seeing & being seen

Errol Morris “ON with red” illustration, above, and “OFF with blue” illustration, below

I realize that I forgot to update here with the second Errol Morris installment about his journey to the Crimea to figure out which Fenton photograph came first - cannonballs or no cannonballs. But no fear, the third installment has just come out - so, with no further ado, read it here! How can we not applaud his obsessiveness? Exhaustive conversations on forensic photography are detailed, the forces of gravity invoked, rocks are named Marmaduke and Lionel, and, finally, a reasonably conclusive answer is provided… only to be appropriately tempered with:

POSTSCRIPT: History is always incomplete. There is always the possibility that new historical evidence can be found. A safe crammed with documents, photographs in a hatbox, a packet of letters tied with a faded yellow-ribbon. I spoke with Dennis Purcell recently and asked, “Do you think these essays will put this issue – the issue of which came first – finally to rest.” Dennis replied, “No. I don’t think so. There could be some guy who reads your essays, writes in, and says: ‘You know, there aren’t just two photographs. I found another. There are actually three.’ ”

Cameras demand that their owners (the ones who are hooked on them) keep on taking snaps, that they produce more and more redundant images. This photo-mania involving the eternal recurrence of the same (or of something very similar) leads eventually to the point where people taking snaps feel they have gone blind: Drug dependency takes over. People taking snaps can now only see the world through the camera and in photographic categories. They are not ‘in charge of’ taking photographs, they are consumed by the greed of the camera, they have become an extension to the button of their camera. Their actions are automatic camera functions . . . What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

Vilém Flusser, from Towards a Philosophy of Photography

I found, and promptly purchased, a delectable little family photo album at a flea market a few weeks ago, and finally got around to some scanning this morning. The handwritten dates range from 1925 to 1950. It seems to be a New England farm family - there are a few wonderful headshots, as well as some fantastically whimsical documentation of farm life towards the beginning… the tone becomes more somber mid-album with the uniforms of the war, and some pictures disappear from the pages… and then the last few pages are enigmatically filled with repetitive documentation of 1943 snowdrifts.

Frances Édouard Isidore Buguet Fluidic Effect 1875 (left)
Eugène Thiébault Henri Robin and a Specter 1863 (right)

I seem to bring up spirit photography in class all too often - as an enthralling example of early analog manipulation via double exposures, darkroom interventions, etc. (not to belittle, of course, any actual supernatural appearances documented in-camera). The Museum of Hoaxes (which I am, improbably enough, linking to 2 days in a row) has a lovely story about P.T. Barnum’s skepticism, in which he testified in 1869 against a prominent spirit photographer, William Mumler, by having the photographer produce a studio image of Barnum himself with none other than Abraham Lincoln floating lazily in the background, thereby proving conclusively that any competent photographer could summon a ghost.

Abraham Bogardus P.T. Barnum & Abraham Lincoln 1869
(I’m not sure that is the exact title and I couldn’t find a larger image)

I bring this up yet again in the context of recent discussions about lying and constructing falsehoods using photography, and because I just saw a link, via Boing-boing, to the work of Austin-based photographer William Hundley, who has a vastly different recipe for ghost simulation in his work, involving little more than a mundane sheet prop and a physical jump. And because I love this spirit (yes, spirit) of random obsession in photography.

William Hundley Cloud 2006

William Hundley Venus 2006

From the ever-useful photoquotes.com:

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.
-Lewis Hine

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.
- Harold Evans

Some good discussion on lying in photography has been taking place in class recently, from the charming and, dare I say, reasonably transparent Cottingley fairies and jackalopes to the more interesting, albeit slippery, philosophical underpinnings of truths and untruths in photography as a whole.

Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright Frances and The Fairies 1917

Jackalope found here.

There is obviously some dramatic (but far from unprecedented) potential for playing with the lines between truth/fiction/untruth with the pixel-level power of new technologies, particularly in a sudden proliferation of algorithms that analyze patterns/similarities in images and use multiples to re-create a scene, such as the Tourist Remover. Can’t get a clean shot of that statue/monument because of pesky tourists, strollers, joggers, and dogs? Can’t be bothered to wait for an aesthetically “clean” moment? Go ahead and get those nettlesome visual irritants in the frame - fire off a couple of shots, and then average them away into the background! It’s like they never existed - and you can live happily with your Pure Photographic Proof of what was never that apparently quiet, monument-gazing moment of visual awareness. Lies! Monstrous jackalopes of photographic lies! Any more of a lie, however, than waiting patiently for 2 hours, camera at the ready, for a 30 second interlude in which you might take a picture devoid of ambling pedestrians?

See also Scene Completion Using Millions of Photographs.

Harry Callahan Eleanor, Chicago 1949

Harry Callahan Eleanor and Barbara, Lake Michigan 1953

Returned last week from a brief stint at Atlanta Celebrates Photography, in which the city annually becomes pleasantly overwhelmed with the photographic image - from talks to placemats to a variety of interesting shows. The High Museum (which, sadly, had a dearth of photography on display in the contemporary collection at large - the Jeff Wall seen in the background in previous post and… well, that’s about all) contributed to the photo extravaganza with a large exhibition of Harry Callahan’s photographs of his wife, Eleanor. Callahan’s long photographic love affair with the seemingly ever-patient Eleanor is a fascinating survey of photographic technique, formalism, and experimentation, not to mention a long marriage and an indefatigable model. From the NYTimes review of the show:

“I never refused when he wanted to take a picture,” said Eleanor Callahan, the 91-year-old widow of the photographer Harry Callahan. “I never complained, whatever I was doing. If he said: ‘Come quick, Eleanor — there’s a good light,’ I was right there.”

…when fixed in the coolly minimalist eye of his camera, she assumed a dizzying range of identities. When she is lounging naked, in a forest or at home, her curves may suggest an abstract volume or a 19th-century odalisque. Standing in an overcoat on a city street or alongside trees, she can resemble a stern Soviet worker or an impish sprite.

My personal favorites of this mind-bogglingly extensive homage are the large format landscape views, as above, where Eleanor and their daughter Barbara - almost always centered, invariably engaged with the camera - are dwarfed by the surrounding landscape.

Also on display was a much-too-small nod to Malick Sidibé.

Malick Sidibé Vues du dos 2002

All from the High Museum in Atlanta:

Andres Serrano is stirring up the waters again.

From the NYTimes:

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.

… Paula Cooper, Mr. Serrano’s New York dealer, whose gallery in Chelsea exhibited his “History of Sex” photographs in 1997, said she was horrified by the attack in Sweden. “Art inflames people,” she said.