holyoutlaw

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion
by Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor

Well, the Seattle Public Library has a copy on their reference shelves. During Lange’s lifetime, there was only the one edition. There have been a couple facsimile reprints of the first edition, sometimes with new accompanying essays. After Lange died, Paul Schuster Taylor produced a second edition, but it was revised and reorganized. It’s in the first edition (or facsimile reproductions) that we see their statement in its most clear and direct form.

It was not the first work to combine photos and text about the Depression and Dust Bowl. There had been Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee and photos by Walker Evans; and You Have Seen Their Faces, with text by Erskine Caldwell and photos by Margaret Bourke-White. But this was the first to feature actual direct quotes from the subjects photographed, and deep socioeconomic analysis from Paul Taylor.

I felt this was the distilled essence of Lange’s photography. That, although not the best reproductions of her work (given 1930s printing technology vs. today’s), this was the purest form of her work I’d seen. The book itself does indeed presage design techniques now common, and I agree with A.D. Coleman that it’s worth studying. Unfortunately, I got so wrapped up in it I forgot to take notes.

The endpapers are a stream of quotes from people they interviewed, printed in all caps, without attribution. They flow across the endpapers in a way that reminds me of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. Each chapter focuses on a different region, working westward. The chapters start out with photos and brief captions, followed by an analysis from Paul Taylor. Another element distinguishing “An American Exodus” is their use of newspaper facsimiles and reprints. A newspaper ad extolling the depth and fertility of the soil of the Oklahoma panhandle, saying the farmer could be living a life of ease in just a few short years, is followed by a photograph of the dustbowl captioned simply “Thirteen years later.”

I got a better sense of the interplay of elements in the catastrophe from Taylor’s words than I had from other reading I’ve done about the dust bowl (admittedly, not very much). It wasn’t just the drought, it wasn’t just the mechanization of farming from mule to tractor. Also involved were farmers taking payments from the government for crop reduction, part of which should have gone to their tenants and sharecroppers. Instead, most farmers used the money to buy tractors and kick the sharecroppers and tenants off the land.

Tractored out, Childress County Texas, June 1938
Photo by Dorothea Lange

All the farmers moved gradually west, until they wound up in the central valley of California. Here they were met by large farms that were already industrial, already mechanized except for the planting and harvesting. When labor was needed, it was needed by the thousands — Lange and Taylor reproduce an ad saying “1000s of cotton pickers needed.” The farms there had already been using Philipino, Japanese, and Mexican migrant labor for decades. Now they were flooded by displaced white people as well.

Paul Schuster Taylor made a graphic representation of the migrant labor flow: An outline map of the US, the tributaries of the flow start further to the north and east than I had expected them to. But they build across the south, as the streams unite through Texas and Oklahoma, until they become a vast sideways river dumping into California. The sudden influx of labor drove down the already near-starvation wages.

The final chapter of the book makes suggestions for reform, calls for action. But you know, I couldn’t read it. I was already pretty wrung out by the sustained reading of the previous chapters, and I thought that reading the suggestions made in 1939, ignored completely or only half-executed, would have been too much.

NOTE: Since I’m working without Coleman’s essay at hand for reference, I may have either misquoted or unintentionally plagiarized. My apologies.

Here’s another article on An American Exodus, from the University of Virginia’s American Studies program. And here is a contemporary review of the book, by Paul Strand.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion
by Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor

In his essay in The Heart and Mind of a Photographer, A.D. Coleman focuses exclusively on An American Exodus. He says that its layout and design presage many of the design elements we see today on the web, and that documentary photographers working today could do well to find a facsimile of the first edition and examine it in depth.

Well, the Seattle Public Library has a copy on their reference shelves. During Lange's lifetime, there was only the one edition. There have been a couple facsimile reprints of the first edition, sometimes with new accompanying essays. After Lange died, Paul Schuster Taylor produced a second edition, but it was revised and reorganized. It's in the first edition (or facsimile reproductions) that we see their statement in its most clear and direct form.

It was not the first work to combine photos and text about the Depression and Dust Bowl. There had been Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee and photos by Walker Evans; and You Have Seen Their Faces, with text by Erskine Caldwell and photos by Margaret Bourke-White. But this was the first to feature actual direct quotes from the subjects photographed, and deep socioeconomic analysis from Paul Taylor.

I felt this was the distilled essence of Lange's photography. That, although not the best reproductions of her work (given 1930s printing technology vs. today's), this was the purest form of her work I'd seen. The book itself does indeed presage design techniques now common, and I agree with A.D. Coleman that it's worth studying. Unfortunately, I got so wrapped up in it I forgot to take notes.

The endpapers are a stream of quotes from people they interviewed, printed in all caps, without attribution. They flow across the endpapers in a way that reminds me of Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. Each chapter focuses on a different region, working westward. The chapters start out with photos and brief captions, followed by an analysis from Paul Taylor. Another element distinguishing "An American Exodus" is their use of newspaper facsimiles and reprints. A newspaper ad extolling the depth and fertility of the soil of the Oklahoma panhandle, saying the farmer could be living a life of ease in just a few short years, is followed by a photograph of the dustbowl captioned simply "Thirteen years later."

I got a better sense of the interplay of elements in the catastrophe from Taylor's words than I had from other reading I've done about the dust bowl (admittedly, not very much). It wasn't just the drought, it wasn't just the mechanization of farming from mule to tractor. Also involved were farmers taking payments from the government for crop reduction, part of which should have gone to their tenants and sharecroppers. Instead, most farmers used the money to buy tractors and kick the sharecroppers and tenants off the land.

Tractored out, Childress County Texas, June 1938
Photo by Dorothea Lange

All the farmers moved gradually west, until they wound up in the central valley of California. Here they were met by large farms that were already industrial, already mechanized except for the planting and harvesting. When labor was needed, it was needed by the thousands -- Lange and Taylor reproduce an ad saying "1000s of cotton pickers needed." The farms there had already been using Philipino, Japanese, and Mexican migrant labor for decades. Now they were flooded by displaced white people as well.

Paul Schuster Taylor made a graphic representation of the migrant labor flow: An outline map of the US, the tributaries of the flow start further to the north and east than I had expected them to. But they build across the south, as the streams unite through Texas and Oklahoma, until they become a vast sideways river dumping into California. The sudden influx of labor drove down the already near-starvation wages.

And what happened to the migrants after the harvest? They had to choose between food and gas money. The car was necessary to follow the work, but there was never enough money for food and car maintenance both. If the crop failed, or if they arrived too late for a place, they were stuck.

The final chapter of the book makes suggestions for reform, calls for action. But you know, I couldn't read it. I was already pretty wrung out by the sustained reading of the previous chapters, and I thought that reading the suggestions made in 1939, ignored completely or only half-executed, would have been too much.

NOTE: Since I'm working without Coleman's essay at hand for reference, I may have either misquoted or unintentionally plagiarized. My apologies.

Here's another article on An American Exodus, from the University of Virginia's American Studies program. And here is a contemporary review of the book, by Paul Strand.

While I’m working my way through Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946 2004, I thought I’d look at these two portraits of Bob Dylan by Avedon.

The first was taken on November 4, 1963. It’s one week after Dylan’s first performance outside the Village, where he first sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in front of an audience. The location is 132nd St, with the Harlem River and the Park Avenue (Metro North) railroad bridge in the background.

Bob Dylan, Musician, 132nd and FDR Drive, Harlem, New York, November 4, 1963

The pose is casual, the slightly upturned face and barest hint of a Mona Lisa smile show an openness of character. He’s wearing a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and workingman’s boots. There’s a pen in his pocket. The guitar case is beaten up, the background is industrial, literally gritty. He looks young, but not naive; open to experience, and ready to meet it. The clothes, location, beat-up guitar case are all markers of his background. He could be just in from Minnesota.

The second was taken just sixteen months later. It was between the finished production and the release of Bringing It All Back Home, his first record that included a rock band on some tracks. There are of course a lot of differences, but first I want to point out the similarity of pose: Hands in pockets, right knee slightly bent, weight on left foot.

Bob Dylan, Musician, Central Park, New York, February 10, 1965

The first difference I noticed was the clothes. They’re no longer working man’s clothes. The boots are pointy-toed, the pants straight leg. He’s wearing a suede coat. There’s no sign of a pen or guitar. And of course there’s the difference in location, striking even if you know little or nothing about the socioeconomic geography of New York. The overall picture is much darker, and the light is behind Dylan, not above him.

Here, the gaze is more direct. The angle of the head and the light cast the eyes in shadow, making them look hooded, guarded. The eyes are slightly heavier, and the lips, barely turned up in the first photo, are now barely turned down. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” has become the anthem of his generation. Instead of looking openly to the future, he’s practically glaring at it. He bears the weight of his experience in the intervening months, and he knows a lot more is coming.

This shows how much you can see in just the surface of a good portrait. I think the very slight difference in poses say a lot about the large difference in Dylan’s life and status between one photo and the next.

(A brief note: I’ve been looking at the pictures in the book, which are very large and well reproduced.)

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

While I'm working my way through Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946 2004, I thought I'd look at these two portraits of Bob Dylan by Avedon.

The first was taken on November 4, 1963. It's one week after Dylan's first performance outside the Village, where he first sang "The Times They Are A-Changin'" in front of an audience. The location is 132nd St, with the Harlem River and the Park Avenue (Metro North) railroad bridge in the background.

Bob Dylan, Musician, 132nd and FDR Drive, Harlem, New York, November 4, 1963

The pose is casual, the slightly upturned face and barest hint of a Mona Lisa smile show an openness of character. He's wearing a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and workingman's boots. There's a pen in his pocket. The guitar case is beaten up, the background is industrial, literally gritty. He looks young, but not naive; open to experience, and ready to meet it. The clothes, location, beat-up guitar case are all markers of his background. He could be just in from Minnesota.

The second was taken just sixteen months later. It was between the finished production and the release of Bringing It All Back Home, his first record that included a rock band on some tracks. There are of course a lot of differences, but first I want to point out the similarity of pose: Hands in pockets, right knee slightly bent, weight on left foot.

Bob Dylan, Musician, Central Park, New York, February 10, 1965

The first difference I noticed was the clothes. They're no longer working man's clothes. The boots are pointy-toed, the pants straight leg. He's wearing a suede coat. There's no sign of a pen or guitar. And of course there's the difference in location, striking even if you know little or nothing about the socioeconomic geography of New York. The overall picture is much darker, and the light is behind Dylan, not above him.

Here, the gaze is more direct. The angle of the head and the light cast the eyes in shadow, making them look hooded, guarded. The eyes are slightly heavier, and the lips, barely turned up in the first photo, are now barely turned down. "The Times They Are A-Changin'" has become the anthem of his generation. Instead of looking openly to the future, he's practically glaring at it. He bears the weight of his experience in the intervening months, and he knows a lot more is coming.

This shows how much you can see in just the surface of a good portrait. I think the very slight difference in poses say a lot about the large difference in Dylan's life and status between one photo and the next.

(A brief note: I've been looking at the pictures in the book, which are very large and well reproduced.)

Atget
by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2000

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Atget
by John Szarkowski
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2000

One night, in my early 20s, I came across Casablanca on TV. Never having seen it (and this being pre-VHS, let alone DVD), I settled in. Within ten minutes, I couldn't stand it. How did such a cliché-ridden travesty get to be so well-regarded? Within twenty minutes, I got it: this was the source of what lesser creators would turn into cliché. My journey to understanding Eugène Atget wasn't quite so amusing, but it might be more profound overall.

Atget worked for decades in Old Paris, from the late 1880s into the 1920s, making what he called documents for artists. He photographed doors, street tradespeople, windows, architecture, public art, stairways -- whatever artists requested for their paintings, or whatever he thought would be worthwhile. He developed an objective, direct style, sharply focused, which went against the Pictorialist approach of the time.

He wrote very little about his work, methods, how he selected subjects. Even how he numbered and categorized his negatives had to be pieced together by scholars long after his death. In fact, if not for the circumstance of Man Ray publishing some of his pictures in a surrealist magazine, and Atget's work being discovered by Berenice Abbott, who was Man Ray's studio assistant, he might have been completely forgotten. When Atget died, Abbott bought as much of his estate as she could afford.

But now he's not only well remembered, with exhaustive catalogues of his work and scholarly studies, but highly lauded. Every history of photography will include a section on Atget, every book that attempts to study photography from the beginning. And they all laud his work. This left me curious. I wasn't quite getting it. I didn't have the strong reaction to cliché that I had wtih Casablanca, but there didn't seem to be anything original in the work to me.

Work by his contemporaries, and those who came soon after (Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans), thrilled me.

So it was in patiently reading this book that I finally got a handle on what makes Atget great. In fact, it was the picture below that made the first connection to me.

91, rue de Turenne (1911)

What caught my eye was how much the bottom step is worn. Worn through, in fact. Think of all the people coming home, carrying groceries and the burdens of their days, the centuries (literally) it would have taken to wear through the stairs to that degree. I can practically hear the soft tschk of their steps.

It's the vantage point -- close to the right wall, not showing much of the ironwork railing that might be the subject -- that sets Atget apart from the other commercial photographers providing documents for artists of his day. It's the clarity of the image and the prosaic subject matter that set him apart from the Pictorialists. This is how he was a bridge from the Pictorialists to the Modernists.

Another thing that makes Atget so important to photography is the length of time he spent photographing Paris. The nature of the streets of Paris, and trades people in those streets, would change during his lifetime. He would rephotograph subjects, sometimes decades apart, and under different lighting.

His photographs are very still, very quiet. There are rarely people in them (this is partly due to relatively long exposure times). He concentrated on sections of paris that were old when he started photographing, and were soon completley outmoded.

Dorothea Lange: American Photographs, with essays by Sandra S. Phillips, John Szarkowski, and Therese Thau Heyman
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro
Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer by Pierre Borhan, with essays by A.D. Coleman, Ralph Gibson, and Sam Stourdze

You've seen work by Dorothea Lange, even if you don't recognize the name immediately.

She was born in 1895. At 7, she had polio, which left her with a lifelong limp. At 12, her father abandoned her family. At 18, she said she wanted to be a photographer before she'd even picked up a camera. At 19, she apprenticed herself to New York photographers, and took some classes with, among others, Clarence H. White. At 22, she set off on a round-the-world trip with a girlfriend, but they got robbed in San Francisco. She lived in the Bay Area the rest her life.

She got a job in a processing lab, but soon set up her own studio, doing portraits of San Francisco's well heeled and Bohemians. Her work from this period is not particularly memorable. In the early 1930s, her studio work fell off, and she took to the streets to photograph the people she found there. Her accounts of this decision vary. She said sometimes that seeing the people on the streets from her studio window, during the early days of the depression, compelled her to leave the studio. In other interviews, she said that during a thunderstorm, the idea came to her that she should work only with people, whether they could pay or not.

Some of the early photographs were seen by Paul Taylor, an economist studying land-use and farm migration issues. He was apt to use snapshots to illustrate his work, as much as tables and graphs. When he was hired by the government, he asked that Dorothea Lange also be hired as the photographer. This lead to the most fruitful collaboration of either career. She was soon hired by the Farm Services Administration, and spent months at a stretch driving around California and the west, documenting the plight of the displaced farmer and migrant worker.

All of her best known work stems from the years she worked for the FSA, circa 1935-1939. This is where the interpersonal skills she developed as a portraitist came to the fore. Her work is much more personal and connected to the subject than that of the other FSA photographers.

Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940. Resting at cotton wagon before returning to work in the field. He has been picking cotton all day.
A good picker earns about two dollars a day working, at this time of the year, about ten hours.

A Child and Her Mother, FSA Clients. Yakima Valley, near Wapato, Washington, August, 1939

Daughter of migrant Tennessee coal miner. Living in American River camp near Sacramento, California

Migrant Mother almost didn't happen. When Lange took those pictures, she was returning from a month in the field. She said that she drove past the camp at first, but something compelled her to return. The publication of Migrant Mother electrified the country, and lead to an outpouring of aid. And it is a very compelling image.

Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California

The children close, but turned away shyly. The concern and the hand raised to her face. The closeness of the framing, so that everything else is removed but this very moment. This was the final of six frames shot by Lange, a process that with her equipment (a 4x5 Graflex) would have taken several minutes. It has echoes of Christian madonna and child imagery.

The strength of the image is part of why it's remembered so well today, and still used as an icon of poverty and survival. It's one of the most famous (if not the most famous) photographs of the 20th century.

Of three books, Impounded has the best writing, and The Heart and Mind has the best photographic reproduction, spanning all of her career.

The two essays in Impounded concern Lange's documentation of the internment, and the internment itself. It was more horrific than I realized. Whatever standing the people had, whatever generation they were (fourth, fifth, and more), however much money or property they had or business they owned -- it was all stolen from them. The theft amounted to several billion dollars in today's money. Lange spent months working on the documentation, driving all around California, up into Washington and Oregon. The same empathy that connected her to the displaced farmworkers connected her to the internees. That's why the photos were never published during the war.

The Heart and Mind has photos from her early portrait studio days, through the depression era for which she is most famous, and up into the late 50s. There was a period of about ten years she was unable to work due to illness, but in the late 1950s she traveled with Paul Taylor to Vietnam, SE Asia, Ireland, and other places. These photos, too, show the same depth of connection to her subject as all her photography does. I also liked the essay by A.D. Coleman, "Dust in the Wind: The Legacy of Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor's An American Exodus," in which he makes the claim that the design and content of An American Exodus presages the way information is presented on the web, and that photographers and designers could do well to read it today.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Time Exposed

One of Hiroshi Sugimoto's most famous series is single-exposure images taken for the entire length of a movie. In all cases for the Interior Theaters, it looks like he's in the seat directly underneath the projectionist booth. The screen becomes a blinding gateway of potential, and when it becomes time to look away, many architectural details are revealed by the blinding light that would otherwise be hidden. If I'm in an older theater, with appointments and details worth looking at, I love to look around at the play of shadows and the lighting. But these photos, with exposures lasting for an hour or more, reveal different details: the light is unidirectional, and from a source the architect never intended. Whether the examples here were shot in the 1970s or 1990s, many of the theaters are old enough that they still have stages; one still has an organ.

The particular one I just mentioned isn't online that I can tell, but here are a couple examples:

Paramount, Oakland, 1994

Ohio Theater, Ohio, 1980

Of course the screen is going to be completely washed out, that's the point. But to hold all other details shows a great mastery of the medium. My favorite, though is of a drive in:

Union City Drive In, Union City, 1993

...because of the way the plane trails make it appear that the movie is leaking out from the screen.

Sugimoto has spoken about photography as a means of fossilizing time:

Fossils work almost the same way as photography...as a record of history. The accumulation of time and history becomes a negative of the image. And this negative comes off, and the fossil is the positive side. This is the same as the action of photography. So that’s why I am very curious about the artistic stage of imprinting the memories of the time record. A fossil is made over four-hundred-fifty million years—it takes that much time. But photography, it’s instant. So, to me, photography functions as a fossilization of time.

Seeing these theater photographs, the dimension of preservation is added. How many of these theaters still exist?

Time Exposed was originally published in 1995, as the catalog to a German exhibition. It also includes examples of the Dioramas series. When you look at a diorama in a museum, it's obviously and intentionally a construction. But photographing it in black and white, and rearranging the lighting to be more natural, fools the eye and mind. Is this a real scene? We know it isn't, but the abstraction added by the black and white film, and the control that Sugimoto brings to the medium, have to make us pause and think for a second. He applies the same techniques of abstraction and relighting to his Portraits series.

But looking at the website, I discovered another series that I like, Conceptual Forms. Here he takes 19th century wood carvings meant to illustrate mathematical concepts and photographs them as if they were heroic sculpture.

Kuen's Surface: A Surface with Constant Negative Curvature

The object is probably small enough to be handheld, but the photograph makes it look dozens of feet tall.

Lee Friedlander, Self Portrait

Lee Friedlander's self portraits began by accident,

not done as a specific preoccupation, but rather, they happened as a peripheral extension of my work. ... soon I was finding myself at times in the landscape of my photographer. I might call myself an intruder. At any rate, they came about slowly and not with plan but more as another discovery each time. I would see myself as a character or an element that would shift presence as my work would change in direction. At first, my presence in my photos was fascinating and disturbing. But as time passed and I was more a part of other ideas in my photos, I was able to add a giggle to those feelings.

Of these pictures, he's perhaps best known for the pictures in which his shadow intrudes on the frame. New York City, 1966 (first below) and Louisiana, 1968 (second below) are two of the best examples of this.

In the first, his head looms against the woman's back. He is almost a stalker, he must be within a couple feet of her. In the second, he's just a parade observer, one of the few. At first glance, the looming head shape just seems an amateurish mistake, which is exactly the prejudice or preconception he's playing against. But look how carefully composed these photos are: There's no sign of camera in the frame. He's not looking through the viewfinder, he knows the angles of his lens and camera well enough to guess what he's capturing. In an interview, he said "If I am used to the camera and I know a scene, I know where to stop and look, because I am used to what it shows."

Although these self portraits are the more well known, and the ones I knew about before reading this book, the ones I found more intriguing are where he's directly in the image, sometimes quite uncompromising, and always self-deprecating.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1965 he's just in a hotel room. He looks tired, unkempt. Given the wide range of locations and short time span of this book, he was probably on the road constantly. He's said he finds photography to be a great deal of fun, but even that can be tiring.

In Haverstaw, New York, 1966, the camera shadow on the hood indicates it's either very early or very late in the day. I thought of it as early in the day the first few times I looked at it. Early in the day, a full day's driving ahead of him, and already road weary.

But there are lighter moments, as in New York City, 1966. Here he is with friends. He isn't bragging, just showing us that it's not all lonely hotel rooms eternal windshields. Sometimes you can just relax and be with friends. (In the book, you can see the amused expression of the man on the right of the frame easier.)

What he's doing is taking the piss out of the standards of the self-portrait. There's no attempt to make himself more noble, or present himself better than he is. Here he is.

Mr. Bristol’s Barn (with excerpts from Mr. Blinn’s Diary)
John Szarkowski
Harry N. Abrams, New York

You might not know it, but John Szarkowski has influenced how you look at photographs. During the decades he was curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he brought to the foreground such photographers as Lee Friendlander, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, and many others.

After he retired, he returned to his own photography. His own work is nearly the opposite of the photographers above, about as far removed from the snapshot aesthetic, decisive moment, urban, 35mm street photography as it’s possible to get.

Mr. Bristol’s Barn was his first post-retirement publication. It features 33 duotone photographs of an old timber barn on the Connecticut farm he retired to. The barn was built about the time of the Civil War, and followed a construction style old even then. As Szarkowski says in his introduction:

The frame of a timber barn … was made from the trunks of trees, fashioned to a degree of reulartity with ax and adze and two-handled drawknife, and fastened together by mortise and tenon and wooden pegs. There were no standardized parts, and every joint was a special case. The buildings were expensive in terms of the material they used, the time they took to build, and the cost of the skilled mecahnics who tailored them, but this was not understood until something cheaper was available.

Living with the barn for years, Szarkowski had plenty of time to study it, get to see it in many different types of light, all different seasons. These large format, long exposure, low contrast, wide tonal range photographs reveal every detail of the ancient wood. But the details aren’t laid bare, as if on an examination table. They’re brought forward to us, for study, with a fondness and affection. It’s almost as if Szarkowski were standing next to us, and we could talk about the people who built the barn, who farmed the poor land (good for forests, too rocky and rolling for more than subsistence farming). The excerpts from Mr. Blin’s diary add a voice as well. Mr. Blin and Mr. Bristol were neighbors, and may have been acquainted. The diary talks of the hard, never ending work, the distant Civil War, and going to church.

I come back to how different these photographs are than the work he promoted as curator at MOMA. I like these photographs, but find the work of the photographers in my first paragraph more challenging. I want to engage in their dialogue, whether I take pictures like them or not, whether their influence is directly visible in my photography or not.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Mr. Bristol's Barn (with excerpts from Mr. Blinn's Diary)
John Szarkowski
Harry N. Abrams, New York

You might not know it, but John Szarkowski has influenced how you look at photographs. During the decades he was curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he brought to the foreground such photographers as Lee Friendlander, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, and many others.

After he retired, he returned to his own photography. His own work is nearly the opposite of the photographers above, about as far removed from the snapshot aesthetic, decisive moment, urban, 35mm street photography as it's possible to get.

Mr. Bristol's Barn was his first post-retirement publication. It features 33 duotone photographs of an old timber barn on the Connecticut farm he retired to. The barn was built about the time of the Civil War, and followed a construction style old even then. As Szarkowski says in his introduction:

The frame of a timber barn ... was made from the trunks of trees, fashioned to a degree of reulartity with ax and adze and two-handled drawknife, and fastened together by mortise and tenon and wooden pegs. There were no standardized parts, and every joint was a special case. The buildings were expensive in terms of the material they used, the time they took to build, and the cost of the skilled mecahnics who tailored them, but this was not understood until something cheaper was available.

Living with the barn for years, Szarkowski had plenty of time to study it, get to see it in many different types of light, all different seasons. These large format, long exposure, low contrast, wide tonal range photographs reveal every detail of the ancient wood. But the details aren't laid bare, as if on an examination table. They're brought forward to us, for study, with a fondness and affection. It's almost as if Szarkowski were standing next to us, and we could talk about the people who built the barn, who farmed the poor land (good for forests, too rocky and rolling for more than subsistence farming). The excerpts from Mr. Blin's diary add a voice as well. Mr. Blin and Mr. Bristol were neighbors, and may have been acquainted. The diary talks of the hard, never ending work, the distant Civil War, and going to church.

I come back to how different these photographs are than the work he promoted as curator at MOMA. I like these photographs, but find the work of the photographers in my first paragraph more challenging. I want to engage in their dialogue, whether I take pictures like them or not, whether their influence is directly visible in my photography or not.

Helen Levitt, Slide Show
powerHouse Books, New York, 2005

Helen Levitt's early work, in the 1940s, set the bar for black and white street photography. In 1959, and again in 1960, she received two Guggenheim grants to revisit her earlier style using color film. As John Szarkowski says in his foreword:

Her object was to use color neither in a decorative nor in a purely formal way, but as a descriptive and expressive aspect of the subject, as inherent to it as gesture, shape, space, and texture.

This book is actually my first acquaintance with the work of Helen Levitt, so I can't compare her color and black and white work. However, she does integrate the color of the film with the subject. The use of color here feels very matter of fact to me, it doesn't intrude on the subject.

There's a lot of humor to this work. A tall, skinny man stands in the narrow gap between parking meter and sign post, all angles, elbows, and knees. A young child sits nonchalantly in a window, his face covered with yesterday's Halloween makeup. On the cover, three scrawny, bedraggled roosters parade in front of empty rows of new restaurant chairs, still covered in plastic.

The humor bridges the gap between the subject and the viewer. I think her eye is not to sensationalize but to empathize. So that when I look at the picture of two old people, bent with scoliosis, crossing a street in front of shiny new sports cars (all we see are the hoods) I'm not laughing at the old people. I think, "that could be me someday." Her pictures show, as Szarkowski said in his foreword, "the games of children, the errands and conversations of the middle-aged, and the observant waiting of the old."

Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs
Edited and introduced by Sophie Howarth
aperture

Can you talk about a photograph for an hour? Is there enough there to see, to analyze? We have heavily image saturated eyes these days. There are images everywhere, newspapers, magazines, the web, television and movies. Another thing weighing against the single image is the increasing attention to the seriality of photography; that is, how easy it is to make a series of photographs at the expense of the single image.

Given this inundation, is it possible to look at a single photograph the way a skilled critic might analyze a painting, a piece of music, or work of literature?

Singular Images does just that, in eleven essays that span 170 years of photography. With the older photographs, the essayists can examine the historicity of the object: what gives it its provenance, how it has been recognized, forgotten, and recognized again, how the print itself has changed over the years. For the three 19th century photographs, I thought the essayists' opinions were balanced by the recorded history of the image. That history gave me more leeway to accept the opinions of the essayist.

The early 20th century images have slightly less of the weight of history, and therefore I felt a little more comfortable questioning the assertions of the writers. I didn't quite understand Dust Breeding (Man Ray), or A Snicket, Halifax (Bill Brandt). But even these essays added to the photograph for me, opened them a little even if I'm underwhelmed by them.

The essay on Jubilee Street Party, Elland, Yorkshire (Martin Parr) added quite a bit to the individual photograph, and I think opened Parr's photography for me in general. I also thought the essay on The Hug (Nan Goldin) added quite a bit to my understanding of a photographer whose work I do like.

The Nature of Photographs (a primer)
Stephen Shore
Phaidon, 2007

This book about photographs is probably the least verbal of any similar book that I have, yet it's also the most conceptually dense.

The upper left hand corner of each facing page contains a short paragraph or two, rarely more than a few dozen words. The right hand page contains a photograph illustrating that concept. The captions list only photographer, title, and year. I've easily written more words about this book (in my notes) than this book contains.

I kept having to remind myself to slow down when I read it. The writing was so succinct that there was no apparent trickiness of meaning that causes me to read something twice. I had to make myself reread sentences and paragraphs, to get the deeper meaning. And look longer at the photographs, and ask myself: Why this photograph next to these words? Why these two photographs next to each other? Particularly, why Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Still #21 next to a publicity shot of Joan Fontaine?

After a few pages, an effect came over me of sitting in a lecture hall while somebody quietly spoke a few words behind me, and then lingered over the next few slides, giving me time to absorb an image before moving on. I encouraged this feeling because it had me look at the images longer.

Even going as slowly as I did, The Nature of Photographs took less than an hour to read the first time. I felt infused with its voice, the questions it raised and the thoughts it stimulated. I curled up in bed and wondered what a photograph of me would look like, in that position, that location, under that light. Watching Julie comb her hair later, I thought of Willy Ronis.

I've read this book at least twice since the first time, finding specific discussions (for instance, time: frozen time, extrusive time, and still time) and trying to reabsorb it. Even on rereading I've looked up to think "this is a photograph" when pausing.

I read The Nature of Photographs immediately after Criticizing Photographs, so even though they're two vastly different books, they're related in my mind. Criticizing Photographs will have a deeper effect on how I articulate my reaction to and understanding of photographs, but The Nature of Photographs has deepened my understanding and awareness of my photography.

Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images
by Terry Barrett
McGraw-Hill, 2006, 4th Ed.

In the introduction, Terry Barrett says his goal with this book is to help both beginning and advanced students to better appreciate and understand photographs.

To this end, he says there are four basic questions one can ask about a photograph (or any work of art): What is here? What is it about? How good is it? Is it art? These four basic questions reflect four basic activities of criticism: describe, interpret, evaluate, and theorize. These activities overlap and accentuate each other, as when a critic gives a general description of a photo in order to make an interpretation.

Has this book affected how I look at photographs? Not much yet, but I think the effect will increase over time. When I first started it, I thought it was written specifically with me in mind, that it was the most appropriate book I could be reading at the time.

Has this book affected how I look at photgography? Yes, for the better. I can see how curatorial and editorial decisions and critical commentary affect what is considered art photography, suitable subject matter, or worth collecting. For instance, one trend of postwar photography (street photography -- Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand) is the result of curatorial decisions by John Szarkowski. A different curator, making different decisions, could well have resulted in different photographers becoming as much the standard as those three.

Has this book affected how I understand photographic theory and criticism? Yes, again for the better. I can parse out what's happening in a review or critique better than before. Cogent, succinct criticism is more informative; dense, obscurantist criticism is more frustrating. Having read this book, I now want to reread The Photographer's Eye and Mirrors & Windows.

Has this book affected how I take photographs? I hope not. But maybe so. At first I was going to say "When you take a photograph is when you put theory aside," but it's not that simple. Theory might guide your eye to subject matter. Being aware of how and why other photographers approached particular subjects will affect my approach.

Satellites
Jonas Bendiksen
aperture foundation

I arrived in Russia in 1998, at the age of twenty. After two years of living and working there, I made a bureaucratic misstep and was deported. Unable to work within Russia proper, I spent much of the next five years traveling through the fringes of the former Soviet empire, exploring the oblique stories of half-forgotten enclaves and restless territories.

I hadn't heard of any of these regions before seeing the exhibit at PCNW. They're most often unrecognized splinter states of splinter states, making their poor living through drug or gun running. The Ferghana Valley, for instance, was once an important way station on the Silk Road. Stalin redrew its borders intentionally to cross tribal and geographical boundaries, leaving "a seemingly nonsensical series of squiggly lines that disrupted trade routes and clannish power structures." Now those borders facilitate heroin going to Russia and Europe. The good heroin, that is. The bad heroin stays in the valley.

The pictures are uniformly bleak. In the entire book, there are three pictures that have smiling people. In one a woman dances alone during a private moment at an unexplained party. In another, a government official holds a small missile, his backdrop the mural of an important battle for the region. In the third, one boy smiles to another at a service at an underground mosque.

Most of the pictures are blurry, with crooked horizon lines, as if grabbed. Perhaps the most sharply focused and traditionally composed image is of Aghdam, an abandoned Azeri city in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The victorious Armenians were dismantling Aghdam, using it to rebuild their own nearly destroyed cities. "Now, all that was left of Aghdam was a mini-Hiroshima of a landscape, the starkest war memorial I had ever seen."

The uncorrected color shifts of the interior and night photographs add to the bleakness. There is little or nothing to redeem the human condition in any of these pictures. I'm all for art challenging comfort zones and preconceptions, but I sometimes wonder how much photojournalism actually contributes to change, and how much it contributes to a horrified voyeurism. I kept thinking how wealthy I was, in comparison to any of the people in this book.

“An American Exodus”

"An American Exodus"

Two Photos of Bob Dylan

Two Photos of Bob Dylan

Eugène Atget

Eugène Atget

Dorothea Lange

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Lee Friedlander

John Szarkowski

John Szarkowski

Helen Levitt, Slide Show

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

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