Book Design Notes III

Revisit parts I and parts II if you like.

Charging in to the coda. I had this motif of a lawnmower, this sort of trashed instance of one of those old hand-powered reel mowers that the neighbors a couple doors down use to occasionally whack at their lawn, more or less in futility. I had a bunch of photos of this thing, and it seemed to fit with a sort of ending idea, so I grabbed two of them, toned them a bit purplish and dark, and tried them out.

The first iteration was basically this:

Bluntly, this sucks. The idea is that the blank pages show that matrix of morning glory picturelets having gone away entirely, but it's too white, too much blank space after the more visually/design rich central part of the book. The pictures are simply not strong enough to carry a blank page.

I tried the pictures facing one another, I tried a blank spread to separate things. The bottom line was that there needed to be more visual complexity on the page, the previous pages with the background of morning glory material was simply too much to drop suddenly. I could revisit that, or I could invent a way to make the coda similarly rich/complex.

Back to the drawing board. I conceived the idea, after a while, of recapitulating the growth of the morning glory in a more organic, fall-themed way. This time the small elements would be "blown" off the side of the page.

Happily, fall is more or less here, so I was able to collect a bunch of yellowed leaves and suchlike and I photographed the on white, compositing them together to make three spreads, like this (imagine these as full bleed, blogspot is going to stick a white border around them, but the leaves will go to the page-edge):

My original thought was to desaturate these, to make them read as very dully colored, but I forgot, and when I popped the full color pictures into the book I liked it. So there's this strange splash of color at the back. Finally, I placed the mower pictures on there, and wrapped up with my last photo. The final four spreads looking like this:

The last shot was a horrible screwup, a marvelous grab shot of a young woman with whom I have a "I think I recognize you" mutual relationship based on buying coffee here and there. She saw me photographing her and smiled cheerfully, but I botched the focus. She's so very very Bellingham, though, that I wanted to find a place for her, and here it is.

Novelty and Repetition

Mulling over my previous remarks, I find myself considering the questions of repetition and of novelty. Also, I hate myself for saying "narrative" over and over but dammit, it's the word that works.

It's tempting to think equate opening a new Narrative with a piece of art with novelty and in a sense it's true. It's literally true, but the word novelty comes freighted with connotations. To my eye, something is novel if you note it first, or primarily, because of its newness. If the first thing you notice about a photograph is how new it is, then the art-like experience of learning and growing is already compromised.

My sense is that really good work does not strike one first as new but as interesting, and that it is only after a while you realize that this is something new, these are thoughts, ideas, viewpoints that you have not had previously. This does not prevent many an artist from aggressively pursing the novel, it's much easier than the interesting.

Which brings us around to repetition. What if I have had these thoughts, these ideas, these views previously? Is there no art-like experience here?

I think the answer is that it depends.

Suppose I saw some gallery show or book 10 years ago that blew my mind. It was wonderful, amazing, so very very art-like. Consider two possibilities:

In the first scenario, these ideas and experiences blew up. They're dominated part of my world, they've become thoroughly embedded in my consciousness, they've become integral in some sense. Seeing a new show that covers the same ground in the present day could well be tedious. "But that's the dominant narrative now, you're just repeating what we all know!"

You might say that in this case the starling murmuration turned, at least my part of it and the new show is simply flying in obedient formation.

In the second scenario, the ideas do not take over. My mind, expanded ten years ago, contracts. Those doors gradually close through disuse. Now the same new show reopens them, and I remember, "Oh my god, yes. Where did this stuff go? Why isn't it everywhere?!!"

In this scenario, the murmuration did not turn, and this lone bird finds itself (again) trying to fly in a new direction.

Note that I am conflating the individual experience with the collective one. So it goes with Art, all our experiences are individual, but when things are working well we're having similar enough experiences to make the group's experience more or less shared.

But then I ask myself, is that all? Is there not some room for flying with the murmuration, but nonetheless making something art-like? Certainly almost all of the photographs and other art produced are doing exactly this, and it is surely unfair of me to dismiss the lot as Not Art. I've had it somewhat forcefully proposed to me that Art might be large enough to contain things which are simply beautiful, which have aesthetic value regardless of starlings and their flight paths.

I don't know. That last bit sounds right, but I cannot quite buy it as is. It remains on the shelf, tempting me, but I haven't yet but it in my cart.

Transgression, Novelty, and Good Art

Jörg Colberg's most recent essay over on CPHMag has gotten at least one of my commenters a little baffled, along with me. His thesis seems to be that transgression is necessary to make Art, or at any rate good art. He does not say, note, that transgression is sufficient. Thankfully. At the same time, our old friend Ming Thein has a post up asserting that novelty is the thing. His claim is that novelty is what inspires us to make pictures, but he implies that it's also a driving force behind making them good pictures.

Both of them are, I will argue, wrong. Both of them have a sniff at the right thing, though. They're close, or in the right neighborhood.

Before we go any further I will point you to an example. It's a horrid despicable project which you can google if you're interested, I refuse to link to it. The key words are Cannonball Kids Cancer, No More Options. The conceit of the project is that people who have recently lost someone (a friend, a child) to childhood cancer are asked to write a letter to the dead child, and to read it out loud. Then, when they're good and weepy, the aptly named Dick Johnson, no, wait, he's actually named Rich, takes a portrait of the victim. The is, ostensibly, to raise awareness, raise some money, blah blah.

You're uncomfortable with this project, but perhaps you cannot quite put your finger on why. I mean, obviously it's exploitation, but it's all voluntary and for a good cause, right? Colberg would note, surely, that it's transgressive. It's bloody well abusive.

Well, here's the thing. These portraits don't actually say anything new, there's no artlike quality to them. They say simply that childhood cancer is bad, which we knew, and maybe they raise a few dollars which, while good, could surely be done without savagely abusing the people who have recently lost a loved one.

Obviously Rich is just trotting out award-bait. He's got a history of this kind of shit, if you poke around his aptly named (I am not lying this time) Spectacle Photography web site. He likes to trot out this kind of "confronting hard truths, raising awareness" thing, and it's obviously aimed to promote Rich's brand.

The trouble with Rich, other than "he's horrible," is that he's simply repeating the Official Narrative, to borrow from my previous remarks. It's chic and populist, and it will get attention and awards, but it's not Art, and it's not particularly valuable. Exploitation of this sort without any particular value is despicable. In fact, let me remind you that the setup is explicitly designed to make people cry, so that they could be photographed in tears, and that Johnson ran some little kids through his mill of horrors, and photographed them after they read their "letter to Nolan". Hang on one sec:

Rich Johnson, you're a fucking monster and you deserve the strongest censure for executing this ghastly idea.

Let's back up a bit and find the common thread that I swear is in here someplace.

Art, if it does anything, enbiggens us. It shows us something new, it opens our brains, it makes us rethink, revisit, reevaluate. It makes us grow.

In order for a photograph or a group of photographs to accomplish this, it has to have a message of its own, a new message, a new narrative. One we have not seen, at any rate. Colberg has it partly right, in that transgression is a way to accomplish that -- by elucidating a message that is counter to the Official Narrative(s), a piece of Art has a shot at saying something new, something which enlarges the viewer. Thein also has it partly right, novelty is a route to the same, or can be.

Both miss the point. The message, the narrative merely need be its own thing, its own enlarging vision. You can take pictures of apples if you can make them speak in a new way about apples, or fruit, or capitalism.

Rich Johnson shows us that merely being transgressive does not guarantee anything new. He's simply repeating the same "cancer is awful, please give money because death makes people sad" narrative that has been with us since before recorded history. Thein's novelty often shows us much the same pictures as everything else, because what is novel to him may not be novel to anyone else. Indeed, his illustration is perfect. We have all seen, ad infinitum, photographs depicting the sensual pleasures of inhaled narcotics. The fact that his friend has taken up vaping may be novel to Ming, but it's boring as shit to everyone else. More importantly, "Inhaling Narcotics is a Sensual Pleasure" is not exactly a new and exciting message. We're been hearing this from vendors of inhaled narcotics for 100+ years.

My initial thought was that, in order to be interesting, the "Narrative" in your art had to defy the conventional, the standard, narrative(s). Upon reflection, I came to the conclusion that it need not. It need merely diverge from those Official Narratives, and find its own way. This, conveniently, allows my own pictures to be awesome, but I think also makes a logical sense. To enlarge the viewer you need not overturn the Official Narrative, although you may, you need only say something different from it.

Which doesn't exactly lead us around to the last bit, which is Colberg's weird comment on portraits.

"if you want to make portraits for an art context, there can be no collaboration when the portrait is made"

Honestly I spent some time trying to imagine some innocent typo that could have produced this, but I cannot find one. Colberg appears to genuinely think this, which makes absolutely no sense. Cindy Sherman's work consists almost entirely of collaborative portraits, and while you might not like her, it's pretty goddamned hard to deny her claim to be making Art.
I think he's just gone slightly off the rails pushing his theme of transgression as a necessary component of Art Photography, and can't quite wrap his head around collaboration plus transgression? But even if we stipulate that he's right about transgression, this still makes no sense, and he does not elaborate on it. So, I am just plain lost at this point.

I do see what he's reaching for with transgression, though.

Representation and Interpretation

I struggled with this topic for days and days and finally came up with the right image, scrubbed all the half-assed text I had, and started over with brand new half-assed text.

Imagine, if you will, a murmuration of starlings. We might just as well think of other flocks, a vast shoal of fish, and so on, but I prefer the romance of the starling. In this enormous configuration we have a gigantic number of birds moving more or less as one. Each starling follows the others, and yet each one, we might imagine, also leads in a small way. Each bird is a part of the whole, mostly following, but also contributing to the leadership, to setting the direction. Importantly, each bird is part of the structure, and also a follower of the structure, and also a leader of the structure.

In the same way our culture is like a murmuration of, well, of stuff. Of Art, and novels, and tweets, and conversations over beer. Our culture is not only made up of these things, but also is directed by these things.

Consider a photograph of a rose. Allow me to press back into the traces that exhausted word "narrative" and talk about Narratives of The Rose. It's an emblem of beauty, and of love, in our western world. If I photograph it in soft backlight, with tiny droplets of dew on its petals, I repeat that Standard Narrative. I amplify it every so slightly by the repetition. My photograph, my starling, is at that moment simply following the flock swooping off in the current direction. Not everyone will love my repetition of that narrative, the recently jilted may reject that story of Love and Beauty. Your personal opinion may diverge from the Standard Narrative, or with my repetition of it.

If I choose to photograph the rose crushed into the mud, surrounded by mud, I defy the Standard Narrative, somehow. My starling is pushing in its tiny singular way in a different direction. Will the murmuration turn? Probably not.

A skilled propagandist, seizing control of a critical handful of the starlings, and picking precisely the right moment can turn the murmuration, pivoting around a tree, a hill, or a change in air pressure, into a new direction. Perhaps not the one the propagandist chose, but at any rate one that suits him well enough.

A friend of mine spent some time on his blog trying to untangle some issues surrounding portrayals of Africa in Tinytin comics, and the statue "The Footsoldier of Birmingham" (he approves of the latter, disapproves of the former, as do I). The Africans in Tintin are silly caricatures, bug-eyed golliwogs, lazy, and so on. In its time, this portrayal was a starling following the flock. Hergé was no more responsible for negative stereotypes of Africa than I am, but he did follow them, he did in his small way amplify them. But, Tintin is not the murmuration, it is but one starling.

Remove Tintin from its time, and it is a lone starling, flying through, well, not an empty sky, but a rather more thinly populated one. There is no murmuration any longer, although there are rather too many lone starlings. Tintin flies against the mainstream narratives today, in this way. Is it harmless? Not entirely, but it is still just one little bird.

My children will read Tintin, it is my job to ensure they know that Africa is rather more complex than that, it is a vast region of 54 countries (at least) and 100s of different cultures, none of which have particularly large eyes, and none of which are congenitally lazy.

"The Footsoldier of Birmingham" is an interesting case. The actual incident on which it is based appears to have almost nothing to do with the apparent message. A young black man was leaving the scene of a protest, of which he was not a part, and bumped a policeman. The policeman's dog was startled, and the cop restrained the dog from getting all up on the young man.

A photo was taken, which allowed a different reading, namely that the cop was siccing a vicious dog on a helpless young man. This photo, in its time, was a starling flying against the murmuration. It suggested a brutal, racist, cop in a time when the Standard Narrative of cops was as good guys, not thugs. This photo, along with a wide collection of other material, belongs to that great turn in the murmuration that is America, which turn we know as the Civil Rights Movement.

The statue, loosely based on the photo (bur further amplifying the message of the Thuggish Cop, the Innocent Boy, and the Vicious Dog) dates from the 1990s, and rather than flying against the Standard Narrative is in fact flying entirely with the current (new, post Civil Rights Movement) narrative. By analogy, it is just another tedious backlit rose, sightly amplifying the long-standing Standard Story.

In all these cases, we have the objective reality which is arguably not a cultural artifact at all. We also have representations of that, which may or may not align with the underlying reality.

In turn, these representations represent "narratives" which may or may not align with a) the current Standard Narrative or b) our personal opinions. Art that does not align with the Standard Narrative is often a lot more interesting, but beware of defiance for defiance's sake.

And finally these representations in their alignments may or may not take part in some subtle change in direction of either the Standard Narrative (i.e. they may become part of vast turn of the murmuration-of-culture) or in your personal opinion (they may "reach you" in some important way).

Everyone who makes Art seriously knows that weird sensation of working with waldos that merely work the controls of other waldos and so on, hoping to somehow, at some great remove, make some kind of goddamned difference. And yet, frequently, when we look at Art (particularly Art with which we disagree) we are wont to ascribe vast power to it.

Hergé was working with the same set of waldos working other waldos that we all are, Tintin is not bottled purified, bottled, fascism waiting to spring forth and corrupt our society. Neither are my little books purified, bottled socialism, waiting to spring out and bring forth Paradise on Earth. They're all just starlings.

Watch out for murmurations, though.

CPHMag Fundraiser

For those few of you who may not already know, Colberg's got a fundraiser for CPHMag.

Personally, I am uncomfortable with this. I have a knee-jerk adverse reaction to cyber-begging, and it also seems to me that CPHMag is a part of Jörg's "brand" from which he is already deriving, presumably, a living. He does, after all, teach in an MFA program on the very subject of his web site. This strikes me as different from, say, ToP's funding efforts - Mike's web site is his livelihood, turning it in to money and thence food is right up front, it is the point.

If money was not tight this year, I might kick in a few bucks anyways. Were I actually opposed to Jörg's fundraising, I would have remained silent. Do as you will, of course!

PSA/Misogyny Followup

Michael Zhang of PetaPixel got back to me after I told him I was going to stop submitting content for consideration, and we had a nice conversation.

In short, PetaPixel is a tiny tiny operation and simply does not have the resources to moderate the comment threads (which is what I had assumed), but Michael and his tiny staff are interested in hearing about inappropriate comments. The correct action is to use the Report feature of the disqus comment system (which is what PP uses) and then the staff will see these comments and -- at their discretion -- do something about it.

They seem pretty ruthless about outright banning people. I assume their attitude is that they have a million readers (literally) and they can afford to pretty much execute readers without warning pretty much full time pretty much all day without making a dent.

So, Report Vile Comments.

I will be sending content PetaPixel's way on my usual very very occasional schedule. Also, I will be reporting inappropriate comments with some vigor. Off and on.

And that's enough about that. I am ruminating on the role of interpretation in Art-making, propaganda, photography, and will deliver some tedious overlong philosophical ramble in due course. Promise!

Book Design Notes II

In an earlier posting, I wrote out some stuff on my work in progress, working title Bellingham Summer showing some ideas for the introductory material. That has evolved, a little, and I think I have a handle on it.

Next up is the core of the book, 20 or so pictures that, I think, nail down something of the essence of what I see as Summer in Bellingham, up here on the 49th parallel, where the days are very long in summer, and very short in winter (the British, of course, are very familiar with this, as are the northern Europeans -- I understand that the approved coping mechanism in winter is to Drink and Complain, both of which I feel fairly adept with).

After due consideration and winnowing down, I found that I have no special needs in this central section. There was no particular reason for pacing, recapitulation, anything fancy. It's just a group of pictures. So, the goal of sequencing here became simply to make it look structured, organized. I spent some time categorizing things, and rediscovered the specific list of things that I had first identified as representing Summer in Bellingham:

I looked for geometrical coincidences, and without really looking for it, I found one pretty decent visual joke. Well. Let's be honest, visual jokes are, at best, about as good as a lousy pun, but this one's that good.

I also worked up a look, one that I have used in the past, roughly. Essentially, high contrast, firm blacks, and a heavy vignette. The intent here is a hallucinatory, dreamlike, flavor. Which is indeed what I am going for, I see summer here as a slightly crazed and altogether too brief experience. We're all sleep deprived from the light, and frantic to get in enough Summering to carry us through the chilly, wet, cloudy winter. Summer here is glorious, it's sunny, it's warm without being too hot. The area is beautiful, filled with natural wonder and rushing water. There's a lot to get done in the few months of summer. And the days are very very long indeed at the height of it.

The pictures look kind of like this:

I didn't kill myself over structure. The aim was purely to avoid jarring juxtapositions as far as possible (keep the Kids a few pages removed from the Topless March) and to exploit whatever relationships seemed obvious to impose a sort of order. Here are some spreads.

This is the joke, the second spread immediately follows the first:

The central content of the book opens with the Wisteria, as I suggested in the first post of this series, to connect with the foliage theme of the intro. The next spread, though, is this kid-themed spread. (note foliage recto to provide some loose link to that Wisteria):

We move on through another page or two of kid-related material, and after a while end up here. This is essentially a geometrical relationship, although there's also a "boys vs. girls" thing, and the people are all college aged, more or less:

The coda is still giving me a little trouble. I have boiled it down to two pictures of a lawnmower, but they frankly look stupid sitting there in a sea of white. I've toned them slightly, to separate them from the main content, and I have an idea for recapitulating the growth pattern behind the main content in a more organic way, to imply fall, to carry the main body of the book into the coda while still indicating a clear change of mood and idea, and then the close.

I have one last picture on the end, a flashback of sorts, printed very faint, which I visualize verso opposite the end paper.

Once I have the coda worked out, I will post a third and final set of remarks, and most likely a link to the finished book so you can buy it yourself! Assuming, of course, that the wheels do not fall off.