The Cruel Radiance

 This is an “on the other hand … ” response to Felix Grant’s post, Pilate Asked What Is Truth? I don’t think this post disagrees with his. It’s just an elaboration of the problem.

It’s an extract from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers For the US Government 1935-44 by Andrea Fisher (1987). (The part I’m quoting is not specifically about women photographers.)

… It was not the photographs alone which convinced the urban populace of a crisis calling for action in the countryside. They might equally have been understood as artistic expressions of inner vision, as they were soon afterwards. Their truth-effect consisted in the complex intersection of the image with both pervasive claims for the honesty of the instrument and the social reforming arguments which accompanied them in newspapers, journals and exhibitions.

The meaning of the image thus became inseparable from these converging rhetorics. And the prerogative to persuade with such a rhetoric lies with power. Only with power may rhetoric be convincingly presented, not as persuasion, but as objective report.

The Depression was a crisis in an entire regime of truth. As such, it was also a crisis in authority. Newspaper, radio and government officials, the established mediators of social information, had systematically downplayed or ignored the extent of the crisis. In the wake of the 1929 crash, mass unemployment and evictions in the city, and drought, foreclosures and destitute migrations in the countryside were met with only minor monetary reforms from President Hoover. There was neither relief provided for the unemployed, sick or homeless, nor protection for the rights to organize.

The press was no longer believed by the people; it had fallen out of step with its audience. the crucial event in this repudiation was the 1936 election. More than 80% of the press opposed Roosevelt, yet he won by the highest percentage ever. And that repudiation was not just passive cynicism, but an actively expressed hostility. When Roosevelt motored through Chicago after his election the crowd was cheering not only in support of him, but jeering and shouting slogans against the press. In electing him, they clearly felt that what had been defeated was not only his opponent, but an entire informational network.

Irreparable rifts had opened between people’s desperate experience and fragmentary word-of-mouth knowledge of the crisis, and the anodyne view offered by those in whom they had invested their trust. The collapse in their credibility was, as a result, not simply a demand for better information from the existing authorities. Acquiescence in having ‘reality’ mediated by those on high erupted into a call to have reality speak for itself. The established ‘reality’ had been predigested for the common man as its silent and invisible object. A democratization was now demanded through the representation of the common man, by the common man.

It was in response to this pressing demand that the rhetoric of documentary emerged. It became a rhetoric in which the photograph, as re-presentation, was elided in the hope that its subjects could speak for themselves unimpeded. Claims of particular types of image to achieve this transparency were vehemently debated in a wide range of popular journals, symposia, radio discussions, and social and political groups.

Far from its present seclusion within a ‘profession,’ the rhetoric of documentary was an insistent and pervasive speech. It was a speech impelled by a crisis in power, and one which was consequently invested with multiple attempts to supplant that power. Everywhere, the nature of reality, and therefore the means of its transformation were open to contest.

… Everywhere ‘reality’ lay open to contest; and everywhere the camera emerged as paradigm for truth. Even James Agee, searching for a literary language that would confront reality in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, refers to the camera as metaphor for the truth:

all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what it is . . . This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time . . . If I could do it I’d do no writing here at all. It would be photographs and the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speeches, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement. A piece of body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

That quest which Agee so voraciously pursued overflowed the bounds of the political to permeate every pore of the social body. His urgency to ’see’ went far beyond the correction of prior misguided myths. Its focus widened to aspects of existence never before visible as sites of passionate intensity. And this imperative to poetically catalog every mundane detail of the Depression’s effects signalled the penetration of crisis into the unspeakably intimate.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Quantifying Darkness

This is from a Q&A with Spanish author Javiar Marias by Chelsea Bauch (Nov 30, 2009) on Flavorpill:

Flavorpill: A lot of literature tackles unanswerable questions and subjects — what is the purpose of writing for you?

Javier Marías: I think it was Faulkner who once said that when you strike a match in a dark wilderness it is not in order to see anything better lighted, but just in order to see how much more darkness there is around. I think that literature does mainly that. It is not really supposed to “answer” things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore — often blindly — the huge areas of darkness, and show them better. So in my opinion it does not really matter if subjects are unanswerable (all of them are, possibly), as literature is not expected to solve riddles or mysteries, but just to show them — perhaps putting them in a slightly new light, perhaps calling attention to overlooked aspects of them.

Hopefully, before setting out to see how much darkness there is the author or artist should make sure he doesn’t have a bag over his head or his eyes squeezed shut. It has been known to happen.

More from Marias that I think is true of the visual arts as well as of writing:

FP: Do your dual roles as a writer and an English-Spanish translator intersect?

JM: I have not translated a book in the last 20 years or so. Writing and translating are too similar to cope with at the same time. What I can say is that translation is the best possible school for a writer. If you are capable of “rewriting” acceptably (that is what a translator does, he or she rewrites) texts by Laurence Sterne or Joseph Conrad or Thomas Browne, it means you have learned a lot, it means that your instrument or tool is ready for rather ambitious enterprises. Of course, translating does not give you talent or imagination, but it tunes your instrument — language — and that’s a lot.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Wake

The extracts below are from a very long essay that sort of rambles around — sometimes into silliness — but that is, nevertheless good in parts. I hope these disjointed snips convey some of that goodness.  The essay is  Notes on Love and Photography by Eduardo Cadava and Paola Cortés-Rocca in the book, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida ed. Geoffrey Batchen.

Photography is mad, and, in the world of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida its delirium and danger are related to the experience of love, and, particularly, to what he calls the “pangs of love,” …

… within the logic of the book, it is his mother’s survival, her living on, even after her death, that indicates that things pass, that they change and transform, and, minimally, because this survival asks us to think not of the impossibility of a return to life but of the impossibility of dying, not life or death, but life and death, or perhaps, even more precisely, “life, death.” It is this ghostly survival — as a metonym for all such survivals — that defines the madness of the photograph, since it is there, within the medium of photography, that we simultaneously experience the absence of the “observed subject” and the fact of its “having-been-there,” the relation between life and death, between testimony and its impossibility, between the self and an other, and among the past, the present, and the future. Within the delirious space of photography, all these apparent oppositions are suspended and ruined …

… Barthes suggests that photographic representation stages — makes absolutely “literal” — what is at the heart of modern representation, and this is precisely the putting into crisis of a temporal order in which first there is an object and then later its representation. What stands in front of the photographic apparatus — an object or subject that gives way to a portrait — does not “exist” before the camera’s click.

… What Barthes engages here, in an extremely systematic and rigorous manner, is nothing less than what produces the difficulty of all contemporary reflections on photography: the absence of the subject. But, as he suggests — and here lies his strength and courage — this absence does not result from disappearance or effacement, but, on the contrary, from multiplication and proliferation. As he puts it,

in front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares).

Photography — and the portrait as its genre par excellence – constitutes a radical and absolute destabilization of the Cartesian subject, “comparable to certain nightmares,” and not unlike the one advanced by psychoanalysis, in which “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”

… If photography is “the cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity,” it is not only because photography signals a crisis in the identity of the subject but also because it introduces a mediation and break into the very interior of the concept of identity. Within the photographic space, I “discover” that I am never self-identical to myself, and that there is no object, no act, no instant that ever coincides with “itself.” … Photography prevents us from ever recognizing this or that identity — ours, but also that of someone or something else — because “photography” is the name of the destruction of any consciousness of identity.

… Camera Lucida perfectly identifies the ontological violence that characterizes photographic technology and translates into a kind of grammar that names the effects of the image on the body of the observed subject and the subject observing it: it pierces, pricks, scans, and tears a hole. Nevertheless, Barthese reads this photographic violence — perhaps another name for the force of decontextualization that takes place in any photography — in relation not only to melancholy or tragedy but also to enjoyment. The image is comparable, then, to the haiku. It shares with this poetic form the “essence (of a wound),” this feature of the fragment in which nothing is missing because “everything is given,” which neither asks for development not provokes “even the possibility of a rhetorical expansion.” … [T]he haiku, like the image, is a kind of “anaphoric gesture,” it, “undevelopable,” and in which “the wake of the sign which seems to have been traced” within the photographic image “is erased.” Somewhat different from melancholy and tragedy, and as a fragment that becomes a totality and does not ask to be expanded, the image therefore acquires the brilliance and splendor of the haiku …

I don’t agree with the “nothing is missing”/”everything is given” bit, but it’s (therefore) interesting to think about.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Spaced Out

This rhetorical stance flaunts a certain dandyism; but it spares us photography’s old long-faced expression, its mask as the image of ‘truth.’

… it is as if one were intersecting an ongoing narrative: what might the script, the text of this space be? What relations does it privilege or preclude, what modes of imagination does it foster or preempt? What different readings of it might be possible?

Above and below, I am taking bits and pieces out of context from a group of writings by Susan Butler that was first published as part of the book British Photography: Towards A Bigger Picture, ed. Mark Haworth-Booth and Chris Titterington (1988). I am deliberately leaving out the identity of the various photographers that she is writing about. [The Susan Trangmar photographs shown are not among those that Butler is writing about -- though other Trangmar photos (not related to those shown) are among those discussed.]:

… The photographer admits to intentionally making these images difficult to read. Seeing exceeds knowing as forms and objects lose the discreteness of their shapes. Phantasmagoric elements enter, as ghostly simulacra, often facelike configurations, appear and recede amid the illegible chaos of disintegration. the mind substitutes metaphors of the known in an imaginative effort to overcome the breakdown of rational cognition, but one cannot describe these images with any precision — they slough off language. Identification fails, and with it identity: in this wasteland entire categories of human functioning collapse into one another as the objects that supported them are obliterated. …

………………..

… The flat surface of the photograph can only show me as viewer where I cannot be, never was or can be no longer, where I am nothing. The photograph is a limit, not an extension. Having thus negated the viewer’s ‘presence’ in the scenario of landscape, this unknown woman [the photographer, who has included herself in her pictures] might at least show her face, accede to the order of the portrait. But this is not to be, either; she will not dismantle one fantasy only to comply with an untenable fiction of exchanged glances. What maddens is her refusal either to disappear, to function as absence, or, as presence, to be revealed, available. …

………………..

… One can go into mourning for meaning, lament the loss of the ‘true’ image (really the loss of ourselves as the privileged subjects of its knowledge). Or one could take pleasure here in the sheer allure of the image, its self-proclaimed masquerade, and the free play of allusion to allusion detached from the ‘real’ world, circulating across texts, across framings. This rhetorical stance flaunts a certain dandyism; but it spares us photography’s old long-faced expression, its mask as the image of ‘truth.’ …

Susan Trangmar, Blue Skies

………………..

… If the desire for representation of mirroring is an unavoidable part of the process of identity, and if a representation is inevitably only a semblance of something displaced, that has escaped, then perhaps it is better this representation should be self-created, maintaining a measure of indeterminacy. …

………………..

… How to address questions of orientation, of locating oneself in relation to place; of locating the photographic in relation to communication, to imagination? …

………………..

Susan Trangmar, Between Here and There

… The scale of these pictures seems to invite a kind of imaginary entry while making the viewer aware of the unexpected intrusion of the image and its proposed space into another, preexisting space. These works, by setting up confrontation between spaces, implicitly ask viewers to reevaluate their perceptions of both the ‘represented’ space and the actual space, which also embodies a cultural or social mise-en-scene. In both instances, it is as if one were intersecting an ongoing narrative: what might the script, the text of this space be? What relations does it privilege or preclude, what modes of imagination does it foster or preempt? What different readings of it might be possible?

The persistence of questions similar to these in the works discussed here links them not only with each other but with current preoccupations with representation, interpretation, and knowledge. In the conflict between an empirical or pragmatic view based in presence and immediacy and one which privileges the role of language and cultural framing as a precondition of knowledge, the status of the photographic image is bound to be a matter of contention, insofar as the photographic, unlike other modes of representation, bears the trace of what it depicts. As the inheritor of … ‘the power of glimmering visibility,’ it seems to retain something of the immediacy of direct sensory impression and through this ‘aspires to a union of presence and absence.’ The photographic makes us forget its status as medium — that which comes between — as well as the preconditions of framing, cultural, mechanical, psychological, contextual, that qualify its indexical relations. Yet a normative notion of the photographic as giving unmediated access to the real is precisely what allows the photograph to impart its verifying illusion to fictional or staged events, and the relation of the index also permits the medium to absorb, recombine, and reproduce both its own preexisting images and the imagery of other visual media, reducing all these elements to its own terms in nonreciprocal relations.

As both index and construct, the photographic image provides fruitful if constantly shifting ground within which problems of reading and knowing can be reconsidered at different levels and in changing contexts — its potential relocations would seem to be indeterminate, its epistemologies multiple. …

Susan Trangmar, Resightings

I love the quoted sentence that I started with: “This rhetorical stance flaunts a certain dandyism; but it spares us photography’s old long-faced expression …”

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Art of Espionage

The CIA does art! Who knew?!

It’s quite profound. I expect it would take me a long time to master the intricacies of lace-threading.

That’s from here (part of a series) and is associated with an article on Boston.com, Tinker, tailor, soldier … illusionist?; When the CIA tried its hand at magic by Tom Scocca (Nov 1, 2009). Here is a bit from that:

… Melton and Wallace have rounded up some of the extreme forms of covert activity. The Soviets deployed a cyanide-bullet gun concealed in a cigarette pack; the Americans countered with a “nondiscernable bioinoculator” gun shooting tiny poison darts. A pop-up dummy took the place of an agent diving out of a moving car. A person was transported in a St. Bernard costume in a crate to a fake veterinary office. A radio was hidden in an artificial scrotum, to be worn over the real scrotum; miniature lock-picking tools were packaged in a suppository capsule.

This would have been a pleasantly funny essay if not for the tasteless joke made at the end:

… Such finesse is hard to detect in the present-day scandals over the crude and brutal treatment of captives by the CIA. The agency that came up with this manual – to say nothing of the dog costume, hollowed-out silver dollars, and schemes to put depilatory drug powder in Castro’s boots to make his beard fall out –  is the same agency currently complaining that its employees will be unable to do their jobs if the United States enforces the existing laws against torture. Agents who would have been willing to stab themselves with a needle laced with shellfish toxin and die anonymously behind enemy lines have given way to people worried about possibly being investigated and prosecuted stateside. Reading the manual, you wonder: When did the brave men with a wealth of tricks concealed in their suit pockets become such hapless crybabies?

Or, on second thought, maybe they just want us to think they’re hapless crybabies.

Not funny. Really makes you wonder what the writer was trying to say (was he being intentionally jarring?).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Irony’s Victim

This post is somewhat prompted by something Dr. C said in comments to yesterday’s post: “I was just thinking about Afghanistan this morning and how our involvement there and in Iraq is so much different than even Vietnam because of the deromanticizing effect of technology.”

It’s from an essay, Star Wars: The Photographer as Polemicist in Vietnam by Jan Zita Grover (first published in Afterimage, 1983). I’m starting in mid-discussion, but I think you’ll be able to pick up the meaning:

… the most pervasive mode of meaning created by photographs placed in juxtaposition — the construction of irony — plays a very minor part in And/Or [And/Or, Antonyms for Our Age by Marjorie Morris and Don Sauer (1967)]. the photographs’ contents make the antonyms appear mutually exclusive, so no possibility of simultaneously entertaining their opposed meanings seems possible. Like most popular cultural artifacts, the y reduce real complexities to exceedingly simple terms — significantly, this is the only Vietnam War photography book that does not integrate text with photographs, the better to present the enormity of the problems presented.

Subsequent books on Vietnam, as did Capa’s 1938 Death in the Making, employ irony both as mode and meaning. As Paul Fussell so brilliantly hypothesizes in his The Great War and Modern Memory,

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. . . . I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.

What, exactly, constitutes this ‘modern understanding … that is essentially ironic’? Fussell appears to take his cue from the theory of literary modes developed by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, where:

irony, as a mode, is born from the low mimetic; it takes life exactly as it finds it. But the ironist fables without moralizing, and has no object but his subject . . . Tragic irony . . . becomes simply the study of tragic isolation as such . . . Its hero does not necessarily have any tragic haemartia or pathetic obsession: he is simply somebody who gets isolated from his society. [ellipses in original]

Whereas the tragic hero’s fall is foreseeable, adumbrated in his character or circumstances, the ironic victim’s fall is not:

Tragedy is intelligible because its catastrophe is plausibly related to its situation. Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be.

Irony’s victim, the scape-goat of pharmakos, is innocent of any crime or character defect commensurate to the enormity of his or her punishment or fall. Instead, it is guilt-by-association with a society that permits injustice to befall its members that confirms his or her fate.

If this sounds like an apt characterization of America’s collective part in the Vietnam War, it may be because that war was conceived and played out — in its media and military conceptions, its creation of heroes, villains, scape-goats, act-end climaxes, entr’actes, dying fall, and tearful epilogue — in terms of drama of tragic irony. Players and audience alike (the roles changed constantly) perceived each other across unbreachable gaps, each incapable of imparting his or her peculiar insights to the other: infantryman to officer; field-officer to staff; staff to Washington; Washington to public; public to Washington, etc. — an ironist’s dream, this great chain whose faulty synapses prevented the circuit from ever closing and consequently confirmed one’s own isolated, superior (if often quite impotent) knowledge or perspective.

The civilian correspondent in Vietnam, lying somewhere between the high military’s will-to-believe and the individual infantryman’s no larger but differently limited information about the war, may have been the most fluid position of all for seeing the war for what it was and thus for constructing its human meaning. Not surprisingly, the chief proponents of this theory are war correspondents themselves. For example, in Dispatches, Michael Herr describes the ease with which press writers and photographers would pass from fire-base to fire-base, from frontline to Saigon officers’ club. But even with all the dark knowledge made possible by this experience, Herr writes,

We’d all seen too many moves, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult.

. . . A lot of things had to be unlearned before you could learn anything at all, and even after you knew better you couldn’t avoid the ways in which things got mixed, the war itself with those parts of the war that were just like the movies, just like The Quiet American or Catch-22 . . .. just like all the combat footage from television . . . [ellipses in original]

[ ... ]

… open partisanship and tendentiousness on [Philip Jones] Griffiths’s part struck Peter Prescott, Vietnam, Inc.’s only major American reviewer, as ‘appallingly stupid’:

[Griffiths] is a Welshman who claims that Americans want to build a society ‘ “motivated” by personal greed’ and that a truckload of Vietnamese are ‘ARVN soldiers off to loot and rape in Cambodia.’ Sir, how do you know? Griffiths should have learned what Cartier-Bresson knows: the greatest photographs require no words at all. What Griffiths writes would not be so embarrassing if his pictures were not as good as they are; I think they compose, separately and together, one of the great photographic testaments of war.

Prescott’s distress over Griffiths’s text is difficult to place — is it because of Griffiths’s seeming anti-Americanism? His naive, casual adducing of American and ARVN intent? His violation of the conventions of reportorial objectivity? His use of photographs as tools of political expression? His straining to propel photographs into a larger and more ambitious context than mere photojournalism? Or all of these?

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

(Un)Equal Eyes

First Take

I’m examining my deep attraction to this quiet little picture. I have been mesmerized by these faces since the postcard was sent to me last month by a friend, a Native Canadian painter and curator who found it in a taxidermy/Indian shop (he was bemused by that conjunction). Or maybe I am mesmerized by the three cultural spaces between the Beaver family and Mary Schaffer and me.

They are not vast spaces, although we are separated at the moment by a continent, national borders, and eighty-four years. They consist of the then-present space of the subject, the then-present, but perhaps very different, space of the photographer, and the now-present space of the writer in retrospect, as a surrogate for contemporary viewers. Or perhaps there are only two spaces: the relationship between photographer and subjects then, and between me/us and the photograph now.

postcard caption:
Sam[p]son Beaver and his Family. This lovely photograph of Stoney Indian Sam[p]son Beaver was taken by mary Schaffer in 1906. She was a writer, naturalist, photographer and explorer who lived and worked in the Rockies for many years. Mary Schaffer is one of several notable women who visited the area early in the century and fell captive to the charm of the mountains.

This long post is extracted from the book, Partial Recall, ed. Lucy Lippard (1992). The author is documenting her own responses (‘takes’) to the given picture as time passes and she learns more about it. I think it’s a fascinating dissection of the possible positioning of the parties to the picture; subject, photographer and viewer(s). [My 'positioning' link is ... cynical.]

There are multiple possible space-sharing configurations between those three. For example, the photographer and subject may be in the same social/cultural, political, racial space while the viewer is not. But sometimes, the viewer and the subject are from the same space while the photographer is the outsider. Or photographer and viewer may both be outside of the subjects space to a greater or lesser degree. To round out the possibilities, all three could be in the same space, or all three could be from different spaces. Watch the flux of Lippard’s idea of the picture changes as she learns more about it.

Continuing in the First Take section of Lippard’s text:

… Good photography can embody what has been seen. As I scrutinize it, this photograph becomes the people photographed — not ‘flat death,’ as Roland Barthes would have it, but flat life. This one-way (and, admittedly, romantic) relationship is mediated by the presence/absence of Mary Schaffer, who haunts the threshold of the encounter. I am borrowing her space, that diminished space between her and the Beaver family. She has made a frontal (though not confrontational) image, bringing her subjects visually to the foreground, into the area of potential intimacy. … [The Beavers] have been freed from the ‘ethnographic present’ — that patronizing frame that freezes personal and social specifics into generalization, and is usually described from a neutral and anonymous third-person perspective. They are ‘present’ in part because of their undeniable personal presence.

[ ... ]

Second Take

I showed the picture and my ‘diary’ to a friend, who said she was convinced that the real relationship portrayed was between the photographer and the child, and that the parents liked Schaffer because she had made friends with their little girl. Certainly the photograph implies a dialog, an exchange, an I/eye (the photographer) and a you (her subjects) — and we the viewers, if the photographer would emerge from beneath her black cloth and turn to look back at us. At the same time, the invisible (unknowable) autobiographical component, the ‘viewpoint’ provided by the invisible photographer, ‘writer, naturalist … and explorer, who lived and worked in the Rockies for many years,’ is another factor that shaped what is visible here. I have written to the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, in Banff, for information about her.

The cultural abyss that had to exist in 1906 between the Beaver family and Mary Schaffer was (though burdened by political circumstances and colonial conditioning) at least intellectually unselfconscious. It may have been further diminished by what I perceive (or project) as the friendly relationship between them.

… the Beavers are not universalized into oblivion as ‘just folks,’ … Their portrait is devoid of cuteness, and yet has great charm. Despite the inevitable veneer of exoticism (a function of the passage of historical time and the interval implied by the dress of almost ninety years ago, it is only secondarily quaint.

… The Beavers portrait seems a classic visualization of what anthropologists call ‘intersubjective time.’ It commemorates a reciprocal moment (rather than a cannibalistic one), where the emphasis is on interaction and communication; a moment in which subject and object are caught in exchange within shared time, rather than shouting across history from their respective peaks. The cultural distance between photographer and photographed, between white and Native, ahs somehow been momentarily bridged to such an extent that the bridge extends over time to me, to us, almost a century later.

[ ... ]

Last Take

The books ordered from Banff have finally arrived. I dove into them and of course had to revise some of my notions.

… Having just crossed two turbulent rivers, [Schaffer] and her companions reached [the place where the Beavers were] and, weaving in and out of yellowing poplars, they

spied two tepees nestled deep among the trees … I have seen not one but many of their camps and seldom or never have they failed to be artistic in their setting, and this one was no exception. Knowing they must be Silas Abraham’s and Sampson Beaver’s families, acquaintances of a year’s standing, I could not resist a hurried call. The children spied us first, and tumbling head over heels, ran to cover like rabbits…. Above the din and excitement I called , ‘Frances Louise!’ She had been my little favorite when last we were among the Indians, accepting my advances with a sweet baby womanliness quite unlike the other children, for which I had rewarded her by presenting her with a doll I had constructed. …

… Mary Sharples Schaffer Warren (1861-1939) was not a Canadian but a Philadelphian, from a wealthy Quaker family. Her father was a businessman and ‘gentleman farmer,’ as well as an avid mineralogist. She became an amateur naturalist as a child and studied botany as a painter. In 1894 she married Dr. Charles Schaffer, a respected and much older, doctor whose passion was botany and with whom she worked as an illustrator and photographer until his death in 1903.

… When Schaffer and Mollie Adams decided to take their plunge into the wilderness, it was unprecedented, and improper, for women to encroach on this steadfastly male territory. As Schaffer recalled,

… We looked into each other’s eyes and said: ‘Why not!’ We can starve as well as they; the muskeg will be no softer for us than for them … the waters no deeper to swim, nor the bath colder if we fall in’ — so — we planned a trip.

These and many other hardships and exhilarations they did endure, loving almost every minute of it, and documenting their experiences with their (often ineptly hand-colored) photographs of giant peaks, vast rivers, glaciers, and fields of wildflowers. When they were returning from the 1907 expedition, they passed a stranger on the trail near Lake Louise who later described the incident:

As we drove along the narrow hill road a piebald pack-pony with a china-blue eye came round a bend, followed by two women, black-haired, bare-headed, wearing beadwork squaw jackets and riding straddle. A string of pack-ponies trotted through the pines behind them.

‘Indians on the move?’ said I. ‘How characteristic!’

As the women jolted by, one of them very slightly turned her eyes and they were, past any doubt, the comprehending equal eyes of the civilized white woman which moved in that berry-brown face …

The same evening, in a hotel of all the luxuries, a slight woman in a very pretty evening frock was turning over photographs, and the eyes beneath the strictly arranged hair were the eyes of the woman in the beadwork who had quirted the piebald pack-pony pst our buggy.

The author of this colonial encounter was, ironically, Rudyard Kipling.

As Lévi Strauss has pointed out, the notion of travel is thoroughly corrupted by power. Mary Schaffer, for all her love of the wilderness (which she constantly called her ‘playground’) was not free from the sense of power that came with being a prosperous ‘modern’ person at ‘play’ in the fields of the conquered. …More than her photographs, her journals betray a colonial lens. She is condescendingly ‘fond,’ but not very respectful, of the ’savages’ who are often her friends, bemoaning their unpleasantly crude and hard traditional life. In 1911, for instance, her party passed ‘a Cree village where, when we tried to photograph the untidy spot, the inhabitants scuttled like rabbits to their holes.’

… For all its socially enforced static quality, and for all I’ve read into it, Mary Schaffer’s photograph of Sampson, Leah, and Frances Louise Beaver is ‘merely’ the image of an ephemeral moment. I am first and foremost touched by its peace and freshness. I can feel the ground and grass, warm and damp beneath the people sitting ‘here’ in an Indian summer after disaster had struck, but before almost all was lost. Despite years of critical analysis, seeing is still believing to some extent — as those who control the dominant culture (and those who ban it from Native contexts) know all too well. In works like this one, some of the barriers are down, or invisible, and we have the illusion of seeing for ourselves, the way we never would see for ourselves, which is what communication is about.

I think Lippard has written a beautiful description of some of the conundrums faced by photographers.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Robes of Society

Indian image makers do not need vanishing points. The Indian photographer saw a scene as if he were cloaked in the robes of society, as if he were roaming over a range of ‘vantage points’ outside the picture, which resulted in a multifocused picture. It is as if a multiple-headed photographer, representing society, took the photograph.

This is from an essay, Through Indian Eyes, by Judith Mara Gutman first published in Aperture 88 (1982):

Eighty-eight-year old P.J. Cherian … grasped his black umbrella with interlaced fingers and steadied it between his legs. We were looking at some one-hundred-year-old photographs I had brought with me to Cochin, in southwest India.

… [Cherian] stopped, stroked his pointed beard and smiled. ‘You know who that is?’ he asked. I was puzzled. I had thought we were looking at the same photograph, but I did not see anyone. ‘The man on the left,’ he continued, either ignoring my silence or bypassing it gracefully, ‘is Salar Jung II, Laiq-Ali Khan, and the one to the right is Munir ul-Mulik II, son of Salar Jung I and half brother of Salar Jung II,’ And then he relaxed back in his chair.

I did not see those brothers. And as much as I have looked at this picture since, I could never describe it as a picture of two people. It’s mainly of a building, of a building that preempts so much of the picture plane that it virtually wipes out the sky.

In the portrait of the two half brothers I got lost in a mixture of perpendiculars and horizontals. The more I looked at the picture, the more I noticed my attention slipping below the horizon line. For Western standards the horizon line signals a center of gravity, a point of stability. But here, even a contemporary Westerner, proud of a post-Picasso capacity for sophisticated perception, feels uncomfortable. Most of us in the West, and most Indians today, assume that three-dimensionality is, and always has been, a partner-in-arms to photography, that the camera’s natural, automatic, inclination is to see into the distance. Yet here was a photograph in which the space was so flattened, and the picture plane so ‘disorganized,’ that even the subjects of it could not be identified.

… Hundreds of photographs like the portrait of the two half brothers exist all over India, and in most of them ‘gigantic’ or ‘ugly’ foreground features, forbidden by such nineteenth-century Western journals as the Practical Photographer, loomed. Sometimes a tree, sometimes a person blocked the path between viewer and subject. In the West most of us have laughed at photographs like these, thinking of them as ‘mistakes,’ recalling an occasion when the photographer stood there, waving a person from the foreground, trying to get him out of the way so he could keep the path between himself and the subject smooth and open.

[ ... ]

What became increasingly clear to me as I studied Indian photographs and Indian photographers was that the ‘peculiar’ Indian way of making photograph derived from an Indian way of seeing life. Most perspectival depiction results from an individual composing the scene, looking in from outside. Developed during the Renaissance, this concept of the individual naturally emphasizes his physical vision; where and what he saw. Perspectival views and vanishing points derived from this fusion of individual physical vision joined to cultural aims. Indian photographs generally do not have vanishing points, and, even if there is a perspectival dip or an exaggerated perspective, it is usually linked to a second plane of flatness. Life does not slip away to the distant future for the Indian photographers. Indian image makers do not need vanishing points. The Indian photographer saw a scene as if he were cloaked in the robes of society, as if he were roaming over a range of ‘vantage points’ outside the picture, which resulted in a multifocused picture. It is as if a multiple-headed photographer, representing society, took the photograph.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Can You See Blue Through Your Blue Eyes?

This is taken from the essay, Black and Blue: The Shadow and Camera Lucida, by Carol Mavor. I am appropriating the quotes below to my own ends. I’ve included a little bit at the very end of this post on what her essay is really about, in case you’re curious.

What I’m interested is simply her various descriptions of childhood, starting in the middle of the essay:

… I grew up as an only child, with no shadow of a brother or sister to stick to or to stick to me. Although I had more than enough toys, mostly dolls, I grew up in a sterile house (white, white, white and clean, clean, clean) that was rather empty of books, song, and poetry. At first glance, the mise-en-scène of my childhood bedroom/my kiddish mind might seem to be akin to the stilled, cold, always-frozen-tundra mausoleum nursery of Rachel Whiteread’s 1990 Ghost, with hardly a shadow to be found — no dust, no thought, no dirt, no dark, save for the smudge of ash in the fireless hearth. But my childhood house — without traces of words or song, dirt and smudge — provided an adequate setting for shadow (play) that came to be about a writerly, not a readerly childhood.

I invisibly decorated my empty white house with the theater of my mind. Talking to my toys, I dreamed of childish exiles caused by divorce, abandonment, or a move to far away places that I knew nothing about. Joyfully imagining a glorious split between my parents (who are still to this day married), their permanent departure from home, our move to Bangkok, or my imprisonment in my bedroom and never being allowed to come out, or my self-imprisonment in the bathroom and choosing to never come out, I was practicing the third language.

My childhood fantasy life was fueled by what I was — alone. As Charles Baudelaire writes in his “Philosophy of Toys”: “All children talk to their toys: the toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their brains.” I made stories without books and documented them in the camera obscura of my girl brain.

… [Robert Louis] Stevenson’s poem ["My Shadow" 1885] was at the center of the only book that I remember from my childhood, a volume that, tattered and worn, still sticks with me — The Gateway to Storyland, first published in 1956, edited by Watty Piper.

… Like “a little shadow that goes in and out with me,” with its hereness and goneness marking absence and presence, it plays the game of the photograph that marks the split nature of Barthes himself or of little Brady Morell looking at his own shadow on his bedroom wall.

(photo) Abelardo Morell, Brady Looking at His Shadow (1990)

Like Camera Lucida, my beloved storybook had its own stories of desire spelled out through other “shadows” of blackness that I tucked into bed with me, into the corners of my sheets, into the wrinkles of my memory. (As Peter Stallybrass has taught me, in the technical jargon of sewing, wrinkles are called memory.) As my father read, I made rabbit shadows on my white, white wall: my index and middle fingers were ears, my ring finger made wiggly nose, my thumb and my pinky touched to make an eye.

[ ... ]

A gay man, Barthes fulfilled the stereotypes of being too passionately close to the mother. Barthes played best (perhaps even soley/wholely) with his mother. As queer (left-handed, child of a single mother, a Protestant in a Catholic country, brother of a child born out of wedlock, poor as a child, unmarried, lover of men), he was metaphorically stuck in the hole:

When I was a child, we lived in a neighborhood called Marac; this neighborhood was full of houses being built, and the children played in the building sites; huge holes had been dug in the loamy soil for the foundation of the houses, and one day when we had been playing in one of these, all the children climbed out except me — I couldn’t make it. From the brink above, they teased me: lost! alone! spied on! excluded! (to be excluded is not to be outside, it is to be alone in the hole, imprisoned under the open sky: precluded); then I saw my mother running up; she pulled me out of there and took me far away from the children — against them.*

[ ... ]

In our seminar devoted to Barthes, Thu-Mai told us this story:

My high school French teacher told us this story about a trip she took to Japan. She was on a train traveling through the Japanese countryside. Across from her, a little boy and an elderly woman were obviously looking at her as they spoke to one another in their native Japanese. For a blonde-haired American woman, a rare sight in this part of Japan, the attention was not unusual. After more discussion with the old woman, the little boy finally approached my teacher and said, “My grandmother wants to know if you see blue through your blue eyes.”

* from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

As promised, here is a short quote on approximately what Mavor’s long (good) essay is really about:

… Blue, so claims Brian Masumi, is the color of affect.

In French, blue can mean both blue and bruise.

For now, let it suffice to say that the Van der Zee Family Portrait is a black picture, and the Winter Garden Photograph is a blue picture. I am developing them together, turning them into a composite print. The resulting photograph speaks of desire: it reveals a shimmer, a nondialectical convergence of “ô négresse nourricière” and Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Madeleine

(photo) Interrogation floor, Hohenschönhausen detention center, 2004. From the series STASI — Secret Rooms …

… The Fucheses let the spaces speak for themselves. … [They] shift the narrative structure into the mind of the observer, allowing the subject to echo inside us in all its complexity and tragedy.

Quote and image taken from Daniel and Geo Fuchs: In the Halls of the STASI by Matthias Harder in Aperture 195 (Summer 2009). (For more on the Fucheses, see their Web site – which includes a series of the Rammstein band members in diapers, floating underwater.)

A similar theme of photographs of things that are about what is not in the photograph, see Taryn Simon’s post-tsunami series:

(photo above)
Ulee Lheue Beach, Banda Aceh.
Where the Tsunami hit.
2005

(photo above)
Maisara. Housewife, Tsunami Survivor.
Kajhu, Aceh Besar, once one of the most populated in Aceh.
Maisara stands at the site where the water took her children.
She survived by holding onto a floating beam.
Maisara lost her husband and three daughters.
2005

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/