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From Park City, Lewis Baltz

Landscape and the West – Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography

By Kelly Dennis, Paper Presented at the Forum UNESCO University and Heritage 10th International Seminar “Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century” Newcastle-upon-Tyne, April 11-16, 2005

Whereas Ansel Adams photographed the sinuous, abstract patterns left by timeless winds on desert sand dunes (Sand Dunes, Oceano, California, c. 1950), New Topographics photographer Robert Adams’s photograph of a similar western scene turns out to be dune-buggy tracks crisscrossing the desert floor (East of Eden, Colorado, 1977). Landscape photographs by Ansel Adams helped reinforce the image of the American West as an unspoiled wilderness throughout the Cold War era; by contrast, during the post-Vietnam war era, western landscape photography by New Topographic photographers challenged the ideology of such longstanding myths of nature and the West.

Indeed, Robert Adams, along with Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Art Sinsabaugh, and other New Topographics photographers, represented not the pristine western landscape of national parks’ propaganda and of the Hollywood Western1; rather, they focused on the “man-altered landscape” (Jenkins, 1975): tract houses seemingly constructed in the middle of nowhere; a drive-in movie screen silhouetted against Pike’s Peak and even blending in with the latter’s profile; roadways, road-kill, and burning oil sludges. New Topographics photography questioned the supposed distinction between cultural and natural landscapes. In doing so, the New Topographics photographers often formally refer to and ironize past images of “pristine” wilderness, such as those by nineteenth- century U.S. Geological Survey photographers Wm. Henry Jackson and Carlton Watkins from the earliest days of western expansion; as well as post-war images by West Coast landscape photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams of the f/64 group. New Topographics photography works powerfully—and with considerable irony—to question the validity of the centuries-old distinction between nature and culture in some of the West’s most mythologized imagery.

Yet despite the influence of New Topographics on subsequent generations of landscape photographers, little serious scholarship exists on their work. To date, the most significant and lengthy treatment of the New Topographics remains photographer and critic Deborah Bright’s 1985 essay, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Man” (1993). As part of a series of essays on the ideological constructions of landscape and the American West (1990, 1991), Bright’s 1985 essay positioned New Topographics within the vicissitudes of the art market. Querying “Why landscape now?” Bright observed that representations of landscape historically have served “an upper-crust cultivated taste for aestheticized nature” (1993, p. 127). She justifiably invoked the renaissance of the art market at the end of the 1970s—a commercial rebirth coming after nearly a decade of non-object oriented art movements critical of art’s institutionalization and corporate consumption, including performance, video, and conceptual art—as one context for the aesthetic consumability of the New Topographics landscape photographs.

Contextualizing the works within the conservative turn in American culture and politics in the 1980s, Bright also accused New Topographics photographers of occluding increasing corporate dominance over the “social and physical environment” under then- President Ronald Reagan. Ultimately, Bright indicted New Topographic photographers for failing to historicize their subject and for neglecting to articulate a clear social critique. Their status as mere “art objects” diminished any social concern the photographers might otherwise have intended.

 

 

From Park City, Lewis Baltz

From Park City, Lewis Baltz

Yet much of the western “expansion” pictured by the New Topographics photographs consists of mobile homes, impoverished former boomtowns, lower-middle- class housing tracts, and other signs of the lost American Dream still conventionally signified by the West. While far from overt or obvious, the images also neither sentimentalize “nature” nor simply condemn these interlopers on the Western landscape. Although I am indebted to Bright’s sustained social history of landscape photography, it does not adequately register the significant ironic dimension of New Topographics and the role of that irony in the historicizing of “postmodern” art and photography. This essay proposes to reconsider the function of irony in New Topographics photography in order to place the works within another dimension of their historical context. The photographs’ brief, non-descriptive titles, their sometimes serial installation, their clear lack of moral judgment, and the fact that many were initially published in the then-new phenomenon of photo books, all positioned these photographs not only within an art market, as Bright insists, but within a related art movement: that is, not just as art photography but as Conceptual photography.

New Topographics photographers such as Baltz, Robert Adams, Frank Gohlke, Joe Deal, and Stephen Shore, among others, acquired their name from a 1975 exhibition at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New Topographics, and subtitled, Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. The exhibition’s title was clearly a nod to nineteenth-century topographic photography under the initial exploratory auspices of the U.S. Geological Survey, as well as an acknowledgment of the alteration of that terrain during the century intervening—an acknowledgement missing from mid- century photographs by Ansel Adams. An art book titled Landscape: Theory published by Lustrum Press in 1980, which included a number of the New Topographics photographers, helped cement their prominence. Guggenheim awards and the blessings of art photography doyen and Museum of Modern Art’s head photographic curator John Szarkowski secured the group’s place in the annals of art and landscape photography, as well as in the photography art market.

Yet virtually lost to this history of the New Topographics photography’s fine arts pedigree is the fact that the Rochester exhibition of the New Topographics photographers, curated by William Jenkins, specified a debt to the deadpan photographic series of Conceptual artist Edward Ruscha. To paraphrase curator Jenkins, it is not what Rucha’s photographs are of so much as it is what they are about (Jenkins, 1975, p.5). Though Ruscha’s photographs were of gas stations along Route 66 or of every building on the Sunset Strip, they were about a series of aesthetic issues: as photographer John Schott has asserted, “[Ruscha’s pictures] are not statements about the world through art, they are statements about art through the world” (cited in Jenkins, 1975, p.5).

Similarly, while New Topographic photographs appear to be of western landscapes, trees, deserts, houses, roads, and construction, they are nonetheless about the aesthetic discourse of landscape photography, and about “a man-made wilderness” (Ratliff, 1976, p.86): that is, they are about the American myths of the West, suburban expansion, the American dream, and the exploitation and destruction of natural resources. Although Bright observed that “[b]eauty, preservation, development, exploitation, regulation…are historical matters in flux, not essential conditions of landscape”; nonetheless, they are essential conditions of the cultural construction of “landscape”; conditions, as Bright would doubtless agree, serving specific political and even ideological ends.

VISUAL TROPES

While American western expansion in the 1870s was in part encouraged as a means to help unify North and South in the wake of the Civil War, western expansion after World War II was part of the newly-affluent, newly-mobile middleclass tourist experience. The “aesthetics” of this experience in photographs by Ansel Adams, as Bright observed, was “well suited to the conservative social climate of a post-World War II United States basking in its reborn Manifest Destiny as a world superpower” (Bright, 1993, p.129; 1990).2

Well-versed in this American landscape tradition from the U.S. Geological Survey photographs by William Henry Jackson and Carlton Watkins to the now-iconic post-war western landscapes of Ansel Adams, New Topographics photographers appropriated many of the formal compositional elements by which landscape photography—and even landscape painting before it—was known.

For example, the traditional horizontal, “landscape” format that takes its name from the genre and intended to imply the endless sweep of land beyond the picture’s frame, in many of the photographic canvases of Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz square, instead emphasizes the domestic containment of the land. Further, landscape’s traditional midline placement of the horizon for compositional balance between earth and sky is often repositioned by New Topographics photographers above or below midline, or is even absent, rendering the landscape cluttered, unbalanced, or constrained rather than pristine and endless. The use of foliage to frame a distant view, which early U.S.G.S. topographic photographers such as Carlton Watkins borrowed from eighteenth- century romantic landscape painting, as well as to give a sense of scale; is rendered by Robert Adams in On Signal Hill overlooking Long Beach, California (1983) as pathos— the tree in the foreground is not only dwarfed by the enormous sprawl of the city behind it, but it also acts as a lone and pathetic reminder of what has been displaced by urban development.

Other recognizable landscape photography conceits utilized by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston included a point of view chosen to occlude any presence of humans, including the photographer himself, in order to maintain the fantasy of a wilderness untouched by man. By contrast, in Robert Adams’s On Lookout Mountain, next to Buffalo Bill’s grave, Jefferson County, Colorado (1970), for example, the photographer’s perspective from far-flung cliffs includes graffiti, demonstrating that there are few places, regardless how remote, where humans have not been or not marked by their presence. Visual tropes of nature, such as landscape photography’s inclusion of bodies of water for mirrored symmetry, fertility, and preternatural calm are all fodder for compositional parody by the New Topographics. Instead, man-made roads, tunnels, and byways break up the land rather than superimpose symmetry upon the view of the land; and mysterious, natural phenomena, such as steam rising from the sulphur springs that first fascinated the U.S. Geological Survey photographers such as W. H. Jackson in 1875 is, in Lewis Baltz’s Sunflower Condominiums During Construction, Looking West (1978), not steam from a mysterious, preternatural source, but the dust from new construction. Note, too, that whereas photograph titles used by the U.S.G.S. that incorporate cardinal direction (“looking west”) ostensibly for orientation nonetheless managed to instill “west” as a distinctly American concept; the New Topographics photographer’s similar use of topographic titling laconically acknowledges cardinal orientation as the contemporary developer’s dream of open, profitable land.

Frame for a tract house. Colorado Springs, from The New West, Robert Adams

Sunday School. A church in a new tract. Colorado Springs, from The New West, Robert Adams

Colorado Springs, from The New West, Robert Adams

Indeed, such specific and even famous photographs as Ansel Adams’s Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico (1944) are invoked by Robert Adams’s Fort Collins, Colorado (1976) some 30 years later in order to show us suburban habitation illuminated by that same moon—a parking lot that holds surrounding undeveloped land at bay while importing a small, cordoned bit of nature within itself for decorative and humanistic purposes. Robert Adams’s photograph even slyly suggests that the moon is the source for what in fact turns out to be artificial illumination by a nearby streetlamp.

The irony of these photographs, as Jenkins suggests of Ruscha, is that they are of landscape but about the discursive construction of landscape and the literal destruction of the land, a kind of irony that is part of the modus operandi of conceptual art. Though irony has been considered at length in literary studies—as a trope, a device, and a mode—it has generated little more than passing commentary in art history and criticism.3 Irony remains Conceptual art’s primary legacy for contemporary art and photography, yet the phenomenon is little understood by the scholars and critics who acknowledge its appearance in art since the Vietnam War.

ROMANTIC OR POSTMODERN IRONY?

I would venture to say here that it is the work’s irony that both frustrates Bright’s own social agenda—as it did many critics in the 1980s—and is the defining characteristic New Topographics photography. I would further argue that it is the irony itself that, in New Topographics photography, expands what Bright characterizes as landscape photography’s “narrow, self-reflexive project,” though it does so in a more opaque fashion than perhaps she would prefer. Bright’s reluctance to acknowledge the work of irony in New Topographic landscapes is symptomatic of art and culture of the United States from the 1980s onward.

For the culture of the United States is one that does not much care for irony or ethical ambiguity. Photography, despite more than a century’s evidence of easy manipulation, nonetheless remains a medium from which we expect transparency. We are, perhaps, never more frustrated than when the photograph fails to tell us what it means or is about something other than what it is a picture of. I would argue that the ethical ambiguity of these works critiques us more than Bright acknowledges: Robert Adams’s cropping of the word “Frontier” on his photograph of a Colorado gas station (“Frontier” gas station and Pikes Peak, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969) forces us to complete the word that might otherwise have been so obvious as to be overlooked. In so doing, we have the opportunity to acknowledge that we have always been complicit both in the frontier myth of the West and in its destruction. Thus, as the late Craig Owens asserted, irony “is a negative trope calculated to expose false consciousness” (Owens, 1992, p.149).

Photographs by New Topographics photographers indisputably romanticize their subject, for all that they reflect the depredations of the landscape. As a Westerner who grew up during the period chronicled by the New Topographics, and in daily contact with the vestiges of the West’s unfulfilled American Dream pictured by them, I admittedly want to defend these photographs against what is, in part, the detached Easterner’s pointed and justifiably impassioned social criticism. The New Topographics’ coupling of nascent cynicism with formal aesthetics “risks,” as Charles Hagen observed in a review of Baltz’s work, “lapsing into a weary disgust that, in a perverse transformation, could almost become acceptance—the limpid Western light, which in many ways has always been Baltz’s real subject, gilds equally junk and land, detritus and sky. But Baltz’s spare formal vocabulary keeps the pictures from sinking into sentimentality” (Hagen, 1989). Indeed, the laconic irony of many of the photographs preserves their romanticism—the era from which, after all, modern irony stemmed—while reminding us of the true definition of nostalgia—to long for a version of the past that never truly existed.

Moreover, does the New Topographics photographers’ “failure” to judge for us in the photographs relieve us of that responsibility?4 Might not the ethical ambiguity of the works themselves function as a critical tool, as many have argued about Conceptual and postmodern art, and thus more firmly implicate us in their critique of ideology? My interest in the New Topographics is part of an ongoing interest in the fate of ideology critique itself under post-industrial capitalism’s rampant and pervasive commodification of it. Indeed, given the increasing omnipresence and vacuity of form under our corporate culture industry, much of postmodern art, like the post-structuralist critique to which it is often linked, takes form and formal issues as its point of entry.5 My own interest in the New Topographics, some 20 years after Bright’s essay, anticipates, perhaps, the possibility of a larger renewed interest signaled by the 2005 acquisition of Robert Adams’s photographic oeuvre by Yale University, as well as the popularity of “new” naturalist writing by authors such as Barbara Kingsolver (2001) and Michael Pollan (1991, 2002), and an increase in art historical scholarship on previously overlooked artists and movements from the sixties and seventies (Kwon, 2004; Lee, 2006, 2001; Molesworth, 2003). Indeed, whereas Ansel Adams’s work remains a popular subject for coffee table books and an adornment of Sierra Club wall and engagement calendars, few today outside the art world and cultural élite are familiar with New Topographics.

The false consciousness exposed by the New Topographics’ irony is that the West was ever pristine, ever uninhabited: Even the nineteenth-century photographer, to get his view, left footprints (Banham, 1987, p.5). The false consciousness exposed by the New Topographic’s irony is, perhaps, that these photographs are less about the “man-altered landscape” than what California cultural and architectural historian Reyner Banham called the “man-mauled desert” (1987, p.2). The photographs are often beautiful not only because of the photographer’s eye, although Szarkowsky and others would have us believe this the whole story, but because we can be moved by such naked juxtapositions of human exploitation and the beauty of the constructed landscape—all we have ever truly known of nature despite a century’s worth of landscape photographs that have attempted to convince us otherwise. Indeed, as Banham further suggests, the “irony is that this beauty is itself a product of careless human ambition” (1987, pp.4-5).

 

Kelly Dennis teaches modern and contemporary art history and photography at the University of Connecticut. She has published extensively on photography, pornography, and performance art.

 

NOTES

1 The most important essay outlining these histories is Bright, D. (1993), as part of a series of projects addressing the ideological currency of landscape in the post-war United States. See also Bright (1992; 1990).
2 The aesthetics of Adams’s photographs also indirectly served post-war petroleum,
automobile, and lead industries in their drive to expand automobile dominance by destroying mass transit and alternative and safe fuels (Mintz 2006, Kitman, 2000).
3 The exception is Craig Owens work (1992), esp. pp. 52-87.
4 Compare Roland Barthes regarding the dispossession of viewer judgment in “shock- photos” (Barthes, 1979, pp.71-73).
5 This essay is part of the author’s larger project on irony and aesthetics in Western landscape photography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banham, R. (1987) Introduction, in: Misrach, R. Desert Cantos (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press).
Barthes, R. (1979) The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.).
Bright, D. (1993) Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography, revised reprint in: Bolton, R. (Ed.) The Contest of Meaning pp. 125-143 (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press). Originally published in: exposure 23:1 (1985).
—— (1992) The Machine in the Garden Revisited: American Environmentalism and
Photographic Aesthetics, pp. 60-71 in: Art Journal 51:2 (summer).
—— (1990) Victory Gardens: The Public Landscape of Postwar America, in: VIEWS
(spring).
Hagen, Charles (1989) Lewis Baltz: Castelli Graphics, p. 148 in: Artforum International
28 (November).
Jenkins, William (1975) Introduction to The New Topographics in: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (Rochester, NY, The Museum).
Jussim, Estelle (1985) Landscape as Photograph (New Haven, Yale University Press). Kingsolver, B. (2001) Prodigal Summer: A Novel (New York, Harper Perennial).
Kitman, J. L. (2000) The Secret History of Lead, in: The Nation (March 20) [Online] Available at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000320/kitman
Kwon, M. (2004) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).
Lee, P.M. (2006) Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).
—— (2001) Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).
Mintz, M. (2006) Road to Perdition, in: The Nation (May 31) [Online] Available at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060612/mintz
Molesworth, H. Ed. (2003) Work Ethic (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art).
Owens, C. (1992) Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture
(Berkeley, CA, University of California Press).
Pollan, M. (2002) Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York, Random House Trade Paperbacks).
—— (1991) Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (New York, Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.)
Ratcliff, C. (1976) Route 66 Revisited: The New Landscape Photography, pp. 86-91 in: Art in America (Jan/Feb).

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Pat Sabatine’s 8th Birthday Party, Martins Creek, April, 1977

Attraction and Desire: Larry Fink’s Life in Photography

By Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, essay from the book Larry Fink: Attraction and Desire: 50 Years in Photography, published by The Sheldon Art Galleries. Saint Louis, Missouri. 2011.

 

“I photograph because I live. I want to contribute that passion of living to posterity in the best way I can.”1

– Larry Fink, 2010

My first experience of Larry was when I heard his piano playing drifting up from the lobby of my hotel as I descended the stairs to meet him on the first day of my visit to his farm and studio outside of Easton, Pennsylvania. The farm, where he has lived since 1974, is a compound of several buildings, one of which houses his studio and archives and the studio of his partner and wife of 19 years, the sculptor Martha Posner. Surrounding the house, a portion of which was built in 1750, are woods, saucer-sized dahlias, bamboo stands, and a menagerie of animals (an emu, a llama, a horse, guinea hens, chickens, doves, tropical fish, a turtle, a dog, cats and toads, among other beasts), some roaming, others penned. Found-object sculptures find their place on fences and between bushes. The house itself is cozy—full of collections of rocks and shells, dolls, more found objects, paintings and drawings by friends and colleagues, and subtly, in between it all, the occasional classic Fink photograph is hung with a self-effacing lack of pomp.

Larry Fink is a man who clearly enjoys the physicality and sensuality of the world around him. Passion- ate and outspoken with an impish nature, he enjoys good food and earthly delights. Having come of age in the beat generation, Fink has retained that sensibility. His written correspondence takes the shape of a beat poem or a jazz lick, but the images he creates with the camera are drawn from multi-layered influences. Emanating from a passionate psyche, they are also informed by a deep understanding and appreciation of the history of art. Though photographic influences, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, André Kertész, Brassaï, Robert Frank, and Lisette Model, his teacher, played a role in the formation of Fink’s early vision, sparks of Goya, Daumier (a print by the artist hangs in Fink’s studio), and George Grosz, the atmosphere of a Cara- vaggio and the psychology of a Rembrandt, can also be found in his luminous and theatrical works.

 

Early Work

“The pictures I take now and tomorrow and yesterday are about human events on a small order. I try to make them bigger, to make them into metaphors that might speak across the board.”2

– Larry Fink, 1998

Born in 1941 and raised on Long Island, New York, in a leftist, middle-class, Jewish home, Fink began experimenting with photography when he was 13. Art and music were formative ingredients in young Fink’s development. Jazz music filled his house, and his parents were supportive of his early endeavors in photography. His father, Bernard, bought him a Rolliflex and provided entrance into an artistic milieu – an insurance man, his clients included Raphael and Moses Soyer, among other artists. His mother, Sylvia, also supported her son’s artistic endeavors and felt art should be used in service of social change. She was the one who, in around 1960, encouraged him to study with the photographer Lisette Model, who is known for her uncompromising portraits of French bourgeoisie and for her gritty photographs of the streets and jazz clubs of New York City.3

An Austrian Jew, Model had fled Europe in 1938 and was working freelance in New York, teaching at the New School for Social Research, and offering private lessons. Others who studied with Lisette Model include Diane Arbus, Leon Levinstein, John Gossage, and Rosalind Solomon, among many other luminaries, in whose photographs can be seen aspects of Model’s aesthetic and social principles. Model’s instruction was philosophical, not technical: “Photography starts with the projection of the photographer, his understanding of life and himself into the picture,” she once remarked – a philosophy that Fink has embraced in his work.4 She underscored the importance of illuminating intrinsically human qualities like desire, power and vulnerability within human interchange, and encouraged Fink to focus on these basic human elements, which could be made evident through the photographic arrest of a gesture or expression. The power of Fink’s images stems from his ability to intuitively freeze moments that are pregnant with psychological import.

During this time, Fink also attended a few workshops held by Alexey Brodovich, the Russian-born art director of Harper’s Bazaar. A graphic designer, Brodovich integrated contemporary painting and photography into his design spectrum and brought a fresh new look to magazine layouts. He revolutionized magazine design by employing atypical juxtapositions of images, a bold use of typography and innovative cropping, to create a magazine whose pages were animated. Brodovich began teaching in the 1930s, after he moved from Paris to the United States. Formed in 1941, his Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research, where Lisette Model also taught, became immensely popular. Brodovich was the mentor of many influential photographers, among them Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Fink, who came from a left-thinking, anti-establishment perspective, did not subscribe to Brodovich’s aesthetic or the magazines that he worked for, which he regarded as pandering to the wealthy, so his experience of the workshops was not a positive one and he left halfway through the course. 5

 

 

In these early years, Fink photographed on the streets of New York, Las Vegas, London and Paris, and through dark, evocative, 35-millimeter camera images, show us how humanity negotiates a terrain of urban grit. In these moody photographs of the denizens of dark streets, illuminated cafés, busses and subways, we see people alone in the crowd. Captured before these cities were sanitized for tourism, the images present a viewpoint sympathetic to the alienation often encountered in the urban environment. In viewing Fink’s theatre of the disaf- fected and the joyful, we feel what he feels. His intimate connection with his subjects and close vantage point allows us to submerge ourselves in the psyche of the subject. Though these images have an affinity to the work of William Klein or Robert Frank, whose seminal 1959 book The Americans Fink had acquired in the year of its American debut, Fink’s carry an empathy that neither Frank nor Klein share. Ambivalent about Frank’s work in The Americans, he admitted that he “both hated and loved” it for its “ungenerous” attitude.6

Concurrently, Fink joined a group of what he terms “second generation” beatniks, who “were more crazed, more depressed, more engaged with their sense within quasi-history; destined to be holy sphincters on the horizon, to be representative of the spiritual search, to be using drugs of all kinds in order to enter the universe and another level of personal consciousness… .”7 Taken with a medium format camera, these works have a different feel from his street photographs and emphasize the observational role that he played. One senses that, though he was an accepted member of the group, he acted as the recorder of deeds rather than an immersed participant. In these romantic and intimate photographs, Fink tracks the renegade lives of his friends, who seem very much aware of the power of the camera.

 

Somewhere There’s Music

“Music, foul and growling, dark, round and tranquil, long and clear. It is for me the river of life. It feeds me on the deepest level. I wish to share with all, the majesty of being witness to sound.”

– Larry Fink, Somewhere There’s Music, 2006

Music is at the center of much of Fink’s daily life. In his living room, a grand piano, a cello, and several jazz instruments are at hand, ready for an impromptu concert. Harmonica always in pocket, he interjects riffs into conversation… dinner….lectures. An accomplished pianist, Fink grew up in a music-filled house and ventured into New York jazz clubs when he was still in high school. “I entered behind the beat, two days late and wailing, born into a family of social radicals and pleasure seekers. The folks swung and danced through three or four major decades of music. Throw in some Leadbelly and lighting and the ears of a hun- gry innocent were fed with profuse profundity.”8

In 2006, Fink compiled his visual history in music in a traveling exhibition and book, Somewhere There’s Music. Sensitive and intimate, the photographs exude sound. Unlike the famous jazz photographs of William Gottlieb or Herman Leonard, who are icon-makers, Fink’s images show the performers as human and vulnerable. Memorable are his photographs of a beautiful young woman enraptured by music, Jimmy Rushing in a contemplative mood at a recording studio session, and Roland Kirk kissing and playing the hand of his baby, who is in the arms of its mother. In these, we see the humanity behind the fame. Fink peppers the undulating, cyclic sequence with abstracted details that act as counterpoints to the human melody. In these photographs, music becomes physical. We feel it in the attitudes of the players – their bodies in ecstasy – bent, bowed, exploding with the force of it. We also feel Fink enveloped by the music and are enveloped ourselves.

 

Social Graces

“People like to have their pictures taken. Some will endure the pain of flash-blindness because recorded experience is somehow more important to them than actual experience. It is a profound aspect of our culture, this compulsion for proof. It allows me to wade into a party. Once inside, a physical bonding between them and me forms; objectivity and self portraiture exchange places. When I walk around in a tuxedo and tap my toes I’m a fancy dude. When I walk around Martins Creek, I’m a rolling country belly.“

– Larry Fink, Social Graces, 1982/1991

In 1968, Fink was commissioned to photograph the centennial ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was during this time that he moved towards what would become his signature style. Using a handheld flash to wash his subjects in chiaroscuro, then printing so the harshest flash highlights were mellowed into fleshy sculptural tones, Fink helps us to become witness to the complexity and theatricality of human interaction. Already evident in his early photographs is his masterful ability to capture the spontaneous choreography of bodies, among them a photograph of an African-American couple in a loving, dance-like interchange. (p. 32)

The photographer offers us the chance to feel “within” the images. Fink is generous. We never have the feeling that we are closed out, or looking in from outside as a voyeur might. Instead, the images are wide open, sensual and inviting. Perhaps because Fink is as much a participant in as a recorder of this dance of life, that can also be viewed as a dance of death, that the images invite us to also be in them. His photographs of the upper levels of society provide a complex layered view that is both scathing and empathetic. On one hand, they are a harsh indictment of vanity, gluttony and avarice—Bosch in the guise of a Caravaggio—but they also reveal the photographer’s awareness of his own place as an active member of the “scene.” He underscores this in his recounting of a moment at one such event when a fellow photographer pulled him aside and asked him to take a pedantic “recorded experience” photograph of himself, a request that Fink rejected with disgust.9

 

 

The photographs that make up Social Graces are taken at two polar opposites of the social spectrum. A section of the book is given over to images that Fink made at a variety of museum and gallery parties. They show beautiful people engaging in frivolity, but also reveal how they too succumb to the frailties of human nature. Photographs of cavorting masses, doll-like visages and unreal bosoms are punctuated and punctured by deeply felt revelations — the lost and vacant expression of a woman captured in embrace, a glowing fist on a chest, or the long-fingered hands of a man on the back of a woman, whose golden locks are sculptural and shimmering.

These photographs serve as a companion to, and in dialogue with, an equally tender, yet also excoriating body of work on Fink’s longtime Martins Creek neighbors, the Sabatine family. In 1974, Fink and his then wife, the painter Joan Snyder purchased a farm in remote rural Pennsylvania. He first met the patriarch, John Sabatine, when he needed an inexpensive lawn mower. Sabatine had many, rotting and rusting in a backyard wasteland of detritus. After several years of friendship with the Sabatines, Fink’s image-making became a natural part of their relationship. Invited to cookouts, birthday and graduation parties and other rites of passage, Fink’s acceptance into the “tribe” allowed him to make intimate and revealing portraits of this sometimes fractious family. As in his photographs of society players, in the Sabatines he found himself in the other and the other in himself.10

 

Fashion and Hollywood

“When substance is dead, style lives on. Our world is ultimately licensing spiritual banishment. Identity is a word on the logo of your jacket. Capital is the revolution of the future. Justice awaits at the crossroads of infirmity. The world of fashion was and is mine to play; to lie in wait and prey, to lie awake and pray. Thanks to all for the inner access to the glory of the glut.”

– Larry Fink, Runway, 2000

A natural offshoot of the society photographs found in Social Graces, Fink’s foray into the world of fashion and Hollywood peels back the transparent, crackling layer of artifice that forms the basis of the end products that we see in the glistening pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, on the runways during fashion week, and in the daily Hollywood newsmagazines.

Perhaps even more devastating in some ways than his photographs in Social Graces, Fink’s fashion images go backstage to find real beauty underneath the manufactured: grace in the face of a veiled model or in a tender gesture to the eye of a blonde Madonna-like figure, who glows in the light of a flash surrounded by dark pressing throngs. True intensity, vulnerability and in particular, human-ness, are the things we normally do not see in fashion photography’s end-products, but Fink makes them present here.

His Hollywood photographs, commissioned by Vanity Fair magazine, do not offer a sugarcoated, Vaseline-lensed celebrity, iconic perfection, nor are they images of a callous paparazzi. In these photographs, Fink captures the human moments to be found in a world of perfected artifice. The images are penetrating, but also loving, and reverential. These in particular are about raw sensuality and desire—the beautiful back of a starlet embraced in the glow of Fink’s off-camera flash, or a kiss stolen while a fellow partygoer sleeps in a chair nearby, echo Fink’s own appetites and desires. Yet, neither does he let his subjects off the hook. Fink exposes imperfections and creates them—illuminating the lines and lumps of bodies not entirely picture-perfect, and imposing his own shadow on that of a passing partygoer—underscoring his, and photography’s, role in this theatre of pretense. Fink’s lighting and printing techniques intensify the fleshy, corporeality of the figures. The images are about the physicality and the psychology of being.

 

Boxing and Politics

“How many of us would train six hours a day – train not just for strength, but for armor, for the twist of the muscle that makes it invulnerable and pliant simultaneously? Train so that on the way to the battle our tools will stand the test, our body will prevail? Such a personal way to inflict injury, so intimate is the contest for egos and skills fighting for primary dominance throughout the history of the world.”

– Larry Fink, Boxing, 1997

Fink has found personal voice in each of his commissioned projects and never separates the “art” from the “job.” Often, com- missions blossom into larger, personal projects. Somehow, the fact that Fink was asked to produce a series of photographs on boxing is no anomaly. The series, shot over 10 years between 1987 and 1997, which culminated in a book and exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, began with an assignment from Manhattan, Inc., who sent him to a small gym in Catskill, New York. The subject captured his imagination and he spent the next decade visiting small gyms in the Philadelphia area, photographing to the memory-sounds of childhood radio boxing broadcasts.11 The dramas that he captured there were visceral and psychological. These small gyms, whose denizens are not the Don King superstars, but those who come to find physical release, fraternity and hope, also have a rich psychological life. In these images, Fink found beauty and grace. This beauty is not of the model kind, but instead can be found in the rough, sweaty grandeur that is the glistening, sculptural back of a Zeus-like figure, an enveloping satin hood, or a boxer transformed by a beatific touch into the image of a saint.

 

 

Politics is a lot like boxing. Opponents spar and jab while the mass media plays referee. In 2008, Larry Fink went “backstage” for a series of photographs commissioned by Vanity Fair magazine during the presidential campaigns of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. It is no surprise that Fink did not record the official “photo-op” moments expected of press corps journalists. Instead we see images of Hilary Clinton caught in an awkward, stooping kiss or whisper, the adoring face of a woman regarding an encircled Obama onboard his campaign airplane, and the future president, exuding palpable charisma, rising like a demigod out of a sea of humanity. Like his fashion or Hollywood photographs, Fink uncovers those moments in which the guard is let down and the inner being, however flawed, escapes.

Collectively, Fink’s images of partying socialites and Hollywood celebrities, fashion models and even boxers, can be seen as a monumental danse macabre, or dance of death. Like its late-mediaeval allegorical counterpart that portrays figures from all walks of life, from lowly laborers to kings and papal majesties, Fink’s images, in some ways, remind us similarly of the fragility and vanity of earthly life.

 

Travels and Commissions

“The moment that we have is the only moment we will ever have, insofar as it is fleeting. Every breath counts. So does every moment and perception. It’s a way to be alive. I am involved with the idea of reaching deeply into the pulsing matter of what it means to be alive and being vulner- able and seeing if I can cast an emotional legacy about being human.”12

– Larry Fink, 2011

The state of the human condition is a theme that plays through images that Fink has taken on a variety of travels, and in the greater body of his work. In the late 1980s, after the success of his Social Graces project and following the dissolution of his marriage to Joan Snyder, Fink spent time in Europe. There he captured images that were not typical travelogues, but instead recorded the small but important moments between people, and the poetics of place. In one image from a Condé Nast Traveler assignment, an ancient woman in the Côte d’Azur, France looks up at her caretaker, whose attentive face Fink places slightly out of focus in the far upper right corner, almost outside the picture plane. The woman, a nonagenarian, was once an important member of the Rivieran social world, but now lives in a villa surrounded only by her caretakers and staff.13 Another photograph taken in the same year captures a heightened moment between a man and a woman at a dining room table. His eyes are downcast and she appears to be anticipating his next words. In these photographs, Fink does not use artificial light, but instead makes use of existing illumination, and plays with shadow, framing and depth of field to elucidate the state of mind of both the photographer and his subject.

In 1997, the Ministry of Culture of Matosinhos, Portugal hired Fink to “create a photographic record, historic and interpretive, of the two ways of life.”14 In the resulting images, Fink reveals the power of the collective to move work and life forward. Young and old participate to create the blood-dark wine, the grapes of which are harvested, pressed and celebrat- ed in their final liquid form. Fink’s photograph of a young boy carrying a basket of grapes up an incline in a field is powerful and devastating. We feel the exertion in his penetrating gaze. On the same trip, Fink also rendered disturbingly real Christian religious figures. He illuminates them in such a way that the fleshy, hu- man sculptures seem to carry the light of the spirit that they were made to exemplify. These sculptures are animated in the same way that his photographs of people are sculptural.

Another important commission that resulted in a formidable publication, shared and paired with the work of the photographer Andrew Moore, was to photograph the work and workforce of the Cleveland Clinic. In these, Fink moves in as close as he can to his subjects, choreographing within the frame their interpersonal dances. Nurses, doctors, and other support staff are illuminated by Fink’s glowing light, which arrests movement and forms images that can only be compared to Old Master paintings. We feel the emotion of both the subjects and the photographer as he moves within hospital culture and unfolds life and death dramas and quotidian moments enclosed within vast, institutional architecture.

 

Home and Family

“Death is silent. The body, sodden, is swept up in decompositions quiet process. This renders deaths grave message as part of the organic nature of all physical things but doesn’t take into consideration memory, which is based on life’s movement. Life has a miraculous power to trans- form the everyday into tides of spiritual intelligence. The soul lives on within the memory of the living. Memories do not decompose, they transform within time and the spirit floating through interpretative cognition. Memory is held for as long as those living are allowed to live. In each aftermath we have more and more souls to care for. Eternity is never cheap.”15

– Larry Fink, 2010

Perhaps the most moving and illuminating are Fink’s photographs taken of his home and family over the decades. These images are unabridged—raw and exposed, sweet and tender. They take us through the decades of his life and relationships that have included three wives, his only child, and a large, extended family. Too often, Fink is known and judged only by his “society” photographs, which provide only one layer of this complex artist’s vision. In this body of work there are wrenchingly personal photographs of his parents and grandparents, and images of his daughter Molly, the first which is visceral and raw as she makes her powerful presence known in the world. Another voluptuously lit image, taken a few months later, places baby Molly reverently amongst her toys like a sacred being in a Renaissance painting.

 

 Fashion Week, Press Pit, New York, April, 1996

Self-portraits too have found a consistent place in his artistic expression. Compelling and tender is the self portrait that captures a moment of bliss as his wife Martha embraces and kisses him. Another shows him with his now-toddler daughter—he looking slightly unsure—she confronting the camera head-on with fist extended. There are also lovely images of the family’s presence in his life—his daughter’s toys, a dinner plate, his dog and a glowing silver radiator that serves as a foreground to a view of his first wife, Joan Snyder, drying her hair. Then there are the portraits, which are full of unguarded moments – his mother crowned by Rhododendrons, Martha on the floor of their home playing with their dog, his sister Lizzie in the hospital, and activists Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, and his mother Sylvia, on a couch. These images, into which the photographer has poured his soul and asks us to participate, provide us with a generous glimpse into the life and mind of the photographer and his kin.

 

Primal Elegance

“I found them at home, in the fields and on the sills of each window, hanging as predators do, waiting for prey – still life thrusting, going through its cycle. It has been five months on my knees, three hours each day, camera in hand searching for images that allow me entry in a world where I cannot be. I am large, but they are larger than me. I have been awed; I have been frightened. I lay waiting, trying to enter into their ravenous avidity. I photographed from the inside not the outside; I became what I beheld.”

– Larry Fink, Primal Elegance, 2005

The flora and fauna in and around Fink’s farm is another little-known subject of his investigations. Poetic and sensual, with touches of the sublime, Fink captures low, dark notes in photographs of plants, insects and animals that have surrounded him there for 36 years. The images of vegetation and insects, like praying mantises and bees, are primal studies of the microcosm that is macrocosm. In the fecund, leafy undergrowth, are found miniaturized versions of human dramas that are both beautiful and terrible. Fink followed several mantises on his property for two years, capturing their “primal elegance.” In these images, Fink crawls into the world of the mantises, photographing them stalking prey and copulating through the canopies of vegetation. The undergrowth itself has also been a topic of discovery for Fink. He captures windfall pears, winding plant-life, his tiny dog, Rose, in a nest of long grasses, and a bumble bee magnified to fantastical proportions. There are also close-up studies of flypaper on which flies are fixed in their last writhing death agonies—a comment, perhaps, on the human condition in this time of conflict and war.

Fink’s photographs have soul. They mirror our attractions and desires, exude generosity and passion, they are opinionated and uncompromising, as is he. These images, for they are images as much as they are photographs, show us our true nature as fractious beings, inclined to avarice, gluttony, pride and lust, among other biblical offenses, but also reveal our distinctly human ability for sensitivity, humor, hope, and foremost, empathy.

 

Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Director

The Sheldon Art Galleries3648 Washington BoulevardSt. Louis, MO, 63108314-533-9900 x 31

 

Notes

1 Robert Simons, “Interview with Larry Fink,” Pocko Blog, Wednesday, April 21, 2010, http://pocko-people.blogspot.com/2010/04/interview-with- larry-fink.html. (5-18-10).
2 Larry Fink, interviewed by Jowita Kepa, Tim Saltarelli and Phil Brideaux, “Interview with Larry Fink,” Toronto, Canada: Ryerson University, November, 20, 1998, http://www.imagearts.ryerson.ca/imagesandideas/pages/interview.cfm?page=195.
3 Laurie Dahlberg, Larry Fink (London and New York: Phaidon, 2005), n.pag. (essay, par. 8).
4 Lisette Model as quoted in Ann Thomas, “Model the Teacher, 1949-1983” in Lisette Model (National Gallery of Canada and New York: International Center of Photography, 1990), 118.
5 Email correspondence with the artist, December 20, 2010.
6 Dahlberg, n.pag. (par.6).
7 Larry Fink, commentary on series of photographs, published in the online magazine Visura, “The Beats: Larry Fink,” Visura Magazine, Issue 7, January, 2010, http://www.visuramagazine.com/vm/the-beats-larry-fink.
8 Larry Fink, untitled foreword, Somewhere There’s Music, essay by George E. Panichas (Bologna, Italy: Damiani Editore, 2006) n.pag.
9 Conversation with the artist, October 24, 2010.
10 “The pictures are taken in the spirit of finding myself in the other or finding the other in myself.” Larry Fink, original 1982 foreword (published as an afterword in the 2001 edition of Social Graces) in Larry Fink, Social Graces, essay by Max Kozloff (New York: Powerhouse Books, 2001), 119.
11 Dahlberg, n.pag. (par. 20). Larry Fink also relates his memories of boxing on the radio in an interview published on a New York Times web blog: “I used to listen to the Friday night fights. We were people of the left. Boxing was a symbolic sport for people who were underdogs to come up and prove themselves triumphant and powerful. When I got older, I would watch a boxing match on television and find my adrenaline building to a point where my heart palpitations would start and I would have to turn away from the screen. I guess the latent aggression was
flamed by the stimulus.” From Larry Fink and Adriana Theresa, “A Moment with Larry Fink,” New York Times Lens Blog, January 5, 2011(1/6/10).
12 “A Moment with Larry Fink,” (1/6/11).
13 Dahlberg, notes to plate 20.
14 George E. Panichas, “Fish and Wine: Larry Fink’s Photographs of Portugal” in Larry Fink: Fish and Wine (Easton, Pennsylvania: Lafayette College, 1997), 5.
15 Larry Fink, “Death,” Blog Entry, Wednesday, March 10, 2010, http://larryfink.blogspot.com/2010/03/d-e-t-h-death-is-silent.html (1/4/11).
16 Dahlberg, n.pag. (par. 19).

 

Details on ordering the book:

Fink Limited Editon Book Order Form

 

ASX CHANNEL: LARRY FINK

 

 

(All rights reserved. Text @ Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, images @ Larry Fink)

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El Grafico 28,051, November 29, 2010

Hot, Daily Death and Sex

Text by Paul Loomis, ASX, May 2012

I had been living in Mexico City for only two months when I encountered artist P.J. Rountree’s collection of El Grafico covers.  He collects various visual textures from the urban environment, manipulating some and archiving others as part of an ongoing project entitled El Grafico, 2009-Present.  El Grafico is one among many striking visual features of the city, and he began to purchase issues with covers that drew his attention when he arrived around two years ago.  This process allowed him to both curate the covers and document his own desensitization to them, which he says is constantly growing.

Viewing the collection in person the spectacle of their collective presence fascinated me, and their signature mixture of sex, death, and design was far more apparent when they were together than on a single issue in street stand.  They struck me as only a curiosity before Rountree showed me into a room with walls lined in newsprints of naked women carefully arranged around mutilated corpses.  After that I become engrossed in El Grafico, its images, the surreal fact of its existence, and I began my own process of purchase and desensitization.

After seeing dozens of El Grafico covers at once it is tempting to think of Mexico through the lens they present, but it is also important not to do so.  Although Mexico is at war, drug killings are not El Grafico’s sole subject.  It shows the bodies of murder victims and people killed in traffic accidents much more often, and as a result it is misleading to think of the violence it depicts as uniquely Mexican.  There is enough death each day in any one city in the United States to create a similar paper, but that paper does not exist.  What is unique about the covers is not violence, it is the pairing of violence with sexuality through the medium of design.

El Grafico falls in a tradition of similar papers: Mexico’s Notas Rojas, or red notes.  The Notas Rojas are papers that have offered lurid coverage of death and crime in Mexico since photographs have been distributed on a large scale, and they remain immensely popular.  In Mexico City alone there are many papers that market themselves with the blood of people killed the day before, and it is this competitive atmosphere that has shaped El Grafico.  Other publications feature the same content but focus on either photographs of corpses, photographs of naked women, or news writing.  El Grafico is the only paper to combine the two types of images on a single page and enjoys the highest circulation of any daily paper. It does, however, fit in a spectrum of similar media.
 

 El Grafico 27,919, July 20, 2010

El Grafico 28,143, March 28, 2011

El Grafico 27,953, August 23, 2010

What Mexicans think about the role of such publications in the politics and culture of their country tends to fall into two broad categories.  When I asked my friend Fernando, who sells religious artifacts on the street and has a masters degree in communications, what Las Notas Rojas meant in Mexico, his most notable insistence was that it was not a reflection of Mexican Culture, but a tool of the oligarchy.  He said that the owner of El Grafico was a member of the nation’s elite (which is true), and that it is in his interest to fuel fear (with pictures of bodies) and feelings of inferiority (with pictures of beautiful women).

This sentiment was echoed by other, mostly educated Mexicans, and may be an attempt by those individuals to separate themselves from a grotesque part of the popular culture.  However, it is true that Mexico possesses a large and powerful ruling class that is historically corrupt and owns large swaths of the popular media.  As a result, this understanding is not necessarily inaccurate, but dismissing El Grafico does not explain it.

No one who held the above point of view regularly and uncritically read any publication that could be considered part of the Notas Rojas.  When I asked people who did read it, their responses were similar, too.  A taxi driver told me that he read El Grafico because it was the truth, and the images it contained were nothing more than what had happened.  A man leafing through El Grafico’s thin pages on the Metro said that it was news and entertainment, and he too invoked ‘the truth’ as a justification for the daily scenes of carnage that adorn the newsstands of Mexico City.

This may seem trite at first, but I can think of very few pieces of media that combine facts more elemental to the human experience (sex and death) inside of a single daily publication and make them as accessible. El Grafico should be recognized for putting these things in the open where we can talk about them, for being honest; yet its motives seem considerably more sinister than openness and honesty.

As far as ‘the truth’ in a political sense, Mexico was just named one of the most dangerous places in the world to practice journalism by Freedom House, a third party free press monitor.  This is mostly due to intimidation and assault and murder of journalists by drug cartels, and although El Grafico publishes photographs of corpses it does nothing in the way of investigative journalism; it exists to sell issues.  A glance at the content behind the covers unequivocally confirms its profit motive.  There are very small news blurbs about political campaigns and international events, much larger pieces of text about soccer matches, long daily columns about the sex lives of real people who write in for advice, full page spreads of nude women, and the rest of the pages are filled by advertisements aimed squarely at Mexico City’s male working class (hiring security guards!, etc).

 

construction paper sun print, @ PJ Rountree, from El Grafico, 2009-Present

newspaper sun print, @ PJ Rountree, from El Grafico, 2009-Present

El Grafico cover installation, @ PJ Rountree, from El Grafico, 2009-Present

It’s worth noting that much popular US media traffics in the same currency of sex and death but flatters, glorifies, and obscures it.  Although El Grafico is strange and brutal, it does not exalt the violence it contains.  Its photographs of corpses are gruesome, and while they do in the end sell newspapers, they play to morbid curiosity more than a desire for ‘truth’ or entertainment. This curiosity shapes the Nota’s presentation of death.  All of the characters in El Grafico’s covers are excerpted from humanizing influences.  There are never extensive plots surrounding the victims of murders or accidents, nor around the women who accompany them.

Lack of elaboration and the straightforward documentation of death is opposite the strategy of US media whose readers’ social and cultural standing is comparable to those of El Grafico. Celebrity tabloids and fictional tabloids (aliens, bat boy, etc) all  depend on their ability to lure readers into a tight web of narrative, as do most Hollywood films that celebrate murder and promiscuity (James Bond etc).  Media in the US is generally attentive to violent actions and inattentive to their results, whereas El Grafico designs covers around aftermaths and ornaments them with sex.  These design choices are revealing of the two cultures.

There are no popular publications in the United States that do what El Grafico does. The reasons for this are manifold, but include the laws in the two countries, their respective religious traditions, economic situations, and their histories. However, even though Mexico has a war within it’s borders that is covered by media in the US, the US is fighting multiple wars outside of it’s borders, none of which are covered in the brutal detail that makes El Grafico distinct. This reluctance on the part of US media to print the disturbing photos of national action may be part of the United State’s ability to fight wars that are forgotten by its population; wars that might be more difficult to ignore if the blood they spilled adorned street-corners every morning.

El Grafico’s pairing of naked women and corpses is shocking to foreigners, and it is easy to criticize El Grafico for its tastelessness, easy to dismiss it for its shallowness, and easy to condemn it for its subject matter. But repudiations are not as powerful as questions, and I encourage anyone who sees El Grafico to interrogate its careful selection of images, its sometimes brilliant design, and its murderous ‘honesty’ before making cross-border judgments.

Ultimately El Grafico is a thing to be seen because of its undeniable force and because of its complete disregard for the western standards of decorum in journalism which help prevent us from being shocked. It is a version of truth that most of us would prefer not to see but to forget, and it brings the intensity of death and desire very, very close. Whether that confrontation results in thought and investigation or cowering is a choice each viewer makes, but El Grafico is powerful enough to demand attention.

 

http://pjrountreeelgrafico.tumblr.com/

 

Paul Loomis grew up in North Carolina, Mexico, and Holland, and spent his early years in Ohio, North Carolina, California, and Nevada. He now resides in Mexico City, teaches chemistry and literature, and writes fiction.Contact: Tetra.Loomis@Gmail.com

 

 

(All Rights Reserved. Text @ Paul Loomis, Images copyright/or @ courtesy of PJ Rountree)

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By Nan Goldin, Originally Published in ArtForum, May, 1997

Late one Berlin night in 1991, a famous German fashion photographer invited me and two friends to join him for a trip to Bel Ami, his favorite brothel in the Grunewald. The presence of a woman as a customer created a ripple of surprise, but the photographer, being a regular and popular visitor, put them at ease. Glossy prints of his published photographs of the house, group portraits of the “girls” who worked there and the pimp (“host”), were hanging on the walls. Though the setting was a German villa, the props were familiar: patterned wallpaper, heart-shaped velvet pillows, mirrors, chandeliers, gilded Turkish figurines holding red lamps, pink fleshy faux-Baroque nude paintings. One could imagine the same prevalence of gold and red in the brothels of Storyville, the red-light district of New Orleans in the early part of the century.

We drank overpriced splits of cheap champagne with the girls in the living room while chatting about the most mundane aspects of Berlin life. Finally, while the photographer was otherwise engaged, my friend, a shy poet, and I hired a beautiful young Brazilian woman to take us to a room. She stripped to her G-string while we sipped champagne and I questioned her about her life history. She kept asking us what we wanted her to do. I asked if I could take some photographs, and shot a few pictures of the decor of the rooms, and then of her nude and smiling, at ease on the round bed. I wanted these images to come as close as they could to the experience of her having to be intimate with strangers, like putting myself in the position of a john without forcing any sexual transaction. The experience of photographing her served as sublimation for the act of caressing her velvet skin. We each kissed her, paid her, and left. A gallery in Los Angeles recently exhibited a wide variety of photographs of prostitution that included one of these pictures of Linda from Bel Ami. The artists represented ranged from Brassai to Lisette Model to Mary Ellen Mark to Philip-Lorca diCorcia, but on the cover of the invitation, appropriately enough, was an image by E.J. Bellocq, the remarkable early-twentieth-century photographer of the Storyville whorehouses whose pictures are among the most profound and beautiful portraits of prostitutes ever taken.

In October 1996 a gorgeous new book of Bellocq’s photographs was published by Random House, much to the delight of all who have known his work since the early ’70s. Eighteen photos have been added to the thirty-four that were included in Storyville Portraits, put out by the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 on the occasion of a survey of Bellocq’s work. The frontispiece is new: a charming picture of two women in their underwear playing cards in an opulent room. This elegant book, a collaboration between the brilliant editor Mark Holborn and photographer Lee Friedlander, is also in a larger format – the same size of the original glass plates – than the earlier publication, allowing one to see the details of the interiors with clarity and inviting entry into the world of Storyville. The printing in tritone instead of duotone permits much more gradation and subtlety in the print quality. The book is as sensual and seductive as the women in it.

 

 

Without Friedlander’s intervention, no one would know the work of E.J. Bellocq. A frequent visitor to the Crescent City to photograph the jazz scene, Friedlander was friends with a compulsive collector named Larry Borenstein, who owned an art gallery in the ’50s. One night Borenstein showed Friedlander a number of the glass plates, which were among his collections and from which he had made some ordinary 8 x 10 prints that he sold around town for about $100 apiece. Apparently, the plates had been discovered in a drawer in one of Bellocq’s desks when the contents of his apartment were sold after his death. A number had incurred water damage, and some were damaged by the cracking of the glass itself during Hurricane Betsy in 1965 (many of these cracks weren’t evident in the rare earlier prints). Friedlander couldn’t forget these images, and felt they should be preserved and seen. So in 1966, he bought the plates from Borenstein. When one thinks of the massive amount of negatives and glass plates one comes across in flea markets and thrift shops, Friedlander’s power of discrimination becomes even more admirable, rivaling Berenice Abbott’s rescue of Eugene Atget’s work from oblivion. As a prominent photographer himself (and, like all artists, undoubtedly always behind in his own work), it is exceptional that Friedlander took the time and energy to research the appropriate printing technique for plates from that period. With this work-intensive method he printed a total of eighty-nine images. He took them to magazines and book publishers, one of whom told him they could only be published on the condition that Tennessee Williams write the introduction. Finally, John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art agreed to exhibit Friedlander’s prints and publish the book, Storyville Portraits.

The body of Bellocq’s portraits has been dated to around 1912, a period of legal bordellos in Storyville (women lived in these houses and were subject to arrest for working outside the quarter). Although little is known about Bellocq, many believe that the pictures were taken at Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall (the wallpaper in some of the photos apparently matches that from White’s whorehouse). Bellocq takes us into the brothel, one that is thought to have been a high-class joint frequented by prominent men. In those days, guides to the various brothels in Storyville called “Blue Books” were occasionally illustrated with photographs and euphemistically describing the girls’ talents in Victorian language (“she serves amber fluid, reads poetry beautifully”). Although some believe that Bellocq may have made the photographs with the intention of publishing them in one of these catalogues or on a commercial assignment, the fact is that they remained hidden away until after his death.

At the turn of the century, prostitution was an even more unusual subject for photography than today, and the experience of being photographed was far different. At that time, it would have been a special occasion, a form of attention that required time and collaboration. In spite of the large, unwieldy 8 x 10 camera, Bellocq’s pictures appear natural, and the women seem open and trusting. There’s a nonthreatening presence with an unprecedented degree of empathy permeating his work, rather than the usual sense of someone in a power position objectifying his or her subject. Bellocq’s photos do not show prostitution as a reductive identity. As well as the many straightforward portraits, there are also pictures that are like a playful game: both parties were fully engaged and indulging in layers of fantasy and self-creation. With the women’s obvious trust, warmth, and ease, these pictures transcend the normal customer-to-prostitute relationship, and therefore one must assume Bellocq and the women shared a greater than usual degree of familiarity and intimacy.

Bellocq never betrays his respectful and nonjudgmental position in his portayal of the women. That they are prostitutes does not preclude the fact that some of them are shown as ordinary young women. They seem to have posed themselves, choosing from an enormous variety of identities. Some pose like Pre-Raphaelite heroines, others like college girls with school banners, while some recline in interiors as opulent as Turkish opium dens. There are girls in gymnasts’ outfits, in pantaloons and homely nightcaps, and others hold their little pet dogs. There are thin young girls more passive and childlike in their nudity, a la Pretty Baby, the 1978 Louis Malle film supposedly based on Bellocq. Many are ladies dressed in all their finery who look like they are on their way to a garden party. One woman is pictured as a virginal saint with eyes downcast, cradling a huge bouquet, almost like a religious painting. A wide variety of body types are shown with the same reverence and lack of judgment, including women with the voluptuous flesh of Rubens’ bodies, which is rare in the history of the male representation of the female nude in photography. And unlike other male photographers – from Weston to Cartier-Bresson tO Strand to Friedlander – Bellocq never severs the head from the female nude in the shot. There are domestic scenes that evoke Vermeer, where one sees the details of the girls’ lives in their personal mementos, the steamer trunks, the bedclothes and the laundry. There’s a touch of perverse sexuality in some, in which the women, totally nude, wear masks. But the most expressive photos are those overflowing with a casual sensuality, where the woman’s bodice is dropping off, proudly exposing her breasts, while her whole being is filled with radiant innocence. One of these pictures, of a woman with bare legs in a silk camisole and curls and a delighted smile, is the most joyous photograph I have ever seen taken of a prostitute.

Contradicting the effervescence of much of the work, many more of the disturbing photographs in which the women’s faces are intentionally scratched out have been included in this new book. While the willful destruction of photographic images of the body in contemporary art has become a kind of artful, self-conscious trend, in Bellocq’s case, this bizarre and savage act seems to be some kind of personal censorship. In art school in the ’70s, I had been taught that Bellocq’s brother, a Jesuit priest, had been the culprit, though that theory seems to be disputed now. Some theorize that Bellocq himself scratched the glass negatives while they were still wet, either out of the desire to protect somone’s identity or some emotional outburst or jealousy. I think it’s highly unlikely that he would have done this to his own work, so lovingly made, and if he had wanted to hide the identity of some of the women, he could have used masks, as he did in some of the pictures. The theory that one of the girls may have done it out of jealousy or a desire to deny the intimacy she had previously been engaged in seems most likely to me, although it could be called into question by the fact that in a few places pictures of the same girl occur with her face both intact and deleted. In the end, the defaced pictures add a darkness that could represent a visual metaphor for violence against women that is in direct contrast to the warmth and tenderness of the book as a whole.

 

 

Much has been made throughout the years of Bellocq’s supposed identity and its relationship to the women he photographed. Until recently, photographic history described him as a “hydrocephalic semi-dwarf,” largely based on an imaginary discussion, patched together from letters and excerpts from recorded conversations, that John Szarkowski published in both the original and the recent versions of the book. Szarkowski’s discussants include Friedlander, a writer named Al Rose, jazz musicians, old photographers from the Quarter, and Adele, the subject of several of Bellocq’s photographs. They describe him as a kind of peculiar, Toulouse-Lautrec-like figure with a very high head that came to a point, who spoke in a high-pitched voice and walked in little mincing steps. This description of him as a physically nonthreatening and asexual man, different from the others who would have frequented the brothels, has often served as an explanation for why the work is so empathic and intimate. When I asked Friedlander what he knows about Bellocq personally, he answered, “I’m not interested in the man, I’m interested in the pictures.” He recommended I call Steven Maldansky, curator of photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art, who has done extensive research on Bellocq while organizing an exhibition of the photographer’s life as well as his Storyville work. On the basis of an image of Bellocq published in a turn-of-the-century magazine, Maklansky contends that the description of him as physically abnormal is exaggerated, and that he was indeed a debonair young man with a moustache who did not look so different from the photographer played by Keith Carradine in Pretty Baby. Rex Rose, whose research Maklansky drew on when compiling his exhibition, found Bellocq’s hospital records, which describe him at seventy-six, not long before his death in 1949, as a “normal, well-developed male.”

What is known about his life is that he was born Ernest J. Bellocq in 1873 to a middle-class Catholic Creole family. His father was a bookkeeper, and his brother Leo became a priest. Bellocq dropped out of Jesuit college at age eighteen to become a clerk and bookkeeper. He took up photography as a hobby in the early 1890s, and had a career for twenty or thirty years as a commercial photographer, taking mundane pictures of sports teams, graduation classes, and first communions. Around World War I, he photographed shipbuilding companies and machinery parts. He joined the New Orleans Camera Club and had work published in various magazines and newspapers. At the same time he was photographing Catholic schoolgirls, he would have been making these Storyville pictures, and there is also a rumor that he photographed in the opium dens in the Chinatown of New Orleans, though these plates have never been discovered. He was a prominent though not hugely successful amateur, and had some family money. A lifelong batchelor, he lived with his mother a block and a half from Storyville until her death in 1902, after which he moved just a few blocks away. Above his mantelpiece, which is shown in a photograph in the book, hung many photographs of women, vignetted and framed as close-up portraits of their faces. Some of them seem to be among the fifteen or twenty women included in “Storyville Portraits.” One of the houses where he lived in the ’30s is thought to actually have had a whorehouse in it. In the ’30s the shy and reclusive Bellocq retired, but was said to make daily rounds of the camera stores, becoming one of the many familiar eccentrics that the Quarter is known for. His cause of death is not known but seems to have resulted from either falling down a flight of stairs or being hit by a car.

Regardless of the mythology surrounding Bellocq, whether he was a dwarf or an ordinary man, whether his familiarity at Lulu White’s was based on being a customer or a confidant, the genius of his work cannot be diminished. Some people have ascribed the pleasure evident in the women from being photographed by him as mirth at his physical deformity. Maklansky theorized that his obviously nonthreatening relationship was motivated by his paying them. Since most interpersonal transactions for a prostitute involve the exchange of money, it takes more than money to make a prostitute smile. I know that prostitution, especially today, can be a dangerous and potentially self-destructive job. Whatever Bellocq’s intentions were, whatever the nature of his relationship to these women, his portraits transcend the portrayal of the prostitute as an object. I imagine that, with his loving gaze, the desire and the sexual act that normally occurs in prostitution had been sublimated into the act of photographing. In the end “Storyville Portraits” remains a unique collection of love poems.

 

Special thanks to Lee Friedlander and Steven Maklansky.

 

(All rights reserved. Text @ Nan Goldin, Images @ Lee Friedlander)

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A short film about Jim Goldberg’s book ‘Raised by Wolves’.

Edited & animated by Brandon Tauszik

brandontauszik.com

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#1, From Train Church, 1986

By David Alvarez, excerpt from Alternation, 1996

I think that particularly in a country like South Africa where for centuries and particularly in the last four decades or so there has been an overt attempt to remove people’s identities or to make them something other than what they are there is a huge potential there for using photography in a way that could actually, in some small measure, get people back to their identity, get people back their control of identity’ (Cedric Nunn, 1993)

To extend leftist discourses about political economy and the state to a discourse about capitalist civilization is to accent a sphere rarely scrutinized by Marxist thinkers: the sphere of culture and everyday life. And any serious scrutiny of this sphere sooner or later must come to terms with religious ways of life and religious ways of struggle (Cornel West, 1984).

Cedric Nunn’s call for a photography that would help restore a people’s identity and Cornel West’s insistence on the need for progressive thinkers to engage the sphere of religious ways of life and struggle are simultaneously concretised in a photo-essay entitled ‘Train Churches’, by the documentary photographer Santu Mofokeng. Published in a 1987 special issue of the North American journal Triquarterly devoted to new writing, photography, and art from South Africa, ‘Train Churches’ photographically documents an instantiation of De Certeau’s (1984) notion of how

a practice of the order constructed by others redistributes its space, it creates at least a certain play in that order, a space for manoeuvres of unequal forces and for utopian points of reference

The order here is that of the commuter trains transporting African workers in the service of the apartheid economy; the practice is that of improvised prayer meetings through which some commuters attempt to overcome the menace and alienation of apartheid transport.

In this section I examine ‘Train Churches’ as a text which frames and valorises certain everyday practices of resistance grounded in religious ritual. Since I am dealing here with a textual representation that mediates everyday life and not with a transparent window onto a quotidian South African reality, I devote some attention to the questions raised by the complexity of the photo-essay form. First, however, I offer a brief overview of the trajectory of oppositional South African documentary photography and of Mofokeng’s relationship to it.

In his 1987 reflection on documentary photography’s role in the struggle against apartheid, photographer Paul Weinberg claims that South African practitioners of the genre can be divided into two generations: the pre-1980s generation, characterised by the figure of the dogged and solitary photojournalist (best exemplified, perhaps, by Ernest Cole, and the generation which came of photographic and political age in the 1980s. While there is some continuity between the two, the work of the 1980s generation is in Weinberg’s view largely the product of collective endeavour. Mofokeng belongs to the 1980s generation, one which in a later piece Weinberg dubs the ‘Taking Sides Generation’. This generation created a number of photography collectives, one of the most active of which was Afrapix, formed in 1982.

The work of Afrapix was motivated by two broad objectives: on the one hand, to function as an agency and as a picture library; on the other, to foster the practice of documentary photography in alliance with the mass anti-apartheid organisations which emerged in the early 1980s. Afrapix photographers exhibited and published their work collectively, abroad as well as in South Africa. Most of this work attempted to record the ongoing struggle against apartheid from an openly partisan perspective. For instance, ‘On the Front Line: A Portrait of Civil War’, another photo-essay published in Triquarterly, consists of images produced by four Afrapix photographers which document scenes of repression and defiance from the State of Emergency of the mid-l980s.

Considered seditious by the State, the work of oppositional photographers was often banned, confiscated, and destroyed throughout the apartheid years. A plethora of legal restrictions severely curtailed the efforts of photographers to document social unrest and opposition to the State. In addition, photographers themselves were regularly harassed, banned, and imprisoned.

Significantly, the clampdown on press freedom during the mid-1980s State of Emergency led photographers to turn their attention to what Weinberg (1989) describes as ‘more in-depth community photography and more personal searches in the community of the photographer’. In so doing, Afrapix photographers like Mofokeng shifted their gaze from the spectacle of head-on struggle to less dramatic scenes, away from the conflict-ridden streets of the townships. Writing in 1991, two years after the lifting of the State of Emergency and a year after Mandela’s release, Weinberg (1991) argued that documentary photographers should create a photographic practice that could go beyond the limitations of protest photography:

The momentum we flowed with has gone. We now have to create our own. Our photography is faced with that challenge. We need to go beyond politics or maybe redefine what politics is. Maybe we should start by recognizing that it is people out there that make this struggle. It is people that make those statistics. It is time for photography to shift its focus. People make the struggle and it is not simply the politicians, the press conferences and the talking heads that are important. ‘News and politics’ both so critical in our highly politicised country have made the rendition of imagery superficial and limited.

This dissatisfaction with ‘superficial and limited’ imagery was also expressed by another member of the Afrapix collective, Cedric Nunn. In an interview in which he argues for empowering people to become active, critical consumers of images from the multifarious social text of late­-capitalist South Africa, Nunn (1993) charts the transformation in his aesthetic and political concerns:

Certainly I became a photographer and many people in Afrapix became photographers, because we wanted to make some sort of political intervention. A lot of us have moved, in that process we have come closer to seeing photography as art-form, as a creative art-form… And that removes it from the arena of hardcore politics, if you want, but I don’t think that that diminishes it in any way because it then takes on a creativity of its own.

 

#2, From Train Church, 1986

 #4, From Train Church, 1986

As the quotations by Weinberg and Nunn make clear, in photography (as indeed in literature), a tactical shift was underway in the late 1980s from the overtly political to realms often dismissed as apolitical (and therefore not ‘relevant’) by leftist critics. I want to argue that in the terms of Njabulo Nljebele’s critique of protest writing, the shift entailed focusing on the arena of ‘the ordinary’ and on the ‘infinite number of specific social details’ of people’s lives (Ndebele 1989) of which the ordinary was composed.

Mofokeng’s work shows an abiding concern for depicting ‘ordinary black South Africans going about the day-to day business of living’ (Mofokeng in Holst Petersen & Rutherford 1992). In ‘Train Churches’, published in the same year as Nunn’s interview, Mofokeng records the activities of railway commuters taking part in prayer meetings, a common feature of urban train travel since the early 1970s.

Mofokeng’s introductory text, ten photographs, and three captions capture moments in the rituals of the urban railway expressive culture of the ‘train churches’. The essay’s introduction deftly summarizes the characteristics and significance of this assemblage of performative railway practices, keyed on religious faith:

Early-morning, late-afternoon and evening commuters preach the gospel in trains en route to and from work. The train ride is no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself as people from different townships congregate in coaches-two to three per train-to sing to the accompaniment of improvised drums (banging the sides of the train) and bells. Foot stomping and gyrating-a packed train is turned into a church. This is a daily ritual (Mofokeng, 1987)

Comaroff notes that ritual is a key element of the everyday forms of protest of marginalised peoples. Such forms of protest are often imbricated in what Cornel West calls ‘religious ways of life’ and ‘religious ways of struggle’ in the ‘cultural life-worlds of the oppressed’. In ‘Train Churches’, Mofokeng’s camera has recorded a few moments of the everyday expressive religious culture of the oppressed.

Upon a first viewing, Mofokeng’s photographs jar with an outsider’s mental archive of images of South Africa in the 1980s. Absent from these photographs are the toyi-toying comrades, the burly, sjamook-wielding policemen, the billowing clouds of rubber-tyre smoke, and the ominoud Casspirs which long dominated photographic imagery of that decade produced for international consumption. Instead, in ‘Train Churches’ we encounter images of mostly middle-aged African women dressed in everyday work clothes who have been photographed while performing various practices such as singing, clapping, healing, praying, preaching and dancing. Surrounded by other commuters who are photographed looking on bemused, reading, or dozing, the framing of the worshippers in these train churches suggests that they are transported by religious fervour.

If the ethnographic arguments of anthropologists like Jean Comaroff are accurate, such fervour is the expression of an assemblage of practices which enable worshippers to mediate the profoundly alienating character of urban railway travel, itself a manifestation of a larger order of alienation, that of industrial capitalism in its South African form. In addition to describing what the photographs reveal of that mediation, I want to consider the work they do as images assembled in a photo-essay. Before assessing the character of Mofokeng’s photographs as representations, however, I want to consider briefly the nature of the practices which they represent.

In his 1972 study of Zionist rituals on commuter trains transporting Black workers between the township of Kwarnashu and white-dominated Durban, ethnographer J.P. Kiernan (1977) noted that while the people of the township accepted the train as part of everyday living, it was a constant reminder of their economically and politically dependent status. Further, in view of the sometimes disastrous accidents which took place on the African routes in the major urban areas and of the rampant violent crime on board the trains and at the stations, the train not surprisingly represented menace (Kiernan, 1977). Kiernan shows how some commuters chose to contest their subordinate status and the menace of the trains through the enactment of religious rituals practised by Zionists (not all the subjects of his study were in fact Zionists).

While Mofokeng’s essay does not specify what denominations the commuting worshippers belong to, their singing, improvised drumming, foot stomping and dancing suggests that they are adherents of the various charismatic sects of either the Independent or the Zionist churches of Southern Africa. Jean Comaroff (l985) explains that the dynamic system of religious signs and practices of the Zionist sects is centred on ‘the ritualized attempt to reform the body and the location of the person in the world’. Reforming the body and re-centering the person are symbolic responses to the sense of alienation and of loss of cultural identity generated by capitalist socio-economic structures in a racially segregated order. Just as the body is at the centre of Zionist ritual and belief, bodies (and especially faces) occupy most of the photographic space of Mofokeng’s frames.

In the remaining paragraphs of this section, I attempt a close reading of the photo-essay. I hope to show that in an essay consisting of only a one­ paragraph introduction, ten photographs, and two captions, Mofokeng has managed to convey a sense of the resilience of African workers condemned to undertaking the same dreary, dangerous journey day after day. Commencing with three ambivalent pictures of solitary worshippers surrounded by indifferent commuters, and proceeding with a series of five portraits of worshippers in varying states of transcendence, the essay concludes with two collective portraits of exultant commuters continuing their perfonnative practices on the platforms of the railway station.

Before commenting on the photographs individually, I want to under­ take a brief reflection on the relationship between myself as viewer/critic and Mofokeng’s essay. John Berger (1982) observes that when we find a photograph meaningful, ‘we are lending it a past and a future’. Despite tbe verbal contextualization of the photographs through the medium of a prefatory paragraph and two captions, providing ‘Train Churches’ with ‘a past and a future’, is not an altogether straightforward proposition.

While ‘Train Churches’ is not a ‘pure’ photo-essay, most of the photographs in it lack the most minimal textual features that conventionally accompany a photo-essay: captions, legends, dates, names, and locations. Much about the photographs remains ‘unreadable’. We are not told, for instance, why Mofokeng chose to document this particular aspect of quotidian South African urban life. This alone generates questions which the photographs cannot answer. What, for example, is the relationship between the photographer and his subjects? What relationships do his subjects have among one another? Were the photographs taken on different occasions among different groups of congregants? If so, why? What practices are the congregants engaged in precisely?

More intimate details about the photographs are also unavailable to us. What are the names of the people in the photographs? What do they think about their being photographed? The unavailability of answers to these and other questions reinforces the ambiguity inherent in the photographs. In what follows I intend to supplement the weak intentionality of the individual photographs with a narrative pieced together from the clues given to us both by the essay’s verbal components and by the arrangement of its visual information. This narrative is perforce fragmentary and much about the photographs remains ineffable. But if John Berger (1982) is right in arguing that photographs placed sequentially are restored to a context of interpretable experience, then the ambiguity of ‘Train Churches’ yields polysemic meaning and not a frozen iconicity.

 

 #5, From Train Church, 1986

#9, From Train Church, 1986

‘Train Churches’ opens with a half-body shot of a woman singing, clapping, and swaying her shoulders in the midst of a crowded train carriage. Although the woman’s face is the photograph’s focus, she is not gazing straight ahead but is looking instead in the direction of somebody in front of her and to her right who appears as a blurred arm in the bottom left part of the frame. The woman’s face is the only one we see clearly in this photograph. We can only see partial profiles of the two figures behind her and of the seated woman in the bottom right hand comer. There is an odd tension in the photograph between the fast movement which the woman’s blurred hands and body posture convey and the stillness and manifest uninterest of the figures behind her. That tension is further enhanced by the distribution of the light and dark tones. The light streaming in through the window in the right-hand third of the frame is bright and diffuse, evoking newness and illumination. That sense is offset, however, by the predominantly dark tone of the left third of the picture. The overall impression conveyed by the photograph is one of disconnection and engagement. Apparently disconnected from the commuters behind her, the woman sings on regardless, her countenance only slightly less impassive than that of the standing figure whose profile we see in the left third of the picture. The strange sense of impassivity conveyed by these two faces is however, slightly offset by the half-smile of the woman in the bottom right hand comer, who is sitting and reading a book (a Bible?) illuminated by the light from the window.

A similar dynamic is at work in the next photograph, a medium-long shot of a man crouching slightly as he apparently blows air outwards into the carriage with the help of his hands, also blurred. Like the woman in the previous photograph, this man is absorbed in his task and is not looking at the camera, thus lending the photograph an air of disengagement. The intensity of the man’s expression stands in strange contrast to the impassivity of the three out of the four figures behind him who are contemplating his actions. The fourth person, the man reading the newspaper at the left of the photograph, is unconcerned with the display of religious expressivity taking place in front of him. Holding up the paper with his left hand, he hangs on to a strap with his right hand, his right arm held diagonally above his shoulder, leading the eye away from the scene to a point outside the frame. The air of disengagement is further enhanced by the way in which Mofokeng has captured the space in which the man is located, standing as he is between two poles by himself, flanked on either side by seated, dozing women clutching their carrier bags.

The mood changes somewhat in the third picture, another medium long shot of a singing worshipper, who like the worshippers in the previous two photographs is looking away from the photographer and is surrounded by considerable empty space. In this case, however, the worshipper has engaged the attention of those around him to a small degree, as is evident from the faint smiles of the two women behind the man, in the left half of the picture.

In the fourth photograph, much of which is dark, the partially lit faces and hands of three women and the light in the windows behind them prevent the dark areas from overwhelming the composition. Even though the women are clapping and singing (while seated), the photograph has a heavy and silent quality to It.

The fifth photograph, which captures women undertaking what appears to be a healing ceremony, generates greater tension than the previous ones. The tension results from the intensity with which the healer (captured from the side) holds the face of the woman in front of her, and the equal intensity with which a younger woman in the background, whose illuminated face is the picture’s focus, looks on to the scene of the healing with her mouth open as though she is both singing and registering alarm.

The sixth and seventh photographs capture the transported visages of an individual woman and an individual man respectively. Located at the very centre of the frame, the woman’s illuminated face and torso convey a sense of sheer exaltation, a sense reinforced by the blackness which surrounds her and by the way in which her lit countenance contrasts with the faint silhouette which we can barely make out to the left of her. A similar effect is achieved in the next photograph, a captioned close-up of a priest with furrowed brow whose lit-up face is framed by two areas of black.

In the eighth photograph, we have close-ups of the serious countenan­ces of two women, praying with their eyes closed while they hold their anns aloft. The last two pictures are of activities outside the train, and each captures more worshippers simultaneously than any of the previous photographs. In the first, a group of five women at the centre of the picture run in circles surrounded at a distance of a few feet by fellow commuters standing in a ring around them. The expressions on their faces are joyful, and that sense of joyfulness is enhanced by the wider sweep of the photograph, taking in as it does a much larger area than any of the previous eight pictures.

The very last photograph in the essay has a caption which reads ‘Park Station, Johannesburg’. Singing continues onto platform before people go off in different directions to work’. In the left centre half of the picture, a small band of commuters walk along singing and clapping. Seven faces are visible and most of them are smiling. In the right-hand third of the photograph, other commuters standing at the open doorway of the train appear as blurred figures, while in the bottom right hand comer, the skirt, shoes, and socks of a woman walking along the platform are visible. The rest of her is not. There is a tension in the photograph generated by the contrast between the distinct joyfulness of the commuters on the left of the picture who have descended after surviving the journey intact and the blurred image of the commuters still mside the overcrowded and dangerous train.

Possibly taken on separate occasions, the photographs constitute a narrative whole which tells a story of alienation resisted. Writing about the ‘opposition to history’ manifested in a photograph by Andre Kertesz, John Berger (1982) notes that

All photographs are possible contributions to history, and any photograph, under certain circumstances can be used in order to break the monopoly which history has over time.

These words are pertinent to my reading of ‘Train Churches’. The train-and time-bound commuters in Mofokeng’s photographs are represented in the process of breaking the monopoly which history has over time and which the realm of necessity has over their day-to-day lives. As a whole, the essay contributes to this resistance by assembling the images in ways which invite recognition of the everyday drama they represent.

The overall effect of the essay is greater than the sum of its parts. This may be an intrinsic consequence of the montage-like properties of the photo­ essay. John Berger (1982) argues that still photographs placed in a montage sequence are restored to a living context:

… nor of course to the original temporal context from which they were taken­ that is impossible – but to a context of experience. And there, their ambiguity at last becomes true!. It allows what they show to be appropriated by reflection. The world they reveal, frozen, becomes tractable. The information they contain becomes permeated by feeling. Appearances become the language of a lived life.

The context of experience to which the photographs in Mofokeng’s essay are restored is that of the daily commuting experiences of millions of African workers. Celebratory and detached by turns, ‘Train Churches’ captures some of the complexity of an everyday experience in which ordinary workers enacted ritual practices that undercut the commodification to which they were subjected, even as they reproduced some of the features of the oppressive order. Appearances here do indeed become the language of lived lives, lives fraught with alienation, hope, and contradiction. Mofokeng’ s text is therefore in a sense more complex and compelling than either the deceitful, glossy images of life in South Africa circulated by apologists for apartheid or the imagery of unremittingly spectacular confrontation produced even by progressive photojournalists.

For all its power, however, a de-contextualized reading of ‘Train Churches’ could serve to occlude the harsh realities which train-congregants often had to face. In ‘Dumani’, Bereng Setuke (1980:64) notes preachers and their impromptu congregations are often silenced by train-gangs singing obscene songs. In the story which I analyse in the next section, it is the congregation itself which participates in a ‘silencing’.

 

http://cargocollective.com/santumofokeng

 

(All rights reserved. Text @ David Alvarez, Images @ Santu Mofokeng)

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By Dennis Cooper, originally published in ArtForum, February, 2002

Until recently, being an American admirer of the photographer Bill Henson was a lonely and rather painstaking chore. Apart from a small survey of his work at the Denver Art Museum in 1990 an a few photographs included in a 1984 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition of Australia art, he has been almost impossible to find in the Unite States, less unknown than antiknown–a sub-subcult figure even within circles devoted to contemporary photography. Given that his work has been a staple of the European art world since 1981 and that it occupied an entire pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Henson’s invisibility is bizarre enough. But when you consider that his photographs of the ’80s and ’90s predict and arguably outclass much of the personal, edgy portraiture currently in fashion and ubiquitous in galleries, you have to wonder (or at least I do) whether Henson’s effect on contemporary art isn’t much larger than his reputation in the States reflects.

My own discovery of the forty-six-year-old Australian photographer was a weird stroke of luck. While house-sitting for art-critic friend in the late ’80s, I fished a thin catalogue of Henson’s work from the shelves of art books and gave it a scan. At that time, auteurish, confrontational photographers with a taste for the fucked up and taboo were near the center of the critical dialogue, as well as the hippest things going. Not only did the dozen or so images in Henson’s catalogue hold their own against the work of better-know artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, and Bernard Faucon in terms of their refined transgressiveness; but just as interestingly, their plush, cinematographic look and romantic, almost melodramatic tone had a radically old-fashioned gorgeousness that raised fascinating questions about the strengths and limitations of his contemporaries’ lower-key, sketchier–or, in Mapplethorpe’s case, serenely rigid–styles.

 

 

Just prior to the appearance of that catalogue, a permanent realignment had taken place in Henson’s work In the ’70s and early ’80s he was known for his black-and-white, mock-candid, quasi daguerreotype images of self-absorbed individuals lost in crowds or striking solitary expressive poses in gloom-shrouded voids. In the mid-’80s he began to produce color photographs focused almost exclusively on introverted, compellingly beautiful teenage outsiders and the abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and deserted back roads that formed their turf. The catalogue featured a then-fresh series of diptychs and triptychs that juxtaposed portraits of naked, dirt-smudged teens looking almost like coal miners with images depicting the interiors of palatial homes filled with antiques and old master-ish paintings. The teens appeared to be addicts, prostitutes, and runaways snapped at moments of intense self-mourning. Unlike the subjects in Clark’s or Goldin’s similarly populated work, Henson’s figures were approached with such unreserved empathy and preserved with such an artfully impersonal, elegant visual luster that they became strangely interchangeable with their lavish architectural counterparts. The dichotomy between luxurious empty decors and undressed tormented characters was over the top, to be sure. Yet there was a purity of intention that turned these heavy-handed gestures into acts of moving, even desperate complicity, the way an opera’s rigorously expelled emotion can turn its overstated musical phrasings into profound instruments.

The experience of being haunted by reproductions of contemporary artworks, with no real hope of comparing them to the originals, or investigating the work’s context, or having even a small library of criticism against which to check one’s opinions, constitutes an odd and not unpowerful dilemma–one that living in the art-importing center of the world normally prevents. In 1995, there was a rare Henson sighting in the form of another catalogue for the photographer’s aforementioned Australian pavilion exhibit in Venice. By then, his work had phased into something more sexually explicit and emotionally diffuse. In place of the multipanel photographs from the ’80s there were autonomous, single-frame images containing pictures, violently cut-up and then collaged, of young, pale, faceless bodies fucking, sometimes in large groups, in dark, apparently cavernous locales. It was as if the orgy in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point had gone on past the point of exhaustion and into some posterotic realm where sex was the only cure for unquenchable loneliness. Again, as in Henson’s almost too blatant parallel between the superficial spoils of the privileged and the ruined internal lives of the young and disenfranchised, his aggressive cuts and reassemblages bordered dangerously on a dumbass, obvious way of signifying his subjects’ interpersonal agonies; yet some depth of understanding and level of finesse at which the reproductions could only hint left an almost addictive longing to search out these pictures and deconstruct their effect.

 

 

Despite the Biennale exposure, it would be another six years before I would see Henson’s work in America. And by the time he had his long-delayed solo gallery show in 1999 at Karyn Lovegrove in Los Angeles, the experiments with collage and multipaneling had given way to large framed photographs that engaged even more unobtrusively with the psyches of his young subjects. In this recent work, boys and girls stand, sit, and lounge around alone or in seemingly romantic couplings, their averted faces revealing emotions so deep, mixed-up, and masked in achy casualness that one searches the photographs’ compositions and patina for the aesthetic system that makes such intimacy possible. What becomes apparent when you see Henson’s work in person is the importance of the almost pitch-black darkness that, in whatever formal context he has devised over the years, always cloaks his forlorn, defiantly unneedy subjects, giving their run-down urban environments the look of remote desert outposts. It’s a black that seems both to be caked on the surface of the photographs, like tar or centuries of soot, and to recede infinitely into the background. It looks as solid as lead, a physical threat to the teens it blankets, and at the same time it’s as if the blackness were exuded by their bodies, forming a kind of paranormal manifestation of some feeling too intense and guarded to register in any other fashion. In its own peculiar way, Henson’s black is as unique an achievement as, say, Robert Ryman’s white. It gives the similar impression of an idea refined to a point of such complexity that it can only be communicated through a suggestion of its absence. Were it not for Henson’s primary, almost devotional need to elicit empathy for his troubled human subjects, there’s a feeling that nothing would prevent that black from completely absorbing his attention and extinguishing the work.

Bill Henson’s photography is far too reclusive within the world of its own concerns to fit comfortably into the kinds of categories that make a writer’s job easy. Characterizing it as a forebear of the new portraiture practiced by younger artists like Anna Gaskell, Tracey Moffatt, and Collier Schorr is helpful in distinguishing its more forceful, less attenuated pursuit of emotional truth, just as viewing it in light of Henson’s transgressive contemporaries’ work puts a useful emphasis on the unabashed classicism and painterliness of his style. While these associations flatter him and create a reasonable introduction to his work, the map they form gives only the vaguest directions into the matter of Henson’s achievement, which lies not so much in the twist he gives to the subject of disenfranchised youth but in the almost pretmodern beauty he conjures from such a familiar and clinically post-postmodern source.

 

ASX CHANNEL: BILL HENSON

 

 

(All rights reserved. Text @ Dennis Cooper, images @ Bill Henson)

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Igor, 1987

By Gary Indiana, originally published in ArtForum, January, 1993

The man’s name is Igor. I don’t know if this picture is posed, I don’t know if the photographer even knows Igor; by chance, I do. An architect from Trieste, he acted in movies a friend of mine made in the early ’70s. He’s carrying the goldfish to drop in an aquarium I’ve never noticed in his house. Maybe it’s for the restaurant he used to own on Greenwich Street: at home, Igor’s a cat person. Large, furry, slow-moving cats who drop unexpectedly from high bookcases. My director friend once told me, “I really don’t know why I like Igor. But he fascinates me. Maybe it’s the way he looks, his voice, I can’t help it.”

A few years ago, Evan Lurie and I were planning an opera about Wittgenstein. Igor told me he had some documents relating to Wittgenstein’s death in Trieste. I told him I was certain Wittgenstein had died in England. “No, no, that’s what everybody believes, but my friend’s written a whole play about Wittgenstein’s last days in Trieste.” “Igor, I’ve been researching this opera for two years, I know.” “Yes, but what you know is a myth.” His insistence wore away my certainty, and on the hottest day of the year Evan and I made our way to Igor’s office in the extreme west 20s. “Gary,” Igor said when we arrived, “Sit down for a moment: I have some bad news. But maybe it’s also good news. It seems the play isn’t about Wittgenstein. It’s about Winckelmann.” At this point I thought: “See? He’s crazy!” “How could you get them confused? Wittgenstein? Winckelmann?” “But maybe you should consider,” Igor said, in complete earnest, “writing an opera about Winckelmann instead.”

Perhaps the man in the photograph isn’t Igor but someone who looks like Igor–if that’s possible. An actor playing Igor who believes he is Igor, or someone who knows nothing of Igor and who’s headed uptown instead of downtown a little after rush hour, on his way to some bedroom community where keeping fish and watching television fill the hours and times. Miles from him, a couple in another picture, in their classic Lower East Side apartment (though the unbarred door and other details suggest maybe a less embattled enclave of sexy poverty, some place like Pittsburgh): she’s Hispanic, he’s white. He’s pulling his pants on. She’s got the dog in her lap. I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I now know that it’s possible for two people in an interracial relationship never to discuss race, even when the racial difference permeates everything, determines practically all the decisions the “raced” person makes, defines all the unarticulated boundaries that are drawn and redrawn between the two people, and decides, sometimes, when the relationship will end. As a friend of mine says when unspoken, repressed, yet obvious factors produce a fait accompli: Go know.

 

Mario, 1978

Alice, 1988

Gerald Hughes (aka Savage Fantasy); about 25 years old, Southern California; 50 dollars, 1990-92

 

In photos like this, where a man’s alone and peering into the abyss–in this case, into the refrigerator–I always see two people, the man pictured and the man taking the picture. (If it’s a Cindy Sherman, I see Cindy behind the camera as well as the image she’s worked up.) I imagine the tone of their complicity, hear the directions being given to the subject. I inhabit the mental process of an actor, who knows that he “himself” is not the point, but who is also inescapably aware that at least one person is watching him intently–at least one person is watching not only the image he’s presenting (which is the point) but him, watching everything that won’t be in the picture: the expressions that sleet across his face as he fixes his markers in memory, the way his shoulders relax between takes, accidents with his clothing and makeup.

The only defense available is to stylize even these gestures, expressions, accidents, until everything’s just for show. During the Reagan/Bush years, a lot of people I know (I don’t leave myself out of this) became keenly and painfully aware that other people were looking at them, watching their every move. We began layering ourselves with protective covering, contriving ourselves as figments of the public imagination, disembodying ourselves as “phone friends,” withdrawing to our various Fortresses of Solitude like Supermen contemplating the properties of kryptonite. To the point where even opening the refrigerator at 4 A.M. required a certain struggle of will, an effort of histrionics.

I’m not going to talk about the bedroom or the bamboo wall hangings or Cosby on the television: the fact that I assume, by one quick look, that it is Cosby (it isn’t) tells you more about me than I want you to know, but you know that already. I don’t have words for this unspeakable sorrow. I miss you. As Rene says in a poem, you know what rhymes with miss you.

This is a sleepwalker headed for the IRT: she’s either getting on it or going under it, go know.

 

Gary Indiana is a writer who lives in New York. He selected and responded to these photographs.

 

ASX CHANNEL: PHILIP-LORCA DICORCIA

 

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(All rights reserved. Text @ Gary Indiana, Images @ Philip-Lorca diCorcia)

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 ”I enjoy cooking, dogs, cats, kids, soccer, and living here.”

Interview by Robert Hirsch of Light Research

Bill Owens’s Suburbia (1972) is a quintessential photographic study of suburban California life and of its rituals. Owens followed with Our Kind of People (1975), which examined political, religious, scholastic, and sports groups and their practices. Then he published Working: I Do It for Money (1977) that looked at people who work from nine to five. In 1976, Owens received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, afterwards, two National Endowment for the Arts awards. Between 1978 to the 1982 he was a freelance photographer and did work for magazines including Life and Newsweek. In 1982 Owens started Buffalo Bill’s Brewery and published American Brewer Magazine (1984 – 2001). In 2004 Owens added to his visual anthropology cycle of the American middle class with the publication of Leisure: Americans at Play. Currently, Owens is making mini digital movies about America society. This piece is the result of conversations and emails between Owens and the author from December 2004 through March 2005.

Robert Hirsch: How did your personality allow you to do your suburban projects?

Bill Owens: My mother worked in the shipyards and my dad was a construction worker. Neither graduated from high school, but my dad always told me to learn from everybody. My mom had the gift of gab and made friends with everybody. They gave me a personality of a natural salesman, one who can project his personality. My photography is successful because I sell my ideas and myself to people. I speak well, I am direct, I carry myself professionally, and I don’t use the F word too often.

RH: How were you different from other kids?

BO: I was dyslexic and didn’t read. I skimmed comic books. I was at the bottom of the class. No one would have predicted I would succeed at anything, but I am proof one can grow and mature. We can expand our intellectual capacity and our intellectual compassion, which is why I have a problem with our president; I don’t see much human compassion in him.

 

 ”I enjoy giving a Tupperware party in my home. It gives me a chance to talk to my friends. But really, Tupperwear is a homemaker’s dream, you save time and money because your food keeps longer.”

RH: How did you overcome your dyslexia and learn to read?

BO: I took a class from John Gardner and he made me realize I was a good storyteller, but I flunked out of college and hitchhiked around the world. I came back a changed individual and started taking remedial courses. Now I brag I have Attention Deficit Disorder. I take credit for everything. Why not? It doesn’t mean a damn thing in life. All it does is brand you as being different. And sometimes you can wear that badge of difference proudly and say screw you.

RH: Why did you join the Peace Corps?

BO: I was raised in the Quaker church. We were socially concerned and believed in tithing to help the less fortunate because that is what the Bible preaches. In college I took part in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and when I graduated I wanted to do something positive. I thought being a teacher in a foreign country would allow me to contribute something to the world at large and learn more about life.

RH: How did you decide to start making photographs?

BO: While I was serving in the Peace Corps in Jamaica during 1964 a photographer came through and changed my life. I watched him work and decided I would love to do that too. I bought $10 Leica with a pinhole in the shutter and put shoe polish in the pinhole so the photographs wouldn’t have a little white spot. I discovered I had a natural eye. I switched to a Nikon SLR so I could see the exact image I was getting and before I left the Peace Corps I had my first photography exhibit.

RH: How did you encounter John Collier [author of Visual Anthropology: Photography As a Research Method (1967)]?

BO: I went back to school at San Francisco State and took a visual anthropology class with John Collier during 1967 -1968. He wanted us to do community studies. Every Thursday I would go to the little town of Brisbane, south of San Francisco, and photograph. I would shoot along Main Street and go to Cub Scout meetings. I made a shooting script, as I had been taught to do in his class, and started to lay down the stuff that eventually evolved into Suburbia.

 

 

RH: Does this approach still interest you?

BO: Yes, I am planning to digitally photograph Starbucks, which is part of the new suburbia. I don’t care to go back and photograph a Tupperware party again. The new demographics of our commercial society, the Dollar Store, Home Depot and Costco, are right in front of my nose right where I am living and that is what I want to photograph.

RH: What intrigues you about digital imaging?

BO: When photographers hold a 35mm camera up to their eye they are looking through a straw. The digital camera gives you a screen to watch. When making my new digital mini films, I hold the camera out in front of me and I have a 180-degree vision. I can anticipate what is going to happen in front of the camera and just let it happen. You can see the world and the camera simultaneously. You are no longer looking through that straw and can anticipate where to move the camera.

RH: What about Photoshop?

BO: Photoshop is not in my vocabulary. I don’t need it because I have content. You need Photoshop when you’ve screwed it up.

RH: Would you use digital video in your new project?

BO: You know where I am going! I am going to be a documentary filmmaker. I’m flipped out over dovetailing the small image into the moving image back to the still images. It is also about sound. We lay our film out using iMovie and then go online and get music. Now I am making a mini film, 64 Degrees of Separation, for the New Orleans Museum of Modern Art.

RH: How much directing did you do?

BO: I have never directed much. Take the Tupperware party picture, there was no directing at all. I try and find the “right” position and pray the action unfolds in front of me.

 

 

RH: Will people devote the time to look at these mini films?

BO: I’m not going to worry about it.

RH: Do you still want to make books?

BO: Yes. A book is a physical object that you hold in your hand, carry around, and put on a shelf. The books on my coffee table include: Keeping Food Fresh, Germs, Medieval Kitchen, Generation Kill, The Power of Gold, Professor and the Mad Man, 1000 Years on a Hot Stove.

RH: Why the food books?

BO: I am doing a book on food because the photographs in the food magazines are too perfect. I am going to be the anti-Christ of food photography and show people the way that it really is. The first cut is done. It’s digital and fun.

RH: What about photography books?

BO: The only photography book is Motel Fetish (2002) by Chas Ray Krider. My favorite photographer is Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who did Good Breeding (1999), because he does his research and makes straight photographs of people and their animals.

RH: What previous work influenced Suburbia?

BO: I poured over Russell Lee’s Pie Town and the FSA images because they understood form. Everything has been done, but you draw inspiration. John Collier told me to open up the knife and fork drawer in people’s kitchen. I kept looking, looking, looking. I opened over 100 knife and fork drawers until I found the one I was searching for. All the symbols, from the corkscrew to the knives and forks, were there and properly arranged plus there is a toaster, an electric can opener, and blender in the background, and the counter is clean. This image was the result of studying those who came before me.

RH: Why did you switch to color in Leisure?

BO: Color offers another level of content, more texture, and more going on in general.

RH: Why did it take 30 years to complete your suburban project?

BO: I was married, had kids and responsibilities and couldn’t make a living in photography.

RH: I thought you would have made it.

BO: I had a slice of the pie, but advertising agencies weren’t interested in Suburbia. I may have documented the essence of the American soul, but advertisers didn’t want those kinds of images. I do not consider advertising pictures to be “photography”. When you are paid to do it, it’s not you; it’s them making the picture. They control what you want. Recently I did a New York Times assignment and it scared the crap out of me. They send you a shooting script telling you what they want, you provide that image, and that’s the end of that. It is work for hire. You can’t turn around and declare it is now suddenly art. There is a real difference between work for hire and what you see and respond to when you drive down the road.

 

 ”Before the dissolution of our marriage my husband and I owned a bar. One day a toilet broke and we brought it home”

RH: Has anything changed for those wanting to make social statements and meet their family obligations?

BO: No. I’m a socially concerned photographer ala Robert Capa. I wanted to change the world and make it better. It comes from my fascination with culture. I wanted people to be aware of the crass consumerism of the American culture, but young people are not taught to have social concerns. The emphasis is on being financially successful. Plus there is too much to do, and people can’t sort it out. Look in the Sunday paper, and there are a zillion things to go do. Why be socially concerned when you can go out and have fun?

RH: Would you become a photographer today?

BO: I don’t know that I would. I have been in the brewing business and now I’m president of the American Distilling Institute.

RH: What happened to Buffalo Bill’s Brewery?

BO: It’s still going, but I sold it in 1998. Sixteen years was enough. I had to be open 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s way too draining.

RH: How do you respond to the critique that most of the people in Suburbia are white?

BO: That’s what the suburbs were and are. Near me now is Chinese suburbia, but you cannot tell the difference. They shop at the same stores. In my town we have a Buddhist temple next to a mosque and a half-mile down the road is a Catholic cemetery. Only in America can those things co-exist. That is the beauty of it.

RH: What about where you live now?

BO: Here in Hayward, CA we have about a 55 percent minority population consisting of Mexicans, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. It’s a cross-cultural experience. It’s good, and we should get on with that.

RH: Do you think the desires in suburban areas have changed over the last 30 years?

BO: No. We live in a society that is inundated by the materialism. People are still getting married, having children and need a washer and dyer and two cars in the garage.

RH: How long did it take you to photograph Suburbia?

BO: I was married, and I had a child. I selected one day a week to shoot for a year; 52 Saturdays and I got it done.

RH: What did you learn as you went through the photographic process?

BO: I would study the contact sheets and prints and then go back to the John Collier shooting script again and look for the holes, the places where I failed. For instance, I didn’t include a birthday party. I went to a few and they were totally chaotic. Finally the right moment unfolded and I was out of film. By the time I reloaded the camera the moment was past and I didn’t have time to go to another party. It was also critical to review the shooting script to see if I got the right overview. It takes months to find it. You have to keep making sure you have the long shot, the medium shot, and the close up.

 

 

RH: Did you think cinematically?

BO: You might say that, but I never studied movies. I got it from John Collier’s Visual Anthropology: Photography As a Research Method. Collier not only discussed land use, but also introduced me to the concept of ecology.

RH: How much of this thinking was influenced by Roy Stryker?

BO: It’s all commingled, but Stryker didn’t write the book. I was raised on a farm and we would get together with our neighbors at the community center for potluck dinners. That was the beginning of it for me, that sociology of a community.

RH: Do you see Starbucks functioning as our new community center?

BO: Absolutely. I belong to the local chamber of commerce. It takes time to know everybody in your community. When I go downtown and I go to Joe the barber, Joe knows me because of my brewery and my antique store. I am part of the fabric of this town. They know me.

RH: How did your business skills enable you to do Suburbia?

BO: I am interested in structure. I know how to organize, plan, and make things happen.

RH: As in Documentary Photographer: A Personal Point of View (1978)?

BO: Yes, It was self-published and includes my Guggenheim application, how to write a grant, and how to do a shooting script. I show how to use a strobe and what happens when you don’t. “Dark light” gives a different meaning to a photograph and dark photographs don’t fly for Suburbia. You want the strobe lights to make the image well lit so that it can easily be read. I also put out Publish Your Photo Book: A Guide to Self-Publishing (1979).

RH: What other books influenced your working style?

BO: The Life Library of Photography (1970). In one of the books the editors compared two photographs of a hardhat construction worker. One made with 35mm and a second with 2-1/4. The 35mm image appears menacing while the 2-1/4 looks “documentary.” There are more tones and texture, and it communicates a bigger meaning. It convinced me to jump to the 2-1/4 format. For me it was critical to have the subtlety of the flash fill and bare bulb flash with the Pentax 6 x 7 negative, a combination that brought out detail and depth. This made the pictures open and non-threatening. Had I shot Suburbia with 35mm it would have communicated a very different meaning.

RH: What is important for young people in the field to know today?

BO: I don’t know how you become a photographer. There are many fabulous young photographers producing at a high level of sophistication, but can they last 30 years? It’s not a normal life. You have to travel a lot and make work to please others. Nothing drives you crazier than working on an assignment and then having the client hate your images. I have a Christopher Morley adage on my wall: “There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.” I’ve lived it my way.

On “Suburbia”…

“All the photographs in this book were taken with large format hand-held cameras; a Pentax 6×7, 2 1/4 x 2 3/4, with three focal length lenses- 55mm, 105mm and 200mm, and a Brooks Veriwide 2 1/4 x 3 1/4 which was used for most of the indoor shots. It is a super wide-angle camera.

All indoor photos were taken with a fill-in flash. Sometimes I used a regular flash unit and bounced the light off the ceiling for soft-light effect. The strobe used was a Speed Graflex bare tube. The bare tube gives a very soft, natural light effect.

The film was Tri-X, 220, rated at ASA 800. It was developed in Edwal FG-7 for around ten minutes.”

- Bill Owens

 

Robert Hirsch is a photographer, writer, and the Director of Light Research. His books include Seizing the Light: A Social History of Photography, Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age, Photographic Possibilities: The Expressive Use of Equipment, Ideas, Materials, and Processes, and Exploring Color Photography: From Film to Pixels. Hirsch is an former Associate Editor for Digital Camera(UK) and Photovision Magazine, and a contributor to Afterimage, exposure, Buffalo Spree, Fotophile, FYI, History of Photography, Ilford Photo Instructor Newsletter, and The Photo Review.

 

http://www.billowens.com/

 

BOOKS: Bill Owens

* Suburbia (1973)
* Working (I do it for the money) (1976)
* Leisure
* Bill Owens (2008)

Around the WEB: Bill Owens

* Bill Owens
* Greg Kucera Gallery: Bill Owens
* Wikepedia: Bill Owens
* Art a GoGo Interview: Bill Owens
* Artnet: Bill Owens
* Life Magazine: Suburbia: A Portfolio by Bill Owens
* James Cohan Gallery: Bill Owens

ASX CHANNEL: Bill Owens and Robert Hirsch

For more of American Suburb X, become a fan on Facebook and follow ASX on Twitter.

(© Robert Hirsch, 2005. All rights reserved. All images © copyright the photographer and/or publisher)

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Cambodia Genocide: Memories From Tuol Sleng Prison

By Peter Maguire, Columbia University

Tuol Svay Pray High School sits on a dusty road on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In 1976, the Khmer Rouge renamed the high school S-21 and turned it into a torture, interrogation and execution center. Of the 14,000 people known to have entered, only seven survived. Not only did the Khmer Rouge carefully transcribe the prisoners’ interrogations; they also carefully photographed the vast majority of the inmates and created an astonishing photographic archive. Each of the almost 6,000 S-21 portraits that have been recovered tells a story shock, resignation, confusion, defiance and horror. Although the most gruesome images to come out of Cambodia were those of the mass graves, the most haunting were the portraits taken by the Khmer Rouge at S-21.

The four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge (1975-9) took more than a million lives-10 percent of the Cambodian population, dead from disease, starvation and murder. There was overwhelming evidence that the Khmer Rouge violated the Nuremberg Principles, the United Nations Charter, the laws of war, and possibly the UN Genocide Convention, yet no individuals have ever been tried in legitimate courts, much less punished. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, in 1979, the United States and China funneled aid to the deposed regime and undermined all efforts to try the Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Sonn Senn, Noun Chea, Ta Mok and others. Accountability was not part of the UN’s $2 billion reconstruction program for Cambodia, which ran from 1993 to 1994 and ended with disputed elections and no mention of war crimes. Today, Cambodian domestic politics threaten to defeat a proposed UN tribunal to try the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.

I became interested in the fate of the Khmer Rouge leaders after I defended my Ph.D. dissertation on the laws of war and the Nuremberg Trials in December 1993. I first traveled to Cambodia in early 1994 to interview S-21 survivors and Khmer Rouge prison staff workers. I wondered how Cambodians from both sides of the civil war were reckoning with their respective pasts.

 

 

 

Today, S-21 Prison is known as the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide. Inside the gates, it looks like any high school; five buildings face a grass courtyard with pull-up bars, green lawns and lawn-bowling pitches. The ground-floor classrooms in one building have been left to appear as they were in 1977. The spartan interrogation rooms are furnished with only a school desk-and-chair set that faces a steel bed frame with shackles at each end. On the far wall are the grisly photographs of bloated, decomposing bodies chained to bed frames with pools of wet blood underneath. These were the sights that greeted the two Vietnamese photojournalists who first discovered S-21 in January of 1979.

In another building the walls are papered with thousands of S-21 portraits. At first glance, the photograph of a shirtless young man appears typical of the prison photos. Closer inspection reveals that the number tag on his chest has been safety pinned to his pectoral muscle. With a bruised face and a pad-locked chain around his neck, a boy stands with his arms at his sides and looks straight into the camera. A mother with her baby in her arms stares into the camera with a look of indignant resignation. The photographs and confessions were collected in order to prove to the Khmer Rouge leaders that their orders had been carried out.

Many of the questions asked by S-21 interrogators revolved around what the historian David Chandler has described as “Stalinist” charges of sedition–insurrection against lawful authority. Khmer Rouge torture manuals discouraged torture that ended with death, or what they described as “a loss of mastery.” This was discussed at length in a torturer’s manual found at S-21:

Our experience in the past has been that our interrogators for the most part tended to fall on the torture side…. However, we must nevertheless strive to do politics to get them always and absolutely to confess to us. Only once we have pressured them politically, only when we have put them in a corner politically and have gotten them to confess will torture become productive.

The head of S-21 Prison was Kang Kech Ieu, better known as Brother Duch. The former schoolteacher ran a tight ship where both guards and inmates feared for their lives. In a memo from a meeting, Duch told an interrogator, “Remind him about the welfare of his wife and children; does he know that his wife and children have been detained; now that he is here does he know what has become of his wife?” The guards, interrogators and other prison staff at S-21 were between 15 and 19 years of age and were from peasant backgrounds. These self-righteous teens served as the praetorian guards of the Khmer Rouge revolution. One of the most important members of the S-21 staff was a Chinese-trained young photographer named Nhem En, who served as a key link in the prison’s documentation system. He did not defect from the Khmer Rouge until 1997 and I was able to interview him twice in 1998 and twice more in March 2000. A Khmer Rouge hard-liner for more than 26 years, even today Nhem En clings to the belief that without the Khmer Rouge Cambodia would have become a Vietnamese colony: “1979 to 1990, the Khmer Rouge were afraid of Vietnamese colonialism. This is why they fought back.”

 

 

Today, En lives in northwest Cambodia with his family and hopes to one day become a provincial governor. He was born in 1961, and joined the Khmer Rouge, then known as the National Front, in 1971. He was part of the Artistic Childrens’ Liberation Troupe, which danced and sang for visiting delegations of leaders. At the same time, En served as a rearguard soldier for the National Front. His youth group was taught how to use automatic weapons, and at the age of 12 En was issued his first gun. By 1973, he carried weapons and food to frontline soldiers fighting pitched battles against the army of Lon Nol. The National Front was renamed the Khmer Rouge by King Norodom Sihanouk, and by 1975 they controlled much of the country. Now a battle-proven soldier, En was promoted to unit leader and on April 17, 1975, he and his men heard over the radio that Phnom Penh had fallen. As Nhem En and the other Khmer Rouge soldiers approached the capital, they saw the city’s residents crowding along Route 5. “They looked different from us,” he recalled. “We always wore black uniforms, and they wore many different colors.”

After Nhem En arrived in Phnom Penh, he was sent to study political science and military tactics at a technical school. En was again promoted to an elite youth unit and sent to China for training in late 1976, at the age of 15. After the group arrived in Peking, they were divided, some sent to train in military and naval affairs, others in industry or agriculture. Nhem En was selected to study photography. When he arrived back in Phnom Penh, En was assigned to Unit 870 at the Ministry of National Defense under Pol Pot. At the age of 16 he was sent to photograph the incoming prisoners at S-21 Prison.

Even though En had learned only the basics of photography, he was given a studio and several assistants at S-21. Nhem received his daily orders directly from Khmer Rouge interior minister Son Sen and prison commandant Brother Duch: “Every time I met with them they both told me to be very careful when taking photographs, not to ruin or lose them, and to keep them in order. I was also told to keep the darkroom clean and proper…. They told us that we were clean-minded, and we were the representatives of the Angkar.” Nhem said that he was told by Son Sen that the purpose of the photographs was “for conducting investigations on issues about the CIA spies, KGB, Vietnamese.”

En’s most difficult day came in 1977, when his cousin was arrested and brought to S-21: “We just looked at each other but we were afraid to talk to each other. During those three years that day was the worst, but it was not the only bad day, there were many other days I felt bad. All of my cousin’s family members were also killed. My heart burned until the day I left the town Anlong Veng.” I asked if he was afraid that these photos would later be used as evidence against the Khmer Rouge. Nhem En fell back on a very common justification: “I never had a thought what would happen to the photographs. I made them because I was ordered to. I never thought anything would happen to them.” According to En, the political organization of the Khmer Rouge was very simple. “In the leadership of the Khmer Rouge, there are Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Pol Pot and Noun Chea. They all know everything. If there was no order from the top leaders, no one dared to kill. We could only kill ordinary people by ourselves, but for high-ranking people from the district level or Americans, or diplomats brought back from other countries–if they did not order us to kill them, they would not die. It was them who ordered me to kill those people.”

 

 

 

 

I wondered whether En, after seeing so much cruelty at S-21, sensed that something was very wrong. Or did he believe that S-21 prisoners were truly guilty and deserved punishment? “I saw the suffering of prisoners who were arrested and tortured with electricity. This is beyond what I thought of. If they tied me and whipped me to get me to confess that I was a thief, I would say that I am a thief because I could not bear such torturing.” I pressed En for his opinion of the prisoners’ innocence or guilt, “As far as I know, out of 1,000 people there were two or three of them [who were guilty]. I say this because some from my village, who arrived here with me, were arrested and charged with being the enemy. As they could not endure the torture, they confessed that they were enemies.”

What was the most difficult part of taking pictures of people who would be killed? “It was difficult to take pictures of the newcomers who were blindfolded and tied up when they were leaving the truck. Sometimes they arrived in chains. Sometimes we got reprimanded; for example, if we took a picture of A and the photo was not good and A was already killed, then we were charged as the enemy. In here, if we did not carefully do our jobs we could not escape from being jailed or stopped from working.” I asked, “Was it important to have a stone face–no emotion, no feeling?” En replied, “If the photos of the important people, such as the KGB, were not taken well, then the photographer would be in difficulty. They were looking for CIA, KGB and the invaders.”

Did any of the prisoners ever resist or fight back? Did anybody ever escape from S-21? “Rarely. Fear. People all across the country had no rights or freedom. Some prisoners attempted to run away but could not. In a month, on the 10th, 20th and 30th, the prisoners were allowed to walk around in the room,” En said. I asked him if he considered his actions bad or wrong in retrospect. “As far as I know, it was the mistake of our leaders such as Ieng Sary, Pol Pot and Son Sen who ordered such crimes. Without them, such things did not happen.” When I inquired further about his personal code of morality, I got a rather rote Khmer Rouge reply: “If we did not follow the 12 points of Khmer Rouge morality, we would be in danger. The clean revolutionary people must carry out the 12 points of morality. If anyone breaks it, he is removed to work in a worse position, like raising pigs.”

I tried to get En to reflect more broadly on the work he had done for the Khmer Rouge. “If I look at the years 1977 and 1978, the situation now is quite different,” En said. “It was like being a frog in a well that can only see the sky.” En continued to deflect the blame onto his superiors. “Most of the Khmer Rouge leaders are educated people,” he said. “They learned in France, but could not lead the country at all. Contrary to Hun Sen, who knows nothing but how to lead the country well, the Khmer Rouge leaders who were well educated led the country crazily. Hun Sen is not well educated, but he can lead the country.” If En thought that his former leaders were so bad, did he support the UN’s plan for an international trial for the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders? “As far as I know, the 1978-1995 Khmer Rouge leaders must be tried. The Khmer Rouge leadership has made me suffer. Now the Khmer Rouge leadership does not meet difficulty because they have money. I do not like their leadership. In the end, we were all injured. Look! [He points to the scars from bullet wounds in his thigh.] I got injured in my thigh. If the Khmer Rouge leaders are tried by the UN, I would be pleased to be a witness, because I really know their activities.”

“What would you testify to?”

“The evidence I will get from Tuol Sleng.”

“How do you respond to those who say that the branch of the tree should also be punished?”

“If they are tried by the UN, I think that the people below are like rubbish.”

I asked En how he felt about the fact that his Tuol Sleng photographs had drawn international attention. “I feel both pride and regret, because all of the photographs were sad photographs and were from a painful experience. This is why I didn’t want to change my name,” he said. “My name is still the same. It’s easy for those who want to find me to talk about the case of Pol Pot. Right now, if any government leaders could help me I may want to join promoting democracy. From now on I won’t change my name, even though people suggested I should. I don’t want to change my name because I want to show the world about the tricks of the Khmer Rouge leaders!”

After a year of negotiations with the United Nations, the Cambodian Parliament will decide whether or not the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Ta Mok, Noun Chea and Brother Duch will be tried before a UN-sanctioned, mixed international war-crimes tribunal. The recent acquittal of the Khmer Rouge commander Chhouk Rin by a Cambodian judge, invoking a controversial Khmer Rouge amnesty law and the recent statements of members of the Cambodian Parliament, make it very unlikely that the parliament will approve the UN’s trial plan. The uncertain fate of the UN-approved Khmer Rouge war-crimes tribunal raises a troubling question: Was amnesty for Khmer Rouge war crimes the price for peace in Cambodia?

 

www.tuolsleng.com

 

Peter Maguire, a Columbia University Ph.D. who has taught the law and theory of war at Columbia University and has conducted numerous interviews with the staff and survivors of the notorious Cambodian prison Tuol Sleng, is completing a book on Tuol Sleng for Columbia University Press.

 

(ASX Editors Note: This type of human behavior cannot be forgotten and as it occurs, we in the surrounding world, as fellow humans, have a human and moral responsibility to stop it together – by any and all means necessary.)

 

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A Notebook of Journal Entries by William Gedney

…

“Exhaustion is apparent on every hand – exhaustion of soil, exhaustion of men, exhaustion of hopes. Weariness and lethargy have settled closer. Everywhere the nation, engulfed in its money-making and international politics, has paid no noticeable heed to its darkest area.”

Harry M. Caudill from Night Comes to the Cumberlands

These photographs were taken in Eastern Kentucky during the summer of 1964. For over a month I lived with two families in the area. The fathers of both families were unemployed coal miners (one with twelve children), the region is rugged and isolated, the people are trapped in a circle of poverty, bad schools, corrupt politics and unskilled labor, etc.

I do not consider myself a “social-problem” photographer, I am concerned first with making a good photograph – an uncropped blending of form, value and content. I prefer the ordinary action, the intimate gesture, an image whose form is an instinctive reaction to the material. In these photographs I hope that something of this region and its people is conveyed to you. Reality is elusive and this is only my view.

William Gale Gedney

…

“There are two ways of looking at a thing. Either you feel that a thing must be perfect before you present it to the public, or you are willing to let it go out even knowing that it is not perfect, because you are striving for something even beyond what you have achieved, but in struggling too hard for perfection you know that you may lose the very glimmer of life, the very spirit of the thing that you also know exists at a particular point in what you have done; and that to interfere with it would be to destroy that very living quality.

I am myself always in favor of practicing in public. There are, of course, those people who say, ‘But the public is not interested in watching people practice. It wants the finished thing or nothing.’ My answer is that if one does not practice in public in reality, then in nine cases out of ten the world will never see the finished product of one’s work. Some people go on the assumption that if a thing is not a hundred percent perfect it should not be given to the world, but I have seen too many things that were a hundred percent perfect that were spiritually dead, and then things that have life and vitality, which I prefer by far to the other so-called perfect thing.

It is one thing to think about a piece of work as a scientific or objective entity that will stand up a hundred years hence, and another to think of the living quality of the person doing the thing and of his development. Is the thing felt – does it come out of an inner need – an inner must? Is one ready to die for it? That is the only test…”

Alfred Stieglitz quoted by Dorothy Norman from American and Alfred Stieglitz, page 136-137.

 

 Willie Cornett, others without shirts smoking and leaning on truck, Kentucky, 1964 by William Gedney

…

Each man must at a time examine himself clearly without pretense. We spend our lives in forgetting ourselves, lost in meaningless work for money, meaningless entertainment, meaningless relationships and meaningless talk to disguise it all. Why am I not about to focus myself? I have the talent, I love to create, yet why do I waste most of my time, my days, now years in meaningless? Why am I so restless and unwilling to discipline myself. I let myself slide to the quickest way to forget, to pass a moment in the quickest pleasure, sex. I do not drink or smoke. So I use sexual pleasure and pursuit (3/4 of the game) to fill my days till it becomes an obsession, till I run to the window to peek out the blinds to wait for some attractive person to walk by – to watch, to desire and not to have.

“What a waste of spirit is lust in action.”

I am going to leave my job the end of January – beginning of February. I have money saved for six months. Am I to let this time drift by in meaningless days, in sleeping late, in boredom, and pursuit of pleasure, in waste to have nothing to show for it neither an expanded spirit or mind? But rather waste destruction of spirit and body. I have done this before many times in the last 6 years – given myself chances to do what I want – and I have always failed, wasted my time.

True I learned much from sexual adventures (so numerous that I lost count, if I was ever keeping count, years ago) but you reach a point where you can learn no more from lustful action – where it becomes repetitive habit. Why this distaste for work? It goes back far. Why this rebellion against discipline, now when it is not imposed from the outside but from within, when I know it is for my very existence.

I fall to easily to pleasure. I put up no resistance – can man change by himself, or is it thrust on him? Is the pattern set? New York City is a constant seduction. A constant bombardment of distraction. It is hard to control oneself here, yet the will of discipline comes from within, so it does not matter where you are? Evil breeds evil. Evil entices you to more evil. It becomes easier each time. It is an ever quickening progression to destruction.

I have never been able to take advantage of the spare moment. (I need a whole day to make photographic prints I tell myself, that four hours is not enough, so I waste the four hours at my disposal and do nothing). I don’t seem able to discipline these hours. I will fly at the slightest desire to a movie, to buy a book or record only to satisfy the momentary desire and thereby kill an evening. Now again I have the money saved for time to work. I have the talent, will I waste again?

…

“What matters most of all, is to penetrate into the pulsing of life of the people themselves, to become imbued with their way of living, and to see their faces when they sing at their weddings, harvests and funerals, and from all these associations to distill and preserve something more significant than a song on record, something beyond music and words, an abstract essence that will remain a living force within you.”

Bartok quoted by Agatha Fassett in “Naked Face of Genius”, pg. 190

…

 

Still photography and poetry are very close. To capture in a single frame visual forms organized to the point where neither more or less are needed. The single moment when form and content are one. Poetry does the same with words with the same strictness and economy. The exact arrangement of words to produce the effect with no more words than are needed. Art is the seeming perfect blending of many elements to produce a whole.

…

“I must say my feeling is – always has been very strong that the key to things must not be as we imagine it, but that the world must be ruled by strange systems of which we have not the slightest inkling. This is why I rush toward strange things . I am quite convinced that truth is strange; it is at the far end of strangeness that once has a chance to find the key to things.”

Jean Derbuffet – Lanscaped Tables, page 63

…

“The great lesson of modern Western art and thought: that one discovers in the object of one’s creative and reflective attention only what one has found or constructed in one’s self.”

From a review by Paul Mirs in the New York Times book review, page 1, December 10, 1967

…

Thur. April 11, 1972

Last night at cooper Union a seminar was held for Diane Arbus. Marvin Israel showed 120 to 140 slides of her work and talked about Diane. She has been dead not a year. So this was the first public thing about her. Her work is always a revelation, of course your sitting in a darkened room, your looking at slides, an ideal situation, it’s not prints with a lot of things to distract you. And someone is talking about them and then there is the emotional thing involved of her having killed her self. But I was wonderfully impressed by her work.

It is strange, last week Walker Evans was at Pratt, and this week Diane Arbus, it seems sometimes there’s too much to think about. I think she progressed marvelously there were of course many pictures I had not seen into 1971. And she really grew as an artist. I remember a kid at Pratt brought in a 1962 copy of Infinity with some 35mm pictures of hers of some of the odd people she photographed and they were good but they were not right yet. There is something about using the larger format camera, this ability of photography to render detail sharply and clearly: it seems to me more and more the 35mm camera give too romantic an image, its soft by its very nature because of the small negative, that it tends to romanticize things a great deal. It lacks the clarity I would like in photography.

Arbus had a background in fashion photography, she developed slowly but very surely, with a very clear instinct she developed because of her interest in her subject matter. All of this tied together as a photographer and his subject matter are intimately tied together. She was used to using the 2 1/4 in fashion and probably larger format too, at what point she switched to 2 1/4 I don’t know but I think it was inevitable.

Her photography is sort of a confrontation thing, not a harsh confrontation always, she deals with people directly. She didn’t like Cartier-Bresson and she felt in a sense that his traveling around the world and taking pictures was phony. At least that’s what she told me once. She felt that her presence must be recognized. That the photograph was a contract between her and the person being photographed. It was a joint venture. So that they must be aware that she is photographing and participate in being photographed.

She had a fondness for the odd people of society, the grotesque, the freaks they’re sometimes called, she photographed midgets and transvestites and giants and every one. She called these her people. She had an affinity for these people why I don’t know. And she loved the adventure of meeting all these strange people. It is told how she would spot someone on the street and run after them and engage them in conversation. She was extremely charming and I think she could charm anyone out of anything. And the fact she was a woman worked perfectly for her, she thought that being a woman was an advantage. There are many thins a woman can go that a man cant.

…

 

Big Rock Kentucky, June 1977

Dear Vivian and Willie Cornett,

Another year has gone by and I meant to write my letter last year. I hope nothing is wrong and you are O.K. I know you have not hear from me in years and maybe I am a stranger to you now. I hope you still think of me as a friend and enclosed is a money order for $35.00.

I made myself a promise that if I ever sold any of the pictures I took of your family I would split any money with you. I sold my first picture from those I took in 1964. It is of three of the girls in the kitchen. I think I sent you a copy of it. I am enclosing a xerox copy of the page. It is for a book on photographing children.

 

 

ASX CHANNEL: WILLIAM GEDNEY

 

 

Courtesy of William Gedney Photographs and Writings
Duke University David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney/

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Mrs. K and Daughter, Jones Beach, 1970

By Tim Murphy, Newsday Long Island, NY, 2010

Why did you start photograph­ing at Jones Beach?

JS: There were a lot of teenagers there in the ’70s. So having taught junior high and high school and photographed teens, the natural thing was to photograph teenagers at the beach. They’re the easiest subjects – they’re very open to people and to the camera, as opposed to older people, who would be more suspicious.

What drew you to teenagers?

JS: I was teaching high school and there was a real gap between myself and the teenagers. It occurred to me that if I made things more fun in art class, things would loosen up, so I brought my camera and start­ ed photographing them in class. Things really changed. When you photograph some­ one, you’re saying, “I’m photo­graphing because I like you.”

What was it about the beach you wanted to capture?

JS: The stories that come through in the people, in their images and relationships. They could range from very funny, humor­ ous things to very introspective things, so I looked at the whole emotional landscape. At the beach, people are much more open and vulnerable than anywhere else.

Why?

JS: When you go to the beach, all of your stresses and difficulties start to lift. You’re going to have a wonder­ ful time and you’re more open to the things you see and the different kinds of people. Contrast that with taking a camera into Manhattan, where people are so tight and always on a mission.

 

Pricilla, Jones Beach, 1969

What would you look for, and how would you approach peo­ple?

JS: It was intuitive. I wanted to be inclusive, not exclusive. So if somebody had an outrageous look which caught my eye, I’d have to get a photo of them. If they were very introspective, that would be a more difficult thing to try and photograph.

Would you wear a bathing suit?

JS: Oh, yeah. I carried my cameras on an army belt with pouches so my shoulders wouldn’t get tired after five, six hours.

Once you started shooting, would people get into it?

JS: Yeah, that was always a lot of fun because now they were interacting and working with me. I’d let them do whatever they wanted to do and be who they want to be. No judgment.

Who’s the star of the book?

JS: That’s hard to say. I guess the stars would be the four girls on one lifeguard chair and the lone guy on the other. The girls weren’t aware of me at first – then they became embarrassed and broke up laughing. The guy just sat there.

Were you motivated by a love of female beauty?

JS: Absolutely. Certainly if you look at photos of my teenagers, beauty was a very important thing, not only for the obvious reason, but I found that the girls were so open in express­ing themselves to the camera.

Did adults ever question that the photos were so sexy?

JS: Nobody ever said much about that, maybe because it was just there. I think it’s sexy in a good sense. I’m just showing people as they actually appear. If it’s there, it’s because that’s exactly who they are.

Lonely Girl, Jones Beach, 1972

How has the beach changed over all these years?

JS: It has become more and more inclusive of all kinds of races and nations and people. It used to be the middle-class white beach. When I ask the life­ guards, they say, “The beach is now like the UN.”

Has the tone of the beach changed because of that?

JS: The one thing that’s changed is there’s more suspicion. People are suspicious of somebody with a camera. Though once I show them the kind of work I do, they understand.

When’s the last time you went to Jones?

JS: Just a couple of weeks ago. But I’ll be going when the weather’s nice-with a camera.

 

ASX CHANNEL: JOSEPH SZABO

 

(All rights reserved. Text @ Tim Murphy, images @ Joseph Szabo)

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