Gray City

Market Street, 2007

Reasons To Be Cheerful

#4 OMG!!! Fabled former bloggers Alec Soth and Christian Patterson are back! Best of all - due to an inexplicable shortage of new blog domains - the dynamic duo has arranged to rent space here on Hiding in Plain Sight, where they’ll be posting alongside the regrettably undynamic and possibly nonexistent George LeChat. Watch for them!

#5 Overworked: Jessica Dimmock. “If you haven't seen Jessica's work yet check out the show or pick up her book. You will be hard pressed not to be effected by the work,” says Amy Stein. Me, I'm almost always a sucker for colorful pictures of people doing dope, but if I see another post about The Ninth Floor I think I’m going to go out, rent a copy of High Art and get effected myself.

#6 Headline: "Tina Barney and Larry Sultan to Talk in Boston." As well they should. Think of the possibilities. Naked socialites! Park Avenue pornstars! A marriage made in heaven.

#7 Can't we all just get along? Apparently not. Talk about mud wrestling. (But go Mrs. B.)

#8 What’s become of Dear Leader? Rumor has it he accidentally locked himself out of his own blog when he changed the master password in the course of an unusually crazed shoot involving a wheelbarrow, a cornfield, and . . . Well, I’d better stop there.

Easter

So there was this priest, she said, who strapped himself to a bunch of balloons, helium balloons, like at a party.

A bunch?

Hundreds, actually. They think maybe 900.

What happened?

He flew.

Then what?

No one knows. He was never seen again.

Jesus.

Philip Jones Griffiths

Philip Jones Griffiths, Civilian Victim, Vietnam, 1967

Thinking about Philip Jones Griffiths, who died last month, I was reminded of something John Berger said in Uses of Photography about the two broad categories of photographs, private and public. A private photograph - the portrait of a friend, say - is appreciated and read in a context that gives it meaning. Public photographs, on the other hand, depict events having nothing to do with us, events we cannot read because they have no context. As Berger put it:

“In the private use of photography, the context of the instant recorded is preserved so that the photograph lives in an ongoing community. . . . The public photograph, by contrast, is torn from its context, and becomes a dead object which, exactly because it is dead, lends itself to any arbitrary use.” Thus, Berger argues for an alternative photography, the task of which would be “to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.”

And that’s what Griffiths' work was, the social and political memory of his time. Even today his 1971 book Vietnam Inc. is an almost intolerable reminder of things we thought we had forgotten. You know, there may after all be some truth to his view that, among photographers, the really great artists are photojournalists.

Gray City

Franklin Street, 2007

Reasons To Be Cheerful

#1 Rob Haggart has again vastly improved the quality of his "I Like These Photos" slideshow by cutting in half, from 297 to 146, the number of pictures on display. As Rob tells it, this feat was accomplished without the loss of a single entrant simply by cutting each picture in half and stitching it to a similar shot by another photographer. Makes sense to us. After all, if you can hire a photographer from one picture, you can hire one from half a picture.

#2 In other arithmetical news, Joerg Colberg has reduced his use of the word "quite" - as in "I quite like these unusually banal cibachromes of Moldavian agricultural workers" - to only 43 instances this month, down from 171 last month. Keep up the good work, Joerg!

#3 Finally, after further deconstruction, the notorious "gallerina" article is now understood not as the sexist screed it was originally thought to be but instead as a cleverly disguised attack on grumpy people everywhere. Concerned bloggers are protesting by posting multicolored badges with the obscure phrase "Don't ask me nothin about nothin, I just might tell you the truth." Honest!

History

Kara Walker, Burn, 1998

Do we Americans have some particular knack for lying to ourselves?

That question arose, most recently, during the imbroglio over Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his association with Barack Obama. What did Wright say that caused all that furor? He said this:

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo….We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear….We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost….Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism.”

I don’t see the problem. Is any word of that statement untrue? Of course not. If anything, the facts are worse. This country was founded by men who saw nothing wrong either with owning other human beings or with systematically dispossessing and then killing those who inhabited the land before us. And those facts have haunted our history ever since.

And the worst of it is how easy that history has made it to lie to ourselves today. Maybe we have no choice. Maybe if we confronted our present conduct for what it is we would also have to look at who we are and how we got here. Or maybe self-deception just becomes habitual. I don’t know. But I do know that if we can’t recognize what Wright said for the truth, we’re lost.

Gray City

Pacific Street, 2007

Change

James Welling, IP30, 2001

On the other hand, it can’t be denied that there is at least a momentary flowering of interest in photographs that function as something other than rectilinear objects depicting subjects in illusory space. The current issue of Blindspot, for example, contains new work by Carter Mull, Michael Rashkow, Susan Silton, Ed Heckerman, and Miranda Lichtenstein, all of it worth seeing. And Aperture has an article on James Welling.


Susan Silton, On the Beach, 2007

Whether this presages some fundamental expansion of photographic practice is unclear. (Personally, I’m inclined to doubt it, but you never know.) Whether there is room in photography for such work is another question.

Style

Paul Cezanne, Bather, 1885

Art moves forward. The history of the visual arts is the history of avant-gardes. Successive avant-gardes. And the changes effected through these successions are fundamental, not mere fashion. This is how art grows. Or at least, this is how painting grows. And sculpture. But not photography.

Photography has not progressed. Not in any fundamental way. Photography was representational at its inception, and it is representational today. With a few marginal exceptions, every photograph ever made has been a rectilinear object depicting its subject in an illusory space.


Rineke Dijkstra, Kolobrzeg, Poland, 1992

Paintings were once rectilinear objects depicting subjects in illusory space. Strangely - or maybe not - at about the time photography was invented they started to become something else. First they lost the illusory space. Then the subjects. And over the 150 years of that transformation, Western painting became something entirely different.

But not photography. Photography has changed, if at all, only in the ways that painting used to change. Before painters realized they didn't have to carry all that representational weight. That is, changes in photography are merely changes in styles. Pictorialism to realism. Black and white to color. Engaged to deadpan. These changes are not fundamental. They are fashions.

This is probably good to remember, whatever style you’re working in.

Mare Island

While you're up . . . ?

What is up with Iceland spar? What’s the deal with double refraction? Why does it figure so prominently in Pynchon’s Against the Day? Not to mention Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials? What do those books have in common? Where is Iceland, anyway? Is there still ice? If there is, would you get me another one?

Animals

A while back I had a brief conversation with someone who thought it necessary to refer to animal rights in quotation marks, as in “the underlying justification offered by PETA in terms of ‘rights’ of animals is wholly unpersuasive.” I was a little surprised.

Don’t animals have rights? (What rights? Well, you know, just the same basic rights - to live, mainly - that we want for ourselves.) I think they must.

I realize this is something most of us would rather not think about. But if you agree that humans have rights, it’s difficult not to accord similar rights to animals. Because it’s impossible to draw a really fundamental distinction between humans and animals. The most you can say is that, generally speaking, we have evolved relatively larger brains, as a result of which we are more intelligent, have developed better languages, and have a level of consciousness that may or may not be unique to us.

But brain size is not a criterion on which basic rights can be granted or denied. (If it were, it would be open season on lots of people - hunters, for example, or Republicans.) On what basis, then, do we deny the rights of animals?

There is no principled basis. Nor is there a practical one. I don’t dispute that full implementation of animal rights would wreak havoc with our present arrangements. But let’s not worry right now about implementation. Let’s just start by acknowledging that animals have rights. Implementation, like evolution, may take a while. In the meantime, every step toward it will help stem the most damaging consequence of the way we treat animals now: the erosion of our own capacity for empathy.