Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky
room
Top, photograph by Irving Klaw, 1950. Via. Bottom, photograph by Marc Asnin, from the series and book Uncle Charlie, 2012. Via. More.
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Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The success of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who have used them, to disguise themselves so as to perfect them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 1980. Via.
(fette)
PHOTOGRAPHER BEARS WITNESS TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
The captions on these pictures tell a more powerful story than the article by the photographer.
(via stickyisaslut)
The late Zen master and photographer John Daido Loori would tell his photography students to think of someone or something they loved, and take a photograph of that love - but the photograph couldn’t be of the person or thing. They had to find it, a visual image of that love, somewhere else in the world.
This photograph by Daishin Stephenson is a portrait of her and me.
Dogen Zenji wrote, “There are mountains hidden in mountains. There are mountains hidden in hiddenness.” So much of Daishin Stephenson’s photography is about making visible the worlds we walk over or just walk past. These two pictures look like an enchanted forest and a hillside, but they were taken on a city street, a street so busy that a cop held back traffic long enough for her to lie on the ground and enter the world I do not know about, because it is too small, or because I am.
Jean-Luc Godard asked, “When you see your photograph, do you say you’re a fiction?”
There is an iconic photograph of Elmore Leonard by Annie Leibovitz. He sits on a chair on a street, with palm trees and buildings silhouetted by a sunset or sunrise. He wears sunglasses, all his clothes are black, and a typewriter sits on his lap.
I saw this photograph on a poster in a bookstore in Scotland in the late 1980s, before I had read anything by Leonard. It gave me an impression of Leonard’s prose style, what he calls his “sound,” that I found to be accurate when I began to read him a decade later and he became my favorite English-language novelist.
But Leonard doesn’t type. He writes his novels with a pen. So is the photograph a fiction?
No more a fiction than if he had been photographed with a notebook instead of a typewriter. What is being presented is a mediated persona, an image contrived to present a certain story, a story that has been chosen instead of millions of other possible stories about the person, the subject.
Yes, photographs are fictions, and so are clothes, names, titles and facial expressions, things said and things done, things told and things not told. The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said, “life is like a movie.” As we experience it, life is not “like” a movie - it is a movie, with narratives and meanings contrived from our interpretation of what is presented to us, and what we present to ourselves.
Gordon Parks was the director of one of my favorite films, Shaft (1971) and its dull sequel Shaft’s Big Score (1972), and he made a cameo appearance in an excellent sequel - also entitled Shaft - in 2000. He died six years later.
Jizô asked Hôgen, “Where are you going, senior monk?”
Hôgen said, “I am on pilgrimage, following the wind.”
Jizô said, “What are you on pilgrimage for?”
Hôgen said, “I don’t know.”
Jizô said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
Hôgen suddenly attained great enlightenment.
My commentary:
About 20 years ago, I helped Kevin Williamson choose poems for publication in Rebel Inc. One day, when we met up to discuss some submissions, he handed me a poem that didn’t have the author’s name on it. “What do you think of this?” he said.
“Who wrote it?” I said.
“I’ll tell you after you tell me what you think of it,” he said.
Was this a poem by someone I knew and liked? Someone I knew and disliked? He wouldn’t tell me. I read the poem, and, wondering if it was written by my worst enemy, I recommended that it be published.
Afterward, I realized that it was the first time in years that I had intimately read a poem. Usually, when I read a poem, I had a story about it. In a poem I read by Gary Snyder - one of my favorite poets - the first line seemed like a cringe-worthy cliche, and had it been written by someone else I would have laughed at it. But because I knew it was by Snyder, and I knew that I liked Snyder’s poetry, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I wasn’t reading the poem intimately, but through the filter of my “knowing.”
I have a Zen student who’s a talented photographer. Sometimes he uses an editing program to enhance his photos. I prefer the ones he leaves unenhanced. Recently, I was looking at some new photos of his, and I saw one of an airplane that was glowing with a colorful painting of a cardinal. Assuming it had been enhanced, I decided it was an okay picture, but that I didn’t like it as much as I liked the others. Then I realized that it hadn’t been enhanced - the airplane was actually painted with that design. I then felt that it was one of my favorite pictures he had taken. The picture hadn’t changed, but my story, my “knowing,” had. I wasn’t viewing the picture intimately.
We do this not just with the books we read and the pictures we view, but with all of our lives. We think we know what’s going on, but it’s that very knowing that keeps us separate from our lives and our hearts. Not knowing is most intimate.
These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in the 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.
Some wonderful photographs here.
I don’t like the animated views, but you can click on them to see the original stereoviews.
