Walker Evans and Photography

By David Walsh

Walker Evans (1903-75), whose work is currently (2000) on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was an American photographer who produced some remarkable images, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. He is perhaps best known, rightly or wrongly, for a series of photographs he took of tenant farm families in Hale County, Alabama in 1936. Of those probably the most famous are several 8 x 10 portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs, dark hair pulled back, tightlipped, against unpainted wooden clapboards. There are not many other photos one can think of that “stand” for a moment in history and are so widely assumed to have summed up the situation of a suffering population as these do.

Looking at Evans' work makes one think about documentary photography as an art form, a complex subject.

The invention of photography was made public in Paris in August 1839. A recent history of photography published in France defines the medium, somewhat pompously, as “an ensemble of highly disparate images which possess in common the fact that they were created by the action of light on a sensitive surface.”[1]

In the decades following photography's invention a considerable debate took place as to whether the medium represented a new art form or a threat to art. The poet Charles Baudelaire, in 1859, for example, suggested that photography was one of those “purely material developments of progress ... [which] have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius.”[2]

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin described this earlier dispute as “devious and confused.” He observed that the “primary question—whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art—was not raised” in the controversy.[3] And not only art. The impact of photography on society as a whole is a subject that ought to be studied. Just to take one side of the matter, the ability of masses of human beings to see, for the first time, likenesses of their leaders, of social conditions, of the horrors of war and so on, had to have a “leveling” and demystifying, i.e., a generally radicalizing, impact.





Naturally, photography, like any other act, takes place under definite historical circumstances. The radical art critic John Berger, in a 1978 essay inspired by Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977), referred to the 1920s and 1930s as “the period when photography was thought of as being most transparent, offering direct access to the real: the period of the great witnessing masters of the medium like Paul Strand and Walker Evans. It was, in the capitalist countries, the freest moment of photography ...”[4]

Berger goes onto suggest, basing himself apparently on Sontag, that “The very ‘truthfulness' of the new medium encouraged its deliberate use as a means of propaganda. The Nazis were among the first to use systematic photographic propaganda.” It is one small step from there to an indictment of photography itself. Berger cites Sontag: “A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to simulate buying and anaesthetise the injuries of class, race and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information.... The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them” (emphasis added).[5]

While the radical critics of the late 1970s were made gloomy by the apparent ease with which the ruling elites absorbed and used image-making (Sontag, of course, has subsequently become a strong defender of “capitalist society”), no such mood was provoked among the postmodern philosophers of subsequent decades. Photography, because of its apparent impersonality, seemed ideally suited to analysis by these "playful" thinkers. In the words of one, “the photographic surface ... offers little reassurance of the founding presence of the human subject. The absence of the brushmark or dribble that constitutes the index and trace of the expressive body, and of the human essence to which it plays host, therefore makes the photograph particularly resistant to appropriation within the authorial discourse of history.”[6]

Modern-day relativism has a field day with photography. Yves Michaud, professor of philosophy at Paris University and author of The Crisis of Contemporary Art (1997), writes: “A photographic image is manufactured, produced with the help of instruments. All we can say about it is that something has left a trace there—but the causes cannot be read in their effects; the former are limited to causing them [Wonderful!—DW]. A photograph is the imprint of something—of what is another matter. Something which realizes not its truth but simply its value as a trace or relic. A photograph is not a ‘true image,' it is the trace of something which has disappeared.”[7]






Michaud goes on: “Fundamentally, the whole problem of the photographic image is that it ‘seems' to be transparent. It ‘seems' to provide us with the actual things, while really giving us only a relic. Objects seem to push their way through the image, but we only see, to use [photographer] Gary Winogrand's words, ‘what they look like when they are photographed.'”[8]

But is there any relationship between how things look at the instant they are photographed and how they actually, objectively look? This is the sort of "naïve" question Michaud and others can't be bothered with. Because photographs are produced by a machine, because the material world is constantly changing, because the camera sees things the eye cannot, because there is no absolute identity between the object and its photographic imprint, the relative identity, within which there are absolute grains of truth, is obliterated as well. This path leads nowhere.

Photography as Art

What can we say, even if somewhat tentatively, about photography and art?

It would seem logical that the documentary artist-photographer, the only category of photographer considered here, must have the most highly developed internal pictorial sense of any artist. Or, to put it another way, only the photographer possessing such a sense might be considered an artist. The photographer, after all, is least aided directly by art in his or her work, or, one might say, he enters into artistic production having overcome the greatest obstacles. (By “art” in photography, I don't mean the self-consciously picturesque, but images highly charged with meaning.)

As soon as the novelist has typed a sentence, or the painter laid down a brush stroke, he has produced art, for better or worse, he has invented something in the form of an art object, that is new and separable from himself. The performer (dancer, actor) turns himself into something of an art object.

The camera, however, is not an artistic device per se; it more or less obediently, depending on the skill of its operator, reproduces what is visibly available to its mechanism. The history of photography cited above suggests that “the photographic process could also be defined as the utilization of an automatic machine for transmitting information, a recording apparatus along the same lines as the gramophone, invented a few decades later.”[9] (To borrow crudely a notion from economic life, the camera does not create new artistic value, but merely transfers it. The sole source of artistic value is the individual human subject.) Great numbers of people successfully take photos. There has to be some specialized, conscious effort on the part of the individual, the result of thoughts and feelings worked out quite independently of the camera, but nonetheless entirely dependent on it, to transform his photographing into artistic work.

We say that a painting is neither a means to an end, nor the "after-product" of a finished thought process, but the object in which thought and feeling are embodied, that a painter thinks and feels, no matter with what degree of difficulty and struggle, with his brush. As a rule, the individual who systematically applies paint to a canvas has undertaken some organized form of training, has entered into a particular relationship with art history and with materials, has assumed and accepted the role of “artist,” with all that implies. No such complex historical-intellectual relationship is involved in the elementary act of taking a photograph. To put it concretely: one assumes a person painting on canvas to be an artist; one makes no such assumption confronted by an individual taking a photo, even with expensive-looking equipment.

The art critic Meyer Schapiro noted: “All renderings of objects, no matter how exact they seem, even photographs, proceed from values, methods and viewpoints which somehow shape the image and often determine its contents.”[10] This, I think, is critical, including the use of the word “somehow,” which suggests the nonlinear character of the process.

From this point of view, one would have to say that in documentary photography the critical aesthetic act takes place—bearing in mind that the artist is limited by the objective world he confronts—in the shaping of the image in the photographer's brain, which the camera then records and preserves. The artistic act and the opening and closing of the shutter, in other words, are distinct moments, although it will not seem that way to the individual taking the picture. Photo-taking is always an attempt to capture an image that has already been seen and perhaps disappeared. For a number of reasons perhaps, photography is more bound up with memory than any other art form.

The fact that the artistic and mechanical acts are discrete operations has a number of implications. The painter's brush is an extension of the hand. The viewfinder is likewise an extension of the eye; but the picture-taking mechanism is not. It is something harsh and unforgiving, estranged from the photographer. One might go so far as to say that the relationship between the artist and the camera is an antagonistic one, that the photographer does not capture the truth in images with his camera, but despite it.







The camera sees things, first of all, the eye does not see. “Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.”[11] By its very nature the camera picks up unforeseen aspects of external reality. Because photography is an art form centrally involving a machine, it is the most accident-prone. The interesting question is: can the photographer somehow [that word again!] intuitively direct the camera's tendency to include elements that he can't possibly have foreseen in such a way that it works to the advantage of his artistic purpose and deepens his work?

Photographs can be fascinating for a variety of reasons. A book on the history of photography will inevitably include many works of purely socio-historical or scientific value. It's possible to linger over uninspired photos of exceptional subjects. Almost any yellowing photograph has its appeal. Likewise anyone who has raised a camera to his eye more than a few times has had the good fortune to take accidentally striking, even “artistic” photographs, with remarkable lighting effects and so on. There must be more “near-art” in photography, private and public, than in any other medium. Serious artistic photography must involve something more than happening upon a riveting subject or relying on chance. How do you, in fact, align aspects of external reality, or put yourself into the proper relationship to them, so they reveal the truth about themselves?

Millions of people take photographs at some point in their lives; only a relative handful write novels or paint pictures. It's far less time-consuming to take a photograph than to write a novel, even a bad one. Let's assume, however, that there are only a limited number of great photographs or series of photographs, as there are of great novels. This means, since the time required physically to take a photo (leaving aside the problem of the dark-room) is a matter of a split second, that years and years of preparation, including of course the taking of thousands of less satisfying pictures, must go into the creation of a great photograph. What does this preparation entail? One wants to know, for example, how it was that on an August afternoon in 1936 Walker Evans had put himself in position to photograph the Burroughs family.

"Particularly American”

Critics like to describe Walker Evans' photographic work as “particularly American.” By which they mean to refer to his apparently direct, succinct approach. There is a grain of truth in this. It would be difficult to imagine Evans or Edward Hopper or Howard Hawks or Ernest Hemingway having been born in any other country, but such characterizations have an extremely limited value. If his style is so indelibly “American,” then why didn't many Americans take pictures in that manner before Evans, and why, by and large, aren't they doing it now? The historical epoch must have played some role.

Evans was born in 1903. He grew up, in other words, with modern technology. In 1903 the Wright Brothers first successfully flew a powered airplane, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company and the first coast-to-coast crossing of the US by automobile was completed, in 65 days. Bolshevism emerged as a distinct tendency in 1903 and Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Evans was born in St. Louis, moved with his family to a suburb north of Chicago about 1907 and eight years after that to Toledo, Ohio. By that time T.S. Eliot, another St. Louis native (born in 1888), had permanently settled in England. For Evans' generation, as appealing as Paris was in particular, pursuing a career as an advanced artist in America no longer offered such nearly insurmountable difficulties. By the middle 1920s the US had a far less provincial atmosphere.

When he traveled to Paris in 1926 Evans wanted to be a writer. He admired Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Huysmans; among his contemporaries, Gide, Joyce, Hemingway, Cocteau. He studied and wrote in French. He tried writing short stories, unsatisfyingly. His serious interest in photography began after he'd returned to the US and was living in New York City. Evans took pictures of the parade in honor of flyer Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

James Mellow, in his 1999 biography, cited Evans' later comment about these early days: “I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily, because I thought that this is a substitute for something else—well for writing, for one thing ...” Mellor noted that Evans once described his photography as “a semi-conscious reaction against right thinking and optimism. It was an attack on the establishment. Wanted to disturb them. I could just hear my father [an advertising executive] saying, ‘Why do you want to look at these scenes, they're depressing? Why don't you look at the nice things in life?'”[12]

One of the first photos that struck Evans, while going through magazines in the public library, was Paul Strand's Blind Woman (1916), although he had little use for Strand's work as a whole, and very ambivalent feelings about the latter's mentor, Alfred Stieglitz, whom he felt was too much of an aesthete. Evans set out, like so many American artists of the time, to do hardboiled work. It reminds one again of Meyer Schapiro's comment that “After 1913 we discover more often in this country a type of painter [or photographer or writer] who is both an inventive, scrupulous artist and a tough.”[13]

1930 was Evans' first year as a professional photographer. It was also the year, through photographer Berenice Abbott, that he was introduced to the work of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), the great French photographer who had made it his business to document Paris in some 7,000 photos. (Atget also pursued political activities as a lecturer at workers' schools and a follower of the Socialist press.) During these years Evans befriended, among others, the poet Hart Crane, the painter Ben Shahn and art patron Lincoln Kirstein. He began to be exhibited and entered into New York's artistic circles. Ezra Pound commented favorably on his photos.

The grip of the Depression tightened. Evans recorded Victorian architecture at the suggestion of Kirstein in 1931 and sailed to Tahiti, taking photographs for a group of wealthy tourists, in 1932. He was regularly exhibiting at New York galleries by this time.

A Certain Coldness

He had already taken such deservedly famous photos as Couple at Coney Island, New York (1928), Girl in Fulton Street, New York (1929), Roadside Gas Sign (1929), Posed Portraits, New York (1931), Torn Movie Poster (1931), Main Street, Saratoga Springs (1931) and Parked Car, Small Town Main Street (1932).

Evans liked to take pictures of buildings, objects, debris. In the first place there was a certain white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant coldness in him. To be provocative he could write in his journal, in 1931, “I am a Fascisti and I think the human race should be kicked around a great deal more than it is, and that I should do the kicking.”[14] At the time he traveled in left-wing circles and one of his best friends was Ben Shahn, the painter and photographer who was close to the Communist Party.

The quasi-misanthropic streak had roots as well in certain social phenomena. Evans came from a relatively affluent, suburban Midwestern background. He subsequently attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and (briefly) Williams College. A photograph of the Williams freshman class in 1922-23, which includes Evans, suggests an insular, privileged, largely homogeneous world, almost a prewar, turn-of-the-century world. Evans rejected all or most of that, but is it likely that his response to the growth of large-scale industry, the rise of the great cities with their ethnically diverse populations and the political and social conflicts of the 1930s would not have had some ambivalence to it?








Evans began collecting picture postcards in the late 1920s. He assembled a portfolio for Fortune magazine in 1948 entitled, “Main Street Looking North from Courthouse Square,' carrying 18 examples of postcards dating from 1890 to 1910. Douglas Eklund, in a catalogue essay, notes about one, Bank Square, “Five Corners,” Fishkill-on-Hudson, N.Y.: “Everything in this golden-age image exists for him in an uncorrupted state ...”[15]

Evans furiously denied that there was an element of “nostalgia” in his own photographing of small and rural communities, and that's no doubt true in the narrow sense. However, the notion that late nineteenth century America was a more manageable and coherent, less corrupt and vulgar place and the longings attached to this notion have an objective basis for certain segments of the population that can't be dismissed so easily.

To a certain diffidence toward other people, women in particular (not to be equated with a lack of success), which might have encouraged a predisposition for photographing objects, one must add the fact that artists of Evans' type and generation saw many reasons to drive out of their work everything ornate, picturesque, sentimental. His rejection of Stieglitz and what he perceived to be pictorialism was quite firm and quite final. He once made a list of things and subjects not to be photographed, and they included nudes, “motherhood” and “anything ever anywhere near a beach.”[16] In objects Evans saw human thought and activity materialized. Photographs of nature bored him, but “I am fascinated by man's work and the civilization he's built,” he told a group of students late in life.[17]

There is something too to the idea that for Evans, like Cézanne, objects in a still life were the equivalent of human figures. He may have felt that he was less at the mercy of accident and could better determine or set out his ideals of art and human personality when he photographed things. He described the postcard mentioned above as the “epitome of Yankee utilitarianism, in subject, in execution, and in mood.”[18] His sharply focused photographs are ceaselessly polemicizing for certain values: restraint, precision, detachment, the irreducible.

Evans liked to photograph signs, graffiti, posters. Sometimes this produces an irony that is a little heavy-handed, like his photo of workmen loading a giant sign reading “Damaged” onto a truck early in the Depression. Should we read his recurring interest in photographing words as an indication of frustrated literary ambitions, or its opposite, a way of making clear, in a playfully hostile manner, that he now had the upper hand over written language? Either tendency would indicate that literature remained an essential model.

For many of the photographs Evans made for the federal Department of Agriculture's Resettlement Authority (RA), renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, in the mid-1930s, “he used the longest focal length, which both enlarged the size of the subjects within the frame and, by telescoping near and far, helped him establish a dialogue between foreground and background elements ...”[19] In addition to this deliberate “flattening” of the subject matter when he took long shots (of cities, neighborhoods), Evans often posed or otherwise captured people against walls and building fronts, or simply photographed walls, building fronts, billboards. Nearly everything is shot from the front, hardly any photos are taken from an oblique angle. These are the sorts of arrangements that suggest the “clean,” orderly two-dimensionality of words on a page.

Girl in Fulton Street, New York and Parked Car, Small Town Main Street are remarkable photos. In the first, the “Girl” in a cloche hat (tight-fitting, bell-shaped), with only one lock of hair peeking out, stands in the center of the picture in profile, looking off to the left. Fulton Street is in downtown Manhattan, in the financial district or on the edge of it. Three men in fedoras, none of whose faces can be seen, are in the foreground behind her. Above their heads one sees a sign hung out on a flag pole across the street, “Fulton Billiard Parlor,” other signs (“To Let,” “Cafeteria” and parts of two more) and a crane. The girl, with the look of a “flapper,” wears a fashionable coat with a fur collar. She has an intense expression on her somewhat hardened face. She's leaning, in the right of the photo, against a store's glass window that makes a right angle at the corner of the street. The glass forms a strip that reflects a jumble of images.

Mellor cites David Wolff in New Masses on the photo (which appeared in an exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art, “Walker Evans: American Photographs” and a book by the same name in 1938), proving that the publication was not entirely dominated by Stalinist blockheadedness. Wolff noted: “The face itself has a tragic and almost ferocious sensitivity, as if it were a kind of self-portrait of the artist.” About Evans' work in general he wrote that it revealed “a certain hideous miscellaneousness of American life.” Wolff noted the subject matter of Evans' photos: “the used cars abandoned on a field; a confused and helpless back room, revealed through an open door; the tires, tubes and spare parts displayed on the front of a garage; and the magic advertising words, the names, the signs, ubiquitous, ugly, meaningless, and powerful.”[20]s

In Parked Car, Small Town Main Street [http://www.masters-of-photography.com/E/evans/evans_parked_car.html] a young man and woman (brother and sister, husband and wife, lovers?) are seated in an open sedan, looking at the camera. Immediately above their heads in the photo a truck, a blur, drives by. She is closer to the camera and certainly seems to be at the center of the photographer's attention. Part of his face is hidden by the frame of the windshield. The pair seem to be economically comfortable. The hair is pulled back from both of their faces, which are entirely exposed to the photographer's gaze. The sweater she's wearing has been pulled off her shoulders down to the elbows to reveal a white blouse with some kind of ruffle in front. There is something old-fashioned about her clothing and the arrangement of her body; her hands are neatly folded in her lap. The most striking feature of the photo, to which one's eyes return again and again, is the look of anguish on the young woman's face. It's the only element, but an unmistakable one, that indicates crisis, personal and social.



There's little question that Evans thrived on the human and material manifestations of crisis. For all the ironic, somewhat defensive disdain he expressed throughout his life toward political activism and activists (the problem of Stalinism, as always, complicates the matter), the truth is that he came to life as a photographer in the Depression years, hibernated more or less from 1945 to 1964, and was revived somewhat in the radicalized milieu of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It's probably true that for an artist like Evans life presents a more intriguing face at moments when people and social processes are unsettled. This is bound up with his sensuality too in the sense that he was most attracted, it seems, to women about whom there was something restless, “available.”

In 1933 he did some important and interesting work documenting social life in Havana for The Crime of Cuba by left-wing writer (of Dewey Commission infamy) Carlton Beals. The photographs, of pimps, dock workers, the unemployed, are remarkable, but Evans, perhaps inevitably, remains too much of an interested tourist-observer; the distance here does not work to his advantage.

He began taking pictures for Fortune magazine in 1934, including a small assignment on a “Communist Party Summer Camp.” In 1935 he took some 500 photos for “African Negro Art” at the Museum of Modern Art.

Working for the Resettlement Administration

Evans first went to work for the Resettlement Administration—part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal—on a trial basis, in June and July 1935 taking photos in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. In October he was hired on a full-time basis by Roy Stryker, head of the agency's photographic unit, to record the social conditions of the Depression.

In the spring of 1935, when a job with the RA seemed possible, Evans wrote in the draft of a memorandum: “Mean never [to] make photographic statements for the government or do photographic chores for gov or anyone in gov, no matter how powerful—this is pure record not propaganda. The value, and, if you like even the propaganda value for the government lies in the record itself which in the long run will prove an intelligent and farsighted thing to have done. NO POLITICS whatever.”[21]



Stryker's unit produced some 270,000 photographs, by Evans, Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans and others. The photos had propaganda value as far as the Roosevelt administration was concerned. Stryker supplied free pictures to Fortune, Life, Look, Time and the New York Times. In line with the Stalinist policy of supporting Roosevelt, Shahn, a party sympathizer, designed an exhibit of RA photographs for the 1936 Democratic Party convention.

In late October Evans began his photo-taking expedition in Pennsylvania. He spent time in Bethlehem and Pittsburgh, as well as smaller towns. While in Johnstown he wrote the following note about working conditions, one of his few overt social comments: “The hotel chambermaids in the best hotel in Johnstown get $9 a week without lunch or carfare and contribute to community chest by threat of loss of jobs.”[22] He traveled on to Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana. He took remarkable photographs in the black districts of numerous Southern towns, including Vicksburg, Mississippi. Mellor notes: “His politics drew him to the Negro quarter [in New Orleans], and he made many photographs there. But he also savored the street life, photographing toughs (white) on a street corner, prostitutes at their profession.”[23]

One of his more memorable Vicksburg photographs, involving one of his favorite devices, is of a black man, in working man's clothing, in front of a billboard bearing larger than life faces of smiling white movie stars (Maureen O'Sullivan most notably). On the last leg of this trip, in the spring of 1936, Evans returned to Alabama, then traveled on to Georgia and South Carolina.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In the summer of 1936, Evans was granted a leave from the RA to work on an assignment with 26-year-old writer James Agee for Fortune magazine—whose editorial policy had temporarily taken a leftward turn—on tenant farming in the South. The work the two men produced was ultimately rejected by Fortune and became the basis for the renowned Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Agee's overheated prose is too rich for my blood, but Evans' photos have stood the test of time.

Evans had scouted Hale County, Alabama the year before. He and Agee were looking for “a single sharecropper family that would serve as model for the whole condition of the tenant farmer in the Depression South.”[24]

In late July in Greensboro, Alabama, Evans met farmer Frank Tingle and two of his kinsmen, Bud Fields and Floyd Burroughs, who worked on adjacent leased farms. Evans took the majority of his photographs in Hale County in and around the four-room home of Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs. [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/fsa/gallery.html]

Evans and Agee spent several weeks with the Burroughs family. “The family owned nothing—not their home, land, mule, or farm tools, all of which they leased from their landlord. Burroughs was a ‘sharecropper' or ‘halver'; at harvest time he had to give his landlord half his cotton and corn crop and pay off any other debts incurred during the year for food, seed, fertilizer, and medicine. In 1935 he had ended the year only twelve dollars in debt, which was almost a miracle because at the end of 1934 he had owed his landlord eighty dollars.”[25]

For the portraits he took against the cabin walls, “Evans placed his camera extremely close to his subjects, so close that it recorded their crow's-feet as well as the grainy patterns in the unpainted pine clapboards behind them.” He made four photographs of Allie Mae Burroughs, recording different facial expressions “ranging from bemused cooperation to brooding anger and resentment.”[26]

Evans had clearly served his artistic apprenticeship. He had translated his aesthetic sense, first developed in literature, into photographic language. He later observed about the other RA-FSA photographers, with the possible exception of Shahn: “I look at those other photographers and I see that they haven't got what I've got. I'm rather egotistical and conceited about that. I knew at the time who I was, in terms of the eye and that I had a real eye, and other people were occasionally phony about it, or they really didn't see.”[27]

As for his social views, this comment, also made in later years, probably sums them up relatively accurately: “The problem is one of staying out of Left politics and still avoiding Establishment patterns. I would not politicize my mind or work.... The apostles can't have me. I don't think an artist is directly able to alleviate the human condition. He's very interested in revealing it.”[28]



By the time he photographed the Burroughs family, Evans had created for himself the proper intellectual and aesthetic frame of mind. The artist's attitude toward the family members is one of the decisive elements or themes of the series of pictures, and it is an exemplary one. Evans had shed enough of his diffidence to work his way much closer to his human subjects, without losing his own independent and critical stance.

The photos of Allie Mae Burroughs in particular are sympathetically taken, but their aim is not to elicit the sympathy of the spectator; they have a certain sensuality, without seeking to evoke sensuality in the spectator. Evans had traveled some distance from Girl on Fulton Street and Parked Car, as remarkable as those photos are, and not simply in terms of subject matter. There is something self-serving about the anxiety in the faces of the two women in those earlier photographs, as if the artist were really saying, “They're anguished without me. I could save them from their unhappiness.”

His emotional maturing intersected no doubt with the political and social crisis. In the situation of the Burroughs family he had found a far greater tragedy, although the expressions of Floyd and Allie Mae betray neither anguish nor self-pity. In Alabama Evans had discovered something larger than himself and his career or emotional needs. Of course precisely at the moment the artist puts aside his pettiness and self-absorption, ironically, he plays the most indispensable role. Despite Professor Michaud, the most conscious and worked-through photographs do demonstrate a certain transparency. Or, to paraphrase the Soviet critic Aleksandr Voronsky, the most transparent manner is at the same time the most intellectual.

Evans was able to create such a “marriage of his own mind with the object before him” that he gave something essential to his subjects.[29] The Burroughs family members are not, in these photographs, objects of social consciousness. What is most revolutionary, if one may use this word, about the photos is that the family members are clearly presented as the subjects or potential subjects of history. There is nothing about their oppressed state, Evans' photos suggest, intentionally or otherwise, that prevents these people from understanding who or what they are.

Apparently the Burroughses understood or guessed a good deal about the radical social purpose of the literary and photographic work. Years later Allie Mae Burroughs told interviewers that the “big people” in the area told her and her husband that Agee and Evans were “spies from Russia, and that they was trying to get all they could out of the United States. I don't know what spies does, dear, but anyway we knowed that they wasn't going to hurt us, and they didn't. I don't know why they'd say such things about them. They just didn't know them was all... Afraid they might tell us some way to get by, tell us some way to make a better living, so we wouldn't have to dig it out with them, you see. It was the landlords mostly.”[30]

When Evans returned from Alabama in September 1936 he went back to work for the RA. In December he set to work researching some 6,000 glass plate negatives of the Civil War that had been acquired by the US government from the great Civil War photographer Matthew Brady in 1875. In January Evans went south again to photograph flood victims in Arkansas and Tennessee. He was cut loose from the federal agency in March 1937. The official explanation: “Services no longer needed.”

After Fortune turned down the tenant farming essay and photos, Agee spent four years turning the manuscript into a book. The authors also struggled to find a publisher. Houghton Mifflin finally came out with the work in 1941, but the World War had broken out by this time and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men hardly made a dent in public consciousness. The book was reissued to considerable success in 1960, five years after Agee's premature death.

Evans continued to take remarkable photographs (the New York subway series, “Labor Anonymous” in Detroit), but the onset of postwar prosperity and stagnation took its toll. In 1945 he became a full-time staff photographer for Fortune, in 1948 the magazine's Special Photographic Editor. He worked for Fortune for 20 years. This sounds like a prison sentence to me. He took to drinking heavily, got divorced and remarried during this period. In 1955 he took a series of photographs of pristine tools (crate opener, tin snips, pointing trowel, wrench) against white backgrounds. In 1962 he photographed street debris. He collected road and advertising signs.

After Evans went to work teaching at Yale University in 1964 he seemed to revive somewhat. He believed that art couldn't be taught, “but that it can be stimulated and a few barriers can be kicked down by a talented teacher, and an atmosphere can be created which is an opening into artistic action.” Mia Fineman, in her catalogue essay, discusses his teaching methods: “Evans diligently noted his students' interests and projects in small looseleaf notebooks, but he gave no assignments, rarely talked about photography directly, and almost never discussed technique. Instead, as [then graduate student Alston] Purvis recalled, ‘he seemed to hover about the subject like a circling hawk.' He engaged his students in freewheeling conversations that touched on music, films, travel, printed ephemera and signs, mutual acquaintances, shyness, French literature, history, and golf...”[31]

In 1971 a major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art. In December a smaller version of the same show was held at the Yale University Art Gallery. In the text accompanying a group of road signs Evans made the following point: “The photographer, the artist, ‘takes' a picture: symbolically he lifts an object or a combination of objects, and in so doing he makes a claim for that object or that composition, and a claim for his act of seeing in the first place. The claim is that he has rendered his object in some way transcendent, and that in each instance his vision has penetrating validity.”[32]

During the last few years of his life Evans took photographs with the Polaroid SX-70, including a series of traffic arrows on the asphalt of an intersection in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. He died April 10, 1975. The current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum is the first complete retrospective of his work.

Notes:
1. A New History of Photography, edited by Michel Frizot, 1998, p. 11.
2. Art in Theory, 1815-1900, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 1998, p. 667.
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, 1977, pp. 226-7.
4. John Berger, “Uses of Photography,” About Looking, 1980, p. 48.
5. Berger, pp. 48-49, 55.
6. Neville Wakefield, Postmodernism: The Twilight of the Real, 1980, p. 25.
7. A New History of Photography, p. 736.
8. A New History of Photography, p. 737.
9. A New History of Photography, p. 16.
10. Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art,” Modern Art, 1982, p.1 96.
11. Benjamin, pp. 236-7.
12. James R. Mellor, Walker Evans, 1999, p. 76.
13. Schapiro, “The Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show,” Modern Art, p. 173.
14. Mellor, p. 143.
15. Douglas Eklund, “‘The Harassed Man's Haven of Detachment': Walker Evans and the Fortune Portfolio,” Walker Evans, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, p. 124.
16. Mellor, p. 553.
17. Mia Fineman, “‘The Eye Is an Inveterate Collector': The Late Work,” Walker Evans, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, p. 132.
18. Eklund, p. 124.
19. Jeff L. Rosenheim, “‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is': Walker Evans and the South,” Walker Evans, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, p. 76.
20. Mellor, pp. 379-80.
21. Mellor, p. 256.
22. Mellor, p. 282.
23. Mellor, pp. 288-9.
24. Mellor, p. 309
25. Rosenheim, pp. 88-89.
26. Rosenheim, p. 89.
27. Mellor, p. 281
28. Mellor, p. 308
29. Wood and Harrison, p. 661.
30. Mellor, p. 326.
31. Fineman, pp. 132-3.
32. Fineman, p. 134.s

www.wsws.org

Photographs available at The Walker Evans Project:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/fsa/welcome.html

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Walker Evans

Sally Mann's Immediate Family: The Unflinching and Unafraid Childhood

October 27, 2006 by Valerie Osbourn

In the fall of 1992, a traveling exhibit opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. The collection was called "Immediate Family", and it was by a young and lesser known photographer by the name of Sally Mann. The images, taken from 1984 to 1991 detailed the complex childhoods of her three children; Emmet, Jessie and the youngest, Virginia. At the time of the first gallery opening, Mann was unaware of the media attention she would attract, and the controversy that her work would stir up. To her, they were little more than tender, maternal photographs of her children.

Yet to others, they were child pornography, and the mark of an irresponsible mother. Sally Mann's "Immediate Family" shows us the sensuous and sometimes disturbing side of childhood. The controversy that "Immediate Family" stirred up is a direct reflection of the times in which it was produced, and says more about the adult viewer than of the child subject. Sally Mann chooses to explore the concept of childhood and "growing up" using a variety of the sensual, reality and the fantastic; all through a maternal eye.

"Immediate Family" is a collection of photographs taken in rural Virginia, where the children, and Mann herself, spent their childhoods. Mann photographed the children and the landscape through a massive 8 by 10 view camera, staging elaborate portraits that still lie within the realm of possibility. Mann states that these photographs are "of my children living their lives here too. Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictitions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things that every mother has seen" (Mann) In most of the images, the children appear nude, or partially nude.

They posture, as children do, but through a combination of suggestive titles and lack of clothing the images take on a more overtly sexualized appearance. Many have hastily labeled this as indecent, and consequently, something they would rather ignore.

The sensuality in Mann's work is unavoidable. She sees the innate sexuality of her children where others would shy away from it. She glorifies it. In the image entitled "Popsicle Drips", we see a young, male torso, stained with liquid dripping down his lower abdomen to his thighs. His hips are sensually thrown to the side, and his arms are fully out of view. Upon first glance, it is an incredibly disturbing image, for two reasons. One, without the title, this liquid substance could be anything. My first impression of it was blood, and the second was feces. When reading the title, it makes a bit more sense, but one has to wonder, how did the popsicle drips get down there?

It opens up an entire line of questioning on how staged this image really was. Secondly, this image is the only one in the entire body of work that details male full-frontal nudity. This comes as a shock to those who were not expecting it, and it causes more of a discomfort than that of the full-frontal nude female. This image is highly provocative in its subject's pose, and the added popsicle drips adds an element of touch and tangibility for the viewer. Gender is an issue that many people bring up when dealing with Mann's work.

The image's meaning changes when the artist is a woman, and the subject is male. It has the tendency to become distinctly more sexual, and in turn, comes more under fire than the female/female exchange. Emmet, the only male of the three children, is seen much less provocatively in the series than the girls are. When Jessie and Virginia are naked in bed, he appears with shorts. While the girls are busy posturing, he is only staring at the camera, almost resentful in the way that he is being depicted. Even in the almost sad titled "The Last Time Emmet Modeled Nude", we still only see him from the waist up, he genitals obscured by swirling water.

This photo "respectfully solemnizes a pre-adolescent boy's newly awakened modesty, emblem of his loss of innocence and lingering vulnerability" (Boulanger). This image, above all, shows the modestly and uncertainty that Emmet felt about his modeling. In an interview that an older Jessie Mann gave to Aperature magazine, she tells how Emmet is dealing with the pressure that he is put under from the photographs of his youth. "Emmet is completely daunted by it. He doesn't know what he wants, so he backs away from the whole thing" (Jessie Mann). This feeling is easily discernable in the images of him, and can explain why he appears nude much less than the girls.

Another overtly sensual image is "Dirty Jessie". We see Jessie, who couldn't be more than six or seven, lying vulnerably on the grass. Her legs are spread wide and her hands are placed over her nipples; obscuring them. She wears only panties and rubber galoshes. The shoes are partially kicked off, making her legs appear detached and broken. She appears so vulnerable and so frail, yet her gaze is so enticing. The image is taken from above, objectifying her. Her gaze falls directly into the lens as if beckoning the viewer to come join her. The name again suggests something sexual and playful; "Dirty Jessie". This image becomes the most sexual due to the positioning of the camera above her, and the semi-modest touching of her nipples.

Jessie poses in many other of the most provocative images in this series, and seems to do most of the posturing. She appears in another of the most sensuous images entitled "Jessie at five", where a game of dress up becomes a nude model session for the camera. Jessie is shown from the waist up, two other figures next to her, but thrown in the shadows. One of them is Virginia, Mann's youngest daughter, who appears to be covering her face in an act of modesty. Jessie poses in a way that one would not expect a child to do. It is a pose of a much more sexually mature girl than that of a five year old. Jessie wears a pearl necklace and earrings, along with lipstick and blush.



The title is shocking in that this girl looks as if she could be twelve or thirteen, modeling for a fashion magazine. The image plays off of the concept of age, and what it truly means to be a child. Jessie obviously is, but she has made herself up to look much older, and she flaunts for the camera with a centerfold gaze. Jessie Mann comments on these actions most articulately, saying that "There are so many levels to childhood that we as a society ignore, or don't accept. Rather than just saying it, she (Sally Mann) was able to capture it with photographs. It's easy to discount these things unless you can really see them in the kids' eyes, or see it in their actions" (Jessie Mann).

To depict what childhood truly is, Mann utilizes reality in a select few of her images. However staged this reality may be, she is dealing with what being a child means; and the fiercely private nature of bed-wetting, chickenpox and bloody noses. One image that seems to stand out from the rest in terms of reality, is the aptly named "He is Very Sick". It shows a very young Jessie and Emmet in a hospital room, sitting on a bed with whom is presumably their grandfather, lying in it. The old man reaches his hand towards the camera, letting it clasp the rails of the bed. Jessie leans her head against it, staring tragically at the camera. Emmet is slightly out of focus, and the look on his face looks more like a feigned sadness than a real one. His arms are crossed defiantly, and he pulls his head away from the camera.

The old man in bed is shrouded by light, making his face barely visible. These are the moments that most families go through, and they are the ones that no camera-happy relative would be caught dead capturing on film. They are tragic and denied, and I can hear the mother's words attempting to explain what is happening to grandpa to her young children. "He is Very Sick". Emmet does not seem to understand why he is being photographed, and he is presumably trying to hide his sadness. Jessie seems to be too young to understand that these are very private moments, and that they are not generally photographed. This image brings Mann's work back into the realm of reality, and makes it familiar for viewers.

"The Wet Bed" is an image that falls somewhere between the real and the fantastic. The subject matter is a very real and frightening issue for children, yet the composition of the image takes it to a dreamlike state. Beautiful nude Virginia is seen sleeping, sprawled out on the mattress without a care, her quilt kicked off of her. It is a perfect depiction of childhood until one reads the title "The Wet Bed". The eye instantly darts to the stain permeating out from under her, and she becomes a vulnerable and victimized subject. She becomes the child that pees in bed, that is ashamed of what she has done. The bed floats in the shadows, becoming the only highlight in the photo. It is a reflection of Virginia's sleeping, dreamy state, and it is brought back to reality through the darkened urine stain on the sheets.

The ambivalence towards the ugliness of the wet bed creates a whole different type of beauty, one that can only be shown through blatant reality. Another easily looked over detail in the image is the doll towards the bottom of the image, partially in the light. It lies on the ground, and mirrors Virginia's sleeping state. This is an image that most mother's see when they have toddlers, and Mann chose to bring her private world to the forefront of the public. This hasn't sat well with everyone, as some think that the private world should stay that way, even concerning art. "Certain photographs have concerned critics, as has the transferal of the ‘private' family imagery into the public domain" (Fletcher).

"Damaged Child" is another reality based image, in which Jessie appears with a very swollen right eye. Her hair is cropped short, and her sexless face is determined only by the frilly dress that she wears. Her face is the only thing in focus in the image, and it appears to be jutting out towards the viewer. She wears no smile in the image, and she looks sad and helpless. While other mother's are busy bragging about their child making the soccer team or winning a beauty pageant, Sally Mann is busy showing the less flattering side of motherhood. She is showing the maternal need to tend to her wounded child, and is not concerned about the beauty of it. This is real life and she is not afraid to show it.

Jessie Mann feels that this was her way of showing her love for them, through the capturing of their lives on film. "She has a hard time letting us know how much she loves us. But I've also realized that each one of those photographs was her way of capturing, if not in a hug or a kiss or a comment, how much she cared about us" (Jessie Mann). Capturing such reality of motherhood and childhood on film reveals an uncanny look at what a child is, and how they at once need a mother incessantly, yet still push her away to develop their own identity.



Mann also tends to lean towards the fantastical image; the fiction based in reality. The landscape and the lighting provide a dreamlike setting in which the children reside. "Winter Squash" is a perfect example of the use of the fantastic in Mann's images. A reclining Virginia is depicting next to a decrepit toy horse, a staple of childhood. She is surrounded by uprooted squash, all glowing with the winter light. The light playing off of the figures produces a glowing quality, and makes the image seem more dream-like.

Virginia is shown with her eyes half-lidded, and her arm between her legs, modestly covering herself. She looks serene, and is transformed into a iconic Madonna like figure, her body free from blemish or scar of any kind. The toy horse is lying down in the dirt, its paint chipping. If the horse has been discarded, what does this say about Virginia's childhood and innocence? This image deals with what a child sees, versus what an adult sees. Mann uses this theme often, mostly in the photos that deal with the fantastic. She transports us into an imaginative world that often disappears after childhood has.

"Hayhook" is another good example of Mann's use of the fantastic in "Immediate Family". The image is of the adults in the family lounging on the porch, while a young Virginia watches her sister hang by her hands from a hay-hook. The image is very neutral, not utilizing much contrast, except where the hanging Jessie is concerned. She glows a perfect white, a stripe down the center of the image. It is easy to forget what is going on elsewhere in the photograph, because the nude and highlighted figure of Jessie demands so much attention. The adults are all facing away from her, ignorant to what the children are doing. Jessie hangs, her head thrown back in apparent ecstacy. She is all alone in the image, yet is surrounded by adults.

Childhood is often made up of this, and many children feel isolated in their emotions and their presence. In this image, Mann uses a obviously posed and fictitious image to represent a very real issue that children deal with everyday in a world of adults. "Yard Eggs" also depicts the loneliness and isolation of childhood. It shows a much more mature Virginia sitting in the bushes, her long curly hair entangled in the branches. She holds a straw hat filled with eggs, and her eyes are shut dreamily. She is all alone in the picture, and is behind a fence between her and the house. Her hair blends perfectly into the branches, mirroring its organic shape. This is not a picture that any mother would come across, and it is obviously highly composed. Mann chooses to depict her child in this way to show how lonely childhood can be. Her whimsical yet sad images transcend reality to reveal deeper issues, and to give her children a voice.



"Immediate Family" is all about showing what really makes up a child and a childhood. Although Mann is composing the images, she lets her children have their own voice, and it is easy to see each of their personalities through the images. The fact that the work was created over many years suggests a sort of narrative; three children growing up and attempting to discover themselves and their sexuality. It is most notable in images of Jessie, where she seems to be on the threshold of childhood and womanhood. She stands on the precipice, yet is undecided (Ferrer).This happens everyday, and the fact that Mann chose to photograph it should not be grounds on which to deem her an irresponsible mother. She always made sure they were comfortable with what she was doing, and the adult Jessie recalls what happened previously before the work went on display. "When Aperature published ‘Immediate Family', Mom and Dad sat us down, and we had a family meeting. They asked, ‘Are you going to be okay with this?'" (Jessie Mann).

Mann brings to the forefront what other mothers wish to hide, and this deeply concerns some critics. Though she is glorified by some, her unflinching view of childhood has become infamous to others. This is much more about the current socio-political climate than it is about the actual images. Novelist Ann Beattie commented on Mann's work, saying that "These girls still exist in an innocent world in which a pose is only a pose-what adults make of that pose may be the issue" (Ferrer). The issue of children's sexuality has also been argued in response to Mann's work.

"What adults understand as the sexuality of children is always defined by the adult world; in this view, childhood is not fixed but culturally produced" (Edge, Baylis). ""Immediate Family" needs to be considered within the cultural and social climate that produced it; an America which was busy legislating to prevent Federal Funds being used to promote, disseminate or produce material depicting sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children or individuals engaged in sex acts"(Fletcher). Pedophilia is a very real fear in today's world. When images of this type, no matter how innocent, are displayed to the public, it is always possible that they will be deemed inappropriate. Child molestation is a frighteningly real issue that most would choose to ignore, and stamp out anything that even slightly resembles it.

Mann's depiction of her children's real emotions and sexuality frightens and disturbs many. "The reception of her work reflects contemporary concerns about child abuse and the nature of childhood" (Fletcher). Though she produces many beautiful works of art, she still falls under the blade of many, through a projection of their own insecurities onto her work. Many mothers would like to view their children through themselves, denying them their own voice and stealing from them their sexuality and emotions. Mann refuses to do this, and faces the problem head on through the work of "Immediate Family". Through the use of the fantastic, the sensual and the real, she lends us an insight into what childhood may really be about, and questions where the line between children and adults begins to blur.

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Sally Mann

Untitled, from At Twelve

By Dana Cox

Sally Mann has been quoted as saying, "Art's role... is almost nefarious. It's to challenge expectation. To push a little bit, whether that's aesthetically, politically, or culturally (McQuaid, p.1).”

Sally Mann is an artist who became well-known for the controversial photographs of her three children, Jessie, Emmet, and Virginia. She was born in 1951 in West Virginia and still lives there with her husband today (Price, P.1). Mann’s inspiration for her photographs has always come from her surroundings. Whether photographing the majesty of West Virginia or capturing the innocence of her children in film Mann does not seek out interesting subjects, they seem to come to her. Which, is not to say that Mann does not put a significant amount of thought into her art. She captures both spontaneous portraits and orchestrates pre-planned sittings. In fact, Mann often sketches out her ideas for photographs before shooting. This leads viewers to assume that Mann considers the symbolism of her work, adding depth to each image. Mann also prefers to work with antique black and white film cameras because she values the imperfections that are inherent in older photography methods. Each photograph Mann takes has a character and a style that is distinctly Sally Mann.

Damaged Child, 1984

Damaged Child was created in 1984 and was Sally Mann’s first portrait of any of her children. Mann was inspired when her daughter came home from a friend’s house covered in gnat bites, giving her a swollen face (Woodward, p.3). The portrait was at first spontaneous, but Mann had her daughter pose in the same position the next day. It became an obsession for Mann, when she realized that she had perfect subjects to photograph living in her own house. It was also extremely controversial, because viewers of the piece worried about the girl. Was she abused? Did her mother hit her for the sake of the photograph? It is hard for the public to look at a photograph entitled, Damaged Child and not be concerned about abuse, especially when it seems actual child abuse is all too common in our society (Woodward, p.3).

The colorful portrait of Sally Mann’s son Emmet is alarming because the boy in the photograph appears to have blood pouring out from his nose and mouth, which then becomes smeared over his chest and drips in blotches on his forearm and hands. The boy’s face is cut off at the bottom of his nose so that you can’t see his eyes. His mouth is open as if he were in complete disbelief. The picture seems to have been posed simply for the shock value. The blood is, in fact, raspberry juice (Pyle). The notion that Mann would have her son smear raspberry juice over his nose and chest implies that Mann really did want to give people something to complain about. Mann loves to explore the boundaries of what is and what is not acceptable when it comes to portraying children. It seems that all of her work in portraiture was created in
order to ask people to debate this idea.



Squirrel Season is a black and white photograph of a boy holding some strange mole-like creatures, which are assumed to be squirrels due to the title. The animals seem stiff and lifeless. The child’s facial expression is hard to gauge. Is he disgusted by what he’s holding? He could be fascinated. Perhaps he considers the ‘squirrels’ to be his treasures. It is an interesting contrast for a child to hold corpses. Children relate to death in different ways that adults do, because often the concept is strange to them. The idea captures their imagination but it is likely that the concept is not quite as terrifying because many young children are not aware of their own mortality.

The Last Time That Emmet Modeled Nude, 1987

The beauty of The Last Time Emmet Modeled Nude lies in smooth lines of the water and defiant stare of the subject at the center of the photograph. The water reflects the surrounding area except where the adolescent boy has blurred his own reflection. The water fails to capture the boy’s face, just as Mann fails to capture an image of the boy after this photograph. Hence, its title The Last Time Emmet Modeled Nude.



Mann’s color photograph of her daughter with raspberries on her fingers is both charming and slightly off putting. The girl is posed in the center of the frame and looks of to the side, she has a raspberry on each of her fingers and holds her berry-laden hand up nonchalantly. In the foreground a hand from another person is structured right underneath the girl. The hand’s fingers curl up and are slightly blurred as if they were in motion. The image becomes slightly uncomfortable when thinking of it in relation to the scene in Lolita where an older man spies on a young girl eating raspberries off her fingers in front of an open refrigerator and falls in love with her. Mann admits in an interview with the Boston Globe that she has read Lolita at least twice 1. It’s hard to believe that Mann could be oblivious to the controversy in her photographs.
Perhaps Mann posed her daughter in this manner as a direct response to that scene in Lolita in order to incite a strong reaction from the viewer.1 McQuaid

The Wet Bed is a black and white portrait of Sally Mann’s daughter splayed out on a bed, at first it seems to give the viewer a glimpse of a peaceful nap time. Upon closer inspection a large stain (presumably urine) sits adjacent to the little girl. The placement of the stain is interesting because it looks as if the liquid was seeping out of the girl’s side. There are many possibilities as to what this could represent. Is Mann reminding the viewer of the child’s messy birth? The white, clinical bed looks as if it could easily fit in a maternity ward. The naked child’s flailing limbs make her look like an over-sized newborn. Perhaps the girl was posed next to the stain to remind the viewer that she may one day also give birth, liquid and life both seeping from her womb. The photograph frames the small child in the center. She and the bed are a lonely block of white that seems to float in darkness. Has she been abandoned, perhaps as punishment for soiling the sheets? Any adult laying naked on a bed next to a stain of questionable origin would, undoubtedly, be mortified. The beauty of this image is that the child does not seem embarrassed or ashamed. The photograph captures her unblemished innocence.

Night-blooming Cereus, 1988

Night Blooming Cereus is a black and white photograph of a child with a flower (a night blooming cereus to be specific) around her neck. The photograph is almost completely symmetrical, the two flowers reflect each other laying on the child’s chest, covering her nipples. The child’s face is cropped above the mouth, almost as if Mann was protecting the identity of her subject. It is more likely, however, that Mann simply wanted to focus on the beauty in the imperfections of the white petals and the contrast of colors of the skin against the flowers. The child in this photograph seems to form the background of the image and the body becomes more of a landscape than a portrait. The small child looks strong in comparison to the flower around her neck, although the plant is large and seems as if it might have been relatively uncomfortable to wear. The plant is a burden to the girl. It restricts her movement and covers her chest exactly
where society will force her to cover herself later in life.

The Ditch

The Ditch is an extremely interesting photograph. Sally Mann’s son, Emmet, lays on his back with his knees folded under him in what looks like a very uncomfortable position. He is positioned in the narrowest part of a ditch and the ditch widens into a pool of water just in front of his knees. He is surrounded by several people, all of whose faces are hidden from the viewer. In fact, the only face that can be seen in its entirety is the little boy’s in the background, and even his face is out of focus. It appears that the group was enjoying a swim, because some of the boys are wearing swim trunks and other people in the photograph are wrapped in towels. Emmet is the central figure in the portrait and everyone faces towards him causing the viewers eye to settle on his body as the focal point. Everyone, except Emmet seem closed off and reserved, but the little boy splays out in the center of everything, clearly he has no qualms about being the center of attention, which is a good quality for any model to have.

Flour Paste was taken in 1987 and is a black and white image. The portrait exhibits the legs of Mann’s daughter Jessie. The legs are cut off at mid thigh and at the toes, so that the knees and calves are the focal point. The skin looks painfully cracked and severely dry, almost as if the legs were burned. This image is alarming. Why is no one helping this little girl? Anyone looking at the photograph with no background knowledge would not be able to ascertain if the subject were alive or dead. The legs could easily be sticking out of a freezer at the morgue. The white background echoes the ghostly feeling of this portrait.

Drying Morels is a charming photograph, because it captures a moment of domestic tranquility. The photograph is not only a portrait of Mann’s daughter in the upper left hand corner, but a portrait of the place itself. Mann has said that each photograph of hers reflects the environment. West Virginia is a central character in this photograph. Mann has also said that she only photographs her children in the summer time because the most action occurs during the warmer months. It is an interesting convention of portraiture to place the person slightly out of the center of the picture. Perhaps Mann did this to make the viewer find the subject. To place the girl within the context of her environment gives the child more importance. She is not just a little girl, she is a little girl in West Virginia participating in summertime activities.

The Alligators Approach

Sally Mann’s portrait of her daughter The Alligators Approach is composed in a way that leads the viewer’s eye straight to little girl at its center. The diagonal line of a wooden plank guides the eye away from the left side of the photograph, likewise the tree in the center of the photograph gives importance to the center of the piece. This image is interesting because it combines Mann’s love of her home state, West Virginia and her affection for her children. The stillness of the environment around the little girl reminds us that this is only a moment in time captured in film, it is not a complete portrait of the essence of the child. Although, it is a very striking moment in time. The little girl is nude and sits facing the viewer, with her back against a plastic folding chair. Mann’s children were often unwilling to be her models. In this image one might wonder whether the girl was complaining about having to sit still. Regardless, the photograph remains a valuable portrait and a chronicle of a brief, yet beautiful time.

Last Light is an eerie photograph of a young girl between the legs of what looks to be a middle aged man or woman. The girl’s head is tilted by the adult’s hand and a strange liquid which looks like it could easily be blood drips from the girl’s neck. Many viewers of this piece were outraged, because the liquid looks so much like blood. In reality, the liquid is raspberry juice. Mann has used raspberry juice more than once in her photographs whether intentional or not, the red liquid insights an emotional reaction from the viewer. Mann may have chosen to pose her daughter in this manner in order to create a response from the viewer. Art that gives the viewer an emotional reaction, seems much more meaningful and its understandable that an artist would try to prompt this sort of interaction with the photograph. The girl in the photograph looks limp and obedient to the adult who looms above her. This portrait conveys the cooperative nature of the Mann children who were not always willing sitters, but were very supportive of Immediate Family’s publication. Today, all three children remain supportive of their mother’s art and proud of the photographs that feature them as the prominent subjects.

Jesse at 5 seems to be the quintessential Sally Mann photograph. The photograph is composed with three girls in a straight line, with Jesse at the center. The two girls on either side of Jesse are wearing clothes and seem pushed into the background. Jesse gazes at the viewer, almost defiantly. She is not wearing a shirt and her white skin contrasts the darker scene around her. She looks as if she just turned to face the camera, because her hip is pushed out and only one shoulder faces the viewer directly. The pearl necklace around her neck seems like typical jewelry five year olds love to wear, although it makes her look more mature than her five years. In fact, the combination of the pearl necklace and the rebellious stare give the viewer the impression that this girl is much older than five. The image could be a commentary on the controversy of Mann’s work. The girl is topless and posing in a way that might be perceived by some to be morally questionable. The photograph is almost a challenge. It’s so beautiful that it’s hard to imagine any person could criticize it or call it pornographic.

Mann has few colored photographs, but in the case of the portrait of her daughters playing a card game, color is essential in enhancing the scene. The main focus of the photograph is Mann’s daughter, Jesse who stands naked with one hip out, reaching her hand across the table to play with the bright red cards. The girl in the lower right hand corner of the image focuses her attention on Jesse so that the viewer’s eye comes to rest on her again and again. The beauty of the girl lays in her own innocence and comfort with her body. She does not make eye contact with the viewer, her pose is one of disinterest. She may not have realized that her portrait was being taken while she was playing. Mann says that her children often walked around the house in the nude, because it came natural to them. Just as Mann would have walked around her home naked when she was a girl growing up in West Virginia. The own artist’s childhood is reflected in the way she captures moments in her children’s lives.

Sally Mann’s photograph Tobacco Spit features a man in overalls holding a little girl beside a truck. The contrast of the dark, possibly dirty working class man and the tiny, bright, white girl is apparent. These two people seem to be complete opposites. The comparison between both persons create a dynamic portrait. The man is older, tired, and filthy compared to tiny person in his arms. His sad expression causes the viewer to think that perhaps he feels that the best days of his life are already behind him. The girl stares at the viewer with a blank expression that conveys some surprise at having to stay still. She does not look happy to be held. Her skin is white and ethereal without any of the scars or battle wounds of age. She seems frustrated that this older person is holding her back. Its possible that the old man holds her because he wants to protect her or because he’s jealous of her youth. The man could be a symbol
for adults everywhere, while the girl represents childhood.

As a culture, we celebrate and love children because they remind us of our own fleeting youth. These photographs allow us to hold on to pieces of childhood. Photography has evolved as a form of portraiture that is more adept at capturing a sitter’s likeness than a painting, but portraiture is not purely about capturing likeness. In Portraiture by Shearer West the author writes. “Portraits are not just likenesses but works of art that engage with ideas of identity as they are perceived, represented, and understood in different times and places (11).” Each photograph of Mann’s explores concepts of identity, especially the developing identities of her children within their environment. For this reason, Mann’s photograph’s can be considered portraits.

http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/portraits/research%20paper%20PDFs/mann.pdf

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Sally Mann

Robert Frank's America

By Jno Cook, Afterimage, March, 1982

"What do you want from a county with only two hundred years of history?"

- My Father

Robert Frank's The Americans, which I think is the most important single effort in photography in this century, is also the most enigmatic. For 24 years the book has remained nearly impenetrable. There has seldom been any question of its intensity, its cohesiveness, or its uniqueness. The question has been what it is about. It is the purpose of this essay to investigate that question and, specifically, the book's stubborn refusal to answer it. Opacity has been one of the most important aspects of the book: it is this that has allowed it to be accepted by photographers of widely differing interests, and this that has extended the book's range of influence, for the diversity of understandings produced a multiplicity of responses in the work of individual photographers.

To realize the extent to which the content of the 83 photographs in The Americans has been glossed over one can look at what has been said about it over the years. For the most part, criticism as well as enthusiasm has centered on Frank's style of photography and on its formal aspects. Until recently, no one delved into the content of his pictures. The style, however, evoked a plethora of reactions. It was Frank's lack of respect -- his careless, off-angled, acompositional, grainy images -- that caused a flury of disapproval from the critics of the popular and professional photopress when the book appeared in the U.S. in 1959. [1] "Warped" and "sick" were just two of the adjectives used. [2]

These critics read his style well, perhaps better than anyone since. The feeling among them was unanimous: this was not how America was to be shown. But what was at issue was a larger matter than patriotism. The challenge of Frank's work in the late '5Os lay in his treatment of his subject matter and in his use of a photographic style well out of the mainstream of representational conventions. The Americans involved a matter of how things were shown. [3]

But the book was noticed. Younger photographers liked the openness of Frank's street photography; indeed, Frank's way of treating his subject matter, even his subject material itself, were vindicated by their wholesale adoption by a generation of photographers. And critics, too, gradually came to look on The Americans as seminal, as a breakthrough, but the recognition of its influence was slow.

Beaumont Newhall's The History of Photography, certainly the standard text, gave only minor mention to Frank's work in the 1964 edition. [4] Newhall deferred, in fact, to a description by Walker Evans. [5] Newhall's caution was prudent, for throughout the '6Os no one had much of an idea of what The Americans was about. But the images were widely anthologized, and the book was eventually reprinted by Aperture in 1968. [6]

By the '7Os, even though many photographic textbooks still failed to mention The Americans, some definitive opinions had been arrived at. The work was then variously described as a harsh look at America of the '5Os, as a new iconography, or as a personal and expressive response. These ideas were often used in combination.

By the '7Os it was also clear that The Americans represented the most influential, and therefore the most important, work in photography in the preceding 2O or 3O years. There was no longer any doubt that it had turned American photography around. As Ralph Gibson recalled, "It hit the photographic community with the impact of a pole-ax." [7] Harold Jones said, "After Robert Frank's pictures, ordinary photographs in Life would pale." [8] Arnold Gassen wrote of the overnight transformation of photography of the social landscape. [9] And in 1978 Szarkowski noted the difficulty younger photographers would have in understanding "how radical Frank's book was when it first appeared." [10]

But these accolades do little to explain how the book was important -- except in terms of its revolutionary style -- and they say nothing about what the images in it mean. The pictures continued to be addressed in terms that are either general or meaningless. Szarkowski, in fact, made a good case for avoiding their content altogether. In the catalogue for the exhibition "Mirrors and Windows," published in 1978, he summarized the initial reaction to The Americans by saying, "It was... not the nominal subject matter... that shocked the photography audience but the pictures themselves...." [11]

Today the pictures no longer shock us. Today only one quality stands out -- their muteness. Twenty-four years later, those images still never describe fully, never seem to make a clear point. A strange subliminal feeling is generated by the book because of this lack of a clear, rational -- that is, verbal -- equivalent. There are photographers -- Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander are examples -- who have taken up that illusive opacity and made it a life project, a separate way of seeing the world. And what is that? Szarkowski has described Frank's work as, "kaleidoscopic, fragmentary, intuitive, and eliptical." [12] But that string of adjectives only acknowledges once again the troublesome surface quality, the boundary we cannot seem to pass beyond. It is not surprising to see that a recent page-by-page analysis of The Americans has taken the metaphor as a starting point. [13]

That reputation for opacity has fascinated me over the years, especially since I do not view the book that way. When I first saw work from the The Americans I could make no sense of it. It wasn't political. It wasn't an exposé. It seemed only to deal in street photography enlightened by some perverse sense of humor, at times pervaded with an undirected melancholy. Only when I was told that this was the work of a Swiss national did it make sense -- and then instantly.

Well, it made sense to me. I saw The Americans as a caustic anti-American polemic. It did not deal, as we already knew, in politics; it did not deal with race issues or poverty. It did not present a new exposition of reality. The Americans dealt with culture. That is, it dealt with our culture, but not on our terms. Let me give my qualifications. I'm also an immigrant. I arrived five years after Frank did, from the Netherlands, a country quite similar, culturally, to Switzerland. Both of us, l would presume, arrived with similar, if not identical, ambivalent attitudes -- European attitudes, and specifically European post-war attitudes -- toward America, largely uninformed and then arrested with the act of immigration.

You arrived, certainly with hope, but also with a feeling of loss that could subside to a wistful sadness or grow to a disappointment in the new lover that had been taken for life. What was that really like? John Brumfield, in a recent essay in Afterimage, speaks of Frank coming from a devastated Europe, as if he escaped the horrors of a DP camp. [14] It is an error to compare the personal life of an individual to the economics of a nation, however: it makes Frank into a refugee. This was hardly the case.

Indianapolis,(1955-1956)

He arrived by free choice, like almost all the post-war immigrants, and as a middle-class citizen of Switzerland. The choice to leave could have carried with it considerable hesitation and ambivalence. Frank could have stayed. If we are to look for a stage from which Frank might have operated we have to look not toward national life, but personal life, a personal life embedded in family and culture.

In addition, the suggestion that Europe lay utterly devastated is a misrepresentation, as could perhaps be guessed from the political oratory Brumfield quotes to support his view. [15] Despite all the tribulations of World War II, there was little question about the quality of life for the middle class in the '5Os. The war, for the survivors, was over. The economy, not to be measured by American standards, provided jobs, housing, and food. Europe, in fact, was regaining the momentum lost during the war years. Switzerland had remained physically outside of that war.

Then why emigrate? -- because the land of wealth and opportunity in those days certainly was the U.S. In America you could afford a home, a car, and later a TV. The European middle class lacked all of these. (With equal family on both continents, this was exactly true for my family in the early '5Os, except that the oldest European generation owned their homes.) You emigrate because jobs are tight, and you realize that it will be a long time before you, being one of the younger members of your family, will also own a home. You emigrate because you are confident in your skills and your ability to find work.

And, God, what a land of plenty the U.S. turns out to be. America... where they pay you four or five times what you make in Europe, where you eat meat daily -- not just on Sundays -- and where every day you eat white bread. "When I got to the New World I thought l was lucky," Frank recalled 24 years later. [16]

But consider what you give up. To begin with, you leave behind your language, and with it all capacity for finesse and every nuance of the life you grew up with. But much more is involved. If you were to hope to regain that aspect of life from your daily intercourse in English, from the newspapers and magazines, or from radio and TV, you would be sadly disappointed. These media speak to a nation where the population, despite 12 years at school, seems to have barely received a fifth-grade education by European standards.

When my father stepped off the boat in 1952, he spoke in English. It wasn't his native tongue, but he had been brushing up on it for a few months. It could just as well have been French or German; he had studied all three in high school. That's middle-class by European standards. In America owning a car and a TV makes you middle-class. America, to Europeans of the '5Os, was a land of cultural barbarism. The shock of it, despite the forewarning Frank must have had, might have been like being transported in time to the Klondike gold rush, or worse yet, finding oneself suddenly in Europe of the Dark Ages.

And the actualities of immigration are not at all like the romance of Twain's Connecticut Yankee. One does not take control with either wit or skill; one stays above the barbarism by holding on to what one has. What in Europe might have been an attitude of disdain tinged with jealousy is expressed as a sadness, a disappointment, when transposed to the U.S. Frank's book, more than anything else, expresses this sadness, as it also expresses that disdain and criticism.

It shows America as a county lacking taste, humorless and impoverished. Frank's disappointment brought an awareness of the superficiality of American life. especially the discrepancies -- not hypocrisies -- arising from the American lack of awareness of the self: he repeatedly points to the masks and facades that Americans put on so readily and wear so unawares.

"What do you want," my father used to say, "from a country with only 2OO years of history?" As Europeans you identify with 2,OOO years of history. You speak of how Caesar turned at the Rhine. You know the Roman names, and they matter still: Ultra Jectum, a stone's throw over the Rhine, now Utrecht -- that's where my father was born. Or was it, as he used to suggest, that his forbears came out of the wilds to throw stones at the Romans? There are many places like that in the old world. The European with any education identifies with the land through its history. The architecture of European cities in the '5Os still related to the land; there were reasons why things were built the way they were, reasons reaching into antiquity.

I have not heard the terms Old World and New World for a long time. Europe, too, has changed. But in the '5Os, the term New World was all too apt for the U.S. -- a land of meaningless architecture, of endless renewal and rebuilding almost all within the memory of its older citizens, a land senselessly and ruthlessly lacerated with roads and highways, strewn with cement-block buildings, utilities, and advertising competing for attention. Does the American identify with the land?

The white American is denied this in Frank's book; with few exceptions only the black and the dead are shown in the landscape. Look at the photos from Butte, Montana. One cannot drive to Butte without traveling through a landscape that would rival all the mountains of Europe. But what does Frank show? -- a view from a hotel window that reads isolation, and the unlikeliness of a Navy recruiting office a thousand miles inland. How, for that matter, can Americans even know their land when most of them live in megalopic cities? Americans, Frank maintains, have no sense of where they are just as they have no sense of where they come from.

When Frank depicts architecture it is not as a metaphor. It is as a bitter comment on the phoniness, the meaninglessness of such things as the Greek or Roman decorations of a facia -- meaningless in that the American has no claim to such designs, no basis for their use, and worse, no comprehension of their origins. The American, Frank says (and he says so over and over), has no culture, no history, no relationship to the land. America is like a land of children wearing masks, acting out roles with no comprehension of the self, no awareness of the infinity of history and humanity, no awareness of what is called culture.

Of course, that infinity of history is European history, and that infinity of humanity too, is European. If Frank made an error in judgment it is founded in this myopic, centuries old, European chauvinism. To the European the term "culture" does not mean milieu, but culture as it is used to describe a cultured person, a refinement of thought, manner, and taste that represents the culmination of the history of a people. It is a concept that is defined in nationalism, in the access to his- tory, in the achievements of the past, and in a chauvinism that judges others against a standard of propriety akin to that of being "civilized."

It is therefore more than just a personal acquisition: it is the whole atmosphere of one's existence, and it is defined in terms of the accidentals of a social environment, the non-essential attributes and qualities that become symbols for culture. It is the expected behavior of one's peers and countrymen. For the European, especially the middle class, participation in culture is a matter of social necessity, the important quality of life that allows all to feel equal. American culture, in contrast, still partakes of frontier egalitarianism.

The necessity of personally embracing culture to lessen class distinctions doesn't exist here: in America everyone is first of all equal. And, as William Carlos Williams has pointed out, what passed here as culture was false in being an imported version of European high culture, inauthentic, and unspecific to the American condition. [17] Certainly Frank recognized that something was lacking. The very concept of culture was not translatable into English. Culture, as Frank would see it, could not be easily defined, but it could be accurately felt, and its absence was a keen disappointment.

The Americans is a bitter book and alien. As Americans we could not read it. What was depicted as crass was seen as social commentary. Where the book points to class distinctions, we read economics. Where Frank deals with pointed description, we see metaphors. And when Frank explicitly doles out sarcasm, especially when he speaks to our littleness, we misread him entirely because we are little, just as we are provincial and parochial. We are backwards, barbaric, uneducated, but mainly uncultured. We are ill at ease in our environment, we wear uniforms and costumes with dead seriousness, we mimic Europeans without knowing why. We are reported to be classless, yet we draw severe racial and economic distinctions. We are rich, yet we have needless poverty. We pretend to sophistication, yet are spiritually impoverished.



Contradictions, pretense, shoddiness -- that's how Frank presents us. Would an American understand that? No people would admit to such ugliness, agree that their lives are a pretense, their culture artificial. It would matter little if Frank's thesis were irrelevant or incorrect: enough had been gleaned from the tone of those pictures to make the early critics very angry.

But the specific charges were lost to the lack of that European overview. Indeed, Frank's particular attitude might be totally inaccessible. It is European of the late '4Os, but out of touch with European thought of the '5Os. It has allied itself with the American disdain for America as expressed by the Beat Generation, but I do not think it is the same. Whereas the work of Ginsberg or Kerouac remains American, and remains readable, despite its harshness and joylessness, Frank's expression does not. Frank has a different axe to grind, and it is honed on a disappointment which surpasses what the Beat writers can grieve for. Like a celt from a barrow, it has a magic of another age, another culture, a wider overview. It is telling that the book was readily published in 1958 in France, as Les Américains, after it had been rejected by American publishers (even though Frank's work had been done under the auspices of a Guggenheim Foundation grant). [18] In France it came out as a clearly anti-American book.

The photographs were accompanied by an 84-page text of quotations and anecdotes collected by critic Alain Bosquet, presented under headings such as, "The Civil War Continues," "Isolationism," "An Incorrigible Idealism," "Uniformity." "The Intellectual is Suspect," "Religion or Religiousity," and "The Almighty Dollar." [19] One of the anecdotes serves well to give the feel of the text.

On the first day I ate in a 'drugstore.' A stool, a paper napkin from a dispenser. Drugs and cosmetics. Afluence. l said to the man behind the counter, "Thank you very much. Goodbye." He looked at me with irritation -- I had made him lose three precious seconds. You suspend politeness and along with that the conditional and the subjunctive. You don't say, "I would, perhaps, very much, like to have...," You say, "I want --." [20]

This note by Bosquet succinctly expresses contempt for the meager economies which make eating a trial rather than a pleasure. These are set off by the signs of the American abundance, as if to say, why is this necessary? The reason, Bosquet suggests, lies in the American drive to make every minute profitable. This note is one of a number that are offered not as observations but reproaches: they are addressed to us.

It is typical of the tone and attitude that runs through most of the text. The point, for example, of the quotations (which constitute most of the text), is to show how American intellectuals -- mostly familiar names, ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Adlai Stevenson -- have seen their nation. Like Frank's photographs, they are presented as a self-indictment, and therefore indisputable.

TEXT EXCERPTS, 1958 EDITION OF THE AMERICANS

The excerpts for the 1958 Robert Delpire edition was compiled and edited by Alain Bosquet. The excerpts translated are from Bosquet's "Petits Télégrammes aux Américains." Translations are by Nathalie Magnan and Catherine Lord.

Every year there is a national holiday in honor of new citizens: it is not they who thank you, it is you who thank them. The American, in America, cannot understand that the entire world doesn't wish to become American. Lets be fair: Americans who come to Europe after a while can't imagine that one would wish to remain American.

In a restaurant on Broadway, there is on each table a photograph of the complete menu: one sees what one is going to eat. It's practical, and it avoids surprises. You have a horror of surprises. One insures onself against surprises of fate: accident, death, unemployment will bring in so much or they will cost so much.

- All week you manage your existence in the most rational way: you run on pills, vitamins, calories, whole milk, preservatives. Saturday night comes. Alcohol lets you do everything. It is your freedom. In France, and in other parts of the world, one gets drunk by chance, in enthusiasm or sudden sorrow: you, you are the only ones to get drunk with premeditation. You say, "Come at six; we'll eat, then we'll get dead drunk." The program is clear, and minutely planned. I knew a soldier who had spent many months on one of the Auleutian Islands: he was paid a bottle or whiskey (forbidden at the garrison), the equivalent of a year's wages. It is true that alcohol lets you make love without too much remorse.

Abstraction is forbidden to you, and consequently, wit. More or less ordinary people (car, television, etc.) to whom I talked about poetry all told me, "Nice hobby." If I insisted that it was more, they asked me, "How much do you make doing that?"

You work more than other people, by inclination... or is it from the inability to divide yourselves in half? I have known some high officials who return in the evening, from nine to midnight, to work at the office, because they needed an activity and also because it seemed less tiring to them than finding a new activity.

In general, you are neither snobbish nor pretentious. You lie little for the sport of it. Consequently, you are natural and indiscreet. A man of affairs told me, at our first meeting: "Long ago, my wife had a Caesarian, which made my daughter a little retarded."

A young woman from the Middle West whose coat I held out for her said to me, "I can do that myself." That was to indicate we were equals and that she didn't have to submit to my European gallantry, which was a little insulting to her. As she was nice and kindly she quickly understood that I hadn't wanted to put her in an inferior position. We left the town in a car, and the car -- as is proper -- served as a shelter. In your country, it is rarely a question of undressing to make love. One feigns surprise, that surprise one fears so much. Thus love resembles rape, without the violence of rape. Tenderness too is interchangeable. I wanted to ask my companion, "Are you sure thar we haven't loved each other somewhere else already?"

You have no respect for the past. A skyscraper thirty years old disappears to make room for another skyscraper, which will last tweny years. You change quickly and you show little stubbornness. In addition, you haven't a lot of pride. From whence your reversals, your about-faces, your infidelities, your fashions. One can always hope, therefore, to persuade you, to dissuade you, to make you deviate from a tradition that you don't yet have. A dead dog in the sky is enough for you to go from blind self-sufficienry to the most masochistic panic.

Where are you going? Happiness, which you confuse with technical progress, has played some nasty tricks on you. Are you going to go to sleep in the laziness of a practical mind which prefers numbers to words and graphs to ideas? Then the world will escape you. That would be a pity: we very much like, with our rather perverse pride, giving you lessons in civilization.

But when the book was published in the U.S. by Grove Press the following year, the indictments of the French edition were omitted. A retraction? After all, 1O years away from Switzerland, Frank had become an American. You just can't go back to a farm in the Swiss mountains when you have family and friends in the U.S., professional standing, and a knowledge of the economics and way of life. Then, too, there is the growing appreciation for your work, even if it is misplaced.

That apparent retraction -- the change in format -- changed the tone of the book. It removed much of the bitter polemicism. The Americans could now be seen in other ways.

Even before the U.S. publication of his book, Frank seemed to be turning elsewhere. A portfolio of prints done in 1958, pictures taken from a moving city transit bus, was accompanied by a statement which declared, "These photographs represent my last project in photography.... l knew and felt that I had come to the end of a chapter." [21] In a way Frank's abandonment of still photography sanctified the project of The Americans. It was as if the book had been a last and final statement. Little wonder, then, that many viewers were quite ready to accept the book as a personal statement, to understand it in terms of what was to be called his "intensive response to the moment." [22]



The Grove Press edition certainly looked and felt different from Les Américains -- more like a travelogue, but without the idealizing point of view we might expect from such a document. The captions were expanded to include the labeling of activities, so that, for example, "Hoboken" became "Parade -- Hoboken." The French text was replaced with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. Because most viewers were unfamiliar with the French edition, the book effectively made a fresh start at a dialogue. The introduction by Kerouac also served to Americanize the book, for he was identified with those vocal and highly visible homegrown critics, the Beats. Kerouac starts:

"That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral. That's what Robert Frank has captured in these tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically 48 states in an old used car.... [23]"

It's disarming, and it makes little sense as a companion to Frank's photographs. Kerouac reads like a night-time Beat poet, self-indulgent, taking pleasure in the pictures and in describing them. Even the relationship between Frank's hardhitting pictures and the Beat stance seems tenuous. The Beat's languorous deprecation of America was something that could be ignored-and eventually was.

As time passed and the Beats faded, and with that the novelty of acting out a social critique, Frank's book could be seen in similar terms: as a reflection only of past days. For some that crazy feeling Kerouac spoke of came to be the record of the days that closed the McCarthy era. When those days were seen in retrospect as ugly and filled with anxiety, then The Americans, by virtue of the ugliness and that vaguely unpleasant feeling it seemed to deal in, became identified with that era. That became another understanding of The Americans.

To summarize, a clear interpretation of Frank's work did not come forth. As Leslie Baier recently pointed out, Kerouac's preface to the book, along with Evans's brief essay and a piece of Gotthard Schuh, both done in 1957, were the only criticisms of any substance on Frank's work for nearly a decade. [24] For the critics, especially, the book remained a mystery. The pictures not only stayed mute, but proved impervious to formal analysis. We find, for example, photographs with precise framing next to photographs which display the careless gesture of a grab shot. The diversity was too great to make any formal sense of the pictures, and this remained true as long as they were looked at as individual pictures.

It was John Brumfield who first looked at The Americans, in print, as a book -- an organized sequence, not just a random collection of pictures. [25] A formal identity now seems to come forward, which includes the codified order of the photographs (unchanged through four printings), and the remarkable internal development of visual themes that carry through the pages like a cadence of rhymes.

It is this monolithic totality that Brumfield tackles, in an attempt at penetration which has been begging to be undertaken ever since Szarkowski first made reference to the "new iconography"" which Frank deployed with The Americans. [26] Brumfield does zero in on those icons, but they are seen in the service of a larger structure, the book. He sees The Americans as carefully organized, and assumes Frank had a clear purpose in mind. For Brumfield The Americans becomes a social document, an accurate reflection of the mood of the county in the mid 5Os, and perhaps a commentary on it. "It was to this," he says, commenting on the start of the Guggenheim, "This bleak and dreary American ambience, that Frank began to address himself [27]

Brumfield demonstrates his proposition in two ways. First, he finds a coincidence of mood and tone between the photographs and the political and social atmosphere of America in the '5Os. Second, he performs a reading of the content of the photographs. The first approach seems conjectural: the contiguous use of text on two different topics -- national politics and descriptions of the photographs -- tends to suggest a connection between them, but little is proven. Brumfield's assumption is that a work is representative of an era; it seems as if he is proceeding backwards from the tone of the photographs to some fugitive feeling now associated with the politics of the '5Os.

In fact, tone rather than subject becomes the content of those photographs. Capital is made of anguish in the attempt to make that tone universal. We are told, in effect, not that The Americans may have expressed how Frank felt, but that it told us how we felt. Yet we also know that by and large it has been photography's task to falsify reality in the presentation of a hopefulness and confidence which has no more claim to truth than Frank's expression of anguish.

Brumfield's other method of suggesting this coincidence of moods, however -- his reading of the pictures -- is innovative and powerful, and leads to some amazing insights and a rich exposition. It is also, I would say, a personal interpretation -- even though many of us would agree with his view. We would agree because the reading is American, and the underlying assumptions are American. But I feel those assumptions are incorrect.

Brumfield's reading, based on finding personifications and allegories, is a figurative reading which treats The Americans like a romance. It sees the subjects of Frank's photographs as stylized figures and psychological archetypes rather than real people. "We are being introduced to a cast of characters," Brumfield writes, "but, like figures from a medieval drama, they are types, not personalities." [28] His method of cracking the content of those pictures consists of defining a particular use of the metaphor. (The need for limiting the definition is obvious, since the metaphor is the most open-ended of all figures of speech.)

The use Brumfield imputes to Frank centers on the thesis that a set of socially defined (one might say culturally defined) connotations exists for the public and private symbols (one might say icons) which appear with such regularity in The Americans. The American flag is used as an example. Frank's use of such a set of connotations would have involved creating secondary meaning from an interplay of what is shown in his photographs against what is connoted by the very appearance of those symbols.

What is wrong with that is the insistence on metaphor, and in particular the application of connotative conventions. It assumes something very strange, and most likely, untrue. It assumes Frank to be an American. It assumes that he is American in his attitudes, in his point of view, in his familiarity with American connotative conventions. It assumes not only that he would be sure of their use, but that he would be willing to give recognition to them.

I think that therein lies the error. I know from my own experience, and I think it is safe to generalize, that eight or 1O years are not enough to acclimatize an adult to a foreign culture, not enough to reach such surety with a language, visual or verbal, in all its connotative and denotative forms, as to be able to construct a masterpiece of allegorical form, especially one that would depend so heavily on conventions which might be commonly held but are seldom expressed. [29] I think that if Frank had actually attempted such a metaphorical construction it would have been all too transparent.

And what are those signs and symbols for which these connotative conventions are said to exist? Certainly the flag, but what are the others? They would seem to be the automobile, the juke box, the TV set, the highway, the public eating place, signs and posters, various phony decorations, outlandish costumes and clothes, and also our parks and our assorted electric machinery. Certainly some of these hold symbolic meaning, especially an object like the flag.

But it soon becomes problematic to list connotative conventions for these other repeated icons, and with those problems their use and function in a metaphorical system is thrown into doubt. How much agreement, for example, is there when it comes to the connotations of automobiles, or bars, or funerals? If these become rhetorical devices for Brumfield, just as they were new-found icons for Szarkowski, it is because they are out there and they always were. They speak to us just as they speak about us, and if their ubiquitous appearance suggests symbolic significance it only speaks to the fact that we still can't see ourselves as we are.

Brumfield's insistence on figurative meaning, admirable as such a hypothesis might be, again avoids the question of literal meaning. Why would a photographer with such facility in the real wish to put together a document which could only be read at a secondary level of meaning?

Why would Frank want to create a melodramatic characterization, a stylized typology, which, if we are to believe Brumfield, dealt with social issues and philosophical positions such as "an alienation amounting to nothing less than ontological anguish." [30] We would be led to regard The Americans as having only symbolic significance. This seems yet another dismissal of the genuine grit of those pictures, another denial of their actuality.

And as a metaphorical document the intent of The Americans would be fully bracketed by the production of that book, leaving nothing open for the ambivalence and uncertainty that Frank himself expressed about the project. Consider what Frank said in his application to the Guggenheim Foundation: that it was his desire to "produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact of which should be such as will nullify explanation." [31] Does a metaphorical system lend itself to a reading which projects authenticity?

The very use of any figurative form involves the risk of misreading. And what form, what device could be used that would "nullify explanation"? In my mind it would be such directness in presentation that no secondary meaning could be derived from the book -- at least not in terms of what we generally think of: stock visual statements, trite metaphors, easy symbolism, transparent ironies. These were the devices of the illustrated magazines, economical attempts to allude to higher meaning through what Walker Evans had called, "woolly, successful 'photo-sentiments'... mindless pictorial salestalk." [32]

This was the very thing that Frank had been steadily moving away from. Szarkowski has noted this, and Walker Evans made mention of it. [33] "Irony and detachment" is how Evans summed up those photographs. Those are intellectual qualities, not at all in character with the allegory, the metaphor, or the dramatic unfolding which Brumfield suggests. [34] When those photographs come together in The Americans they partake in a continuous form which is related to the satire, the critique, the exposition. The primary figure of speech is irony, as Evans correctly noted. That is what the secondary meaning hides behind. Irony doesn't allow resolution, doesn't allow penetration by those against whom it is directed. Frank's irony is directed at us.

City Fathers, Hoboken, New Jersey, (1955)

But what exactly were Frank's photographs meant to illustrate? Allow me to present the most transparent meaning of the first few. The first photograph identifies the folks with the flag as Americans, [35] but there is also a comment about the appropriate use of the flag. Any Boy Scout knows that flags are not to be used as bunting. A flag hung against a building speaks of a callous and unthinking attitude, of a citizenry which lacks the thought to provide a proper respect for a national emblem.

Those first images are also about clothes and costumes. It starts with the drab clothes of the women in the first photograph set off against the dress coats and high hats of the city fathers in the second. It is more than just a distinction of class and station, it's a matter of how that is accomplished. It is the absurdity of those hats from another century -- what purpose do they serve in Hoboken? This sort of costume for public occasions in European towns would have a tradition dating back perhaps hundreds of years, but in Hoboken it smacks of mimicry.

The third photograph continues these observations. Now it is the silliness of being a billboard, of wearing Kefauver's head on your chest just as that frieze wears a bodyless head. Perhaps a comment about political fervor, there is also something sinister about this photograph, for something else strikes through that pose and that angle: the image of the demagogue. It could be Hitler again, or Mussolini, all too immediate for the European. But the reality is quickly tempered by the surrounding images; though everyone is watching, as Brumfield points out, there is no interest or agitation. [36]

The idea of pretentious costumes used in childish affectation and worn without comprehension continues. Is the fourth photograph, Funeral -- St. Helena, South Carolina, really about social stratification, as Brumfield suggests tangentially? Is that gripping hand on the mouth a symbol for the powerlessness of the Negro? Perhaps, especially since the gesture has clear and universal psychological meaning. But are we then to take that gesture as a metaphor for the grief and lack of power of blacks in America?

I think that to do so is to project our contemporary racial consciousness onto images of another era. Neither the Beats nor, I would think, Frank, had developed such an awareness. The Beats callously admired blacks for being able to live in poverty but never gave any thought to changes in the political power system. Neither was the middle-class European of the period significantly aware of racial issues; it was the automobiles and the formal attire that were significant. Negroes owning automobiles? Negroes in formal wear? It's a put-on. It's a facade.

Such thinking is a monstrous bigotry today. But that's where bigotry comes from -- firmly held, uninformed ideas about propriety. Notions of propriety can be enlightening, but just as often they can be petty and lacking in generosity. The next two photographs select a different constituency and continue the commentary. Even today, Western dress is a gross affectation in most parts of the county, including Detroit, as is the civilian use of an army uniform. But that interpretation derives from the point of view of the pragmatic, republican, Calvinist citizen of Switzerland. It's not American. We accept the right to wear cowboy hats without hesitation. It never occurs to us to ask if that is what those pictures are about.

Another theme that runs through those first few photos, starting with the barely perceived gesture of one of the women in the first picture, is the mouth. In the seventh photo. Navy Recruiting Station, the mouth finally speaks, saying. "Ask me about it." The businessmen, enroute to Washington, strain to hear, as does the young lady at the movie premiere -- être aux écoutes -- certainly the kids at the candy store and I suspect that those kids at the Motorama, too, have entered their car to listen. [37]

U.S. 285, New Mexico (1955)

But while this ties the images together, their primary message is wholly different. The reading of Navy Recruiting Station is in its comment on provincialism, seen directly in those feet on the desk, and something more in the strange display of a flag tacked to the wall. That flag looks as forced and contrived as, for example, the oversized portrait of Lenin that might hang in a similar small government office in Russia would look to us. The European of the '5Os was suspicious of such overt and oversized nationalism; swastikas came in that size too.

The stars of the flag in the recruiting station, which are repeated in the following photograph, just as stripes appear in the photograph that precedes it, serve to introduce a concurrent theme which runs through the following pictures. It is a theme of stars, stardom, and acting: first those tycoons in the star bedecked club car, then the starlet of the movie premiere, followed by kids listening to stars, kids playing at being stars, and kids acting as if stars. Everyone is obsessed with stardom in America. Paul Goodman summed it up in 1956: "We live increasingly, then, in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, and profit." [38]

Is what Frank is showing us a visual metaphor for concerns like Goodman's? I don't think so. Frank's photographs are no more metaphors than the examples Goodman uses in his book to demonstrate his summary. That needs to be remembered. Frank's photographs should first be looked at as examples, as demonstrations. He dealt in direct evidence. And the task of taking photography down to absolute fact, of drawing directly from daily life, was the very thing photojournalism had avoided -- purposely so, for the reduction to raw reality inadvertently degrades the subject to a mode of low irony. The distinction between fact and satire becomes difficult to make; raw realism introduces too much unbelievability.

Frank on the one hand dismissed the need to present information in the mildly romantic and stylized manner of the illustrated magazines, but on the other, his pictures failed to make their point, their comparisons, or their anecdotes within our schema of understanding. If they had -- that is if this had been an American photographer giving expression to American concerns with photographs drawn from such a dead level of life -- it would not have worked.

But Frank did strike a nerve, although it would be more accurate to say that he irritated our collective nervous system. The reason The Americans struck us so hard was that Frank worked as if ignorant of American social ethics. Some of the topics which he addressed visually (the emerging race issue is an example) would have been seen as moralizing if done by an American photographer working within the established visual equivalents of the venacular of American thought. What Frank did with his photographs, unexpectedly, was something totally unfamiliar, something which crossed boundaries only vaguely recognized by Americans.

It becomes as difficult as it is needless to continue addressing these pictures individually, and embarrassing. Certainly not all of them are as suggestive or as alarming as Political rally -- Chicago and Recruiting Station. Often they do nothing more than point, for example, to those loud shirts which first came into prominence in the '5Os -- so immodest and vulgar in European eyes -- or to the tact that both children and adults will take off their shirts in the summer heat. But then, few Europeans realize that Chicago is on the same latitude as Rome, and that the climate in the U.S. ranges from mid-continental extremes of heat and cold to the subtropical.

Realizing these things -- and realizing the other vast differences in demography, land use, and the differences that these ultimately bring to American citizens -- is helpful in understanding the basic issue which must lie behind any of Frank's pictures: why it was taken, why the activity or the situation was of note. Not to know these things makes it difficult to understand the literal content of Frank's work, and leads to assigning a meaning which simply doesn't exist to many of his pictures.

An example is U.S. 285 -- New Mexico, which has been one of the most enigmatic photos of The Americans. It has always seemed inexplicable in terms of the other images. A highway receding to the far horizon had been photographed repeatedly, and often better, especially in terms of what we would expect it to say. Gassen notes that it is a Dorothea Lange photograph. [39] Why then would Frank want to repeat it? One reason, of course, for an artist to repeat a past image is to play with the possibilities inherent in historical allusion. This seems likely in the case of U.S. 285, because there are a number of photographs in The Americans that recall the work of others. But I think Frank had something else in mind, and if he consciously made the allusion it would have been to set that meaning against his intent in using it. U.S. 285 also appeared among the 33 pictures first published, in 1957, in U.S. Camera Annual 1958; [40] only 15 reappear in The Americans.

San Francisco, (1956)

Edited out were photographs which were easily read or obvious constructions, and a few which were interesting but not archetypally American. The Joan Crawford photo, for example, is left out, and for good reason, for it presents itself more as a photo-gag than anything else. It has the look of a Cartier-Bresson, and something of Atget, but also it presents a situation which might occur anywhere in the world. An overwhelming display of posters is not particularly American. But then why did Frank keep U.S. 285 when it seemed so transparent?

Walker Evans seems to have been puzzled by that photograph also, for he specifically addresses it in his introductory remarks to Frank's portfolio of 1957. "In this picture, instantly you find the continent," Evans says, "The whole page is haunted with American scale and space, which the mind fills automatically." [41] He then goes on to write of how that space is filled, but his description is of feelings provoked by Frank's other pictures.

Evans seems to be trying to match this particular photograph to the claims he has made for Frank's work: its "irony and detachment," and the critical clarity that distinguishes Frank from the romanticizers of the illustrated magazines. [42] But U.S. 285 certainly doesn't look ironic and detached, and Evans's attempted justification doesn't ring true. He is probably correct, however, to suggest that U.S. 285 makes reference to space and long distances, as well as, I might add, emptiness. The emptiness of that landscape was selected, I suspect, not to point to scale, but to make a very emphatic point about the highway stripe, which dominates the picture.

Think of the highway crew that carefully painted that dashed line over perhaps hundreds of miles of empty county roads. Think of highway crews everywhere doing that, everywhere making decision about where it is safe to pass, and where it is not. Down comes the brush: "Do Not Cross Solid White Line In Your Lane." Everywhere, too, Americans obey those solid white lines. The American might not meet another car in a hundred miles, have 1O miles visibility, yet the American stays in his lane despite road camber and close shoulders, now and again making a mental note not to pass when that solid line appears. That's why the car had to be in Frank's picture.

What is being described is American -- typically American, and absurd in many ways. It is no less absurd perhaps than the companion photograph, the one that follows U.S. 285, where a sign says: "You Must Be 21 And Prove It." That sign is located between two of the dashes in the highway stripe across the back of the bar. Both pictures comment on the socialization of Americans, a sheep-like homogeneity in radical contrast to what we believe ourselves to be, and strange behavior for a people that pride themselves on their freedom: hypocritical, Frank might have suggested, or puritanical in not being able or willing to distinguish between moral and civil law.

But it is difficult, as an American, to read these pictures like that. We would have to see beyond things which we take for granted. We would have to be from elsewhere to think of those highway stripes as orders, and then to note how Americans obey those orders implicitly and under all circumstances, as if to do so were a virtue. That observation also derives from a European point of view. While American roads were built in the '2Os to accommodate the automobile, perhaps complete with stripes, European roads date from antiquity and the question of their appropriate use by automobiles is only a recent one.

In Europe neither the economy nor the ubiquity of automobiles were sufficient at any time since WWI to merit paying attention to county roads. Little wonder that Frank might suggest that this picture illustrates how the American doesn't seem conscious of his actions, and doesn't examine them to conclude that maybe each driver should be left to trust his own judgment with respect to the use and occupancy of highways.

Movie premiere, Hollywood, (1955)

If this is difficult to understand or see, at least we should be aware of the magnificent pun contained in U.S. 285. It's more than just a picture about stripes: it is obviously night and therefore it is about stars and stripes. Both are lit, and both are also lit in the following photograph, where they undulate like a relief of the landscape in the preceding picture. U.S. 285 is now a personification of the American flag, a metaphor if you will. Walker Evans didn't think of it that way. Nor did Jack Kerouac. Kerouac saw the whole of The Americans as a journey. He described U.S. 285 as:

Long shot night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible-to-believe America in New Mexico under the prisoner's moon. [43]

Brumfield doesn't describe the picture, [44] and for good reasons maybe. It's been 2O years now and the realization has come to most readers that Frank's book wasn't just about such simple things as the vastness of the American landscape. Exactly what it was about has remained uncertain. We have been unwilling to admit that perhaps that photo of the highway is about the highway and about the stripe that dominates it.

We still look at those pictures with eyes trained to Romanticism. If, however, we had been capable of penetrating the irony of U.S. 285 to see the car approaching on the correct side of that stripe and the utter emptiness of that road, we would have been seeing what it was Frank had in mind. The picture is neither metaphorical nor symbolic -- no great quality of American life was being alluded to -- it simply demonstrates a single aspect of the American character.

I don't need to continue with an analysis of Frank's entire book. The point is that there was an underlying point of view, and an awareness of that should keep our metaphorical leaps in check. [45] That Frank's book came from America of the '5Os is unquestionable. Whether it has anything to do with the '5Os is problematic. That the tone of the book is harsh, sad, and expresses a certain anguish is almost universally agreed upon. That this represents anything more than the stance of the author is questionable. That Frank makes use of sarcasm, irony, and humor in his images I would agree to. That these extend to a system of metaphors, and ultimately to an allegorical narrative, is uncertain. That Frank set out to create a contemporary document of America we know. That this document should be taken for anything more than the images it presents is a misreading.

In the end the ultimate utility of The Americans might not lie in reinterpretation, but in what has already been made of those pictures by the photographers who saw them. Perhaps there is no real need for penetration. Perhaps the best critique has been performed already by those practitioners who saw The Americans as if it were polished obsidian, and went out to construct their own impenetrable visions of the world.

Notes

(1) Robert Frank, The Americans (New York: Grove Press, 1959). I would like to thank Alex Sweetman and Peter Thompson for their encouragement.

(2) Quoted in John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), p. 19. The reviews Szarkowski refers to were published in Popular Photography (May 196O), and were written by Les Barry, Bruce Downes, John Durniak, Arthur Goldsmith. H. M. Kinzer, Charles Reynolds, and James Zanuto.

(3) Which is the thesis developed by Szarkowski in op. cit., pp. 17 - 2O.

(4) Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photoraphy, fourth ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), p. 2OO.

(5) Newhall quotes Walker Evans's essay, "Robert frank," printed in Tom Maloney, ed. U.S. Camera Annual 1958 (1957), p. 9O. This one-page essay is an introduction to photographs by Frank presented on the following pages. Evans is misquoted.

(6) One of the more widely distributed anthologies was Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966). Five photographs by Frank are included in the 172 illustrations, making him, in terms ot the number of pictures reproduced by a single individual, fifth among the 95 photographers. Aperture reprinted The Americans again in 1969 (New York: Grossman Publishers), and in 1978 (Milleton, N.Y.).

(7) Quoted in John Brumfield , "The Americans and The Americans," Afterimage, Vol. 8, Nos. 1 and 2 (Summer 198O), p. 8.

(8) Harold Jones, "The 5Os -- A Renaissance in Photography," The Photographer's Choice (Danbury, N.H.: Addison House, 1975), p. 34.

(9) Arnold Gassen, A Chronology of Photography (Athens, Ohio: Handbook Co., 1972), p. 146.

(10) Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows, p. 19.

(11) Ibid, p. 2O.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Brumfield, op. cit., pp. 8 - 15.

(14) Ibid., pp. 9 - 1O.

(15) Brumfield quotes Winston ChurchiIl from a speech which could only have been applicable just after the end of WWII, if at all.

(16) Robert Frank, The Lines of My Hand (Los Angeles: Lustrum Press, 1972).

(17) William Carlos Williams, "The American Background," in Waldo Frank, et al., America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Potrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1934), pp. 9 - 32.

(18) Robert Frank, Les Américans (Paris: Robert Delpire, 1998), text Compiled by Alain Bosquet. The Guggenheim feIlowships were for 1955 and 1956.

(19) Ibid., ad passim.

(20) Ibid., p. 6, from "Petits Télégrammes aux Américains."

(21) Quoted above plate 32 in Jerome Liebling. ed., Photography: Current Perspectives (Rochester, N.Y.: Light Impressions, 1978). First published as a special issue of the Massachusets Review.

(22) Gassen, op. cit., p. 146.

(23) Preface, The Americans, p. 5.

(24) Leslie Baier, "Visions of Fascination and Despair: The Relationship Between Walker Evans and Robert Frank," in Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 1981), p. 55. The third piece is Gotthard Schuh, "A Letter Addressed to Robert Frank," in Camera Vol. 36 (1957), pp. 339 - 34O.

(25) Brumfield, loc. cit. But only an introductory "cycle" of 17 pictures is identified.

(26) Szarkowski, Looking At Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973). p. 173.

(27) Brumfield, loc. cit., p. 8.

(28) Ibid., p. 11.

(29) Cf., Paul Goodman, Growing up Absurd (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), which deals with the same conventions. especially in Chapter 5, "Patriotism."" Goodman maintains that these comventions are the vocabulary of youths and adolescents.

(30) BrumfieId, op. cit., p. 12. Consider, also the incessant punning. What does that black, and occasionally vulgar, humor have to do with a political and social rhetorical dramatization? Noticing that many of the puns are based on French expressions one comes to reaIize how little the book is derived from American sources. By comparison see the extremely reasoned and sensitive analysis by Leroy Searle, "Poems, Pictures and Conceptions of 'Language'", in Afterimage, Vol. 2, No. 1O (May-June 1975) pp 33 - 39.

(31) Robert Frank, "A Statement," in U.S. Camera Annual 1958, p. 115.

(32) Evans, loc. cit.

(33) Szarkowski, Looking At Photographs, loc. cit.; and Evans, ibid.

(34) The intellectuaI quality also shows in the humor and in a certain amount of moralizing.

(35) Picture references are to the 1970 Aperture reissue of The Americans. Although the order has remained unchanged through all four editions, the cropping, sizing, and emphasis of the photographs has changed.

(36) This device, i.e., bringing up a point of criticism and then negating it, is used consistently throughout the book.

(37) To the car radio, that is.

(38) Goodman, op. cit., p. xiii.

(39) Gassen, op. cit., p. 138.

(40) Under the title of "Guggenheim Fellows in Photography," (which includes Evans, op. cit., and Frank, "A Statement") in US Camera Annual 1958, pp. 84 - 115.

(41) Evans, loc. cit.

(42) Ibid.

(43) Kerouac, op. cit., p. 5.

(44) But he calls it "emphatically transitional." Brumfield op. cit., p 15.

(45) And Caution against notions at an international style of photography, or the existence of a visual lingua franca.

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W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Photographs

Carnegie, Nov/Dec 2001 by Ellen S. Wilson

"Don't expect," wrote photographer W Eugene Smith, "a point-by-point hand-led tour. This is an experience as an intensely curious visitor (perhaps a new resident) might discover it."

Smith wrote those notes to himself as he began his Pittsburgh project, what he later called "the finest set of photographs I have ever produced." With a clear vision and a spectacular result, it is puzzling that Smith also considered the project a failure, and that until now the final results have never been exhibited together.

Smith was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1918. His mother, Nettie Lee Caplinger Smith, was an amateur photographer. His father, William, lost his grain business in 1936 and shot himself. Doctors were unable to save him with a blood transfusion from Gene.

Smith had already had one photograph, of the drought-parched bed of the Arkansas River, appear in the New York Times. Shortly after his father's suicide, he left Kansas and enrolled at the University of Notre Dame on a photography scholarship. School did not suit Smith, however and he left after one year and moved to New York, where he worked on free-lance assignments.

It was during World War II, photographing combat at close range and becoming involved personally with the soldiers, that Smith's sense of mission and its role in his photography began to emerge. As Stephenson writes in Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project (WW. Norton and Company and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University [a Lyndhurst Book], 2001), "His pictures began to express a tragic lyricism infused with a benevolent melancholy. He shaded his prints with ever-deepening contrasts between dark and light, creating a visual metaphor for the basic struggle that he was witnessing in civilization, and feeling waged within himself."

Badly wounded in the head and left hand in 1945, Smith spent a year recovering and then, as a well-paid staff member at Life, completed more than 50 assignments for the magazine. Some of those photo-essays, Stephenson says, are "among the most significant in the history of photojournalism."



Life in those pre-television days was a dominant cultural force as well as a major news source, and a position such as Smith had was a rare opportunity. Smith, however, was not happy. He wanted complete control over printing his negatives and arranging his layouts, spent much more time on small assignments than his editors felt was necessary, and was generally cantankerous and difficult to deal with. "The magazine wanted a reliable photographer who could accept the boundaries of given assignments and meet deadlines," Stephenson writes. "Smith wanted to change the world with his pictures."

All of this is well documented in his numerous notes to himself and letters to family and friends, of which he kept copies. "He had a significant ego and some of his copied letters feel like a paper trail left by him for future researchers to follow," Stephenson says.

"He liked being known as the tortured artist. I think he loved that legend, fed off of it and fueled it."

This ego, his burgeoning ambitions, and the recurrent conflicts with his editors led Smith to resign from Life and then try to prove he could survive without it. "Smith would have tried something this large no matter where he had gone," Stephenson says. His mother, long a powerful presence in his life, had recently died, and Smith "erupted with this massive project. He was primed for something like this. But we are lucky that it was Pittsburgh. He caught one of the most richly historic and important American cities in its prime."

When Stefan Lorant hired Smith to produce 100 photographs of contemporary Pittsburgh for a book in honor of the city's bicentennial, it was impossible for the job not to grow well beyond its assigned boundaries.

"Pittsburgh at that time was an industrial dynamo," says Linda Batis, associate curator of Contemporary Art at Carnegie Museum of Art, who organized the exhibition for Pittsburgh. "It was so important to the American economy, and the city was at a moment of tremendous transition."

Smith, in transition as well, found something of a portrait of himself here. Stephenson writes, "The haunting, eternal elements of an evolving, conflicted modern world - elements that first entered his photography in a much different setting during World War II -- were on display in everyday Pittsburgh: simultaneous images of glory and despair, production and destruction, past and present, human and machine, the individual and collective, the ordinary and spectacular."

"He was aware," Batis agrees, "of the human undercurrent. You see the Duquesne Club next to kids playing in the dirt - and there is no doubt that the kids are having fun.

"On the one hand, he had an agenda," she explains. "On the other, he was trying to create a tapestry of the city by photographing disparate elements and weaving them together, and it was the weaving together that gave him such a hard time."

Smith fell into the same sort of conflicts over artistic control with Lorant that he had had with Life. He finally fulfilled his obligation by turning in the required prints (two years after beginning the planned three-week assignment) and then, aided by two Guggenheim fellowships, worked to organize the Pittsburgh photographs and find a publisher.

Again, however, Smith's need for complete editorial control prevented most magazines from accepting his conditions. He finally published a selection of Pittsburgh photographs in 38 pages of Photography Annual 1959, and wrote the accompanying text. An editor, however, might have been helpful. Smith was accustomed to the larger pages of Life, and his layouts did not do justice to his pictures, nor did his text. Smith himself called the result "a debacle."

While a few of the photographs appeared in scattered publications and one retrospective exhibition, Smith turned his attention to other projects - the important series on the effects of poisoned sea water in Minimata, Japan, as well as scenes outside his Sixth Avenue loft in New York. The turmoil of his personal life - rocky marriages, a dependence on amphetamines, and never enough money - continued to rage, and his health to deteriorate, until his death in 1978 after a massive stroke.

The simple history of the Pittsburgh Project still does not explain why the photographs have not been given a museum exhibition until now (2001). One reason, according to Stephenson, is Pittsburgh itself, and the fact that its placement in middle America has kept it off the world's cultural radar screen.

"For some reason, here in the United States we ignore cities like Pittsburgh," he says. "If Smith had done an essay of this magnitude on New York or

London or Paris, it would have been exhibited by now."

Additionally, Smith's most famous photographs tend to be portraits of individuals, but in this project, the city itself is the individual. That was Smith's intention. The result, however, is atypical of his body of work.

And finally, Stephenson speculates that Smith's own personality accounts in part for the neglect of the project. "We're just now beginning a reassessment of his entire body of work," he explains. "Smith's personality was enormous, and he rubbed a lot of people in the official photography world the wrong way... I think we needed 20 years of separation to start looking at his career anew."

The exhibition was made up primarily of photographs in the collection of Carnegie Museum of Art, 500 of which were donated to Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh by Stefan Lorant and given to the Museum of Art in 1982. One third of the photographs are from the collection of the W. Eugene Smith Archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.

"While the exhibition is not a reconstruction - nobody can get into an artist's head - it is modeled on what Smith might have done," Batis explains. Of the 16,000 negatives Smith shot, he repeatedly singled out about 200, and those are the ones being shown here. After an introductory section, there are 10 thematic sections loosely modeled on themes that interested Smith. A room at the end of the exhibition will include a selection of 5x7 work prints, arranged the way Smith did, on boards.

"This section will elucidate how he cropped, how he picked images out of larger shots," Batis says. "It is a resource area intended to flesh out the process through which he worked. Smith was a very thoughtful photographer, and he would go back to places again and again to catch them at a particular time of day."

While Smith's perfectionism and sense of mission made him a great documentary photographer, they exacted a high price. Two years before he came to Pittsburgh, he wrote to his mother, "I have a cult of followers throughout the world who look up to me as the shining light and the protector of integrity and as the one who never compromises my beliefs before pressures of the commercial and outside world. Perhaps this... is a reason I am unhappy because I am afraid I will let these people and the world down ....."

Such an ego can be a burden. The image of the tormented artist was one Smith cultivated, as Stephenson says, but the torment, avoidable or not, was real. Smith's inability to compromise on anything made him a difficult employee, husband, and friend, but gave the world an opportunity to see itself in unflinching light and dark.

Carnegie Museum of Art

www.cmoa.org

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Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by David L. Jacobs

Where adults see grays, young children seem able to recognize and deal with death with disarming aplomb. They are drawn to the look and feel of death, and want to explore it as avidly as their own sexuality. Charles Dickens's Little Nell was completely at ease with her famous mid-nineteenth-century illness, strung out over months when The Old Curiosity Shop was published, chapter by chapter from 1840 to 1841, and read avidly by most of the literate population of England. Nell thought only of others, and never of her own malady; she was the epitome of the selfless, childhood angel, ready to meet her Maker. The adult reading population, on the other hand, held their breath for what they hoped wasn't the inevitable, and many implored Dickens to spare her. They wanted to defy in fiction what could not be denied in real life, which is understandable given the mortality rates of the period. In Manchester, England, for example, 57 out of every 100 children died before the age of five in 1840, and during the same period the English gentry lived to an average age of only 44, which dropped precipitously to only 22 years for laborers.(1) Little Nell died despite thousands of entreaties, but Dickens bestowed upon her the ultimate "beautiful death."(2)

The Victorians who wept at The Old Curiosity Shop (or Henry Peach Robinson's 1858 photograph Fading Away) had seen some of their children, nieces and nephews die as infants. Sometimes the same hands that cut their umbilical cords cleaned their bodies before rigor morris set in. They knew the smell of a deathbed, the breath of a dying grandparent, the dust in a shaft of light seeping through curtains, the passing of a mother in childbirth, the heft of a coffin being hoisted from a wagon and lowered into the ground. Throughout human history, death, like birth, had been close at hand, an everyday experience.

But the twentieth century brought with it revolutionary changes in the Western theory and practice of dying, as Philippe Aries has argued:

In the course of the twentieth century an absolutely new type of dying has made an appearance in some of the most industrialized, urbanized, and technologically advanced areas of the Western World. . . . society has banished death . . . Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects its continuity. Everything in town goes on as if nobody died anymore.(3)

The "banishment" of death is stunning in many respects, not least in the way it has taken such a strong hold on our society in such a short period of time. In a span of three or four generations, American society has so pervasively distanced itself from death that practices that previously were exceedingly common - like memorial portraiture - strike many late-twentieth-century people as twisted or perverted. Throughout history, to die at home, surrounded by family, friends and neighbors, was the norm. In our own time, most of us confer our rights of death and dying to the professionals, and die amidst doctors, nurses and blinking machines. In 1940, 70% of all deaths occurred in the home, but only 40 years later 80% take place in hospitals or nursing homes.(4) Death is kept at bay: tending the dying and dead is customarily given over to a whole professional sub-class of medical, funeral and legal communities who transact the theory and practice of death. If terminally ill patients want to die at home, they and their family often have to fight the medical establishment for the privilege, so radically have conventions changed. As Michael C. Kearl suggests, "with modernization, medicine has replaced religion as the major institutional molder of cultural death fears and immortality desires."(5)

If it is a rarity in our society to experience death in its moment, our mediated selves consume it daily through TV and film. Ever since Viet Nam, our living rooms have been the sites of death and destruction. The nightly news nearly always begins with stories of local gore - traffic fatalities, drive-by shootings, rapes. When fortune brings the networks a new war, flood or famine, we are treated to pictures of the "real thing," with grave voices that provide little in the way of context, but much advice about how to feel. In films and television shows countless bad guys writhe operatically before succumbing to the final horizontal, and Kung Fu is readily available on late night cable for those who need a close before bedtime. The National Institute of Mental Health recently estimated that by the age of 16, the typical American has seen some 18,000 homicides on television(6) - which works out to an average of three deaths per day - exclusive of newspapers and movies. Mediated death occurs across town or over oceans, but always elsewhere; it might be frightening or sad, but ultimately it's someone else's problem. Safe death, safe sex - if the pronouncements about cyberspace are any indication, our society is only just beginning to concoct ways of living in an airless remove.

In contrast to the preponderance of death imagery in the mass media, still photographs of death are something of a rarity. On television, death can be highly dramatic, but is always fleeting. Still photographs are much less tractable; their evidence is not as easy to dispense with, particularly since the viewer, as opposed to the film director or editor, controls when to look and when to move on. The very stasis of still photographs demands more attentiveness, which may suggest why these images have been in large measure invisible in exhibitions and publications until quite recently. Their absence may correlate with the broader societal banishment of death.

Spurred in part by the AIDS epidemic, which has brought death closer at hand and occasioned numerous photographic essays, the publication of several books on the subject in the last few years is a welcome sight. In addition, the ongoing controversies over euthanasia and abortion turn, in all of their complexity, upon issues of defining life and death, and deciding who can and should settle such matters - politicians, lawyers, medical professionals, citizens. Our society is reevaluating some of the lift-and-death positions that have taken hold during our century, and photography can play a significant role in shedding light on these issues. The relative proliferation of photographs of death in exhibitions and books might even signal a readiness in our society to re-examine our attitudes about dying and death.



The images contained within the books under review here touch on a wide variety of places and times, events and cultures. But before proceeding to them, permit a couple of caveats that the preceding pages have already warranted. Subjectivity, triteness and over-generalization seem inevitable by-products when writing about death, and this essay is no exception. It would be absurd to pretend that my personal contacts with death do not affect my attitudes about these photographs and the issues they raise. To generalize from one's particular point of view on a subject like death swings somewhere between the foolhardy and the downright stupid. However, in the absence of inordinate self-reflexivity, such generalizations are inevitable. And, too, the snare of triteness looms. Who among us has not resorted to "I'm sorry" in the face of grief? The inadequacy of language to transact the deepest of our experiences - the dances of love, of death - makes for a thriving industry in greeting cards. Only the poets are able to reach into the deeper waters, and even they come up short - the great elegies of literature can be counted on two or three hands. Metaphor recurs in some of the writing in these books, and in this essay as well, as the trope that seems best suited to an impossible subject, since at its heart metaphor concedes that some things can only be expressed through indirection. Metaphor denies direct description, for few (metaphorically speaking) can peer directly into the sun. As Wallace Stevens suggested in his "The Motive for Metaphor" (1947):

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer Of red and blue, the hard sound - Steel against intimation - the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

Looking at Death contains a broad range of photographs that Barbara P. Norfleet assembled from various photographic collections housed at Harvard University. Included are images of deaths from all manner of natural and unnatural causes: disease, decapitation, rape, fire, lynching, murder, suicide, old age. There are children and adults laid in state, body-littered battlegrounds, charnel houses, fetuses and some especially difficult photographs of people who died of melanosis and dermatitis. With few exceptions, the photographs were made for documentary purposes by anthropologists, commercial photographers, news photographers and the police. The photographs represent a variety of cultural approaches to death, past and present, and their inclusion in no way reflects a token multiculturalism. Rather, the cultural range of images is central to the point and power of the anthology: that our responses to death, individually and socially, are as varied as the forms that death itself takes. As Norfleet suggests, the photographs also reinforce a theme of community,

". . . that [Americans] are trying to make death and grief less isolating . . . But it is most often a sharing among strangers. Most of us have lost the art of sharing our own grief and helping others with theirs."

Norfleet introduces the book with a section called "Staging Death" that includes histrionic photographs of plays and films: Julius Caesar lying bloodlessly dead, surrounded by serious-miened Romans peering off in various directions; Greta Garbo as Camille, dying in the arms of an immaculately coifed Robert Taylor; and various other actors and actresses in postures of soulful lamentation. As Norfleet says, these pictures "show death as graceful and romantic," as something that "is never faced alone, but is shared with others." These are wonderfully hokey photographs of clean, well-lit deaths, and their ironies only increase when compared to the pictures of actual death that follow. These simulated death scenes serve as a deft and humorous counterpoint to the grisliness of much of the rest of the book.

Elsewhere, wit emerges in unexpected forms. William N. Jennings's photograph Morgue with a Poem (c. 1920) displays an assembly line of dozens of enshrouded corpses hanging from meathooks. Some unknown scribe wrote the following memento mori on the photograph:

Gaze my friends perhaps with glee As you are now, so once were we And if you do not give a cuss Just grab a hook and follow us

Next to a hook lying on the floor is written "The Hook," and beside a corpse enshrouded in black, lying on the floor, "Not Joe Louis." Perhaps the writer was an undertaker who, having lived with death for untold years, used black humor for the same reasons that surgeons sometimes banter irreverently around the operating table.



Norfleet achieves sly humor in her sequencing. A section called Remains of Death, that features mummies and skeletons from various parts of the world concludes with a series of photographs that feature skulls. An 1850 portrait of Professor John Collins Warrent presents a handsomely dressed, serious man whose hand rests atop a human skull. The iconography of this image looks back to past centuries, where men customarily posed for memento mori with skulls and other symbols of mortality, while at the same time being very much of the nineteenth century, where learned "gentlemen" were often passionate naturalists and amateur scientists. It is an archetypal image of Western attitudes and sensibility. On the opposite page is a photograph of a nearly naked, emaciated Philippine man taken in the nineteenth century. He stands holding a spear, and beside him four skulls are lined up against a white sheet. A turn of the page reveals a picture of Hamlet pondering the skull of Yorick, taken from a Moscow performance in the mid-1950s, perhaps in the midst of uttering these lines:

To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till 'a find it stopping a bunghole? . . . . . . . Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? (V,i)

The final picture is a display at the American Museum of Natural History of skulls strung along a tree that illustrates cranial development among the hominids. This suite of photographs raises searching questions about competing systems of knowledge and representation, and does so with wit and insight.

In some images death is seen as part of the natural order. In the "Death in the Family" section American children lie in coffins, beds, chairs and laps. Dressed in Sunday finery, surrounded by flowers, hands often folded, they are posed to look serene and at peace. In a 1938 photograph a young couple poses together with their dead child as if she is simply sleeping on the mother's lap, while an 1864 carte de visite shows an older brother with a protective arm around his equally dead sister in their joint coffin. These patently American images are balanced with pictures that attest to different rituals and iconography: ancient Mummies and grave sites from Egypt, Guatemala, Pompeii and Ohio mound builders. An arresting photograph of a Roman ossuary made in the 1870s shows a room decorated with thousands of bones, skulls and four skeletal monks dressed in full regalia bearing crosses. Norfleet writes:

At first glance, the embellishments look like carved wood, but then you see the rose window made from ribs and vertebral segments . . . The remains of the friars in their hoods . . . and flowing robes are far more disturbing and haunting than skeletons would be. The hollow sockets peering out from the hoods, the bony hands clutching crosses, and the solemn postures make these friars seem part alive, part corpse.

A 1961 photograph shows a young dead New Guinea warrior, surrounded by tribesmen, tied upright in a chair, being prepared for his funeral pyre, and a 1985 photograph by Jane Tuckerman depicts two shrouded corpses awaiting cremation in India. In many of these photographs the accoutrements of death suggest, with varying degrees of subtlety, hope for a better hereafter.

The heart of the book lies in images of the grim reaper in high spirits - images that call into question the nature of a species that is capable of such aggression and inhumanity. Ponder, for example, Felix Beato's Hanging Man, the Execution Ground (c. 1870), in which a mangled body is splayed along a crucifix, foregrounded by the heads of six Japanese warriors. Or B. W. Kilburn's 1902 stereograph of five beheaded Chinese Boxers, the severed heads laying along side their bodies at odd angles. Or a (c. 1900) picture of a Philippine headhunter holding a lashed, headless victim that resembles an animal carcass. Or consider the photograph of Mussolini and his mistress, made soon after a mob beat them to death in 1945. The couple sit more or less upright, with their heads leaning against each other, tags of identification pinned to their shirts. Blood covers her face and clothes. Mussolini's mangled head looks more like an overripe squash than anything human. The phrase "beaten to a pulp" takes on new meaning in viewing this photograph. I try to imagine the hands that held the clubs and the feet that stomped these people to death, and the years of frustration and hatred toward the dictator that fueled such frenzy. It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Mussolini - the least sympathetic of figures - in reaction to the capacity for violence that the image implies. We confront in such pictures not only death, but Joseph Conrad's unspeakable acts born in hearts of darkness. One returns with relief to hokey pictures of Caesar, Garbo and Hamlet pondering Yorick's skull.

The photographs of crime victims are among the toughest photographs, in part because of their everydayness, and their suggestion that terminal violence can lurk around any corner. Taken at the sites of death and most often unattributed, the images encourage us to narratize as we search for explanations. Some of these photographs bring to mind Roland Barthes's idea of the punctum, the piercing element in a photograph that leaps into us from beyond the frame; in Barthes's words, the "sting, speck, cut, little hole - and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."(7) In Victim in Family Slaying (1958) a dead girl lies on a bed, only her bare legs visible, with what appears to be parities bunched around her ankles. Two detectives stand on either side, one looking at her, the other studying a legal pad. Above the corpse on the wall, the publicity pictures of four Hollywood celebrities, neatly framed in a grid of four, smile broadly, showing gleaming teeth. In Murder of Young Couple (c. 1966) two partially visible dead bodies are slumped in the front seat of a car. A single bullet hole, ringed in the pure white of fractured glass, is visible on the windshield in front of the driver's seat. In Murder of Children by Gas (c. 1967) two young children lie as if asleep on a kitchen floor. The girl is missing one shoe, and the boy has wet his pants at the moment of death. To appropriate a metaphor from a wholly different context, the devil is in the details.

Joel-Peter Witkin's anthology, Harm's Way, consists of four series of photographs of murders, sickness, pornography and portraits of the insane. The selection principles go unstated, but they're evident enough, since the pictures have the unmistakable stamp of Witkin's aesthetic. Many of these subjects would surely have found their way into Witkin's photographs, if only they hadn't had the misfortune to die long ago. In his terse three paragraph introduction, Witkin informs us that "existence is a form of pathology," that the photographs possess a "brutal extreme of . . . purpose," and that these photographs are "from a time resplendent in the atrocity we once called life."

The 24 photographs of crime victims were made by the New York police between 1914 and 1918. Luc Sante first mined this archive in his stunning and disturbing book, Evidence (1992), and several of the pictures published there are included in Harm's Way.(8) Many depict the dead in public places - stairwells, hallways, alleys and streets. The shoes of an executed man are visible from the end of a barrel in which his body has been jammed. Another man lies against the doors of a cornice and skylight shop, with rows of people standing on either side of him, wholly neglecting the corpse as they peer back into the camera lens. Many of the bodies depicted are firmly rooted to the beds, chairs and streets that captured them in their final moments.

But others almost seem to levitate. Several victims were photographed from above, with a wide angle lens used on a camera set upon a tripod. The spatial ambiguity can be quite disarming: the eyes play tricks, and at times it seems as if one is looking up at bodies that seem to hover above the viewer, as if their final resting places were ceilings, not floors. In her accompanying essay, Eugenia Parry Janis calls these murdered people "the fallen," and the metaphor fits the vertiginous feel of the images as it invokes various physical, metaphysical and mythical associations of falling.

These are photographs of ambiguous scenes seen ambiguously. Even if the police records hadn't been destroyed, it would be virtually impossible to reconstruct these people's lives, much less the events that led to their demise, or the identity of the hands that killed them. Janis discusses the intervention by the police photographers, who customarily moved the bodies and inserted props into the pictures, all of which makes these images all the more inscrutable. Add to these crime photographs the limits of descriptive language - to say nothing of the power of rhetorical speech and - voila! - we get the O. J. Simpson trial: ambiguities that eclipse two dead people on a Brentwood sidewalk. Image, exposition, argument are all supposedly marshaled in the search for truth, whether in courtrooms or criticism. But such positions, intentionally or otherwise, often serve the larger role of screening us from the fatal dominant X - the inertness of these people and their evocations about us and our world.

The problem with stressing the ambiguity that confronts us in 80-year-old police photographs - or the more recent color versions made outside Nicole Brown Simpson's condo - is the temptation to aestheticize experience. Given the impossibility of knowing the contexts, we treat objects as if they are entirely self-contained and resistant to hermeneutic penetration. Action, and perhaps even reaction, become irrelevant. We are free to play with the image as we see fit, ironic distance is readily achieved, and death becomes just another consumable object. We see grays, and perhaps even seek them out for the cushion that they provide. But in their final moments, the people in these photographs knew the red bloodedness of their murderers and the feel of their red blood seeping out. No amount of theoretical dancing can eliminate, in the end, the impact of these simplest of earth-signs.

Rooted in the immutable, if ambiguous, fact of death, these images raise questions both about their subjects and ourselves as viewers. Sante suggests some of the paradoxes:

I am presenting [these crime photographs] because of their terrible eloquence and their nagging silence. I cannot mitigate the act of disrespect that is implicit in the act of looking at them, but their power is too strong to ignore; they demand confrontation as death demands it.(9)

Writing in a similar vein, Janis poses the most relevant question of all: "We cannot look at these photographs today without wondering why we want to look at them, why we want to probe each one, puzzle over what seems at the same time alien and yet profoundly familiar . . . "She answers the question not by emphasizing the voyeuristic or sensationalistic impulses that drive some viewers. Rather, she suggests, invoking the operative metaphor from Edwin Abbott's novel, Flatland (1884), that

These photographs design the dead in a universe different from our own, as flat stars in a flat galaxy. We must admit to ourselves, as we take them on, that such pictures-fulfill a need, increasingly insistent, to face in two dimensions what in the third we will never understand, and what the fourth has yet to reveal.

Janis stretches the language in order to suggest the ways that these photographs enter into and change consciousness through metaphor. She deftly encourages us to ponder our innermost responses to the impenetrable shells of the fallen.

In Secure the Shadow author Jay Ruby devotes much of his attention to the largely neglected area of memorial portraits. These photographs were, in Ruby's words, "a normal part of the image inventory of many families - displayed in wall frames and albums along with other family pictures." Memorial photographs were first made soon after the invention of the medium, and they were a familiar practice in America until the early twentieth century. They persist in our own day, but the images are circulated only among close family members because of current taboos.(10) Ruby sets out to analyze these largely overlooked photographs in hope of situating the practice within broad currents of American social history.



The research in the book is extensive. Ruby succeeds in amassing far-flung materials on American death imagery into a coherent whole, employing methods from anthropology, sociology, cultural history and art history. He marshals evidence from well-chosen primary materials that enliven the topic. For example, in 1873 Boston photographer Albert Southworth coolly describes his work with corpses 30 years earlier:

Just lay [the corpses] down as if they were in sleep . . . I will say on this point, because it is a very important one, that you may do just as you please so far as the handling and bending of corpses is concerned. You can bend them till the joints are pliable and make them assume a natural and easy position. If a person has died and the friends are afraid that there will be liquid ejected from the mouth, you can carefully turn them over just as though they were under the operation of an emetic. You can do that in less than one single minute, and every single thing will pass out, and you can wipe the mouth and wash off the face and handle them just as well as though they were well persons.

Or consider the following 1877 advice, offered by an Illinois photographer to others who might be pressed into performing "the unpleasant duty to take a picture of a corpse":

. . . it is no easy manner [sic] to bend a corpse that has been dead twenty-four hours. Place the body on a lounge or sofa, have the friends dress the head and shoulders as near as in life as possible, then politely request them to leave the room to you and your aides, that you may not feel the embarrassment incumbent should they witness some little mishap liable to befall the occasion . . .

Place your camera in front of the body at the foot of the lounge, get your plate ready, and then comes the most important part of the operation (opening the eyes), [sic] this you can effect handily by using the handle of a teaspoon; put the upper lids down, they will stay; turn the eyeball around to its proper place and you have the face nearly as natural as life. Proper retouching will remove the blank expression and the stare of the eyes.

Among other things, these passages implicitly suggest what was earlier alluded to: that the physical proximity of death was much closer at hand to the average nineteenth-century citizen than to ourselves. Our ancestors knew the movements of the joints and the bodily emissions of the dead, and could discuss them matter of factly. In contrast, were I to read these passages in a public lecture, nervous laughter would no doubt fill the air.

The materials assembled here reveal other significant differences between us and our great grandparents, and embedded attitudes about death in our time are dramatized in the process. We learn, for example, that photographers who advertised their deathbed services sometimes promised to be there with photographic equipment within an hour's notice because the burial process could take as little as one day. A tradition of photographs devoted exclusively to funeral flowers sprung up, which, Ruby suggests, was "a reflection of the shift in attention from the deceased to the funeral." There were also a fair number of death photographs made of pets: Ruby reports that pet cemeteries in Philadelphia and Los Angeles contain a large number of tombstone photographs, many of recent vintage.

But, of course, some things never change. Even the most bathetic of the nineteenth-century death photographs - angelic sleepers amidst super-abundant flowers and elaborate coffins - carry with them the lingering hope of a hereafter in an age when traditional faith and the conceit of an anthropocentric world continued its retreat. As with the death of Little Nell, behind the patent sentimentality of many memorial pictures there lies a familiar need for consolation, if not explanation.



Regrettably, despite the wealth of materials, Secure the Shadow falls short of captivating the reader. Details are amassed to the point of tedium and loss of focus. Within a couple of pages, in the course of a discussion on photographic tombstones, we discover that the first daguerreotype made in Indianapolis was for a tombstone; some Catholic dioceses have proscriptions against photographs in cemeteries; "there appear to be no photo tombstones in Arlington National Cemetery"; in Juniata County, Pennsylvania, there has been recent vandalism of photographic tombstones; and that the first patent for a photographic tombstone was issued in 1851 (thankfully, we are told patent number, too).

Moreover, the flat affect of Ruby's writing fails to reach the emotional subtexts that fueled the practice of memorial photography, as in:

Funerals are a time when families get together. While a sad occasion, it is not unusual for family members to use the event to conduct family business and have a social time. It is therefore not illogical that family pictures are taken at the time of the funeral. (p. 97)

Or consider this paragraph, which concludes the third chapter of the book:

In order to accommodate the loss of a loved one, we need to celebrate his or her life. Memorializing the deceased with a photograph seems an altogether reasonable means to accomplish that task. The logic of this argument is sufficient that several industries - from memorial card manufacturers to photographic tombstone plaque makers - have raised to facilitate these activities.

The concluding chapter of the book, "A Social Analysis of Death-Related Photographs," is especially disappointing. The chapter begins, "There is no mystery as to why people take pictures of deceased loved ones. They feel the need for a last visual remembrance." In a similar mode, Ruby begins a section entitled "Motivation" with:

Why do some people take photographs of their dead loved ones and their funerals and affix their images on tombstones? Is there some overriding purpose and motivation that can account for all photographs of death? It may be no more complex than the fact that photographs that memorialize a life or commemorate a death provide us with a means to remember so we can forget.

Such pat thinking forecloses the kind of inquiry that "social analysis" warrants. If, after more than a decade of research into the topic, Ruby finds no mystery in such open-ended questions, it may explain why the analysis that follows seems so flat-footed. He loses himself amidst details that seem largely irrelevant to his larger objectives. In the midst of this "social analysis," why are four pages devoted to evidence concerning the pervasiveness of death photography - a point firmly established earlier in the book - culminating in a page and a half given over to a lengthy quote from an Ann Landers column, about which Ruby offers no additional comment?

Ruby devotes too little attention to issues that lie at the heart of the matter. What personal, social and political needs were satisfied by these images? Have people in the late twentieth century lost something by having relinquished, in large measure, this tradition? Might there be an inverse proportion between the proliferation of mass-mediated imagery of death and the waning of private death images? And most important - and elusive - how, in a span of two or three generations, did America evolve from a country that knew death close at hand, and used photography to transact part of this knowledge, to a country that largely proscribes against such imagery, banishing death to hospitals, while simultaneously indulging violence in the streets and the mass media? Overriding issues such as these are either begged or given short shrift.

This book is a useful starting point into a large and fascinating topic. Ruby is adept at gathering and categorizing death images and related materials. But as an excavation into social history, or an explanation of what these photographs meant to families and to the culture at large, this study falls short. The basic materials are at hand, but they cry out for a synthesizing sensibility like that of an Aries, Michel Foucault or Christopher Lasch.

On August 10, 1945, Yosuke Yamahata, a 28-year-old photographer for the Japanese News and Information Bureau, was given the toughest photographic assignment in history: to document Nagasaki the day after the atomic bomb had been dropped. The more than 100 photographs he made that day comprise the ground zero of atomic photography. Until its recent publication in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the bombing, the work in Nagasaki Journey has been largely unseen in America. The landscape that emerges in these photographs is an unprecedented wasteland, the likes of which John Bunyan, T. S. Eliot, and J. R. R. Tolkein never imagined. A few withered trees, smokestacks, telegraph poles and building foundations are all that rise from the leveled city. Lumber, steel, rocks and body parts litter the landscape. Smoke and dust hover above the ground, turning much of the scenery into a dirty, middle gray.(11)

In the photographs taken at or near ground zero, we search in vain for signs of life - at ground zero everything alive turned into powder and dust. Life itself is the missing term in these pictures. Further from the epicenter, amidst the rubble, lie charred body parts that look sub-human, with their stiff limbs and contorted hands, and the blackened flesh that could be hides or fur. These pictures evoke some deeply fearful realms of the psyche in suggesting an atavistic, retrograde metamorphosis. It's as if in death these men and women moved backwards toward an earlier, primordial biological state. The cocked arm of a human corpse, head facing up, hands twisted, looks not unlike a dead cockroach on the kitchen floor.(12) The impact is related, however tragic the irony, with a stock-in-trade shot in horror films, where the unmasked heroine or hero - outwardly beautiful - is transmogrified into the reptilian monster within. And, closer to the bone, these pictures suggest a deeper reversion into the inorganic condition of dust. I don't introduce these fearful metamorphoses to in any way trivialize the dead in Japan, but rather to suggest the mythic and dreamwork elements that such images can evoke. These photographs encourage us to confront the human selves that create war and death machines in the first place . . . and the animal selves that inhabit our skins . . . and our deeper mineral selves, Hamlet's "quintessence of dust."(13)

Yamahata's photographs of the Nagasaki survivors are equally challenging. People walk along devastated highways, sleep on the ground, wash themselves, stare into space, cradle children in their arms, bear away the dead. Robert Jay Lifton writes in the book's Forward,

We encounter devastated human beings and profound emptiness. The emptiness is partly in the landscape . . . But the emptiness extends to people's faces. On those faces are recorded combinations of anguish and confusion . . . Yamahata records what Japanese people have spoken of, in relation to atomic bomb survivors, as muga-muchu, literally, "without self, in a trance," suggesting a state of psychological obliteration.(14)

The images give testimony to the immediate impact of the bomb and its aftermath of desolation, but say nothing of the subsequent effects of the radiation poisoning. For example, three photographs show a woman nursing her child. In two of the pictures, the mother gazes into the child's burned and scarred face, while in the third she looks off into the distance with a glazed expression of great sadness. Only a few days after her birth, and just hours after the explosion, the infant at the breast is already ingesting massive doses of radiation. We see these images with 50 years of hindsight, and the knowledge that many of the survivors were to face slow, excruciating deaths. At times we might want to cry out to these people - and to Yamahata himself - "Get out of there, those smoldering grounds will poison you." But they are frozen in their time, and we in ours, and anyway, there was nowhere to run.

Yamahata, who died of duodenal cancer in 1965, wrote a brief "memo" on the experience of photographing Nagasaki for the Japanese book of his photographs that was published in 1952. He recounts his orders:

I had been directed to photograph the situation in Nagasaki so as to be as useful as possible for military propaganda. At the same time I was concerned to discover the means for one's survival in the midst of this tragedy. These, I remember, were the only two thoughts on my mind as I lay down to rest, gazing up at the beautiful dawn sky and waiting for the light to grow strong enough to begin taking photographs.

In an interview made 10 years later, in 1962, Yamahata spoke of the strange beauty of the scene after the bombing, "I tried climbing up onto a small hill to look - all around, the city burned with what looked like little elf-fires, and the sky was blue and full of stars. It was a strangely beautiful scene." In responding to the question, "you must have been paralyzed in fright" when photographing, Yamahata responded:

I was completely calm and composed. In other words, perhaps it was just too much, too enormous to absorb . . . Walking through the tragedy of Nagasaki at the time, all I thought of was the photographs I had to take, and of how to avoid being killed if another New Style Bomb were to fall. In other words, I thought only of myself. That might be shameful, but it was the reality of the situation and I can't change it.

These reactions, though not what some might expect, seem fully human. In the face of such devastation and misery, we somehow retain the capacity to go on auto pilot, to get a job done, and in the process even to find beauty in the most anomalous of places.

In Death in Life (1967), Robert Jay Lifton cites the following testimony of a Hiroshima survivor:

. . . at a certain point I must have become more or less saturated, so that I became no longer sensitive, in fact insensitive, to what I saw around me. I think human emotions reach a point beyond which they cannot extend - something like the photographic process. If under certain conditions you expose a photographic plate to light, it becomes black; but if you continue to expose it, then it reaches a point where it turns white . . . Only later can one recognize having reached this maximum state . . . (15)

In encountering and engaging in the photographs contained in these wide-ranging, ambitious, courageous and disturbing books, viewers and readers, too, can reach the point of saturation, lapse into a state of semi-shock, and even take refuge in their terrible beauty. Perhaps these responses and mechanisms are deflections, perhaps they are lies, perhaps they are saving graces. Whatever the case, there is much to be gained in seeing ourselves see: in pondering the moves we make when peering at Yorick's skull, or flirting with the fatal, dominant X.

NOTES

1. Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 45.

2. Phillipe Aries develops the concept of beautiful death at length in The Hour of Our Death, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 410-474.

3. Ibid., p. 560.

4. Kearl, p. 478.

5. Ibid., p. 406.

6. Ibid., p. 383.

7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans., (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 27.

8. Luc Sante, Evidence, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992).

9. Ibid., p. xii.

10. Norfleet makes the same case in her Introduction, p. 13.

11. Some of Yamahata's film was also fogged that day.

12. Director Francis Ford Coppola used this effect in Godfather 3, when one of the mobsters died from eating poisoned candy while watching the opera that concludes the film, and in his death throes he looks as much like a bug as a human.

13. Cf. Hamlet, II, ii.

14. Robert Jay Lifton, "Foreword: Yamahata's Witness, Atomized Nagasaki: the Bombing of Nagasaki - A Photographic Record, Munehito Kitahima, ed., (Tokyo: Daiichi Publishing, 1952), p. 11.

15. Quoted in Rupert Jenkins, "Introduction," Nagasaki Journey, (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995), p. 17.

DAVID L. JACOBS is professor and chair of the art department of University of Houston.

Jim Goldberg, Raised by Wolves, 1995. Tweeky Dave’s Jean Jacket

Raised By Wolves as a Non-Fictional Multi-Media Narrative

By Sarah Wichlacz

"It’s not like you can go home and watch TV."

(Unattributed handwritten quote from "Raised by Wolves" p.46)

Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves is purely narrative. It is a story, as true as any story can hope to be; it is a story told through many mediums; it is the story of the streets. Jim Goldberg, a photographer by trade, spent ten years on the streets of San Francisco and LA "documenting" the citys’ homeless teens. Raised by Wolves is the story of Goldberg’s experience with these teens. This story takes on many forms: a traveling art gallery exhibit, a book, a website, and an experience. All of these radically different modes of narrative function to tell the same story. Raised by Wolves is the fabula at the core of these different manifestations, altered by different mediums and orders. But multiple venues are just the tip of the multimedia iceberg. Raised by Wolves is part photojournalism, part novel, part movie, part comic, and part museum display. Shifts in mediums occur within the individual pieces themselves. In the book, the fabula and the story (the order) remain the same while the text (the medium) changes repeatedly. Raised by Wolves adopts some conventions from all of these mediums but it transcends them as well. Raised by Wolves is nothing like anything you’ve seen before. While the traveling exhibit is seen in fine arts venues, the website caters to social activism through testimonial. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I will only be discussing the book version of Raised by Wolves, but it is important to keep in mind that the exhibit and website, while separate, are still part of the greater piece.

The history of storytelling is as old as humankind, maybe even older. Throughout this history voice, body, images, text, objects themselves, and today even film, video, and computers have all been utilized to create and tell stories. A number of mediums have been created by utilizing more than one of these storytelling techniques at once. Comics usually combine image and text; film, moving photographs, combines sound and image. Raised by Wolves has it’s own unique blend of image (photos and video stills) and text (transcripts of conversations and handwritten notes and letters). Out of Raised by Wolves’ 315 pages 31 of them are fully textual, usually typed transcripts of conversations between Goldberg and the homeless teens. But bulk of the book is photographic in nature; even handwritten notes become photographs within the book. The style of Goldberg’s photographs and the reportage nature of Raised by Wolves refers to photojournalism.



Photojournalism itself grows out of journalism, and the main goals are to inform/teach the audience and to uphold the truth. The first real photojournalistic narrative was The Execution of the Lincoln Conspirators by Alexander Gardener, photographed in 1865. It includes traditional portraits of the conspirators along with seven sequential images depicting the hangings. Earlier, in 1855 the Crimean War was the first war to be documented photographically, but slow film speeds made it impossible to record action, only the aftermath. These images were often reproduced as lithographs and published in European journals and newspapers. But these early news photos lack the narrative qualities that later became synonymous with photojournalism. The same detached nature prevents the famous Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady from being true photojournalism. These types of photos were published in journals such as Harper’s as illustrations for articles on the war, but the article and the photo rarely combined to make a true narrative. In the depression era United States a social documentation style was emerging. Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves comes directly form this photographic heritage. Documentary refers to a style apart from news and art photography; it implies that the photographer had a goal in mind, usually to expose social injustice and to somehow bring about a change. But another more important convention is the presentation of photos in a group rather than one at a time. Multiple images lead to a decidedly more narrative approach to photography.

The social documentation style (combined with European war reportage style) evolved into what is known as Life magazine style. The Life style is defined by the combination of text and image; while the two mediums remain spatially separate, they combine to tell the same story. Here the fablula is told through two separate texts (mediums) creating a unique gestalt telling. Mary Ellen Mark best represents the contemporary manifestation of this style. Her subject matter is also closely related to Goldberg’s, which provides points of comparison and contrast in looking at his work. In 1983 Mary Ellen Mark, working for Life magazine, went to Seattle Washington with writer/reporter Cheryl McCall to document the city’s street children. The resulting piece was a powerful story with even more powerful characters, so powerful in fact that Mark’s husband, Martin Bell, was moved enough to make a documentary film. So today Streetwise exists as a Life magazine article with photos, a black and white documentary film, and a book with Mark’s photos and quotes from the street children in the film. This type of multimedia impulse is reflected in Raised by Wolves, but Goldberg alone is responsible for the whole that is Raised by Wolves, whereas there is a separation of the writer, photographer, and filmmaker in Streetwise. Streetwise also upholds many of the conventions of documentary photography that are often disregarded in Raised by Wolves.

Jim Goldberg, Raised by Wolves, 1995. Contact Strip.

The conventions of documentary photography demand that the photos be printed full frame with black boarders. Full frame images allude to truth, in that nothing has been cropped from the photographic frame. This idea ignores the fact that many (usually hundreds) of images are "cropped" out during the editing process. Another important convention is the lack of the photographer within the narrative. Narrative photographers strive not to alter, change, or influence their subjects at all. This is no easy task, as most people don’t act normally when they have a stranger with a camera following them around. In documentary photography truth is the most important ideal. The job of the photographer is to represent objective truth as best as they can. This is an impossible and outdated objective that Jim Goldberg works hard to successfully usurp.

Goldberg uses text and imagery to relate the experiences of his subjects directly to his audience. He originally shot only straight black and white photographs, but later began incorporating text. In his exhibit/book Rich and Poor (1979) Goldberg juxtaposes photographs of very rich people and very poor people, but he allows the people to speak for themselves by letting them write their feelings about the image on the photograph itself. Goldberg goes further in Raised by Wolves by recording and transcripting his subjects’ real voice, not their more contrived written voices. In many other ways Raised by Wolves evolves from Goldberg’s earlier works. In their class conscious and gritty street photography style, as well as narrative elements Goldberg’s earlier work prepared him for his master work, Raised by Wolves, Goldberg’s ten years with San Francisco’s street children has created a finely tuned story of epic proportions, as grand in scope as a Russian novel with over 170 photographs and over 100 characters in the "cast" (Raised by Wolves, p5).

Jim Goldberg, Raised by Wolves, 1995. Last photo of Tweeky Dave

The immense task of recording and then assembling the incredible volume of media that went into Raised by Wolves is all the more impressive because of how finely tuned the piece is. While Raised by Wolves is grand in scope, it finds focus in the intertwining stories of Tweeky Dave and Echo, two very different homeless teens. Tweeky Dave is a mysterious, skinny, sickly, kid that manages to be friendly and strong despite the years he's spent on the street. In contrast, Echo (Beth) is a new comer, a runaway struggling to survive her new environment. Jim, Goldberg himself, is a character cum narrator. He is a faceless voice who muses about how to start his book, this book, with Tweeky Dave and Echo (28). Jim who takes the ailing Tweeky Dave and Echo to the hospital pediatric clinic (199). Jim Goldberg is the documenter and the documented, a character and an actor, the narrator and photographer, the friend and the witness. The multiple roles played by Goldberg/Jim are in direct conflict with the conventions of modern documentary photography. This has the effect of calling into question the role of the photographer/documentarian. Is Raised by Wolves more truthful because it admits the role of the photographer? Or is Goldberg a puppeteer in plain sight? Goldberg is much more a collaborator, allowing his subjects have a direct say and refer to him and the project. Goldberg lets the teens know what he is doing, what his motives are, and allows them to be involved as much or as little as they like.

The book opens with Echo’s story, utilizing photographs, photographs of photographs, video stills, transcripts of a conversation with her mother, Echo’s handwritten testimonial, a map, and the most innocent school portrait. Echo was your average girl in the average working class family until her stepfather, a cop, molested her. The pain at home was too much so she fled across the country at 13 to live in the San Francisco streets. The two page spread gives a blurry abstract notion of suburban bliss and normality (12-13). But this is cut into an interview with R. Sylvia, Beth’s mother, who unflinchingly tells the story of Beth turning her stepfather in to the police and her repeated attempts at running away. A map with handwritten notes and photographs cooberates R. Sylvia’s story.

We meet Tweeky Dave as Echo’s new boyfriend, and Dave is in love. Goldberg lets Dave’s body tell his story first with close-ups of his rotten teeth, track marked arm, and scarred and twisted stomach. Like his scars, Dave’s own handwritten scrawl tells a violent story, a 15 year old junkie mother and a biker father who shot him. This is combined with the transcript of Dave’s story on the next page. In the transcript Dave admits that he is "making things up" because "It doesn’t hurt as much" (36). Already we know that Tweeky Dave is who he says he is, who the other street children think he is, and not his "real" history. "Their twinned stories are told with a mixture of fact and fiction that mirrors their penchant for self-mythologization in their desperate search for identity (Strauss 102). But a few more pages into the book there is a photo of Tweeky Dave’s jean jacket covered in profane writing; this jacket is not a prop. It is here to emphasize the reality, an artifact confirming Dave’s reality. Through out the book

there are other objects, depicted unlike anything else -- large, full of color and detail. These objects: a jacket, skateboard, broken baseball bat, letter from the hospital, a dirt encrusted pillow, function to tie these non-entities to reality. Do these children without home or parents exist at all? Forgotten and abandoned, so far on the edge of reality these relics give proof to the street kid’s marginal existence.

After these introductions Goldberg start to let the viewer/reader in on his methods. A black and white photograph of a girl is marked with sharpie, a crude crop mark highlights the girl’s scared wrist. (p61) A few pages later an enlarged strip of film crosses over both pages, this occurs again with crop marks selecting a choice frame (p64-65 and p100-101). These images give us insight into Goldberg’s process, how he selects to crop, the type of image he edits out, but most importantly it allows the viewer to understand that there is a man and a method that is shaping this narrative. He is again reminding us of his subjectivity and his effect his hand has on the work.

While we as viewers are aware that Goldberg is as present in the scenes as the characters themselves, the teens seem to forget about him and allow him to record their most private moments. From sexual encounters to drug use, fights to prostitution, the kids are very open. Transvestites and crack pipes mix with cut heads and bruised necks to form a backdrop were children aren’t children anymore and numbing the pain is more important than survival. Goldberg’s interviews with police officers and a youth counselor highlight the indifference and apathy of the adults who know these children. Adults who, like the children, just don’t know what they can do, yet they have a kind of respect for them, Dave especially. Mindy Lennon, a youth counselor, says of him, "It’s a mystery. Dave is an inspiration to people. He is society’s throw-away" (p133).

Raised by Wolves describes these children, who have been chased out or run out on dysfunctional and abusive families and into the streets where children teach children how to do anything to survive. In his handwritten scrawl Dave writes "Born a wicked child/ raised by wolves/ a screaming kamakazi/ I will never crash" (166). Dave revises his earlier rendition of his life story, he says he made it up and he is really a twin born to a young mother and a politician father who tossed him away, but luckily he was found and raised by a homeless junkie whore (156-9). Goldberg titles Dave’s story "The same ol’ story Romulus and Remus, Griffith Park, LA." A boy of noble birth forsaken by his family, raised by a wolf (Lupe, the homeless junkie whore), a twin, and a warrior of sorts; Dave fits the bill as Romulus, and the story isn’t true but that hardly matters. How could this street child fabricate a story so thick with history and symbolism; how could he be so prophetic in his poetry? Dave is on a downward spiral, from now on each time Jim sees him there is a little less left. Dave says he is dying but no one really wants to believe him. Echo gets pregnant. Things are falling apart.

Towards the end of the book Goldberg lays out six pages of Polaroids with a couple pages of lists of names. Many of the Polaroids are signed, some addressed to Jim. They read like a yearbook for the streets: have fun, stay cool. But these high school aged kids have been robbed of that innocence and purity. There is no normality on the streets. Still just a girl, Echo cleans up and has her baby, a girl named Amber, and then another. She retreats back to her mother’s suburban home and rejoins "normal" society. She phones Jim often sending snapshots of the girls. Echo returns to being Beth, and in a way her’s is a happy ending.

Dave on the other hand was telling the truth, he was dying. Dave soaks up small time fame by staring on daytime talk shows, like Jerry Springer, using himself as a repellent for runaways. The last pictures of him are in shocking contrast to the happily blurry snapshots of Beth. The harsh black and white photos of Dave cruelly expose his ravaged face, wrinkled eyes, and rotten stubs of teeth. Jim shows Dave the dummy for the book. He reads it (all of it) and says absolutely nothing. He calls a number of times after this to report on his deteriorating health and cravings for drugs. Jim hesitates to believe him. Dave claims to have hepatitis A,B,C, and D, and maybe E. On November 20, late in the afternoon, Dave calls Jim one last time to say he loves him. The next morning Jim finds out that Tweeky Dave is dead of liver disease. With his last dying will he had called Jim Goldberg, photographer, artist, documentarian, friend, and witness. Before having a ceremony with the street kids, Jim gets in contact with Dave’s real family. His sister is very detached; he was a twin deserted and adopted, his stomach was partly missing due to a birth defect, but he wasn’t abused or chased out. Ten years ago he had gone home right before "momma" died, and for the last two years he called home promising to return soon. Dave never did tell the truth, he was a myth until he died, he was "Tweeky Dave," a self-created character. Truth is again called into question: Which Dave is the truth? Is there a truthful Dave?

In the end Raised by Wolves proves that it is stronger for it’s use of mixed media. It is a text carved from a grand experience, a story pulled from the streets and the heart. Goldberg tossed old photographic conventions to the wind, discovering a powerful way to weave a narrative. Goldberg also allows himself to become part of the narrative. Without the Jim character to call and to love Dave would have had no one in his last days, hours, and years. It is Jim, the nonjudgmental photographer that brings the audience close to Dave and Echo. We are called by their very human relationships. Raised by Wolves is story told out of devotion, obsession, and emotion. Raised by Wolves is a narrative as potent as any film, novel, or photographic series. Raised by Wolves is purely narrative -- it is a story, as true as any story can hope to be, told through many mediums. It is the story of the streets. It is Jim Goldberg’s story.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballerini, Julia. "Raised by Wolves (book reviews)." Afterimage 26, no. 6 (Summer 1996): p120-125

Chen, Chris. "No Gravity: Jim Goldberg's Raised By Wolves." http://www.idiomart.com/issue_3/wolves.html, 1997

Goldberg, Jim. "Hospice: A Photographic Inquire, Jim Goldberg." http://pathfinder.com/%40%40TanbUPPMBwAAQBu6/twep/artslink/
exhibitions/hospice/goldberg/goldberg.html, 1998

_________. Rich and Poor. New York: Random House, 1985.

_________. Raised by Wolves. Berlin: Scalo Zurich, 1995.

_________. "Raised by Wolves." http://www.art.uiuc.edu/@art/rbw/wolves/wolves.html, 1995

McKean, Dave. "Storytelling in the Gutter." History of Photography 19, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 293-97.

Norton-Westbrook, Becky. "Jim Goldberg: Raised by Wolves." ArtPapers November-December 1997. 43.

Ribiere, Mireille. "Danny Lyon's Family Album: Sequence, Series, Set." History of Photography 19, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 286-91.

Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997.

Strauss, David Levi. "Jim Goldberg: Pace/Macgill Gallery." Artforum, September 1996, 102.

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Jim Goldberg

A Life on the Piss, 2003, from Lost Man

By Robert Cook

I never figured out how to make art from the suburbs. While I lived there throughout art school (and still do, just in a different one) the translation of the places I resided in and walked by into anything of emotional, aesthetic or intellectual note whatsoever escaped me. Sure, I wasn’t meant to be an artist. I get that. Yet I was also missing something. Basically, none of it looked like the art I dug at the time. Which meant most of all - because all I was interested in was sadness - it didn’t resemble Edward Hopper’s New England. Art was just not possible. There was too much sun. The architecture was crap. The people were ugly. These ugly folks had little scungy cross-breeds not elegant bird dogs. Since then I have naturally read all those books and articles that informed me, too late, that my attitude was kinda off-beam. And yeah, I suppose it was. I understand that - consciously, intellectually. But even now I find myself overlooking everything suburban around me. It’s some sort of deeply ingrained habit, a shitty default setting.

Dolphin, 2006, from Decrepit
Road worker blues, 2006, from Decrepit
666, 2006, from Decrepit

Because of this, the work of Glenn Sloggett remains surprising to me, each and every time I encounter it. I saw it on the ABC ‘s The Art Life recently and it totally shone, as did he. The work, the voice, held so much honesty. Its mix of melancholy and prosaic hope captured my entire suburban upbringing. It brought it all back. It caught how it existed beneath the CSI gloss and the on-air rouge; so it was a relief and refreshing to see this work on the place that mostly elides such images. Afterwards I switched off the television, walked up the stairs at the back of our units, and took in the twinkly lights of Osborne Park. The smoke puffed from the factory where the early morning truck-loads of chickens go. The sign for the Victory life Church was trying to claim some souls. Dodgy sportswear distribution businesses were trying to on-sell their purple one-piece. Mechanics had lost some spare part under the sump. The units to the left and the right of ours were full of cars speeding up central drive ways after blowing through stop signs. And in the day time when I woke up, silence. The silence of a suburb deserted by all the residents saving up to leave.

Cheaper & Deeper, 1996, from Cheaper and Deeper
Elwood Canal Shopping Trolley, 2003, from Lost Man
Crematorium furnace, 2008, from Morbid
Picket Fence, 2003, from Lost Man
Grease, 2006, from Decrepit
Jesus has no hands, 2003, from Lost Man
Anonymous death, 2008, from Morbid

Glenn Sloggett totally gets and feels and loves this world that we are either in the business of overlooking or trying to escape. He creates an intensely resonant emotional language from a set of reference points dead to others. Bricks, brown grass. Compressing blocks of flats. Kid’s 20-cent rides. Stuff like that. Stuff that is part of the grain of our lives and the texture of our beings. Sloggett easily - it seems, perhaps I am wrong - gets to this space. His images seem complete, beautiful, full already. This fullness is important. It signals that he is more than his choice of subject matter in so far as his images do no need anymore than is there within them. I think that what I mean by this is that they are not attempting to convert or prove a point. In this regard, also, they are not part of our avant-garde way of thinking about art. They are not about the everyday in so far as it is a category about the merely overlooked, an ever expanding way of art devouring more and more of the world. Instead the work is located within the tradition of folk like Atget, Stephen Shore, Walker Evans. To me, and I am probably projecting heavily here it is the view of the pedestrian. It is the glance and focal point of someone has the intimate knowledge of his environment. It therefore implies a presence and body, and a gaze is neither judgmental not scandalous. In it, it opens up a form of anthropology that examines the real conditions of habitation of a people. Sloggett does this with a whole range of emotions: humour, irony, disgust, familiarity, bleakness, hope, transcendence. He is one of the few artists in this country to be unrelenting in this regard, and his work has over the years opened up to fashion something close to an encyclopedic take on the fringes of settlement. He brings the drift and float of suburban time into the structures of contemporary art, therefore, not as a glib spectacle, yet another in a line of minor transgressive episodes, but as part of the experience of being fully human. It is, therefore, a highly structured addition to the history of humanist realism that includes both literature and the visual arts. The complexity of his work is additionally significant within the context of our so-called boom (mostly in WA where I live, but in other places too I guess). As all of us know only too well, this boom is highly selective in its affects, yet it is slowly changing the nature of our aspirations and our culture at large, from the communal to the individual. In this domain, Sloggett’s work offer us space to think again about how we aspire and why, why we seek to vault out of our immediate lives for something apparently larger. Which is to say, he allows us to start to think about the suburbs we live in as places not just where art might be made, but as places to stay, rather than escape, and to face the various layers of personal and group politics and community building that that entails.

By Robert Cook

Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia

Glenn Sloggett

http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/artists/sloggett/





Stills Gallery

http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Glenn Sloggett

Nikolay Bakharev in Conversation with Luca Desienna of Gomma Magazine - Translation by Olga Ippolitova - Series Baharevland

Nikolay Bakharev’s emotive and controversial images are important social documents that enlighten and inform the viewer. The subjects - freed from oppression by this oppurtinity to express grace and fragility, desire and control, honour and sincerity - are merely a means of expression for the photographer: every image gives us an enhanced view of the ‘bigger picture’.

Nikolay Bakharev was born in 1946 in the village of Mikhailovka, Siberia. He now lives and works in Moscow and Novokuznetsk. With help from Moscow’s Regina Gallery, Gomma contacted Nikolay Bakharev in Siberia for this exclusive interview.

LD: How did you find your subjects?

NB: In the 70s I worked as a photographer at the Communal Services Factory of Novokuznetsk. I went to schools, kindergartens, funerals and weddings, visited hostels and private apartments offering various photographic portraits. Yet, it wasn’t interesting for me to photograph groups at schools and kindergartens, and I had to make 20-30 prints of each frame… It was boring, irritating, but it meant good money. Like many amateur photographers in this country, I wanted to do something creative. I always bought and read Sovetskoye Photo, Czech Photo Revue, German FotoMAGAZIN. During the same period I started going to the local beach, initially to make some money, but then I realized that this kind of work could produce very interesting results. As a matter of fact, the beach was the only place where people were allowed to bare their bodies without provoking a negative reaction from the Soviet society at the time. Our morals forbade us to be nude in front of strangers. There was also a clause in the Criminal Code which banned the distribution of nudity in photographs, so it put off most photographers from approach this theme. That is why people posed cheerfully before a photographer at the beach without any reservations or shame. Thus, a cycle of beach works appeared and later many beach clients also expressed their desire to have photographs taken at home.




LD: Did the political or social situation in Russia influence your creative work?

NB: In the past the political and social situation restrained me in the choice of themes and plots, it limited the access to the viewer, which is very important at a young age; it created a strange perception of the environment when the values promoted by propaganda did not correspond to real life. Many photographers, who worked with social topicality or with nudity, were forced to accumulate their material in “desk drawers”. In my time I tried to get an official permit to shoot nude models in my studio at the Communal Services Factory where I worked then; I went to the municipal and regional party committees for support trying to substantiate my claims with the fact that the openness of such work would help somehow monitor this activity. But they said, “You should be thankful that you haven’t been sent to prison yet.”

LD: You seem to have a dialogue with the person you are shooting. Does this dialogue pursue certain goals, or does it emerge by itself in the work process?

NB: The dialogue with the portrayed person is quite conventional because many things have been read, seen and heard. Looking through the prism of this cultural baggage produces the subjective vision of the portrayed person, so there’s no need to warm myself into his or her confidence to SEE the person. The conversation with the person you shoot is commonplace, just the usual “where”, “who”, “when” etc., but the dialogue in the portrait is a norm for any artwork; something you attain after many hours of work. This dialogue is spontaneous and depends on professional skills and chance. If this is not so, then it is not a portrait, it is a report which flies past without leaving any imprints on the subconscious, leaving no trace of someone’s life.




LD: You were one of the first photographers to deal with such intimate subject matter. What was the reaction of the people you shot? Was it desire, fear, excitement or the feeling of freedom?

NB: While initially clients bared themselves out of simple interest in their bodies, later I discovered that the person in such a state forgets about the public morals, and a more confidential attitude appears which forces the client to communicate more frankly. Having read a lot of articles in many magazines about the psychological portrait, and looked through art and photo albums of various authors (Zander, Bresson, Koudelka, Binde, Salgado, Mikhailovsky, Newman, Nappelbaum and others), I found out for myself that the human being is interesting with his or her own openness and frankness, and that it has nothing to do with an exalted spirituality and beauty which seems to be hidden in any person and must be revealed. Unable to discover this spirituality and beauty myself, but seeing that my clients wanted their images to fit these ideals, I catered to their desires and tried to inject my own aesthetical and psychological interests into the moment of shooting. Typically, the clients rejected these “ugly pictures”, but they were informed that they could be displayed at some exhibition. The clients would only exclaim in surprise: “Who will take them?” and nobody took them in fact, until 1987, when the All-Union Photographic Show in Moscow dedicated to the 70s anniversary of the revolution, first displayed the social works. Since my clients mainly ranged from workers and students in hostels, to the people at the beach who then invited me for private sessions (mainly working class), they did not have any special requirements except “make it beautiful, man”. If they bared themselves, which is what I tried to make them do, they almost never ordered those photos, or took them for free and hid them somewhere.

I had problems later, when somebody discovered them, and well, then I had to listen to some hard language from the bosses. Just operational costs, as they say. While earlier clients almost never took away their nude photos, nowadays, in the last 5-7 years, many people have begun to take them as I give them for free, although all the rights concerning these photos belong to the author.





There’s one more thing: the client would very rarely work with the photographer if he or she knew beforehand that they would be asked to bare their bodies. I would rather try to make the client do it during the progression of the work. The client surely experiences excitement and agitation from the awareness of his or her freedom, lack of restraints and independence from public morality. Later this reaction may change: they witness both fear and shame and a desire to forget his or her craziness (the customer may even fail to come to review his or her photographs).

LD: Your photographs produce a certain awareness of “fashion”. Was it your intention to show freedom as something fashionable, something that must form part of the way of life, or is it the influence of recent fashion trends seen in your work?

NB: If you mean the fashion for nudity and frankness associated with it, it is the tendency of the global mass culture about which I do not really care a lot. I see the difference between inner morality and public morality as the behaviour and ethics regulating relations in the mass environment. The fact that people are interested today in the inner morality may be associated with the change in the political situation in this country. Although men of letters had always depicted it, this was absent in the documentary sphere due to the natural dependence on behavioural stereotypes formed in the society at any given moment.

My technology of work and communication with people is still the same, just as it was 30 years ago, but the skills have become more automatic which is a great problem and my approach to the portrait is more conscious and motivated. There is no great demand for a certain topic in photography in our province because there are no advertising agencies and no publishing houses wanting to use certain topics. As for freedom, it stays inside people just as it stayed there before. You just have to win their confidence and leave their inner morality unviolated.

LD: Do your subjects have the copies of their images and what do these mean for them?

NB: All the photographs were ordered by certain clients who agreed to pose for several hours and then selected the pictures they were interested in among the contact prints offered. So I give them all the photographs they order.




LD: What does photography mean to you?

NB: Photography is one of the channels through which the present penetrates into the future, just as the art of the past got inside us. For me photography is a means to express systems of opinions and values, the author’s ideology.

LD: What are you currently working on?

NB: When I finished the photographic projects for the Regina Gallery and the Afisha Magazine, I started on a project suggested by the Moscow Photography House. The goal of this project is to create a contemporary photographic chronicle of Russia through a series of provincial portraits. I’m pursuing a broader aim, which is to compose a gallery of human faces that, by reading the subconcious level in the memory, will change the attitude of the ordinary people of Russia.

LD: Do you believe that contemporary photography emphasizes the form rather than the content?

NB: In the 1980s there was a discussion among creative photographers about the documentary as a sphere of global mystification. It is precisely these photographers, I mean G. Kolosov, I. Mukhin, V. Shchekoldin, V. Syomin, S. Chilikov, S. Osmachkin, M. Ladeishchikov, A. Pashis, V. Vorobyov, A. Trofimov, V. Sokolayev, A. Bokin, V. Shabankov, who helped me to consolidate my stand against the distortion of reality. “Social” was a fashionable term then. Various trends in photography appeared for the first time after a long period when nothing else was allowed in photographic creation except “Stop, this moment, you are beautiful” and the Cartier-Bresson approach to reporting. Many people played the theatre game, of photographic life. In their interpretation reality of that sort looked empty, invented, pure entertainment. Photography of this kind would actually operate with the form ignoring the content. I wanted to arrange my work to counterbalance the creation of these authors.

LD: Do you regard yourself as a social artist?

NB: Society sets up limits for ourselves through the morals which are, to a certain extent, violated by the society itself. In my work I destroy notions concerning the morals of an ordinary person, exposing the environment of his/her life and I am well aware that the reality I depict would never win recognition from that very ordinary person. Certain courage is necessary for it, since the social genre is a drama deprived of any entertainment aspects, fully appealing to the civil, social emotions of the viewer, arousing empathy.

They often accuse me of the fact that the material I have collected represents the society as something spiritually deprived and impoverished and the human being looks miserable and ugly in it. Yet, a certain notion of our life is created to the extent of the recognition of reality by the viewer, making me thus, a social artist.

LD: What is the influence of the present political and social situation in Russia upon your creative work?

NB: The political situation has practically no influence on my creation, if you skip the fact that I am no longer looking around with fear, I am not afraid to be caught by the police or KGB. As for my clients, they are opening up in front of the camera as they did before but they no longer believe that I am doing something forbidden.

LD: Do you think that photography needs to have a sense of rawness, a sense of sincerity?

NB: It is precisely ordinary life registered without any beautification which makes the borders of a stranger’s life transparent, makes us intimate with the other person. As for the creation of types who, instead of living, display what their author “knows”, who are deprived of openness, who are not natural, they will find themselves outside human relations and will hardly move the viewer. In the absence of inner spiritual force and integrity we can persuade other people only with our SINCERITY. My work has taught me that you can impress concrete people only through cultural drive, using the language they understand. That is why I have to mask my actions with interest in the wishes of my clients during the work process exploiting the stereotypes of beauty floating in the minds of people which suddenly turn into frankness when tested with reality. This frankness which is often shocking has many times produced accusations that I create the world peering through the keyhole...that I promote triviality. From my point of view, I expose the nature which people do not want to admit to, if it does not fit their notions of themselves.

Orignally Published in Gomma Magazine - Issue 2





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All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Nikolay Bakharev and Gomma Magazine

By Nan Goldin

AIDS changed everything in my life. There’s life before AIDS, and after AIDS.

We were in Fire Island that first time we’d heard about AIDS, in July of 1981. I was with Cookie Mueller, Cookie’s lover, Sharon, and photographer David Armstrong, one of my oldest, best friends, and 2 or 3 other boys. Cookie used to write a monthly art critique for Details Magazine. She was the starlet of the Lower East Side: a poetess, a short-story writer, she starred in John Waters’s early movies. She was sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene.

Cookie just started reading this item out loud from The New York Times about this new illness. David remembers that we all kind of laughed it off. We certainly didn’t think of its magnitude. It didn’t affect us, like: This is going to be our future. Then I remember an article, just after that, in New York magazine calling it “the gay cancer.” Our first friend died in ’82 - one of David’s lovers, a male model.

My art was the diary of my life. I photographed the people around me. I didn’t think of them as people with AIDS. About ’85, I realized that many of the people around me were positive. David Armstrong took an incredible picture of Kevin, his lover at the time, right before Kevin went into the hospital. I photographed him when he was healthy. At that stage, we still didn’t know very much. There was a lot of ignorance. We were very obsessed with what caused it: There were all kinds of rumors, everything from amyl nitrate to bacon. People were tested and being told they had something called ARC, that quickly became medically non-relevant. I was in denial that people were going to die. I thought people could beat it. And then people started dying.

One of the ways I started becoming involved was through artist and activist Avram Finkelstein in ’86, ’87. I’d become friends again with him, having known him when I was 18 and living with the drag queens in Boston in the early ’70s. He was in art school then. In the 1980s he became my hairdresser up at Sassoon. He had helped start the Silence Equals Death Collective, which turned into Act Up. He was one of the people who designed the logo Silence = Death, and the triangle.



By 1988, Cookie’s condition was worsening. That was the last time I saw Cookie when she could still talk. She had ARC and wasn’t feeling that well. She went into the hospital. I was in the throes of my own problems with addiction and people with AIDS didn’t become defined as ‘people with AIDS’ in my own mind. I continued to photograph Cookie as I always did. Then I went into detox, partly because I wasn’t able to show up for my friends who were sick. Somebody had said to me, ‘How can you be killing yourself when your friends around you are dying?’ And that woke me up.

When I went to see Cookie in Provincetown, after I got out of the halfway house, she had lost her voice. Her laughter and her verbal wit had been so much of her personality. The fact that she couldn’t talk, the fact that she couldn’t walk without a cane was so devastating that I was calling every doctor, screaming at the impotence I felt. At that point, I was like a child thinking that doctors will still make you well, and not believing that there was nothing they could do. That’s when the rage became an obsession with me.

It was only in ’89, after Cookie died and I put together the Cookie portfolio - - 15 pictures taken over 13 years, with a text about our relationship - - that I realized photographing couldn’t keep people alive. Even though I never consciously set out to create pictures that would help humanize AIDS, I realized they could affect others.

The same day Cookie died, my big show “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” opened, which I curated at New York’s Artists Space. It was the first major show done by people in the community where all the work was done by people with AIDS or by people who had died of AIDS. It became a national controversy. The government took away the show’s grant from the National Endowment of the Arts because of David Wojnarowicz’s text, a brilliant dissertation against the government and the Catholic church for their position and their silence on AIDS. There were 15,000 people at the opening because of the rage at the government’s response.



And out of that show, came Visual AIDS. We were the people who started the Red Ribbon, the idea of artist Frank Moore. We were the people who started the Day With(out) Art , in 1989, and every December First thereafter. So, in effect, photography and art addressed this issue in a pivotal way in the 1980s. A lot of it came from our group’s personal anguish and desire to affect change.

I showed my portfolio and text of Cookie in 1990. And as I said in the accompanying text, I had always thought that if I photographed someone enough, I could never lose them. Putting the pictures together had made me realize how much I’d lost. And I went into a long period of not being able to photograph. I realized how little photography did. It had failed me. Then, after a while, I started showing the Cookie portfolio and then the other grids and groupings of other very close friends who had died in Europe and in New York, I sort of had the support of Act Up. By then, Act Up was becoming very active and having a major effect. I went to some meetings and demonstrations, though I wasn’t a member in terms of going every week. But people in the group expressed to me at the time and over the years that I was sort of doing emotionally what they were doing politically. And I was never accused of exploitation, that I was doing anything to advance my career. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to use my friends that way. Ever.

Every show I have at New York’s Matthew Marks Gallery in the last few years, I sell a print cheap, 200 of them for $200 or something, to raise money. I never wanted my work to get elitist and expensive. There’s always something sold for very little so that people - - like myself - - could afford it. I’m still poor in spite of the fact that everyone else makes money off me. Last year I raised $75,000 for ‘The Good Doctor’ in Haiti. The year before, I raised $50,000 for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis to target their addiction program for free treatment for drug addicts with AIDS.

In large part, my work is about AIDS. In my 1996 retrospective at the Whitney, there was a room about AIDS. And the catalog that went with it, I’ll Be Your Mirror, has sections on my photo dealer in Paris who died of AIDS. I photographed him and I was witness to his death. Gilles had shown the Cookie portfolio. He and his lover, Gotscho, understood that it was important that I make the same kind of record of Gilles’s life so that he wouldn’t be lost. It was about trying to hold onto people, making sure they didn’t disappear without a trace. And my latest work, in the manner of Renaissance altarpieces, is a grid called ‘Positive.’ Most of my friends are positive. It shows people who are positive, living positive lives.

My photography, in the end, didn’t do enough. It didn’t save Cookie. But over time, my photographs, and other photography about people with AIDS, has helped. It has definitely given a more human face to statistics. We need to keep putting images out there. But not ones that are digitally manipulated like almost everyone is doing now. In two years, there’ll be no more Cibachrome, supposedly. I hate digital images. We need to have reality instead of this believable-fiction crap that’s become so popular.

By Nan Goldin

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Nan Goldin on Jean-Christian Bourcart (2002)

I first saw Jean-Christian Bourcart's photos ten years ago in the home of my former dealer Gilles Dusein, in his little apartment on rue du Repos overlooking Père Lachaise. Gilles, whose ashes are now dispersed in the famous cemetery, had just begun to represent Jean-Christian and was extremely enthusiastic about his work. He had a large scroll-like c-print from this prostitution series, stuck up with pins. I was very excited by it: by the subject, close to my own heart and history, and by the palette of sexy reds and vivid blues. I felt an instant kinship with him though our actual photos are so different: here was someone with his own distinct style, not afraid to transgress all the rules of documentary photography, where his work could be compartmentalized but not contained.

Viewing his prints was like looking through a door into an underlit world where the stories are not explicated or overtly articulated, but remain secretive, left for the viewer to discern and to discover. It also seemed to contain a quality rare in contemporary photography: honesty.

Gilles Dusein was like few others in the contemporary art world then or now. He showed artists whose vision and sexual politics were akin to his, whose imagery enthused him regardless of whether they had attained any recognition. He had earned the money to open his gallery by starring as a can-can dancer at the Lido. He demonstrated incomparable generosity and loving support for his artists. He told me how much I'd like Jean-Christian and promised to introduce us. When he did, we decided to trade work.

In Jean-Christian's photos, which are sometimes printed almost life size, he opens the door but a bit shyly, not intruding, as if hanging back in the doorway. The empty rooms are portraits in themselves, full of clues to the occupants' identities. They are touching, in the womens' almost pathetic attempts at creating an air of eroticism with their posters, their fake satin sheets covered with towels instead of blankets offering nowhere to hide, and their heart-shaped pillows. The Hawaiian room, the Elvis room, the heavily equipped S&M room, the Empire room with the gilt mirror and flocked wallpaper, the tropical room: they exude isolation and loneliness.





Stuffed animals piled on a couch suggest a girl barely out of childhood, striving for some emotional comfort. One man stares into a room romantically decorated with roses and fragile paper fans. As he sizes up the commodity, Jean-Christian captures something arrogant in his body language. The women are often strongly defined individuals, unlike the men. Only occasionally does JC reveal the men as vulnerable, as in a photo where the client is naked and the proud woman is fully dressed. In the true light of the place, the red underlit glow that pervades nearly all the pictures, it is impossible to see eyes, and rarer to see features but so much is revealed through the nuances of stances and postures in the girls' bodies.

Jean-Christian renders the spaces skillfully. The double views into side-by-side rooms show the actual lack of privacy in what is thought of as a world of private interaction. I love the photographs of the women laughing together, conferring with their little toy dogs, staring at the camera or chatting in their matching black bras and garters. He captures the women dressing after a trick or displaying themselves spread-eagled on their beds or sleeping, seemingly spent or waiting. With a woman washing her hair or another sewing, he shows the mundanity of life in the bordello. So much of the content of these photos is about the waiting, as much a part of the job as the actual sex acts.





Jean-Christian renders the spaces skillfully. The double views into side-by-side rooms show the actual lack of privacy in what is thought of as a world of private interaction. They retain the values of chance and of risk, of going into the world where one's vision is expanded by what one experiences. They also differ from those of most other male documentary photographers, whose pictures of prostitutes-some exotic species brightly, falsely lit and exposed- seem to show no understanding of the harsh reality of their work. In their haunting sense of loneliness, these pictures maintain humanity and fragility. Jean-Christian never represents these women as alluring or even especially erotic, but as touching and also trapped: working a hard job in a difficult environment.

In a sense his position in these pictures is that of the "john," the trick, for whom the identities of the women he seeks to service his desires remain outside of his grasp. It is the truest view available to him because it mirrors the experience of the other patrons. Normally I don't like the concept of a hidden camera, but in this case the whole is greater than the parts in that he is not merely a voyeur, he puts himself in the same position as a participant. But these pictures don't feel voyeuristic to me; a real voyeur would have kept the images for himself. He is willing to share what remains a mystery to him, never assuming he knows more than he does, showing true humility. The work comes from his heart and his compassion as the best photography does, and not from theory or marketing strategies.

Most of all, there is respect in the way he reveals these women while preserving the anonymity of their actual identities, even as he enters into their private world. Although Jean-Christian has gone on to complete other intensive series of work, mostly surreptitious and dealing with the public nature of sexual activity and the desperation that pervades it, this series from Frankfurt still remains among his strongest and deepest.





Each time I study these pictures I discover new masterpieces, like the one of the woman lit only by a blue lamp and surrounded by darkness, that looks like a still from Michael Powell's brilliant film Peeping Tom, or the very moving picture of the woman with the heavy, Rubenesque body, whose flesh offers comfort although she's seemingly crying.

The book ends with a series of cropped portraits that emphasize the dignity of the women and feels like photography from the past: neon versions of Bellocq or some other picture from the end of the nineteenth century that was never taken. The fabulous final image is so simple, so classical, that it's somehow deeply familiar and perfect. She is the whore as a contemporary Mona Lisa: enigmatic, mysterious, and representing all women.

Nan Goldin, Paris, April, 2002

Jean-Christian Bourcart is currently on display at Les Rencontres D'Arles 2009, as a special guest of Nan Goldin.

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Diane Arbus’ Noah’s Ark of Humanity - A legendary photographer’s unfinished book

By Randall Decoteau

This article was written in response to the exhibit Diane Arbus: Family Albums at the Portland Museum of Art.

In 1968, three years before her suicide, the great American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-1971) wrote that she was compiling her photographs into a ‘Family Album,’ likening it to a ‘Noah’s Ark’ and imagining in it the people who might be remembered and saved in the aftermath of the tumultuous 1960s.” Exhibition label, Portland Museum of Art, Diane Arbus’ cast of characters is a startlingly unusual group. They are people held together by all sorts of bonds, traditional and alternative, yet each merits special attention. Her mothers, fathers, children, and partners are people on the edge. They represent not only those on the margins of society, but traditional people, normal folk, who somehow look just as strange through the filter of her lens.

A sort of documentary history

She compared herself to Noah, “The working title, if you can call it that, for my book, which I keep postponing, is Family Album. I mean I am not working on it except to photograph like I would anyway, so all I have is a title and a publisher and a sort of sweet lust for things I want in it. Like picking flowers. Or Noah’s Ark. I can hardly bear to leave any animal out,” asserting further, “all families are creepy in a way.” Her photographs of families offer a sort of documentary history. They give physical form to the abstract set of relationships that define family. It’s really the relationships that she examines. She shows the ‘relatedness’ of her subjects to each other and to the world beyond. She also depicts friends, neighbors, and relatives, appearing to document the family’s integration into a larger community.

Her photographs offer respect for those who represent marginal elements of society like carnival workers, female impersonators, and tenant farmers. Yet her ordinary suburban families get the same treatment in her work. The images of the Ozzie and Harriet Nelson television family offer both public and private looks at the same sitters, and help us to widen our field of vision and look at domestic space and the qualities of domesticity as recurring and structural motifs. According to Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz in their catalogue accompanying the show, given the extraordinary difficulties surrounding so many projects about Arbus, they actually embody in their fragmentation and disjointedness something of the challenges and pleasures in studying this most important photographer and her pictures. “As we have learned, for every absence, there is presence. For every gap, there is the possibility of filling in,” they wrote.

Bedroom photographs

Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, photographed in 1966, stares dully from her bed with cigarette in hand. Her face, framed by a tufted chintz headboard and marabou bed jacket, is sharply lit by a bedside lamp. She barely resembles the celebrated beauty, who was 1938 debutante of the year. Her tired, jaded, and bored expression is amplified by Arbus’ starkly pedestrian background. One wonders at the artist’s ability to talk her way into this woman’s bedroom. How did Arbus draw out and reveal so much about Ms. Frazier in this single image?

There are other bedroom photographs of subjects like Madalyn Murray, Mae West, and Andrew Ratoucheff. Each reveals her interest in the oddities within those who pose for her camera. She has the uncanny ability to capture people on the outer boundaries of acceptability. With each photo, it becomes apparent that the artist has the ability to eliminate private space. There is little delineation between public and private here. Arbus’ scrutiny is uncanny – sometimes humorous, often critical or sympathetic, but seemingly non-judgmental.

Jayne Mansfield Cimber-Ottaviano, actress, with her daughter, Jayne Marie, 13, 1965.

Underlined artifice

One point of style in her photographs is that she leaves the black edges of the negative visible on the print. This draws awareness that the image is a work of art and it underlines the artifice of the photograph as opposed to it being a window on the world. She also poses her subjects and shoots them from a lower vantage point than is customary. This often forces the viewer to focus on the knees and legs of the sitters. Good examples of this phenomenon are the photographs of Bennett Cerf, Marguerite Oswald, a group of feminists, and the King and Queen of a senior citizens’ dance in NYC. In the latter shot, the glasses on the King and Queen become a sort of mask, complete with the glare of the flash bulb, and the Queen’s opaque panty hose draw attention to the absurdly regal robes that the couple is wearing.
Other photographs are in such sharp focus that hair and makeup become masks as well. They help to blur the lines between public and private personas. Two photographs of Mrs. T. Charlton Henry, the noted socialite and fashion luminary, are in a sense clown-like. One wonders whether she saw herself as we do.

Parental subjects

Mothers, stock characters in most family albums, help to secure the notion of family. By their mere presence, they bring together the photographs of any album. Some figures are matriarchal simply because their notoriety is derived from their status as mothers. These might include Marguerite Oswald, Madalyn Murray, and Flora Knapp Dickinson (honorary regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution). Other subjects, such as Blaze Starr, the sexy Mae West, and the wartime personality Tokyo Rose, were made to seem maternal in part because of the domestic settings in which Arbus photographed them. She takes a similar approach with fathers. The authors tell us, “Typical of Arbus’ interests and sensibilities as a photographer, she sought out men whose claims to fatherhood derived from different forms of authority and public presence.” Photographs of writer Normal Mailer and physician Donald Gatch are representative of this body of work.



The Matthaei shoot

An important collection of previously unknown contact sheets, working proofs, and final prints from a family photo shoot are included in this exhibition. Commissioned in 1969 by Konrad Matthaei, an actor in the long-running soap opera As the World Turns and owner of the prosperous Alvin Theater, the 322 images, 200 of which are represented in the 28 contact sheets that Arbus gave to the Matthaeis, provide valuable insights into the artist’s photographic strategies and practice. Curator Susan Danly suggests that they reveal a family accustomed to the spotlight of celebrity, but also vulnerable to Arbus’ inquisitive eye. Nothing was known of the Matthaei shoot until fall of 1999, when Konrad’s wife Gay, a Holyoke alumna, and her oldest daughter, Marcella, came forward with the prints and contacts and offered them on loan to the Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art.

It is uncertain how much Arbus knew of the Matthaei family before the shoot. It is likely that she knew of the family’s celebrity, so the interrogation between public and private identity that emerges in the photographs is typical. She appears to have been given free rein of the family and house and shot as she pleased. The informal qualities of the photographs suggest a photographer silently and unobtrusively recording the family’s daily life according to Pultz. “The image here of Arbus as a fly on the wall is a corrective to the usual one of her at work in which, as it is sometimes imagined, she was a predator zealously, even uncontrollably, out for prey.”
The sheer number of shots suggests a professional busily at work, but also an artist intensely scrutinizing a family suited to her Family Album. This was a family, not unlike her own: upwardly mobile, well educated, cultured, a New York family living on the Upper East Side. The session offers several centers of attention that, because they seem the product of a chance encounter, encourage the viewer to read the pictures as unproblematically real: not structured, not transparent, not contrived.

Truncated career

Born into a wealthy family, Diane Arbus lived and worked in Manhattan. She began her career as a fashion photographer, working for magazines like Vogue and Glamour in the 1950s. Once on her own, she shot portraits for Esquire, between 1955 and 1957 she studied with Lisette Model and began to develop her penetrating documentary vision, which became very different from her commercial work. By the 1960s, she had gained a substantial reputation as a photographer of New York’s many subcultures. In 1967, she was one of three photographers invited to participate in The Museum of Modern Art’s influential exhibition New Documents. After her suicide in 1971, her MoMA retrospective attracted easily as many viewers as Edward Steichen’s famous Family of Man exhibition in 1955, confirming Arbus’ stature in the history of photography.

If Diane Arbus had actually gotten the chance to assemble her own Family Album, it would probably have included as wide a range of her work as that found in the exhibition on view at the Portland Museum of Art from June 5 to August 1, 2004. The 50 black and white images along with 57 contact sheets by the artist offered a depth in her work that is rarely seen by the public. The exhibition was organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, and by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. If you missed the show a handsome catalogue published by the Yale University Press is available. Diane Arbus: Family Albums, Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz, 2003. Portland Museum of Art, (207) 775-6148.

Family Albums.
Photographs by Diane Arbus. Text by Anthony W. Lee and John Pultz.
Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003. 168 pp., 65 duotone illustrations, 9x10".

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Diane Arbus

Interview with Camilo Jose Vergara

By Jesse Serwer

What is it about American cities that draws you to document them versus, say, ghettos in other places like your native Chile?

CJV: Here is where I live. I can’t just take the bus and go to Mexico. After a while you become interested in what’s around you. India is fascinating but it’s do damn far. What can you start there? First of all, you have to learn the language. Here at least, with some trouble I understand what folks are telling me. There are some places, like parts of Chicago, where it’s almost like a foreign language but you still can understand.

Are America’s ghettos more tragic than ghettos elsewhere?

CJV: Immigrants seem to do alright. Look at folks that come from India or Latin America. A lot of them are not even going to the central cities. At least half of them are going to the suburbs. A lot of them that go to the cities, go to the surroundings. Like in Camden, if you go to the site, the further you go from the center, then you start getting Mexicans and Vietnamese. Where things are not so bad, where there are at least some organizations. There’s Stone Catholic Church or they’ve got their own churches. The schools are somewhat better. It’s not that the immigrants are…often, their kids have more problems and their grandchildren have more problems, but the immigrants themselves somehow are more resourceful, sink or swim. Some of them go back.

But, by and large, this is a country that has come through for immigrants, and that counts for people just about everywhere. It is the natives, those are the ones that get screwed. It’s the folks that were here that own the place to begin with, the folks that came here as slaves and ended up in the core ghettos and they’ve been there three, four generations. Before that, they were in some plantation exploited by some landowner. It is the ones that get handouts if you want to call it that, because they get access to public housing, access to welfare, some sort of public services that the immigrants are not tied to. So they stay and their kids go to the same lousy schools, their kids get to walk the streets where there is no security and go by the drug dealers. Immigrants are more mobile.

You get a long discussion about France because every once in a while you get some cars burned down. Nothing like the 52 people that got shot in LA in the riots, but a couple cars get burned and they think there’s revolution over there. You look at the population of those places and most of them are native French, they are not of Arab descent. You don’t have the kind of thing you used to have in the projects of Chicago or places like North Richmond in California. Some of them are turning around like Harlem. They color barrier their walls. It is like this: one mile minority people, 10 miles of minority people. In Detroit, it’s like that.



Doesn’t the idea of the ghetto originate in Poland?

CJV: It was the Jewish ghetto in Venice. The Polish ghetto was much later. This was before the 17th century, the Jews lived in a special section of Venice that had some restrictions but also some privileges.

Camden is an obvious choice as a city for you to document on the website, but why Richmond? It’s somewhat suburban, isn’t it?

CJV: A lot of suburbs are becoming really desperate, like Ford Heights in Illinois. I didn’t make the choices, the choices were made by the Ford Foundation—they came to me. I was fine with Camden, because I was doing work there in the late ‘70s, from ‘77 and on. Richmond I didn’t know a thing about. I had been there once but the Ford people wanted Richmond. There are parts of Richmond, to be truthful, that are similar to Camden, but not as bad. The price of homes in Richmond is much higher. You look in some place that’s falling apart in a little plot of land in Richmond, and they say it’s $300,000. In Camden, it used to be that with $200, you could by a home there. Of course, you had to fix it. I don’t know what it is now but I assume it should be at least $10-20,000 but nowhere near $300,000. $300,000 will buy you a palace in Camden.

What was [Ford’s] connection to these two places?

CJV: They have been supporting programs, community development organizations, all over the country. They figured by focusing their efforts on these two cities, bringing out foundation money—not just their own but getting together with other foundations—that there could have an actual impact and things could change in places like Camden and Richmond. And that one important part of change is to have some clear idea as where places are changing from. It does take a long time for a place to change. My next website is on Harlem. You should have seen what Harlem was in the late ’80s. Somewhere along the line there will be all these pictures people can look at, and that will give them a sense of what things were like. Or, conversely, if nothing happens, this will give them a sense of how little has been accomplished. What I do is sort of systematic, which means that you try to cover the whole area. Mix the areas of poverty and all different aspects, so you get a pretty good view. It is a table in comparison to which you can see where you are.

What is unique about Richmond?

CJV: Richmond is not a ghetto in a sense, but it has ghetto parts. And 1/3 is white folks, 1/3 is black folks, 1/3 is Latino folks. It has areas, where tiny homes sell for $600,000 and they look clean with very well kept yards. You can go to the section I call “Modest Masterpieces” and you will see these beautiful little houses with a yard in the back, yard in the front, decent neighbors. I wish I could live in one. On the other hand, there are places where they have shootings regularly, and things are dilapidated and falling apart. There is an air of menace, and there are signs are everywhere saying so and so was shot here, in memoriam of so and so. Then there are the drug dealers, you go to these places and they’re out there, as if it was their territory. The cops come, and they’re still dealing.

Is it in stasis now, or getting better or worse?

CJV: The city is doing it’s stuff. It is tearing down the main street, putting a median in. Target is putting another mall there. There’s two Targets, and they figure they need a third Target. It is a city that has a balanced budget, yet, on the other hand, it has some of the worst schools in the state. It’s full of those contradictions. You see these really beautiful spots, at the same time you want to cry, why isn’t this spreading? It is that kind of a science we have developed here, it’s like compartmentalizing things. We create these little compartments. On one side of the street is a ghetto and the other side is a nice place. If we don’t need to go to a doctor or school, the two don’t have to meet.

How long will you continue the Invincible Cities site for?

CJV: I want to do it until I stop kicking, but it needs support. It is not cheap to do. I hire a webmaster. I have to live somehow. So far I am well taken care of but soon this is not going to be the case. I’ve been able to keep this going for so long. I started photographing in Camden in the ’70s, started doing these sort of building concentrations in 1977. That’s 30 years. Very few photographers work a sustained period of 30 years. With any luck, I’ll be able to do another 10-15 years.

How come you’ve stayed working on buildings and cities, instead of shooting, I don’t know, farms?

CJV: I’m not interested in farms. Besides, there’s so many better photographers for that. Horse racing up on the hill, why would I do that? All these other folks spend a life doing that stuff. It would be suicide professionally. What I do is kind of suicide to begin with, but so far I kind of have the field to myself. There are other photographers working in these cities but they do the people-centric ghetto photography. You see the folks drugging themselves, and the children playing with tires and mattresses—the same thing that doesn’t tell you anything.

Where did the idea of following buildings falling apart and being reborn come from?

CJV: In the ’70s, it was happening so quickly. The Bronx was burning. You could go somewhere one week and the next week there was nothing there. First it was all buildings, second it was all charred structures, folks trying to get their furniture out. The smell of burning stuff was all over the place, and they stayed like that. Then they figured that was where the drug dealing was happening, little girls were getting raped. So then they started bulldozing that, and the place was full of empty lots. Then the empty lots started to be built on, they built all those townhouses. You started to see something get going, but you couldn’t tell from the beginning that this is how it is going to happen. Nobody would have pictured that townhouses was going to be the new wave of The Bronx.

When did Camden first come to your attention?

CJV: 1977 was the first pictures. If you go to the Wikipedia entry under my name, you will see a series of Camden. That was the first time I was there. It was destruction of small buildings but it was similar to the Bronx. In other words, in the Bronx you saw big stuff burned and abandoned. In Camden, you saw these little rowhouses, and you figured you could understand an apartment building because you are just a tenant there, you are out in the little corner of that apartment building. You have no control over what happens in Apt. 1B, you’re in the fifth floor. You somehow can understand how the Bronx got out of control. But in Camden it was individual homes, rowhouses [that were burning down]. You figured there they had some control, but it just happened the same way.

Why has it held your attention for so long?

CJV: It’s not difficult to explain. Why would you get bored—you never know what is coming next? With a lot of other places, it kind of gets predictable, you run out of ideas. But this is not somebody’s plot in somebody’s head, this is a city. And the city has twists and changes, and those don’t follow any plan. They can fool a lot of the plans, and that’s what is interesting. It’s so complex, and I’m interested in so many of the other sides. I’m interested in the graphics that appear, how people talk back—the graffiti. I am interested in religion, how people play. What happens to the trees. It is amazing to see that you’ve got to demolish a building so you bring the machine and there’s a tree in the middle and you just go and knock it down. Some of the most beautiful trees are in the middle of these cities.

There is a Camden section, on 4th Street and Whitman on the south side… if you look at the section called “Vegetation” on the site, there is a canopy of streets you would wish you had in the suburbs. Then every house underneath looks derelict. So what are these magnificent trees covering all this derelict abandoned houses? And then the prostitutes that do their business there. You’ve got this Central Park out there, and instead of having carriages pass by you’ve got dealers, prostitutes and abandoned houses. Then when they demolish these houses, the trees are coming out.

What aspect of Camden have you yet to capture?

CJV: The future. In Camden, if this push along the waterfront continues, I am really interested in the frontier. Where are they going to put the border, because there’s going to be a border. They’re going to say from here on there is middle class mixed Camden and, on the other side, here is the ghetto. How do you consolidate that zone? You do it for one building sometimes, you can do it for the street. You can have security guards, a fenced community. Folks are thinking about it, coming up with their things and I am out there with my camera to look and see what they come up with.

How often do you go there?

CJV: Five or six times a year, for three days or something each time. I stay in hotels in Philadelphia. I am so tired by the time I come back—you want a place that has a restaurant or bar nearby.



How do you find people in Camden feel about their city?

CJV: I stay away from general questions. I just ask really specific things, like what is it like to live near a methadone clinic? Why do you have a camera and a metal door in front of a day care center? The more general you get, people answer those questions in a tired way.

Do people answer your questions or do they say who is this strange guy?

CJV: That is part of it, most of all because I stand on the roof of a car, a brand new car, which they see as a desecration, because a new car means a lot. When you rent a car, they give you a brand new one. I’ll park it in front of someone’s house and take a picture. You take it from the roof so you don’t get any distortion. So the people living in the house will come out and talk to you. Sometimes they get mad, sometimes they’re friendly. Sometimes you tell them something about their neighborhood that they forgot, and then they remember. You start a conversation.

You live in Harlem, right?

CJV: I love the place. I live on 110th, almost on the corner of Broadway. I don’t photograph Broadway. That would be preposterous. That is one of the most expensive areas in the country. What am I talking about? Do I show that there is three Starbucks within 10 blocks? I am particularly interested in issues. Every city has different issues but, to me for Harlem, a really interesting issue is what Harlem has lost, compared to what Harlem has gained. There was a lot of what blacks call down home flavor, which was there very much in the ’70s. Now you get the Kentucky Fried Chickens and the Radio Shacks, and what happened to the down home flavor? They sell Harlem with that and people go in and what do they see? The Gap. I am doing the whole of Harlem, from 110th to 155th, from Broadway to the river.

Do you do go out and shoot every week?

CJV: A lot of shots I need are from high points of view. I need to go to the projects and say, ‘Hey look, I want to go to the Polo Grounds,’ or the Jackson Houses and so on, could you get me an appointment to go with someone to the roof? If I go by myself the cops will come running, thinking I am part of some terror thing.

Do you have other cities you’re planning on including in the Invincible Cities website?

CJV: I want to do L.A., Detroit, Chicago, Gary, Indiana, Newark. It would be my hope, but it would take a lot of time.

You’ve published quite a few books of your photographs, are going to gather the ones from Invincible Cities in a book?

CJV: I think the site is more useful then a book to be honest. What I imagine happening is a lot of people taking the images, teachers using them in classes. I want to do an “Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto” that can be a visual, Internet encyclopedia. But it also can be a book that’s shaped like the bible. I think there are other book plans I have thought more about. I’ve been talking to folks about doing a book on the transformation of California with the Latino influx.

The emphasis of my work from the very beginning has been on lots of images rather then one single series or place. Before the word website existed, I used to think of spiderwebs. They have a center and those lines that circle around. I thought what if you cover a city like with the website where all these intersections point from where you photograph, and what if you continue doing this over time? You’ve captured the life of the city. Of course, you do some talking and interviewing. That was the image that was in my head. Then I came with another way of saying it—picture networks.

When you ask me for one picture that goes against the whole idea because it’s the network that’s important. That’s why there are so many photographers much more famous and important then I am. They get the masterpiece pictures. I can’t tell you my best picture but I can tell you my best websites. The area around Northgate, the real tall building in Camden. That series of pictures taken from the roof, and the ground around that building. Talk about something that places you right at the center of poverty in America, over a period of almost 20 years. The first one is ‘88. That’s really powerful, from my point of view.

You mentioned in the introduction that one of the goals is to encourage people to visit and see for themselves. Have people done this?

CJV: If you really want to end this extreme segregation and concentration of poverty, you’ve got to start creating context and one of the ways is by having, in every school in America or as many as you can, teachers who can pull these images and say this is what Camden is like, and Camden is part of the US of A. A great poet lived there, and big inventions and great records were made there. I think that would eventually create an interest. I don’t think everybody’s going to pack up and go to Camden. But it would be different from what is going on now, this extreme segregation. I do want to make it a force in American education. That is why I put the exact addresses and the real names of people, so others can go and ask for them so the contact can be made. Why make it abstract? Why say, “Mexico City, 1934.” You’re never going to encounter “Mexico City, 1934.” You will never be able to make that connection with a place unless you know exactly where the person who took that picture was.

The amazing thing is that I was able to go to so many places. I enjoy this. Even if it’s bad news that you find, its great to discover things. Even if that beautiful canopy of trees in Camden is going to go down, it is great to be the one that saw it and said, “this is how it happened, and where it happened and you better watch for it somewhere else.”

(Jesse Serwer interviewed photographer Camilo Jose Vergara in early 2007 for this brief piece in XLR8R magazine.)

www.jesseorosco.com

Jesse Serwer is a freelance journalist and the music editor for Jamrock Magazine. His work regularly appears in Time Out New York, XXL, Wax Poetics and XLR8R.

www.invinciblecities.com

Camilo Jose Vergara is a 2002 MacArthur fellow whose books include American Ruins and How the Other Half Worships.

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Interview with Weegee and Mary Margaret McBride for station WEAF on July 11, 1945

ANNOUNCER: It's one o'clock, and here transcribed is Mary Margaret McBride.

MARY MARGARET MCBRIDE: Who's always been madly in love with New York City, but maybe Weegee, I'm not quite as much in love with it as you are. The way everybody talks about you and this book, this beautiful book that you've done, I think maybe you not only love it better than I do, but you know it a doggone sight better than I do. You've been studying it how long?

WEEGEE: Well, all my life, down on all the streets, I know 'em all because I drive all night long. I know every block, every sign-post, every cop, every beggar, every . . . everything

MCBRIDE: Weegee, you must have another name and even I don't know what it is.

WEEGEE: Well, let me see now. Oh yeah, my name, my real name, is Arthur Fellig, but nobody knows me by that. It's Weegee.



MCBRIDE: I must tell you about Weegee -- that's a funny name, isn't? W-E-E-G-E-E. He got it, I'm told, because somebody said "That guy acts as if he were propelled by a Ouija board." Is that what they said?

WEEGEE: Oh yeah, I was named right after the Ouija board.

MCBRIDE: But they spell it differently?

WEEGEE: Well I used to spell it O-U-I-J-A, but I changed it to W-E-E-G-E-E to make it easier for the fan mail which I sometimes get.

MCBRIDE: Well, the reason they said he was like a Ouija board, it is because he's psychic, he can pick up crime where there are no indications at the moment. He'll just go to a spot, and there's a feeling inside him. Isn't that it, Weegee?



WEEGEE: That's right. I can sense it. I hover around a neighborhood knowing something is gonna happen.

MCBRIDE: You don't know what exactly?

WEEGEE: No -- I can't -- I don't know what, but I'm all ready with my camera, just in case.

MCBRIDE: I know in Naked City, that picture of a man just sitting on the curb. You took that and then suddenly he gets up to walk across the street and an automobile knocks him down and he's killed right there before your eyes, and your camera records the whole thing.

WEEGEE: Yeah, it was a very sad thing, I mean, sometimes . . . I cry, I mean, but I can't help it. I figure it's my job to record these things, the same like the cops and ambulance driver arrive on a scene, I'm there too. Incidentally, if I arrive at the fire after the fire engines do, I feel disgraced and hurt.



MCBRIDE: Remember the time you were in Chinatown and you insisted on taking the picture of a hydrant and everyone thought you were a little crazy?

WEEGEE: Oh yeah, let me tell you about that. It was two o'clock in the morning. I had nothing to do, so I went down to Chinatown, right in the heart of Chinatown. I aimed my camera and the two cops looked at me and they hollered over from across the street, "Why waste the film on us?" Well you won't believe this when I tell you: the whole street blew up the fire started because the gas main caught fire.

MCBRIDE: And you don't know what led you to go there?

WEEGEE: No, I just had nothing to do. It was just a nice morning. It had been too quiet I mean, or something.

MCBRIDE: Did you ever hear of anything so fascinating? And wait 'til I tell you -- I understand that in this book, there's a picture of a park bench that you yourself have slept on.

WEEGEE: That's right. I used to sleep in Bryant Park not so many years ago. That was in the summertime of course, at 6 o'clock in the morning. A cop would come around and hit the sole of your shoe with his club. I'd get up and go looking for a job. I always loved photography but I couldn't get no work. That was during the days of the depression and so forth and I started hanging around police headquarters at the teletype desk and took pictures. I had no business there, because you're supposed to have police card or press card, but I did it two years on my nerve, then after I got a little bit known the editors of the different newspapers that I sold my pictures to helped me get a press card.



MCBRIDE: I understand the police tailors make zipper pockets so your pockets won't be picked.

WEEGEE: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Listen, you can see it right here -- this is no gag. I've got zippers in every pocket, also in a couple of secret pockets because around police HQ first thing you know, your cigars are gone, my drivers license may be gone, I take no chances.

MCBRIDE: I should think when you are taking pictures, you're oblivious. You don't really know what else is going.

WEEGEE: Oh absolutely not. I just look through the wire- finder in my camera and as a matter of fact, when I really see the picture is when I've developed the film. Then I really see what I've have done. I really seem to be in a trance when I am taking the picture because there is so much drama taking place or will take place. I mean, you just can't hide it -- go around wearing rose-colored glasses. In other words we have beauty and we have ugliness. Everybody likes beauty, but there's an ugliness. When people look at these pictures of people sleeping on the fire escapes, and kids and little girls holding cats, they just won't believe a thing like that has happened.

MCBRIDE: You are going to love Naked City, published, by the way, by Dual Sloan and Pierce under their essential books title.

WEEGEE: That's right.

MCBRIDE: And its worth every nickel you'll pay for it because some of the pictures are unlike anything you've ever seen. I have never seen photography like some of this. It's beautiful, it's sad, its funny.

WEEGEE: Don't forget it's human.

MCBRIDE: Human, that's the word.

WEEGEE: Its the people of New York exactly as I and others have seen it.

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Weegee

Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop With Garry Winogrand - Two Weeks with a Master of Street Photography that Changed My Life

By Mason Resnick

My two-week workshop with Garry Winogrand began in a third floor classroom above crowded Nassau Street in lower Manhattan in August 1976. We spent the first day looking at his portfolio.

Winogrand's photos showed an amazing lack of adherance to any rules of composition. Like the streets below, the images were filled with people in motion. There was a precarious, dynamic balance between humor and loneliness in the odd angles--an unfamiliar but powerful combination.

We looked at the portfolio without hearing a word of explanation. Winogrand spoke little. He seemed bored and restless, uncomfortable about being stuck in a classroom. When he did talk, his raspy voice reminded me of a a New York cabdriver's. A few times, people tried breaking the awkward silence with a question that was answered with barely a monosyllable. We had a coffee break. Winogrand still wasn't talking. He seemed to be waiting for us to ask him to tell us something, but whatever he had to say wouldn't come easily. We struggled to find questions, hoping one would coax some information out of him. Winogrand broke one long silence by telling an off-color joke. We went home after four hours, perplexed. What had we learned?



The next day, Tuesday, was a bit better--the questions came faster, there were fewer silences--But ultimately just as perplexing. Winogrand told us that anything was photographable. He said that we only make the pictures we know; it is hard to break from our preconceptions about how something should look photographed. He told us to let what we see determine where the edges of the photograph go. He challenged us to forget our preconceptions about how to photograph something. "A photograph," he said, "is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera saw a piece of time and space." I wanted to know what technique Winogrand used to get his best shots, and all he'd talk about was a strange, esoteric theory!

By Wednesday, the students were getting restless. We had a gripe session with the program director; several students were ready to drop out. The director confided that Winogrand doesn't make learning easy; be patient, he earged, it's worth it. If we weren't satisfied by the weekend, he'd give us a refund.

Back to class. After an hour or so of Winogrand's interminable jokes and more coffee, the whole exercise seemed futile. Suddenly, almost in exasperation, he said, "Aww, let's go out and take some pictures."



That's when the class started.

He opened his camera bag. In it were two Leica M4's, equipped with 28mm lenses and dozens of rolls of Tri-X. The top of the bag was covered with yellow tabs. He told us he wrote light conditions on the tabs and put them on rolls as he finished them so he would know how to develop them.

As we walked out of the building, he wrapped the Leica's leather strap around his hand, checked the light, quickly adjusted the shutter speed and f/stop. He looked ready to pounce. We stepped outside and he was on.

We quickly learned Winogrand's technique--he walked slowly or stood in the middle of pedestrian traffic as people went by. He shot prolifically. I watched him walk a short block and shoot an entire roll without breaking stride. As he reloaded, I asked him if he felt bad about missing pictures when he reloaded. "No," he replied, "there are no pictures when I reload." He was constantly looking around, and often would see a situation on the other side of a busy intersection. Ignoring traffic, he would run across the street to get the picture.

Incredibly, people didn't react when he photographed them. It surprised me because Winogrand made no effort to hide the fact that he was standing in way, taking their pictures. Very few really noticed; no one seemed annoyed. Winogrand was caught up with the energy of his subjects, and was constantly smiling or nodding at people as he shot. It was as if his camera was secondary and his main purpose was to communicate and make quick but personal contact with people as they walked by. At the same time, as he passed from shadow into sunlight into shadow again, he was constantly adjusting his meterless camera. It was second nature to him. In fact, his first comment right out the door was, "nice light--1/250 second at f/8."

I tried to mimic Winogrand's shooting technique. I went up to people, took their pictures, smiled, nodded, just like the master. Nobody complained; a few smiled back! I tried shooting without looking through the viewfinder, but when Winogrand saw this, he sternly told me never to shoot without looking. "You'll lose control over your framing," he warned. I couldn't believe he had time to look in his viewfinder, and watched him closely. Indeed, Winogrand always looked in the viewfinder at the moment he shot. It was only for a split second, but I could see him adjust his camera's position slightly and focus before he pressed the shutter release. He was precise, fast, in control.



Inspired, I shot eight rolls that day. Up all night printing, the next morning I excitedly showed Winogrand some 50 workprints. He divided them up into a good and a bad pile, then handed them to me without comment. I pressed him for details: what made this print work? Why did he like that shot? He simply said, "It's a good photograph." He told me to take a close look at the shots he liked and keep shooting. I was disappointed, but I felt challenged.

The rest of the workshop followed the same pattern. I shot like a maniac all day (as did most of the other students), worked in the darkroom until dawn, schlepped my pile of 8x10s back into New York from Long Island for the 9 a.m. class. Winogrand divided the shots into good and bad. I studied his selections, trying to divine his logic. I eventually realized that when the whole photograph worked--an intuitive response to something visual, unexplainable in words--he liked it. If only part of the photo worked, it wasn't good enough. Cropping was out--he told us to shoot full-frame so the "quality of the visual problem is improved." Winogrand told us to photograph what we linked, and to trust our choices, even if nobody else agreed with them.

By the second week, Winogrand had opened up and told us about his working methods, which were rather unorthodox but not sloppy. He never developed film right after shooting it. He deliberately waited a year or two, so he would have virtually no memory of the act of taking an individual photograph. This, he claimed made it easier for him to approach his contact sheets more critically. "If I was in a good mood when I was shooting one day, then developed the film right away," he told us, I might choose a picture because I remember how good I felt when I took it, not necessarily because it was a great shot. You make better choices if you approach your contact sheets cold, separating the editing from the picture taking as much as possible."

Winogrand developed by inspection to avoid overly contrasty or flat negatives. He would make contacts, then make 8x10 prints of everything but technically inferior negs. "I need to see what they look like large before I can make selections," he explained. To save time, he exposed the negatives in bulk--a hundred or so 8x10 or 11x14 prints at a time. As he finished one exposure, he put the print in a box and exposed the next negative. When he was done, he would develop the prints en masse. These were workprints, so quality was not expected to be the best. Exhibit prints, however, had to be perfect. "Without technique, you won't get anything good," he noted.

Winogrand found some of his best-known themes by looking through his workprints. He never went out saying "I want to photograph X today," because this would create preconceptions and prevent him from being open to seeing other things. He worked with no preconceptions about what would be a proper photographic subject or how a photo should look. He said, "I photograph something to see what it will look like photographed."

He encouraged us to look at great photographs. See prints in galleries and museums to know what good prints look like. Work. Winogrand recommended looking at The Americans by Robert Frank, American Images by Walker Evans, Robert Adams' work and the photographs of Lee Friedlander, Paul Strand, Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Weegee and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He told us to place ourselves where a lot is happening to get a lot of pictures. His favorite place to shoot: Columbus Circle in New York City, Sundays at 3 p.m. ("Lots of action.") Why did he tilt his horizons? "What tilt?" he answered. He wasn't interested in keeping the horizon straight within the frame, but always had a vertical frame of reference in his images. (This may be the only rule of composition he taught us.) He told us to treat editing photographs as "an adventure in seeing" and to enjoy the whole process. He said that tension between the form and content of a photograph makes it succeed. He told us that the most successful art is almost on the verge of failure.

These random ideas eventually added up a coherent approach to photography that can be summed up in two words: no preconceptions. His photos looked like nothing that came before. Even his teaching method (letting the students create the lesson by responding only to their questions) reflected his philosophy of not relying on any previous example of how it's done.

After two weeks, exhausted, I saw my camera and the world differently. Encouraged by Winogrand's parting words--"Get another camera and work at it"--I bought a Leica M-3 with a 35mm Summaron and continued exploring.

I saw Winogrand only once after that workshop, at a lecture he gave at my alma mater, Queens College, in 1982. I showed him some recent work. He said he liked it, and told me to keep shooting. He signed a photo I took of him at the workshop and said, "See you next time." But there wasn't a next time. Two years later he was gone.

Garry Winogrand died of cancer at age 56 in 1984 and left over 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of processed film, 3,000 rolls of contact sheets that evidently hadn't been looked at--a total of 12,000 rolls, or 432,000 photos Winogrand took but never saw. Some of these images were published posthumously in Figments from The Real World.

The above article originally appeared in the June 1988 issue of Modern Photography. It was written by Mason Resnick, the founder of Black and White World, who was the associate editor of Modern Photography at the time.

See his street photography.

http://www.photogs.com/mrphotos/mrphotos1.html

All ASX Articles, Essays, Galleries & Video by Category: Garry Winogrand and Mason Resnick

You see that dream way up high on the painted wall? That dream is evidence that exists until buried, as time continues to fall.

That picture is hope and its withering pride, those who came before, those that are here, those to come and those who've died. You can see them, they were here, they were flesh and blood in a mirror. The paper is torn, the dreams are now cracked, the walls are so faded as the memories peel back. Evidence to cling to before it flees, disappeaing into air, can we save the memories on paper to prove that they were there? A child’s eyes, oh look, how fierce they were glistening! A sun beginning to rise, can you see it? Are you looking-are you "listening"? We see the faces, the stories passed, the ghosts of the "gone" and a sun that won't last.




What is this peeling-paper green jungle in a dirty room in a dirty city? What should you feel, do you dream, should you pity? Do you wonder, do you analyze, do you see hope, is it "pretty"? Look at the palm trees and the soccer hero, and what of those? Perhaps they’re the dreams of something lush... an escape from the violence, a temporary hush. Perhaps for their moment, an escape to a special land, an escape from the struggle, to a place more grand! To forget about the "war torn", to smile and stand proud, let us look at their heart for it’s beaming out loud! Let us look at the humans and feel their love... their prayers on a wall, their hope lifting above. They’re coming to pose, they’re coming to remember… they're coming for pride and its fire - its glowing ember!




Andrea Stultien’s Pose is like a precious quilt and a land as a memory, as a fabric. The quilt is rich in layers left on paper, left on walls, left in pixels, left in plaster, left in ink, left in thoughts, left in blood. The quilt is intertwined as a history and a tale, a microcosm, an expanse, a reflection of a fable - truth, fiction, the dreams of the subjects and the histories of the viewer all woven together and stitched up by Andrea. Combining found photographs with those that are made, it fits in between a genre and like all of the strongest work, the genre's simply fade or perhaps a genre is starting to be made, and the work simply stands by itself as it "is", genre-less... as it should be.

Let's call it the "genre" of Andrea Stultiens.

Regards,

Doug Rickard




Pose
(Special Edition)
Ugandan Images
By Andrea Stultiens
Six Leporello's in luxury box. Edition of 25
Produced for and awarded with Bouw in Beeld Photography Award 2009

Pose
(Blurb Edition)
Ugandan Images
By Andrea Stultiens











www.andreastultiens.nl

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The Animals and Their Keepers: Garry Winogrand and Photography After Septempber 11

By Hilton Als

“The Animals,” a book I was moved to reexamine after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is the deliberately literal-sounding title of photographer Garry Winogrand’s first book of photographs, which was published in 1969, some 20 years after the artist embarked on his life’s work that of becoming the Theodore Dreiser of the lens. Winogrand was New York’s, not Chicago’s, most brilliant modern reporter, a journalist not unaware of the issues implicit in what he chose to photograph: the women and blacks who defined the city’s “outsiderness.”

“The Animals” consists of 43 black-and-white images shot at the Central Park Zoo over a period of seven years from 1962 to 1969. Published by the Museum of Modern Art, the photos were created with a wide-angle lens, Winogrand’s preferred style after 1960. He would follow “The Animals” with four more books: “Women are Beautiful” (1975); “Garry Winogrand” (1976); “Public Relations” (1977); and, in 1980, “Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.”

Winogrand’s present-day canonization—St. Garry of the Lens—by the academic community fixes the artist and his work in terms that are antithetical to the work itself. The ways a photographer’s vision is preserved by curators who patiently catalog every frame shot, every interview given, and record every reminiscence scratched from the head of the artist’s friends, wives and associates kills what we love about photography in general and Winogrand in particular: his derisive attitude toward connoisseurship. Winogrand disdained those who treated photographs not as photographs but as an extension of painting and therefore refused to develop a language about photography distinct from the old dead European art. Painting was never about letting the world in, as Winogrand tried to do, but about editing out as much of it as possible, the better to reflect the artist and not his world.



Indeed, what will always be crucial to Winogrand’s oeuvre and the history of post-war American photography in general is his powerful, lyrical and commonsense–based language about photography. In a Charles Hagen interview with Winogrand, published in Afterimage in 1977, Winogrand said: “When I’m photographing, I don’t see photographs, I see faces. I see photographs. When I’m dealing with photography, I have to deal with it as a photograph.”

Hagen: “So the interesting face in a photograph isn’t enough to make a photograph….”

Winogrand: “Well, it may or may not be. But the point is, I have to deal with it as a photograph. You know, your face doesn’t have four corners. There’s space that has to be accounted for —the whole frame. You know, what’s the subject of a photograph, but a photograph?”

Indeed, what is the subject of a photograph but a photograph? And what constitutes a photograph? The actual object? The subjects that fill the frame? The photographer’s sensibility in everything and nothing, ranging from pigs, air terminals, rodeos, wallpaper, coffee shops, girls on the street, exhausted animals of every species? America is lousy with images. Perhaps that’s what makes a Winogrand a Winogrand—so-called “lousy” images, the attention paid to the greasy wrapper that advertised the already-eaten hamburger. Winogrand’s attention to detail within the frame that is America is literary in tone: The details evoke the story he means to tell. And that story is always political.

Winogrand’s large vision, the sheer scope and volume of his unruly work - when he died in 1984, he left a third of a million unedited exposures—bears a distinct relationship to that of Theodore Dreiser, particularly in “Sister Carrie,” Dreiser’s groundbreaking turn-of-the-century novel of descriptive realism. In fact, Winogrand’s “The Animals” and his second book, “Women are Beautiful,” can be regarded as visual corollaries to Dreiser’s great work in that Winogrand and Dreiser share girl love and are romantics who fed off the distant object and were equally concerned with the political inherent in the details they sought out in the life of cities.

From “Sister Carrie”: “A woman should some day write the complete philosophy of clothes. No matter how young, it is one of the things she wholly comprehends. There is an indescribably faint line in the manner of man’s apparel that somehow divides for her those who are worth glancing at and those who are not. Once an individual has passed this faint line on the way downward he will get no glance from her. There is another line at which the dress of a man will cause her to study her own. This line the individual at her elbow now marked for Carrie.”

Like Winogrand, Dreiser makes distinctions within differences. Carrie is a woman and therefore different, a stranger to the quotidian. Nature and society have taught her that she has no face, no identity, without a man. But Carrie doesn’t want just any man. He must be “better” somehow, and confer on Carrie a kind of exalted status. Carrie’s single-mindedness of purpose makes her—what? A harridan or a modern woman? Or is the modern woman by definition a harridan, rapacious and Wonder-bra-ed? Dreiser and Winogrand imagined who their female subjects were based on what they saw, which was completely and utterly subjective. They saw their fascination and fear of that “other species.”

Winogrand photographed many women all over the world, but the women collected in “The Animals” are New Yorkers, female citizens in the part of the world that interested him the most. His women, like Carrie, are urban creatures. They wear attitude like another coat of makeup. They are as threatening and bored as the creatures in the cages, creatures we’ve locked up less to satisfy our zoological curiosity than to visit what we are not. In his pictures, women are animals stalking city streets, looking to feed, or offended by Winogrand’s feeding off of them. Winogrand, it seems, couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t stop looking. New York, the city’s Central Park Zoo and its inhabitants were brilliant metaphors for the lives women and black men lead in public spaces in New York —stalked by the male gaze, confined by the city, which remains the greatest show on earth. In her 1975 essay on Winogrand, Janet Malcolm wrote: “In his book ‘The Animals,’ [Winogrand] shows the Central Park Zoo for the dirty prison it was, focusing on the bars, the concrete floors, the dispirited ugly animals, the dumb (for thinking they are enjoying themselves), ugly people, and the grubbiness and meanness, conveying an atmosphere of nakedness and brown soap harshness like that found in the paintings of Francis Bacon.”

Again, photography is compared with painting, robbing it of its distinct power. The “grubbiness and meanness” Malcolm talks about is the grubbiness and meanness inherent when we look at the real—photography’s great subtext. The animals on both sides of the fence are captive to each other’s gaze, not recognizing what they see, but looking just the same because what else is there but other animals? And what else is there but cities, specifically New York, a page waiting to be deciphered by writers or developed by photographers?

Born on January 14, 1928 in the Bronx, Winogrand served two years in the Army before he enrolled as a painting student in the General Studies program at Columbia University in 1948. A friend who took pictures for the Columbia Spectator encouraged the budding artist to join him in the darkroom, which was located in the basement of the architecture building. The darkroom was open 24 hours a day then. Shortly after being introduced to this underground world of dodgers and fixers and the blues of city streets recorded in black and white, Winogrand—pock-marked, chain-smoking and alluring in a tough Jewish way —embarked on and never deviated from his life’s work: casting his eye around a city that, 18 years after his death, remains nothing more and nothing less than a “figment” of the real world that defines its life.

Nevertheless, create Winogrand did, using a variety of cameras at first before eventually choosing a Leica, the lightness of which was essential, given that Winogrand’s metier was the “street,” especially as it had been looked at and sized up in the work of the Swiss-born Robert Frank, whose 1959 photo collection “The Americans” traversed the junk Americans cultivated like weeds: movie posters, raw adolescent sexuality, TV, a cruel disregard for poverty and old age, speed, and an interesting disjunction between thought and action. This was, more or less, the same landscape that photographer Walker Evans had mapped out 20 years before Frank arrived on the scene. But Evans’ exploration of the American vernacular was quieted by his high style, which owed something to his use of the square-formatted Rolleiflex—the photograph as painter’s frame—and his love of literature. Evans’s pictures are visual analogies to Flaubert’s sentences—controlled to appear natural. Frank picked at Walker’s photographic sentences and found something distinctly his in them, which could not and should not be described with language, and which was infinitely dirtier and messier. Frank smashed Evans’ stately text by opening his aperture to changing times. But it took Winogrand, with his cineaste’s eye and ear and wide-angle lens, to find the political that Frank could grasp but not decipher, and that Evans elevated. Winogrand was a poor New York Jew. As such, he was as much a part of what defines the city—its ethnicity—as he was outside that which makes the
city powerful: the rich. Winogrand’s work asks: What is it like on the other side
of Park Avenue, where blacks and women lived? And was their New York the New York of many things to buy, of (at times) profligate prosperity and love as shiny as hubcaps on new cars? Or were women and blacks simply animals? And what was it like for them on the other side of the camera, framed by a white man’s lens?

In “The Animals,” there are a number of extraordinary photographs. There is, for example, a young couple standing by a cage, seemingly unmindful of the caged beast—their desire? —stalking them on the other side of the bars. There is also a close-up of a boar gripping his iron cage with his teeth. Each of these photographs has a power all its own, and is the distillation of Winogrand’s art, which is the art of the humanist, not the ironist, as observer. However, there is one photograph in “The Animals” that resonates more deeply than others. This picture shows, in medium close-up, a black man and a white woman. The man wears a jacket, a shirt and a tie. She is blonde and sports a head scarf. The man and the woman are each carrying a baby monkey. The monkeys, by implication, are the product of miscegenation: that is, born of parents who defied a natural law—the marriage of black to white—and whose only natural progeny could be… animals.

In looking at any number of photographs taken during and directly following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, I was immediately reminded of the lessons set forth in Winogrand’s work: that any documentation about life in New York is about race in New York, the city’s great, half-written text. I was also reminded of Winogrand’s commitment to photography as a surrealist tool or, rather, as a tool that documented the everyday surrealism we make of our animal lives. Pictures of women with ash lying flat on their heads like plaits. Pictures of handkerchiefs stuffed into eyeglasses slightly askew. Pictures of men and women in suits, shoeless, carrying briefcases and self-importance across the Brooklyn Bridge, despite the nakedness and vulnerability visible in their feet. Somehow, an event had taken place that not only made surrealism real, it made it journalism: an event that made all of us, each and every one, news.

Presumably tragedy humanizes us. In the three daily papers published in New York on Sept. 12, 2001, the lines between race and sex and class were presented as having been blurred by things “never being the same” (a sentiment that Joan Didion decried, saying that, on the contrary, New York was now just like the rest of the world). But the photographs in those papers showed that things were exactly the same. Sex and race and class were, in fact, brought into greater relief against the backdrop of devastation. My eyes focused on pictures of single women, alone and together, and office workers, some black, some white, whose demeanor—as operators in the capitalist machine—had already been one of defeat before Sept. 11. Within a matter of hours or days, many of these workers would be further marginalized since they were, after all, dark-skinned and, perhaps, observers of a non-Christian God. I looked at photographs of blacks and women escaping to the outer boroughs, and others of white, upwardly mobile men trying to contend with a surrealism that was at odds with reality as their privilege had defined it. New York for all New Yorkers. This is the “city of difference,” but the terrorist attacks made difference unfashionable.

The photographs in New York’s three daily papers on or about Sept. 12, 2001, told the real story or, rather, belied the terrible untruths that marked the implicitly patriotic tone of many of the articles that accompanied them: They revealed a narrative about us and them. What the photographs showed—and what Winogrand showed us photographs about life in the city showed—was that we are still a city of black and white, the marginalized and the prosperous, “real” animals—blacks and women—and their keepers. One was able to see how they reflected, more truthfully than any prose could reveal, the divide and suspicion that grew deeper and wider, and remained largely unspoken, between those who were American (white) and those who weren’t (any dark-skinned person, any Muslim). I recall, on the afternoon of Sept. 12, sitting in a Garry Winogrand photograph. I recall sitting with a Muslim friend and her three little girls in Central Park. I recall how she hid her crescent moon and star necklace from people who lived on the east side of the park. And I recall how they regarded her: as someone who, potentially, could blow up their world.

Anything you see is true. In photographs, on the streets. Garry Winogrand knew this before calamity became part of our daily conversation. His pictures presage what is commonly held to be our shared disaster but what in fact reveals that this “brotherhood” is rotten at the core. We are all in a zoo, fat with lethargy and discrimination: this is my cage, not yours. Central Park is the only central metaphor we have for difference in the city, since the brutality of difference is acted out in its environs, again and again. This divide began but did not end there.

Construction on Central Park began in 1857. To some extent, its construction came about to alleviate the stress of the depression of 1857. Another civic-minded project. The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. From the first, the terrain—scrubby trees, rock outcroppings and the like —was thought barely hospitable to pigs, goats, and squatters. Egbert L. Viele was commissioned by the Park’s board (which included Washington Irving and William Bryant) to make a topographical survey of the land. Squatters bodily ejected him. During the park’s construction, issues of safety to strollers, health enthusiasts, boaters and so on were not especially addressed. Unlike parks in Europe, which were shut after dark, Central Park would be available to its citizens on a 24-hour basis. Olmsted expressed his trepidation about the park’s accessibility to the very squatters who had tried to eject Viele, but his concerns were ignored. More than a century later, when the park had become something of the city’s heart of darkness, a white woman was raped by a number of young men as she jogged in the north end of the park, at the lip of Harlem. She was raped, beaten and left for dead by a number of young men who were a part of the city’s underclass: young black men. That the woman these young men “caught” jogging was also marginalized went unremarked upon. That they were part of the narrative of New York’s sentimental love of narrative, of stories that could be neatly framed and divided between black and white, rich and poor, the victim and the perpetrator, was much remarked upon, particularly by Joan Didion in her essay, “Sentimental Journeys.” That Garry Winogrand confronted our fear and distrust of these two “different” groups in a single image more than 30 years before the fact was not noticed. But it can be seen now, in the most controversial image in “The Animals.” In it, we see a white woman and a black man, apparently a couple, holding the product of their most unholy of unions: monkeys. In projecting what we will into this image—about miscegenation, our horror of difference, the forbidden nature of black men with white women—we see the beast that lies in us all.

Download the PDF:

http://www.najp.org/publications/articles/Als.pdf



The Animals.
Photographs by Garry Winogrand. Text by John Szarkowski.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2004. 48 pp., 46 duotones, 10x8½".