Shooting Wide Open

This is a little snap I took of a stall in one of the food markets in Beijing. I assume they fry those scorpions kebobs for you if you make a purchase. More China photos this month. Soon.

I haven’t written a personal update in a while. I thought things would slow down once I was done with school and I’d have some time to reflect and do research, especially before I find a job, but it hasn’t happened yet. So many little things are on a giant to-do list that I feel like I maybe actually have to think about more than when I was in school. Probably because there’s no structure to the type of thing that pops up, and meanwhile I am still primarily obsessed with scanning, editing and looking at photos rather than the Meta-Photography. I’m attending the PhotoAlliance portfolio review in a week or so and I really need to make final prints and just sit down to think through what I want to say about them.

I am glad that the western photos are getting around a bit, even if it’s only on campus. The MFA and Art History students started a little arts publication and some of my stuff is in there. I’ll get my copy soon. I was also asked to show for a short while at some arts events on campus and I’m gratified that I get to show to the larger student body, not just the arties.

The Wallenberg exhibit was especially fruitful. In addition to Thom from PhotoAlliance seeing the photos, someone from a sustainability blog saw them and wants to post them online. Even though it doesn’t exactly lead to any career payoff, this is the stuff I end up getting excited about the most – when people on the action side notice. Like when someone who works on environmental consulting in Sacramento contacts me through Flickr just to make contact. That’s somehow more exciting to me than prepping for a portfolio review, which on some level feels like I’m playing a game where I’m just competing for spots in a hierarchy. So much of what getting shown in the art world for me now involves submissions and competition, whereas working on actionable items feels like contributing to something important.

What I’ve realized over the past year is that what I really want to do is work with policymakers or scientists or other people who are active on these issues. I have no idea how I could possibly make a living that way, since the non-profits always want donations and policy organizations don’t usually have much of an arts budget, if any. Nonetheless, that is what makes my little heart beat! That and working with education in some way. Oddly enough, that’s my favorite part of photography or anything – the learning curve when you’re not entirely sure of yourself.

I don’t consider myself particularly great with kids, but I’ve tutored elementary school kids before and there’s something great about teaching them stuff. It’s really true that if you can’t conceptualize and explain a concept to a 9-year-old, you don’t really know it. Try explaining gravity! “We’re on a giant ball hurtling through space and through some sort of interaction with or denting of the fabric of space-time, we stick to the ground.” You realize, wait, what do I actually know about this stuff?! So I’m curious about teaching photography to kids, if only to learn a little about what at the end of the day I’m truly enthusiastic about and how to pass on knowledge of technical concepts and visual literacy in an accessible and enjoyable way.

Wayne Bremser did an interesting post on Oscar Grant’s cellphone photo of James Mehserle before Grant was shot in the back by Mehserle. Despite my interest in the case, I hadn’t realized that Mehserle had taken out his taser at multiple points in the encounter. The photo indeed proves he had. Does this mean that he knew the difference between the two weapons, contrary to what he claimed in court? Or does this only prove that he in fact meant to reach for his taser a third time and in the heat of the moment came up with the wrong weapon? It’s infuriating that we can have photographic evidence, yet intentions remain ambiguous. It’s not a popular opinion, but I think the jury reached the right verdict. How can you possibly prove without reasonable doubt what a man’s intentions were?

Wayne also points to another case where a victim captured a shot of his killer, this one in the Philipines, where a local politician inadvertently photographs a gunman as he is about to be shot.

Empire City, Wonder City from Jin Zhu on Vimeo.

Another video I’ve stitched together. This one is pretty self explanatory. Too bad I couldn’t get more of a businessman as civic leader angle into it, but I may tweak it soon, if only to add a line about America being the envy of the world. I’m not sure I like this one as much as I liked the last one. This seems a bit done before, but I’m intent on continuing with it if only for the unevolved logos because I love how Nyman’s music interacts with the ‘vintage’ footage. I can’t believe some of the educational films that were made in the ’50s. My new obsession is watching declamatory government sponsored educational footage on Archive.org.

I’m just starting to discover the video world and I’ve got that inertial early feeling of not knowing where to look. I’m just starting to check out the Vimeo community (reminds me of when I joined Flickr!), videoart.net and Aspect, but I have no idea what the landscape is like. Kinda exciting. First sightings, “land ho!” and all that. It’s a good medium for working with sound too. I was doing a bit of college radio last year and it occurred to me that the best films and movies are always the ones that you can also just simply listen to.

On a more personal note, I am officially done with all the coursework for my degree, and am just waiting on conferral, which will happen in spring due to some technical paperwork issues. So now I suppose I pass into the odd jobs and applying to everything phase of life. A little daunting, but also exciting since I can actually plan a spring trip to the SW without much constraint. I’m free!

Nice to METT You (Pleasure’s All Mine) from Jin on Vimeo.

I love working with found video – to my brain that’s closer to the way I photograph than generating my own video would be. There’s a variety of approaches on similar subject matter that I think I’d be incapable of generating on my own, with my single lonely head, and I’m not sure I ever want to deal with the complex lighting and physical camera support issues that video demands a solution for. But I love editing. There’s something about the meticulousness of syncing image and sound, of cadence and micro changes in duration of clips that is satisfying to no end. No really – to no end.

This weekend, I finished the first video that I’m fairly happy with. For the record, my favorite bit has to be the audio on happiness and, more trivially, the fact that the sound for that parting shot is actually the slowed down audio replay of a slap in the face. It’s rough, but even if this little piece isn’t an end in itself, it makes me want to gather up more material and make more, which is exciting.

For the record, the title’s not a misspelling. METT is Paul Ekman’s Micro Expression Training Tool, which is a package of video and interactive tests aimed at law and order professionals interested in more effective interrogation through the ability to read suspects’ and interviewees’ faces. I found the professional voice-over and the slo-mo replays of basic expressions in the training videos fascinating in an almost surreal way, especially when contrasted with the almost imperceptible blinks of the actual fleeting expressions in the practice sections. I’m tempted to post one of the full videos, but that’s probably not fair use, considering this is a commercial product. (Is putting it into an art video even fair use?)

Last Friday, the Mehserle sentence came down and the protests were in the local news. It worked itself into the video. I’m not sure at this point I can be any more articulate about what it’s “about” (let’s be clear – it’s by no means “about” Oscar Grant), but it’s a stew arising out of:

• the ugly and mildly scary efficacy of detecting and projecting emotions in the context of interrogation
• how emotionally charged the name Oscar Grant has become in Oakland
• the ambiguity of intention in such a fatal encounter, even when seen and recorded (murky cellphone footage, but nonetheless a man being shot from afar, so avoid if you’re unwilling to watch such things) by many witnesses.
• all the details we can see in slow motion that are completely lost at fast or even normal speed
• the ambiguity of non-linguistic communication, especially for say, autistics (I was reading Gladwell’s Blink at the time, which was how I learned about Ekman in the first place.)

  and last but not least,

• the cheesy, almost self-help marketing of the METT tool, which involves a test that earns you a janky digital certificate (I’m an “expert”!). The FACS manual – an encyclopedia of the most subtle and minute expressions – seems much more interesting…

Part of my fascination with Ekman is that he seems to be at once a heavyweight in his field in terms of his FACS work yet also one of those popsci experts frequently seen on TV. In fact, Tim Roth’s character in fun if scientifically unsound show Lie to Me seems based on him. It took me a while before I made the connection between the two names, and I only did because, I confess I’m a mild fan of Roth and the show.

I can’t be the only one who finds all of this hugely compelling. It’s like data collection meets Gladwellian popular science meets race and politics (METT is very explicitly multi-ethnic). Meticulous categorization of facial expressions turns into a vague idea of expert lie detection bandied about on national primetime TV as it’s also being researched earnestly in labs. A few weeks ago, having to pick up an unassigned shot, I ended up listening to the better part of a panel on fMRI testing as lie detection. Turns out there are court cases where lawyers are attempting to enter such tests into evidence. The experts assembled (Anthony Wagner on the science side and David Faigman on the law side) roundly dismissed the validity of such tests (there’s almost no way to distinguish brain activity associated with lying from activity associated with memory tasks or being witness to a memorable event, especially one with a clear ethical tint), but lie detection seems to be attractive enough of an idea that services like No Lie MRI (seriously) already exist. Pay to get documentation of your truthful brain! Or, if the results aren’t to your liking, they will destroy all results and any record that you engaged their services. Good lord.

Guess this is a good argument for going to lots of events and following your random interests. Eventually they all end up tied in one knot. When it rains, it pours?

Hot rod, Twin Falls

The photo above is a snapshot from the Yellowstone trip – while we were lunching at a spot with a grand view of the Snake River, I stumbled onto a man taking pictures of his crazy hot rod in the parking lot in preparation for the hot rod show that was happening in a few weeks. If this is an example of what you’d see in that show, I am sorry we missed it.

But speak of Yellowstone…

Another grant cycle has concluded and I showed a selection of eight prints at Party On the Edge last week at the Cantor Center. Word is that 2700 some people came through. Maybe that’s not so many in the grand scheme of things, but for me that’s a whoa. Then immediately afterward, I carted the frames over to the art dept. where we’ve just installed a group show of work done during and inspired by the Yellowstone trip. I’ve got five prints up in the Cummings lobby and some snapshots documenting the trip in the subgallery in the Welton building.

Before a show opens, the thought of showing work to actual people makes me want to puke a little, but it always ends up being a positive experience. Apparently everyone loves the Eruption photo. As do I. It’s nice when people like and what you love match up, isn’t it?

It’s been a crazily busy term. I’m in five classes, including a sculpture and a video class, plus an art history course on post-WWII European movements like SI and Fluxus. On top of that I’m still photo editing at the Daily, and I just met a dance group this week whose concept to performance process I’d really love to document. Even on top of that I’m hoping to work with Futurefarmers on a wonderful video + book project that’s just the sort of combination of art and science that I’m most happy working with. Cross my fingers that the scheduling works out.

Jeremiah Barber
I Spend the Day Walking Through Clouds, and Walking the Earth, 2007
Photos by Greg Stimac

On the Yellowstone trip, I got to know Jeremiah a little. He’s a performance artist who just finished his MFA, and my first encounter with his work was when he rolled by inside a giant transparent cast of his own head. That’s an entrance if I ever saw one. I caught the tail end of the performance, by which time the sticks that constituted the frame of the cast were breaking apart and tumbling about in the head with him, and the impermeable plastic had made the interior hot and uncomfortable.

The video on his site is better than words, but being there was better than the video, which doesn’t really do it justice. Up close, the plastic shimmered in the evening light. The plastic was starting to tear. He was turning red. You get none of the feeling, at least for me, of wanting to help the man out. He’s sweaty, tired, and every step gets more and more difficult. A small crowd gathered around, following him as 4 or 5 photographers and videographers took footage. (Folks in the 3D imaging workshop I was attending took the opportunity to shoot some close up footage, and I’m hoping to eventually get my hands on that, or at least access to an edited version.) I want to run up and yell, “would you like some help!?” But in the context of art, I’m afraid that would spoil the piece. Maybe it’s about one man’s struggle? But then again, what if it’s about people not lifting a finger?

I cave and play it safe by standing back, but it’s hard to watch in person in a way that the video document is not hard to watch. The disparity stirs up my love of photography, of visual art. A person could make a life’s work out of translating that in-person emotional weight to film. Or flash media, as we may as well get used to saying.

Portrait of My Father Illuminated by Pounding Dry Ground (excerpt), 2009

Looking at his other work, I like the ones that use dust. Maybe it’s my interest in projection, but I love the little piece in which he pounds the earth at night (click image for the video excerpt). Not being very versed in performance art, it’s sometimes difficult for me to get past the production values of the documentation, but there’s something about the darkness, and the incarnation slowing appearing and warping that gets the physicality of the act across. I confess I’ve never pounded the ground, but I imagine it’s hard to think about much other than pounding the ground (given that you’re going at it with the appropriate fervor) while you’re doing it. Can you vigorously pound the ground and think brainy rational thoughts simultaneously? An excellent experiment to conduct, if I do say so.

I’ve been reading books on the contemporary art world and all of them can’t seem to stop from mentioning multimillion dollar price tags. It’s nice that the more performance-oriented art still seems less touched by commerce, despite Rirkrit Tiravanija’s pots and pans. The more polished the documentation, the less like documentation and the more like a commercial product it seems, though I can’t deny that well done documentation really animates the performance. For instance…

Shirin Neshat, Passage, 2001

Shortly after returning from the trip, I went to SFMOMA for the Fisher Collection preview and saw Shirin Neshat’s Passage, a video also containing people stirring up dust on the ground, this time by a circle of women dressed in black. There’s a bit more to the piece – fire! – and it has a polish that made the actions seem a little less visceral, but the score really drove the piece forward, giving it a sense of urgency and lending it an emotional tone that wouldn’t've been present without the music. After a bit I realized, of course! It’s Philip Glass. (On a tangent, a good documentary film: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts) The music and editing lent the video a structured cadence that you usually find in… well, music.

Another tangent… In an interview, Neshat says:

In Passage, the main theme revolved around a relationship between men and women (dressed in black) and the landscape (forces of nature). I needed to separate these two so that at all times the audience became aware of the juxtaposition of the two. If this film was shot in black-and-white, it would have had a totally different effect, where often the people got lost in the landscape and there would have been no separation. Here, the people seemed more like silhouettes against the changing and colorful landscape.

After reading this, a light bulb went on above my head. Earlier in the spring I had been trying and failing to explain why I like this Eggleston photo in color rather than black and white in Lukas’ book class. A couple of people thought that the graphic elements of black and white would be preserved in monochrome, but for exactly the reasons Neshat mentions, I like it in color!

William Eggleston, Adyn and Jasper

One night we stayed with a Native American family and looking around the house and grounds, it was very clear that they were fervently Christian. I was reminded of the chapter of text in The Last Days of Shishmaref about Christian missionaries and the natives of Alaska.

A couple of snaps from the Colorado River area trip in spring. Has anyone ever resisted taking photos in Monument Valley?

The first photo is a corner of a little souvenir stand set up by the Native Americans. There were a lot in the area, and there were no customers at any of them. It was the off season, but it still made me a bit sad.

Earlier in the trip, we met with some folks from Navajo Nation and they reported how retailers buy their blankets and ware for very low prices (ie $30-50, if that) and then sell them in their boutique shops in town and export abroad for a huge mark-up (ie $300 up to four figures). So now the Navajo are thinking of selling direct on the internet. I wish them the best of luck, but I do wonder if it’s a doomed venture, since these wares are the types of things people buy while traveling on vacation, not while sitting at home contemplating purchases. I wonder why they can’t simply charge higher prices of the middlemen, but I suppose when you’re poor, you aren’t in a position to refuse small amounts of money in hopes of a future of larger amounts.

The trip was a real eye-opener. We focused mostly on water issues, but in addition to having traded their Colorado River water rights away for very little (say, one community center) before Las Vegas became what it is today, the native tribes in the Southwest also have to deal with the consequences of having mining operations on their lands – the illnesses, the tailings piles. Recently the EPA declared that they were responsible for their own environmental standards on reservation lands, but essentially this means that the US government is no longer respnsible for enforcing environmental regulations on reservations, and since the tribes don’t have the capacity to do any sort of large scale clean up or enforce the regulations, the real world result is that there’s very little in the way of regulation.

The ruling council seems to be prone to the same porblem that the rest of us have with representation. The politicians don’t really understand the local circumstances. Those who are in power, who have wealth try to protect it for themselves and their progeny.

There’s nothing like the feeling of being content with a newly processed photo. Even if you know that by next week you will probably have changed your mind.