Geometrical Bullshit

Look! I went outside with a camera.

The Story

I am fond of repeating the notion that Art exists inside of and as part of a culture. It is inextricable from that culture, and derives much of its value from it.

There was a man named Han van Meergeren who famously made some fake Vermeer paintings. They were very good fakes, lots of experts considered them authentic. Let us suppose for the moment that these paintings were and are the aesthetic and technical equal of genuine Vermeers. These paintings were extremely valuable when they were thought to be authentic, but their value dropped precipitously when the forgery was revealed.

One way to consider this is that the story behind the paintings ("Vermeer made this") lent value to the painting. The story, revealed to be false, is pried off the painting. A new, less desirable story ("Some rando made this"), adheres now to the painting, and the value of the painting is accordingly less. The painting has not changed, only the story. The price tag, without a doubt, lost a zero or two.

I do not know, but it would not surprise me to learn that van Meergerens have been rising in value over the decades, as this new story acquires a patina of romance and interest. Certainly it would be perfectly reasonable.

This goes up and down the scale. Alain Briot, writing for Luminous Landscape a few years ago, told us that selling a photograph is best done through stories. Tell the story of how you took the picture, and if it overlaps or intersects with the customer's story, you've got a sale. His picture of the Grand Canyon isn't a picture of a hole with a river in it, it's a picture of this one guy's memory of how he proposed to his wife just a few yards to the left of where the photograph was taken, just at sunrise.

Photographs, even more than paintings, rely on these stories, because they are themselves like stories. They are little slices of truth. The true story surrounding a photo is intimately tied up with the true story of the photographed, it is a natural extension of the true story the picture comes from. Set aside for this discussion that a photograph can also be bound up with an explicitly fictional story (fashion, Crewdson, etc.)

Capa's pictures of D-Day, the story of D-Day itself, and Capa's stories about the pictures he made, were all the same story. It is a powerful story, a genuinely historical moment, a moment all of the good guys could be proud of, could look back on with pride and honor. These stories are intricately connected to the value we find in the pictures he made there.

The fact that it turns out that Capa's little slice of the story is a pack of lies damages that value.

Coleman's work on this has ruffled a lot of feathers, angered some. Many are prepared to dismiss Coleman out of hand, because they cannot bear the thought that he might be right. Others are angered that Capa sought by way of his false story to ride on the shoulders of the true story to lend value to his pictures. Stolen Valor.

Capa's fabulism, though, does not change the larger story. It only damages his little slice of it. The larger story is safe. The pictures remain the same. Capa himself is dead and past caring.

The only thing that changes, really, is that the social value we place on his handful of frames is lowered. Like van Meergeren's "Supper at Emmaus" their social value has taken a dive. We are left with several uncomfortable realizations:

   1. That we were fooled, and
   2. That the value of these things does after all depend on the story.

But these, in the end, are OK. Everyone was fooled, so what? And, the value of things changes over time, it is inevitable. The stories evolve, or are lost entirely, and we recall only, maybe, that the object itself was valuable once, and then that too fades away.

D-Day

Mike, over on ToP, took a few lines to express his irritation with A.D. Coleman's work to discredit the official story of Robert Capa's D-Day photos.

You know, the story were Capa was on the first amphib to land or at least in the first wave, ran around for hours shooting roll after roll of hard-hitting journalism before rushing back to England to hit the deadline, only to have almost all the negative ruined in a darkroom accident, leaving only a few artistically damaged negatives that were barely salvageable? That story is crap. Among other things it turns out that the people in charge of Operation Overlord wanted, for some incomprehensible reason, to focus on putting guys with guns onto the beach in the first few waves rather than guys with cameras.

Anyways, whatever, you can read up on it elsewhere if you like. Mike makes the point that, whatever the true story, Capa managed to make "one of the iconic images of the entire Second World War and one of the most famous war images in the history of photography," to be specific, this photo:

which, you know, ain't wrong. It is iconic, we all know it.

Here is another photo from the same day, shot by Robert Sargent:

which is, well, it's not iconic, is it? At least, I have no memory of ever having seen it today. It was one of the first pictures that popped up when I was looking for D-Day photo not taken by Robert Capa. You may well recall it, and it has apparently been widely reproduced, but it does not have the status of Capa's picture.

Sargent's picture is also a very strong image. It's quite different from Capa's picture. It is frankly far more photojournalistic, it carries far more "story" than Capa's picture, but much less emotional grunt as well. But it's graphical, it's strong, and it's a very minor photograph in the canon.

Why?

Well. One reason is that Capa had much better PR. He had a great story, and he was shooting for a major magazine. Sargent was just some jerk in the Coast Guard, shooting for the Coast Guard. Is there more to it than that? I dunno, but I kind of don't think so. A object becomes iconic through the slow and intricate workings of vast cultural machinery. Is the photo great because it's a Capa, or is Capa great because he made good photos? Yes. And also, yes.

I don't intend to argue A.D. Coleman's case here, that has been done to death in other venues, much more thoroughly than we would do it here.

But I do want to raise the ideas around how a picture becomes iconic. It's not just because it's a really good picture.

Crit: Hereafter by Federico Clavarino

I read a review of this book on Conscientious, a couple of months ago, and was inspired to buy a copy for myself. I confess, largely on the grounds that I suspected Jörg of writing a lightweight review.

So, here it is. It arrived some days ago, and I have accordingly spent time with it. It's not a small book, although contrary to reviews it is not too large but rather just as large as it needs to be. You can examine it briskly but completely in an hour.

I will be taking it apart in some detail, so read no further if you would prefer the pleasure of discovering it for yourself (which is no small pleasure). It touches heavily on the British Imperial project, in a nuanced and adult way, and takes an approach which is I will allow not entirely fashionable. The book is not, though, some sort of apologia. If it sounds like something you'd enjoy, stop reading now and go get a copy for yourself.

The material in Hereafter is various. Photographs made by the author. Family photographs. Official portraits. Newspaper clippings. Children's drawings and writings. Poems and letters. Also included are a series of what the kids call "texts" which are in this case, quotations. These form the core of the book, with all the visual material acting as supporting material, working in counterpoint with the quoted remarks. There are maybe a couple thousand words of this textual material, paired with many hundreds of visual elements.

It is instantly obvious that this is one of those books which is intended to create an impression by accretion of detail. Very few of the individual elements are particularly weighty. With few exceptions, you could drop this one, or that one, or even 10% of the total selected at random, without much changing the book.

Not to suggest that Clavarino is Dickens, but it is also true that any Dickens novel could be trimmed by 10% without anyone really noticing, and any one could be condensed to a taut 192 page novel, as well. Neither of these operations would ruin the book, but they would render it lesser and, more importantly, into a different book. Hereafter is not Dickens, but it has some of the same sprawling bigness, to much the same purpose.

The quotations mentioned earlier are attributed, a cast of characters emerges as you read. John, Mary, William, Susan, Elizabeth, and Robin. They are set as if in a play, but no quotation leads directly to the next. This is not, alas, a conversation, but a sequence of remarks, each loosely related to its neighbors, telling, elliptically, a story. We never learn the source of these quotations. There is some hint that John and Robin may have written some pieces of length, and that their remarks may be lifted from those. But perhaps all the quotes are transcribed interviews. It's unclear, and it doesn't matter.

The material surrounding each quoted remark appears to be related to the remark, at least loosely. And so we have an elliptical narrative given us loosely, rambling, by the remarks from the cast, and in parallel we have visual material filling in, fleshing out, reifying, the facts and feelings laid out in the words.

The work can be divided into pieces for our consideration in at least two ways.

The first is simply the chapters as given. The narrative concerns, largely, the service of John in the British Diplomatic Service in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when his children (the other characters) are unborn or quite young. The first chapter is really an introduction to John and Mary, something of how they met and so on, with some of John's family history. His ancestors, it turns out, served in the British military supporting the apparatus of the Empire. John's service as a diplomat is, therefore, something of a family legacy, this corps being essentially what remains of the Imperial apparatus.

The next three chapters cover three of John's postings. Oman, Jordan, and Sudan. We see in these chapters something of the mechanics of British influence in this era. We learn, if we are attentive, that John and Mary are perfectly well aware of the essentially ambiguous nature of these things. That the influence of the British is in many ways harmful, but in many ways beneficial. These people are, after all, the people on the ground. It is impossible to take seriously the notion that they knew less about the situation than, say, some professor ranting from a comfortable office in an ivy covered university building, somewhere west of Cyprus.

Mary chimes in with light details about diplomatic life, but occasionally also sidles up to ugly realities. Slavery. Female circumcision. Infanticide. John and Mary are working in and sometimes against cultures with some habits that they, and we today, find odious, deplorable. If in this modern age we were honest cultural relativists, we would not mind; but we are not, and we do. As they did then, and they strove against these things. British Colonialism was many things, many of them terrible, but it was also this striving against darkness.

I did promise you, though, that Hereafter is no apologia, and I shall redeem that promise. Patience.

John remarks, at one point, early on:

A period of colonialism, or imperialisn, or whatever you like to call the subordination of one country to another, can, despite the humiliation of being subordinate to foreigners, be an effective means of bringing an underdeveloped country more quickly into the 20th century. Just as Lenin said that war is the midwife of revolution, so imperialism can be an efficient midwife of progress.

This is a fairly clear-eyed man, he is not a mere ignorant tool of Empire, although assuredly he is a tool of British influence. One does not cite Lenin if one imagines the situation to be entirely champagne and canapes.

This is also roughly the sentiment expressed by the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, who served in the diplomatic service a couple of decades before John. This provides a little parallax for me, and leads me believe that, perhaps fairly broadly, British diplomats were aware of the ambiguities inherent in their work.

The last chapter is a meditation by Robin on the nature of death, and of personal history. Arguably a kind of loopy essay, connecting life and memory to quantum mechanics in that way that feels like it might be illuminating and wise, or possibly just sheer nonsense. It makes a kind of oblique comment, here, on the nature of family history, of the collective memory that is family history. It is either the weakest or the strongest chapter, I think. It certainly does not land anywhere in the middle.

The second way to divide up the work for critical consideration is at right angles to the chapter-based dissection. There are categories of supporting material that flow throughout. That is, we see the same types of materials, as well as the same motifs, repeated throughout the book. Clavarino's photographs, aged family photographs, poems by John, and so on. It is not unfair to imagine that each type of material carries its own thread of meaning.

If the quotations, the words, provide some sort of basis, Clavarino's still lifes provide a secondary theme, his portraits another, his photographs of the land a third. The family photos, the poetry, and so on. Each connects forwards and backwards to its likes that precede and succeed it, and each connects vertically (if you will allow the musical metaphor) in harmony with the unlike material to which it is adjacent.

In any small handful of pages in sequence we might find Mary talking about the Sultan of Oman; modern photographs of Oman by Clavarino; a modern portrait of a resident of Oman, ditto; family photographs from John's time in Oman; a poem written by John about the diplomatic service.

Clavarino signals his meaning in two distinct ways. First, he selects archival material with care. I assume, because of the words from John and Mary that he's selected, that he wants us to be aware of the complexity of colonialism, the ambiguity of it. Second, he gives us his own photographs. He depicts the countries in question not in their best possible light. Clavarino favors a bit of ruin porn, albeit well done (Clavarino has a sound eye for graphical design and for color). He engages in his own project of Orientalism, depicting the people as noble, serious, and mysterious (the portraits are all taken from a fairly low angle, the subjects are invariably wearing an expression that is mostly neutral, slightly proud).

Clavarino intends us to see these countries, in the aftermath of John's labors for Great Britain, as genteel ruins populated by noble, distant, people.

A couple of Clavarino's still lifes deserve mention. One is a book, an older book. Looking closer, you see that it is Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, one of the most British of his books, rather than one of Kipling's collections of stories of colonialism. A second is an inscription on a book, something about the Nuba people of Sudan. Looking closer, one notices that it is inscribed by the author, Leni Riefenstahl, who spent decades in Africa photographing the people there and did not quite redeem herself in the eyes of the world. Kipling I might take as an accident. That two such characters arise in Clavarino's documentation of John and Mary's things seems well into the realm of the deliberate.

I believe that Clavarino wants us to understand that his personal view of John's work, and the work of the British Empire, is less positive than John's already ambiguous and uncertain position. And yet, he lets the words of John and Mary and the others stand.

This is not a one note book. This is not some simple screed, this is a nuanced and multi-faceted study.

The themes of Clavarino's photos of land and people are not always harmonious with the themes of John's words, Mary's words, the family photo albums.

The book is not really a family history. There is nothing of the time Susie sprained her ankle, or when William learned to swim. The family history which we learn, while rich, is entirely the history of family as it intersects with the geopolitics of the Middle East. On the flip side, the geopolitical history we learn is likewise slender, concerned almost entirely with the same intersection.

I spent some time reading up on Oman, and the situation there was vastly more complex, and in many ways far more awful, than Hereafter's sketch would suggest. This is not the history of Oman, it is the family's memory of that time in Oman as it overlapped with that dreadful unfolding of history. The Sultan was much much nastier than Mary's remarks might suggest, and the British were absolutely correct to back his removal.

Other reviewers have suggested that Clavarino should have ditched these pictures, or those, and tightened the whole book up.

Those reviewers are wrong. Each of the themes serves its role in filling out a more complete impression of this whole episode, of that intersection of family and geopolitics. Even as limited as the scope is, this subject is nevertheless extremely complex, ambiguous, and filled with conflicting details. The ground truth here is fractal, if you will, and is represented here by a kind of printed visual fugue.

The photos are often very appealing. Clavarino gifts us with many well designed spreads, with visual themes that repeat and repeat (watch for the serpentine line through the frame). It's a visual design treat, quite apart from its meaning. You can and should enjoy the book purely on those grounds, as a kind of coffee-table scrapbook thing about subjects you don't even care about.

It's also a nuanced and worthy piece of meaning, of Art. It does not resolve anything, the questions in play here have no answers, but it does remind us of the depth and complexity of reality.

In short, the book hits all the right notes. It is visually pleasing, almost arresting (my wife picked it up and enjoyed it as a visual treat with no trouble). It handles a complex subject with both nuance and depth. It does what Art ought to, and it does it much better than the vast majority of Serious Photobooks being made today.

+1 would read again!

ToP: Topaz AI Sharpen Thing Whatever

Ctein appears to have returned to The Online Photographer, which is basically a good thing, I think. He's written a review of a piece of software, a machine-learning powered thing that sharpens photos for you.

The thing is clearly borderline magical in its results.

What it is doing, obviously, is re-painting a new, sharper, picture based on your picture. Whether it knows what a "stick" is or not is probably not even a meaningful question, but it can certainly replace a fuzzy stick with a sharp stick, and the sharp stick is credibly the same stick as if it had been photographed more sharply. It's not the same stick, but it's credible. It does this for every little detail of the frame.

You could do it too, if you were a competent painter, and had an incredible amount of time and patience.

Now, I could rattle on about "the index!" and how it's not a photograph any more, but a digitally rendered drawing based on a photograph and the potential cultural implications of that. Long time readers could probably write it for me at this point, so I shan't.

Instead I am going to talk about the vague sense of unease the whole thing gives me.

Ctein's photo is a good example. Why on earth is this thing something that needs to be saved? This is not a picture of a Yeti or an Alien. It's a vaguely dynamic but ultimately not very interesting picture of an eagle coming in for a landing (I think). These pictures exist already as technical exercises. The entire point of this exercise is that you nailed focus, because that's the hard part. Nobody gives a shit about the picture. Ctein fucked it up, and he lost the game. It's a stupid game, so who cares?

But going in afterwards to fix it, as if you had won the game, seems like a cheat. I know that he would argue that it's not about that at all, that this picture is Art and whatever means are necessary to restore the technical details that allow Ctein to oh god I can't go on, but it dribbles on for a few more lines without ever making the picture actually particularly good or noteworthy.

Even if it was a great picture, so what? Go shoot another one, and try not to screw the pooch this time. There are lots of great pictures out there. The problem is not that we don't have enough great pictures.

More generally, it is not at all clear to me that a software device which allows us to "salvage" more pictures is doing anything that needs to be done. We already have too damned many pictures. I consider a missed shot to be something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, maybe it would have been great. On the other hand, it's a hell of a lot easier to edit out, now.

Bellingham Climate Strike 9/20/19

If there's a reason to protest, Bellingham will come out to protest it. I took the kiddos down, to give them something to think about, and also brought the 300mm lens which really lets you reach out and touch somebody, by god.

I doubt the efficacy of protests for creating change, and I think there's a lot of silliness involved, but these people have their hearts in the right place. My mission here is to normalize for my children the idea of protest, of questioning, and of seeking change. Whether protests change anything or not, the idea that we ought to do what we can ought to be normal.

Here are some photos. I actually do take pictures from time to time, so y'all shut up.

Antifa. looking like the idiots they are. No offense, you're just kids, but, jesus. Grow up:

First Nations, represent! In Bellingham we are loudly self-conscious about the fact that all our land is stolen from Lummi Nation. We don't give it back or anything, but we spend a lot of time acknowledging that we stole it. How this helps anything is.. unclear:

Many many signs. Some witty. Some stale. Some both.

The speakers were mostly First Nations, or kids. Mostly kids:

These kids taught us how to chant "WHAT DO WE WANT?" "CLIMATE JUSTICE!" "WHEN DO WE WANT IT?" "NOW!" "OH GOD KILL ME NOW PLEASE."

There are always some real characters at a Bellingham protest:

Then we all marched around town for a while. My kids were done so we got bagels and went home instead.

The local press. Yes, they use phone photos.

Alfred Stieglitz

I am reading up on Clarence H. White, a photographer and teacher of some note from 100 years ago or so. White was rattling around New York City about the same time Stieglitz was holding court there, and they overlapped and interacted a fair bit. They ran with the same gangs.

The attentive reader of history will, eventually, notice that the main thing Stieglitz seems to have done was fall out with people. He also ran a couple iterations of a small but evidently influential gallery, and he published an influential magazine.

Now, I get that if people say a fellow is influential, well, then he is, because influence is entirely about perception. Still, Stieglitz doesn't seem to have done much except sit around writing and judging (the irony does not escape me, here).

White ran a school which churned out a number of truly stellar photographers, and a few handfuls of B-listers (known, but not, you know, well known) and White's influence is felt literally to this day in advertising photography. But White practically does not exist in our historical understanding. Beaumont Newhall, shamefully, almost entirely omits him from what is the standard American history.

Edward Steichen was a curator of real note, held the post of Director of Photography at the MOMA for about 15 years, curated The Family of Man, and a bunch of other stuff. Newhall, at least, and I think our collective grasp of history, consigns him to the role of a kind of Stieglitz protege.

Stieglitz, on the other hand, seems to have been born a grumpy old man with too much money. His usual reason for falling out with someone was that the someone was too mercenary, not committed enough to photography as a pure art, but rather decided to make something commercial of it. The effect of this is that he had no patience for photographers without money.

It is long past time to correct the record, I think. Not by minimizing Stieglitz' role. His role was real, photographers did go to him to pay court, and his imprimatur was valuable. Rather by enlarging our understanding of other roles. To whom, for instance, would you go with your Letters of Marque from Stieglitz (who had, himself, nothing by those Letters to give)?

White, Steichen, and (ugh) even Newhall, among surely many others, were the people who could actually redeem Stieglitz' grudging approval with concrete gifts. Exhibitions or, gasp, jobs.