More birds that I can’t use in a composite — unless there’s some reason why they should be covered with snowflakes in my contrived scene. For that reason, I wasn’t going to take any pictures while it was still snowing (Saturday), but I think they missed me. That, and I was bored; there’s not much to do when the power is out and you don’t want to go outdoors.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

In considering her past and in trying to assess how it should be conveyed or understood, Daisy struggles with the question of whether the story of a life should be “a chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression.”

All of this is from an essay, Image — Memory — Text by Nancy M. Shawcross that is in the collection of essays, Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative eds. Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (2003)

In Shawcross’s essay the part that I am quoting first comes after the part that I am quoting second … because I like it that way.

… Memorializing a common life is the task the novelist Carol Shields pursues in The Stone Diaries. She chooses a metastructure that faithfully follows chronological time and organizes a unique existence into predictable, commonplace chapters: “Birth, 1905″; “Childhood, 1916″; “Marriage, 1927″; “Love, 1936″; “Motherhood, 1947″; “Work, 1955-1964″; “Sorrow, 1965″; “Ease, 1977″; Illness and Decline, 1985″; and “Death.” Her novel is a rumination on the ways in which human existence is remembered or even known. In the case of her mother, Mercy, who died in childbirth, Shields’s protagonist, Daisy, has only a few small pieces of information. From these she weaves a tale of her mother’s life, but it remains a fantasy or myth, for there were few if any witnesses to most of the defining moments of that life and few artifacts survive to carry a record of her thoughts and aspirations. No diary, for example, endures that keeps Mercy’s voice alive to anyone who cares to read it. With this realization in mind, Daisy examines her own life and what will remain to mark its actuality. She then proceeds to fabricate a diary from the vantage point of old age. And in the process she reconstructs her life not only from her own memory but also from the personal artifacts that have occured over the many decades. Ini addition to reproducing a family tree, a wedding announcement, letters from a lover, snippets of gossip, and the like, the text includes an eight-page section of photographs (bound approximately midway in the volume). The reader is exposed to most of the banalities of the afterlife of the common individual — bits and pieces that may include one-way correspondence (letters received but rarely copies of letters written), newspaper clippings, documents, mementos, photographs, and perhaps descendants. As she imagines her death, Daisy ends her diaries with a list of addresses (the places in which she has lived); her unspoken final words, “I am not at peace”; the closing benediction at her memorial service; and the conversation among unnamed funeral guests (probably her children) regarding the fact that in the end they forgot her name.

In considering her past and in trying to assess how it should be conveyed or understood, Daisy struggles with the question of whether the story of a life should be “a chronicle of fact or a skillfully wrought impression.”

(Please remember that Shields’s novel was a work of fiction.)

As already noted, this second quote from Shawcross’s essay precedes the above:

… The lifeblood of history is narrative — a connective discourse in which events, individuals, and things cohere and meaning is made possible, allowing entry “to a wider world of literary and cultural reference.”* Yet she [Carol Steedman] hesitates to release her working-class autobiography and her mother’s life to the project:

[T]o do this is to miss the irreducible nature of all our lost childhoods: what has been made out on the borderlands. I must make the final gesture of defiance, and refuse to let this be absorbed by the central story; must ask for a structure of political thought that will take all of this, all these secret and impossible stories, recognize what has been made out on the margins; and then, recognizing it, refuse to celebrate it; a politics that will, watching this past say “So what?”; and consign it to the dark.*

Like Barthes, Steedman fears the loss of the individual — particularly one whose life was lived in the margins of history — to the sweep of “the monolithic story of wage-labour and capitol.”* Both writers conjecture about a new approach to understanding human existence: one that partakes of “the impossible science of the unique being.”***

[Annette] Kuhn echoes Steedman’s reluctance and ultimate refusal to merge personal history into a comprehensive narrative — to subsume individual identity in a collective identity. Pivotal to her approach and methodology is the photograph, which serves as raw material for her exercise in “memory work [which] is a method and a practice of unearthing and making public untold stories, stories of ‘lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretive devices of the culture don’t quite work.’”**

====================================

* Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A story of Two Lives (1994)

** Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995)

*** Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1981)

-Julie Heyward

http://www.unrealnature.com/

I’ve been without (electric) power since about 6:00 AM yesterday. It’s been cold (22 F outside this morning; 46 F inside), dark, and very, very , very quiet. I was listening to the rustle of my nosehairs for most of the night — while cocooned in a mountain of comforters and wearing a ridiculous amount of clothing from head to toe.

The East coast of the US is being hammered by a “historic” snow storm. Read about it here and here. Where I live, we got more than two feet of snow, which is why it took so long to get the power back on. I’m told (via telephone) that the four lane highway nearest me is a parking lot with both big rigs (trucks) and cars strewn about.

Anyway, here are a few snaps, starting with Miss Liberty, taken on Friday when the storm was just getting started:

Next (below) is the snow that has slid off the roof and which I will have to shovel away before it starts to melt though that (side) door onto the wooden floors inside. (No, the door and walls aren’t pink; that’s just digital noise due to the uneven exposure and subsequent Photoshop torture to bring it up.).

This (below) is looking out of an upstairs window, yesterday:

Below is my car, which I cleaned off during a lull in the storm yesterday and took this picture.  Then it snowed another four inches.

Doesn’t matter. I won’t be going anywhere for quite a while.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… I’m like a monk in a whorehouse …

This is more from The Paris Review’s interview with poet Charles Simic that I quoted from a while ago. These excerpts are found only on the pdf of the full interview [ 89 KB]:

INTERVIEWER

How crucial to your sense of the poetry you wanted to write was your experience of reading Yugoslav poets such as Vasko Popa and Ivan Lalic?

SIMIC

It is all mixed up in my mind with the experience of translating them. Translation is the closest reading of a poem so it’s almost impossible not to be influenced. They were two very different poets, Popa coming from French surrealism and Serbian folklore, and Lalic with his roots in Hölderlin and Rilke, so I got myself an extended education on how to compose poems in such radically dissimilar ways. I did all kinds of poets and learned how poems are made and, most importantly, about language. It’s mind-boggling to discover that a word, a phrase, or an entire poem perfectly understandable in one language cannot be translated into another. Whatever the answer to this puzzle, it has something to do with the relationship of experience to language and the way each language encompasses a particular worldview. In fact, it’s not only a question for poetry to concern itself with, but for philosophy too, to ponder.

INTERVIEWER

Can you give an example of a word or a poem that can’t be translated?

SIMIC

Chieftan Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

The more a poem depends on language to make an effect, the harder it is to translate. I mean, there are lyric poems where there’s almost no content, where the gorgeousness of the vocabulary and the music are everything. As for individual words, I met a fellow once who insisted that the word for bread in any language cannot be translated. Sure, one can find an equivalent in a dictionary, but can that other bread really do justice to what one knows of bread?

[ ... ]

INTERVIEWER

What would you recommend a poet study?

SIMIC

There’s no preparation for poetry. Four years of grave digging with a nice volume of poetry or a book of philosophy in one’s pocket would serve as well as any university.

[ ... ]

INTERVIEWER

One of the most distinctive features of your poetry is the way it combines wildly unpredictable imagery with a narrative style that is terse, clipped, at times elliptical. How did that tension evolve?

SIMIC

William Carlos Williams made a big impression on me. I think my style was formed partly in reaction to my early Crane and Stevens imitations. I wanted something seemingly artless and pedestrian to surprise the reader by conveying so much more. In other words, I wanted a poem a dog can understand. Still, I love odd words, strange images, startling metaphors, and rich diction, so I’m like a monk in a whorehouse, gnawing on a chunk of dry bread while watching ladies drink champagne and parade in their lacy undergarments.

Simic does a wonderful interview. I wish I could say I like his poetry. I do enjoy this little bitty one:

Watermelons

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

 He (Simic) actually has a tie-in to photography. At one time, he worked for (then) editor of Aperture magazine, Michael Hoffman. At that time, the magazine was:

… staffed primarily by Michael and a young man with what was then an utterly useless university degree in linguistics, Charles Simic. He hadn’t been able to find a job anywhere else. Simic’s first volume of verse was published while he was working at Aperture … “I was paid a miserable salary and did everything — answered telephones, handled mail, swept floors, cleaned the bathroom, proofread, ran errands, picked up people at the airport or train or bus station …”  [from Aperture169 (Winter 2002)]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

One:

Two (below):

Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889

Three (below:

Mona Hatoum, Van Gogh’s Back, 1995

One = Two = Three, but One does not = Three.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… why shouldn’t we also presume that perception actually changes in concert with transformations in the discourse of vision?

This is from the last chapter (if you don’t count the Epitaph) of the book, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography by Geoffrey Batchen (1999)

… Postmodernists and formalists want to identify photography with a single generative source (either culture or nature, either context or essence, either the outside or the inside). The discourse of the proto-photographers [as many as twenty persons; between 1790 and 1839], by contrast, presents their invention as a differential economy or relations that completely confuses these categories. As a consequence, none of the elements in the pairs remains either autonomous or simply opposed to its other. Although metaphors of both culture and nature figure prominently in the thinking of the proto-photographers, neither rests as the “origin” of the photographic process. Each is instead deployed in a strangely disjunctive relationship to its other, such that photography (the very word repeats this dilemma) becomes the movement of something continually being divided against itself. Thus, according to its makers’ own descriptions, photography is a set of relations that carries within itself the trace of a perennial alterity.

Some might say that the equivocal wordings of the proto-photographers are simply a product of their ignorance or naïveté. These pioneers hesitated to describe what they did not understand or had not yet fully experienced. According to this argument, these hesitations resulted in an awkwardness of expression evidenced as much in the clumsiness of their language as in the “primitiveness” of their images. Photography’s inventors just did not know what they were talking about. Such criticisms fail to recognize what this book has tried to make clear: there is no more a primitive photography than there is a primitive language. The proto-photographers approached photography’s identity from within the traditions of natural philosophy, and as sophisticated philosophical thinkers and experienced artists proffered their various words and images. Anyone who considers Talbot a naïve writer or Bayard an unthoughtful picture maker has simply not looked at their work closely enough.

… Every foundational point of origin that photography’s historians posited — temporal, authorial, conceptual, textual, or pictorial — has depended on another absent but supposedly more originary moment.

… photography is consistently positioned by its commentators within some sort of play between activity and passivity, presence and absence, time and space, fixity and transience, observer and observed, real and representation, original and imitation, identity and difference — and the list could go on.

[ ... ]

Despite protestations to the contrary, postmodernists tend to maintain an entirely instrumental view of photography. For them, photography is a mere vehicle for the transfer of power from one place to another. Photography has no power of its own. It is instead temporarily vested with the power of the apparatuses that deploy it.

… Postmodern criticism would simply reverse a given economy of oppositions and thus move from one side of a duality to the other. It wants to say, not photography but photographies; not nature but culture; not autonomy but context; not the “thing-itself” but discourse; not sameness but difference; not essentialism but antiessentialism. Most importantly, postmodernism comes down on the side of photography and power, not photography as power. As a consequence, photography continues to be conceived as an inconsequential vehicle or passage for “real” powers that always originate elsewhere.

… Although postmodern criticism opposes itself to the essentialism of a transcendental nature, it nevertheless often finds itself conjuring precisely this (not culture but nature) whenever it seeks to name photography’s generative source. This repressed contradiction reveals the limitation of a critical approach that is content to reduce everything to representation but is not willing to engage the economy that makes representation and the real utterly complicit and mutually constitutive. The result is an unacknowledged but tenacious investment in a foundation that always precedes both representation and difference. The problem is exemplified in Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, a book that has been justly praised for bringing a Foucault-inspired postmodernism to the question of vision. In wanting to make clear that all historical selection serves the interests of the present, Crary claims that “it should not be necessary to point out there are no such things as continuities and discontinuities in history, only in historical explanation.” The boundary between history and fact, between discourse and “things,” is similarly figured on an earlier page. “If I have mentioned the idea of a history of vision, it is only a hypothetical possibility. Whether perception or vision actually change is irrelevant, for they have no autonomous history. What changes are the plural forces and rules composing the field in which perception occurs.” Why do postmodern critics always feel the need to make this sort of disclaimer? What are they so afraid of? If, as Foucault’s work suggests, sex and the discourse of sexuality produce each other, why shouldn’t we also presume that perception actually changes in concert with transformations in the discourse of vision?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The pedagogical questions crucial to Lacan’s own teaching will thus be: Where does it resist? Where does a text (or a signifier in a patient’s conduct) precisely make no sense, that is, resist interpretation? Where does what I see — and what I read — resist my understanding? Where is the ignorance — the resistance to knowledge — located? And what can I thus learn from the locus of that ignorance? How can I interpret out of the dynamic ignorance I analytically encounter, both in others and in myself? How can I turn ignorance into an instrument of teaching?

That is a quote from Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable by Shoshana Felman (1981) which is used, below a section header in an essay, Dykes in Context: Some Problems in Minority Representation by Jan Zita Grover (first published in The Contest of Meaning ed. Richard Bolton, 1989).

As indicated in Jan Zita Grover’s essay’s title, it has to do with the representation of lesbians in photography. The essay is very long, and is beautifully written. I found it to be quite illuminating — because, I’m sorry to say, I know much more about gay men than I do about gay women. So much to learn, so little time … The quotes given below have been chosen because I think that they have more general relevance — beyond issues of lesbian representation. This is simply because I felt they would be of interest to a photography-in-general audience — not because I found those more specific to her topic to be less interesting.

… what I am exploring here is the problematic interplay between culturally prevalent forms and what are intended as oppositional practices, between what is expected of us by our own and by dominant groups, between what we are willing to grant ourselves and others of our own/their expectations.

… any visual representation is initially addressed through a cultural medium possessing greater or lesser authority to a particular constituency, for whom it may possess a greater or lesser degree of authenticity. As it moves beyond this primary audience, however, it acquires other meanings, other statuses. This is a condition of circulation that no one can afford to ignore.

… as signs move away from their culturally specific ‘climate,’ they become constituted as signifiers pointing to new meanings. What may appear retrograde or progressive, unsophisticated or sophisticated, obscure or blatant depends primarily on the climate for or within which the sign is produced/circulated and the expectations set for it.

… Those of us who are interested in photographs nominated as ‘personal’ or ‘art’ images are accustomed to hearing them discussed formally, which is a heritage of photography’s arrival in the academy in the late 1960s, when the simplest way of paving over the painful differences among images and their readers — and to claim for them the seriousness of modern art — was to discuss them using agreeably vague and democratic terns like intensity, originality, genius, formal purity, line, movement.

My resistance has taken a classic form: it has taken me over a year to write this section of the article, and even as I write, even as you read it, the slide between an honorable (expected) intention and what I am in fact doing is evident: the prefatory material I consider critical to a discussion of the photographs has extended itself indefinitely [in the edition I am quoting from, this is the fifteenth page of the essay], pivoting endlessly around what may appear to you as a hole, a vacuum. I feel an anticipatory guilt toward the photographers who sent me their work, trusting that I would analyze it, only to find that I am doing something quite different; I feel a similar anxiety about my readers, who expect no less; and yet (Yes, but . . . ) I am convinced otherwise. There is a reason for resisting the expected here, something to be learned from it. Wrapping and rewrapping the photographs in these many layers of historical circumstance seems the only way I can shape what would otherwise be an unsatisfying and academic approach to them.

Analyzing the formal strategies deployed in these photographs would ‘explain’ only how a particular representation is constructed visually; and it is the representation as a sign, an argument in the world, that interests me. This emphasis points us away from that enclosure measured by what lies within each photograph’s frame, the province of most academic criticism of photographs; it points us instead to a field constituted very differently: the concrete historical sites in which the photographs are encountered by different people, sites where they establish their meanings. Thought about this way, both the presences and absences in these photographs become more lucid: we can read images as sites of consensus or resistance to cultural prescriptions/proscriptions, as locuses of contending discourses, such as those of academic art photography and dominant and subcultural politics, rather than as isolated acts of individual creativity.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

I’m so confused. I don’t have TV (broadcast or cable) and I think I’m just completely out of touch because this post over on Sociological Images, Burger King, Pornified, makes no sense to me. I’ve read it three times and I still don’t get it. Is Burger King selling personal hygiene products? If so, why? From the post in question:

… everyday you can go to the website and watch a girl in a bikini sing a song in the shower (don’t miss the burger boobs). You can also vote on the song and bikini for the next day, as well as enter into a contest for a date with the girl. If you don’t win the date, you may still be a lucky runner up and win Burger King “proper man toiletries”:

There must be a connection somewhere, somehow to burgers and fries …

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… the macho posturing, the heroicizing of self-expression is so extreme as to border on the parodic. Furthermore, there is manifest a stubborn, indeed a perverse denial of the material processes of photography, grotesquely dramatized and mystified into a Hemingwayesque litany of combat, struggle, fights, battles.

This is from an essay, The Armed Vision Disarmed — Radical Formalism from Weapon to Style by Abigail Solomon-Godeau (first published in Afterimage, Jan 1983).

I don’t entirely agree with what I’m quoting. However, there is a valuable, or at least usefully thought-provoking kernel of truth lurking somewhere in her criticisms.

… Aaron Siskind seems so perfectly to represent the cultural and photographic adjustment of the period that one is tempted to present him as the emblematic figure par excellence for art photography’s postwar retreat from engagement with either social or political reality. It is not only in the fact of Siskind’s abandonment of the social-documentary work of his Photo League days (exemplified by the Harlem Document project) and his shift to the production of the virtual abstractions from 1944 on that one sees the magnitude of the larger social transformation (Siskind after all, continued to teach documentary photography at the [Chicago] Institute [of Design] for years). Rather, the enormousness of the shift is signaled in Siskind’s zealous embrace and assimilation of Clement Greenberg’s doxology of modernism — the ne plus ultra of Anglo-American formalism — as the theory and ground of his work. ‘First and emphatically,’ wrote Siskind in his ‘Credo’ of 1956, ‘I accept the flat picture surface as the primary frame of reference of the picture.’ And two years later: ‘As the meaning has shifted — shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.’ This interiorized purified notion of art-making is, of course, closely linked to similar attitudes current among the New York School artists with whom Siskind was allied, both by friendship and through dealers (he exhibited from 1947 to 1956 at the Charles Egan Gallery). In the same way that action was redirected from the political field to the field of the canvas among abstract painters, Siskind’s arena became equally circumscribed. ‘The only other thing that I got which reassured me from the abstract expressionists,’ said Siskind in a 1973 interview, ‘is the absolute belief that this canvas is the complete total area of struggle, this is the arena, this is where the fight is taking place, the battle. Everybody believes that, but you have to really believe it and work that way. And that’s why I work on a flat plane, because then you don’t get references immediately to nature — the outside world — it’s like drawing.’

Aaron Siskind, Chicago 206, 1953

What is striking about Siskind’s enterprise is not simply that he produced photographs that look like miniature monochrome reproductions of Klines or Motherwells – if one believes taking a photograph to be just like making a drawing, why not? — but that the macho posturing, the heroicizing of self-expressioin is so extreme as to border on the parodic. Furthermore, there is manifest a stubborn, indeed a perverse denial of the material processes of photography, grotesquely dramatized and mystified into a Hemingwayesque litany of combat, struggle, fights, battles.

[ ... ]

The basic issue is whether the [Chicago] Institute [of Design] formalism, or its MOMA [Museum of Modern Art, NYC] version, for that matter, has not become a cul-de-sac. The Institute tradition of experimentation and serial work notwithstanding, what one sees over and over again is a recapitulation of various devices and strategies which exist as guarantors of sophistication and mastery, but rarely exceed the level of academic, albeit accomplished, exercises. And inasmuch as so many of these photographers can be presumed to be serious, intelligent, and committed to their art, I wonder at what point they may begin to question whether the concerns of art photography may properly extend beyond the boundaries of the creative, the self-reflexive, or the subjective? … The formalism which sustained the best work of a [Harry] Callahan or a Siskind has run its course and become useless either as pedigree or foundation. Walter Benjamin’s prescient warning on the results of fetishizing of the creative* seems as applicable to present-day art photography as it was to the photography of Renger-Patzsch and his milieu which had, at the very least, the gloss of newness.

* “Therein is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connexions in which it exists …” — Walter Benjamin; A Short History of Photography

I think that Callahan’s work, especially his color photographs made well before this essay was written, easily refutes her conclusion and especially the Benjamin quote. Siskind, on the other hand … (I’m not particularly taken by his work).

One Siskind quote, “…meaning has shifted — shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean,” is a show stopper. That word, want …how did he mean it? Did he intend that such “wanting” should happen? And would that be before or after perception? Can he choose? Can he not want? (Would not emptying oneself of want be simply an even more fervent form of want?)

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

These are more bird boo-boos — headed for deletion. Kewl, but not useful for compositing. A continuation of the Idea of a Bird post.

The next one (below) I made on purpose. I wanted to show you how some of these birds watch me while they have their back to me. I didn’t get its head quite pointed straight away; when it is, you can see both eyes. In this picture you can see just a bit of the right eye.

Here is a wider crop of the same picture:

That’s enough for now. I expect there will be more throughout the winter.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/