Gray City

In the Avenues, 2008

Outside Looking In

I don’t want to be Jeff Wall. Or Andreas Gursky. Or Thomas Struth. Or any of those guys.

And I never wanted to be Garry Winogrand. Or Lee Friedlander. Or even Diane Arbus.

I want to be Robert Frank.

And I’m not.

It’s not like I just figured this out or anything. But it’s still pretty upsetting. And it got rubbed in a little more the other day when I went to see Looking In, the Robert Frank show at SFMOMA.

It wasn’t all bad, though. I learned a couple of interesting things.

For example, they have a bunch of Frank’s contact sheets, from which I could see that he used mainly Tri X and Plus X. Just like me! (He also used something called Double X. I tried to order some, but it turns out Kodak doesn’t make it anymore.)

And part of the exhibit replicates Frank’s kitchen wall, to which he taped prints he was trying to sort through and sequence. Hey, I do that too! (Honest. That's it up there.) Not just that, but you could see from the wall that he took some fairly mediocre pictures, at least from time to time. Me too! (Except for the time-to-time part.)

It was also interesting to learn that Frank struggled with the occasional hostility of his subjects. He’s quoted in the show as saying that the picture of the African-American couple in the San Francisco (!!) park is his favorite, because viewers can see from it just how tough it is to go around taking pictures of people who don’t want their picture taken.

But that actually made me feel worse. Because I usually can’t get up the nerve to take pictures of people who wouldn’t mind having their picture taken, much less the ones I can see are going to get all hostile.

But as I was wandering through the museum bookstore on my way out, I had a thought. If I can’t be Robert Frank, maybe I could be Eugene Atget.

The Atget of San Francisco! I like it. What do you think?

Crayon

Window, Polk Street, 2009

Crayon

Carpet, Octavia Street, 2008

Crayon

Store, Geary Street, 2008

Funston

Glider Flying, 2008

Funston

Glider Getting Lift, 2008

Funston

Glider Taking Off, 2008

North Coast

Woman with Dogs, Fort Funston, 2009

Funston

Gliders, 2008

Funston

Woman with Dogs, 2009

Zabriskie Point

I saw Zabriskie Point again the other day.

I first saw it in 1970. It was a disaster. widely scorned. The right hated it for all the obvious reasons. Even the left disliked it, although I never quite understood why. (Maybe, by that point, “I’m ready to die, just not from boredom” hit a little too close to home.)

Nevertheless, it was a powerful movie. Antonioni understood as well as anyone the symbiosis between cops in the street and real estate developers in their offices, and the peculiarly American murderousness that fuels them both.

To be fair, it was also a little ridiculous. The desert orgy, in particular. You would have thought Antonioni knew better than to credit either free or love. He should have listened to Nabokov.

But the heart of the movie is still the house, and Daria’s walk through it. The everyday evil of Rod Taylor and his cronies. The adamantine ugliness of the wives. The complicity of the servant. And then the explosions. What could have been better? I still remember the people I first saw it with, and how happy we were.

Of course, that was then, and now is the Age of Obama. Is the ending of Zabriskie Point still appropriate today? I don’t know. It may help to remember that people were filled with hope then too. Although by 1970 that was pretty much over.

Maybe we should revisit the question in a few years.

Mare Island

Houses, 2008