E-Lava

Not doing my morning post(s) seems to make me very unhappy — positively explosive — so here I am, as if nothing is wrong (hoping the WordPress page will load by the time I’ve finished typing this in WordPad).

At 8:32 A.M. on May18, the bulging north face of Mount St. Helens finally reached the point of instability, and the result was a landslide. This was the trigger for everything that followed — a total release of energy roughly equivalent to the detonation of one Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb every second over the ensuing nine hours.

It so happened that two geologists, Keith and Dorothy Stiffel, were at that very moment watching the mountain from a light plane directly above the summit. Dorothy had a fear of flying, and this was her first flight in a small plane. She was just growing comfortable with the experience when all hell broke loose below the plane. The Stoffels later described what they saw:

As we were looking directly down on the summit crater, everything north of a line drawn east-west across the northern side of the summit crater began to move as one gigantic mass. The nature of the movement was eerie, like nothing we had ever seen before. The entire mass began to ripple and churn up, without moving laterally. Then the entire north side of the summit began sliding to the north along a deep-seated plane. We were amazed and excited with the realization that we were watching this landslide of unbelievable proportions slide down the north side of the mountain towards Spirit Lake. We took pictures of this slide sequence occurring but before we could snap off more than a few pictures, a huge explosion blasted out of the detachment plane. We neither felt nor heard a thing even though we were just east of the summit at the time.

They did not have time to watch events develop further because the blast could rapidly threatened to envelop their plane. Although the pilot, twenty-three-year-old Bruce Judson, turned the plane and flew away at top speed, the blast still gained on them. Judson was able to accelerate by putting the aircraft into a steep dive; by heading southward through a gap in the blast cloud, they just escaped — “by microseconds,” as the scientists put it.

The avalanche was one of the largest in recorded history: about three-quarters of a cubic mile of rock and ice rushed down the slope at a speed of up to 150 miles per hour.

Before I source the above, I want to say that I really wish writers would quit casually using “Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb” as if it were simply a unit of measurement.

The source for the above quote and what follows is an essay, Blasts from the Past: Mount St. Helens and Her Sleeping Sisters, by Kerry Sieh and Simon LeVay in the photography book, Mount St. Helens: Photographs by Frank Gohlke  (2005); (on sale at Daedalus books, if you’re interested). The Sieh/LeVay piece is a really good outline of both the long and short term history of volcanoes.

How well did government respond?

The DES was notified of the eruption by Gerald Martin’s final message, as well as by messages from the Emergency Command Center in Vancouver during the next few minutes, but it took the agency nearly two hours to put out a statewide warning about the eruption. The reasons for the delay, and its consequences, were later analyzed in a study by Thomas Saarinene and James Sell. According to this study, the DES was a small, underfunded, ill-equipped agency of twenty-five employees run by a political appointee with no hazard-management experience. When the warning messages came in, the onsite staff insisted on waiting for “official” confirmation from the USGS and the Forest Service, but the phone lines soon became jammed and no such confirmation came through. Therefore they did not act on the radioed warnings, nor even on reports from the Seattle Weather Service that described flash floods and the trajectory of the eruption cloud. The eruption was on radio and television news an hour before the DES did anything; in fact, according to one DES official, the DES used the news reports as it major source of information. And when the DES eventually did try to activate the National Warning System, which was supposed to alert all the local emergency services automatically, the system did not work. The DES had to resort to sending teletype messages to the law enforcement agencies around the state. The National Warning System also failed to work after two subsequent eruptions (May 25 and June 12).

Some of the consequences of the delay were merely ludicrous: the police chief of one town that was being pelted with chunks of pumice called the county Department of Emergency Services, only to be firmly reassured that no eruption was in progress.

A miniature Katrina.

If you’re interested in volcanoes, there is a great movie, Supervolcano, about what would happen if/when Yellowstone next blows. (It will make Mount St. Helens look like a mosquito bite.)

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

FYI

I am having major problems getting online since Wednesday night. My normal service is down, and my telephone service is also almost down — has massive crackling and popping on the line — so I can’t even get a “normal” dial-up connection. I’m posting this with a blistering connection speed of 14.4 Kbps. It only took ten minutes for this Add New Post page to load (not including the two previous attempts that got disconnected just before the thing finished loading) …

Which is to say, if a post doesn’t appear tomorrow morning, you may amuse yourself by picturing me (accurately) sitting before my disconnected computer, cursing and/or sniffling pathetically.

Who knows when things will get fixed. This ain’t New York City.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Mindless

In his brilliant article “Art after Philosophy,” Joseph Kosuth scathingly denounced traditionalists. Explaining that the purest definition of conceptual art would be “that it is inquiry into the foundations of the concept ‘art,’ as it has come to mean,” he ridiculed critics who did not understand that all art is conceptual in character. “Formalist critics always bypass the conceptual element in works of art. Exactly why they don’t comment on the conceptual element in works of art is precisely because Formalist art is only art by virtue of its resemblance to earlier works of art. It’s mindless art.”

Today’s quotes are from the essay, Landscape as Concept, in the collection of essays, Landscape as Photograph, by Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock (1985):

Concepts can be boring, exciting, beautiful, ugly, fragmentary, unresolved, simple-minded, amateurish, complex, aggressive, passive, memorable, faddish. They are all, necessarily, products of the mind and are associated with underlying philosophies — ideologies, if you prefer — about the nature of the world, the nature of Nature, human nature, the nature of art, photography, communication, money-making, fame, success, the pleasures of creative activity, technology, politics — the list is endless.

“Thinking is radically metaphoric,” according to the great logician I. A. Richards. He believed that the mind takes hold of phenomenological reality by “the analogy, the parallel, the metaphoric grapple or ground or grasp or draw by which alone the mind takes hold. It takes no hold if there is nothing for it to haul from, for its thinking is the haul, the attraction of likes.” We haul in images with cultural nets; we unconsciously carry with us a stream of associations for such abstractions as liberty, progress, strength, time, omnipotence, sorrow, and we either construct visual symbols for these ideas or we find analogies in nature’s happenstance. The pathetic fallacy, the anthropomorphizing of natural forms — a proud stand of oaks or a sorrowing willow, a majestic mountain or a joyful brook — occurs as readily in visual images as in poetry, even if visual images are more ambiguous.

For photographers to deny that their work is conceptual would be the equivalent of admitting that their work is utterly mindless. For landscape photographers, particularly, to deny their conceptual operations would be to suggest that they simply wander the face of the earth without purpose or ultimate destination.

It seems to me that the essay is stating the obvious, but then there are an awful lot of people who deny that there is necessarily anything conceptual about photography.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Supremes

I think this post, Thoughts on this Term and the Next, on the SCOTUS blog by Tom Goldstein (June 29, 2009) is really interesting. I’ll only give two brief snips. First, one about when the court might shift back to the left:

… It isn’t until the election of 2016 at the earliest that there is a real prospect for a significant shift to the left in the Court’s ideology. Actuarially, that election is likely to decide which President appoints the successors to Justices Scalia and Kennedy (both on the right, and both 73 now) and Justice Breyer (on the left, and 70 now). Absent an unfortunate turn of health, between now and the summer of 2017 there is no realistic prospect that the Court will turn back to the left. Over the course of that eight years, it is possible to take enough measured steps to the right to walk a marathon. Again, no need to rush.

Scalia gone! Finally! I get all excited just thinking about it.

This paragraph, near the end of Goldstein’s post has me in a bind:

… Justice Thomas, in particular, remained willing to front new theories on critical questions, often writing only for himself, as in NAMUDNO. No other member of the Court is so independent in his thinking. The irony of course is that there remains a public perception, rooted in ignorance, that he is the handmaiden of other conservative Justices, particularly Justice Scalia. I disagree profoundly with Justice Thomas’s views on many questions, but if you believe that Supreme Court decisionmaking should be a contest of ideas rather than power, so that the measure of a Justice’s greatness is his contribution of new and thoughtful perspectives that enlarge the debate, then Justice Thomas is now our greatest Justice.

Thomas? Gag, choke, spit! … but you all should know how much I believe that “decisionmaking should be a contest of ideas rather than power.” Does that include the ideas of complete idiots?

Read the full piece if you have time. It’s long, but well-written and very thought-provoking. [ link] I also recommend daily reading of the SCOTUS blog when the court is in session.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Unadulterated

The following is taken from the autobiographical book, All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life, by Loren Eiseley (1975). (He’s talking about memories when he says “pictures”):

… Amongst this odd collection of pictures I must confess that much of historical importance has passed me by. I do not travel to political rallies and it has not been my fortune to be present at the scene of great events. On the whole, as I pause to examine this lost studio in my head, the animals outnumber by far the famous people I have met. If I sense a dearth of presidents, I have still encountered, though he looked right through me, one magnificent snow leopard, and I have also danced with an African crane. The crane, which is nearly as tall as a man, has an intricate mating dance. I was once strolling in the Philadelphia zoo when I came upon one of these birds solitary in a barely retaining enclosure.

In the animal world lines of definition are not as severely drawn as in the civilized one that we inhabit. This bird, acting under the impulse of spring, made some intricate little steps in my direction and extended its wings. Now I too believe in friendliness and spring festivities. I realized that the bird saw me as a vertical creature of the proper appearance to be a potential mate. To simplify things for her unlettered offspring, nature imparts, as in this case, a recognition of the vertical. After all, what is a face to a creature with a large bill? But then, unfortunately, in order to prevent, in her wisdom, unwise mixtures such as I and this crane potentially represented, nature insists upon an extremely complicated recognition dance. If one fails the steps and gestures, nothing is going to happen.

I fitted the vertical line pattern all right and I tried to be a good sport about the rest. I extended my arms, fluttered and flapped them. After looking carefully up and down the walk to verify that we were alone, I executed what I hoped was the proper enticing shuffle and jigged about in a circle. So did my partner. We did this a couple of times with mounting enthusiasm when I happened to see a park policeman sauntering in our direction. I dropped my arms and came to a direct, meditative halt.

The bird, too, paused uncertainly. There were now two attractive vertical figures, but they really did not seem to know the approved steps. Furthermore, not having read up on African cranes, I was a bit uncertain about the sex role I was playing. Male, female? I looked at the policeman. He looked at me. Suddenly I felt it best to leave the vicinity. Three is a crowd at moments like this. I walked away with careful unconcern in the direction of the small mammal house.

But why should my dance with a crane supersede in vividness years of graduate study? One can see a certain lack of disciplined control in a mind of this sort. Either that or the artist eye of my deprived mother lingered in me so that I was too much taken with color and form. I remember the vast wastes of the Mohave but, much more than that, I recall a baby ground squirrel that I came suddenly upon sunning himself in some fresh-turned earth beside the family burrow. His mother must have been careless, for here was her little waif blissfully lying on his back and patting his stomach. He looked up at me without a trace of fear as I stood over him. There the image stays, yet close to fifty years have passed: one ground squirrel patting his paunch.

I think, you know, it is the innocence. A violent dog-eat-dog world, a murderous world, but one in which the very young are truly innocent. I am always amazed at this aspect of creation, the small Eden that does not last, but recurs with the young of every generation. I can remember when I was just as innocent as that baby ground squirrel and expected good from everyone, as a puppy might.

You might say that innocence is a form of ignorance. Then again, you might say that one can grow ignorant of innocence.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

13

In the 1990s, it emerged that the brain generates random noise, and hence cannot be described by deterministic chaos. When neuroscientists incorporated this randomness into their models, they found that it created systems on the border between order and disorder — self-organised criticality.

More recently, experiments have confirmed that these models accurately describe what real brain tissue does. They build on the observation that when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells. This results in alternating periods of quiescence and activity – remarkably like the build-up and collapse of a sand pile.

That and what follows are from an article, Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain, by David Robson in New Scientist (June 29, 2009):

… In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality”. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These “sand avalanches” occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising. Earthquakes, avalanches and wildfires are also thought to behave like this, with periods of stability followed by catastrophic periods of instability that rearrange the system into a new, temporarily stable state.

… It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain’s ability to transmit information and solve problems. “Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances,” says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

[ ... ]

As it processes information, the brain often synchronises large groups of neurons to fire at the same frequency, a process called “phase-locking”. Like broadcasting different radio stations at different frequencies, this allows different “task forces” of neurons to communicate among themselves without interference from others.

The brain also constantly reorganises its task forces, so the stable periods of phase-locking are interspersed with unstable periods in which the neurons fire out of sync in a blizzard of activity. This, again, is reminiscent of a sand pile. Could it be another example of self-organised criticality in the brain?

In 2006, Meyer-Lindenberg and his team made the first stab at answering that question. They used brain scans to map the connections between regions of the human brain and discovered that they form a “small-world network” – exactly the right architecture to support self-organised criticality.

… For the brain, it’s the perfect compromise. One of the characteristics of small-world networks is that you can communicate to any other part of the network through just a few nodes – the “six degrees of separation” reputed to link any two people in the world. In the brain, the number is 13.

Meyer-Lindenberg created a computer simulation of a small-world network with 13 degrees of separation. Each node was represented by an electrical oscillator that approximated a neuron’s activity. The results confirmed that the brain has just the right architecture for its activity to sit on the tipping point between order and disorder, although the team didn’t measure neural activity itself (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 19518).

That clinching evidence arrived earlier this year, when Ed Bullmore of the University of Cambridge and his team used brain scanners to record neural activity in 19 human volunteers. They looked at the entire range of brainwave frequencies, from 0.05 hertz all the way up to 125 hertz, across 200 different regions of the brain.

The team found that the duration both of phase-locking and unstable resynchronisation periods followed a power-law distribution. Crucially, this was true at all frequencies, which means the phenomenon is scale invariant – the other key criterion for self-organised criticality.

What’s more, when the team tried to reproduce the activity they saw in the volunteers’ brains in computer models, they found that they could only do so if the models were in a state of self-organised criticality (PLoS Computational Biology, vol 5, p e1000314). “The models only showed similar patterns of synchronisation to the brain when they were in the critical state,” says Bullmore.

Read the full piece. It’s interesting and there are links to the supporting research. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

That Strange Manic Courtship

The following is Myriam Weisang Misrach’s description of her husband, photographer Richard Misrach, at work (taken from Aperture 146):

It’s been ten years now of this adventure, joining Richard in his travels to remarkable sites — the postapocalyptic landscape of Bravo 20; the carnage of the dead animal pits; the Edenic glory of the desert empty of humans save for the two of us. But what stands out most is the photographer’s dance, that strange manic courtship between man and fading light, head swiveling under the cloth, camera roving up-and-down and side-to-side like some blind beast sniffing the air, then head reemerging, eyes wild, hair in knots and peaks, film holder in, slide out, thumb bearing down, seconds counted out — one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three . . . — then the whole thing in reverse, then running back to the van for more film, shouting with joy as he speeds by, “Can you believe this light? Oh God, I’ve never seen anything like that,” the same exclamation each time, over the many years. The same glee.

That is a perfect description of photographing with a view camera. Especially the bit about the hair … (and the joy). If you’re curious about Misrach, here is a pretty good 1996 article about him from the Los Angeles Times. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Expectoration

 

Silverfish
by Robert Siegel

It lives in the damps of rejection,
  in the dark drain, feeding upon the effluvia
    of what we are, of what we’ve already been.

Everything comes down to this: we are its living –
  the fallen hair, the fingernail, the grease from a pore,
    used toothpaste, a detritus of whiskers and dead skin.

All this comes down and worries it into life,
  its body soft as lymph, a living expectoration,
    a glorified rheum. In the silent morning

when we least expect it, it is there
  on the gleaming white porcelain: the silver scales,
    the many feelers busy, busy, so fast, it is

unnerving, causing a certain panic in us,
  a galvanic revulsion (Will it reach us
    before we reach it?), its body

translucent, indefinable, an electric jelly
  moving with beautiful sweeps of the feet
    like a sinuous trireme, delicate and indecent,

sexual and cleopatric. It moves for a moment
  in the light, while its silver flashes and slides,
    and part of us notices an elusive beauty,

an ingenious grace in what has been cast off.
  As if tears and the invisibly falling dandruff,
    skin cells and eyelashes

returned with an alien and silken intelligence,
  as if chaos were always disintegrating into order,
    elastic and surprising,

as if every cell had a second chance
  to link and glitter and climb toward the light,
    feeling everything as if for the first time –

pausing stunned, stupefied with light.
  Before we, frightened by such possibilities,
    with a large wad of tissue come down on it,

and crush it until it is nothing
  but dampness and legs, an oily smear
    writing a broken Sanskrit on the paper,

a message we choose not to read
  before committing it to the water
    swirling blankly at our touch,

hoping that will take care of it,
  trying not to think of it — the dark
    from which it will rise again.

 

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Atget

It is worth trying to imagine what kind of life he led, this Paris pedestrian, laden with cumbersome equipment that made his work as arduous as that of a street-porter. Imagine what it meant to have to lug a bellows camera, with glass plates in plate-holder, a focusing cloth, a lens case, a wooden tripod: twenty kilograms at the very least, well over forty pounds. Flexible negatives had come onto the market before the turn of the century; far lighter than glass, they made exterior shots much easier, but Atget never used them, remaining faithful to his old equipment and his old habits. He went everywhere by bus and Metro; a notebook of his, now in The Museum of Modern Art in New York, gives clients’ names and addresses marked with the name of the nearest subway station. Atget’s technique is known to us. Virtually all his photographs are albumen prints. The paper was sold impregnated with whipped and salted egg white, and the photographer soaked it in a bath of silver nitrate. Sensitized and dried, the paper was laid in the printing frame with the glass negative and exposed to sunlight until an image appeared, then fixed and toned with a salt of gold. The resulting images were very “clean,” quite unlike the blur favored by the pictorialist photographers of the period. The prints were fairly stable in themselves, but the thinness of the paper and its tendency to curl induced Atget (along with many other photographers) to paste his photographs onto card: a disastrous practice, since the acid in the card discolored the prints, and the albumen, prevented from curling, developed a network of cracks. Subsequently, Atget used aristotypes, on citrate paper, which was sold ready-sensitized and was — in theory, at least — more stable. Unfortunately, however, these were poorly fixed and washed, and a number of images have been irreparably stained.

Atget used an 18 x 24 cm plate camera, with a short-focus lens, mostly with a rising front. [ ... ] He positioned his camera low, no doubt so that he could sit comfortably on his bag of plate-holders. Atget liked to work in one particular kind of light, that of the early morning. It may be that this originally came about because his institutional clients wanted a documentary record uncluttered by people. He operated in a world without vehicles or pedestrians, and this imparts a strange quality to his photographs, especially when seen in any quantity. There is a weirdness in his empty streets, his impenetrable facades, his gaping dormers, his windows opening onto shadowy, inscrutable interiors; and it is easy to understand why they fascinated De Chirico, another resident of the Rue Campagne-Première, whose dummy-like figures owe a lot to Atget.

All of today’s quotes are from the book, Atget Paris, by Laure Beaumont-Maillet (1992).

Portrait of Atget by Berenice Abbott, 1927

… Why did the Surrealists adopt Atget? Man Ray always claimed that he had discovered him; and Robert Desnos confirms this. However, try though they might to take him over, Atget entreated them to do nothing of the sort. When Man Ray offered to publish some of his works (notably the Corsets of 1912) in the June 1926 number of La Révolution surréaliste, Atget gave this surprising response: “Do not mention my name. The pictures I take are simply documents.”

[ ... ]

Atget worked without a break, day in, day out, patiently recording the face of a Paris that was constantly changing. He was not interested in Haussmann’s Paris — rich, grand, pretentious — but in a picturesque section of wall that was on the point of collapsing, or in any touching or unexpected detail. “Having seen the famous sights of a great city,” wrote Pierre Mac Orlan, “does not necessarily entitle one to hear its private song.” In Paris, perhaps it is Atget, more than anyone else, who allows us to hear that private song. The images that he gives us are precise and profoundly honest. Mute witnesses, his photographs look out at us with something like a reproach; for a topographical view in a photograph has a completely different flavor from the same view in a painting or a drawing: it has the bitterness that springs from direct proximity, and the emotion that is stirred by photography’s unequaled ability to resurrect. In a sense, Atget’s work has escaped from its creator; it is and will continue to be subject to an interpretative process that would have astonished him more than anybody. On every side, efforts are made to appropriate him, or at least to fashion his work into the expression of an ideology. Every commentator looks for the man behind the myth; but the man remains elusive, and we must reconcile ourselves to that. Even the self-evident can retain its mystery.

His technique belonged to the nineteenth century; his vision firmly belongs to the twentieth. His gaze was direct and frank; but he, more than anybody, was able to make the imaginary coexist with the real. And so he invented modern photography.

That last sentence is a bit of a stretch, though he was, indeed, influential.

For an interesting look at Atget’s work, side by side with photographs of the same locations taken by Christopher Rauschenberg, see Rephotographing Atget: photos and text by Christopher Rauschenberg. [Navigation buttons are at the bottom of the page; Atget's images are on the left, Rauschenberg's on the right.]

On this page, you can see a number of pictures of the inside of Atget’s ‘atelier.’ [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Propaganda, Prepropaganda, and the Merely Aesthetic

Photographs in and of themselves may prove to be like Scripture, which the Devil has been known to quote to his own advantage.

That and all that follows are from the essay, Landscape as Politics and Propaganda, in the collection of essays, Landscape as Photograph, by Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock (1985):

In a recent issue of Life magazine, and article on the increasing destruction of Montana’s Glacier National Park featured a large color photograph of a meadow, a river, and a distant gloriously snow-covered peak. The meadow was strewn with abandoned automobile carcasses, rusting vehicles in considerable numbers and of no explained origin. The otherwise impassioned text commented on this eyesore as being a “merely aesthetic” problem. The more conspicuous dangers were the strip-mining operations and energy resource explorations on the boundaries of the park, the atomic dump sites nearby, and the unwitting destruction of the delicate balance of nature by admiring hordes of tramping tourists. In other national parks and preserves similar destruction continues unabated. As the Life reporter noted, for more than a hundred days a year, smog drifting in from Los Angeles prevents tourists from seeing across to the opposite rim of the Grand Canyon. … The list of elements and activities destructive of nature — not to mention human health — is unbearably long. Yet it is typical that the commentary about the trashing of our wilderness areas by the automobile culture is relegated to the “merely aesthetic.” We suggest that this scanting of the aesthetic issue represents a much deeper aspect of American behavior toward nature and the fundamental ideologies which inform that behavior.

We might begin by blaming Abraham Maslow for listing the aesthetic need last in his famous hierarchy of human needs. Not only does he place it last, but he insists that only for some people is the desire for the beautiful a genuine need. Not everybody has this need. Maslow does not say who does, but the implication is that they are probably aristocrats or the “artistic” minority.

[ ... ]

For inner-city minorities, trapped by poverty, the segregation of spectacular scenery into national parks beloved by landscape photographers is a gesture unrelated to their desperation. To live in the South Bronx or in Harlem is to experience “nature” in the form of an occasional sumac tree — what New Yorkers called “railroad trees” because they grew along the tracks into the city — and mammoth legions of roaches, rats, pigeons, sparrows, and the tough grass which even cement pavements cannot entirely squelch.

How does seeing a stunning color photograph by, say, Eliot Porter, assist these slum dwellers in their daily lives? For some, if they can afford the Sierra Club calendars, pictures of golden aspens and snowy pines may refresh spirit, reminding them of the nature of which we are all a part. On the other hand, for others, such pictures only widen the gulf between their status as social outcasts and economic pariahs and that of the very rich, who can afford to travel to spas, national parks, and their own more private nature enclaves whenever they like. The national parks were conceived in the spirit of democratic sharing, rich and poor alike — that was a significant part of the ideology and political pragmatics of nineteenth-century congressional actions. And although photographs can distribute images of these wonderful places, they can never alleviate the bitterness of those who can hardly afford the busfare to Bear Mountain.

[ ... ]

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Nazi Germany was perfecting its own style of propaganda and Hitler was preaching conquest, genocide, and totalitarianism, there was violent dissent among photographers as to what their ethical and artistic stance should be. The situation can be summed up by a statement attributed to Henri Cartier-Bresson; indeed, it is much more than a statement, it is a shocked expostulation: “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!” Because he believed that humanity needs the purely aesthetic as much as anything material, Adams defended himself: “I still believe there is a real social significance in a rock — a more important significance therein than in a line of unemployed.” Unfortunately, Adams did not explain what that social significance might be, and he was accused of being politically and humanly insensitive.

The story is reminiscent of an exchange that took place between Berthold Brecht and André Gide. The latter, writing at the time of the appalling expansion of nazism, happened to speak about a tree he greatly admired. Brecht wrote, sorrowfully,

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

To talk about trees, to photograph trees, to think about nature, were all insupportable in the midst of barbarism.

… Like poetry, photography, with its compression and metaphor, can be considered a seductive anodyne, not a remedy; it could even be condemned as a hypnotic substitute for direct experience leading to action for socially beneficial causes.

When Roy Stryker was exhorting his Farm Security Administration photographers during the Second World War, he fully recognized that what was needed was a gigantic propaganda effort. For landscape, the Great Depression and its Dust Bowl documents were to be forgotten. “Emphasize the idea of abundance — the ‘horn of plenty’ — and pour maple syrup over it … I know your damned photographer’s soul writhes, but … Do you think I give a damn about a photographer’s soul with Hitler at our doorstep?” Thus, instead of Dorothea Lange’s tractored-out farm, Americans were treated to images of this land as a vast granary, with wheat and corn sheaves stacked in never-ending rows.

This last is from the beginning of the essay; it precedes all of the above quotes:

Modern propagandists — by whatever name and of whatever political persuasion — recognize that propaganda for a cause can succeed only if a number of conditions are present in the decision-making context. To begin with, there is more than one kind of propaganda: Jacques Ellul calls these prepropaganda and active propaganda, the former obviously being indispensable to the latter. Prepropaganda has the task of mobilizing our psychological responses, loosening the old reflexes, and instilling images and words in repetitive formulas. According to Ellul, prepropaganda, perhaps surprisingly, “does not have a precise ideological objective; it has nothing to do with an opinion, an idea, a doctrine. It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes.”

… Playing on the already present assumptions and unconscious motivations of individuals and groups is the art of the propagandist. In order to be successful as propaganda, photography has to create images that not only resonate with what people will accept, but also has to contribute to the creation of the fundamental myths by which we all live. If you are on the side of the angels, this might be the “myth” (or ideology) of democracy, liberty, productivity, authority, the dignity of labor, or the sanctity of life. But there are other myths, like racial superiority, religious “truth,” the beliefs that life is dog-eat-dog in the best tradition of social Darwinism or that people are no good and that women deserve to be raped, for those who feel too threatened to be civilized.

It would not be hard to make an argument that all photographs are, to some degree, prepropaganda. Those that are ”merely aesthetic” are those that have a greater — not lesser – degree of potency.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/