Portraits

Mother’s Day

Politics, Portraits
May 10, 2021
1 Comments

Let me take yesterday’s Mothers’ Day as my annual occasion to remind all of us that mothering would not be possible but for those who support it, parents and non-parents alike. Let’s celebrate ALL who make raising children in this world a shared adventure.

In this particular year my heart goes out to mothers who have lost their children in the pandemic, upending the natural order of parents dying before their offspring. I cannot imagine anything more painful than to lose a child. The hardest hit geographic areas, Brazil, Uruguay, India have also seen a huge percentage of young people killed by a virus that could have been contained, the latter a fact that adds insult to injury for the bereaved.

Gustav Klimt *Mother with two Children* (1909/10)

I cry with the mothers who have seen their children killed by political violence. Scores of schoolgirls in Afghanistan, this weekend alone. In Syria, the war has injured or killed one child every 8 hours in the last 10 years. In Yemen, at least 3,153 children have died and 5,660 children have been injured, according to a report by UNICEF. On average, 50 children are killed and 90 are wounded or permanently disabled each month.

Kaethe Kollwitz *Die Eltern* (plate 3) from *War* (1922)

The numbers for the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel vary depending on what source you read, but they are shockingly high even when reported by neutral parties. The deaths caused by IDF or settler activity are just the tip of the iceberg. The threats to health imposed by blockades, restricted access to medical care, electricity, food and water have their own consequences. A Human Rights Watch report can be read here and one specifically for Palestinian children by War Child, an organization that supports children in 17 war-torn countries, here. While bereaved families on both sides try to work together and plead for reconciliation, the violence against Muslims continues to increase, as we have seen this weekend in the shocking events at the Al-Aqsa mosque during end of Ramadan prayers. As reported in the Times of Israel, the Red Crescent was blocked by Israeli forces to come to the aid of the 200 wounded, many under 18 among them.

Tears for the mothers in our own country, too. In the last 6 years police have shot 22 children under 16 fatally. According to the Equal Justice initiative, the risk of being one of those victims is 6 times higher for those kids who are Black. If we look at mortality statistics for young Black men and teens, the risk of dying in a shooting, by police or by gang conflict, is increased 20 fold. Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 make up just 2% of the nation’s population, but they were among 37% of gun homicides in 2019 according to the CDC.

Heartache for the mothers and their children who flee unsafe lives for hope of asylum, only to perish on the perilous path across seas or deserts, or to be separated violently at the point of arrival.

Solidarity to the women activists, many of them mothers, who are willing to face separation from their children, and/or threats to their health and lives by torture in prisons around the world: in Saudi Arabian jails, in Iranian jails, in Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Egyptian and Philippine jails, a list by no means exhaustive.

Kaethe Kollwitz The Mothers (plate 6) from War (1922)

Children should be safe. From war, from political conflict, from systemic, state sponsored violence, from racism, from hunger, from being ripped away from their families. Mothers should never have to bury a child.

Portraits, Doubled

To end this week devoted to portraits I will tell two stories, one of a clever way to create indirect portraits, the other about how to portray someone who portrays you.

The first story is about Matthias Schaller, who has an ongoing project to portray living and deceased artists by photographing their palettes. His website in the link above gives you a good idea of the kinds of palettes he has pursued and portrayed. The work supports his claim that you can often identify the painter by looking at how the palette is arranged, geometrically used, and by the assigned color range. (The website also has one of the strongest warnings about not using any of the materials without permission – so you have to go there yourself, I can’t put up teasers here.)

Alternatively you can peruse the article below,

Photographic Portraits of Famous Artist’s Paint Palettes by Matthias Schaller

or read an interview with images here or enjoy the views on one of his exhibitions two years ago at the Berman Museum of Art. I am always a bit taken aback by excessive proprietary actions when it comes to art on the internet. I probably err in the opposite direction, with art on my ow website being easily snatched – but then again why should people not enjoy what they desire? Nothing you print off a website comes even close to the quality of the real object, with its particular paper and color requirements.

Anyhow, I digress. I like Schaller’s idea, I think he is on to something, and I truly admire when someone pursues a particular passion across many years, hunting down and negotiating with those who hold the palettes of famous artists in their collections, archives, museums, or wherever.

The second story I first told three years ago here. It described the thoughts and feelings of portraying a painter, Henk Pander, at work, while his work was you yourself – a portrait of your scarred body.

The artistic collaboration created some meaningful results, although, as is so often the case, the gorgeous painting got the exposure it deserved in public, while the photography slumbers along in an overly expensive, little book collecting dust on bookshelves. Double portraits, uneven distribution.

In any case, the photographs today are from those sessions, with a focus on Henk’s palette since those tie to story #1, and a few extras to wrap up the theme of portrait.

Music shall be my eternal go-to in hard times, Schuman’s Davidsbündler Tänze. I will resume reporting when I am settled in San Francisco.

The Beauty of Age

I have visibly aged by about 100 years in the last month, through fear, worry, helplessness. No wonder then, that a project called The Beauty of Age caught my attention. I was taken not only by the portraiture of numerous people all above 75 years of age, photographed with a gentle lens and loving perception.

It was for me all about the approach to the project which explicitly combined a focus on the photographic portrait with attention to the life experiences behind the faces, the at times unbearable suffering that put my own anguish in perspective.

Laura Zalenga, a young European photographer, supported by the Adobe Creative Residency program, spent 2018/19 interviewing more than 30 people in Germany. Here is her description of the project (my translation from the German.)

“The project contains hundreds of photographs, weeks of listening and more than 2000 years of combined life experience. None of these statistics can capture though the gift these encounters. The wonderful people I met. We laughed together, sat silently with each other, cried softly. I heard so many beautiful, stunning, horrible, funny and sad stories. I sensed such aliveness. Such power and pain and contentedness, so much quietude, loneliness and courage. There is much to discover and learn if we allow the oldest of our societies to say their piece. If we afford them a bit of our hectic time, they return to us a piece of their wisdom, bear witness to our own history and express much gratitude.”

The work, as displayed in traveling exhibition, is a combination of the pictures of the faces and written quotes from the conversations, printed alongside the portraits. A companion book to the exhibition provides more detail.

What struck me, when perusing the photographs in The Beauty of Age was something practically all of the portraits had in common: they pulled their emotional weight without the visual tricks and forced stylishness of so much contemporary portrait photography. Not that the artist doesn’t know how to: she is on top of the contemporary demand for slickness as much as any of the big names these day.

In her project with the aged, however, Zalenga, in her 20s at the time, saw with the heart – she has, I predict, a clearly marked path to success in this image saturated world. These were mostly naturally lit snaps of people in their living rooms or other personal environments. Perhaps because of the naturalness of the approach the photographer captured something essential that is not always there when the sitter is too aware of and tense in the image-taking situation. I am thinking here of the mildness of the gaze. Look at all of their eyes, their expression – softness abounds, despite the hardships in their lives.

What an optimistic thought – we all might be able to come out un-hardened at the other end of life’s crises. I cling to that, while turning my back to the mirror.

This will be my self portrait, then, in the near future….

And here is the Marshallin from Rosenkavalier singing about getting old…

Twigs and Stones

About a 5 minute walk from my house is a small neighborhood park, a refuge for kids, dogs and the rest of us. A patch of old-growth forest, it has a path circling the periphery which gives you a good 20 minute stroll and leaves the interior protected, for deer, coyotes, kids’ forts and all. On balmy spring evenings at dusk the high schoolers or L&C students hang out with Today’s Herbal Choice – and the whole place pleasantly smells like those initials. But I digress.

A few years back a tiny wooden fairy house appeared, lovingly constructed and painted, with a house number and doors and windows that could be opened. Then another, and another, I think at its peak there were over 10 of them, parked under or affixed to the trees. Kids would bring little toys to decorate, and dogs would ignore those, if you were lucky. A walk in the wood was no longer boring for the young ones and everyone had a blast to spot new houses. Well, not everyone. There was a serious discussion in the neighborhood association about leaving nature to be nature and not make it a kitschy theme park, and that was that. Everything disappeared overnight.

This spring, a spark of defiance appeared at the bottom of the trees. Small painted stones can be found in locations close to the path, and for those of us walking there daily it has once again become either a bit of joy at the creativity of the young artists and our own sleuthing for new ones, or a source of dismay that there is yet again artificiality introduced into nature.

(Some of you might remember that I have argued along similar lines in an essay on Botanic Gardens, but here we are talking about a sort of playground (albeit a nature one) for families. https://www.orartswatch.org/art-among-the-plants-a-lament/)

The presence and fate of these stones might be under dispute – the way twigs have been affixed in what I am about to introduce next should not be controversial – it is simply ingenious.

Meet eyesasbigasplates – a duo of women photographers who do spectacular work with older people who participate in creating their “costumes” from materials found in their natural surroundings. They introduce themselves and their work here:

We are a Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth. Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Since 2011 the artist duo has portrayed seniors in Norway, Finland, France, US, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden, Japan and Greenland. Each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists.

https://eyesasbigasplates.com

I adore everything about the idea (and admire the photographers’ technical skills as well – the images are of outstanding quality.) Collaborating with a group that usually falls by the wayside, making them active participants in their portraiture, using natural materials in such inventive fashion and creating portraits that simultaneously crystallize the person’s characteristic face and hint at something more fleetingly, almost magical – it’s just terrific. Why don’t I have ideas like that???? And why am I not the wisdom-radiating rhubarb lady??? All the portrait images are from this website: https://eyesasbigasplates.com/list-of-works/

A big shout out to T.L. who introduced me to this work.

Best fit for music today (magic in the forest!) happens to be one of my favorite operas of all times: Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Here is a Prague production from 1970, conducted by Bogumil Gregor.

Street Roots

After a week of portraying travel options mostly linked to the past, today I want to direct us to the present. The here and now where we are all called upon to walk on paths shared with those who are less fortunate than most of us. And with those who are steadfastly around to help them. Traveling, in other words, not necessarily for fun and adventure, but for the larger good. Good for social justice as much as for your soul. Down a road that is not necessarily comfortable, either.

These thoughts were triggered by attending a breakfast fundraiser at the ungodly hour of 7:30 in the morning, in the company of hundreds of other slightly bleary-eyed souls, to celebrate the incredible work of Street Roots, our local weekly newspaper produced and sold by people experiencing homelessness and poverty. Here is what they do:

From a beginning of a few volunteers 19 years ago, they have grown to a large organization winning prizes for their journalism, winning political battles affecting housing and poverty, and, most importantly, giving voice to those who are not usually listened to, with their contributed articles and in their interactions with those of us who buy the paper. More detailed history here: http://streetroots.org/about/work#history

The organization has a fighting spirit, in the best possible meaning of the word, not shy to risk losing donors if demanded by principle (they lost an annual $10.000 grant from the PDX Archdiocese for refusing to take Planned Parenthood off their resource guide for people in need, not exactly peanuts.) But they also fight for cooperative action, as was evident by the wide range of city players and business donors present at the breakfast, willing to engage across social class, political and economic divides.

Metro

Portland Fire and Rescue

Trimet

Portland Housing Bureau

Kaia Sand, recently appointed executive director of Street Roots, embodies these core values of principled defiance and energetic partnership quite well. (She’s also one of those more interesting poets meandering at the crossroads of literary art and activism – more on that on another day.) http://kaiasand.net/#wavebook

The award procedures for Vendor of the Year and Keystone member of the Street Roots community were moving,

and I was lucky enough to be close to a beloved 4-legged companion of one of the honorees, Migo the best dressed dog in recent memory.

Still resonating is the keynote address by Michael Buonocore, executive director of Home Forward, (the former Housing Authority of Portland,) which provides access to affordable housing and services for people facing low income, addiction, disabilities and other issues making it difficult to maintain a safe existence.

http://www.homeforward.org/home-forward/welcome

He called on everyone to choose what I called a difficult path at the beginning of today’s musings: to engage in honest interaction with those outside of our comfort zone, when encountering them on the street, when put off by their attire, when seeking distance because of the potential threat to our own emotional well being while confronted with misery.” LEARN TO SEE EACH OTHER. ”

It might provide the best traveling companions yet!

PS: On my way home from the bus after the event I came by this under the bridge that carries the Highway traffic. A steep cement slope, noisy and full of exhaust gases, attracts sleepers desperate to be dry. Regularly dispersed.

From the Ground up

The Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene creates scenarios that resemble in some ways some of the old Dutch masters’ paintings. The light is natural, the scenery detailed and yet timeless, there is always a mysterious element and the portraits tell stories.

She actively searches for young girls/women that trigger her curiosity and does the same with potential locations, often knocking on strangers’ doors to ask if she can use a particular room or building. She then combines her models with other living creatures or special props with sometimes almost mystical results. (Click on the arrow in the photo spread to see 12 representative images.)

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/maedchen-und-frauen-fotografiert-von-hellen-van-meene-fotostrecke-160233.html

She works from the ground up, carefully choreographing every last detail to achieve moody, sometimes disconcerting portraits.

A different team is working from the ground up to provide opportunities to underserved populations of young aspiring artists in Portland.

http://fromthegrounduppdx.wixsite.com/fromthegroundup/young-women-s-residency-program

Katherine Murphy Lewis, her colleagues and visiting artists offer workshops that prepare for acting, playwriting and other creative outlets in group sessions that are financially underwritten by the fairy godmother of Portland’s art scene, the incomparable Ronnie LaCroute who, in my book, is generosity personified. Which counts double in a city that is not exactly famous for individual generosity towards the arts, if you ask me.

I was able to provide some needed headshots for this term’s participants in the workshop, also in natural light, but no props needed. The women themselves were striking enough.

In times where art in all of its expressions is cut from curricula due to economic pressures, small independent endeavors like FTGU become ever more important to reach a clientele with otherwise little access to tools of learning the trade. We all are the beneficiaries – the stories and talent emerging from workshops like this just might contain seeds for change.

Linn-Benton Community College Choir

A small two-year junior college located in Albany, south of Portland, has caught my attention – and not only because their mascot is the Roadrunner, a bird I feel at times strangely related too, although in my case it isn’t a coyote that is chasing me….

I had a chance to photograph the LBCC choir members and their conductor, Raymund Ocampo some weeks back.

I had not gathered any information on them, and so did not know at the time that the choral ensembles of this community college in small town Oregon have consistently won prizes, traveled and performed abroad, engaged in workshop with big-name composers and conductors. All I had to do was listen to them and just acknowledge there was a group making beautiful music.

http://www.linnbenton.edu/current-students/student-support/instructional-departments/music1

Not only did they move heartstrings, and easily held their own when thrown in with another choir in joint performance, they also were intensely serious about it, as you can see in the photographs. Many people who go to community colleges have to work for a living at the same time that they pursue a degree. Many students in these rural communities are, in other words, not likely to have lots of extraneous funding and support when pursuing activities beyond the regular curriculum. Their achievements probably require sacrifices that students in wealthier institutions or from wealthier backgrounds do not encounter. The stamina and passion required to pull it all off, then, is remarkable.

And the results speak for themselves (from a performance some years ago in Europe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiD87OTQqa8

Of course I photograph them when they are busy, badly lit and in constant motion with a camera that is not particularly adaptable to these three factors.

Compare the results to the portraits of one of my favorite portrait photographers from NYC, who specializes in portraits of music performers and moves, needless to say, in very different circles with very different gear.

Laurie Anderson by Ebru Yildiz

Ebru Yildiz is originally from Turkey and now lives in Brooklyn. An incredibly talented photographer who manages to make her subjects feel at ease at the same time that she courts them in ways that make the perhaps feel powerful – at least that comes across for me in her pictures. Then again, maybe these subjects are already so famous that they feel powerful to begin with. Who cares. The photographs are brilliant.

http://www.ebruyildiz.net

John Cale by Ebru Yildiz

I wonder what the result would be if one put the young women and men from LBCC in front of one of Yildiz’ lenses. We’ll never know.

They are probably too busy rehearsing, a Mozart Requiem is in the works, I hear, to be performed at the Russel Tripp Performance Center on June 8th. But I still think I captured their dedication.

The Mortuary Collection

During the last couple of months I had the opportunity to take a lot of portraits while on the job documenting this or that event. I will present some of them this week, while linking to the work of others who have caught my interest.

We will start with Soft Shells, a portrait series by Canadian photographer Libby Oliver. For this series, Oliver turns the notion of portrait upside down. The portrayed people are actually hidden, quite literally under heaps of their own clothes, with only this or that body part peeking through. Ranging in age from 4 to 88, selected from a wide variety of backgrounds, through internet calls in addition to family and friends of the artists, the subjects were picked for their wardrobes. Oliver intended to present as many styles as possible – not to accuse of consumerism, but to demonstrate how personality can be expressed through choice of clothing.

I am not sure that a pile of jumbled and amassed clothes can necessarily reveal the owner’s personality, since much of that might only emerge in the conscious and/or clever pairing of dress items. I think, though, Oliver is on to something with this idea of hiding behind the outfits in a portrait session in your own bedroom. Good portraits hint at something with something, rather than plainly depict. They catch your attention and ask you to provide interpretation – that act of thinking brings you closer to the portrayed person (or your assumptions of who s/he is, whether they are true or not,) and establishes thus a connection. In that way good portraits mimic the process of real life encounters with someone, relating to them in the moment, being curious about them, or wanting to gauge them, anticipating interaction.

Soft Shells: A Portrait Series That Presents Subjects in Every Piece of Their Wardrobe by Libby Oliver

In addition to making us think about these people, the technical aspects of Oliver’s photographic work are stellar. She obviously had an environment where she could control the lighting, the exposure, the posing etc. None of that was true for the situation I found myself in, working on a movie set recently in Astoria.

I was documenting the behind-the scenes work of members of a film crew that was shooting The Mortuary Collection, a Gothic Horror Anthology; it revolves around an eccentric mortician who spins 4 interconnected tales of madness and the macabre in weird surrounding. Some of it was filmed at Flavell House, a land mark Victorian house in this coastal town.

http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2018/04/film_in_the_works_features_ast.html

But the days I was there were spent in an old gymnasium, now used for roller-skate derbies, with suboptimal lighting and chasing after a crew that was bustling with activity. Needless to say, I savored every minute of it. I also have a newfound appreciation of how hard people work when making movies. The sheer act of organizing 100s of people on a set, not get in each others’ ways, spending hours in cold, cramped conditions repeating necessary work over and over until it finds satisfaction with the director, is daunting. The workdays are by fiat 12 hours long, with meals sneaked in on set (much depends on the quality of the hired cook) and much of the labor is intensely physical because the machinery and sets are heavy. No wonder the crew is young, given the stamina that is required. And it is not just physical stamina – the producer has to spend years of finding funding, organizing continuity, keep the ball rolling until the final product emerges in all its glory. Or gory – I wouldn’t know, am waiting to see the final version, but it is a horror anthology after all.

My choice of portraits today from that film set are partially tied to Oliver’s wardrobe theme; the young women you see here were responsible for tailoring, dressing, costumes in general, make-up, acting and set-design. The men were responsible for filming, directing, moving the set around, sound recording and the like. Gender difference, anyone?

A friendly and lively bunch who graciously gave me a few extra minutes of standing still in their mad work day. I certainly will happily do this again.

Serving in War

Art, Politics, Portraits
Nov 13, 2016
1 Comments

Poverty, inequality, healthcare, racism, sexism, a general hatred for those who pray or love or define themselves differently from traditional Western norms, will probably be with us for the next foreseeable future. Perhaps in FAR worse forms than before. What will affect the world beyond American borders are war and climate change denial. I am not denying the fact that present and past administrations have been warmongering, more so perhaps than we are aware of. I also thought the least desirable aspect of HRC was her hawkish inclinations. Yet the thought that an unpredictable narcissist with fascistic leanings and a coterie of sycophants has the finger on the nuclear button gives me nightmares.

For paintings I chose one of my favorite and one of my least favorite painters. The former captures the horror of war like no one else. Otto Dix painted The War between 1929 and 1932.

More on it here:http://www.skd.museum/en/special-exhibitions/archive/otto-dix-der-krieg-war/

The latter artist, Anselm Kiefer, is discussed in the link below (take it with a grain of salt) but painted something for a Paul Celan poem that I really like.

Anselm Kiefer’s Heady and Heavy-Handed Behemoths

As photographic counterpoints I chose portraits I took of our young women and men who will be the potential canon fodder should war be part of the Trump presidency. I, of course, have no access to those who will be killed by drones, bombs, mines or nuclear missiles in the rest of the world. And so, so young.

Strong Women

Art, Politics, Portraits
Nov 12, 2016
1 Comments

I can wrap my mind around the fact that men feel threatened by women being their boss, taking their jobs instead of their orders. A shift towards equality always hurts those who were in dominant positions. I cannot understand, however, how women can long for a return to a status quo that celebrates their subjugation, narrows their independence, controls their bodies. Making decisions that give other, competing women the finger.

Maybe the fantasy held by anxious, disenfranchised males that a strongman will reinstate control and status at large is reflected in the fantasy of women that their prince will come through the house door, no longer angry and punitive with his place in the world restored.

Let’s look at those who never bought into that and held their own in a misogynistic world. I am linking to an article about an extraordinarily strong woman I had never heard about. What a discovery.

368 Years Before Hillary, This Trailblazing Feminist Demanded Her Right to Vote

Then there are portraits of those who shaped their households or their surrounding culture or their countries’ fate by various forms of leadership.

Quentin Metsys Portrait of a Woman

Date: ca. 1520

http___npgportraits-si-edu_emuseumnpg_media_csc_7500160a-jpg

Raphael Soyer, Golda Meir (1975)

Hannah Arendt in a sketch seen in VOGUE….

Muhammad Yungai Angela Davis

Barbara Berney Indira Ghandi (2010)

As for photographic portraits, here are some of my own role models when it comes to fierceness and determination: those who are or have been fighting cancer and excel in competitive dragon boat races.