Many years back I was part of a group of artists invited to spend a full day at the Blue Heron Paper Company in Oregon City, a site long shut down after bankruptcy. Like for so many photographers, decaying industrial sites held a special appeal for me, with beauty found in strange places.
In 2019, the Confederate Tribes of the Grand Ronde bought the 182 acres, and in 2021 publicized plans for the development of the river and Willamette Falls-adjacent property which holds special cultural and historical significance to the Grand Ronde. Here is the vision (captured in a short video) as expressed at the time. The plan included “mixed use for office, retail, restaurants and public spaces near the falls, as well as instructional learning spaces so visitors can learn about the history of the land. The long-discussed riverwalk would also be a part of the plans.“
Rounding up Circles
Progress has been slow, with demolition of select buildings taking a lot of time, amongst permit woes and required resources. Then, 2 weeks ago, a large fire broke out on the site, still smoldering a week later, requiring closure of major thoroughfares. The billowing smoke caught over the small town, with worries about toxic air quality lasting for more than a week. The fire fighting was hampered by the intensity of the fire, and the fact that during an earlier fire in 2020, several fire fighters faced life-threatening conditions that no-one should experience again. The cause for the fire is still under investigation, but tribal authorities are confident that their demolition plans will proceed along the original time line.
Lining up Lines
I was thinking back to my earlier explorations because of an incredibly moving and thought-provoking essay that I am linking to here. I truly recommend reading it, it is not too long and I will myself shut up momentarily, so you have time. The Miners combines current political analysis with history and an ardent love for a State, Missouri, that has seen much destruction through mining extraction. The author describes the beauty of the remaining structures of the mills and the mines, as well as the travail of the aftermath, when companies leave town, and that triggered my memory. Kendzior, by the way, has a new book coming out at the beginning of April, The Last American Road Trip, a collection of essays of her travels cross country. It can be pre-ordered here.
Imagine yourself on a mountain ridge between two deep canyons. The city is spread out at your feet, the mountains behind you.
You are surrounded by olive, palm, eucalyptus and pine trees, with an occasional sycamore thrown in.
The vegetation is dry to the bone ,
and when you marvel at the fiery sunrise in the mornings your heart goes out to all those affected by wildfires, enraged by the thought that soon we will have a president and his minions who will make disaster help contingent on political lockstep, as announced by them.
Worse, they will do away with environmental protection and pollute as long and as hard as they can, climate change be damned, its science ridiculed or overruled by the demands for profit.
You feel privileged, up there on that beautiful ridge, to be able to look at the changing sky,
to hike down the small private trail to the city, along the waterline, sandy, steep, surrounded by dead yuccas and a landscape filled with luminous rusty colors. The only official access is a one-lane dirt road crossing the canyon with a small bridge, your car soon anticipating the worst potholes and getting the hang of serpentine curves.
Imagine yourself waking up in the middle of the night to the acrid smell of fire, loud crackling and popping noises, flames already sky high. You don’t know what is burning in your vicinity, one of the other structures, and how far away it is. You grab your meds, your purse, your computer and the car keys, and race down that hill fully aware that once a firetruck comes up you are stuck on the ridge.
This happened to me Tuesday night. I am still processing, rattled to the core.
The first fire-police jeeps came within a minute after I had exited the lane onto the street, where I had stopped the car, shaking too much to drive safely. The firetrucks, later, could not cross the bridge. The fire was extinguished with hoses on site and helicopters dumping their load, onto the vicinity as well, to prevent the spread of fire into the wilderness. One person hospitalized, some non-human life lost.
I went back the next day, still in my nightshirt, to pack up my unharmed stuff, my house completely unscathed as all the others in the neighborhood but that one structure and parked truck that burnt to the ground. I can no longer envision myself up there without fear, forever hyperalert to the smells and sounds. And I cannot help myself but thinking of the symbolism mirroring our current situation, ever aware of potential catastrophes and then, in a flash, they have arrived. Yes, it could have been far worse here, but in many instances it HAS been and WILL be far worse, with so many people affected, around the world for lack of appropriate leadership.
I lost nothing other than a cherished place to spend my time in SoCal, and even that loss is entirely psychologically grounded in my own fear to return to the place. I don’t want to think about how it must feel for people who lost loved ones, or their entire material existence, or a community that will never again cohere, thrown into the winds, and still floating many years later. In fact, I don’t want to think about it much at all, since I still get these waves of flash-backs of that drive down the mountain, the overpowering noises still in my ears.
I had meant to visit the World Forestry Center’s current Exhibition Following Fire once back in Portland. Can’t see myself doing that, either. Subtitled A Resilient Forest/An Uncertain Future it is a photography project by photographer David Paul Bayles and disturbance ecologist Frederick Swanson, documenting the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire that burned 173,000 acres along the forested McKenzie River canyon in the Cascade Range of Oregon. You should, though, if only to get motivated to help protect our world against the dark forces.
Onwards. With the appropriate musical accompaniment.
I have to admit, it’s been ages since I visited the World Forestry Center. No more explaining to my (now grown) kids that the fake logger climbing a fake tree with a fake goose and owl calmly sitting on branches below him, are there for educational purposes, and maybe, just maybe, meant as a joke. Or to stimulate discussions how museum exhibits not necessarily reflect the real world. Don’t get me wrong, they and I loved the place during too many rainy days in Portland, Oregon, and some of the educational displays did promote meaningful conversations.
As it turns out, there are now more and better reasons to visit, than simply looking for bad weather diversions. The place is changing at a fast clip, with an ambitious plan to update and modernize this Portland treasure. Among the important improvements are a program of new art exhibitions that should attract a wide swath of visitors who are interested in both, information about the environmental conditions of our state as well as of international forests and how contemporary issues of changing nature is represented by serious artists.
Let’s face it: today’s cultural institutions have a near impossible burden to carry. Besides the particular content they are supposed to display in aesthetically appealing ways – here forestry in all its permutation and history – they have to engage in educational missions, social outreach, community involvement, and simultaneous financial juggling between higher cost and decreased funding. To fulfill all these imperatives you need innovative thinking, creative solutions, and a vision that extends beyond the safe, habitual offerings we’ve come to expect from specialty museums. Judging by the current exhibition, the Discovery Museum at the Center has found someone who fits the bill. Stephanie Stewart Bailey, the new experience developer (unfamiliar title to me, but makes sense when you look at the intersection of art, science and nature) has managed to mount a show that combines stellar international photography with an educational mission to help us understand better the central role and function of trees in numerous civilizations.
Tree People by Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo was the first installment of a three part artistic collaboration between these two prize-winning Finnish photographers interested in the interrelationship between nature and those that populate it. For over three decades the duo have explored the mythology associated with trees and forests, (Tree People, 1997) the way forest management and silviculture affect both land and people, (Silvicultural Operations, 2009) and now how primeval forest look (and act) differently from those that have been exposed to centuries of human commercialization (Forests of the North Wind , 2024).
The visual work is compelling (as is their environmental activism), but the deeper attraction to me lies in the artists’ rigorous research, amounting to an anthropological tour de force across these 30 years, including field interviews and archival exploration. Each of the three installments stands on their own. I found the choice of Tree People for the Discovery Museum timely because they speak to some issues that are currently of great cultural interest in the Pacific Northwest as well.
The exhibition is divided into topics, photography always accompanied and enhanced by written explanations of the historical context. One section explores the destruction of sacred spaces, groves believed to be hallowed, once Christian proselytizing started in earnest, cutting down worshipped trees and replacing them with churches. One of the most appealing aspects of the curation was a circle of fabric panels, printed with trees, that you could enter as if it was a grove. It was mounted by Stewart Bailey in a clever way, hanging from a braided wreath of twigs and branches, which stayed with the topic of trees, and were visually harmonious. More interestingly, they projected shadows onto the semi-permeable canvas, doubling the sense of being close to trees.
There is a part on forest spirits, and traditional fare around how to combat them and keep a boundary between human civilization and the forest.
There is an introduction to good luck/sacred trees that are associated with a particular homestead. One of the photographs depicts a houseless person who had made his home under a tree in a Finnish park. It was a comforting thought to one of the younger visitors feeling they would never be able to afford a piece of property where a legacy tree could serve multiple generations. Stewart Bailey told me, that the idea to choose a tree in one’s general environment was visibly uplifting. Must be the Zeitgeist (or more likely the housing market…): the Washington Post just last week had an article strongly encouraging us to select a favorite public tree and tie our own life events to frequent visitations.
Last but not least, there are two sections devoted to memorializing the departed, humans and animals alike. These provide a direct link to a big question raised in the contemporary Pacific Northwest where competing interests fight over the preservation of certain trees that were culturally modified.
***
Oregon, like Finland, has an important history linked to the ways we have handled forestry, claiming ourselves to be the state that timber built. The natural riches of fir trees, cedars and Ponderosa pines were there for the taking, and taken they were, generating winners and losers along the way. Depending on one’s perspective you could think of pioneers conquering the wilderness, or robber barons using illegal timber sales through the rail road contracts to make a fortune. Here, as well as in Europe, opposing interests fought over legislation that promoted their often contradictory goals.
Logging throughout the first half of the last century provided great pay, secure employment and boons to the infrastructure of many growing timber communities. When private timber reserves dwindled in the late 1950s, the Forest Service and Bureau of Federal Land Management were pushed to permit increased harvesting on public lands and allow clear cutting and use of chemical herbicides. Eventually environmentalists started to fight back, and during the 1990s the “timber wars” ensued – protection of endangered species like the spotted owl was weighed against the fate of the many communities that lost their livelihoods with stricter federal regulations on logging, or the earnings of the lumber industry, respectively. (The link brings you to a fabulous OPB series on the history of the law suits.) An early verdict prohibiting national forest timber sales in potential spotted owl habitat in May 1991, set off years of litigation over animals and plants that had been listed as endangered and severely curbed logging.
The attempt to change the rules and regulations governing timber harvest and protection of old growth forests is ongoing. The 1994 Northwest Forest Plan is in the process of being amended, partially due to fast changing environmental conditions. Catastrophic wildfires and tree-killing pests have done intense damage to all habitats. Barred owls are conquering spotted owls’ habitat, ever diminishing their numbers. A committee working under immense time pressure has made numerous recommendations, several of which were slashed by the Forest Service, deemed irrelevant to the amendment. There is also a planned amendment for all national 128 forest plans, a draft of which was release in June. In theory the public has 90 days to comment, and the timeline declares hopes for a decision and implementation by January 2025. Many of the parties involved in this joint effort to find compromises for forestry management have expressed worries that different national election outcomes would affect the planned amendments in various ways. (Ref.)
Most of us have probably an inkling of this history, although the extent to which it is related to violations of treaties with tribal groups who had to cede old growth forest in land swaps or were simply dispossessed, has rarely been stressed. New to me, and bringing us back to the context of the exhibition and its focus on the function of trees as keepers of memory, archivists of entire civilizations, is the call for protection of individual trees in the fight over the right to harvest large swaths of timber by the industry. What is at stake here is the fate of culturally modified trees (CMTs), living trees that have been visibly altered by indigenous cultural practices. They were related to food production (peeling the bark), cultural traditions (weaving, producing ceremonial regalia, building shelter or carving of paddles and canoes.) Trees were selected for memorial or mortuary poles as well, and many exhibit drill holes that tested the strength of the tree so that sustainable harvesting could be completed, not hurting future growth.
These trees are of cultural and spiritual significance, sacred memorials to tribal ancestors and living archeological sites that allow insight into historical practices. Equally important, they are of legal significance. When indigenous rights are challenged, carbon dated trees with indigenous modification can be testament to the occupancy and forest stewardship of tribes at a given point in time. For cultures that existed without much written record, whether the indigenous Samis for Finland, or the first nations, tribes and bands in the North American sphere, these trees are archives that can be precisely dated and are a rare historical source for archeologists, anthropologist and historians alike. The question is how they can be legally protected from clear cutting, before they die a natural death given their age in old growth forests. (Here is a great book for further information about the research and the political debate around CMTs.)
It would have been fascinating to link the photographs of the Finnish memorial trees with their arboglyphs, those carvings of dates and numbers, to the contemporaneous questions raised by the protection of modified trees in our own backyard. But I am sure those connections to place and universal issues will be made once the museum has found its stride with traveling as well as independently curated exhibitions.
As is, I cannot recommend a visit to see this work strongly enough. It is like falling into another time and place, yet eerily familiar. Then go home and (re)read Richard Power’s The Overstory. The winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is a paean to trees, nature and environmental activism, one of my favorite novels of all time. Or, alternatively, just hang out under a conifer it Forest Park. The trees will speak to you.
Update: Due to copyright issues to be resolved, I will remove the photographs I had taken of Carrington’s work at OJMCHE or found in a book about her paintings. Stay tuned.
“You’re trying to intellectualize something, desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make it into some kind of mini-logic. You’ll never understand by that road.” “What do you think we can understand by?” ” By your own feelings about things. It’ a visual world. You want to turn things into some kind of intellectual game. It’s not. ” – Leonora Carrington in a interview published in 2015, with Carrington’s cousin, journalist Joanna Moorhead, author of Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington.
2024 marks the centennial of Surrealism, a movement born in 1924 with the publication of a Manifesto by André Breton. Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education’s new exhibition The Magic World of Leonora Carringtonjoins the celebration, offering a small collection of prints by Leonora Carrington, one of the female pioneers of Surrealism and a life-long painter of mystifying imagery full of passion for an otherworldly realm.
It was Bruce Guenther’s suggestion to introduce Carrington’s work for this special occasion, and he also secured the loan of the prints from Mixografia. As the Adjunct Curator for Special Exhibitions, he made his mark on OJMCHE’s visual arts programming during the last seven years, and we were the richer for it. In addition to being connected to the art world and able to draw on a trove of curatorial experiences, he, more importantly, pursued two goals. For one, he wanted to widen the horizon of a local audience to the diversity and depth of contributions by Jewish artists, many of them unfamiliar, and secondly, intended to shoot for the moon, when it came to bringing work here that had previously seemed out of reach. Succeed he did!
He introduced us, among others, to Grisha Bruskin (Alefbet: The Alphabet of Memory) for OJMCHE’s inaugural exhibition in its current location, or a wide range of local Jewish artists’ work relating to identity and religion (I AM THIS: Art by Oregon Jewish Artists,) confronted us with the provocative, self-reflective art of Kitaj ( R.B. Kitaj: A Jew Etc., Etc.) or reminded us of the art-historical importance of feminist Judy Chicago (Turning Inward, JUDY CHICAGO). Continually, Guenther encouraged us to question, reevaluate and improve on our understanding of art in the context of Judaism. He pushed us, guided us, helped us. It is our loss that he is no longer going to surprise us with his choice of exceptional programming at OJMCHE.
***
A plethora of exhibitions here and in Europe are currently lined up to celebrate Surrealism’s centennial. Some are offering a general overview of this revolutionary art movement, others have a specific focus. Until mid-July you can visit The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium which inaugurated IMAGINE!, a touring exhibition of works of the most famous surrealists conceived in close collaboration with the Centre Pompidou (Paris). By September, Surrealism. L’exposition du centenaire (1924-1969) will open at the Centre Pompidou, then travel on to the German Hamburger Kunsthalle. On the wings of its recent blockbuster exhibition about Caspar David Friedrich and the reaches of Romanticism, Hamburg will focus on the affinities and differences between Romanticism and Surrealism in 2025. Then on to Madrid, and eventually we can visit closer to home, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This fall, the Lenbachhaus in Munich inaugurates a highly anticipated exhibition about Surrealism and anti-fascism, But live here? No thanks!, illuminating Surrealism as a political movement with an internationalist commitment in the fight against colonialism and fascism. The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds will display The Traumatic Surreal, concentrating on post-war surrealist women artists and their opposition to the patriarchy since 1960. And last but not least, a show entirely dedicated to Leonora Carrington will also open in October at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, Italy.
This – believe it or not – selective list of exhibitions points to the many facets of the surrealist movement and the fact that it has finally “arrived.” The shows will be accompanied by various intellectual explorations of the nature, origins and practical consequences of Surrealism, helping us to understand what the movement is about, its implications for our own time and where to place various artists within its margins. A movement that was dedicated to the deconstruction of rational language, to dissolving the contradiction between reality and the irrational, to resisting habitual modes of thought and perception, is celebrated by means of the traditional intellectual lens and rational analysis of art historians and/or sociologists. One wonders if the artists would have been pleased or annoyed.
I speculate, though, that Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011) couldn’t have cared less. I think of her as a force of nature who marched to her own drummer all her life, pursuing her painting, her writing and her fervent political engagement for women’s liberation without a moment’s thought of the world’s reaction. Then again, she would likely be pleased that female artists within the movement have eventually gotten their dues, rescued from the assigned roles as muses or child-women, young and subservient, as the male founders of the movement liked to think of them and/or treat them. Across the last decades they have finally been recognized as brilliant artists in their own rights, most recently with a magnificent survey exhibition at The Schirn, Frankfurt a.M., Fantastic Women.
Born in England into a family of wealthy if staid manufacturers, sister to three younger brothers and raised by an Irish nanny fond of myths and fairy tales, Carrington rebelled from an early age. Thrown out of countless boarding schools, she enrolled in art programs and ended up in Paris at age 20, where she met and fell in love with a surrealist painter 26 years her elder, Max Ernst. He abandoned his second wife (having divorced his first, Luise Straus, who was later murdered in Auschwitz, marrying and divorcing two more during his lifetime) for Leonora with whom he settled in rural France when interpersonal drama threatened to take over their productivity in Paris. Carrington refused to be a “muse” from the very beginning and engaged in her own – and distinct – exploration of both the themes and the processes closely associated with the new movement.
Photographs removed
Leonora Carrington A Magnificent Bird Portrait of Max Ernst (1939) — Max Ernst Leonora in the Morning light (1940)The artists exchanged these portraits during a reunion in New York. Carrington, by her own desire, never saw Ernst again after that.
When Ernst was arrested by the Nazis and later escaped to New York, she fled to Spain, suffering a severe mental breakdown, made worse by inappropriate, possibly sadistic psychiatric care during inpatient treatment. She eventually left Europe on a visa provided by a marriage of convenience, and after some time settled in Mexico, finding love, committing to motherhood, and becoming extraordinary prolific in her various creative endeavors, as a painter and novelist processing her autobiographical experiences, including her psychotic break. In Mexico she was embedded in a group of close women friends who were also expatriate artists, Remedios Varo whose painted dream worlds incorporated mystical philosophy and surrealist techniques not unlike Carrington’s, and photojournalist and surrealist photographer Kati Horna. They shared various interests that, at a minimum, enlivened quotidian domesticity and, more importantly, provided substance for their creative output less chained to reality: interests in alchemy, witchcraft, mythology and more.
Some of Carrington’s prints on hand are products of her imagination, typical hybrid figures or grotesques that combine animal and human features. The bulk of the work, however, are paintings made in the early 1970s to dress characters of a play “The Dybbuk or Between two Worlds.“ The word Dybbuk originates from the Hebrew דָּבַק , dāḇaq, meaning ‘adhere‘ or ‘cling’ and refers to the soul of a dead person, always a man, now possessing the body of a living human being, most often a woman. Written by S. Ansky who was interested in Hassidic folklore that contained elements of the story since the 13th century, the play was originally performed in 1920, first in Russian, later in Yiddish. (דער דיבוק, אדער צווישן צוויי וועלטן; Der Dibuk, oder Tsvishn Tsvey Veltn. Here is a link to a magnificent Polish film made from the play in 1937, in Yiddish with English subtitles, a window into a world long gone.)
Alternatively, here is a short summary by a modern, feminist playwright, Lila Rose Kaplan.
“Once upon a time a woman named Leah was allowed to be in a story because she was getting married. Her father picked her a rich husband. Then her dead boyfriend possessed her, because if a woman’s gonna take up space in a story she must not be a woman. Then they learned that Leah had been promised to her dead boyfriend before she was born. She screamed why don’t I have any agency, but no one could hear her. So, they did an exorcism and got her unpossessed. Then she killed herself to be with her dead boyfriend or maybe she just wanted to be left alone.“
Photographs removed Leonora Carrington Leye returns transformed into the Dybbuk (1974)
Rachel Elior, the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought at Hebrew University, discusses the societal function served by the notion of possession by a spirit in her book DYBBUKS AND JEWISH WOMEN in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore. She argues that it could have been a means of escape for women who saw no other way out of the misery of oppression. Once “possessed,” women would no longer be held responsible for acting out or demanding agency of any kind, giving them a certain degree of freedom, including the refusal of arranged marriages. Of course there was a price to be paid, eventually, in the form of torturous exorcism.
Carrington was not Jewish – and she certainly did not lack agency! – but the appeal of this quintessentially Jewish story must have been strong, given that it contains so many elements that spoke to her interest in mysticism, soul transmigration, the role of women in male dominated societies, and ultimately resonated with some of her own biographical experiences.
Between two Worlds: Surrealist artists surely moved between worlds, that of reality and that within the recesses of the unconscious, a magical realm where irrationality was a prize, not a burden. As a female artist, Carrington had to fight to have her own voice heard, not being subsumed as a muse, possessed by a male, however smitten. Father figures in her own life, whether her actual father or a substitute, Ernst, had controlled her existence to some extent. But the memory of forced separation from her lover might have also been evoked by the elements of loss in Leah’s world. As one who had experienced “being possessed” during her psychotic episode, the painter could surely imagine herself into the psyche of Leah, to whom this male spirit adheres, using her as a vessel for his own unfinished life. Exorcism was not simply a technical term for someone who had been forced through fit-inducing medication at the asylum in Spain. And last but not least, emigration placed you between worlds, the old and the new, neither one fully your own.
Even though the characters themselves did not spring from her imagination, the way Carrington depicted them with her own aesthetic, strangely graceful, elongated figures, infused them with a life of their own. The lithographs offer, indeed, a visual world, one that generates feelings rather than lending itself to rational analysis (which will not stop me from speculation, as per usual…). The collection traveled through Mexico, exhibited early at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, after they were transferred to lithographs at the Taller de Gráfica Popular in 1974. (I wrote about the political role the print studio played in Mexico previously here.)
I consider her renderings remarkable in the sense that suffering, doubt, or bitterness are anything but central – somehow I find primarily resilience in the strong colors, the androgynous representations. And maybe there are traces of rage, in purple and red. Given that the artist was raised in a staunchly catholic household, these colors might also refer to the liturgical colors associated with the Celebrations of Martyrs (red) and Masses for the Dead (purple.) Then again, we have the red stockings of the women’s liberation movement and in England, her country of origin, the Suffragettes used purple that symbolized royalty, loyalty to the cause, and women’s quest for freedom.
Photographs removed Leonora Carrington Leye y Frade (1974)
The continual presence of protective females in the vicinity of Leah echoes one of the characteristics of the artist herself: she was acknowledged as a reliable supporter of the women around her, building strong connections to women all her life. It is as if Carrington’s own strength and endurance is gifted to the female protagonist, in defiance of the customary image of Leah as the victim. The fact that some Mexican graphic elements are included also signals the possibility that a soul has come home, can come home, no longer restlessly wandering. They might reference the surrealist artist’s own political beliefs captured by the movement statement found already in 1935 in the Bulletin International du Surréalisme: “The human soul is international.”
***
“Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.” – John Berger inWhat Time Is It? (2019)
War, like the soul, is international as well, alas. It claimed and continues to claim victims regardless of their association with the warring parties – international observers, aid workers and photojournalist have paid that heavy price for trying to inform the world. David Seymour (Dawid Szymin, 1911- 1956,) known as Chim, was one of them – he was killed, three days after the armistice, no less, by Egyptian soldiers during the Suez Crisis when British–French–Israeli forces invaded Egypt in 1956 after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.
Chim: Between Devastation and Resurrection presentsphotographs that cut through to the reality of war, ignoring nationalistic or ideological fervor in favor of an empathetic response to the horrors wars impose on their victims. His lens told stories capturing both his times and the timelessness of suffering.
Born in Poland, Chim studied graphic arts at Leipzig’s prestigious Staatliche Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in the early 1930s and then enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study physics and chemistry. He started to take photographs for a variety of journals and magazines to make money for a living and soon got a reputation to be a talented social documentarian as well as war photographer when he documented the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and George Rodger, Chim co-founded the Magnum photo agency after WW II ended and he had returned to Europe, having enlisted in the US Army during war times. In 1948, he was commissioned by UNICEF for a project he is now most known for, documenting the war’s effect on European children. “Children of Europe” was published by LIFE magazine and in book form eventually.
David Seymour (Chim) Girls playing in the ruins of a former orphanage, Monte Casino, Italy (1948)
***
OJMCHE’s photography exhibitions have been hit and miss. There have been brilliant shows (Southern Rites and Die Plage come to mind,) but also more pedestrian ones. One of the problems has to do with receiving previously curated package exhibitions that served well in their original purposes, but do not necessarily speak to contemporary questions. They also do not allow juxtapositions with work that one might choose if curating independently, to complement or off-set the photography on view.
The collection, on loan from the Illinois Holocaust Museum, and excerpted from an original show by the International Center for Photography, exhibits works that are solid, beautiful at times, and often moving. Chim was a master of the medium’s technical aspects, lighting and depth of field. He also often incorporated signs, banners, or posters into his images that functioned like internal captions, reminding us of the important legacy of Constructivism.
If a show had been independently curated, though, it could have raised a number of important issues. For one, just as the female artists within the surrealist movement have long stayed unacknowledged, much less feted, so has the legacy of female photographers in the realm of war photography. Chim has often been called “photography’s forgotten hero,” but there are a surprising number of Jewish women who documented war since WW I, continuing through the Spanish Civil War and on to WW II, and are completely ignored by the canon, no matter how remarkable.
There was Alice Schalek ((1874-1956) who lived in Vienna and is regarded to be the first woman who photographed Austrian soldiers at the frontlines during WW I. Gerda Taro (Gerta Pohorylle) was the first Jewish female photographer killed in the field, in Spain. A lifelong socialist and gifted photographer, she was the partner of Magnum-photographer Robert Capa, who, in contrast to her, has become legendary. Faigel Faye Schulman (1919 – 2021) was a Jewish partisan photographer, and the only such photographer to photograph their struggle in Eastern Europe during World War II. Honorable mention belongs to Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) who, although not Jewish, documented combat zones in WW II as the first woman war correspondent from the US., and, importantly, photographed Buchenwald when the concentration camp was liberated.
And then there was Kati Horna (1912 – 2000), one of Carrington’s closest friends in post-war Mexico. Born into a Jewish family in Hungary, a close childhood (and life-long) friend of Robert Capa, she studied Political Science in Berlin, and, after the rise of the Nazis, photography back in Budapest. She ended up in the early 1930s in Paris, working as a freelance photographer for a press picture agency, Agence Photo. Her work shares both a modernist aesthetic and a focus on narrative with Chim’s. During her documentation of the Spanish Civil War, she concentrated on the conditions of women and children through mainly portraiture, just as we see in Chim’s later work for the UNICEF project. She utilized bird’s eye views early, as we’ve come to associate with Chim.
Kati Horna Umbrellas, Meeting of the CNT, Spanish Civil War, Barcelona 1937
David Seymour (Chim), Child’s Funeral, Matera, Italy, 1948,
It would have been valuable to learn about the history of photographers working at the same time in the same places, with the same political beliefs and then wonder the women disappeared from view. Again.
***
Another question raised by exhibiting images of the effects of previous wars relates to war reporting in our contemporary society flooded with war imagery. LACMA’s exhibition ‘Imagined Fronts – The Great War and Global Media,’ closing after a long run just this week, reminded us of the role of photography in a war-torn world. Photography can be used as a tool of propaganda to generate both psychological and material support for the war effort. Likewise, it can be utilized to create empathy with its victims and oppose war actions. The borders between propaganda and information are porous, since war parties strive to claim that their efforts are just if not heroic, intending to legitimize their efforts, or dehumanize the opponent.
David Seymour (Chim) Boy in bombed building, Essen, Germany (1947)
(Essen was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany, with 90% of its urban structures destroyed. A seat of heavy industry in the Ruhr region, it housed over 350 forced labor camps during the war mining coal and producing weapons, working for Krupp and Siemens. Alfried Krupp was sentenced in the Nuremberg trials, but pardoned by the US in 1951. Some people reliably get away with anything.)
War photography during the World Wars and up until the Vietnam war was regulated and controlled by states and military, censorship included. Imagery of direct violence and death was traditionally avoided, replaced by clichés. In fact Richard Nixon attributed the loss of the Vietnam war to the media’s willingness to show violent images of the victims. I continually wonder how the availability of phone cameras in people’s hands and easy internet dispersal have changed the impact of photography, now depicting participant horrors beyond our imagination, the fate of the victims and the actual unfolding of violent acts in real time. Do we accept their veracity or are they manipulated? Do we avoid them for fear of drowning in helpless bystander feelings? Will they distance us from understanding war because they come from sources that we associate with the “enemy?” Can war documentation cut through hate, anger, resentment, violence and destruction, change minds? Could it in 1956, can it now?
In reviewing the LACMA exhibition, my thoughts were these:
I have no definitive answer. This exhibition’s imagery most meaningful to me, a pacifist, namely the depictions of suffering and the satirical stabs at those who financially gain from war, will likely not speak to those eager to go to war, just as racist propaganda posters embraced by them do nothing for me. Maybe our ideological or political divisions prevent us to think through art that does not confirm our preexisting beliefs. To that extent, art will not be able to produce change, given the strength of our biases.
It is certainly worth a further discussion, and I hope Chim’s images will provide a starting point for exploring these issues at OJMCHE. The last photo he took before he was killed two days later, encapsulates war’s human toll – two wounded civilians sharing a mattress with paltry enough to eat. Half a century later we still see the same pictures, multiplied by thousands. Stories told through a lens were intended as a wake-up call. It seems, to no avail.
David Seymour (Chim) Civilians, Port Said, 1956
OREGON JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION 724 NW Davis Street Portland, OR 97209
Wednesday – Sunday: 11 – 4
Chim: Between Devastation and Resurrection
The Magic World of Leonora Carrington
July 7 – October 13,2020
Special events:
Opening Reception this Sunday July 7, 1:30 – 3:00 pm.
Goddess of Surrealism: A Lecture About Leonora Carrington with Dr. Abigail Susik
August 8 | Event starts at 6 – 7pm, Doors open at 5:15pm for reception
The Life and Work of David “Chim” Seymour, presented by Ben Shneiderman
July 21 | Event starts at 2pm – 3pm, Reception at 3pm – 4pm
Today’s images were made by a young photographer from New York City. Ben Zank was on a meteoric rise as an artist until the beginning of the pandemic. After a stretch of five years without exhibitions, as far as I know, he is now reentering the world of photography with a book of his photographs of staged compositions, performances that are enigmatic and technically exquisite. I thought the string of self-portraits in Nothing to See Here would be the perfect complement for the topic before us: an essay on self-deception by philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty.
We can probably all list numerous self-deceptions that we detect in ourselves or others. They can be as trivial as thinking that the expenditure of frequent visits to a hair dresser is worth it because we now look more desirable (hah!) or as consequential as turning our eyes away from behavior that signals abuse by someone we love. They can be harmless, when we tell ourselves we are really interested in some boring activity, in order to keep someone’s affections, or they can be deadly, if we wishfully look away from physical signs that would require prompt medical attention before becoming lethal. Given that self-deceptions are not just quirks, I wanted to learn more about them.
User-friendly Self Deception, published in 1994 is a fascinating foray into a corner of moral philosophy about questions that heavily overlap with cognitive psychology, my own neck of the woods, and of course older varieties of psychoanalytic thought. I found Rorty’s essay wonderfully informative about what we need to think through when concerning ourselves with the issue of self-deception. And her writing is delicious – just look at sentences like these:
“We draw the lines between self-deception and its cousins and clones—compartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false conscious- ness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflection….The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring?”
One of Rorty’s fundamental claim is the fact that we cannot avoid self-deceptions and that they can have positive results, until a certain line is crossed. Rather than condemning them – something that I habitually do, thinking that any kind of lying, even lying to oneself, is morally objectionable and functionally disabling in the long run – she urges us to be ambivalent. We should acknowledge the value self-deception can bring to both self and communal life, but also know where to draw the life when it becomes self-harming.
The essay is structured around a discussion what self-deception is and what it is not, and what strategies we use to perfect it – a helpful tool when we try to understand how the process of deceiving ourselves unfolds. She then turns to the benefits of this psychological manipulation, both globally and locally, and eventually wonders how we can prevent self-serving strategies to become a folly with serious consequences. I will report on the key points, and leave out the philosophical frameworks which I would surely screw up, given my layperson’s extent of knowledge. Or lack thereof. You might have better luck reading the essay yourself.
Rorty defines self-deception as a species of rhetorical persuasion driving us away from rationality and transparency. Like for all forms of persuasion, the processes involved are complex, dynamic and necessitate co-operation – among the different parts of our own selves, as well as between us and our social surround. They imply various mechanisms, including perceptual, cognitive, affective and behavioral dispositions. Concretely, what we (don’t)see, where we (don’t) direct out attention, what feelings we decide (not)to allow and which actions we (don’t) take all interact to sustain the desired state of belief.
I’lI try to translate this into an example of parenting – assume you suspect your teenager to have turned to shoplifting designer clothes (or taking drugs, or stealing cars – you name it.) You don’t want to face the reality. In order to maintain your self-deception of “my daughter would never do this,” you can ignore that the kid sneaks stuff into the house, believe her lies that items are borrowed from friends, avoid inspecting the closet for new merchandise, tell yourself she has gotten a lot of tips at her summer waitressing job, and never ever join her at trips to the mall, or open her mail from the court system. Note that self-deception is not necessarily about yourself, then. It can be about the honesty of other people or some such, as well.
More often than not, this self-deception is sustained by social support. Your friends tell you, should you dare to mention your suspicion, that it can’t be, your daughter is such a good kid, or that it was a momentary lapse on her part, or a quick phase that teenagers go through, not evidence of a larger underlying problem.
Many kinds of self-deception occur within social interactions, and Rorty argues that without them “our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse.”
“It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion.“
Self-deceptions can protect us from an overload of despair, or the burden of constant skepticism, or the stress that comes with acknowledging a true rupture in personal relations, or having to give up self-harming behavior that we are addicted to.
A further benefit from deceiving ourselves can come when we pretend to have confidence or skills in order to acquire them. When the world reacts positively to our mimicry, we might find ourselves very well in position where it becomes reality. On the other hand, deceiving ourselves about the value of our roles in society, or the amount of respect we deserve, or that hierarchical systems are justified, are, of course, contributing to societal peace as well. One might ask who is paying the price, though…. (I am thinking here of the resurgence of the tradwife (traditional wife) movement and its horrifying consequences of women insisting that (economic) dependency on their partner is the best choice in life, smartly explained here.)
Rorty ends her considerations by noting that “Self-deception does not monitor its own use: it doesn’t know when or where to stop. It is specifically constructed to ignore and resist correction. The danger of self-deception lies not so much in the irrationality of the occasion, but in the ramified consequences of the habits it develops, its obduracy and its tendency to generalize.”
For each instance we have to ask the question of who eventually benefits from the manipulation and when will it be self-defeating. We have to inspect the details of our psychological contortions and be willing to ask within every context and occasion who is trying to persuade whom to what benefit within the circle of our various parts of self.
Honestly, I find that a bit unsatisfying, just as her suggestion to be mindful of the company we keep, company that might collude with and incite self-deception. For one, it seems an elitist approach – how many people have the analytic wherewithal required by such introspection? And when does a commitment to constant analyzing one’s states and motives switch over to a kind of hyper vigilance that detects fault everywhere? Feeds into narcissistic tendencies towards continual preoccupation with self? And, most importantly, If it were as easy as asking ourselves questions and following a moral and pragmatic compass, why are the habits so damn entrenched? Any suggestions?
Music today is about the self-deceptions around departed loved ones….
Last week I came across a short interview with some notable writers all focused on the climate crisis. Rebecca Solnit, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, James Miller and Jay Griffiths were asked multiple questions concerning their own relationship to the crisis, their levels of engagement, their hopes and fears. When asked about the efficacy of the written word for a fight against the climate crisis, their responses ranged from hope and enthusiasm to doubt. One answer lingered with me: “I embrace all forms of storytelling, and I think all are necessary in this struggle. We have to tap into people’s imaginations and show them that another world is possible.”
That is of course one of the many functions of art, showing possible worlds, next to creating beauty, communicating ideas, raising consciousness, being the canary in the coal mine. I want to focus today on how photography can serve as a window into a different, private world that allows us to see people who are perhaps different from ourselves and yet utterly familiar in their mundane settings, poses, and demeanors. With that it creates the possibility of empathy if not bonding, in a way that writing about the subject never would (at least not immediately), words relying on facts and persuasion, rather than the direct emotional involvement created by the narrative of imagery.
The photographs, a century apart, depict queer folk, and I want to stress that today’s musings are not about the issue of transgender origins, medical procedures for transitioning, or transphobia, although all warrant close examination in an era that has made the topic into a tribal rallying cry for exclusion and worse. The intensity of the debate echos other preoccupations with the “order” of things, the retention of existing hierarchies or the need for simple binary truths in this world, an either/or thinking that avoids engagement with choice and uncertainties. (And of course a backlash against the enormous progress made in the area of sexual orientation, including the right to marry a same-sex partner.)
That said, here are the biological facts. Biological categories do exist – have some objective reality in the sense that if, for example, your genetics have an xy pattern, it is enormously likely that you have an anatomy associated with males and a biochemistry associated with males, and if you are biologically xx, the same applies for women. But that reality sits alongside of the undeniable fact that there is a substantial number of people who don’t fit this pattern. Biologically some have traits that are strongly associated with male and female. And in still other cases they have biological traits that are neither typically male nor typically female, and so for example their genetic pattern is entirely different, having xo or xxy chromosomes. One more step: if this is undeniably true at the level of biology, it would be astonishing if it wasn’t reflected in people’s psychology, with one example of many, some people feeling they were born into the wrong body, and often having these feelings from a very young age.
But again, what I am after today, is how photography, in the depiction of something or someone who is different, can create a sense of familiarity nonetheless, and can convey a shared humanity. It does so by offering a narrative that invites the viewer into daily routine, anything other than the exotic fantasies contained in the stereotypes held by those feeling disgusted, alienated or threatened by queerness.
The first selection is the work of two Scandinavian women photographers, Marie Høeg (1866 – 1949) and Bolette Berg (1872 -1944), who met in Finland and lived in Norway, as business partners and as a couple. They were suffragettes and quite engaged in feminist politics on the local level, while making a living by conventional photography, studio portraits and the like. Høeg founded the Horten Branch of the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, the Horten Women’s Council and the Horten Tuberculosis Association. Berg worked more behind the camera. The photographs were part of some 400 glass plates found in a barn of their farm decades after they had died. Marked “private,” they contained images that played with gender roles, cross dressing, mimicking behavior reserved for men (arctic explorers in fur coats,) showing the androgynous protagonist as well as a number of their friends joyously defying gender norms.
The work has a home at Norway’s national photography museum, the Preus Museum in Horten. It is currently shown at the ongoing Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, PHotoEspaña, in Madrid until September.
As you can see, the couple poses like a traditional heterosexual couple at home, going out in the boat (or sitting for a photographer in these studio props that were known to anyone at the time,) interacting with their pet, and having fun at drinking, smoking and playing cards with friends (behavior reserved for men at the time) independent of gender.
A few of the photographs show a male friend not averse to cross-dressing.
Fast forward to 120 years later, and a different part of the world. Camila Falcão has been photographing Brazilian trans women (women born into male bodies), encouraging them to pose as they wish, in their own environments. (All photographs are from her website.) Brazil’s 2019 law that considers transphobia a crime has done nothing to lower the murder rate of Brazilian queer people: it is the highest in the world, for the 13th consecutive year, with a 30% rate of 4000 killings in that span of time.
The title of Falcão’s series, “Abaixa que é tiro” refers to the reactions of the portrayed and their friends, who started commenting ‘Abaixa que é tiro!’, celebrating being shown to the world. “The expression is used widely among the Brazilian LGBT community to address that something really awesome/fabulous is about to hit you. More in general, however, it could be said that “Abaixa que é tiro” signals a paradoxical relationship between fear and empowerment.” (Ref.)
Again, notice how an attachment to pets immediately confers familiarity.
Women are tired, women break arms, women have friends.
Women are barely out of childhood,
could be on a winning gymnastics team,
a first grade teacher,
or the smart, uncompromising sister who sets you right.
Work like this can help to deconstruct stereotypes, although it will be a long road until increased visibility leads to a decrease in violence against this population. The photography world is noticing. We have now venerable institutions calling for work to show what unites us in times of division, like, for example, the British Journal of Photography, having judged exhibitions of Portraits of Humanity. Every single image that manages to shift our consciousness and beliefs is worth it, even if not all of us can have Falcão’s talent, access or courage as an ally to a demonized minority.
Music today is sung in Portuguese by Joao de Sousa, but created by a Polish collective, Bastarda, that has the most amazing modern Jewish music in their repertoire. Check them out. I have been listening to Fado non stop for weeks.
“There is in the universe neither center nor circumference.” – Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584.
JUNE 9th, 2023 was one of my lucky days. After a week that saw so many bleak events across the world, I found myself surrounded by beauty, and urgent reminders that the universe is larger than our tiny selves.
Lucky, because I was alerted to the photographic exhibition by coincidence: an instagram post by the preeminent print studio in town, Pushdot, saying that one of their clients had a show that very day – and only that day – in my neighborhood.
Lucky, because the artist is a friend and colleague who spontaneously agreed to meet me at the venue before official opening, so I could avoid inside crowds.
Lucky, because I got a one-on-one tutorial about how the stunning abstracts on display were created.
From the top: a number of artists and organizations came together to offer a music and art festival at Lewis & Clark College last Friday. EARTH’S PROTECTION, hosted by Resonance Ensemble and featuring special guests, included a drumming and dance demonstration by the Nez Perce performing ensemble Four Directions, information booths from Portland Audubon, and Songs for Celilo by composer Nancy Ives and Poet Ed Edmo – their tribute to the human, cultural, and planetary costs of the 1957 flooding of Celilo Falls which was premiered at The Reser last year and reviewed in OregonArtswatch. At the center of the evening concert was the Oregon premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, with projections by Joe Cantrell and Deborah Johnson. What would I have given to hear the music – but again, I can still not be inside with lots of people.
Joe Cantrell Jingle Dance (2023)
However, I could visit the art exhibition accompanying the proceedings: Joe Cantrell‘s We are ALL ONE.
Cantrell was born into the Cherokee nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, over 70 years ago. He served two tours with the Navy in Vietnam, including as a diving officer in the Mekong Delta, and then worked as a photojournalist in SouthEast Asia until 1986. The pronounced mildness in his eyes and the gentleness of his demeanor belie the traumatizing experiences that defined his younger years. During his decades in Oregon, he taught both, at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon College of Art and Craft. He is a photographer of note in so many ways, providing portraiture and event documentation for art organizations around town, but also specializing in Fine Art photography with his exploration of flora and rocks and fossils.
Joe Cantrell
We connected a few years ago over a shared preoccupation with the ways external or internal components of our experience merge to affect our work. Joe has better ways than I to define the process, ways that are rooted in and amplified by his heritage as a Cherokee, focussed on the interconnection of all things, embracing a multitude of perspectives, be it science, philosophy, history, and, of course, art. His work shines not only due to this conceptual grounding, though. He is ever curious to explore and apply technological advancements that allow him to create work that is unusual, and, yes, I repeat myself, stunningly beautiful.
Joe Cantrell Coming Home (2023)
The images on display were photographs of fossils and polished rocks, macro photography that goes deep inside the object to the very last level that can be captured in focus, then the next one, and the next one, until the surface is reached. A new computerized technology then stitches all of these individual takes together until the full image is constituted, abstractions and configurations resulting from stacking of sometimes more than 70 individual photographs of a single layered object. The color is natural and not photoshopped and appears during post-stitching.
Joe Cantrell Peace (2023)
One of the objects for macro exploration.
Clockwise from left: Joe Cantrell Reef (2023), Oregon Wood (2023,) Fourth Dimension (2023)
Joe Cantrell Stasis (2023)
What emerges are worlds of swirling waves, clouds, geometric patterns capturing all the movement of the elements one can imagine going into the formation of these rocks, the ice, the storms, the droughts, the millennia of relentlessly pounding external forces. A mirror image of the photographs we now receive from space through incredible technological advances, of worlds, of universes, here all captured in a single fossil or a fragment of a rock, for us to behold, whether in our hands – the object itself -, our eyes – the art that emerged from the vision, skill, and patience of the artist -, or our minds – the concept that relations can be captured multi-directionally, as long as we give up the notion that we are the center of the world.
Joe Cantrell Barton (2023)
Joe Cantrell The Gates of Hades (Welcome!) (2023)
Joe Cantrell Fractal Playpen (2023)
The stones include Oco, opals, trilobite, and different kinds of agate.
Sometimes natural forms have been preserved in amber or are fossilized in other ways, like these dinosaur feathers and the insect.
Joe Cantrell Dinosaur Feather & Amber – 320 million years old, give or take (2023,) Fungus Gnat (2023)
Joe Cantrell Ammonite (2023)
Again, Giordano Bruno, 16th century scientist, philosopher, heretic:
“There is no top or bottom, no absolute positioning in space. There are only positions that are relative to the others. There is an incessant change in the relative positions throughout the universe and the observer is always at the centre.” On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584.
Let me juxtapose that with Joe’s perspective, in his own words:
“Yet in a universal perspective (whether we are aware or not, the one in which we all exist) our entire planet seems microscopic, and we, with all our “achievements,” and superstitions and egos, an insignificant, self-destructive nothing. BUT, we are part of All That! See!
Resonance Ensemble’s call to action for this festival was dedicated to protecting the earth, learning to be stewards rather than clinging to ownership with the rights to limitless extraction. Joe’s work addressed those issues with a message derived from earth materials themselves: Let us center ourselves a bit less and join the whole a bit more, acknowledging shared origins. The profusion of color, form, movement and subtlety inside all of these photographs will help to do just that, reminding us of one of the ultimate building blocks of the universe we inhabit: cosmic dust linking us all.
Joe Cantrell Lillian (2023)
Music today is a 2020 version of Sarah Kirkland Snyder’s Mass for the Endangered. It is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. She explains:
“The origin of the Mass is rooted in humanity’s concern for itself, expressed through worship of the divine—which, in the Catholic tradition, is a God in the image of man. Nathaniel and I thought it would be interesting to take the Mass’s musical modes of spiritual contemplation and apply them to concern for non-human life—animals, plants, and the environment. There is an appeal to a higher power—for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention—but that appeal is directed not to God but rather to Nature itself.”
And here is the Agnus Dei from An African-American Requiem by Damien Geter, performed by the Resonance Ensemble some years back.
Today’s musings are dedicated to my friend Henk Pander who died last Friday. Our last phone call, two days before his death, lasted but 3 minutes before he handed the phone over to his beloved wife Jody. He was tired after laughing at the memory, prompted by my day’s visit to the Getty, of a heated argument about the art of Carrie Mae Weems over a decade ago. The Portland Art Museum had shown a retrospective of the artist and I had been invited to give a lecture on her work from the perspective of a social scientist, tackling the implications of art addressing racism in direct and indirect ways. I honestly don’t remember what Henk’s and my disagreement was about, but I do remember the passionate exchange about art and its impact on society, a kind of exchange that was one of the cornerstones of our friendship, re-enacted over and over again. Once we had ticked off daily developments in our lives, and the perpetual topic of what it meant for each of us to have emigrated to the U.S., every single conversation rerouted back to art, to making art, to employing art as a tool of capturing more than beauty, a means of taking note, drawing parallels, exposing power and expressing resistance. Driven by both, our conscience and the hope that a better world would be possible.
Henk’s art and life have been described with empathy and clarity in this obituary. It lays out the complexity of the man and the artist, fully apprehending the magnitude of the loss for the art world as well as his family and friends. Henk’s work will continue to live on and, should we be so lucky, be understood as clarion calls for generations of viewers to come. May his memory be a blessing.
***
I had debated if it was crazy to go on opening day of the exhibition, assuming Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue might attract crowds that I’d have to avoid. But I had no other commitments that day and chanced a visit to The Getty. A fortuitous decision as it turned out, since the halls were still empty that morning and the few visitors mostly masked.
In fact, everything was sort of empty, surprisingly so during the week of spring break, approaching Easter. A few tourists, judging by foreign languages, a group here or there. In a way, the absence of distractions made the architecture stand out even more against the azure sky of that day. The beige travertine stone from Italy split along its natural grain to reveal the texture of fossilized leaves and branches, reflected lots of light, the different off-white enamel-clad aluminum panels and so much glass shimmered and glistened in the bright sun light, occasionally disrupted by cold gusts of wind.
Designed by architect Richard Meyer, it is a compound, half underground, half above due to height restrictions, encompassing more than just a museum up there on the hill above Los Angeles. Museum conservation programs, administration offices, research libraries and grant institutions are part of the campus as well and the scale of it all can best be assessed when viewed from above.
Here are a few images to convey the views, bright, bold starkness softened by lots of curves. I did not photograph the gardens, however, which struck me as pedestrian and strangely not at all in sync with the architecture.
A selection of sources discussing the architecture in depth, admiration and criticism alike, can be found here.
***
The photographic exhibition that opened that day has traveled across the nation. From the Grand Rapids Art Museum, to the Tampa Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, it now has its last showing at the Getty. Four decades of selected work are on view, created by two friends who met in 1976 in Harlem, NY, and inspired each other ever since to explore, document and address issues of race, class and identity within historical and contemporary power structures.
(A recorded conversation between the artists on opening day last week at the Getty can be found here. The presentation and community programming in Los Angeles were made possible with major support from Jordan Schnitzer and The Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation.)
It is a powerful reminder of the role of retrospectives that only museums can fill: providing the chance to see an accumulation of the artists’ work over a lifetime, giving us a perspective that is not just affected by the sheer quantity of the work on display, but how things shifted qualitatively. It allows us to see how multidimensional the artists’ approaches were, how faceted and yet thorough. Museums have historically played a role in how reality is constructed – often in ways that clung to the established and familiar. To open the door to contemporary, and, importantly, critical approaches to the use of imagery in identity formation – so central to Dawoud Bey‘s and Carrie Mae Weems‘ photographic oeuvre – is a welcome move.
Carrie Mae Weems Roaming Series 2006
Dawoud has been the recipient of multiple fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, NY, and the induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, among others.
Dawoud Bey (Left to Right:) Young Girl Striking a Pose, Brooklyn, NY 1988 – Markie, Brooklyn, NY 1988- Three Girls at a Parade, Brooklyn, NY 1988
Weems’ honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the prestigious Prix de Roma, the Frida Kahlo Award for Innovative Creativity, the WEB DuBois Medal, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the BET Honors Visual Artist Award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art Photography, and the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography. This March she was named the 2023 Hasselblad Award laureate by the Hasselblad Foundation, an international photography prize that is granted annually to a photographer recognized for major achievements, called the “Nobel Prize” of photography by many of us.
Carrie Mae Weems Kitchen Table Series 1990
The five sections that present the two artists’ work are grouped by thematic pairings, allowing us to assess commonalities and differences in underlying principles, artistic approach, and selection of subjects across more than 40 years. They include work that (re)constructs and resurrects Black history, or looks for revelations in the landscape (A requiem to mark the moment by Weems, for example, or Bey’s exploration of the landscape of the Underground Railroad segments.)
Dawoud Bey (Clockwise from top:) A Young Man Looking in the Blue Note 1980 – Woman in Luncheonette, New York,NY 1981 – Woman in the Cadman Plaza Post Office, New York, NY 1981 – A Man walking in to a Parking Garage, New York, NY – 1981
My immediate reaction when seeing the juxtaposed work of these two friends and colleagues, each such powerful photographers and activists on the contemporary scene, was a sense of dichotomy. One could think of Bey as a poet and Weems as a dramatist, or alternately, Bey as a listener and Weems as a talker – and I mean that with full admiration for either approach. They both hone in on the power and ubiquity of prejudice, which, of course comes in many forms, whether racisms, classism, sexism, ageism, you name it. It always includes a mix of discriminatory behavior, targeted towards a particular group, discriminatory beliefs, concerning the group and usually an emotional element like fear, anger or even disgust directed at the targeted group. Crucially, prejudice needs to be understood within the historical context, and forms we see now may be very different from those at the formation of this nation, in both legal contexts and the personal one, in our awareness of our own prejudice or the ease or willingness with which a particular prejudice is expressed publicly, or acted on.
In the context of this show about the Black experience, racism is as good an example as any, with modern racism or implicit racism – automatic, unconscious, unintentional – still being tied to a culture that routinely links the idea of Blacks with the idea of deviant behavior, or a set of ideas, mostly bad, that concern violent crime, poverty, hyper sexuality or moral corruptness. Think of it like this: when I ask you to respond to the word peanut butter, for most people the word jelly emerges quickly and spontaneously. That association is independent of whether you like that kind of sandwich, or despise it, or have never tried it. The link between those two words has been established by the frequency with which you have encountered the pairing in your life time, it is anchored in your mind outside of awareness. This is the same for racist stereotypes flourishing for centuries in a culture that had a hierarchical valence of white over Black. You might not act on those beliefs, you might deny them, but the associations are carried by most of us through permanent exposure to the linkage of Black to negative or threatening concepts, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we have the best of intentions and the most egalitarian politics.
What can be done? We can draw attention to the stereotypes (and for that matter the historical burden of racism) with the hope of motivating people to intercept their own mental associations. Or we can pull attention away from prevalent stereotypes by offering alternative representations. Each of these approaches works best in different settings, and both artists have employed both approaches.
Carrie Mae Weems The Assassination of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm from the series Constructing History, 2008
Bey’s portraiture explores the subject with indirect subtlety, hard to decipher metaphors, trenchant depictions, like poetry that goes deep to listen inside and then provides a road map to new ways of seeing. New work includes a series titled after a line in Langston Hughes’ poem Dream Variations: Night coming tenderly, Black. The photographer pursues history, reimagining how a fleeing slave would have perceived landscape stretches along the Underground Railroad, under the sheltering cover or darkness, or tinged by the darkness of the unknown ending of a perilous journey. It is incredibly moving work, all the more so since it is unpeopled – in stark contrast to the portraiture Bey is rightly famous for. I only wish the very last words of the poem’s last line -” like me” – would not have been left out of the title. It would connect then and now, having a contemporary stand-in for the departed, one whose sense of safety and freedom is still not guaranteed in 2023 America or, worse, increasingly threatened.
Dawoud Bey Untitled #14 (Site of John Brown’s Tannery), from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017
Weems’ imagery uses powerful staging both in early and later work, including private and public almost theatrically arranged sets, amplified by literal scripts that guide us into the thicket of our own stereotypes and beliefs. The intense beauty that she captures or instills into her staged photographs reminds me of the song of the Sirens, beguiling you while always containing the undertone of something haunting or violent that lies in wait for us. This is true particularly for those series that replace widespread stereotypic views with alternative representations (the Roaming series, for example), in contrast to those where she makes the horrors of racism and the history of marginalization screamingly explicit (“From here I saw what happened and I cried.”)
A 1984 book by French philosopher Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, talks about how photographs contain implied meanings and depict seemingly naturalistic truths. But he points out that photographs can also, in a paradoxical way, become the tools to question meaning. I find in the work of both artists the strength to challenge existing power structures, to undermine the ways that traditional images generate and maintain cultural dominance.
Carrie Mae Weems Untitled from the series Sea Islands 1992
If the structure of societal norms defines how we look at something – our hapless use of the colonizing gaze shaped by historical expectations – both artists’ work manages to subvert our way of looking and/or applying stereotypes related to race, class and gender. Their photography, across the decades, has adopted a permanent practice of subversion, opening a path to integration and equality, rather than oppression and marginalization. Or, in Weems’ own words upon being made the Hasselblad Award laureate:
“To be recognized comes with the continued responsibility to deliver on the promise made to myself and to the field, which is to shine a light into the darker corners of our time and thereby, with a sense of grace and humility, illuminate a path forward.”
Dawoud Bey A Woman Wearing Denim, Rochester, NY 1989 – A Couple at a Bus Stop, Rochester, NY, 1990
Dream Variations
To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream!
To fling my arms wide In the face of the sun, Dance! Whirl! Whirl! Till the quick day is done. Rest at pale evening . . . A tall, slim tree . . . Night coming tenderly Black like me.
We had it all planned. My friend had an exhibition of his latest work at Lightbox Gallery in Astoria. I was to come on a Monday when the gallery is closed to the public, so I could look at his photographs, safely away from potential sources of infection. Wouldn’t you know it, it did not work out, I was under the weather and the trip had to be canceled.
The work is back in Portland now, and this weekend I got a one-on-one presentation on Ken’s porch, safely outside and yet protected from the endless rain. It was the day before his birthday.
Cape Horn, WA
I want to talk a little bit about this photographer friend of mine and the way I believe he approaches his work. The lack of feedback when you are not a famous artist in the limelight can be anything from annoying to discouraging at times. We all should make more of an effort to share our reactions. So here are some observations, and some guesses.
Historic Columbia Highway at Rowena Crest
If you look at Ken’s website, one thing is immediately obvious: he is willing to take risks, over and over again, by exploring new methods and new subjects with a vengeance. That is not the norm in the world of photography. Most successful photographers have their shtick and stick to it – why fix something if it ain’t broken? It allows the viewers to instantly recognize your work, a marketing plus, among others. It allows you to refine your technique with a particular subject, it keeps you in a comfort zone.
In contrast, Ken’s path as a fine art photographer has been variable across the decades. He has tackled portraiture, color photography, both in spontaneous and in staged settings. His work interacts with our natural environment in a multitude of ways, from descriptive, documentary landscape photography, to capturing the mood or essence of a place, to using nature as a symbolic stand-in for more personal exploration, preferably in black&white, often in the sepia tone range, sometimes in collaboration with people who provide text.
Titles of series clockwise from upper left: Madrone Wall Expressions – Rock(s) – Landscape Americana – Unboxed – Whole – The Trees.
As someone myself who gets easily bored and also likes to stretch herself artistically as much as intellectually, I feel quite drawn to work that shares some of those characteristics. You never know what comes next, and so are kept on your toes, wondering about the newest project, both in terms of method and ideas.
I grew here-lump of stone, settled in my nest of sticks waiting for an Irish spring, waiting for a four-leaf clover to kiss me awake. (From the series Waiting, text by Gay Walker.)
The most recent work consist of diverse series. Ken captures the Columbia river with a nod to the history of photographers who came before us, with fresh eyes, nonetheless. Some of these images were created while he kayaked on the river in order to get vistas inaccessible from land. If you have ever held a camera or/and tried to paddle in those waters you know how daring an approach this is – yet the photographs are nothing but serene. Here is the artist statement:
“Pages: The Majestic Columbia River”
The Columbia River has been a popular subject for photographers since the early days of the medium over 150 years ago. Many wonderful photographs of the river are shown in galleries, museums and the pages of books highlighting the historical importance of the work itself while depicting the beauty of the Columbia River.
The photographs shown here are my own pages of some favorite scenes of this powerful and intensely beautiful resource we have in our backyard. I hope that with the exhibitions at LightBox today, we can celebrate the majesty of the Columbia River and recognize its significance while remembering it as an existential heritage of those who were here long before the first settlers arrived.
Horse Thief Lake, Columbia River Gorge, WA
For the other project, Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River, Ken spent several years photographing the people (some familiar, some met on the road, quite literally) and the landscape of a region resistant to change. Scandinavian fishermen, Chinese immigrants who worked in the canneries, farmers who tried to make a living, make for a hard working populous in a region prone to earthquakes, floods and fires.
“Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River”
There is a special character and history in the small communities found along the Lower Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. This work begins to examine the places and the people who live there.
The communities of the Lower Columbia on the Oregon side along Highway 30 west of Portland and on the Washington side near Highway 4 west of Longview were settled primarily by Swedes and Finns long before roads were built. They depended upon Columbia River tributaries and sloughs for access, so these developments became known as Riverboat Communities. When roads were built the riverboats became obsolete. While fishing and canning were once the primary source of commerce, the canneries are now of the past. Cattle and sheep are raised by many of the locals and fishing is still active. Most importantly the communities depend upon water management of the sloughs via dikes constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and managed by hired locals to minimize pasture flooding, but flooding is still common during the wet season. In Brownsmead in particular, new construction is seldom seen because of the scarcity of available undeveloped higher ground, so changes to the area are rare and most of the locals like it that way.
Clatskanie River
Watermaster walks the Columbia River Dike near Brownsmead
I’ll skip over all the stuff relating to technique that I know nothing about in the first place, given that I still use a point&shoot camera on automatic mode, grateful if I manage to get what ever captures my attention in focus. Seems to me, though, that Ken’s images are flawless, when it comes to the way light was captured and space laid out.
Clockwise from upper left: Ed and Jan Johnson, Brownsmead – Scott Fraser, Midlands District – Ray and Denise Raihala, Brownsmead – and Brooklyn, NYC transplant Carol Newman, Brownsmead (community treasure, heart and soul – and brain! – of the local radio station KMUN/Astoria. I’m an ardent fan, in case you wondered, of her and the show hosted by her, Arts Live and Local.)
Instead, I want to try and express what much of Ken’s nature-based work seems to reflect for me. For lack of a better phrase, I think the images evoke a state of longing. I can’t quite put my finger on what is longed for: establishing a connection between photographer and viewer through successfully communicating what was seen?
From the series Rivers and Streams
Longing to freeze the moment in time when awareness of the beauty of our surround registers, once again, pretending we can make it last forever? Longing to prolong that state where we can focus on the cliffs, the woods, the meadows, the rivers, oblivious to pain or the daily demands on us, our worries and obligations, in blissful isolation? Or, in reverse, longing to belong, while out there all alone, forever wondering if people “get” what one is producing?
From the series Rock(s)
Longing to find a pictorial language that expresses oneself when words fail? Whatever it is, a feeling hovers above the surface of these photographs, or within them, that still believes in possibility – longing can be answered.
Bughole Road
Sometimes the longing is on the melancholy side, sometimes it captures joy about what’s seen, the deep desire to depict and share. Sometimes it is more attached to what is photographed, sometimes it seems more linked to the one doing the photographing. Wherever the scales tip, one thing is true for the work: it does not shy away from, or, really, it comfortably seeks and displays emotion. If I compare it to the traditional (and majority male) landscape photography that I know, that is special.
High Water on Wirkala Rd. Deep River, WA
Surprise me with what’s next down the road! No Dead End for you!
Music today of Finnish origins like many of the Brownsmead immigrants, related to light, appropriate for a passionate photographer.
Today I am posting someone else’s photography for obvious reasons. Ukrainian photographer Yevgeniy Kotenko has captured quotidian life in a beautiful series called On the Benchsince 2007.
He photographed the view from his parents’ kitchen window in Kiev throughout the seasons.
At this very moment the images strike me as tragically poignant, wondering what all these individual people are going through, likely for years to come, if they survive.
And survival is doubly imperiled for people with life-threatening illnesses, in hospitals that are either not functioning due to dire lack of medication and supplies or being attacked themselves. The World Health Organization reports that shortages of cancer medications, insulin and oxygen supplies are reaching hazardous levels. Hospitals have been hit with cluster munition, according to the Human Rights Watch, and sick children are moved to make-shift bomb shelters in hospital basements.
Ukraine had put particular efforts into the care of sick children, beyond medical treatments. Here is a link to a project that provides children’s wards in hospital with constructed environments that support healing through play and discovery.
“The design studio Decor Kuznetsov and the Vlada Brusilovskaya Foundation have teamed up for CUBA BUBA, a project that transforms hospital rooms throughout Ukraine into sensory wonderlands for young patients. Complete with comfy seating, reading nooks, and even open-air chimes, each module is compact and intended for children to rest and relax as they undergo various treatments.The group recently installed its sixth iteration, “CUBA BUBA SUNNY,” which features a shelved room full of greenery and sculptures. Suspended below the light is an ornately carved ceiling that shines a unique pattern onto the eclectic collection. To inspire play, an earlier design’s facade is comprised entirely of holes, allowing kids to wind rope throughout the structure into a vibrant web.” (Ref.)
I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake.
