The End of the Etceterca

That last post was a bit of a lark. Sorry I ruined Christmas.

What really occurred was this. We took a family vacation for a couple days to Manning Park Resort, up in B.C., to go sledding and do a little skiing and whatnot. Just to go play in the snow, because while we live tantalizingly close to snow, we do not actually live in snow country as such.

It was very pleasant. The weather was fine, the days were bright and filled with cheer. The dog had a very good time, which fact we will revisit shortly, and a good deal of fun was had. There are dramatic vistas, and sometimes there were clouds. Just clouds. Greyish masses covering part but not all of the otherwise beautiful blue sky.

The opening shot is a grab shot through the windshield on the way home.

Nothing is as it appears.

The contrast throughout is boosted insanely, anything grey is smashed to a hard black. All you see in any of the photos, with the exception of the two color pictures, is the tonality of the highlights smeared across the range from black to white. This is actually the genesis of the idea -- it occurred to me that some of the interesting texture of the layers of snow could be brought out to good effect.

The icicles are a regular Manning Park phenomenon. The snow builds up on the metal roofs of the cabins. Icicles form, and simultaneously the snow/ice sheet begins to slide down the roof. The edge tends, for reasons I do not understand, to curve under the eaves, which rotates already formed icicles inwards, often reaching a horizontal angle. More icicles form. Since the roof warms differentially over different rooms of the cabin, you can get effects like the one shown.

This effect struck me as slightly eldritch.

And now we come to to the goddamned dog. To be precise, this goddamned dog.

This particular g.d. really likes snow. Really really really. There is a lot of standing at the door writhing and saying Orooooooo ROooORRRr RooooooRRh? over and over and over until someone takes her out for a walk around the loop of road where the cabins are, or perhaps somewhere else, she does not care.

She chews ice lumps with the obsession of a junkie. Her big wet tongue lovingly massages them. She chews them. She chews until her jaws bleed, and does not stop. Being a pit bull mix, her jaws are roughly anvils with a small range of ivory mountains erupting, so she cannot actually injure herself, but it gets disgusting fairly quickly. Then she is made to go back inside and where, occasionally, there is a nap, and then the cycle begins anew.

Long story short, the dog-walking circuit contained several areas that looked a lot like murder scenes by the last day.

Finally, there is a flock of ravens that fly around complaining a lot, looking raven-y. They are trying to cozen snacks out of the visitors but are amazingly prissy little bastards. They inspected, tasted, and rejected some very excellent bread we tested on them, so screw the ravens. No snacks for you. Anyways, they did make an effort to be photogenic and creepy, so I took advantage.

So, I had the eldritch icicles, the high-contrast snow which also looks a little freaky, some ravens, and some murder scenes. The grab shot to open with seemed like a good opener. The result feels a bit like The Shining, don't you think?

And then I thought you know what makes things creepy? cheerful music. Thus was the strangely appropriate Jingle Bells added. Perhaps its not a murder at all, but a terrible accident. Perhaps Fanny Bright survived for a little while, dragging herself desperately through the forest before night fell and the wolves got her.

I confess that I completely missed resemblance of the icicle fan to the fan of feathers on a bird's wing, but I will absolutely accept it. Clearly, um, my subconscious! Also I absolutely did not have Minor White in mind, but I will also accept the antecedent, whether it was intended as a joke or not!

The title is just MFA trash, although it is certainly true that the cabins are on a loop at the end of a road. This also did not occur to me until much later, I was just banging out a derisive title.

I might do a zine. I dunno. It's mostly just a joke.

The End Of The Road Which Is Always Turning Back

Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one horse open sleigh

Dashing through the snow
In a one horse open sleigh
O'er the fields we go
Laughing all the way

... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Bells on bob tail ring
Making spirits bright

O! What fun it is to laugh and sing
A sleighing song tonight

A day or two ago
I thought I'd take a ride
And soon, Miss Fanny Bright
Was seated by my side

The horse was lean and lank
Misfortune seemed his lot
He got into a drifted bank
And then we got upsot

... Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Hey!

Jingle bells, jingle bells
Jingle all the way
Oh, what fun it is to ride

In a one horse open sleigh

Something to look at

John Edwin Mason loves this picture of a counter-terrorism training exercise in Mauritania. He claims to have brought it up in class where, evidently, he telegraphed his affection for the picture hard enough to make his students agree with him on how great it is, and they discussed why it's great. I swear I am not making this up, it's all there on twitter.

This photo is by Laetitia Vancon, for the NY Times, and I will absolutely stipulate that as a graphic design exercise it is excellent. The color palette is on fleek, the design of form in the frame is pleasing, and there's a weird sense of drama going on.

Unfortunately for John, great photojournalism uses great design to clarify the situation, and this one... doesn't. It's a design for design's sake exercise.

The question one might ask about this photojournalistic photograph is, "what the actual fuck is going on here?"

The answer is unclear. Let's take it right to left.

The dominant figure, on the right, appears to be intently tracking a lizard on the wall just out of frame. This is, god willing, an optical illusion. Perhaps there is a doorway or corner just out of frame. Perhaps he is in fact gazing intently, and aiming his rifle, parallel to the wall. We cannot tell, because the picture is framed for visual appeal, not for information, leaving our poor rifleman looking like a guy hunting lizards with an AK. His trigger disciple is admirable, though.

Next we have a group of what appears to be two guys with three rifles, behind the first figure, some ways down the wall. They are either waving their rifles around randomly, or somewhat vaguely tracking around the sky looking for threats. There are in fact three men, one is hidden (visual confusion) and while they do not have their rifles in a safe rest position, they appear to be looking at the camera rather than sighting along their weapons. They are rather less engaged that the rightmost man.

To be honest, they look a bit like dangerous bozos waving their rifles around in one direction while looking in another.

Next we have some guy apparently pointing his rifle at the camera. Closer inspection suggests that he is intent on a point somewhere over the camera person's right shoulder (perhaps the same area the rightmost man is covering?). It requires close inspection, however. His rifle is foreshortened into a visual muddle which takes real effort to take apart.

The leftmost pair have their rifles down. One is in motion, stepping apparently behind the figure aiming past the camera, perhaps checking sightlines? The very leftmost figure appears to simply be lost in thought.

So we have two guys up front actively aiming, tracking, looking for targets to engage. Behind them, three guys with rifles up but looking at the camera. Perhaps they are sitting out this round, or preparing to step in to the exercise a moment from now. To the left, we have maybe two trainers, one active and one, um, not.

My best guess here is that we have a moment of transition. An exercise has just begun, the players are beginning to move. Trainers are ready to make corrections, other trainees are awaiting a cue. This is an inherently muddled moment, a moment that is neither one thing nor another, but rather the interval between two things.

If it's not a transitional moment, I seriously have no idea what the hell is going on. Who are those two, oops, no, three guys in back and what are they doing? What is the guy on the right so intent on? Why is the guy on the left so spaced out?

It is kind of an anti-decisive moment, it is the moment when things reach a crescendo of unclarity, that moment that is least characteristic and revealing of the unfolding event. There are at least three visually confusing muddles in this thing, one of which I am unable to sort out at all. Mood/motivation are completely unclear in at least 3 of the men, and only to be guessed at in two more.

The picture, unfortunately, lends itself to being read as a buncha dumb Africans fuckin' around with gun.s I mean, it's not this is buncha assholes standing around in the street shooting into the air, but they're not exactly coming across like a crack team of ninjas, either.

I'd like to be able to say something glib like "if these were photos of an LAPD counter-terrorism exercise it wouldn't look like this!" but google suggests otherwise. If anything, LAPD counter-terror training looks weirder and stupider. You have to google for the Israeli equivalent to get the movie-poster dangerous assholes in a badass ensemble pose shots.

But the design of this one is very nice.

The Percept

I am reading Rudolf Arnheim's book Art and Visual Perception, which is more or less a coherent survey of what was known in 1974 about how we visually perceive the world, and artworks within it. It's pretty interesting.

A core concept is the notion of a percept, that which is perceived rather than merely seen. Consider a photograph of a pair of dice, one a little further away than the other, not visually overlapping.

Each die presents itself as an irregular 6-sided figure, broken up into 4 irregular four sided sub-regions. Each sub-region is a more or less uniform pale grey, with one or more elliptical blotches of a much darker grey. One of the 6-sided figures is smaller than the other. This is the visual impression, this is what lands on the retina.

The percept on the other hand is: a pair of identically sized dice.

Were you shown the photo for only a moment, you would certainly recall that it is a pair of dice. Likely you would not recall what numbers were showing. You do not remember the visual impression, you remember the percept.

Photographers strive to see the visual impression more than other people. Through the finder, we notice whether the dice overlap in the visual field. When the dice do, the visual impression changes radically. Rather than a pair of 6-sided shapes, there is a much more complex shape that represents the two dice. Visually, it is completely different. Perceptually, the difference is negligible unless the forward die more or less completely obscures the hinder one. A slight visual overlap is almost literally discarded by our visual system, we still perceive two dice, one a little further away.

It is said that, when shown an arrangement of pieces on a chess board for a brief study, and then asked to recreate the arrangement, the expert will create a strategically similar arrangement, whereas the tyro will places individual pieces on or near their original locations. The latter arrangement may be more accurate in terms of position, but less accurate strategically. The chess expert perceives the chess board quite differently, compared with the tyro.

Most of us are expert see-ers, in the sense of being able to identify salient features of the world around us. We perceive at a fairly high, fairly abstract, level and must exert effort to see more simply, more directly, more in terms of the direct visual impression.

As a result of this hard-won technical, visual, way of seeing, photographers overrate the visual impression. While maybe nobody would urge you to "fix" your photograph of dice by eliminating a visual overlap, we are constantly reminded not to let poles "grow out of" people's heads, which is precisely the same issue. An accidental visual overlap, which may or may not be perceived by non-photographers, is a very great evil, to be cloned out or re-shot.

In reality, if the percept is clear, there is a flagpole behind the person, then let it grow out of their head. Who cares?

This brings me around to one of my perennial favorite topics, the lighting of the photographic portrait.

Lighting the face this way or that alters the visual impression radically, in ways that the enthusiastic strobist notes instantly.

The percept does not budge. Not one bit. We are people-recognizing machines, first and foremost. One light, ten lights, it doesn't matter, we're going to recognize that it's a person and read their mood instantly. We're going to perceive Aunt Sally in an instant.

We are told by strobist web sites to use short lighting on fat people, because it makes them look thinner. (Turn the face a little away from the camera to make the face visually asymmetrical, and then light up the narrowed half.) This isn't really true. We know Uncle Bill, and when we look at the picture we're not really even going to see the visual impression the picture leaves, we're going to more or less directly perceive Uncle Bill and his great moon face. Sorry, Bill.

This is not to say that short lighting is useless on Bill. This particular picture of Bill is, maybe, more flattering, even though it in no meaningful way conceals his fleshy magnificence. What it does, maybe, is allow us to recognize Bill without drawing particular attention to the dizzying breadth of his face. We are invited, rather, to dwell upon the twinkling eye and the neat haircut.

At issue here is really what it means for Bill to "look thinner." In one sense, there is no making Bill look thinner any more than there is making a die look like a hexagon. But in another sense, we can certainly emphasize or attenuate this aspect of that of Bill, or of our die. We can draw attention toward one thing and away from another. By lighting the pair of pips on top, and darkening the other visible sides, the die takes on the character of both a die, and of a rolled snake-eyes.

The die remains a die, unequivocally, but, maybe, the rolled two enters our percept of the die. We might recall the number on top.

The painter can actually paint a thinner man with Bill-like features, or can flatten a die out and render its cube-ness versus hexagon-ness ambiguous. The photographer has no such luxury, short of becoming essentially a painter.

Short of optical illusions, or painting, the photographer has to find actual real things to make the picture out of, with the assumption that they will be perceived more or less as they are. You cannot simply take a picture of a boring thing "in a way that makes it interesting," nor an ugly thing beautiful, nor a large thing small.

If the goal is to render the essentially ugly thing beautiful, you cannot really conceal the ugliness. If you yourself do not see beauty in the thing, you ought to give it up as a bad job. If, on the other hand, you see beauty in the ugly thing, then your job is not to conceal the ugliness but to reveal the beauty which you perceive. There may be more to this than simply lighting the shot and picking the viewpoint. Perhaps you need many photographs, perhaps you need words, or sound, or smell. Perhaps you need to circle the important bit with a red pen.

When you look at something, you perceive much more than the visual impression would suggest. The photograph discards most of that, leaving only a spare and limited visual impression. From that spare and limited visual impression, your audience constructs anew the percept. Your ability to manipulate that perception to match your own is remarkably limited.

Good luck!

Unreadable

The shortlisted entries for the MACK Books First Book Award are all over one of the tiny corners of the world of photography, a corner I inspect regularly. It's interesting. These are all established mid-level artists, and all are presenting what amount to finished books. These are not rough concepts, not prints pasted into a notebook (as Colberg recommends), they appear to resemble commercially-made books as much as possible.

Mid-level artists and up is MACK's bread and butter, of course. They're not in the business of breaking new talent, they're in the business of doing books with people who have exhibited, won or nearly won a few awards, and shopped a couple book dummies around the regular circuit. The cynic might say "artists with an established track record of spending fairly copious amounts of money in search of advancement."

Anyways, as noted by the illustrious Mr. Smith in a comment earlier, these books are all, um, of a type. They are all, with one exception, firmly within the bounds of standard issue glum MFA photography, which again is MACK's bread and butter. The books range from My Sad Project all the way to Huh?, again, with one exception: SHIFTERS seems to be utterly mad and potentially delightful. It has, I predict, no chance of winning, because it is charming, delightful, and would be insanely expensive to make (746 pages!)

Here is a picture from one of the books:

This is a photo by Andrea Alessandrini, from his Piccolo Russia project/book. While there are many ways in which it is not typical of all the work, there is one essential way in which it is completely typical, characteristic.

It is almost completely unreadable.

Photographs show us certain ground facts, some or all of which we note when we look at the photo. These facts, their arrangement, and so on, suggest or evoke something. The picture invites or suggests one or more narratives, explanations. We might tend to feel a certain way, and so on. Photography until recently has been explicitly about doing this better. We are taught that the photograph should reveal, it should tell a story, it should evoke an emotion, and so on.

Just as abstract art arose in response to figurative art (and by the freedom photography afforded artists to abandon figurative art) I think we're seeing a reaction to all these ideas, to this philosophy of photography. The point now is to make photographs which explicitly deny a narrative, which deny their connection to reality, which conceal rather than reveal.

This is a normal kind of reaction for a community to have. Such and such is rather tired and stale, let us do the opposite.

There are basically two difficulties to be confronted here.

There isn't much to distinguish these modern photos from accidental snaps. The hard thing is to reveal, to evoke, to tell. This is essentially the same argument as the one leveled against abstract art, my kid could do that, which turns out to be not entirely accurate. I don't think it's entirely accurate here either, but it's a lot closer. Making a Jackson Pollock is surprisingly difficult. Making a shitty photo of nothing is pretty easy. To get to proper MFA-level pointlessness you still have to cull, to be sure. Go out and try to make some of this shit, you can't just literally point it anywhere and bash the button. But they're still pretty easy to do.

Anyone with a camera, or even a phone, has probably made a few things in this line along the way. So, it's not like the hypothetical I could make a Jackson Pollock it's a much more concrete I have made a bunch of those.

The second difficulty is that, as far as I can tell, this is an unconscious trend. We get occasional junk like the review of HORIZONT on ASX: The camera wasn’t meant to work this way, producing images that push back against its discipline, against our habits of seeing which kind of leans in the direction, but mostly people are dragging out the same "critical" language as always to describe material to which it doesn't apply at all.

These pictures are not evoking a sense of place or whatever the fuck. They are not commenting on the thing, or revealing the essence of the wossname. The entire point is that they arguably do no such thing. They're defying the very idea that photographs ought to do such a thing.

I mean, kinda, anyways. I suspect that the artists themselves are not really aware that they're rebelling. They are, I assume, struggling against the visual ideas that we've been hammering for the last 150 years, and trying to find new ways to, somehow, meet the old expectations. The self-styled critics are duly declaring that they are successful, when manifestly they are failing abysmally. The whole enterprise is wandering in the wilderness.

To return to Andrea Alessandrini's photo, we can see this. Perhaps it's just an awkward momentary posture, a frozen moment of an action that, over the seconds it lasted, made perfect sense. As we see it, though, it's incomprehensible. Who is this guy and what is he doing? The picture, maybe, evokes these questions, but its complete failure to provide any suggestion of an answer leaves us (well, me, anyways) basically uninterested.

Note how common the turned back is in these things. Faces are evocative, interesting, we spin stories and ideas the instant we see them -- and so they are concealed. When we see then, the expression is invariably neutral, unevocative, demanding and suggesting no narrative, no emotion. Human figures are cropped, or turned away. Landscape and architecture is chopped down to meaningless, often confusing, details. One incomprehensible note might be framed in another incomprehensible set of material.

The effort to defy traditionally readable material has led, not surprisingly, to unreadable photographs. I think they've been so busy rejecting the details that they've perhaps not really noticed where they've ended up.

It is as if all the painters and their critics in 1900 or so had rejected every individual precept of figurative painting without ever realizing that they were inventing abstract painting.

I don't know if this place they've landed, even if it were equipped with a philosophical basis, a critical basis, would be any good. It seems anti-photographic, and in the end, it's just so damned easy and blockheaded. What we know for sure right now is that trying to make sense of this new thing using the old critical frameworks is ludicrous.

What we do not know is whether there is any new framework that can be applied in which we can make sense of these things. Nobody seems to be looking. Nobody seems to even be aware that a new framework might be a good idea.

Remixes, Mashups, and Sampling

My lovely commenters have been poking me in the brain. Thanks!

Imagine, if you will, that in 1995 someone somehow managed to print up a dozen of Ansel Adams's rejected negatives to make a new calendar of "hitherto unseen Adams photographs." The detonation would have been epic. Adams was extremely clear on his process, and those things are not Adams photographs. The rejected negatives are merely an essential part of his artistic process, but are no more Adams Photos than his development tray or his enlarger. The fact that they can be printed makes them negatives, but not Adams Photos. I think there is rather a lot of legal machinery in place to enforce this, at present, but that is beside the point.

Plus, in 1995, Adams had an army of fans who would have exploded with fury.

Consider the written word. There is a long tradition of finishing so-and-so's unfinished novel, or unearthing rejected manuscripts and printing those, of publishing the papers of so-and-so, and so on. Recently we've seen remixes, mainly adding vampires and zombies to Jane Austen's novels. The original authors involved are invariably reliable money-makers, because absolutely nobody is going to publish this second-rate stuff otherwise. Nobody will print Aunt Susie's unfinished novel which Cousin Bill wrote an ending for.

Accordingly, these things tend to be viewed as seedy money grabs, feeding a somewhat base appetite for "content" of a sort in order to cash in.

A common thread here is that the money grubber is seen as taking something very very good, and making something that's not terribly new and not terribly good out of it. Sometimes it is popular but it is rarely good.

Contrariwise, we have have Tom Phillips working away remixing a, by all accounts not very good, novel by W.H. Mallock into sort of poetry and art. This is not, I think, seen as seedy at all, and I dare say as a money-making venture it's been a complete bust. Mallock has exactly no value at the till. What Phillips is doing is transforming something bad in to something better, or at least making a credible swing at it.

Consider, now, music. Musicians have been stealing licks from one another for the entire history of music. They improvise new versions of things. They cover songs. Now they sample and remix and mash-up. They cover things and then sample their own covers and use that to make something new. One of the most wildly sampled things ever, the Amen Break, was pulled off a B-side by a minor 1960s funk band.

In music, the conceit is, as often as not, that you're making something that is either radically new, or at least as good, as what you're lifting. Judgements will be passed if you just do the same old thing, and not as well. If you make something wildly original, you might get a pass if it's sloppy. If you make the same old same old, you damn well better be tight as hell.

This brings us around to authorship.

Is A Humument authored by Phillips or Mallock? Surely the former. There is nothing of Mallock in it, really. Is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Grahame-Smith, or Austen? The bootprints of both are visible. Copyright law surrounding music, as far as this non-lawyer can discern, seems to hew mostly to the obvious standard of "Well, does it sound like so and so's thing, and is that thing more than a few seconds long and hence valuable? If so, you have to pay so and so."

To summarize: we have a general notion that remixes, mashups, and whatnot should be either better than the source material, or very different from it, ideally both; authorship ought be assigned roughly on the basis of how recognizable the original source material is.

Authorship of photography is complicated. Photography is layered.

We have the negative, which is incontrovertibly made by the photographer. It's a physical artifact, and a complete artistic object in its own right. In that sense it resembles a song, or a novel. To remove the sense of authorship, you'd have to cut it up into tiny pieces, they way you sample a song or steal a riff.

On the other hand, we have the body of work. A negative not included in the body of work might be considered the same as a riff that didn't fit the song, a turn of phrase that was edited out. Does "It was the best of times, but it was also a bad time" belong to Dickens? Is "From hell's heart, I shout at thee" Melville? Probably not. I think you can use those phrases freely and without attribution. If you're an idiot.

Is a negative a phrase, or a novel? Is a rejected negative a poorly formed phrase, a dissonant harmony, or is it a second-rate manuscript or song? Both, and neither, I think.

Vivian Maier's negatives are certainly authored by Maier, but there is no body of work at all. Which one matters for authorship? Lange's photos, edited in all senses by Sam Contis, are from negatives authored by Lange but the body of work made from them appears in some ways to fly in the face of Lange's body of work. The book is surely Contis, the negatives just as surely Lange. Nobody, I think, would look at Sam Contis's book and recognize these pictures as distinctly Lange's. They might see a hint of Sally Mann here, and a touch of Walker Evans there, and they'd see a lot of Sam Contis, but I really doubt they'd pick up on any essential Lange-ness.

The conceit is, naturally, that what we are seeing is not recognizable as old, stale, Lange-ness, specifically because it is new, fresh, Lange-ness. I am, um, not convinced. It looks a lot like Sam Contis.

Has Sam Contis written a completely new novel from the second-rate discarded phrases from early drafts of Dickens, or has she made Moby Dick and the Seven Dwarves? Is the book better than the original source material (maybe), or wildly different (probably)? Where does authorship land (ambiguous)?

Photographers are tremendous hoarders, and quite jealous of their negatives (files). Even the trashiest reject must be saved forever and ever, unless you are Bret Weston or P.H. Emerson (or me, but just because I am careless in both senses), and even that reject is mine, mine, my precious you can't have it thief! The law lands on the side of the photographer here. This in turn suggests that one must always grant authorship to the negative-maker, always and always.

I'm not convinced that it's a great idea.

That said, it was kinda shitty that the guy who whipped out the Amen Break died in poverty, so it's possible music's standard of authorship isn't great either.

Day Sleeper Sam Contis, a few Notes

This is not a review. I have not seen the book, and continue to be not terribly interested in it, although if opportunity arises to leaf through a copy I might do that.

To set the stage: Day Sleeper is a collection of photographs by Dorothea Lange, selected, cropped, and sequenced into a book by Sam Contis, the book then published by MACK. Sam Contis and Dorothea Lange appear to be listed as co-authors on the MACK site. This book has received brief notice in the Wall Street Journal (essentially a recitation of the press release) and reviews from ASX and Colberg, and presumably others. It is, to an extent, the "it" book of the moment.

I'm going to, here, provide a random smattering of details and facts, and draw some connections. I do not really intend to propose any of the connections as causal per se but I think they are of some interest regardless.

You can find a preview glance of the book on the MACK site here: Day Sleeper (click on the book cover).

Among the photos shown there is one of an dead eagle crucified on a barbed wire fence.

There is here some slight interest. This is not one of the "unearthed" photos "never before seen" that the press release goes on about. It is an FSA photo, shot in 1936, likely on Highway 99 somewhere around Fresno as Lange worked her way up from Exeter to Merced shooting migrant workers in picking season. It is a striking and uncharacteristic photo. Lange simply didn't shoot this kind of thing for the FSA.

One might speculate that it was unusual enough a sight to catch her eye, cause her to pull over, and to record it.

The eagle might have been hung to deter birds, either other eagles or perhaps birds that fear eagles, but to deter them from what I cannot imagine. The field behind appears to be pasture and while an eagle might harass your sheep you wouldn't, by preference, fence sheep with barbed wire. The foreground I think is likely just the ditch beside the highway. Possibly it's just a trophy, or a macabre sense of humor. Anyways, it caught Lange's attention.

The caption describes it as "A very blue eagle" which is probably a joke. Obviously, one can construe the eagle as very sad. Possibly it is a reference to the blue eagle logo of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) which administered parts of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). This was a very pro-union but problematic set of legal machinery intended to repair the economy. This was quite popular, but was overturned in May of 1935, about a year before Lange photographed this eagle.

It is possible that Lange photographed the eagle as a kind of commentary. She was, after all, working literally daily with the people this agency and law were supposed to help, and was at the time working for a sister agency. One could argue, I suppose, that the NRA was the industrial/urban counterpart of the RA (FSA-precursor) that employed Lange.

It's a stretch, but it does provide, after a fashion, something of an explanation for this weird photo Lange took. It is also possible that whoever hung the eagle might have intended it as a protest against the overturning of the NIRA.

Onwards.

This is not the first time in the modern era that Lange's blue eagle has turned up. It was also the cover of a 2018 album, Furore, by an Italian guitarist named Simone Massaron. Hold on to that date.

Sam Contis did a book in 2017 with MACK, of her own work and some archival material, called Deep Springs which is about Deep Springs College which is one of these tiny weird places where you work at some back to the land shit to build character while studying some no doubt absurdly out of date curriculum. Contis was photographing just prior to the college starting to actually admit women, I think, while it was in the throes of ditching its all-male status.

You can watch someone leaf through the book in this video, I recommend clicking the little gear-shaped tool and selecting a slowed-down playback speed. 0.5 or 0.25. Note the obsession with abstracted bodies, with hands, with people lying down apparently asleep.

Note the dead eagle, held in a crucified position, at time mark 0:50.

If you have not already, I suggest that you look through the preview of Day Sleeper on the MACK site.

I might glibly say that Day Sleeper and Deep Springs are the same book, but that would be unfair. They share a lot. Not just MACK's random approach to picture placement, either. There are hands, there are day sleepers, there is landscape, there are abstracted bodies, and there is a crucified eagle in both books.

Recall now the dates:

2017 - Deep Springs
2018 - Furore
2019 - Day Sleeper

Is it a stretch to suggest that Contis made the first book, then saw the album cover, recognized the eagle, and went looking for Lange's pictures? Yes. Is it possible? Yep, the timeline works just fine, and there's absolutely no way Contis doesn't connect the two eagles. The only real speculation here is whether the music album provides a link.

Anyways.

Flipping through the photos easily accessible from the two books we see, pretty clearly I think, that Day Sleeper is made up of Sam Contis photos that happen to have been shot by Dorothea Lange. There was some careful selection, some cropping, and some printing/post involved to execute the transformation, but that's what it is.

The standard critical conceit has been, and no doubt will continue to be, that Contis is shedding new light on Lange here, that we are re-discovering Lange, blah blah blah.

This is bullshit. What we are seeing here is a recapitulation of the Vivian Maier story.

We know what Dorothea Lange was about, she made her statement. She selected this negative and not that one. She printed this, and not that. There is no mystery to Lange as an artist. There is also, of course, a good sized slush pile. The Oakland Archive, which Contis mined, contains 25,000 negatives and it is perhaps notable than even with 25,000 pictures she could not assemble the book she wanted without also dipping into the FSA archives.

What Sam Contis appears to have done here is to construct a simulation of Sam Contis out of materials from Lange, in much the same way that Maloof constructed a sort of Frankenstein's monster sewn together from parts of other photographers out of Maier's materials.

This is an interesting phenomenon, and I dare say as more and more photographers give up taking pictures to "work with archives" we'll see more and more of this kind construct lumbering around. I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I think we need better language to describe this process. Contis (and Maloof) have constructed genuinely new things, things which should not really be ascribed to the original photographer but which cannot justifiably be fully claimed by the editor.

It is, obviously, possible to construct a whole bunch of different "artistic entities" given an archive of negatives. What should we call these things, and how should we talk about them?