a general concern for the future that all parents begin to have at some point; and about how he used the internet to do research, at one point getting the idea to photograph the “Terror-free gas” pump from a photo he saw on Flickr. In that vein, this is a project he hopes to take out of the traditional art venues and bring into the street through billboards and some sort of awareness campaign, perhaps even in the communities where the photos were originally shot. To conclude the talk, Epstein quoted Wallace Shawn on the role of artist as a vehicle of change – is this appropriate? is it enough to influence your own circle of friends?

That said, he came at the project without any overt political agenda, which he believes nudges the work into the realm of propaganda, and worked in a very open way. Each morning he would have a plan for the day, but it was all a “ruse” and would invariably be shot as the day wore on, full of unexpected events like the Cheshire, OH grandma who asks him, “would you like to see my gun?”

Mitch Epstein

American Power is the first of his projects which he has shot with a large format camera. In the past he has worked mainly with handheld cameras more suitable to the approach of going where you will and finding the unexpected, but this time he wanted to try “making less photographs and investing more into each.”

Asked to speak on “beauty,” Epstein pointed out that people find art and beauty more enjoyable than power. (Not generally true, methinks. Maybe I’m just jaded, or have a looser definition of “enjoy.”) He went on to say that our sense of beauty is tied to our sense not only of what is pretty but of what is visually awe-inspiring or downright scary, in the case of these plumes of smoke. There is some aspect of beauty that comes out of respect, which is not the same thing as agreement or endorsement or anything along those lines.

Mitch Epstein

The most interesting moment of the lecture for me came when he briefly asserted that much of how Americans view personal property, land and use of space is a legacy of Manifest Destiny and the pioneers’ land-claim mindset, where owning a piece of land was essential to survival on the most basic level.

This is a fascinating idea that touches on how we use or don’t use our public spaces (or the lack thereof), the popularity of single-family homes in suburbia and the need to own. Most of my friends, even the liberal or at least socially liberal, feel a need to own. Mostly this is a decision grounded in being wise with your money, but depending on where you live, the numbers don’t necessarily add up for ownership, yet if they know anything about what they want to do with their lives, they want to own a residence. So on a personal level, I am very curious about this idea, and I think it’s an interesting little puzzle of how a photographer might show these issues visually without resorting to photos of Old West relics.

On a more general level, it’s just fascinating how much we inherit culturally without knowing it. I don’t think any of my friends would really point to Manifest Destiny as the reason they think it’s important to buy a house, but I think it’s something that definitely has trickled down in the culture. That’s not to say that first generation immigrant families don’t have similar desires, but I think that comes from a slightly different place. Though, I would argue that there is a hint of the pioneer in some immigrant experiences. This is not an issue I know a lot about, but boy, I am interested now.

[Which reminds me - I need to read Gridlock Economy, which is about private ownership being a hindrance to innovation. In fact, a few weeks ago, I overheard snippets of a previously-recorded interview with author Michael Heller (mp3) conducted at no other than our very own KZSU.]

Yao Lu

I bought a poster of his from 798 Photo. I’d see his work before on the web, but online it is not impressive to me at all. The prints he has up in the gallery are so much more striking. The key is that you get a lot of detail when you lean closer, but on the web leaning closer doesn’t really get you anything more. Without the detail, the concept looks a little heavyhanded – “yeah, yeah, traditional landscape painting style approximated by photo composites of the artifacts of very modern land development, etc…”

His book runs into the same problem as web viewing because for some reason he chose to print small despite, confusingly, a large book size.

Markus Klinko + Indrani

There’s a lot of photography on consumerism, but it wasn’t til today, when I saw a little deconstructing-the-shot piece in the American Photo magazine blog, that I became convinced that all of it is pure snake oil, shit sold as gold. Apparently the idea was to “visualize a post-apocalyptic world where young people reassert their individuality by putting together pieces of clothing and making it chic.” Really?? In a post-apocalyptic world, we’re going to be concerned about reasserting our individuality by buying clothes?

I heard something on Family Guy that sums it up. Stewie says:

I took some photos. You can see them on my Myspace page, along with my favorite songs and movies and things that other people have created but that I use to express my individualism.

Branding is such a big thing now that sometimes it seems buying is self-expression, which I suppose it always has been in an indirect way, but the leap now seems to be that what you buy is directly related to who you are. One consequence seems to be that at any given moment, you’re stating who you are with what you are wearing or carrying. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it was meaningful. I carry a camera because I am a photographer – that’s a meaningful statement about me. But what can my jeans or bag really tell you any of the important things about me aside from whether I have the money to buy them? That’s no small statement, but it’s hardly new. I’d really like to know whether Victorian girls used brands in the same way that teenage girls now do. Is it human nature to always find something to show off with?

Perhaps it’s less about the thing itself than a signal that we’re playing the same game, which is more explicitly clear when you think about music. Music is a great example. People ask you what music you listen to when they meet you. But they don’t ask you what you’ve been listening to in the last week; they ask you “what do you listen to?” in a way that suggests “tell me something about yourself.” There’s nothing wrong with that per se, if it wasn’t for the fact that the same always seems to mean more than it should. I wouldn’t be surprised if brands have erroded our attention spans for getting to know a person. if it can all be summed up by a list of consumables…

Product awareness leads to a subtle (or not so subtle) pressure to conform. If what you buy says something about you, then you don’t want to buy or consume something that might give a bad or wrong impression. The thing is, it’s such a natural urge. Isn’t that why we list favorites in online profiles? I do it too – I mean, I gotta put some early Greenaway next to that Family Guy so people don’t think I’m not serious!

Conformity sold as individualism is a big money-maker, isn’t it? Buy buy buy, just like everyone else, because brands and looks are what define you, not, god forbid, what you actually intend to do with your life.

I was flipping through my quote books for a quote blog and, what do you know, D.H. Lawrence writes in Lady Chatterly’s Lover: (a great book in parts, but a little cheesy)

If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could manage very happily. If the men could dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be handsome, they could learn to do with very little cash. And that’s the only way to solve the industrial problem: train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing to spend.

In the spirit of the recent Nobel awarded for the invention of the CCD sensor, here is a “photo” of a molecule of pentacene taken by an IBM lab. (Go to the BBC for details.) It is not a photo in the sense of being made with a camera and light rays, but for me it was one of those teary-eyed gaspy moments when you see something completely new. There is something about a recorded image of some sort that has more impact than a sketch or a model, even though, in this case, it looks pretty much like those plastic models they give you in chemistry courses.

I wanted to share this when I first saw it while in China, but alas, all high profile social networking and blogging sites were blocked (proxies aside), presumably either as a part of pre-anniversary measures to control the tone in the media of the lead up or as a part of control of dissent after the XinJiang incidents. A little unusual since they usually don’t block all of them, but there it is.