People to visit: The Odd Sandwich

Lee's caption: "Mary Alice and Fluffles, the morning they pulled the big bank job."

Tumblr accounts, you may have heard, are the Hot New Thing on the Interwebs. I'm drawing your attention to The Odd Sandwich because its host, Lee Ingalls, is a friend and he's drumming up eyeballs for his place. And because I like his wry captions for these vintage pictures, some of them quite odd, from online archives. This particular picture is here, though, because it's by Nickolas Muray, whom I posted about a few years ago in a context about as different from cute kids and kittens as one can imagine.

Anyway, I hope you'll go have a look.

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Sunset project

Sunset, Wichita, Kansas, January 20, 2012, by the Mrs. Click image to enlarge.

It's pretty simple: Take a picture of the sunset each day of the year. This is the task that the Mrs. has set for herself, and you can see all the results that she's so far posted here. If you'd prefer not to click a whole lot, here is a slideshow of the sunsets she has taken thus far this year (that she has posted).

With the exception of a couple taken in Topeka and one taken somewhere along the Kansas Turnpike, all of these were taken near where we live in Wichita. To be sure, the one posted here is the exception that proves the rule that most sunsets, at least in Wichita, are pretty uneventful. But that seems appropriate for a phenomenon that occurs every, um, day.

Enjoy.

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"The Idea of Order at Key West" (and some shameless spousal promotion)

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

(Full text of the poem here.)

Taken at Galveston, Texas, Summer 2009. Image by the Mrs.; click to enlarge. Shill alert: More of her work here; Facebook page here. Send her some love (and some work . . . her slogan is, "Has lens; will travel.")

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The Architect's Brother: Photographs by Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

From top: Kingdom (image found here); Pollenation (image found here); The Passage (image found here).

Monograph

Website

The man's name, we will learn from the helpful little cards accompanying these pictures, is Everyman. He is almost always alone. In other pictures, we see him trying to fly by tying himself to a dozen or so large birds, cultivating a field of light bulbs, clinging to a pole high above the clouds and using what appears to be a sextant. We never see the Architect referred to in the series title, so we never learn whether, in these pictures, Everyman is faithfully executing his brother's vision, whether, if he is, that vision is some sort of joke, or whether Everyman is striking out on his own as he pursues his own peculiar vision (and sure, you may read that last in all its various senses). As we look, we see that the means at Everyman's disposal seem hopelessly inadequate to his apparent ends--humorously, quixotically so, but not despairingly so. As the gallery guide puts it, "The emphasis is on the doing of the action, not the outcome. There is hopeful reassurance in [Everyman's] constant and varied attempts to right seemingly overwhelming wrongs" (italics in the original). Another way of putting it: These pictures aren't religious, but they are spiritual. They are something like fables of faith in action: a surface-seeming futility but, beneath, an affirmation of the good that is working in anticipation of the Good.

The actual making of these pictures is worth quoting from the guide in full:

[T]he ParkeHarrisons printed their photographs from large paper negatives made by cutting and pasting a variety of images together. The underlying mechanics of this technique--including the seams between individual images--are carefully painted out in the negative. A photographic print is then made, which is often painted with a layer of varnish or beeswax. This genuinely original technique, combined with their elaborate process of set construction, crosses many creative boundaries. The result is a fascinating hybrid of sculpture, performance, painting and photography.

These pictures, along with a selection from another series called Gray Dawn, photographs in color that also employ the Everyman figure, are part of a show by the ParkeHarrisons called Restoration that's on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art till February 8th. The Mrs. and I went the museum last Saturday on a whim (we hadn't been since the new wing opened last summer), and while we were disappointed that the photography gallery dedicated to the museum's permanent collection of pictures seems awfully small (only a couple dozen works are on display at any one time), we felt really fortunate to have happened onto these pictures. Those of you in the area who haven't yet seen them should do so.

Added bonus: Robert ParkeHarrison (who is the Everyman in the photos) is originally from the Kansas City area. Who says the heartland isn't fertile ground for cool--and thought-provoking, even inspiring--weirdness like these pictures?

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Adventures at the Wichita Art Museum #5: Photographs of Frida Kahlo

Nickolas Muray, Frida painting The Two Fridas, Coyoacán (1939). Photograph. Click to enlarge. Image found here.

It is most appropriate that a print of this photograph is part of the exhibit of photos of Kahlo currently mounted at the WAM: Current visitors will be treated to a diversity of exhibits that, given the museum's fairly small space, feels almost schizophrenic. Soon to end (but this was my first time to see it) is a collection of images in various media chosen to accompany selected passages from Willa Cather's My Ántonia, Wichita's "Big Read" selection for this year. There's what amounts to a retrospective exhibit of works in various media by Wichita artist Nicholas Trabue, though the exhibit's chief focus is on works in the style you can see here: a "juxtaposition of . . . organic nudes with sacred geometry [that] alludes to an evocative relationship between the two." And there are two exhibits that were my reason for going yesterday: a large collection of contemporary, hand-woven textiles that show off a dazzling range of traditional designs and palettes, collected in southern Mexico and Guatemala by Jerry Martin, director of the museum of anthropology at Wichita State; and the portraits of Frida Kahlo (both alone and, on occasion, with other people) taken by Nickolas Muray (the accompanying text (not exactly a catalogue) is I Will Never Forget You: Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray).

It is a strange experience, seeing these photographs. As anyone who has spent any time looking at Kahlo's work knows, she herself was the subject (or, as The Two Fridas makes clear, subjects) of most of her paintings, and these portraits by Muray, a well-respected photographer in his own right (here is the (brief) Wikipedia article), make no effort to break the frame, as it were, of the symbiotic relationship between Kahlo's paintings and the woman who painted them. There are no pictures here of, say, Kahlo scrubbing floors or going shopping; one does show her wearing pants, though. It was Muray's goal to make photographs of Kahlo that in their own way evoked the paintings and, in my untrained opinion, he succeeded. In fact, one could effectively retitle the picture above as The Three Fridas--and for more reasons than the immediately obvious.

As it turns out, Muray, who is responsible for this, the most-reproduced photograph of Kahlo (this image and the one below found here), was also one of Kahlo's lovers. Their affair began about the time that she and Diego Rivera divorced and lasted for ten more years, when it became painfully clear to Muray that, though Kahlo loved him she would not marry him and, moreover, was indeed serious about reconciling with Rivera. Once the viewer of Frida painting The Two Fridas knows this and also knows that Kahlo made the painting as a way of expressing her emotions after divorcing Rivera, this photograph becomes exceedingly complex: Frida, at once maker and model, lover and beloved, becomes the subject in/of two media, her attention turned toward Muray in his dual roles as both photographer and lover and, at the same time, toward the making of the painting and the invisible subject that prompted its making. It is a little like Velásquez's Las Meninas turned inside-out.

This may be an overreading of these pictures, but it does seem at times as though Muray (seen here with Kahlo in this 1939 picture) wanted to make pictures that didn't just serve as evocations of the paintings but as extensions of them--that, moreover, included him (or, more precisely, their love for each other) as their implicit subject. What it must have cost Muray, then, to take that picture (which I can't seem to find online) of Kahlo genuinely, warmly embracing and kissing Rivera. [Aside: I don't know enough about Kahlo to know whether Muray was ever the subject of her work, but she did send him a print (included in the exhibit) of her painting What the Water Gave Me as, according to the accompanying card, a warning to him of the complex of experiences and emotions she contained within herself.]

It is neither disrespect nor disappointment to say of this exhibit that I learned more about Muray than I did about Kahlo. Indeed, this was my introduction to Muray (fun fact: he was one of the first prominent American photographers to begin working seriously with color photography in the late '30s; not quite half the pictures in the exhibit are in color). I wasn't sure what to expect; I had assumed there would be some pictures that were less portrait-like, and I sure hadn't expected to learn that Muray and Kahlo were lovers and the dimension that fact adds to the experience of looking at these pictures. One could say by way of response, Well, Kahlo made her life the subject of her paintings--just look at them. True. But that, too, was a choice. She looked into a mirror when she painted her self-portraits; but even if she could not control what the mirror gave back to her, she still had complete control over what she said she saw--and, thus, what appeared on the canvas. It was that woman, the woman behind the projected persona, I thought I might see a glimpse or two of. I guess for that, the next time I go to Mexico City I will have to go here.

I am sorry to say that I can find no decent pictures of the exhibited textiles online; and in any case, these pieces are better seen in person: their textures add immensely to the experience of seeing them, as does the bewildering variety of patterns produced by these diverse indigenous populations living within a relatively small geographic space. Go and see.

The Kahlo exhibit lasts through February 1 (for the curious, here is its tour schedule); the textiles will be on display until March 1.

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Touching Strangers

Richard Renaldi, "Julie and Xavier, 2007." Image found here.

What do you get when you ask people who don't know each other if they'd be willing to touch each other and have their picture taken?

See for yourself. Be sure to look for the "advance" icon below the photos.

These are intriguing photographs for the viewer, I think: even as we scrutinize these people and ponder what they're thinking as they hold these poses, we're invited to place ourselves in these moments as well and wonder about questions of intimacy and personal space. This photo is especially intriguing to me, given the space/time context suggested by Julie's wedding dress.

This project reminds me of a slip of the tongue I heard during an interview on NPR sometime last year, I think it was, which I think I've mentioned here before. In the course of the interview, a man had meant to say, "There comes a moment in every person's life . . . " but instead said, "There comes a person in every moment's life . . . " I pretty much stopped listening to the interview after he said that. Think of that, the fleeting (or enduring?) quality of "every moment's life," as though it has an existence apart from us that we bear witness to, like a flash of a meteor burning up that we just happen to catch out of the corner of our eye--just like our memories (if we do remember them) of the people who inhabit that moment . . . or, in the case of these folks' consenting to be photographed by Renaldi, something far more, well, memorable.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

I'm still officially away from here, but work should ease up a bit here shortly.

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Adventures at the Wichita Art Museum #3: "American Ruins"

Arthur Drooker, Cook Bank, Rhyolite, Nevada. Image found here.

Yesterday being Saturday--free admission day at the Wichita Art Museum--I biked on over and had a look at a selection of photographs by Arthur Drooker called American Ruins (he has a book out by the same title). The exhibit's subjects come from points throughout the northeastern, southern, southwestern and western U.S., with a picture from a site in Hawai'i thrown in for good measure, and the structures range in age from the 3rd to the 20th centuries. There are images of cliff dwellings, churches and missions, businesses and factories, homes, military structures . . . it's something of a picturebook archeological history of the United States.

I like this idea very much, and I approve of the exhibit's intention, as presented in its introductory placard:

They're rarely seen, mostly forgotten and completely obsolete. Photographer Arthur Drooker visited these vestiges of our shared past to forge a spiritual connection with those who came before us, and restore what they had built to our collective memory.

[snip]

As a photographic series, these images present a rare overview of some overlooked landmarks and allow us, as Americans, to see where we came from, measure how far we've come, and gain a vision of where we might be headed.

Still, I felt in these images some strangeness, one due to the medium Drooker chose, the other to the inclusion of one image, that seem worthy of a few words. What follows isn't criticism but observation.

First is Drooker's chosen medium--depending on the information you happen to be reading at the time, either digital pigment prints (the cards accompanying the pictures) or digital infrared prints (WAM's website's description). Whichever it is, the result is something that I can't always appreciate when seeing the same images on my computer monitor: a startling three-dimensional quality in the images that immediately reminded me of those on my old GAF Viewmaster discs or, alternately, of photorealistic collages. In other words, the objects imaged in the various pictures--not just the ruins themselves but the surrounding vegetation, too--stand out starkly relative to each other, rather than melding more or less comfortably into each other as would have seemed to be the case with traditional photography . . . or, for that matter, when these structures are seen in person. Perhaps, in keeping with his stated intention, that quality is precisely Drooker's point: he wants the viewer really to see these structures, to contemplate them rather than their gradual reclamation by Nature. Still, as I said, this particular quality in the images wasn't something I was prepared for.

And now for the one image in particular, one that made me wonder about what Drooker has in mind when he says "ruins" and compels the post-structuralist in me to want to start unpacking the first sentence in the placard that introduces the exhibit: A picture of the Alamo. Given that structure's centrality to the Texas mythos--not to mention that for decades now it has been Texas' most-visited place--it's difficult for me to think of the Alamo as being in any way "rarely seen [and] mostly forgotten." I will grant, though, that to describe the Alamo as "completely obsolete" would make for a fascinating discussion, among Texans, as part of a "Whither Texas?"-type socio-cultural debate: To what extent does the story--not necessarily the history but the lessons and near-legendary narratives--of Texas' winning its independence and becoming a sovereign nation have a bearing on what Texas is now (whatever that may be) in the 21st century? Also, I'd suggest, if one thinks about the Alamo's hundred-year history from 1836 to the Centennial, one could argue that it was more ruin-like then than it is now: the story of the battle there may have gone far in shaping the Texan self-concept, but whether and how to preserve the structure itself as a trace of that story was clearly not something unanimously agreed upon during that time. Meanwhile, I wonder what the descendants of slaves who worked in the sugar mill on a Florida plantation that Drooker photographed might have to say about that place being designated a "ruin," or the descendants of the cliff dwellers whose structures are depicted here.

All this matters because Drooker himself makes clear that he's interested in much more than creating aesthetically-pleasing images. He wants them to do the work of "restor[ing] what [these structures' builders] had built to our collective memory." Thus, these pictures are more or less implicit political acts, in the broadest sense of the word: they are intended to evoke discussion about why Drooker has chosen them, what he is trying to say--perhaps even argue for--about the American collective memory and how that squares with our own understanding of that memory's (dis)contents.

EDIT: One further thought: In rereading this, I found myself remembering Gertrude Stein's remark about America's having "a history-less history." There is a strong cultural impulse in American cultural history, as embodied in the phrase "The American Adam" (the title of R. W. B. Lewis' classic study of American literature), that is precisely about "forgetting," very broadly defined: through erasure, through a re-writing of the story of one's origins, etc. (To return to the Texas Revolution: The colonists certainly had legitimate grievances against the Mexican government, but it wouldn't be much of a distortion of things to make the case that that Revolution, especially towards the end, was ultimately, at best, a clash of cultures--and at worst, a race war. But the Daughters of the Texas Revolution would rather not tell things that way.) Anyway, Drooker's project engages in a sort of passive-aggressive cultural rabble-rousing, which I personally am okay with.

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"The Most Curious Thing"

Before I forget (again), I want to make sure you know about Errol Morris's collaborative meditation with his readers (not sure what else to call it) on the meaning of a photograph taken at Abu Ghraib--a photograph which, he says, "aided and abetted a terrible miscarriage of justice." After reading the piece, I frankly don't know what to make either of that claim or, for that matter, of what the photograph does show--which is, surely, at least part of Morris' larger point. There is the photograph, which contains its particular information; and there is the photograph's context, which also supplies information, helping us "read" it--indeed, in many cases with photographs, it's that outside context that allows us to say anything about it other than the merely descriptive. But Morris has also supplied another context: the thoughts of the very subject smiling at the viewer, who has lots to say not only about her image but also her motive for having the picture taken.

For me, Morris' piece is about as fine an example of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in action as one is likely to find, something I'd ordinarily find intellectually cool and remain emotionally cool to; given the photograph's context, though, it's both emotionally and intellectually unsettling, for all sorts of reasons.

What, after all, is involved in the act of making meaning out of what we see? What is/are the effect(s) of "considering all sides" on the making of meaning?

To be read slowly, over a cup of coffee, and pondered long after.

(Via 3 Quarks Daily)

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Otras Américas

Exhibition poster (click to enlarge). Image found here.


[UPDATE: At the end of this post I've added a link to the work of one of the other exhibitors]

Last night I was privileged to attend the artists' reception for Otras Américas, an exhibition of photographs (both conventional and digital) from throughout Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean, taken by a dozen Kansas-area photographers. This exhibition will be in place at CityArts until May 24th; I hope that you local folks will find your way there.

I knew about this exhibit because my bloggy KC friend emawkc of Three O'Clock in the Morning was kind enough to point me to this post by Lucas Hutmacher, one of the photographers whose work is in the exhibit and whom it was my pleasure to meet and talk with for a while last night. Against all odds, Lucas has become a regular reader of good old Blog Meridian (I mean, really: who in full possession of their faculties . . . ?), but that's not why I'm posting about this exhibit. Lucas's pictures were taken in Peru, a place whose people, judging from his pictures, love bright, ostensibly-clashing color that shouldn't "work" but always manages to every bit as much as Mexicans do. Here are posts and pictures from Peru on Lucas' blog, when he went with a small group to supply labor for some renovation and farming projects and then play tourist at Macchu Picchu. Only a couple of these actually appear in the exhibit, which is a shame: some of these are quite good. Lucas tends toward shots with quirky perspectives, which fits well with what many people feel when visiting those "other" Americas for the first time. As one example, which I learned from his pictures: Who among you knew that in Peru you can buy "Kansas brand" denim jeans--or that they even existed, for that matter? Weird.

More below the fold.

Here, Lucas presents the motivation for the show:

The concept of ‘Otras Americas’ is that there are Americas other than the U.S. of A, it’s just that we were the only ones uncreative enough to put it in the name of our country. North America, Central America and South America contain a vast number of countries and diversity of people and that we are united by the geography of our lands. While we share the "American" surname with Latin Americans most honkies really don't know much about "other" American cultures in general or the differences and nuances between them. Most gringos tend to think of the Latino culture as essentially Mexican - whether out of racism or out of ignorance.

It's not dismissive to say that we "know" this already, precisely because, as Lucas implies, if we already "know" it, why do we have to keep on being reminded of it? I think part of it is that, as the pictures confirm (or remind, in my case), those other Americas are often difficult for us, in our prettified, freeze-dried, rough-edges-smoothed corner of the hemisphere, to recognize connections to. Widely-differing standards of living have something to do with that felt lack of connection, of course, but cultural differences figure into this as well.

One case in point is Ken Enquist's pictures of Semana santa (Holy Week) processions in a town in Mexico (which I neglected to note). Looking at their vaguely-sepia tones that make them look antique, even though such events still occur throughout Mexico and Latin America, I found myself thinking about several things: the posadas (processions held in the days before Christmas that symbolize Joseph and Mary's seeking lodging before Mary gave birth to Jesus) that I participated in in San Miguel de Allende a few years ago; the veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe every December 12th; and the fact that in this country, the closest thing we have to such events is . . . Mardi Gras and St. Patrick's Day. Those are events that, I suspect, have lost much of their deep social and cultural resonance for the vast majority of those who participate in them. Whatever the cultural equivalent to secularization is--cultural homogenization?--we here are awfully adept at it.

To be sure, Otras Américas is a reminder that much unites the peoples of Latin America in particular: chief among them the still-strong cultural (if not spiritual) influences of Catholicism, a common language, and the pre-Hispanic indigenous peoples of these lands--a cultural homogeneity of a different sort, yes, but one very different from our own. "Otras," indeed.

UPDATE: Skippy Sánchez (and no, I don't know), Lucas' father, is also exhibiting his work in this show. Here is a nice selection of his pictures from various places in central Mexico, some of which are in the show.

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Revisiting punctum's puncture

"Then the Meridian said, 'Let us make the Meridian in our own image, after our likeness . . . '"

In the comments section of this post, Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience asks a good question in response to my anxiety resulting from pictures of me that appear to feature less hair than I perceive myself as having: "How about pictures of you in a mirror?" A good question, which this post is a partial response to. In a subsequent post, I'll try my hand at reflecting (no pun) on "us" as it applies to the infinitely-reproducible image.

I: You cannot truly see your own profile. Not in front of a mirror, at any rate.

I took the picture you see here; it is, if I had to say, about six or seven years old. You will have to trust me when I say that I am its maker as well as its subject, for while you see a camera, the image is framed in such a way that you cannot tell that it is by means of a bathroom mirror that that same camera you see here, and not someone else's, is the very mechanism that captured its own image as well as mine.

Two curious things, one more obvious than the other, occur to me as I look at this image more closely. The more-obvious one, to me at least, is that, even though I recognize myself and my camera in the image, what you see here is not what I saw but what the camera saw. If I recall correctly, I had bought the camera earlier that same day and took this and some other, similar pictures in order to experiment with uploading the images to my computer. Those other pictures were, shall we say, less successful: in them, I had no head or only a partial one, or I would be even less centered in the image than I am in this one. What changed in those other images was not my position but the camera's. So: What I see here, even as I look at and recognize myself looking at me, sort of, is, yes, my reflection, but it's more accurately the camera's reflection--its (specular) perspective--on my reflection. The less-obvious thing is something I just noticed only this morning as I have been writing this post: My right index finger in this image is not on the camera's shutter-button. What you see here, strangely, is not quite the image I had told the camera to capture; it's more like an after-image. In that delay of a fraction of a second between the pressing of the button and what you see here, the original moment receded into the past, never to be recovered yet retaining its integrity precisely for that reason . . . and, despite the fact that it itself was "only" a reflection of the thing itself, perhaps it now has acquired its own thing-ness, analogous to a platonic form, via its irreproducibility, and thus its ultimate imperviousness to representation, even in the very moment it came into being.

Still and all, this picture does not undo me as I look at it, and I think that's because this--this basic positioning relative to the mirror--is how I usually see myself in the mirror. But I began to wonder this morning: what if, by these same methods, I had taken a picture of myself in profile? How would I respond to that image? Would I feel the same unsettled feeling that I do when I see images of myself that others have taken?

My initial response is that I would feel more unsettled.

This morning, for purposes of this post, I engaged in a bit of research: I tried to look at myself in profile in the bathroom mirror. It's physically impossible, at least for me, unless I use another mirror positioned at a different angle to see the original reflection. The best I could manage was about a 3/4 turn of the head. But not only is it physically impossible, it defies the very essence of a profile: the subject seen from the side, his/her eyes straight ahead.

Profiles require another agency in order to be genuine.

As two male commenters, interestingly, implied through their comments to the previous post, they are discomfited by pictures of themselves taken by others but take some solace in their reflections in the mirror. I am much the same way. When I see a picture of myself made by someone else, there is space for deniability: "I don't really look like that!" So many people dislike having pictures of themselves made because they feel compelled, more often than not, to have to engage in the dynamic of denial. But when we become the agent by which the picture is made, we lose that space. Assertion becomes a question that is all the more disturbing because it becomes rhetorical in nature: "Is that really how people see me?" The camera's nature--its (presumed) objectivity--by way of reply becomes subjective: "Well, it's what I see, at any rate."

One last, quick formulation:

From this summary of Barthes' Camera Lucida:

The punctum of time, the existence of the dead with the photographed object, forces the photograph into an unreality, a hallucination of sorts: "on the one hand, it is not there, on the other, it has indeed been." (115) It is the paradox that the object must have existed, and yet at the same time, it cannot be there now. The photograph is "false on the level of perception, true on the level of time." When Barthes is struck by a punctum, he "passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die." It is, he says, madness. Society wants to tame this madness by making photography an art (Barthes says that no art is mad) or by taming it through generalizing, banalizing it "until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself." (118) When the image is stripped of its personal, private reading, the potential for madness is gone. When the image is meant to be viewed when flipping through a magazine, it is inert. Society consumes images now instead of beliefs, in order to keep them from reaching madness. (emphasis mine)

Preliminarily, at least, the bolded line prompts me to say this: The reflection is true on the level of perception, false on the level of time. The reflection is the obverse of the photograph.

Later: we'll drag Walter Benjamin into this.

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In which the Meridian is punctured by punctum

Something about this post over at Pam's excellent blog, Tales from the Microbial Lab--well, okay, the inevitability of certain things, if you must know--brought to the fore something that I've been pondering of late: our differing responses to reflections and photographs.

Okay, okay. Here it is. I'd wanted to sound all metaphysical and stuff, but I might as well spit it out: In pictures of me I look like I have less hair than when I look in the mirror, and it's bugging me a little.

I have some more thinking about this to do, but the reason seems to lie at the intersection of the Venus Effect (specifically, the passage there discussing Aphrodite's association with mirrors) and some things Barthes has to say about the nature of "a" photograph in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (a summary is here; you'll find "punctum" defined there). Sure, the question arose out of a bit of vanity, I do confess. It's nevertheless striking to me that two modes of representation that initially seem so similar can give rise to such different responses in the viewer.

More on this later.

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Home by Dark: A speculative reading

Eudora Welty stands in front of the ruins of Windsor, Port Gibson, Mississippi. Taken by by Frank H. Lyell. And yes: those are small trees that have taken root on the tops of the columns.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned in passing what might be Welty's most familiar picture, Home by Dark, Yalobusha Co. I can't find a decent-sized online image to link to, so I refer you instead here. I invite you to go there and have a good look at it. I'll wait for you below the fold.

Seeing as I own two books on which this picture appears (and, now that I've added One Time One Place to my Amazon Wish List, will someday own three), I know this photo well. Or, rather, I thought I did. My realization that more is going on in this picture than I had assumed didn't dawn on me at the museum yesterday. Slow of study as I am, it was only some time after I put up yesterday's post and then ran across the image again that I really, you know, looked at it.

Welty's photos' titles tend to be descriptive of their subjects: Here It Comes! Crowd on a Boxcar, Watching a Circus Being Unloaded, for example, pretty much lets you know what you're looking at. Others, like Window Shopping, Grenada, which I described in yesterday's post, are ostensibly descriptive, but as I noted there I think that the title points us in the direction of a more figurative way of thinking about the picture. Still, though, such titles don't make us wonder why they've been given to the image.

Home by Dark, though, is another matter, I think. On its surface, this picture could not be a more simple or tranquil, even clichéd, rural southern scene: a mule-drawn wagon bearing a family on a plumbline-straight dirt road through a field, some woods in the distance forming the horizon. Its title refers to a time of day; more than that, though, it suggests both a destination and a hoped-for arrival time . . . or, perhaps, a deadline.

That latter possibility first suggested itself when I realized for the first time, while noting the twist in the woman's torso as she looks back toward the viewer, that the family on the wagon is African-American. Suddenly, the image's title, its surface tranquility and even clichéd nature were replaced in me by something else--not menace exactly but, certainly, tension. Another, more ominous set of clichés.

As with Welty's other pictures, I cannot say what was involved in its being taken, how much directing Welty engaged in with her subjects prior to taking it. But this one, like the others, has a sense of matter-of-factness to it. Like the others, it simply seeks to portray its subjects as people . . . and it was simply so that, for African-Americans in certain places in the rural South during the Jim Crow era, where one was in relation to one's home as sundown approached had an urgency to it that it did not for whites. This is not opinion but fact; lamentable though that was, the fact remains that, for black people, surveillance was a condition of existence.

Welty's photograph depicts this fact; just as she so often does in her fiction, here she lets us observe this slice of the world without dictating how to think about it. Welty herself, on the back cover of One Time One Place, puts the matter thus, and I'll let her eloquence conclude this post:

I wished no more to indict anybody, to prove or disprove anything by my pictures, than I would have wished to do harm to the people in them, or have expected any harm from them to come to me.

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"Capturing Transience"

Eudora Welty, Sunday School, Holiness Church, Jackson 1935-1936 (click to enlarge)

The Wichita Art Museum, though small, has hosted several nice travelling exhibits since we moved into its neighborhood two years ago. The just-opened "Passionate Observer: Eudora Welty Among Artists of the Thirties" (exhibition catalogue here) may be the best of the lot, and this magical photograph perhaps the best in the exhibit.

Welty is best-known as a writer, but before that she was an accomplished photographer who, during the Depression, found work in the Farm Security Administration's photography program charged with documenting the living conditions of the rural poor. The work of others in that group were and are better-known than that of Welty--Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange are the most prominent, and samples of their work are in this exhibit. Given what I saw today, though, I frankly wonder why that is the case. Not that Evans and Lange are slouches, but that Welty's work is both distinctive and powerful. It feels less "documentary" in nature, more "artful." You can see why, according to Welty, it was photography that led her to become a writer.

It's also quite interesting to me that, though all the photographers here (all of whom are white) have at least a couple of pictures of black people, only Welty has what amount to portraits of her black subjects. And they are stunning, powerful pictures, full of their subjects' dignity and humanity and Welty's respect for them.

Welty's best-known photograph may be Home by Dark, Yalobusha Co.: it's been used on the Vintage paperback edition of Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and Edward P. Jones' The Known World. That photograph is in the exhibit, but I want to spend some time the picture at the beginning of this post and a couple of others that caught my eye.

Photography, Welty once said (according to an exhibition card),

taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I have.

Transience, of course, is the medium of narrative, and what I found myself drawn to in Welty's pictures is the strong sense of story they have. But the stories she wants to tell are not of these people's poverty. She wants to tell the stories of these people--people, both black and white, whom she grew up and lived among, whom she knows intimately, and whose trust she hasn't even had to earn but simply has.

Consider, for example, this picture, "Side Show, State Fair" (the italics and quotation marks are hers). Three boys, looking off-frame, each face registering a different response to whatever it is they see. They become our "side show" as we watch them and wonder at their wonder or incredulity. We wonder what in their pasts led them to respond as they do here; more, we wonder what will become of their responses once they approach, or choose not to approach, the whatever-it-is that has their attention. It isn't a complex picture, but it provides the seeds for any number of narratives.

There's another picture in the exhibit that I haven't been able to find online but which is worth the attempt to describe. Called Window Shopping, Grenada (Grenada is a small town just north of Jackson, Mississippi), it shows a small group of women in the foreground looking in a store window; in the background, visible in the space between the women and the window they gaze into and leaning against a storefront further down the same block, are three men. They don't appear to be looking at the women, but they are positioned in such a way that they could also be the subjects of the women's "window shopping." Or perhaps they are, discreetly, of course, engaging in a bit of window shopping with regard to the women. It's hard to know just how much arranging went into the getting of this shot, but its feel is certainly one of happenstance, of the Lucky Shot.

This photograph (titled Preacher and Leaders of the Holiness Church, Jackson) and the photo that leads off this post are the ones I kept returning to in the exhibit. In each, the sun's various entry points into the pictures become glowing, gaseous-looking entities, seeming to emphasize the idea of "holiness." But, again, ponder this: it's mid-1930s Mississippi. A white woman is behind the camera. Taking a picture like this. I'm not sure which is more extraordinary--the image, or the circumstances of its taking.

For Welty's own thoughts on this and similar moments in her pictures, click on "Back cover" at this link.

Wichita is the penultimate stop for this exhibit; it has been touring the South, with a couple of stops in the Midwest, since 2003. In November, though, it will head to the Kansas City (MO) Public Library. Those of you in the area will want to make sure you see this.

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