Category: Photo History

San Francisco (belated comments)

Jeff

I saw several shows when I was in San Francisco several weeks ago. It was weird to go to a city during a conference (CCCC) and not attend, but there has been very little of interest to me at that conference for several years. I’ve presented there many times, and while it’s nice to see friends I just couldn’t justify paying the fees just for that. My days as a composition teacher, I’m afraid, are drawing to a close. I might dig into that a little at a later date, but for now I wanted to talk about some of the shows that really bothered me. First up, at San Francisco Camerawork there was a video installation that sent me wandering out of the room quickly during the first piece I saw. The description of “Test Patterns: Recent Video From South Africa” seems interesting enough:

Video is a distinctly post apartheid medium. Artists in the United States began working with video in the 1960s, but South Africans hadn’t even seen television until 1976. The government had banned it previously, fearing it would expose the country to the dangerous ideas of the non-apartheid world. And it was not until the 1980s that television was available in any language other than English or Afrikaans. South African national identity under apartheid, as it was portrayed on TV, belonged strictly to the whites.

The breakaway of video from its exclusive use as a television broadcast tool and into the hands of activists and artists is significant in South Africa. If television had been the preserve of white national identity, video became a way to develop diverse narratives about South Africa’s past and to recalibrate contemporary ideas of citizenship and belonging in the post apartheid era.

The exhibition will be presented in two parts. Part One explores ideas of memory and identity under colonialism and apartheid. Part Two surveys post apartheid South Africa as it struggles to define a new national identity amidst the significant challenges of skyrocketing unemployment, HIV/AIDS, corruption, instability, migration and xenophobia

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Nostalgia is Death

Jeff
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I was really interested in seeing this show when we passed through California. “New Topographics” was a pivotal influence on me (both as a show and as a movement). It’s waves were still rippling when I first studied photography in college all those years ago. As Colin Westerbeck recounts in his “On the Road and in the Street” essay in Frizot’s New History of Photography (1994), exhibitions can be seminal:

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August Sander

Jeff
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Architect, Professor Poelzig, Berlin, c.1928

Almost as remarkable as the photos themselves is the fact that this is the first ever solo exhibit by August Sander in the United States (the revered German photographer died in 1964). And for this, my fellow Minnesotans, we must thank Mr. Weinstein–because, at least for a few weeks, you don’t have to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a Sander print. You merely need to make your way to Weinstein Gallery on West 46th Street (there is always parking right in front) and push open the door. Most likely, you’ll be alone in the space and surrounded by the paper-people who Sander, so many years ago, labored to see “as they are and not as they should or could be.” You’ve got until April 12th friends. It’s always free. Don’t miss this one.

Citipages

We didn’t, and we were alone. That makes it even more affecting. The most incredible thing was Sander’s Christmas card from 1939, the centennial of photography.

Poverty Chic

Jeff1 Comment
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Page from Children of the Poor (1892) via Google Book Search

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What would it have been like to see the photograph called “I Scrubs” — Riis’s portrait of 9-year-old Katie, who kept house for her brothers and sisters — and know that she was living somewhere in the city, her life shrunken to little more than a sense of economic duty?

There is nothing that we in the 21st century can do for Katie except to wonder whether she was ever allowed to outgrow her premature elderliness. But to Riis’s audience, Katie was the living present, the very burden of their concern. What was she like? How did she sound? What could it mean to be 9 years old and so ancient already? These are questions it would have seemed natural to ask the photographer who had asked Katie to pose for him.

To us, of course, Riis’s showmanship would have seemed like intolerable distractions from the purity of the suffering his images convey. The last thing these photographs need, from the modern point of view, is an interlocutor, especially one who wants to tell moralizing anecdotes or characterize his subjects by race.

From the distance of 120 years, the mute testimony of Riis’s photographs seems eloquent enough. We stare at them and know that though times may have changed in Mulberry Bend, the camera does not have far to look to find suffering that is every bit as dire.

NYT Editorial

There is no mention of any sort of exigence for this odd editorial pronouncement. I find it particularly interesting because there are no illustrations for the article. The images are so pure (not re-engraved as book illustrations, nor hand-colored as website widgets as found here) that they are invisible to the general public. They only exist in the minds of the hyper-educated NYT reader who has of course seen this somewhat obscure image from Riis’s second book that has been out of print since 1892, reprinted as an aesthetic museum piece. Of course the presence of the image as a component of an argument against poverty taints it as “mere rhetoric.”

The Centenary of Photography

Jeff

The Academy, invited to take part in this ceremony marking the centenary of a truly French invention, indeed one of the most admirable to emerge in the course of the nineteenth century, could not fail to pay its own respects tour great compatriots who hit on the principle of photography and were the first to fix an image of visible objects by employing the very light those objects reflect.

We, however, are a Society devoted particularly to the cult of Letters, which at first glance show no obvious affinity to photography, nor do they appear to be more affected by it in spirit or practice than by many other products of human ingenuity.

We all know that drawing, painting, and the imitative arts as a who were able to exploit this power of a sensitized plate to capture forms instantaneously. Directly the process of fixation made it possible to study, at one’s leisure, beings in motion, a great many errors of observation came to light: the renderings of certain artist, persuaded that they had caught a horse’s gallop or a bird’s flight, were proved, but this means, to be utterly fanciful. Thanks to photography, the eye grew accustomed to anticipate what it should see, and to see it; and it learned not to see nonexistent things which, hitherto, it had seen so clearly.

Yet, this possession of the means of reproducing natural and living appearances through a simple transformation of physical energy seems to have had no certain effect on Letters nor to offer them any marked advantage.

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Holgrave the Daguerreotypist on Historical Consciousness

Jeff

“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of the previous conversation. “It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of an old dead giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you what slaves we are to Death, if we give the matter the right word!”

“But I do not see it,” observed Phoebe.

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