Kratochvil

Antonin Kratochvil, from In God's Country

The current issue of Dispatches - the online version - has an excerpt from a photo essay by Antonin Kratochvil entitled In God’s Country. It’s a series of pictures of America and Americans that is interesting in two respects. The first is its resemblance to Robert Frank’s The Americans. The second is how far short of that standard it falls.

For those, like me, who think The Americans is the definitive portrait so far of this country and its people, it won’t be a big surprise that Kratochvil revisits so many of Frank’s themes, from cowboys to religion to the open road. Still, no matter how salient those themes are to our national character, you might have thought that other themes would have emerged in the 50 years since Frank published The Americans that could at least hold their own in our iconography. If so, they're not much in evidence here.

What’s most striking, in fact, is how difficult it apparently is, subject matter aside, even to approach Frank’s achievement. Kratochvil is a talented photographer (if, as evidenced by his recent work for Ray Ban, a little glib). And these are pretty nice pictures. But in comparison to The Americans, a comparison that Kratochvil has clearly invited, they are superficial and derivative. So is it possible that Frank so completely exhausted his themes that any attempt to recapitulate them is futile? Or is it just that Kratochvil doesn’t get it done here?

I can’t say; you might want to have a look for yourself. But the fact that one of the few pictures in the series that is not borrowed from Frank - the hotel-room television - is instead borrowed from Lee Friedlander inclines me to put the blame on Kratochvil. Still, an interesting question remains: Who, 50 years on, might take up where Frank left off? Because there's no question that this country needs its picture taken, if only to help us see it as it is.

(My money's on Zoe Strauss.)

Gray City

Union Street, 2008

Project Notes (2)

For a while now, I’ve been making pictures of San Francisco with the title Gray City.

The truth is, though, that I'm a little uncertain about this project. I know what I want to accomplish: photographs of San Francisco that show what life feels like here, what the city itself feels like, its gentleness and elegance and grit. But I have a lot of questions.

For example, should the subjects of these pictures be recognizably San Franciscan? I guess it’s still possible to make interesting photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge - Richard Misrach has done it, and Rachel Barrett had one recently- but I don’t think that's what I want to do here.



On the other hand, is it reasonable to expect that a photograph of my kitchen - that’s it there - will be understood as expressing something essential about San Francisco? I suppose it might. After all, the kind of railroad flat in which I live, with that kitchen, is characteristic of San Francisco. But who would know that who hasn’t lived here?

So one approach might be to balance what I personally find expressive with some consideration for the viewer. That is, maybe I should stick to pictures that almost anyone would recognize as potentially expressive of San Francisco, even if it’s not perfectly clear in each and every one of them that the city is San Francisco.



And what about people? Is it possible for a picture of a person to convey the feeling of a city? I think it must be. But it’s certainly more difficult when the person is seen in relative isolation, rather than against some recognizable city backdrop. I don’t know if this picture of the couple enjoying a cocktail - posted last Monday - does the trick or not. But it’s kind of sybaritic, and San Francisco is nothing if not sybaritic. I guess I’ll have to think about that one some more.



(That’s one useful thing about having a blog, isn't it? Posting pictures in public forces you to see them through others’ eyes. I really liked that picture of the guy with the moose heads, for example, before I put it up. But even though it had been hanging on my kitchen wall for months, I realized almost immediately when I saw it here that it was just too cute. But better late than never. And I can always change my mind again.)



Another question has to do with format. When I started this series, I included some medium format pictures that I thought were expressive of the city. After a while, though, I decided they didn't work. The problem, I think, was that they were too precise (with the tripod and the bigger negatives and the slow film and all) and didn't mix well with the slightly-smudged-charcoal look of hand-held Tri X, which is the quintessence of Gray City. But I'm not completely certain about this either.

(I'd be interested in your thoughts. Leave a comment or send me an email.)

Gray City

Union Street, 2008

Healdsburg

Meadowood

Healdsburg