Mid-Life Crisis
Labels: Apple, Technology
“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: Apple, Technology
“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake, are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”Well, the problem is that the scenario Liz chooses is self-serving and virtually non-existent. It is a fabrication of people like her Dad who approved the torture of prisoners regardless of the circumstances. This is not an episode of "24"; it is real life. Liz labels the prisoner in her example a "terrorist" - which of course enhances her rhetorical slight of hand even more. And, of course, she relies on the Orwellian subterfuge of "enhanced interrogation" instead of the actual legal term for the "techniques" she and her Dad endorse - torture.
Clips of Ms. Cheney’s on-air smack-downs with liberal adversaries have become viral sensations among conservative bloggers — most recently, an interruption-fest with Sam Donaldson over the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods on ABC’s “This Week.”The problem, of course, is that while Liz may be resolute, she is also wrong. It is not just Donaldson's friends and acquaintances who think water boarding is torture. Liz might ask, say, Attorney General Eric Holder, who was quite clear about the matter in his confirmation hearings last January. But Holder is a member of the Obama administration and so clearly a pinko. Let's give Liz the benefit of the doubt.
When Mr. Donaldson said that everyone he knows thinks torture and waterboarding are wrong, Ms. Cheney shot back: “Waterboarding isn’t torture, and we can go down that path. The lack of seriousness here is important."
"SEN. LEVIN: All right. We won't go into that.I doubt that General Maples is a liberal pinko of the sort that Ms. Cheney and her Dad so love to deride. I doubt he is among the friends to whom Donaldson was referring. But perhaps testifying under oath might not clear her hurdle of "seriousness." Who knows?
Let me go into -- since you don't know what indemnification means, let me ask you a different question. I'll ask General Maples about this. It has to do with the waterboarding issue, General. Director McConnell's already commented on that in a different form.
General, do you believe that waterboarding is consistent with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions?
LTG MAPLES: No, sir, I don't.
SEN. LEVIN: Do you believe it's humane?
LTG MAPLES: No, sir. I think it would go beyond that bound."
"I was always a big believer in - when I was doing organizing before I went to law school - that focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people's lives is what really makes a difference and that having protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism or something, generally, is not really going to make much of a difference."Does our good president really think that all those folks who were marching in Pittsburgh just come out every so often for a good shout? Does he think that they are not already engaged at home? Does he think they are waiting on he and his cronies to do something politically or socially progressive? Has he considered that - just possibly - working in one's community might prompt one to go out and join political protests? That perhaps the two might be related, because seeing how "global capitalism" works close to home makes "community organizers" angry at all of the ways in which unfettered free markets play havoc with people's lives? Can the president really be that dim?
Labels: politics, portraits, propaganda, protests, Sternfeld
Labels: Charles Mingus, jazz, Music, politics, race
Labels: Nachtwey
Labels: political economy, propaganda, protests, Stiglitz
Labels: Prizes
Labels: science
The Wall Street JournalThis short essay appeared in yesterday's edition accompanied by this slide show. Something to note - according to the credit Sante has a new book on photography due out next month.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2009, 9:46 P.M. ET
Seeing Beauty in Our Shadows
Robert Frank's 'The Americans,' unpopular when first published, has shaped the way America looks at itself.
By Luc Sante
Robert Frank’s book of photographs "The Americans" was first published in the United States 50 years ago, in 1959. The pictures had been taken in the course of several trips by car across the country in 1955 and 1956. They show people—old and young, black and white, rich and poor—in bars, hotels, luncheonettes, parks, offices, factories; at funerals, casinos, parades, cocktail parties, rodeos; on streets and roads. They also show settings without people: gas stations, barber shops, newsstands, dime stores. There are jukeboxes, cars, buses, motorcycles, and each of the book's four sections is announced by a photograph prominently featuring an American flag. Some of the people are happy, some not; some of the settings are desolate, others opulent. The book wouldn't be mistaken for a brochure meant to sell the country's image abroad, but neither does it constitute an indictment. It is a poetic portrait by a photographer to whom all of it was new and who took nothing for granted. At the time, however, the United States didn't recognize itself.
Initially unable to find an American publisher, Frank, a Swiss émigré, first saw his book issued in 1958 in France in an edition featuring a cover drawing by Saul Steinberg and, on the pages facing the photographs, an anthology of critical texts about the U.S. by writers ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to John Dos Passos. The book received only glancing attention. The first American edition, a proper one containing no extraneous images and no text apart from skeletal captions and a brief, lyrical forward by Jack Kerouac, was issued by Grove Press, then the preeminent publisher of all things daring or avant-garde, from Victorian erotica to Samuel Beckett.
Aside from a brief notice in the New Yorker that called it "a beautiful social comment" expressed with "brutal sensitivity," the critical reception was savage. "Utterly misleading! A degradation of a nation!" thundered the photographer and editor Minor White in his magazine, Aperture. The book caused such a furor at Popular Photography that the editors assigned no fewer than seven critics to review it, almost all of whom agreed that it was "a wart-covered picture of America" by "a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption," and who was "willing to let his pictures be used to spread hatred among nations." The book sold only about 1,100 copies, and almost immediately went out of print.Fifty years later, it is the focus of an exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans" (Sept. 22 to Dec. 27), which originated at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. The original catalog is over 500 pages long—many times the size of the original book. (Full disclosure: I contributed an essay to the catalog, and next month will be participating in a discussion at the Met in conjunction with the show.) "The Americans" routinely appears near the top of every list of essential books of photography, no matter how short. It has had nine separate editions, not counting those in foreign languages. How did 50 years transform Frank's work from pariah to classic? Fifty years have added somewhat more ambiguity to the national self-image; perhaps we are more capable of seeing the depth of shadows and the beauty of doubt.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924. After apprenticing with local photographers, he sailed to New York in 1947, where he was hired by Harper's Bazaar. In the following years, he traveled extensively in South America and Europe, taking pictures. In 1953 he met Walker Evans, who encouraged him to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship. His application was successful; the fellowship, renewed once, underwrote the trips he documented in "The Americans." Evans had abundant experience with road photography. As a contract employee of the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration he had traveled extensively through the South in the late 1930s, ostensibly documenting the crisis of American agriculture and its relief, but really looking for the sort of rough-hewn native vernacular beauty that was everywhere along the road but seldom if ever noticed, let alone acknowledged. His own first book was called "American Photographs" (1938). He clearly saw Frank as an heir to his vision.
Indeed, there are remarkable similarities between their two books. Both feature a lot of ordinary people in unguarded moments, and a lot of the sort of expressive but unassuming commercial décor that everyone took for granted before that landscape was overwhelmed by corporate logos. Both are moody, terse and passionate about leveling the distinction between high and low; both avoid simple anecdotes and tidy resolutions. The similarities extend to individual choices of subject here and there, as if Frank were deliberately answering Evans. The possible presumption of their titles leads in different directions, however. Evans was announcing an American modernism based on native, non-academic styles quite distinct from any European models. Frank was presenting the view of a foreigner experiencing the length and breadth of the country for the first time and posing certain questions, if not exactly drawing conclusions.
The extent to which Frank's status as a foreigner determined his vision is open to debate. Certainly there were native-born photographers at the time who shared his aesthetic and general outlook, although they tended to be New Yorkers and perhaps could be seen as equally foreign to the vast expanse of the country. There is a consistency to Frank's approach and choice of subject matter that links the pictures in "The Americans" to the photos he took in Bolivia and Spain and Wales and France; he does not seem to have shot much in his native Switzerland after leaving it for good. Frank's foreignness may have influenced his critics, in any case. The 1950s were a famously nervous time in America, awash in Cold War terrors and attempting to assuage them with grimly sunny boosterism. The most widely broadcast currents in art photography tended to be fastidiously uncontroversial: Ansel Adams's Western landscapes, Eliot Porter's nature photos; and Edward Steichen's great success as photo curator at the Museum of Modern Art, the thematic exhibition "The Family of Man" (1955), which was hardly a disgrace to photography (Frank, in fact, was included) but wouldn't have been out of place at a World's Fair. Frank may not have been alone as a maker of fugitive, spare, sometimes bleak photos, but the others didn't have published books.
Walker Evans did. But the culture of social critique with which that work was associated had passed most of a generation earlier and fallen into opprobrium since then, because of the looming specter of Communism. In the 1950s, Evans was an employee of Fortune magazine and going through a fallow period in his personal work. In stark contrast to the 1930s, when Evans and his collaborator James Agee could propose to Fortune a study of destitute tenant farmers in Alabama (the magazine turned it down but it was published as a book, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," in 1941), views of American society that couldn't be proudly displayed to the people of the Soviet Union didn't get much of an airing.
And the critics couldn't have missed the cover of "The Americans," on which was reproduced "Trolley—New Orleans, 1955," which shows a row of windows of a conveyance headed left: blurred white person, scowling white woman, dressed-up white boy and his vaguely distressed younger sister, and, at the rear, a black man with a look of infinite sadness. Although no contemporaneous critic mentioned it to the best of my knowledge, Frank portrayed quite a lot of black people in his book: elegant mourners in South Carolina, a turbaned mystic bearing a cross on the bank of the Mississippi, a dashing couple of motorcyclists in Indianapolis, a very dark nurse holding a very white baby whose expression matches hers. On the whole, African-Americans come across in the book as possessing somewhat more grace and style than their white counterparts. You didn't see that very often in published photography before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Furthermore, the mainstream aesthetics of the time could only see the pictures' oblique, asymmetrical approach. Their fluid edges and melting grays were received as messy, even squalid. The refusal to present sharply delineated, self-contained, centered figures was to the eyes of the time as troubling as the failure to provide clear-cut moral anecdotes and examples for emulation. The pictures were a photographic counterpart to beatnik poetry and bebop jazz and Abstract Expressionist painting and European art movies, none of which got much respect in the conventional press of the time, either. Both their form and their function were suspect in a time when uncertainty was as good as treason.
Anyway, it is difficult for us to see "The Americans" through the eyes of 1959, because its influence has been so pervasive, persistent and deep that it is impossible to think of the photography of at least the ensuing 30 or 40 years without reference to it. Our vision, collectively, has been permanently altered by it, and this is true even for people who've never seen it but have been exposed to its style and outlook at second or third remove. The book may only have sold 1,000 copies initially, but word got around nevertheless. By the time of its second edition, in 1968, its influence was already widespread. Frank's work at the very least gave courage and inspiration to like-minded younger colleagues such as Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Danny Lyon, and Bruce Davidson, while it was formative for the following generation. There isn't a documentary photographer who came of age in the 1970s and '80s who didn't absorb the book and reflect its lessons in some way, and that includes such disparate figures as Stephen Shore, Sylvia Plachy, Eugene Richards, James Nachtwey, Thomas Roma, Gilles Peress, Nan Goldin, and Mitch Epstein.
Frank essentially abandoned conventional still photography not long after the book came out. He went on to make films, as well as montages and assemblages that employ photographs that are physically altered, sometimes violently. The ultimate success of "The Americans" seems to have cut him much deeper than its transient early failure—he didn't want to replicate the book, for one thing, and yet every picture he subsequently took would lie in its shadow. Although much of his later work is significant—some of the movies, in particular, are extraordinary, such as "Pull My Daisy" (1959), "Me and My Brother" (1967), and "C'est vrai/One Hour" (1992)—Frank remains so completely identified with "The Americans" that it has threatened to overwhelm his entire life and career. He has been, as they say in entertainment, branded by it, and that's not necessarily helpful for an artist who wishes to change and grow.
The overt influence of the book on the young may be on the wane these days, in large part because of the different possibilities and demands of digital photography. Among art photographers there may be more interest in manipulation, narrative, scale and deliberate control of the image. In documentary photography, on the other hand, its influence is deep-rooted and seemingly permanent. "The Americans" might be said to have brought agnosticism to photography; it forcefully introduced doubt, as expressed by asymmetry, overlaps, tilts, radical cropping, out-of-focus foregrounds and the use of massed shadows and pulsing glare. That quality has come to be synonymous with truth-telling, even if it has been abused over the years. Until someone comes up with a transformative new way of taking pictures that can convince us it has an even stronger mimetic relationship to the way we actually see, it is likely to stand as such. Even if art photographers are for the nonce more interested in creative ways to concoct falsehoods, the legacy of "The Americans" remains evident and even necessary in journalistic photography. More than a subjective portrait of a particular country at a particular time, the book is an essential treatise of visual vocabulary.
—Luc Sante, the author of "Low Life" and "Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005," teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College. His new book, "Folk Photography," will be published next month.
Labels: jazz, Luc Sante, Robert Frank
FOUR YEAR LEGAL BATTLE ENDS WITH SUBSTANTIAL DONATIONS TO CIVIL & HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS
CAE Defense Fund donated to Center for Constitutional Rights & New York Civil Liberties Union
Buffalo, NY—After a widely watched four-year legal battle, the CAE Defense Fund was officially dissolved last week, with its remainder of unexpended funds donated in two substantial gifts to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).
The CAE Defense Fund was originally created as a mechanism to raise funds for legal bills incurred by Dr. Steven Kurtz and Dr. Robert Ferrell in what its members argued was a politically motivated attack by the Department of Justice—one which threatened the constitutional and fundamental rights not only of the two defendants, but also of everyone, due to legal precedents that would have been set by an unfavorable outcome.
In response, thousands of people worldwide organized demonstrations and raised money for the two men’s legal defense through fundraisers and a variety of other grassroots efforts.
The fund was also heavily supported by internationally renowned artists including Sol Lewitt, Richard Serra, Hans Haacke, Cindy Sherman, Carl Andre, Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith, Sam Durant, Mark Dion, Jeremy Deller, and many others, who donated work to an auction at Paula Cooper Gallery in April 2005. Other artists such as Chuck Close, Walid Raad, and Ed Ruscha made substantial direct cash contributions. In all, the Fund raised approximately $350,000.
Drs. Kurtz and Ferrell were indicted for mail and wire fraud in June of 2004. Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for those charges was increased from five years to twenty years in jail. After an arduous four-year-long struggle, in April of 2008 the indictment against Kurtz was finally dismissed by Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara as “insufficient on its face”—meaning that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as “fact”) were true, they would not constitute a crime. Ferrell pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in October 2007 after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered during the course of the case prevented him from continuing the struggle.
When the case was dismissed instead of going to trial, approximately $108,930 remained in the fund.
“Had the case gone to a jury trial, that amount wouldn’t have been enough to cover Steve’s legal bills through the trial, let alone appeals in the event of a guilty verdict” explained Edmund Cardoni, Executive Director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo NY, and the Fund’s fiscal administrator. “When the case was finally thrown out, we were thrilled, but we were presented with a new problem. The committee was very conscious of our ethical responsibility to make sure this money would be used in a way that honored the original intent of the many people who gave money to the fund, and the artists who donated art works to the fundraising auction.”
In keeping with that purpose—to defend our fundamental constitutional rights—the CAE Defense Fund and Trial Fund committees, in consultation with artists, curators, and others centrally involved in the fundraising efforts, voted to disburse the remaining funds by awarding 80 percent ($87,150) to the CCR, and 20 percent ($21,780) to the NYCLU.
CAE Defense Fund coordinator Lucia Sommer said, “We are extremely happy that the case is over, and that the remaining funds can be passed on to organizations that have such a distinguished record of defending not only the U.S. Constitution, but also the human rights and dignity of all people.”
Added Kurtz, “I always promised everyone who donated their time, labor and hard-earned money to our defense that this struggle would do more than demonstrate to the Justice Department that the art, science, academic and activist communities would not be intimidated by its authoritarian tactics. We knew the legal precedent set by the case was critical to preventing what happened to Bob and me from happening to others, and it’s incredibly rewarding to know that these funds can now be used to defend others who do not have the kind of support we had.”
Representatives of both organizations expressed gratitude for the donations.
“The NYCLU is very pleased to receive this generous contribution from the CAE Legal Defense Fund to continue our work in restoring, defending, and upholding our constitutional and fundamental rights, including artistic and academic freedoms,” said Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, congratulated the CAE Defense Fund “and its many dedicated and principled supporters for your extraordinary victory—a victory for our country and the Constitution as much as it is for the individuals.” He further stated that, “The CCR is honored to use the tremendous support of the Fund's donors to continue the fight against repression of dissent and illegal detentions—work which, unfortunately, is still sorely needed.”
Labels: Best Shots
This is a headline from this report in The New York Times this morning. The lesson, Max, is that you can spend months and months cravenly trying to 'moderate' a policy proposal - to the point that is will leave all established players un-harmed and not mitigate the actual problem that, say, millions of citizens lack access to health care - and the Republicans will let you dangle in the wind. Bi-partisanship is a fool's game. It is a recipe for anemic policy. And it is, as I've argued here before, dangerous to democracy."Baucus Offers Health Plan
but Lacks G.O.P. Support"
Labels: bi-partisanship, politics
Labels: New Blogs
Labels: political economy, Stiglitz
“Yet recessions do happen. Why? In the 1970s the leading freshwater macroeconomist, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, argued that recessions were caused by temporary confusion: workers and companies had trouble distinguishing overall changes in the level of prices because of inflation or deflation from changes in their own particular business situation. And Lucas warned that any attempt to fight the business cycle would be counterproductive: activist policies, he argued, would just add to the confusion.Interestingly, The Times has also been running a series [1] [2] [3] [4] of Op-Ed pieces by Barbara Ehrenreich over the past couple of months. In these she reports on how the non-recession is working down there among the vacationers. Maybe we should consider them post cards?
By the 1980s, however, even this severely limited acceptance of the idea that recessions are bad things had been rejected by many freshwater economists. Instead, the new leaders of the movement, especially Edward Prescott, who was then at the University of Minnesota (you can see where the freshwater moniker comes from), argued that price fluctuations and changes in demand actually had nothing to do with the business cycle. Rather, the business cycle reflects fluctuations in the rate of technological progress, which are amplified by the rational response of workers, who voluntarily work more when the environment is favorable and less when it's unfavorable. Unemployment is a deliberate decision by workers to take time off.
Put baldly like that, this theory sounds foolish - was the Great Depression really the Great Vacation? And to be honest, I think it really is silly. But the basic premise of Prescott's "real business cycle" theory was embedded in ingeniously constructed mathematical models, which were mapped onto real data using sophisticated statistical techniques, and the theory came to dominate the teaching of macroeconomics in many university departments. In 2004, reflecting the theory's influence, Prescott shared a Nobel with Finn Kydland of Carnegie Mellon University (stress added).”
Labels: economists
Labels: economists, political economy, social science
Socialists as Patriots
Terence Ball
Why are some - mostly older, overwhelmingly white - Americans so afraid of "socialism" and, by extension, "socialized medicine"? One explanation is that they don't actually know what socialism is, namely the public ownership and/or control of the major means of production (mines, mills, factories, etc.) for the benefit of the public at large. Another is that many older Americans have vivid memories of the cold war and the dreaded U.S.S.R. (the second S standing for "socialist").
In hindsight it seems strange and almost miraculous that at the height of the cold war a limited form of socialized medicine - Medicare - got through the Congress over the objections of the American Medical Association and the insurance industry, and made it to President Johnson's desk. (These special interests won't make that mistake again: they now have a veritable army of lobbyists assaulting Capitol Hill and every congressman there.)
But now the cold war is over. For those in their 20s and 30s, the cold war might as well be ancient history.
To many Americans "socialism" may sound vaguely "foreign" and "un-American." Those at rallies protesting health reform now may be surprised to know that "socialism" and "socialist" have a long history in American political thought and that those terms weren't always terms of censure.
For the anti-socialism protesters, here's a quick quiz:
The author of the Pledge of Allegiance (1892), was A) a conservative, B) a liberal, C) a socialist.
The answer is C. Francis Bellamy was a socialist and a Baptist minister. (Yes, there actually were Christian socialists, then as now.)
The "Pledge to the Flag," as it was originally called, was not descriptive of then current conditions, but it was aspirational: "One nation, indivisible" invoked a nation undivided by differences of race, class and gender. And "with liberty and justice for all" it envisioned a nation in which women could vote and African Americans need not fear rope-wielding "night riders" of the KKK.
Contemporary "patriots," I hope, agree with such aspirations, despite their distinctly socialist provenance. It is historically false that the only "real" Americans are conservatives and that people of other ideological persuasions are not or cannot be "real" Americans. After all, what's more American than the "socialist" Pledge of Allegiance?
Labels: socialism
"In Krzysztof Wodiczko's Veterans' Flame, the image of a candle flame moves with the recorded voices of veterans sharing accounts of war and its aftermath in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wodiczko conducted the interviews in April 2009, interested in having his subjects explore, through the act of remembering and retelling, the complex psychological space between the battlefield and their homes. By appropriating public buildings and monuments as surfaces for projections in his work, Wodiczko has focused on the ways in which architecture reflects collective memory, history, and the loss of life. Here, Fort Jay's silent chambers are once again filled with the voices of soldiers, and a monument to history's conflicts becomes a place to contemplate contemporary accounts of war and longing."There is a brief clip of Wodiczko discussing his hopes for the work available on line.
Labels: Krzysztof Wodiczko
"But Penn's great skill is not in peeling away outer layers to show us the person hidden within. After all he's a fashion photographer par excellence. His workers model. Emphasizing aesthetics within ordinariness, their surfaces thrum with meaning."I think, however, that this characteristic of Penn's photographs is not tied just to fashion photography but to the the limits and immense usefulness of the technology itself. What photography shows simply are surfaces. And that highlights a question that I think is important ~ whether there is any 'reality' to be discerned beyond the 'appearances.'
Labels: Irving Penn
Labels: Obituaries
Labels: Leibovitz, political economy
Labels: Best Shots, Sally Mann
"The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times. Civil society triumphed that morning in full glory. Look at it: remember that this is who we were and can be."It always is difficult to know what to post on this date. There is a temptation to turn maudlin, or saccharin, or bitter and vengeful. Instead I'll link to this essay by Rebecca Solnit - the passage I lifted above is her conclusion.
Labels: 9/11, Rebecca Solnit
Labels: Afghanistan, Hetherington, Iraq, Sinco, Sontag, War
Labels: science
Labels: Media Politics, Radio
Labels: politics
Labels: Afghanistan, Censorship, embedded, Media Politics, War
Labels: Diego Rivera, Labor
Labels: Hope, Our Criminals
Labels: Glenn Beck, Jeffrey, organ donation