To end this week devoted to portraits I will tell two stories, one of a clever way to create indirect portraits, the other about how to portray someone who portrays you.
The first story is about Matthias Schaller, who has an ongoing project to portray living and deceased artists by photographing their palettes. His website in the link above gives you a good idea of the kinds of palettes he has pursued and portrayed. The work supports his claim that you can often identify the painter by looking at how the palette is arranged, geometrically used, and by the assigned color range. (The website also has one of the strongest warnings about not using any of the materials without permission – so you have to go there yourself, I can’t put up teasers here.)
or read an interview with images here or enjoy the views on one of his exhibitions two years ago at the Berman Museum of Art. I am always a bit taken aback by excessive proprietary actions when it comes to art on the internet. I probably err in the opposite direction, with art on my ow website being easily snatched – but then again why should people not enjoy what they desire? Nothing you print off a website comes even close to the quality of the real object, with its particular paper and color requirements.
Anyhow, I digress. I like Schaller’s idea, I think he is on to something, and I truly admire when someone pursues a particular passion across many years, hunting down and negotiating with those who hold the palettes of famous artists in their collections, archives, museums, or wherever.
The second story I first told three years ago here. It described the thoughts and feelings of portraying a painter, Henk Pander, at work, while his work was you yourself – a portrait of your scarred body.
The artistic collaboration created some meaningful results, although, as is so often the case, the gorgeous painting got the exposure it deserved in public, while the photography slumbers along in an overly expensive, little book collecting dust on bookshelves. Double portraits, uneven distribution.
In any case, the photographs today are from those sessions, with a focus on Henk’s palette since those tie to story #1, and a few extras to wrap up the theme of portrait.
Music shall be my eternal go-to in hard times, Schuman’s Davidsbündler Tänze. I will resume reporting when I am settled in San Francisco.
I have visibly aged by about 100 years in the last month, through fear, worry, helplessness. No wonder then, that a project called The Beauty of Age caught my attention. I was taken not only by the portraiture of numerous people all above 75 years of age, photographed with a gentle lens and loving perception.
It was for me all about the approach to the project which explicitly combined a focus on the photographic portrait with attention to the life experiences behind the faces, the at times unbearable suffering that put my own anguish in perspective.
Laura Zalenga, a young European photographer, supported by the Adobe Creative Residency program, spent 2018/19 interviewing more than 30 people in Germany. Here is her description of the project (my translation from the German.)
“The project contains hundreds of photographs, weeks of listening and more than 2000 years of combined life experience. None of these statistics can capture though the gift these encounters. The wonderful people I met. We laughed together, sat silently with each other, cried softly. I heard so many beautiful, stunning, horrible, funny and sad stories. I sensed such aliveness. Such power and pain and contentedness, so much quietude, loneliness and courage. There is much to discover and learn if we allow the oldest of our societies to say their piece. If we afford them a bit of our hectic time, they return to us a piece of their wisdom, bear witness to our own history and express much gratitude.”
The work, as displayed in traveling exhibition, is a combination of the pictures of the faces and written quotes from the conversations, printed alongside the portraits. A companion book to the exhibition provides more detail.
What struck me, when perusing the photographs in The Beauty of Age was something practically all of the portraits had in common: they pulled their emotional weight without the visual tricks and forced stylishness of so much contemporary portrait photography. Not that the artist doesn’t know how to: she is on top of the contemporary demand for slickness as much as any of the big names these day.
In her project with the aged, however, Zalenga, in her 20s at the time, saw with the heart – she has, I predict, a clearly marked path to success in this image saturated world. These were mostly naturally lit snaps of people in their living rooms or other personal environments. Perhaps because of the naturalness of the approach the photographer captured something essential that is not always there when the sitter is too aware of and tense in the image-taking situation. I am thinking here of the mildness of the gaze. Look at all of their eyes, their expression – softness abounds, despite the hardships in their lives.
What an optimistic thought – we all might be able to come out un-hardened at the other end of life’s crises. I cling to that, while turning my back to the mirror.
This will be my self portrait, then, in the near future….
And here is the Marshallin from Rosenkavalier singing about getting old…
In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About thedark times. –Bertholt Brecht, Motto to Svendborg Poems, written in exile in Denmark, 1939.
Some people sing about the dark times with their camera, documenting state imposed cruelty as much as the defiance by those affected. One of those contemporary photographers is Ximena Natera, a Mexican reporter and documentary filmmaker who specializes in migration, human rights violations, peace processes and collective memory in the region. Her work with Pie de Pagina’s investigation unit – they support at risk reporters in conflict zones – has been recognized by Mexico’s National Journalism Award, Gabriel Garcia Márquez Foundation, and Pictures of the Year Latam.
Ximena Natera
She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, while attending the documentary photography program at the International Center of Photography in New York on a Jan Mulder Scholarship prize.
Ximena Natera
I had known about her work given my interest in issues of migration, but was reminded of her when a recent issue of Mother Jones featured her brilliant portraits of young children who attended Black Lives Matter marches, gatherings and other communal functions.
The photos were taken in the beginning of June, 2020. At that point, no-one would have hesitated to take their children to marches and demonstrations against police brutality and racism, that would take place in city squares, in front of public buildings, the streets of various cities in this nation. They would have been able to sing about the dark times, gaining a collective memory of civic action, learning that each voice counts at a young age.
Ximena Natera
Can you imagine now, with teargas, toxins and other ammunition shot randomly into peacefully protesting crowds of mothers, dads, veterans and nurses, how a child could be traumatized, if not physically hurt? They have to stay home, or do their little neighborhood bike parades which are gratefully happening all over Portland, deprived of large communal experience that would guide them on their path to be engaged citizens. The political implications of the current PDX situation will be far reaching and long lasting. Dark times, indeed.
And yet, seeing the photographs of the NYC kids create pure hope. Hope for a better future.
My own photomontages for today were the results of working at a peace camp with children of all religions some 7 years ago.
I am not exactly a creature of habit but I do like the contentment that comes from frequent and regular visits to specific places, like my once-a-week walk at Oaks Bottom. This week it offered a rhapsody in green. The water did not just reflect the canopy of green above it, with trees and bushes having long grown all their leaves. It had developed its own thick coat of paint, a saturated green layer of duck grit.
The migratory winter water fowl were gone, the geese and herons stayed put. It is lovely to see change, experience surprise a n d feel the warmth of familiarity, all in one fell swoop.
That said, in my next life I would like to combine my Wanderlust and artistic preoccupations along the lines of the life and work of the duo Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen. I had introduced them earlier here, with their project Eyes as Big as Plates, portraits of older people in their natural environment. Alas, the book has sold out on Amazon.
A different project, stretched out over four years, can be explored here.
The project’s title, Time is a ship that never casts anchor, is derived from a Sami proverb which implies that it is better to be on a journey than to stay still. It is wonderfully descriptive about the longitudinal nature of their work.
Sami culture is, like so many indigenous cultures, severely threatened by both climate change and political forces bent on exploiting the Arctic. Here is a guide to the basic facts of Sami lives and customs now under attack as well as the legal means to defend themselves. Worth a look, particularly in view of the horrendous fuel spill last week that is now contaminating the Siberian rivers flowing into the Arctic ocean, blamed on climate warming, but likely also caused by human greed, indifference and ineptitude.
The two photographers explored the transformation of Kirkenes, a vast region at the north-eastern Norwegian border with Russia and Finland. They documented the construction of a new hospital and in the process visited with and photographed hospital personnel and consultants, Sami reindeer herders, detonation workers, midwifes, wrestling coaches, taxi drivers and local peace workers and the local supporters from electricians to the mayor. The completed artworks were eventually on display at the finished hospital.
“…joined a round-up with Sami reindeer herders and learned how to make our arctic charr sushi dance. We’ve taken the mayor to a bog, manned a taxi station in Båtsfjord, wandered ancient cemeteries with academics and archaeologists, driven to the bottom of an iron-ore mine to find a turquoise lake, wrestled with a peace worker at the border and drunk black coffee with a sound recorder in many living rooms, hyttas, cars and offices to better understand the Jack-of-all-trade Finnmarkings.”
Detonation master Pål
Doesn’t this sound like something I would have fun with?
Seriously now, I do find the dual nature of their work extremely appealing. On the one hand they are documentarians in an anthropological sense, concerned with the cultural diversity, the history of the place and the customs of the people they connect to. They invest time and resources in learning about place, seeing things grow, following the path, not without obstacles, around these kind of huge community projects.
Taxi driver Arne
On the other hand they are painters – with a camera, not a canvas and a brush, but still. Their innovative costuming, sensibility for color and form, the intensity of creative use of natural materials for staging all mark them as gifted visual artists. And none of these images are slick or even tinged with a hint of fashion portraits, like I might have argued (on a mean day) for other photographers I introduced previously.
Thus the repeat performance – they deserve every bit of exposure we can provide. I’ll make it a routine, like my Tuesday walk.
Music today is by a Sami woman, Mari Boine, who is a professor for musicology in Norway. She has a strong, openly anti-racist stance, and, for example, refused to perform at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, because she perceived the invitation as an attempt to bring a token minority to the ceremonies.
Here is her single hit Recipe for a Master Race that deals with the racism against the Lapps, and here is a beautiful entire album.
Alas, often interrupted by advertisement. If you don’t have the patience for it, just listen to the third track, starts a bit before 12:00 to get a sense of the language.
Yesterday was an emotional day. We attended my son’s dissertation defense via Zoom, sad that we could not be there in person for his graduation. I was also bursting with pride, of course, and simultaneously raging that the current circumstances prevent travel so I could not hold my son in my arms. I was frustrated that I did not understand a word of what he talked about in his presentation, just as I never did when I had occasion to hear my father giving a talk – both passionate chemists. It was bittersweet to think that his grandson chose the same path, never to be seen by him, or his other grandfather, unless there are little viewing slots between this dimension and the one for the departed. Shutters that open for special occasion….
Shutters made me think of windows, windows made me think of how people decorate them, or simply use them to display, well, almost anything, from signs to art to whole collections of stuff. So much stuff. Spilling out.
I have attached a small sample of what caught my attention over the last decade, most of it from Europe, but a couple of them from the U.S.
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For me it was simply curiosity, while more professional photographers approach window displays with strategy. To lovely results in the case below, I might add. Larger images can be found on the links.)
Jean-Luc Feixa has a new book out that really captures much what is familiar to me from Northern Europe (in his case he photographed in Belgium.) Although I am keen to introduce mostly young women photographers, given the gender imbalance regarding recognition in this as in so many fields, I really liked Feixa’s work when I first saw his landscapes some years ago. They were photographed at the Franco-Spanish border with its contradictory landscape of misty mountains and barren desert. And how can you not covet an artist statement like this:
False American decor – perfect! Now what do we call all that decor in the windows? Open to suggestions!
And here is poetic wisdom that points to the trouble with clinging to the past, the urge to display, and holding on to things…..
The Three Oddest Words
By Wislawa Szymborska Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being can hold.
And here is César Franck‘s quintet, wistful (in honor of the Belgian windows,) and intricately constructed (in honor of my son’s synthetic molecule.) Mazel Tov, Solomon!
When I observe wildflowers, plants and the natural environment around me, I feel joy, a sense of place, being here and being now. When I look at larger vistas, particularly if clouds are involved, I feel longing, a desire to go to places far away, a yearning to be untethered.
(Wouldn’t you know it, my bird watching is in-between – which probably explains the constant avian barrage that you are exposed to in these pages.)
The opportunity to do both on last week’s hike, feeling grounded and dreaming of a world beyond, reminded me of the work of a brilliant young photographer from the Democratic Republic of Congo. (I was introduced to her by Maaza Mengiste, whose book “The Shadow King” I recommended earlier, and whose public postings continually provide new insights.)
Gosette Lubondo is a photographer from Kinshasa who has already found international acclaim in less than a decade of professional work since she received her degree in visual arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa. Lubondo’s most recent series, Tala Ngai, invites viewers to visit with contemporary Congolese women in their own homes, portrayed in the clothes they wear outside of the house, inside of it, and a glimpse of their personal surroundings. It is strikingly intimate, the triptychs almost defiantly capturing this very moment in time, with no explicit nod to the trauma that Congo (formerly Zaire) had to go through with the worst of wars after the yoke of brutal Belgian colonialism.
Books I’ve read about that country, from the horrible Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, which I liked, have educated me about the history. Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, a remarkable first novel and highly recommended, made an emotional impact. Here is my favorite sentence from a 2015 review:
“Evoking everyone from Brueghel to Henry Miller to Celine, Fiston — as he’s known — plunges us into a world so anarchic it would leave even Ted Cruz begging for more government.”
The photographic work, in contrast, has one overarching appeal: I made me long to get to know those women, creating a desire for connection that is so lacking in our post-colonial world.
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Two of Lubondo’s previous series, created in 2016 and 2018, Imaginary Trip I and II, have more historical pointers and relate back to how I started today’s musing: rootedness versus journey. They combine not just the spatial dimension of travel, near and far, but also propel us into a dimension of time, then and now.
The combination is achieved by manipulating photographs of historical sites, associated with travel (disused train compartments in an old train depot,) or linked to place (an abandoned school building from Congo’s colonial past) from the past, with images of people as they are now or would have been in the respective times and locations. Truly clever.
The work has impressive layers. Independent of the striking visual aesthetics it makes you think about how experience is tied to place (the Belgian colonial oppression was surely one of the most violent in the entire world) and educates about Congolese specifics. On a whole different level, though, it appeals to how much the imagination is involved in travel, in the ability to pick up and go, to leave behind, to become less visible in the distance. She achieves this by often integrating transparent figures or objects into the depictions. And ultimately, the body of work has to be placed within the context of obstacles to migration that are put up against African people by many a nation in the world, regardless of the trauma they experience in countries that are wrecked by civil war, or the exploitation of multinational companies (just look at the Lithium extraction in Congo) that leads to ever increasing levels of deforestation, famine and poverty.
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Knowing about the context – historical, cultural, geographical, political – is here, as so often, a key to understanding the depth of the expressed ideas. The artist’s work was displayed at schools in the DRC to increase students’ understanding of history. Not many of us do, myself included of course, when it comes to countries that are on other continents, outside of our regular information diet.
The same is often true, though, for what is happening right here and now in the US as well: a key to understanding where we are and where we need to move toward is a matter of having contextual insight. An understanding that includes the fact that all of us are affected, not just populations we have kept separate from ourselves. As Stacey Abram’s points out in her new book: “No assault on democracy will ever be limited to its targets.”
And who better to provide the context than Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in her most recent essay in the New Yorker, How to Change America. If you have time to read one thing today, make it this one.
We need to learn.
Music is from the DCR with a bit of political background. And here is Ferre Gola, a contemporary singer (sorry if ads interrupt…) .
What was I thinking. I did not bring rain paints. I wore my ancient, squeaky hiking boots that long ago stopped being waterproof. No plastic cover for my camera. And yet I followed the trail up coyote hill, despite the fact that misty sprays of rain soon turned into real showers.
It was the fault of all those herons, flying constantly in one direction our coming from there, ever since I had spotted them in the ponds. It was the lure of distant noise, increasingly louder when I approached a stand of tall trees at the western rim of the wetlands preserve.
I had found the heron rookery, an accumulation of nests in the fir trees, chicks squawking loudly, parents announcing their arrival with raspy, penetrating voices.
I crouched under a canopy of bushes away from the path, trying to get out of the downpour, camera peeking through the inside of my coat, unbuttoned in one place to let the lens through. I was quite a distance away, separated by a marsh, vision blurry from all the moisture in the air, in awe of the constant action.
Look closely how many gather in one tree.
Parents flying in to feed the babies, then reversing roles with those who had stood guard. A cacophony of bird calls announcing or assuaging need.
And then it went all quiet. As if the world stood still. Birds calmed, stoically standing in the rain, or crouching in the nests. All I could hear, all of a sudden, was the relentless drumming of the rain on the leaves above my head. One of those moments were your heart expands, with gratitude, while your soul is struck with slivers of disquietude.
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In this week’s blogs I juxtaposed forms with lines, isolation with connectedness, and now, today, the natural with the staged. The heron photographs were snapshots, badly taken under challenging circumstances with layperson equipment. They caught a moment in time, captured as is in nature in all its blurry glory.
Contrast this with the work of Kylli Sparre, a young Estonian photographer, whose work is technically flawless, delightful in its creativity, and as choreographed as any of the ballets she ever danced in (having given up a career as a dancer for photography and photoshop manipulation.) In fact I think that’s why she came to mind when I was watching the choreographed approaches and departures of the herons in the rookery, quietly fluid during departure, loudly proclaiming their arrival. They really are among the more elegantly moving birds, as long as they don’t open their mouths and disturb the mood with their screeching.
Sparre has had a fast and pretty steep professional ascent – just look at the accumulation of awards, including the 2014 Sony world photography award, and the invitations to show in arrived venues. I appreciate the combination of painterly sensibility in her staging, her ability to invoke fairy-tales, or at least fairy tale moods, and her embrace of modern technology to alter and manipulate the photographed image.
I think, though, that what speaks to me most is the sense of motion about to invite a dramatic development, the very next move leading to a denouement.
That is even contained in the images where there’s perfect stillness, as paradoxical as that sounds.
There is a sense of eeriness, just as I experienced one hidden under a hedgerow, seemingly the only human on a planet filled with screaming birds who suddenly fell silent. Similarities then as well, not just contrast. At least in the evoked emotions.
Music today picks up the fairy-tale theme – von Zemlinsky’s fantasy for orchestra, The Mermaid.
(“Die Seejungfrau has an unusual history. Having heard the latest Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben, conducted by the composer in Vienna, Zemlinsky determined to create an equally grandiloquent tone poem of his own. Possibly he settled on his program, “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen — a fairy tale of a lover who fails to secure her intended — in response to losing his own intended, Alma Schindler, to the greater charms of Gustav Mahler. At any rate nobody discusses the music without mentioning this”. Ref.)
“What do I want? Why do I want it? And how do I get it?” – Stacey Abrams, in a TED talk shortly after she lost in the 2018 midterm elections.
AS SHOULD BE OBVIOUS by now, I rarely review exhibitions that I don’t like. The world doesn’t need more negativity and I don’t need the emotional aggravation. It is therefore with some trepidation when I accept invitations to review something I have not yet had a chance to see. I will only do so if I am deeply committed to an institution and usually trust their choices, as is the case with the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE.)
Felicia after the Black Prom, Vidalia, Georgia, 2009. Photographed by Gillian Laub.
No need to fret: OJMCHE’s newest exhibition, Southern Rites, is one of their strongest yet, a moving and thought-provoking tour de force about race relations and racism in contemporary America. Organized by the International Center for Photography and judiciously curated by Maya Benton, the exhibition of photographs by Gillian Laub is visual activism at its best: perceptive, engaged, critical photography of human beings in a context that defines them. Did I mention beautiful? Beautiful!
Artist Talk at OJMCHE before the official opening of the exhibition
It is not the beauty that matters here, though. It is the package of three elements that make this not just an artful, but an important exhibition: a longitudinal project executed with skill and courage in the light of tremendous obstacles, for one. Secondly, a slew of smart curatorial decisions how to present that project, equally important for creating a narrative. And finally, the flexibility of a Jewish museum bent on going beyond the traditional role of keeper of memory, whether Holocaust-related or preserving the history of the local community.
Museum Director Judy Margles welcomes the artist.Bruce Guenther, frequent guest curator at OJMCHE, attends the opening
OJMCHE’s invitation to have difficult conversations about racism and relations between African Americans and Whites — at a time when this city is, again, in the midst of a murder trial for someone accused of hate crimes and where the weekend brings marches by the KKK and their allies in close vicinity of the museum — provides the very model of inclusivity that is a prerequisite for change. To hark back to Stacey Abram’s questions (and potential answers): if it is change that we want, and if it is justice that demands it, then to get there we are helped by the kind of art Gillian Laub creates and museums like OJMCHE that channel it.
Qu’an and Brooke, Mt. Vernon, Georgia, 2012. Photographed by Gillian Laub..
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“I am an invisible man…I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” –Ralph Ellison (1952)
GILLIAN LAUB IS A STORY TELLER. I cannot tell whether the New York-based photographer and film maker intuitively grasps the effectiveness of a human interest narrative, or if her projects are the results of intellectual decisions to employ a certain method – probably both, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Her work delivers a comprehensive view into the lives of other human beings, the way that they are shaped by their environments. Her interactions with her subjects elicit an openness and willingness to communicate that are rare for documentary photographers. The fact that she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in comparative literature before studying photography at the International Center of Photography, clearly exerts an influence. At her best she makes the invisible visible.
Gillian Laub, photographer and film maker
The images that you encounter at the museum depict the African-American and White High School seniors of small towns in Montgomery County, Georgia. The towns had segregated Proms way into the 21st Century. Laub visited, on assignment for he NYT, after a high-schooler had sent a cry for help to Spin Magazine in the early 2000s. Not only was she escorted out of the White Prom, chased out of town, car tires slashed, but repeatedly so, across several years that she returned, even when the Prom was now officially integrated some time later.
Yearbook of Segregated Prom
The topic of Prom politics – and the eventual accumulation of Prom photographs – was soon superseded by a tragic death in the community: in 2011 one of the young men associated with all the teens she had been photographing, was murdered by the father of a girl who had invited Justin Patterson and friends to come at night to her house. He shot at several of them several times. Originally charged with seven offenses, among them murder and false imprisonment the man was offered a plea deal and spent a year in a State detention center and some years probation. The victim’s parents’ claim that the shooting was racially motivated, went unheard. In later interviews, once freed, the shooter showed no remorse. In addition to portraits of the involved people, the exhibition shows a tape of the 911 call that is hair raising in its lack of humanity.
Curator Maya Benton in front of a photograph of the shooter and audio tape of the 911 call
A detailed HBO documentary of the Patterson killing, filmed by Laub, can be seen at the museum every Wednesday at 2:00 pm and on demand on the weekend.
Documentation of the Town’s Coping
The third part of the show consists of a large number of B-roll footage, glimpses of workers in the onion fields of Georgia, the town, the churches, and, fascinatingly, the many church signs and billboards that display evangelical messages. Most of the churches are still segregated by choice. Yet you cannot tell by eyeballing which constituency posted the religious slogans. A shared appeal to fear of Divine punishment for your aberrations, however, does not translate into anything much else that’s shared, it seems.
Noted.
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MAYA BENTON, EDUCATED AT BROWN, Harvard University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, was faced with a tough choice for this exhibition. Many of the questions and subject matters raised by the extensive body of images and their implications had to be sifted through to cull a manageable display. More importantly, how do you tell a story that is not entirely your own? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? I have previously asked these questions here for other visual artists.
Maya Benton, Curator, Lecturer and Writer
In the current exhibition the decision was made – successfully – to let the subjects of the portraits speak for themselves, with transcriptions next to the images. It is then equally important to look at the photographs AND read the accompanying texts, particularly in instances where Laub had repeated contact with individual students across time, allowing us to be witness to changes in perspective caused by concurrent events. Believe me, it does not feel like the usual chore of digesting endless artist statements. These are living testimonials of voices that we rarely get to hear, and help to do both for us: to acknowledge stereotypes and perhaps to combat them.
A substantial amount of general information about the history and politics of segregation in our public school systems is displayed in additional showcases. Getting a refresher about the path from Plessy v, Ferguson to Brown v. Board of Education doesn’t hurt. What does hurt is reading the evidence of communal complicity in maintaining segregative practices even during the years of the Obama Administration: teachers’ comments on students’ essays bemoaning the divided Proms, classmates notes decrying calls for change as in the face of Southern tradition and so on. The displays are superbly assembled.
Note from classmate
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“One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.” –Theodor W. Adorno, (1959)
WHEN ADORNO WROTE in 1959 about the (refusal of) working through the past, he had fascism and in particular the guilty German people foremost in mind. OJMCHE is on target when the museum allows us to see how some of this can be translated to the memory culture of slavery and racism in this country as well, I believe. What is striking though, and that is what this exhibition certainly has made me think about, is how much those who used to enjoy the advantages of segregation and relative power in society, want return to the past, rather than forget it, never mind come to terms with it.
Public Shaming, Vidalia, Georgia, 2013. This Country. This Century. Photographed by Gillian Laub.
For large groups of Whites, power is perceived to be a birthright, and resentment surges when one sees one’s own displacement or descent as directly caused by the ascent of specific others – women who work, migrants who come into the country, African-Americans who take over the Prom. Unfortunately, these emotions are often stirred by easily manipulated beliefs rather than facts: if your job is gone, it is easier to blame the women who you see working all around you for displacing you, than questioning an economic system that relies on automation and outsourcing to continue to reap profits. If you believe that South American migrants will deprive you of your share of limited resources you don’t even look at the facts that show this to be untrue.
Those emotions mobilize: You see yourself attacked as a class, no longer as a failing individual, and that unites you with the many who share your view. Rather than apportioning blame to yourself as not being competitive, you can blame a shared out-group enemy – making for these dangerous movements that are now sprouting across the US, movements that are willing to consider even violence to defend what they believe is ripped from them.
Scientific studies have shown this to be true nowhere more so than in the American South. In their book Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics Avidit Acharya, a political scientist at Stanford, Matt Blackwell, a professor of government at Harvard and Maya Sen, a professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, link current conservative attitudes towards gun rights, death penalty and racial resentment in parts of the South directly to a slave holding history.
In a nutshell: Southern Cotton and tobacco industries thrived on chattel slavery, since those crops were extremely labor intense. After the Civil War, those regions’ economic survival depended on finding ways to continue to exploit Black labor. Anti-Black laws and practices, from Jim Crow to the undermining of education and participation in the political sphere, served that purpose. But there is another important mechanism at work, called behavioral path dependenceby the authors: Generation after generation passes down and reinforces beliefs about racial inequality and the need to impede progress of those deemed inferior. Children learn from their parents and teach their own children, all the while being backed up by local institutions that echoe the value judgments and create spaces for segregation. After slavery was abolished and with it Ante Bellum Laws, the subjugation of Blacks now relies increasingly on cultural mechanisms.
“…things like racialized rhetoric from the top down can have really, really damaging and long-term impacts. So things like talking about people in dehumanizing language, institutionalizing policies that treat people as less than human. Those things can really create attitudes that then persist for a long time.
.. to be able to kind of preserve the same structure, economic structure that we had with slavery it required a lot more kind of local vigilance to kind of enact these policies. So you had a kind of creation of a culture, a maintenance of a culture that required things like extrajudicial violence, it required basically training and indoctrinating young children into thinking about the world in certain ways.“
Shelby on her grandmother’s car. Mount Vernon, Georgia, 2008
And this culture is incredibly resistant to change, proceeding at a glacial pace. In other words, federal interventions, like the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act (or what’s left of it) can address behavioral discrimination, but they do nothing with regard to attitudes. Children who are indoctrinated from an early age will carry their parents’ attitudes to the next generation.
For change to happen, we must pursue the one public cultural mechanism at our own disposal: education. This is whatSouthern Ritesdoes on so many levels and so successfully.
Gillian Laub, artist, Maya Benton, curator.
In the true tradition of concerned photography, the early documentary approach to describing the injustice of the world, it educates through imagery, through text, through augmenting materials. It does so effectively because it taps into something beyond our thoughts. Show me one person who is not going to leave that exhibition emotionally riled, to varying degrees. It elicits empathy, pure and simple, an opening to relating in new ways. I just hope every high schooler in town has a chance to visit!
Southern Rites
From the International Center of Photography Photographs by Gillian Laub
Let’s just look at the BRIGHT side. That’s what the views suggest – there are so many spots lit up. That was true for the landscape as photographed 2 days ago, which had this weird partial lighting when the sun peeked through the clouds.
But it is also present in what is on offer this week in the cultural landscape – I will post longer essays in days to come on two of the three things I urge you to visit, and photographs for the third. Each one in its own right is a testament to resilience, finding joy in hard places, fashioning the world with new perspectives and refusing to give in. In other words, they help us look at the bright side.
For now I recommend, highly, a visit to OJMCHE to see their new exhibitionSouthern Rites. The expressive photographs of Gillian Laub, thoughtfully and confidently curated by Maya Benton and The Center for International Photography, introduce us to a new generation of young Black people living in the American South, their losses, challenges and perseverance. The exhibition also offers welcome education on some of the legal issues involved with inter-racial relations.
February 5, 2020 – May 24, 2020 724 NW Davis Street Portland OR 97209 Opening on First Thursday.
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Also of interest, starting First Thursday as well, is an exhibition at Gallery 114 that will communicate joy. Ebullience, initiated by Gallery 114 member Joanne Krug and her husband, displays both 2D and 3D art created by artists living with intellectual or developmental disability. The artists have found a place to be creative at the Portland Art and Learning Studio, part of Albertina Kerr, under the caring and smartly involved directorship of Chandra Glaeseman. I can’t wait to report in detail on the work that is done there, and the art that will be on display at 114.
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The third recommendation regards two 50 minute-long performances this weekend of How to Have Fun in A Civil War, created and performed by Ifrah Mansour (Somalia/U.S.). Offered by Boom Arts in conjunction with the 30th Annual Cascade Festival of African Film, the multimedia performance event will make your heart softer.
Mansour revisits her childhood memories during the 1991 Somali civil war to confront violent history with humor, and provide a voice for the global refugee stories of children. How to Have Fun in a Civil War, is a one-act multimedia play, which explores war from an idyllic viewpoint of a seven-year-old Somali refugee girl. The play weaves puppetry, poetry, videos and multiple oral stories taken from community interviews to tell a captivating story about resilience while pushing the audience to engage in a healing process that is still raw for survivors of the war.
Here is a more detailed review. And here is a video of her explaining her project.
February 8th at 1:00pm & 9th at 5:00pm – PCC Cascade, Moriarity Hall Theatre, on the corner of N. Killingsworth and Albina ( enter on Albina)
About a 5 minute walk from my house is a small neighborhood park, a refuge for kids, dogs and the rest of us. A patch of old-growth forest, it has a path circling the periphery which gives you a good 20 minute stroll and leaves the interior protected, for deer, coyotes, kids’ forts and all. On balmy spring evenings at dusk the high schoolers or L&C students hang out with Today’s Herbal Choice – and the whole place pleasantly smells like those initials. But I digress.
A few years back a tiny wooden fairy house appeared, lovingly constructed and painted, with a house number and doors and windows that could be opened. Then another, and another, I think at its peak there were over 10 of them, parked under or affixed to the trees. Kids would bring little toys to decorate, and dogs would ignore those, if you were lucky. A walk in the wood was no longer boring for the young ones and everyone had a blast to spot new houses. Well, not everyone. There was a serious discussion in the neighborhood association about leaving nature to be nature and not make it a kitschy theme park, and that was that. Everything disappeared overnight.
This spring, a spark of defiance appeared at the bottom of the trees. Small painted stones can be found in locations close to the path, and for those of us walking there daily it has once again become either a bit of joy at the creativity of the young artists and our own sleuthing for new ones, or a source of dismay that there is yet again artificiality introduced into nature.
(Some of you might remember that I have argued along similar lines in an essay on Botanic Gardens, but here we are talking about a sort of playground (albeit a nature one) for families. https://www.orartswatch.org/art-among-the-plants-a-lament/)
The presence and fate of these stones might be under dispute – the way twigs have been affixed in what I am about to introduce next should not be controversial – it is simply ingenious.
Meet eyesasbigasplates – a duo of women photographers who do spectacular work with older people who participate in creating their “costumes” from materials found in their natural surroundings. They introduce themselves and their work here:
We are a Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth. Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Since 2011 the artist duo has portrayed seniors in Norway, Finland, France, US, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden, Japan and Greenland. Each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists.
I adore everything about the idea (and admire the photographers’ technical skills as well – the images are of outstanding quality.) Collaborating with a group that usually falls by the wayside, making them active participants in their portraiture, using natural materials in such inventive fashion and creating portraits that simultaneously crystallize the person’s characteristic face and hint at something more fleetingly, almost magical – it’s just terrific. Why don’t I have ideas like that???? And why am I not the wisdom-radiating rhubarb lady??? All the portrait images are from this website: https://eyesasbigasplates.com/list-of-works/
A big shout out to T.L. who introduced me to this work.
Best fit for music today (magic in the forest!) happens to be one of my favorite operas of all times: Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Here is a Prague production from 1970, conducted by Bogumil Gregor.
