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Staged/Un-Staged

Lots of pictures today. They continue the theme that I introduced at the beginning of this week, varied approaches to memory and change across time.

The first round concerns a German photographer, Birthe Piontek, who is now based in Canada. I came across her work when looking at a review of a current exhibition in Brooklyn, NY, that offers new angles on food photography. Other than that edibles are involved, the inclusion of Piontek as food photography struck me as farfetched – but then so did her artist statement for the staged work, below. It is too bad, since the work itself is creative, clean, with superb workmanship. Meaning must, I guess.

“Janus is another iteration of my ongoing inquiry into the topics of memory and change. All photographs in this series were taken in the same corner of my studio as I am interested in how an artist can find inspiration in the limitations of a specific space. …

In some images, the objects are photographed alone; in others, I perform with them. In the combination of body and object, a kinship is revealed. Much of the series rests on the idea of an alikeness of all organic matter that is exposed to the forces of change. We all adapt, mutate, grow and decline every day, even if this transformation is mostly invisible to the eye. Like the ancient Roman god, Janus – the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings – we always try to look into the future while being informed by our past. Thus the current moment, in which change is happening, usually slips by unnoticed.”

Birthe Piontek Pear/Knee
Birthe Piontek Grpefruit/Armpit
Birthe Piontek Parsnips/Hand
Birthe Piontek Strawberries/Elbow
Birthe Piontek Sliced Pumpkin/Back

The second round is devoted to an artist whose work was introduced to me by a friend. (Thank you C.N.!) Deana Lawson uses staged images as well, this time on steroids. Or maybe I should prefer the term grand scale or regal, as it is offered in various glowing reviews of Centropy, her current exhibition at the Guggenheim.

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Boss award, Lawson approaches strangers who she feels drawn to and then elaborately surrounds them with scenes and props that confuse all sense of being rooted in a particular time – they point to past, press, future simultaneously – yet the artist herself calls it time stopping. The exhibition itself adds holograms and light prisms that enhance a sense of the surreal. Here is the entry of the exhibition blurb of the museum:

“… creates images that are rooted in a moment from the tangible world, but ultimately exist in the shimmering in-between space of dreams, memories, and spiritual communion, where the everyday is transfigured into the uncanny and the magnificent.“

Then again, when you approach her short film that describes her approach to her work and offers interviews with and about many of her subjects, you are guided by an introduction that points to

“. ..the creation of images of Black diasporic identity that powerfully evoke the self-possession and divinity of her subjects.”

One last take (in line with the relentless praise machinery surrounding the artist): the NYT headlines a detailed review of the artist and her work with this interpretation:

The Artist Upending Photography’s Brutal Racial Legacy

Deana Lawson’s regal, loving, unburdened photographs imagine a world in which Black people are free from the distortions of history.

Can we PLEASE just have the images speak for themselves?

Actually, nope. Because we would miss, (many if not most of us, I certainly,) what is potentially disturbingly problematic with this work, including the art critic’s worries about the abject objectification of Black bodies, of a continuation of degradation and exploitation central to historic photography of Blacks, and of misrepresentation of religious practices in the diaspora. Add to that active suppression of art criticism of this work by the artist and those making money around her art. Sorry, more reading required. Then make up your one mind.

“Young Grandmother,” 2019.Credit…Deana Lawson, from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
“Ms. Bell at Home,” 2021.Credit…Deana Lawson, from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Deana Lawson, “Chief” (2019),Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)
Left: Deana Lawson – Nation, 2018 / Right: Deana Lawson – Grace with Woman (Arbeitstitel / working title), 2020. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Deana Lawson – The Garden, 2015. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Alternatively, you can peruse today’s un-staged photographs from yesterday’s visit to a friend’s garden. They document neither history, nor change, nor the future, but simply the persimmons, apples and pears ripened by this summer’s unusual heat. At times I’m content to look at just what IS.

Looking at was is, and listening to somethin else…..

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Defying the Laws of Gravity

Todays’ blog is brought to you by my garden’s hummingbirds. Now that the Buddleia is in bloom they are regular visitors. It takes some patience to stand under the bush (while cursing under my breath because my camera’s focus function has decided to be uncooperative, another spendy repair in the offing) and wait for the birds to appear. Of course they do not defy the laws of gravity, but it looks as if they do when they arrive and seemingly hang still in the air, sucking nectar.

Thoughts of physics reminded me of a photographer, Berenice Abbott (1889 – 1991) who excelled at photographing principles of physics. Her interest in documenting scientific principles and teaching the role of science in photography came late in her life, after she had already a stellar career excelling in all kinds of subject areas within the domaine of photography. Early in life she gained renown by her portrait photography of European artists and intellectuals of the Paris of the 1920s. In the 1930s she turned to documentary photography of the city of New York (funded by the FAP) and rural America in the aftermath of the Depression. Eventually she focussed on science, becoming the photography editor for Science Illustrated and producing scientific images for the textbook American High School Biology. The Physical Science Study Committee of Educational Services published a new physics book in the 1950s with all of the images almost exclusively by Abbott.

Circular Wave System Photograph MIT Museum

My kind of woman, always willing to take a risk to pursue her passion, never narrowly focussed on one single domain, and open to acknowledging the giants who paved the way (she had an absolute crush on the work of Eugene Atget, one of the pioneers of documentary photography.) In fact, she managed to rescue his collection of plates after his death and promoted his work throughout her lifetime.

I first saw her work at the MIT museum. One of the reviews of a solo exhibition claimed:

“Berenice Abbott’s science photographs invite us to contemplate the wonder of creation. As photographs utilizing the latest technology to illustrate scientific principles they are quintessentially modern, but the principles they illustrate came into being simultaneously with the Big Bang, so the images are also timeless, taking us both backward and forward throughout eternity. By making manifest the invisible forces that act upon the material world, they do for physics what the mandala does for Hindu theogony, or Kabbalistic diagrams of the sefirot try to do for the Ineffable.”

Hmm. Do we have to reach into the religious accomplishment-drawers to establish the value of photographic images? I’m certain she would have scoffed at that kind of comparison, seeing the wonder of creation too often subdued or undermined by a different kind of invisible hand – the economic and political forces that ruthlessly ignored the distress of the poor. As the photo-historian Terri Weisman explains, Abbott was interested in “how the things in the world reveal the world.” Abbot was labeled a communist by the McCarthy administration. Her life-long distrust of politics and economic institutions led to a catastrophe in late life: she had put her considerable life’s earnings converted to gold coins in a home safe and boxes stored in her house, all lost during a burglary in 1984. A great biography of Abbot can be found here.

The chain of associations while sitting under my butterfly bush eventually hit on the talents of a younger generation explicitly inspired by Abbott’s work and interests. Here are some ingenious images of the base quantities of physics generated by Greg White. As defined by the International System of Quantities (ISQ), these are time (second, s); mass (kilogram, kg); length (metre, m); temperature (kelvin, K); amount of substance (mole, mol); electric current (ampere, A); and luminous intensity (candela, cd). White captured all with props, ingeniously arranged and camera, no other manipulations. (Photos from his website, linked above.)

Electric Current
Length
Luminous Intensity
Mass
Amount of Substance
Temperature
Time

I’ll stick to capturing my little birds, wondrous in their own ways, and reading about all these interesting minds coming up with ways to depict the rest of the world. Not least because I always struggled with physics.


Hummingbird Music by Leonard Cohen, from the album Thanks for the Dance.

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Documenting Past and Present

Give me an example where you felt triumphant and demoralized at the same time. Nothing comes to mind? Here is one of mine: two days ago I drove myself to Sauvie Island for the first time in 5 months, taking the first solo photography walk there since my surgeries. Feeling triumphant that I dared (and was able to,) demoralized because I could only get so far and at a snail’s pace. Also, the heavy camera was shaky in my hands, as evidenced by the out-of-focus quality of some of the birds, but hey, I did it.

I eagerly wanted to visit the ospreys during their nesting season. Part of that motivation came from the need for appropriate photos for today’s topic, the work of a photographer who turned from photojournalism documenting armed conflicts to working extensively on environmental issues. Christian Åslund, an award winning Swedish photographer, often focuses on the High Arctic and the Arctic Ocean, in need of saving from the oil industry and commercial overfishing, forces of destruction of the natural balance, raptors included. He, some years back, even joined an expedition skiing to the Northpole to call for a global sanctuary of the region. If he can ski at the North Pole, I can toddle along Rentselaer Road, observing the nests…..

The link to the photographer’s name above leads to some magnificent photos of the ocean ice. I want to focus, though, on his documentation of the changes of a particular range of glaciers. As I have mentioned before, people are both hesitant or unwilling in acknowledging what is going on around us, particularly if t seems to occur in a far away future, with the loophole that science might rescue us in the intervening years.

Looking at something concretely, at a change that has happened and is in the process of continuing to happen might be a wake-up call that is harder to ignore. Visual evidence is sometimes more effective than abstract ideas. Aslund was able to find archival photos from 100 years ago of Svalbard Glaciers courtesy of the Norwegian Polar Institute. He then set out to photograph the very landscape from identical angles, ingeniously adding a modern human figure into the mix when the old photo contained one as well – making the interaction between nature and human salient.

The series can be found on his website, which is, as websites go, remarkable for the wealth of information and quality of the design. With easily accessed links you can get written factual information, pause the slides and enlarge them, as well as find different topics at a glance. Might not matter to you, but for someone who is interested in photography websites this one scored big. Ok, I digress.

“The archipelago of Svalbard, a land of ice and polar bears, is found midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Its capital Longyearbyen on the main island of Spitsbergen is the world’s most northerly city, some 800 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

Svalbard is also home to some of the Earth’s northernmost glaciers, which bury most of the archipelago’s surface under no less than 200 metres of thick ice. Taken together, Svalbard glaciers represent 6% of the worldwide glacier area outside the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.”

The danger of these glaciers melting completely is not just one of raising water levels of oceans and feeding into the cyclic nature of global warming. Freed from ice, these areas will be much more accessible to both mining industries and tourism, further disturbing excessively shrinking habitat of endangered species, in this particular case making it harder for polar bears to survive.

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Which brings us back to the Oregon ospreys and, for once, good news. Their population rapidly declined due to deforestation and pesticide use until about the 1970s. They have recovered, though, partly because they have found nesting sites on power poles and river channel markers, helped along by utility companied and the U.S. Coast Guard that see to the safety of the sites, or take armloads of previous used nesting materials to sites that they build near by. (See below.)

Ospreys are migrating birds, going to warmer climes in Mexico and South America for 6 months of the year. The couples separate during that trek, but then reunite upon return during March in Oregon, with great fidelity to the old nesting site which they rebuild. The chicks usually hatch mid-May, flying in July, and then depart for the wintering grounds in mid-August. (I saw one nest with two chicks on my walk, and another one just being built – timing obviously varies.) The female is in constant contact with the chicks for the first month or so, then perches nearby and occasional hunts, something the male did all along. About 375 pounds of fish are needed to sustain an osprey couple with two chicks in the nest – note what that implies for needing clean rivers with healthy fish populations….

If only we could do for the polar wildlife what we were able to do for the raptors here. Work like Aslund’s might help, if enough people were to see it.

Here’s to the next generation of preservationists, learning early!

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Imagined Past and Future

These days I have a hard time remembering all the stuff I read during the course of a week. By all I mean not necessarily the storylines of the current novels on the bedside table – I can still keep those in my memory, if barely. But the rest, the various articles, essays, commentaries, headlines, art reviews or tweets, you name it, seem to leave fleeting impressions. Except when they don’t.

The current duo that stuck its tentacles into my brain comes from very different corners of my intellectual universe: one an artistic project of the most visual kind creating a glimpse of a potential past, the other a philosophical essay of the more cerebral kind envisioning a scenario of a possible future.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Avion Pearce is a NYC-based photographer who has a knack for telling stories through series of photographs that are staged. She manages to produce work that accomplishes both, strong stand-alone images and an unfolding of a story across the series – not an easy feat to pull off. Location, props, costuming, mask and staging are all her doing, as is lighting. She has a large technical repertoire when it comes to the latter, with an unfailing eye for what lighting tells the story best.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Her latest project, Shadows, tells the story of two Black female lovers in Louisiana of years gone by, hidden in a cottage at the banks of the Mississippi, going about their daily routines. The artist and a friend portrayed the women. It is remarkable how the mundane and the erotic, how pride and furtiveness all come across in photographs that are neither particularly dramatic nor particularly subtle. They are not shy of being pretty either, and if I had to translate them into speech, I would think we’d listened to a tenderly told tale, with lowered voices in a private setting, relating joy. Something we don’t come by easily these days, and likely not in those earlier ones either. (Images are all from the link to Pearce’s work.)

Photo: Avion Pearce

Joy is not the thing that comes to mind when thinking through the topic of Agnes Callard‘s essay: our willingness to acknowledge and prepare for a future without humans. Callard teaches Ancient Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Chicago and writes a monthly essay in The Point – a magazine for the examined life, which is one of the more interesting publications out there. Like Pearce, she tells stories or snippets of stories. Her’s embody philosophical or ethical insights in a way that the rest of us laypeople can actually grasp, in a language that is easily understood.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Her essay The End is Coming points out that there will be a future without humans on this planet (whether in about 700 years as many scientist argue or at some later point, relocation to Mars non-withstanding….) because the extant climate conditions will make it impossible to sustain human life. Callard wonders what will happen to humans when they know they are the last ones. Much of the meaning of life for us and those who came before us, if not all of it, rested on the assumption that there will be further generations in whom we live on, for whom it mattered what we created, in all areas of life from art to science. Will the knowledge that there will be no further generations lead to ethical and political collapse?

How do you care about self and others, be passionate about things, find meaning in something when you face extinction, whether as an individual or as a species? How do you overcome our resistance, one likely lasting close to (or beyond) the point of disaster’s arrival, to face the facts? Callard does not pretend to have the answer, but argues that we have the obligation, or humanists have the obligation, to face the scenario and help equip that last generation with courage.

Photo: Avion Pearce

“The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, …, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy. “

Here’s my optimistic (?) alternative. By the time extinction comes around, there will be very, very few of us, with heat, cold, famine, and flourishing pandemics having wiped out most of humanity already. Maybe we’ll regress during these remaining 700 years to a point where we are not aware of the finiteness of existence, where we move through our short lives more like the mammals we originated from. Spared that conscious knowledge, the very last generations will feed, mate, die in due natural cause, with an experiential horizon that barely extends the Now and prevents anticipatory anxiety. And then it’s curtains for a species that was driven by greed and hubris to speed up its very own extinction.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Not what you needed to think about on a Monday morning? Here is cheerful distraction: Gottschalk was born in New Orleans in the 1800s and lived for some years in Cuba. The music goes well with Pearce’s Shadows.

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Paris-Match (2)

Photographer Gisèle Freund (1908 – 2000) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, growing up around art (her father was a notable collector) and receiving a first rate education. She studied art history and sociology at the University of Freiburg and then Frankfurt, becoming acquainted with the Frankfurt School folks around Adorno, friends with Walter Benjamin, portraitist of Berthold Brecht, and engaged in antifascist student organizations.

She barely made it to France in 1933, answering the threatening questions of the police patrolling the train “if they had ever heard someone Jewish being called Gisela,” a classic German name, and handing over her camera that she had intuitively emptied of film in the train’s loo.

She escaped with few funds, but a lot of negatives depicting mass demonstrations and violence by the Nazis against leftist protests which introduced her as a photographer to an ever widening circle of friends and aquaintances in the literary and publishing circles in Paris. Her works can now be found at the Washington State University Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, depicting a veritable Who’s Who of (mostly) European intellectuals.

Prints include numerous portraits of: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Andre Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Andre Breton, Andre Gide, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, Henri Michaux, David Siqueiros, Andrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Max Ernst, G.B. Shaw, J.B. Priestley, Diego Rivera, Henry Moore, Herman Hesse, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Valery, Elsa Triolet, Simone De Beauvoir, Pierre Bonnard, Vita Sackville-West, Georges Mathieu, Ivan Illich, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Steinbeck, Philippe Soupault, Eugene Ionesco, Le Corbusier, Samuel Beckett, Jose Clemente Orosco, Iris Murdoch, Ivy Compton Burnett, Rosamund Lehmann, Christopher Fry. 1933-1974  She took the official photograph at the presidential inauguration of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981.

Here are some of the images:

Previous travels to Paris had already brought friendship with some of the surrealists, more doors opened after she became friends and then lovers (she was bi-sexual) with the famous bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier, which left the latter’s previous partner, Sylvia Beach, in the dust. Monnier published her doctoral thesis (part of the book I reviewed yesterday,) made the connections to the literary illuminati, and helped to find a marriage of convenience with a resistance fighter so that Freund could stay in France.

Until she couldn’t. In 1940 she had to flee Paris, eventually traveling to South America, all the while being published by major publications like Life Magazine, Time Magazine, Paris-Match and Magnum, starting a year after its founding, and being written out of its history when she became politically risky. Argentina threw her out of the country after she photographed Evita Perón in heaps of her jewels and with stashes of accumulated riches. She found a harbor in Mexico City, became friends with Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo and their circle, and was banned from entry to the US until the 1970s (!) because of her leftists associates.

She was described as a difficult person, temperamental, but I am in awe of the independence, the power to take risks and explore while forced to relocate under threat, and the flexibility to adapt to ever changing conditions. She also embraced color photography as one of the first influential photographers, scorned by many in the male establishment.

Postwar return to France saw her fame rise, details found here in an obituary that lamented, 20 years ago, that her work had been hidden from history for too long.

That is no longer true, and brings me to the question that reading her book and articles about her raised for me. How do you understand a person and feel free to interpret her motives for her work, when you can no longer talk to her? It is of course a task for many a biographer, but looking at photographs and interpreting them to infer the motivations of the photographer strikes me as difficult, particularly when their own recorded words stand in contrast to your interpretations.

Let me explain with an example, typical for many. A scholar of photographers in exile argues

“that exile by fascist regimes prompted certain European photographers to resort to human figuration in order to reconsider the possibilities of historical subjectivity at its moment of crisis…. Gisèle Freund, the color portraitist of the interwar French cultural luminaries, made a volte-face from the portrayal of the collective subject in the political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt into the individual faces of the French intellectuals after her exile in Paris…led them to instrumentalize the photographic medium not only to address the aftermath of the European avant-garde—especially the end of its utopian quest to envision political collectives through human figuration—but also to measure and critique the new American mass culture and subjectivity.”

Ok, I have no clue what historical subjectivity is supposed to mean. Not for want of trying, but the literature explaining it is impenetrable for this aging brain. My bad. I do know, though, that Freund never gave up on photographing collective subjects, even during exile, as can be seen in work documenting the British poor, and political movements and working conditions all over the South American sub-continent in her years of exile. Never mind, that she also portrayed individual people with a passion pre-exile.

I have watched interviews with the photographer herself speaking late in life about her intentions. For one, being hired for portraits in the 1930s meant a means of economic survival (the print media were happy to display pictures of the rich and famous.) Shifting to color made her feel she could capture more life-like impressions, serving her goal to “familiarize strangers with each other, potentially decreasing enmity among them.” The close encounters with people also opened avenues for what she thought most important in all of the world: friendship and love.

The interview below is, alas, available only in German.

It ends with a comment that I translated here:

“I believed for many years that you could change the world with photography. I later realized that was an error. People used my photos to pursue their ideologies and I understood that photography lies even though people assume it tells the truth.”

She abandoned photography, her life’s passion, in 1980, a full 20 years before her death of a heart attack in the year 2000.

Photographs, selected for the color that Freund so cherished, are from Coyoacán, Mexico City, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo, who was photographed extensively by Freund, lived. The blue house is now a museum – I wrote about Fridamania here.

And here we go down memory lane for my own youth…

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Paris-Match (1)

So it goes. You learn some interesting things from a book you received for Hanukkah, and then you get caught up in much more fascinating questions about the book’s author. Let me report on both, today and tomorrow, respectively.

The book, Photography and Society, by German-French photographer Gisèle Freund, is a seminal study of the relationship between photography and society, including its political implications.

Freund had to flee Germany in 1933 where she was involved in political resistance against the rise of the Nazis. Finding shelter in Paris, she studied at the Sorbonne and began to photograph an ever widening circle of cultural icons and famous literary types, later published in Paris-Match, and Life Magazine, among others.

The book is an assessment of photography’s role up to the late 1970s, when the book was first written (published in translation in 1980). Freund could not have been more visionary in what was yet to come in the next half century than she was on those pages.

What could I, a photographer who is often thinking about politics, find more fascinating? I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s installment.

Here’s the Heuer’s Digest review:

Freund, using the dissertation she wrote at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, first lays out photography’s history, including how it was invented and how it displaced the many artists who had come to serve the demands of a growing and ever wealthier bourgeoisie for portraits: painters, engravers, lithographers. Originally hailed as an advancement to serve science, it soon dominated in the social realm as a token of status or a means of remembrance. The early phases of artistically creative photography were soon superseded by adjusting to the mediocre tastes of those who paid for the pictures. Eventually professional photographers, a trade that had grown like wildfire due to demand, were sent packing when do-it-yourself photography took over.

The second part of the book relegates the big question Is photography art?, to the dust bin where it belongs. Of course, it can be. Why not ask the much more relevant question instead, What is photography for?

For one, as a means of reproduction, it has been a wonderful tool to disseminate art (painting and sculpture included) – just think postcards in museum stores, or books that open the minds of generations to visual art otherwise confined to museums.

Secondly, there are many types of photography that impact society in other ways. There is “concern” photography, the documentation of suffering in poverty and war and general social justice issues, photography as personal artistic expression, photography as photojournalism, as a propaganda tool, and last but not least, its commercial aspects in the advertising industry. And, of course, always, always self-representation – although the term Selfie did not yet exist when she wrote.

Freund provides memorable examples of how the “objectivity” of photography is laughable, given how what you select can shape an impression, how captions under a given image can completely change its meaning, or how juxtaposition of two photographs can manipulate opinion. For example: take a photograph of a Russian tank sent to squash the Hungarian uprising. Consider caption 1 vs. caption 2:

1. In contempt of the people’s right to self determination, the Soviet government has sent armored divisions to Budapest to suppress the uprising.

2, The Hungarian people have asked the Soviets for help. Russian tanks have been sent to protect the workers and restore order.

Freund concludes her book with thoughts roughly summarized below: What began as a means of self representation has become a powerful tool that penetrates all aspects of society. Yet finding photographs that go beyond representation, some that are truly art, is rare. The tool has democratized mankind’s knowledge and built bridges between people by providing a common language in civilization, but has also “played a dangerous role as an instrument of manipulation used to create needs, to sell goods and to mold minds.”

How was Freund’s life and photography influenced by these insights? Stay tuned.

Photographs today are street photography from my 2014 visit to Paris, Freund’s chosen home.

Music is mainly interesting for the vintage film clips of Paris in the background.
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Mix and Match, Upside down.

Since cheer is hard to come by these days, I grabbed this story by the horns and ran with it – I found its subject so utterly clever and amusing.

Hungarian artist and architect Andi Schmied spent some of the last years exploring New York City from above. During an artist residency in NYC she realized that the city can be viewed from above publicly only from three locations, the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center and ONE World Trade Center.

Before you knew it, she had taken on the persona of an apartment-hunting Hungarian billionaire. Or the wife of one, to be precise. During the real-estate agent guided tours of over thirty exclusive high-rise properties, she photographed the views (as well as the interior of these decadent abodes,) and recorded the sales pitches.

To get to that point she had to engage in quite a bit of cloak and dagger maneuvers. A friend in Hungary posed as the excessively rich husband including a designated website of his business etc; her wardrobe and make-up were changed to play the role. With her background “checked” and her passport inspected, she sailed through guarded sky-scrapers, fawned over by the sales fleet.

The results can be seen in a book, recently published, that is about much more than getting a glimpse of New York from above, usually reserved for the privileged few.

Private Views: A high-rise panorama of Manhattan can be explored here.

“The skyscrapers visited by Schmied were carefully selected due to their representation of a new type of luxury. Those selected for their architectural interest include the MOMA Expansion Tower by Jean Nouvel, Gehry Tower, Jenga Tower, and 432 Park Avenue. Among the buildings visited for political reasons were the Trump Tower or Time Warner Centre, where recently more than a dozen owners have gone to prison, after anonymously buying an apartment through shell companies. For buildings of economic interest, Schmied visited 220 Central Park South, where its penthouse duplex has been sold for a record sales price. Other buildings selected ranged from reconstructed early American skyscrapers to luxury condos (such as the Woolworth Tower Residences, or Pine Street 70) and penthouse suites for sale within luxury hotels (such as the Four Seasons, Ritz Carlton and the Baccarat).”

The photographs and conversations with the sales personell are interspersed with essays that discuss the issue of “Private Views,” including the problem with the shadows these buildings cast, and ghost apartments used for money laundering or speculation. Essay contributors include Peter Noever, Anthony Vidler, feminist architecture collaborative, Sam Stein, Sharon Zukin, SITU Studio, Sara Bernat, Jack Self, Ava Lynam, and others.

Marvelous idea, smart execution, hope she gets the attention she deserves!

Schmied’s previous projects focused on architectural idiosyncrasies as well. A book depicting a quasi ghost town in China, near Beijing, allowed a glance into a world usually closed off to us. Jing Jin City contained photographs, essays and renderings of a luxury resort town that has remained largely unoccupied since construction began in 2002.

“The city’s four thousand mansions exist in various stages of incompletion, set around a Hyatt Regency Resort Spa, horse racing track, and 18-hole golf course. The place is maintained by a small army of caretakers who also make up most of its permanent population. Lacking tasks to complete, they spend their time wandering the streets, occupying the homes they are meant to guard, building constructions in living rooms, and adapting the city to their needs.”

I figured I’d match Schmied’s views of Manhattan from above, which can be found here, with my photographs coming from the other direction, looking up, like the rest of us foot soldiers. I’ll take the woman on the street gig any time over the dame in the tower scenario….. for the company alone.

This is where I lived in the 1980s in NYC, overlooking Sheridan Square in the Village.

And what better music for the ravages of capitalism than the Drei Groschen Oper…..


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Local Color

Let’s end the week with a mix of colors, captured on these strangely sunny October days.

Many come from plants.

Some come from houses.

I will probably go out and photograph some of the famous painted houses next week. For today, it is just color that caught my eye, a bit of cheer in cheerless times.

Some are just part of the streets….

It is surely fitting that the poem below was first published in The Southern California Anthology in fall 1999. If I had energy and time I would go and photograph all of the colors Piercy lists – but that has to wait for another day. Or another lifetime.

Colors passing through us

BY MARGE PIERCY

Purple as tulips in May, mauve
into lush velvet, purple
as the stain blackberries leave
on the lips, on the hands,
the purple of ripe grapes
sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,
like a new flower in a bud vase
on your desk. Every day
I will paint you, as women
color each other with henna
on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,
as coals after the fire is banked,
the cardinal in the feeder,
the roses tumbling on the arbor
their weight bending the wood
the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit
hanging their globes on the glossy tree,
orange as pumpkins in the field,
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs
who come to eat it, orange as my
cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.

Green as mint jelly, green
as a frog on a lily pad twanging,
the green of cos lettuce upright
about to bolt into opulent towers,
green as Grand Chartreuse in a clear
glass, green as wine bottles.

Blue as cornflowers, delphiniums,
bachelors’ buttons. Blue as Roquefort,
blue as Saga. Blue as still water.
Blue as the eyes of a Siamese cat.
Blue as shadows on new snow, as a spring
azure sipping from a puddle on the blacktop.

Cobalt as the midnight sky
when day has gone without a trace
and we lie in each other’s arms
eyes shut and fingers open
and all the colors of the world
pass through our bodies like strings of fire.

Marge Piercy, “Colors passing through us” from Colors Passing Through Us (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).

As a counterbalance, today’s music is black and white….

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The World speaks to Us

Next time you’re bored, or uneasy, or need to entertain the (grand)kids during the umpteenth hour of self-isolation I suggest you try what I do when I need to feel less lonely.

Pay attention to the little, transient details on your walk (often easier in urban environments, but also recommended for your daily round in the park.) Collect them like small gems and thread them together into a story. I, of course, do it with a camera, but you can do it just as well in your head our out loud in conversation with your walking companions.

It will not exactly produce poetry, but a sense that the world is talking to you is often good enough for short-term distraction. Note: I am NOT suggesting to capture the moment, one of the most overused phrases in all of art. If I had a penny for every recommendation of how to capture the moment in photography, in writing, in visual art, I could build housing for the entire PDX homeless population (one of the first things I’d do with a surplus unexpected funds.)

Instead, I just like to imagine that the world is speaking to us, commiserating, scolding, encouraging, reminding and comforting – just what is needed.

Yup, can’t deny it, woes….

But not of biblical proportions,

And no unextinguishable giga fire, like the ones they have here now.

There will always be moments to rest

and places where you are welcome.

It pays to heed good advice

And you might just be remembered if you made use of your skills and time.

And there will always be beauty

If you just keep your eyes open.

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It all depends on your perspective.

Almost half a century ago, in 1975, The Boston Review published an interview with Susan Sontag about writing, photography and memory. As my readers know, all three topics are close to my heart – I write, I photograph and I have spent large parts of my life as a researcher focussed on issues of memory. Of late I have not done much of any of the three, and I miss most the ability to photograph beyond the occasional snapshot on my iPhone, between parking my car and arriving at my son’s loft, or during very short walks when I have a window of time. Or the energy.

No wonder, then, that a chance encounter with writing about photography caught my interest. While I agree with a lot of what Sontag lays out and however much I admire her prescience for the role photography would play in our consumer culture, some of what she said does not necessarily square with my own experience.

Sontag sees some photographers as setting themselves up as scientists, others as moralists. The scientists “make an inventory of the world,” whereas the moralists “concentrate on hard cases.” The themes for “photographers as moralists have been war, poverty, natural catastrophes, accidents—disaster and decay. The photographers as scientists are discovering beauty, a beauty that can exist anywhere but is assumed to reside particularly in the random and the banal. Photography conflates the notions of the “beautiful” and the “interesting.” It’s a way of aestheticizing the whole world.”

I don’t find myself particularly attracted by decay nor do I intend to imbue the banal with a sense of beauty. My lens, (in contrast to my montage work) captures more often than not what IS, documenting from an attempted neutral perspective what I perceive. That spans a wide variety of subjects – from the truly beautiful in nature to the witty in graffiti to the mundane in street scenes to the mysterious in abstract detail.

Sontag argued that making any selection of experience is very tendentious, ideological. While there appears to be nothing that photography can’t devour, whatever can’t be photographed becomes less important. I disagree. If you photograph practically everything that is in front of your eyes – as I am wont to do as you all have seen across the years of this blog – the output becomes a form of documentation, rather than a moralist preoccupation or an attempt to shape the viewers’ experience.

Which brings me to the second disagreement with Sontag who’s writing I admire. She claimed “that the photographer’s orientation to the world is in competition with the writer’s way of seeing… Writers ask more questions…Narration is linear. Photography is antilinear.“

Really? The photographs I take are not just visual documentation but they inspire my writing that, not always linearly, conveys the reactions that the photographed subjects instill. In this regard there is no competition but rather mutual exchange between what I see and what I think and what I ultimately communicate.

Case in point: the many twisted branches you find along the coastline and in Sunset Park in San Francisco which is a block from my little pied-à-terre that has been my blessed, nightly harbor. I started to whip out my iPhone when I realized that they could be – were – seen by me in two completely diametrical ways. One association was with twisted bodies, harmed and distorted by the vicious winds, forced away from their natural growth trajectory towards the light, stunted.

The other was of resilient refusal to be broken, engaging in fluid, curvy movement below the canopy, finding shelter against the storms in low-slung positions that seem the starting point of a languid dance once nobody is looking. No moralizing depiction of crippled nature nor an inventory of overlooked beauty. Nothing antilinear here in the photography, but a rather contiguous trigger of thinking through the psychological puzzle of how much perspective affects the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli. The images are the seed-bed for asking this question – how do we chose the perspective that will govern our perception? Now all I have to do is come up with the appropriate answer…. regarding arboreal forms of existence as much as the rest of my life.

Music today by the master of musical ambiguity, Johannes Brahms, oscillating between pathos and tenderness.

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