Archive for October, 2007
The Halloween Dress
We live beneath a bird highway. Every year thousands of Sandhill Cranes use the highway to fly back and forth to summer breeding grounds and winter feeding grounds. They mark the changes of summer to autumn and winter to spring for us. We use them to keep track of our lives. 
We heard the first cranes of this year’s autumn today and thought of these fine words about cranes from Aldo Leopold:
When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia which underlies and conditions the daily affairs of birds and men.
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. The quality of cranes lies, I think, in this higher gamut, as yet beyond the reach of words.
Off to the Grand Canyon
We’re off to the bottom of the Grand Canyon for a week of hiking, camping and reflection. Which is just another way of saying that no new entries will be posted for a week. The internet does not reach to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Nor does electricity either, except at Phantom Ranch and we won’t be going there.We hope to spot a California Condor or two, some other interesting birds and no Grand Canyon rattlesnakes.
We’ll be taking a small, light camera and hope to return with a few good photos. But we’re not holding our breath. The Grand Canyon is huge and does not reduce well to two dimensions. Even the eleven dimensions of string theory seem too few to encompass the place and very few photographers can ever hope to do it justice.
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A note of sadness: Last week I reviewed the wonderful blog “Fluffytek.” Then came the news that Lin of that blog is suffering from an inoperable brain tumor. Apparently it is not life-threatening; yet anyway. Richard, her husband, angrily weighed in about the disease and the lack of comments extending sympathy and they now – jokingly I hope – say that they only have seven readers left. I took no umbrage and am proud to be number 8 and I hope that every reader of this blog, both of you, will check in on Fluffytek and they will be back up to 10 readers. One of the things I liked about the blog before Lin’s bad news was that it did more than skate along the surface of life. I expect it will go deeper now and be even more rewarding. A sniff of mortality will do that to a person. Especially one like Lin who already was deeper than most. In the Mexico of her Frida Kahlo they say, “Que le vaya bien,” which literally means no more than, “Have a good trip.” But its true meaning is much deeper. It means have a good, rewarding life no matter what is thrown at you and so to Lin and Richard we say, “Que le vaya bien.”
Middle-Aged Model’s Lament
From the New Yorker comes this animated cartoon.
I promise to post the first cartoon I find about middle-aged photographers.
Buttocks?
My reader recently pointed out that I’ve yet to post one of my own photographs on this blog. (Except for the header.) She knows that I am resisting the blogger’s fatal flaw: Narcissism, but she thinks I may be over-reacting.
So, without further ado. . . .
Snapshots and Art
Snapshots as Art
In addition to an Edward Hopper show and the J.M.W. Turner show, the National Gallery of Art in Washington has a show of anonymous snapshots taken in the United States from 1888 to 1978. Sadly, the National Gallery still maintains one of the most boring websites you’ll attend this year and they hardly ever post more but a few of the works of art on show. The Gallery should do better. It is the National Gallery after all. It would be nice for those of us who live in the hinterlands to see a few more samples.
Typically, for their web page, I could find exactly one of the snapshots which I took the liberty of posting. But you can read about the show here. It is up from October 7 through December 31, 2007. 
Fortunately the Washington Post does a better job and it has a small gallery of some of the snapshots here. It also has an excellent critical review of the show by Paul Richard which you can and should read here. If you lack the time to read the article at least take a look at the WP gallery. Following Richard’s notes, look in the photographs for the blurred motorcycle, the gun, the unexplained puff of smoke, the Mom hiding behind the chair and the red cup.
Now, just for a moment, I am turning the blog over to Mr. Richard who makes several interesting points in his review:
Art implies an artist. Great art implies a great one.
So what are we to make of anonymous photos? Do they fail the “art” test because we do not know who the artist was? Or was the photographer even an artist?
Photography was once dismissed as overly mechanical, as not quite real art, but those days have long passed. Just pick up any standard history of photography and riffle through its pictures. The aesthetic of the snapshot — its suddenness, its artlessness — is part of what you’ll see. It’s there in Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Gary Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange. It’s key to street photography.
Yes, but does street photography become art only if we know who the artist was and can therefore judge the artist’s intent? What if the photographer was just lucky? Had no idea what he was doing?
But when it comes to gauging snapshots, how does one decide? What makes a snapshot good? What makes a snapshot bad? Selecting good Vermeers is not much of a problem. It’s a lot harder with photographs that are anonymous and common. By 1977, Americans were snapping nearly 9 billion pictures a year. And this exhibition surveys not just one year, but 90.
These are good questions, especially for an art form for which the mechanical tools are available to anyone. Give me paint, brushes and canvas and I’ll produce something that is highly unlikely to be art. Give me a camera and I at least have a chance at art. I suppose that you could put a set of paints, brushes and a canvas before a monkey and it would paint something but it would not be art. Give the monkey a camera and it will probably learn to work the thing. And what if a beautiful photograph accidentally results. Is it art?
Adobe’s Damn Dam, Part II
Harumph. I see that Adobe, hard on the heels of its release of Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, has also just released Elements 6. I haven’t looked at the new Elements 6 yet but woe betide those people if it has yet another DAM to learn. DAM, for those of you blissfully ignorant of such matters, stands for “Digital Asset Management” and I have railed before about Adobe’s different versions. You can read that post by clicking on this link.
I actually prefer the prior version of Element’s DAM over anything else in the Adobe line including Bridge and Lightroom. That is probably close to apostasy and I hope to be forgiven.
Actually, I may commit even further apostasy after checking out the newest version of Elements. I may decide that all a serious photographer needs for a digital darkroom is Lightroom and Elements. Imagine having a full digital darkroom without paying $700 for Photoshop. In fact, I imagine that Adobe is thinking the same thing. I got an email from them this week offering a special price cut if you buy Lightroom and Photoshop at the same time. I imagine they may be trying to forestall my apostasy. It may have occurred to them that the Lightroom/Elements combination will cost only about half of what Photoshop alone costs.
Then someday – and I don’t expect to live long enough to see it but perhaps my descendants will – Adobe will put everything a photographer needs into Lightroom and be done with it.
Of course, when they do, they will probably include some brand new damn DAM to learn.
Ruth Bernhard Photos in Art Show
Faithful readers — there is at least one, I think — will know that I am a great admirer of the work of Ruth Bernhard. Here is my earlier post about her. I am always casting about, looking for a reason to post another of her photos. I found an excuse just today when I discovered a show of modern photography at the Harn Museum at the University of Florida. According to the museum’s website, they are showing:
215 works by 77 international 20th century Modernist photographers including multiple works by masters such as Ansel Adams, Weegee, Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Ruth Bernhard, as well as less familiar innovators Jan Saudek, James Nachtwey and Marion Post-Wolcott.
The show is on now and runs until January 6, 2008. I am certain it will be worth the time to see if you live in the vicinity or will be traveling there.
Good. Now that the excuse is out of the way. . .
That is enough for one day. Stay tuned. I am certain to find more reasons for more of her photographs.
Fluffytek Blog Review
I admit to being an Anglophile. How can you not love the British who brought us Shakespeare, Churchill and J.M.W. Turner ? Back in the days when the dollar was healthy and Americans could afford to travel to Europe, I went to the U.K. as often as I could. I feel safer and more at home on the streets of London than I do in Manhattan. So perhaps it is no surprise that the best blog about photography of nudes that I have found in my perambulations around the web comes from Great Britain.
The blog is Fluffytek and never mind about the name. There is nothing “fluffy” about it. Just go to the blog and wade in. It is written by a husband and wife team who live in England. Lin, the woman, is pushing 40 but still models and does most of the writing. Richard is the photographer and he also writes.
The entry for Thursday, October 4th is a good example of why I like it so much. Lin writes about one of her personal heroes, Frida Kahlo. Lin, who occasionally alludes to her own chronic pain, writes movingly about Kahlo’s. Separating Kahlo’s pain from her art would be like reversing the law of entropy; it just isn’t possible and Lin doesn’t try. What results is a fine capsule of the essence of Kahlo and her art. You could read an entire biography of her and not get much closer to her than you can in three or four minutes of reading the blog entry.
The day before the Kahlo post, readers were treated to a brief essay about the “photographic eye” and the continuing battle Lin and Richard are having with their son’s art teacher who doesn’t admit photography into the family of art.
Lin, who admits to approaching 40, also writes about modeling. Her insights into a model’s role in producing a good photograph are especially useful, given the dearth of good blogs by models. There aren’t many. In fact, there is a dearth of writing by photo models period. Edward Weston’s model and wife Charis Wilson is about all that is worthwhile. Lin reaches deeply into her own psyche and, from time to time, explores her own motivations; which, at least to this male photographer, seem insightful and wise.
They live in County Norfolk in England. Norfolk has given the world much, including Boudica, the Celtic queen who led an uprising against the Roman occupiers in 60 or 61 A.D., Admiral Lord Nelson and our own Thomas Paine. Nelson once wrote, “I am myself a Norfolk man . . . and glory in being so.”
Norfolk is meaningful to my family too. My father lived there for a year during WWII. He was a B-24 pilot with the 44th Bomb Group which was stationed at Shipdam. You can read about Shipdam here. If you scroll down that Wikipedia page you will see a photograph of a rainy Medal of Honor ceremony in progress. That medal was being awarded to Col. Leon Johnson for his heroics in the low level raid in August 1943 on the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. My father flew that mission as well and his was the only other plane in Johnson’s wing that made it back safely. I am reasonably confident that my father, who was a photographer, took that photo because he had the negative and several other photos taken from the same spot in his possession when he died.
But my family connection is not why you should read Fluffytek. You should read it because it is a thoughtful, rewarding place to spend a few minutes each day. You’ll learn some photography, some quantum mechanics and some humanity.
Oh. I almost forgot. The photography is excellent. All the photographs in this entry are theirs. Check out their galleries here and here.
[I know this is a blog about photography but I'm going slightly afield today because I am in a state of high dudgeon about Justice Clarence Thomas of the United States Supreme Court and his latest book. We'll get back to photography tomorrow. You can read some of the press coverage here and here.
I see that Clarence Thomas is having another go at Anita Hill. Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a man spurned. According to Thomas – in his new book – she was “a mediocre employee” who had a job in the federal government only because he gave her one. She was “touchy” and overreacted to slights, real and imagined. She wasn’t that “demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed.” She was “asked to leave” her job as an associate attorney at the Washington law firm where she worked before going to work for the federal government.
In earlier years I made some unsuccessful sexual overtures at women myself – never anything improper mind you – but I’ve always forgave the women for rejecting me. Actually, I never blamed them in the first place. Sexual partners should be a matter of free choice and I was skinny and had a funny looking haircut so their refusals always seemed rational to me. Of course, none of them ever tried to keep me off the Supreme Court. I might be ticked off if they did that. But it hasn’t been a big issue yet; an unbroken chain of presidents from Richard Nixon forward have kept me off the Court without any help at all from innocent bystanders.
Which is what Anita Hill was: An innocent bystander. Clarence Thomas lied his way on to the Supreme Court.
How do I know that? Several reasons actually but they all boil down to one: For the better part of two decades I have represented women in sexual harassment lawsuits and I have heard Clarence Thomas’ excuses, denials and defenses from hundreds of men. There is no originality in any of them. That is one of the guaranteed qualities of a sexual harasser: A complete lack of originality. The ones I’ve met thought of themselves as decent men but most weren’t. They would have been rapists but they lacked the physical courage for that. They were not people you would want to have to dinner. I suppose the worst thing I ever said about one of them in a trial – after catching him in innummerable lies – was when I turned to a jury and said, “Look at him jurors. Do you really think that if you invited him to your house for dinner, he would help with the dishes?” Sexual harassment, like rape, is about power; not sex, and men who think themselves powerful don’t do dishes. Or windows.
Harassers always claim that their victims are “mediocre” employees, hypersensitive to imagined slights, and sexual sluts in disguise out to entrap innocent male supervisors and co-workers. Sometimes those vixens wear low cut blouses to inflame the innocent males or they “mislead” men into thinking that they want their necks rubbed when what they really want is to have their breasts manhandled. The women are never demure or innocent in the eyes of their harassers.
The men we sued were always lying. But don’t take my word for it, take the juries’ words. We’ve never lost a jury verdict and, in all that time, I only refused to represent one woman because I thought she was exaggerating. The juries always believed the evidence and the women. Mostly the women underplayed what happened to them out of a sense of decency.
But the point is: The men all talked and acted just like Clarence Thomas and their stories were improbable on their face and melted in the heat of the evidence. If Anita Hill was such a lousy employee why did Thomas hire her twice? For the hoped-for sex or because she really was a good employee? He loses no matter how he answers that question. If that Washington law firm fired her, why did the partner in charge of her employment make it clear that she was a fine employee and was not asked to leave? If she wasn’t a demure conservative religious woman why did Oral Roberts University hire her as a law professor and why did Liberty University ask her to stay when it bought Oral Roberts University?
The harasser always attacks the woman first. She was, “always coming on to me.” If they see that isn’t working, they degrade her work performance and, when they see that approach failing too, charge her with misunderstanding and overreacting and being “too sensitive.”
I bet if you had Clarence Thomas over for dinner, he wouldn’t help with the dishes either.
