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if you miss me…
or if you are interested in seeing the work of emerging photographers, I’m also writing here. But I promise I’ll be back here soon, maybe even sooner than usual!
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strategic withdrawal
The nature and tone of recent news and election coverage made me dig up David James Duncan’s collection of essays and short stories, My Story As Told By Water, for the passage strategic withdrawal. (DJD is required reading for anyone who lives, lived or wants to live in the Pacific Northwest but really is good reading for anyone.) In particular, I was searching for these words:
strategic withdrawal: any refusal to man our habitual political or psychological trenches or to defend our turf, for though the turf may be holy, our defenses, when they grow automatic, are not
any refusal to engage with that testy or irritating or ideologically loud or theologically bloated person in your life – you know the one: the agitatedly racist or religionist, politically powerful or compulsively processing pedant, co-worker, parent, friend, or (God help you) spouse whose opinions are too poorly formed, too loudly held, or just too incessantly divulged to allow you to achieve peace in the presence of so much clanging banging editorializing mental machinery
As I re-read more of strategic withdrawal, I was reminded of the work of a professor and mentor, Philip Perkis, a New Yorker, not a northwesterner, but someone who possess the extraordinary ability to go anywhere in the world and take pictures that are fearless, compassionate and beautiful, and about living and seeing in the broadest sense of both those things.
I’ve spent days agonizing about how to write about the connection I felt between this writing and Perkis’ photographs and I’ve decided that I won’t do it, for fear of selling the work short. The best thing, and for now the only thing, is to tell you to pick up The Sadness of Men.
Or, you can see what some of his other students have said about him.
As I spent time re-visting The Sadness of Men, I thought of another man I was recently introduced to, Father Tom, a priest who has dedicated himself to educating and feeding people in Haiti because it needs to be done, not for the church (really). And one late evening on the Jersey Shore (not an epicenter for political or philosophical discussion, I know, but doesn’t the ocean cause us all to wax a little poetic?), he said something like this: in all his time working in Haiti, he began to realize that he felt, “less white, less male, less Catholic.”
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Tags: David James Duncan, Philip Perkis, The Sadness of Men
Yesterday I was informed that it was the Autumnal Equinox and that it was the day of perfect balance and harmony between light and shadow and day and night. And, if I believed that the stars would save my life, that would have been the day… (sigh…)
And even though I don’t believe that the stars are going to save my life, today, walking home across the Williamsburg Bridge, I read these things on the pavement: “you’re beautiful,” “your job is not your life,” and “my god I’m so happy!” The first two were a result of a stencil, the work of an artist (consoling a girl/boyfriend or fulfilling some sort of public service?), but the last one was just scrawled across the sidewalk, making me wonder, who, in a spontaneous fit of joy, grabs a can of spray paint, without any sign of premeditation or planning (unlike the stenciler)? But it also made me think about Jason Evans who takes a photograph of something that makes him happy every day. His site, The Daily Nice, is about his “enthusiasm for looking and being.” It’s a fun site; photographs and taking photographs do make people happy, myself included.
This photograph is not from The Daily Nice but is from Jason’s portfolio site, The New Scent. I choose it because I think it is something that Jason saw while walking and looking down and thinking (like I was today). And maybe he was thinking about art and photography, and funny things that other people say, and other people, and seeing and being and loving. Maybe he was thinking about all the things that save your life when you know that astrology won’t.
Filed under: art, black and white, outside, photography, seeing | 7 Comments
Tags: Jason Evans, The Daily Nice, The New Scent, Williamsburg Bridge
closer than you think
When you share a bench with someone, even if it is a long bench and they are at the other end, if they are talking, and you lean back against the planks, you feel the hum of vocal cords.
Underground, JoAnn Verburg, 2005
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to care for nothing else
One of the things I’ve been looking most forward to seeing this fall in NY is the Giorgio Morandi retrospective show at The Met. It was a happy surprise to come across a Vija Celmins quote in Peter Schjeldahl’s New Yorker review of the show, “Tables for One.” Celmins’ (an all-time personal favorite artist) and Morandi’s works are groundless, ambiguous, and dreamy, for being so firmly rooted in this world. The similarities between the artists don’t end there; their subject matter, attention to paint/graphite application, and color choice (or lack of) all overlap. From all of these things that are so not conceptual and so not exciting for a lot of reasons, they both make/made some pulse-altering art.
Celmins said this about Morandi’s work (above):
“projected an extraordinary set of grays far into the gallery and into my eyes. On closer inspection, I discovered how strange the painting was, how the objects seemed to be fighting for each other’s space. One could not determine their size or location. They appeared both flat and dimensional, and were so tenderly painted that the paint itself seemed to be the subject.”
Morandi, as Schjeldahl notes, painted as if nothing else in life mattered.
For Celmins (below), painting/drawing is, “not really what I would call a ‘brilliant’ idea. It is an act of trying to reach some physical presence beyond idea.” Celmins, I think, paints and draws because she realizes everything else matters.
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Tags: Giorgio Morandi, Vija Celmins
everything that rises
The Twin Towers were never part of the NYC skyline that I know. I moved here in 2006, well after they fell. The Chrysler Building is instead, my landmark; it usually hovers in my peripheral view as I walk home on the far side of the East River. It is lit up in the evening and glows in memory when I am not here. As a memory, it mimics Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photograph, Chrysler Building, from his Architecture series to the point that I am unsure of which I saw and knew first, the building or the photograph.
Somewhere along the line, my memory of the building became inextricably linked with this photograph of the building. I mean this to the extent that the actual Chrysler Building has become mythological. Looking at it, I get the same feeling I got when standing in the Parthenon and realizing just how the Greeks believed in their gods and feeling that I could have (and maybe did in that moment) believed in Zeus and Athena and Demeter and Dionysis; all as marble and stone continued to crumble.
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Tags: Chrysler Building, Hiroshi Sugimoto
An email from a favorite aunt about sailing and sleeping under the September stars in San Francisco with another favorite aunt reminded me of this photograph by Hannah Whitaker:
Which in turn reminded me of summers long, long past in Colorado, when my sister and I were allowed to run out late and wild in the spirit of The Dinky Bird, inspired equally by this Maxfield Parrish print and the poem of the same name by Eugene Field, in a hand-me-down book.
To follow-up on my long ago post on wanderlust, I’m now wondering if all summers are going to pass as quickly as this last one did, with less and less time for sun and sand, sweat and salt, stars, sunrises and sunsets. And worse, I worry that my nostalgia and everyone else’s nostalgia for such days is being replaced by a commercial version of the same feeling. Something more like this advertisement that I saw last spring in a movie theater and was pleased to laugh at, in chorus, in the theater when the Louis Vuitton logo appeared, and saw again this weekend before Vicky Christina Barcelona. I am relieved at least, by the laughter because I fear irony a bit, (although I am sure that irony was the cause of laughter in the theater, for better and not for worse). In particular, I think it is this love/hate uneasiness that makes Hannah Whitaker’s photographs interesting.
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rootlessness
Today’s NYT article, “The American Wanderer, in All His Stripes,” about Obama’s “enigmatic air… fractured (personal) geography and family and wanderings,” and Americans’ equal fascination and repulsion with wanderers or drifters caught my attention for several reasons.
Partially inspired by a father who roamed for much of his young adult life and lived to tell bedtime stories about it, my drifting began when I left Colorado for college on the west coast, studied abroad and traveled Eastern Europe. A victim of Chief Niwot’s curse, I returned to Colorado but shrugged the tethers of a lease for four years so that as soon as I was financially able, I could flee south to Mexico and Central America, or at least road trip through the greater west, and was in and out of the state’s square borders more often than I can account for. Most recently, I left CO for Brooklyn, NY and have been back and forth ever since. In New York, I relished Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, fantasizing about the west, fearing and loving his nightmarish outlaws in Blood Meridian and revering the foot-traveling heroes of The Road, post-apocalyptic survivors blessed and cursed with the burden of “carrying the fire.”
What brought me to New York in the first place was my pursuit of a career in the arts, as a photographer, a practice that also undoubtedly contributes to the tendency to float and flit. Photographers are generally, a wandering bunch. The history of photography is punctuated by infamous tales of travel and travelers: Timothy O’Sullivan’s westward ho, Weston and Modotti’s time in Mexico, the seminal introduction of Franks’ The Americans by Kerouac.
Sand Dunes, Carson Desert, 1867 by Timothy O’ Sullivan
Contemporary photographers continue as well to pursue grander horizons. In particular, Ryan McGinley’s I Know Where The Summer Goes illustrates summer wanderlust.
Question Mark, 2007, by Ryan McGinley
Justine Kurland has an undeniable inclination to pack up her life and her son and travel across the country in pursuit of the scenery for her photographs.
Sleeping Mermaids, 2006, by Justine Kurland
These photographs illustrate the inherent duality of the vastness of the world (and in these three images specifically, the American West) and the smallness of the roaming human, which might possibly enforce the unsettling nature of rootlessness for many Americans. A professor of American Studies notes, “You might say Americans are conflicted within themselves… There is a long and sentimental tradition of celebrating the small town, as the right kind of place to grow up and become morally solid… [there is] no less strong a tradition of regarding the small town as airless and imprisoning.”
I will most likely always identify more with the uprooted and restless crowd but as I am slowly getting older and my wanderlust has made me miss weddings and birthdays and births (!), the growing up of friends, and the growing closer of family, I am hoping more and more to be settled, in one place, for at least, awhile. It is those things, I think, that makes us feel not quite so small.
And I have to say, to bring this rambling post back to where it started, that in that time, I hope Obama is also settling in at the White House.
Filed under: black and white, photography | 3 Comments
Tags: Barak Obama, Justine Kurland, Ryan McGinley, Timothy O'Sullivan, wanderlust
gathering wool while on the road
Summer in Colorado means road-tripping and camping… and in my car, with a busted CD player and no iTrip to speak of (or listen to) that also means a lot of NPR…
On my way home from a wedding weekend of camping underneath the moon and stars and looming Teton Range in Jackson, Wyoming, with a pretty amazing, intelligent, and fun group of friends, my blissed-out state was interrupted by the intensity and wisdom of Poet Laureate, Kay Ryan. The All Things Considered interview/reading began with Ryan reading Home to Roost.
HOME TO ROOST
The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small —
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost—all
the same kind
at the same speed.
I was reminded of the poem when I saw the above image, a photograph by Nicolas Wollnik, on J Colberg’s blog Conscientious which always provides worthy musings on fine art photography among other things. Despite the almost instantaneous link in my mind between the image and the poem, I have reservations about posting the two together, primarily because of the way Ryan works, very slowly. While I often like the pairings of poems and photographs, it’s weighty work to be sure that each is commensurate with the other. I wonder if that’s why photographer Alec Soth often left blog readers with just a poem on Fridays and no photo; although, Jen Bekman has made a few fine matches on her site, Personism.
I was struck by Ryan’s way of working and writing poetry which is similar to the way I work as a photographer. She called it “wool gathering” and remarked that it takes hundreds of pounds of wool for an ounce of good language; it’s inefficient and takes lots of time. But the resulting works are charged, simple, and not overly elaborated.
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Tags: Kay Ryan, Nicolas Wollnik, NPR
It’s no coincidence that a series of events over the course of this week has prompted me to consider what it means to be an American today, within the country, as well as in the world at large. As these events unfolded, Paul Fusco’s photographs from Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train, illustrated my thoughts. The photographs, RFK FUNERAL TRAIN – REDISCOVERED are on view at Danziger Projects until the end of the month. If you’re not in NYC and want to see more, go to The New York TImes‘ article and slide show narrated by Fusco.
Fusco’s last words in the slide show are striking: “The emotion… that appears… for me, emphasized the breaking up of the world… emotionally… America came out to mourn, to weep, to show their respect and love for a leader… someone who promised a better future. And they saw hope pass by, in a train.”
The reason these images resonated with me is that they represent instead the endlessness of optimism in this country. Grief (like the moving train) is fleeting and hope eternal.
Reinforcing the endurance of optimism in spite of numerous reasons to feel unpatriotic right now:
- Colorado Shakespeare Festival’s Woody Guthrie’s American Song - the threat of natural disasters, upheavals in unpredictable economies, the plight of migrant workers, the unjust loss of lives among those fighting in our military and the desire to support those individuals but not the war they’re fighting abroad, are all contemporary American issues visited in the musical.
- Tom Friedman’s introduction of his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America at the Aspen Ideas Festival, heard via a local radio broadcast. The Huffington Post also has a summary of the presentation that includes some video excerpts. Friedman explains, as the title insinuates, that America must lead the green revolution to save our environment and our economy in addition to our standing as moral and ethical leaders in the world.
For me, Guthrie’s songs emphasize the responsibility we have to each other, to fellow Americans. Friedman’s stance reiterates our responsibilities to the world abroad. Listening to the words of both left me with the indelible sense that all is not lost. Past and current reasons to feel unpatriotic are not permanent and change is possible which I guess, is the best that I could hope for on the 4th.
Filed under: art, exhibitions, photography | 4 Comments
Tags: Paul Fusco, Tom Friedman, Woody Guthrie
