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Possible Worlds.

Last week I came across a short interview with some notable writers all focused on the climate crisis. Rebecca Solnit, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, James Miller and Jay Griffiths were asked multiple questions concerning their own relationship to the crisis, their levels of engagement, their hopes and fears. When asked about the efficacy of the written word for a fight against the climate crisis, their responses ranged from hope and enthusiasm to doubt. One answer lingered with me: “I embrace all forms of storytelling, and I think all are necessary in this struggle. We have to tap into people’s imaginations and show them that another world is possible.”

That is of course one of the many functions of art, showing possible worlds, next to creating beauty, communicating ideas, raising consciousness, being the canary in the coal mine. I want to focus today on how photography can serve as a window into a different, private world that allows us to see people who are perhaps different from ourselves and yet utterly familiar in their mundane settings, poses, and demeanors. With that it creates the possibility of empathy if not bonding, in a way that writing about the subject never would (at least not immediately), words relying on facts and persuasion, rather than the direct emotional involvement created by the narrative of imagery.

The photographs, a century apart, depict queer folk, and I want to stress that today’s musings are not about the issue of transgender origins, medical procedures for transitioning, or transphobia, although all warrant close examination in an era that has made the topic into a tribal rallying cry for exclusion and worse. The intensity of the debate echos other preoccupations with the “order” of things, the retention of existing hierarchies or the need for simple binary truths in this world, an either/or thinking that avoids engagement with choice and uncertainties. (And of course a backlash against the enormous progress made in the area of sexual orientation, including the right to marry a same-sex partner.)

That said, here are the biological facts. Biological categories do exist – have some objective reality in the sense that if, for example, your genetics have an xy pattern, it is enormously likely that you have an anatomy associated with males and a biochemistry associated with males, and if you are biologically xx, the same applies for women. But that reality sits alongside of the undeniable fact that there is a substantial number of people who don’t fit this pattern. Biologically some have traits that are strongly associated with male and female. And in still other cases they have biological traits that are neither typically male nor typically female, and so for example their genetic pattern is entirely different, having xo or xxy chromosomes. One more step: if this is undeniably true at the level of biology, it would be astonishing if it wasn’t reflected in people’s psychology, with one example of many, some people feeling they were born into the wrong body, and often having these feelings from a very young age.

But again, what I am after today, is how photography, in the depiction of something or someone who is different, can create a sense of familiarity nonetheless, and can convey a shared humanity. It does so by offering a narrative that invites the viewer into daily routine, anything other than the exotic fantasies contained in the stereotypes held by those feeling disgusted, alienated or threatened by queerness.

The first selection is the work of two Scandinavian women photographers, Marie Høeg (1866 – 1949) and Bolette Berg (1872 -1944), who met in Finland and lived in Norway, as business partners and as a couple. They were suffragettes and quite engaged in feminist politics on the local level, while making a living by conventional photography, studio portraits and the like. Høeg founded the Horten Branch of the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, the Horten Women’s Council and the Horten Tuberculosis Association. Berg worked more behind the camera. The photographs were part of some 400 glass plates found in a barn of their farm decades after they had died. Marked “private,” they contained images that played with gender roles, cross dressing, mimicking behavior reserved for men (arctic explorers in fur coats,) showing the androgynous protagonist as well as a number of their friends joyously defying gender norms.

The work has a home at Norway’s national photography museum, the Preus Museum in Horten. It is currently shown at the ongoing Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, PHotoEspaña, in Madrid until September. 

As you can see, the couple poses like a traditional heterosexual couple at home, going out in the boat (or sitting for a photographer in these studio props that were known to anyone at the time,) interacting with their pet, and having fun at drinking, smoking and playing cards with friends (behavior reserved for men at the time) independent of gender.

A few of the photographs show a male friend not averse to cross-dressing.

Fast forward to 120 years later, and a different part of the world. Camila Falcão has been photographing Brazilian trans women (women born into male bodies), encouraging them to pose as they wish, in their own environments. (All photographs are from her website.) Brazil’s 2019 law that considers transphobia a crime has done nothing to lower the murder rate of Brazilian queer people: it is the highest in the world, for the 13th consecutive year, with a 30% rate of 4000 killings in that span of time.

The title of Falcão’s series, “Abaixa que é tiro” refers to the reactions of the portrayed and their friends, who started commenting  ‘Abaixa que é tiro!’, celebrating being shown to the world. “The expression is used widely among the Brazilian LGBT community to address that something really awesome/fabulous is about to hit you. More in general, however, it could be said that “Abaixa que é tiro” signals a paradoxical relationship between fear and empowerment.” (Ref.)

Again, notice how an attachment to pets immediately confers familiarity.

Women are tired, women break arms, women have friends.

Women are barely out of childhood,

could be on a winning gymnastics team,

a first grade teacher,

or the smart, uncompromising sister who sets you right.

Work like this can help to deconstruct stereotypes, although it will be a long road until increased visibility leads to a decrease in violence against this population. The photography world is noticing. We have now venerable institutions calling for work to show what unites us in times of division, like, for example, the British Journal of Photography, having judged exhibitions of Portraits of Humanity. Every single image that manages to shift our consciousness and beliefs is worth it, even if not all of us can have Falcão’s talent, access or courage as an ally to a demonized minority.

Music today is sung in Portuguese by Joao de Sousa, but created by a Polish collective, Bastarda, that has the most amazing modern Jewish music in their repertoire. Check them out. I have been listening to Fado non stop for weeks.

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Stardust

“There is in the universe neither center nor circumference.” – Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584.

JUNE 9th, 2023 was one of my lucky days. After a week that saw so many bleak events across the world, I found myself surrounded by beauty, and urgent reminders that the universe is larger than our tiny selves.

Lucky, because I was alerted to the photographic exhibition by coincidence: an instagram post by the preeminent print studio in town, Pushdot, saying that one of their clients had a show that very day – and only that day – in my neighborhood.

Lucky, because the artist is a friend and colleague who spontaneously agreed to meet me at the venue before official opening, so I could avoid inside crowds.

Lucky, because I got a one-on-one tutorial about how the stunning abstracts on display were created.

From the top: a number of artists and organizations came together to offer a music and art festival at Lewis & Clark College last Friday. EARTH’S PROTECTION, hosted by Resonance Ensemble and featuring special guests, included a drumming and dance demonstration by the Nez Perce performing ensemble Four Directions, information booths from Portland Audubon, and Songs for Celilo by composer Nancy Ives and Poet Ed Edmo – their tribute to the human, cultural, and planetary costs of the 1957 flooding of Celilo Falls which was premiered at The Reser last year and reviewed in OregonArtswatch. At the center of the evening concert was the Oregon premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, with projections by Joe Cantrell and Deborah Johnson. What would I have given to hear the music – but again, I can still not be inside with lots of people.

Joe Cantrell Jingle Dance (2023)

However, I could visit the art exhibition accompanying the proceedings: Joe Cantrell‘s We are ALL ONE.

Cantrell was born into the Cherokee nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, over 70 years ago. He served two tours with the Navy in Vietnam, including as a diving officer in the Mekong Delta, and then worked as a photojournalist in SouthEast Asia until 1986. The pronounced mildness in his eyes and the gentleness of his demeanor belie the traumatizing experiences that defined his younger years. During his decades in Oregon, he taught both, at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon College of Art and Craft. He is a photographer of note in so many ways, providing portraiture and event documentation for art organizations around town, but also specializing in Fine Art photography with his exploration of flora and rocks and fossils.

Joe Cantrell

We connected a few years ago over a shared preoccupation with the ways external or internal components of our experience merge to affect our work. Joe has better ways than I to define the process, ways that are rooted in and amplified by his heritage as a Cherokee, focussed on the interconnection of all things, embracing a multitude of perspectives, be it science, philosophy, history, and, of course, art. His work shines not only due to this conceptual grounding, though. He is ever curious to explore and apply technological advancements that allow him to create work that is unusual, and, yes, I repeat myself, stunningly beautiful.

Joe Cantrell Coming Home (2023)

The images on display were photographs of fossils and polished rocks, macro photography that goes deep inside the object to the very last level that can be captured in focus, then the next one, and the next one, until the surface is reached. A new computerized technology then stitches all of these individual takes together until the full image is constituted, abstractions and configurations resulting from stacking of sometimes more than 70 individual photographs of a single layered object. The color is natural and not photoshopped and appears during post-stitching.

Joe Cantrell Peace (2023)

One of the objects for macro exploration.

Clockwise from left: Joe Cantrell Reef (2023), Oregon Wood (2023,) Fourth Dimension (2023)

Joe Cantrell Stasis (2023)

What emerges are worlds of swirling waves, clouds, geometric patterns capturing all the movement of the elements one can imagine going into the formation of these rocks, the ice, the storms, the droughts, the millennia of relentlessly pounding external forces. A mirror image of the photographs we now receive from space through incredible technological advances, of worlds, of universes, here all captured in a single fossil or a fragment of a rock, for us to behold, whether in our hands – the object itself -, our eyes – the art that emerged from the vision, skill, and patience of the artist -, or our minds – the concept that relations can be captured multi-directionally, as long as we give up the notion that we are the center of the world.

Joe Cantrell Barton (2023)

Joe Cantrell The Gates of Hades (Welcome!) (2023)

Joe Cantrell Fractal Playpen (2023)

The stones include Oco, opals, trilobite, and different kinds of agate.

Sometimes natural forms have been preserved in amber or are fossilized in other ways, like these dinosaur feathers and the insect.

Joe Cantrell Dinosaur Feather & Amber – 320 million years old, give or take (2023,) Fungus Gnat (2023)

Joe Cantrell Ammonite (2023)

Again, Giordano Bruno, 16th century scientist, philosopher, heretic:

“There is no top or bottom, no absolute positioning in space. There are only positions that are relative to the others. There is an incessant change in the relative positions throughout the universe and the observer is always at the centre.”  On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584.

Let me juxtapose that with Joe’s perspective, in his own words:

“Yet in a universal perspective (whether we are aware or not, the one in which we all exist) our entire planet seems microscopic, and we, with all our “achievements,” and superstitions and egos, an insignificant, self-destructive nothing. BUT, we are part of All That! See!

Resonance Ensemble’s call to action for this festival was dedicated to protecting the earth, learning to be stewards rather than clinging to ownership with the rights to limitless extraction. Joe’s work addressed those issues with a message derived from earth materials themselves: Let us center ourselves a bit less and join the whole a bit more, acknowledging shared origins. The profusion of color, form, movement and subtlety inside all of these photographs will help to do just that, reminding us of one of the ultimate building blocks of the universe we inhabit: cosmic dust linking us all.

Joe Cantrell Lillian (2023)

Music today is a 2020 version of Sarah Kirkland Snyder’s Mass for the Endangered. It is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. She explains:

“The origin of the Mass is rooted in humanity’s concern for itself, expressed through worship of the divine—which, in the Catholic tradition, is a God in the image of man. Nathaniel and I thought it would be interesting to take the Mass’s musical modes of spiritual contemplation and apply them to concern for non-human life—animals, plants, and the environment. There is an appeal to a higher power—for mercy, forgiveness, and intervention—but that appeal is directed not to God but rather to Nature itself.”

And here is the Agnus Dei from An African-American Requiem by Damien Geter, performed by the Resonance Ensemble some years back.

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Art on the Road: Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems at the Getty.

Today’s musings are dedicated to my friend Henk Pander who died last Friday. Our last phone call, two days before his death, lasted but 3 minutes before he handed the phone over to his beloved wife Jody. He was tired after laughing at the memory, prompted by my day’s visit to the Getty, of a heated argument about the art of Carrie Mae Weems over a decade ago. The Portland Art Museum had shown a retrospective of the artist and I had been invited to give a lecture on her work from the perspective of a social scientist, tackling the implications of art addressing racism in direct and indirect ways. I honestly don’t remember what Henk’s and my disagreement was about, but I do remember the passionate exchange about art and its impact on society, a kind of exchange that was one of the cornerstones of our friendship, re-enacted over and over again. Once we had ticked off daily developments in our lives, and the perpetual topic of what it meant for each of us to have emigrated to the U.S., every single conversation rerouted back to art, to making art, to employing art as a tool of capturing more than beauty, a means of taking note, drawing parallels, exposing power and expressing resistance. Driven by both, our conscience and the hope that a better world would be possible.

Henk’s art and life have been described with empathy and clarity in this obituary. It lays out the complexity of the man and the artist, fully apprehending the magnitude of the loss for the art world as well as his family and friends. Henk’s work will continue to live on and, should we be so lucky, be understood as clarion calls for generations of viewers to come. May his memory be a blessing.

***

I had debated if it was crazy to go on opening day of the exhibition, assuming Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue might attract crowds that I’d have to avoid. But I had no other commitments that day and chanced a visit to The Getty. A fortuitous decision as it turned out, since the halls were still empty that morning and the few visitors mostly masked.

In fact, everything was sort of empty, surprisingly so during the week of spring break, approaching Easter. A few tourists, judging by foreign languages, a group here or there. In a way, the absence of distractions made the architecture stand out even more against the azure sky of that day. The beige travertine stone from Italy split along its natural grain to reveal the texture of fossilized leaves and branches, reflected lots of light, the different off-white enamel-clad aluminum panels and so much glass shimmered and glistened in the bright sun light, occasionally disrupted by cold gusts of wind.

Designed by architect Richard Meyer, it is a compound, half underground, half above due to height restrictions, encompassing more than just a museum up there on the hill above Los Angeles. Museum conservation programs, administration offices, research libraries and grant institutions are part of the campus as well and the scale of it all can best be assessed when viewed from above.

Here are a few images to convey the views, bright, bold starkness softened by lots of curves. I did not photograph the gardens, however, which struck me as pedestrian and strangely not at all in sync with the architecture.

A selection of sources discussing the architecture in depth, admiration and criticism alike, can be found here.

***

The photographic exhibition that opened that day has traveled across the nation. From the Grand Rapids Art Museum, to the Tampa Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum, it now has its last showing at the Getty. Four decades of selected work are on view, created by two friends who met in 1976 in Harlem, NY, and inspired each other ever since to explore, document and address issues of race, class and identity within historical and contemporary power structures.

(A recorded conversation between the artists on opening day last week at the Getty can be found here. The presentation and community programming in Los Angeles were made possible with major support from Jordan Schnitzer and The Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation.)

It is a powerful reminder of the role of retrospectives that only museums can fill: providing the chance to see an accumulation of the artists’ work over a lifetime, giving us a perspective that is not just affected by the sheer quantity of the work on display, but how things shifted qualitatively. It allows us to see how multidimensional the artists’ approaches were, how faceted and yet thorough. Museums have historically played a role in how reality is constructed – often in ways that clung to the established and familiar. To open the door to contemporary, and, importantly, critical approaches to the use of imagery in identity formation – so central to Dawoud Bey‘s and Carrie Mae Weems‘ photographic oeuvre – is a welcome move.

Carrie Mae Weems Roaming Series 2006

Dawoud has been the recipient of multiple fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, NY, and the induction into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, among others.

Dawoud Bey (Left to Right:) Young Girl Striking a Pose, Brooklyn, NY 1988 – Markie, Brooklyn, NY 1988- Three Girls at a Parade, Brooklyn, NY 1988

Weems’ honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the prestigious Prix de Roma, the Frida Kahlo Award for Innovative Creativity, the WEB DuBois Medal, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the BET Honors Visual Artist Award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art Photography, and the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography. This March she was named the 2023 Hasselblad Award laureate by the Hasselblad Foundation, an international photography prize that is granted annually to a photographer recognized for major achievements, called the “Nobel Prize” of photography by many of us.

Carrie Mae Weems Kitchen Table Series 1990

The five sections that present the two artists’ work are grouped by thematic pairings, allowing us to assess commonalities and differences in underlying principles, artistic approach, and selection of subjects across more than 40 years. They include work that (re)constructs and resurrects Black history, or looks for revelations in the landscape (A requiem to mark the moment by Weems, for example, or Bey’s exploration of the landscape of the Underground Railroad segments.)

Dawoud Bey (Clockwise from top:) A Young Man Looking in the Blue Note 1980 – Woman in Luncheonette, New York,NY 1981 – Woman in the Cadman Plaza Post Office, New York, NY 1981 – A Man walking in to a Parking Garage, New York, NY – 1981

My immediate reaction when seeing the juxtaposed work of these two friends and colleagues, each such powerful photographers and activists on the contemporary scene, was a sense of dichotomy. One could think of Bey as a poet and Weems as a dramatist, or alternately, Bey as a listener and Weems as a talker – and I mean that with full admiration for either approach. They both hone in on the power and ubiquity of prejudice, which, of course comes in many forms, whether racisms, classism, sexism, ageism, you name it. It always includes a mix of discriminatory behavior, targeted towards a particular group, discriminatory beliefs, concerning the group and usually an emotional element like fear, anger or even disgust directed at the targeted group. Crucially, prejudice needs to be understood within the historical context, and forms we see now may be very different from those at the formation of this nation, in both legal contexts and the personal one, in our awareness of our own prejudice or the ease or willingness with which a particular prejudice is expressed publicly, or acted on.

In the context of this show about the Black experience, racism is as good an example as any, with modern racism or implicit racism – automatic, unconscious, unintentional – still being tied to a culture that routinely links the idea of Blacks with the idea of deviant behavior, or a set of ideas, mostly bad, that concern violent crime, poverty, hyper sexuality or moral corruptness. Think of it like this: when I ask you to respond to the word peanut butter, for most people the word jelly emerges quickly and spontaneously. That association is independent of whether you like that kind of sandwich, or despise it, or have never tried it. The link between those two words has been established by the frequency with which you have encountered the pairing in your life time, it is anchored in your mind outside of awareness. This is the same for racist stereotypes flourishing for centuries in a culture that had a hierarchical valence of white over Black. You might not act on those beliefs, you might deny them, but the associations are carried by most of us through permanent exposure to the linkage of Black to negative or threatening concepts, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we have the best of intentions and the most egalitarian politics.

What can be done? We can draw attention to the stereotypes (and for that matter the historical burden of racism) with the hope of motivating people to intercept their own mental associations. Or we can pull attention away from prevalent stereotypes by offering alternative representations. Each of these approaches works best in different settings, and both artists have employed both approaches.

Carrie Mae Weems The Assassination of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm from the series Constructing History, 2008

Bey’s portraiture explores the subject with indirect subtlety, hard to decipher metaphors, trenchant depictions, like poetry that goes deep to listen inside and then provides a road map to new ways of seeing. New work includes a series titled after a line in Langston Hughes’ poem Dream Variations: Night coming tenderly, Black. The photographer pursues history, reimagining how a fleeing slave would have perceived landscape stretches along the Underground Railroad, under the sheltering cover or darkness, or tinged by the darkness of the unknown ending of a perilous journey. It is incredibly moving work, all the more so since it is unpeopled – in stark contrast to the portraiture Bey is rightly famous for. I only wish the very last words of the poem’s last line -” like me” – would not have been left out of the title. It would connect then and now, having a contemporary stand-in for the departed, one whose sense of safety and freedom is still not guaranteed in 2023 America or, worse, increasingly threatened.

Dawoud Bey Untitled #14 (Site of John Brown’s Tannery), from the series Night Coming Tenderly, Black, 2017

Weems’ imagery uses powerful staging both in early and later work, including private and public almost theatrically arranged sets, amplified by literal scripts that guide us into the thicket of our own stereotypes and beliefs. The intense beauty that she captures or instills into her staged photographs reminds me of the song of the Sirens, beguiling you while always containing the undertone of something haunting or violent that lies in wait for us. This is true particularly for those series that replace widespread stereotypic views with alternative representations (the Roaming series, for example), in contrast to those where she makes the horrors of racism and the history of marginalization screamingly explicit (“From here I saw what happened and I cried.”)

A 1984 book by French philosopher Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, talks about how photographs contain implied meanings and depict seemingly naturalistic truths. But he points out that photographs can also, in a paradoxical way, become the tools to question meaning. I find in the work of both artists the strength to challenge existing power structures, to undermine the ways that traditional images generate and maintain cultural dominance.

Carrie Mae Weems Untitled from the series Sea Islands 1992

If the structure of societal norms defines how we look at something – our hapless use of the colonizing gaze shaped by historical expectations – both artists’ work manages to subvert our way of looking and/or applying stereotypes related to race, class and gender. Their photography, across the decades, has adopted a permanent practice of subversion, opening a path to integration and equality, rather than oppression and marginalization. Or, in Weems’ own words upon being made the Hasselblad Award laureate:

“To be recognized comes with the continued responsibility to deliver on the promise made to myself and to the field, which is to shine a light into the darker corners of our time and thereby, with a sense of grace and humility, illuminate a path forward.”

Dawoud Bey A Woman Wearing Denim, Rochester, NY 1989 – A Couple at a Bus Stop, Rochester, NY, 1990

Dream Variations

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
    Dark like me—
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
    Black like me.

Langston Hughes – 1901-1967

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes. 

***

The Getty Center

Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue

April 4 – July 9, 2023

Tuesday–Friday, Sunday10am–5:30pm Saturday10am–8pm Monday Closed

1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90049, USA

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Happy Birthday, Ken Hochfeld!

We had it all planned. My friend had an exhibition of his latest work at Lightbox Gallery in Astoria. I was to come on a Monday when the gallery is closed to the public, so I could look at his photographs, safely away from potential sources of infection. Wouldn’t you know it, it did not work out, I was under the weather and the trip had to be canceled.

The work is back in Portland now, and this weekend I got a one-on-one presentation on Ken’s porch, safely outside and yet protected from the endless rain. It was the day before his birthday.

Cape Horn, WA

I want to talk a little bit about this photographer friend of mine and the way I believe he approaches his work. The lack of feedback when you are not a famous artist in the limelight can be anything from annoying to discouraging at times. We all should make more of an effort to share our reactions. So here are some observations, and some guesses.

Historic Columbia Highway at Rowena Crest

If you look at Ken’s website, one thing is immediately obvious: he is willing to take risks, over and over again, by exploring new methods and new subjects with a vengeance. That is not the norm in the world of photography. Most successful photographers have their shtick and stick to it – why fix something if it ain’t broken? It allows the viewers to instantly recognize your work, a marketing plus, among others. It allows you to refine your technique with a particular subject, it keeps you in a comfort zone.

Olin and Hazel Oliver  1972 (From his book They Call it Home – The Southeastern Utah Collection)

In contrast, Ken’s path as a fine art photographer has been variable across the decades. He has tackled portraiture, color photography, both in spontaneous and in staged settings. His work interacts with our natural environment in a multitude of ways, from descriptive, documentary landscape photography, to capturing the mood or essence of a place, to using nature as a symbolic stand-in for more personal exploration, preferably in black&white, often in the sepia tone range, sometimes in collaboration with people who provide text.

Titles of series clockwise from upper left: Madrone Wall Expressions – Rock(s) – Landscape Americana – Unboxed – Whole – The Trees.

As someone myself who gets easily bored and also likes to stretch herself artistically as much as intellectually, I feel quite drawn to work that shares some of those characteristics. You never know what comes next, and so are kept on your toes, wondering about the newest project, both in terms of method and ideas.

I grew here-lump of stone,
settled in my nest of sticks
waiting for an Irish spring,
waiting for a four-leaf clover
        to kiss me awake.
(From the series Waiting, text by Gay Walker.)

The most recent work consist of diverse series. Ken captures the Columbia river with a nod to the history of photographers who came before us, with fresh eyes, nonetheless. Some of these images were created while he kayaked on the river in order to get vistas inaccessible from land. If you have ever held a camera or/and tried to paddle in those waters you know how daring an approach this is – yet the photographs are nothing but serene. Here is the artist statement:

“Pages: The Majestic Columbia River”

The Columbia River has been a popular subject for photographers since the early days of the medium over 150 years ago.  Many wonderful photographs of the river are shown in galleries, museums and the pages of books highlighting the historical importance of the work itself while depicting the beauty of the Columbia River. 

The photographs shown here are my own pages of some favorite scenes of this powerful and intensely beautiful resource we have in our backyard.  I hope that with the exhibitions at LightBox today, we can celebrate the majesty of the Columbia River and recognize its significance while remembering it as an existential heritage of those who were here long before the first settlers arrived.

Horse Thief Lake, Columbia River Gorge, WA

For the other project, Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River, Ken spent several years photographing the people (some familiar, some met on the road, quite literally) and the landscape of a region resistant to change. Scandinavian fishermen, Chinese immigrants who worked in the canneries, farmers who tried to make a living, make for a hard working populous in a region prone to earthquakes, floods and fires.

“Small Communities of the Lower Columbia River”

There is a special character and history in the small communities found along the Lower Columbia River in Oregon and Washington. This work begins to examine the places and the people who live there.

The communities of the Lower Columbia on the Oregon side along Highway 30 west of Portland and on the Washington side near Highway 4 west of Longview were settled primarily by Swedes and Finns long before roads were built. They depended upon Columbia River tributaries and sloughs for access, so these developments became known as Riverboat Communities. When roads were built the riverboats became obsolete.  While fishing and canning were once the primary source of commerce, the canneries are now of the past.  Cattle and sheep are raised by many of the locals and fishing is still active. Most importantly the communities depend upon water management of the sloughs via dikes constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers and managed by hired locals to minimize pasture flooding, but flooding is still common during the wet season. In Brownsmead in particular, new construction is seldom seen because of the scarcity of available undeveloped higher ground, so changes to the area are rare and most of the locals like it that way. 

Clatskanie River

Watermaster walks the Columbia River Dike near Brownsmead

I’ll skip over all the stuff relating to technique that I know nothing about in the first place, given that I still use a point&shoot camera on automatic mode, grateful if I manage to get what ever captures my attention in focus. Seems to me, though, that Ken’s images are flawless, when it comes to the way light was captured and space laid out.

Clockwise from upper left: Ed and Jan Johnson, Brownsmead – Scott Fraser, Midlands District – Ray and Denise Raihala, Brownsmead – and Brooklyn, NYC transplant Carol Newman, Brownsmead (community treasure, heart and soul – and brain! – of the local radio station KMUN/Astoria. I’m an ardent fan, in case you wondered, of her and the show hosted by her, Arts Live and Local.)

Instead, I want to try and express what much of Ken’s nature-based work seems to reflect for me. For lack of a better phrase, I think the images evoke a state of longing. I can’t quite put my finger on what is longed for: establishing a connection between photographer and viewer through successfully communicating what was seen?

From the series Rivers and Streams

Longing to freeze the moment in time when awareness of the beauty of our surround registers, once again, pretending we can make it last forever? Longing to prolong that state where we can focus on the cliffs, the woods, the meadows, the rivers, oblivious to pain or the daily demands on us, our worries and obligations, in blissful isolation? Or, in reverse, longing to belong, while out there all alone, forever wondering if people “get” what one is producing?

From the series Rock(s)

Longing to find a pictorial language that expresses oneself when words fail? Whatever it is, a feeling hovers above the surface of these photographs, or within them, that still believes in possibility – longing can be answered.

Bughole Road

Sometimes the longing is on the melancholy side, sometimes it captures joy about what’s seen, the deep desire to depict and share. Sometimes it is more attached to what is photographed, sometimes it seems more linked to the one doing the photographing. Wherever the scales tip, one thing is true for the work: it does not shy away from, or, really, it comfortably seeks and displays emotion. If I compare it to the traditional (and majority male) landscape photography that I know, that is special.

High Water on Wirkala Rd. Deep River, WA

Surprise me with what’s next down the road! No Dead End for you!

Music today of Finnish origins like many of the Brownsmead immigrants, related to light, appropriate for a passionate photographer.

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What was.

Today I am posting someone else’s photography for obvious reasons. Ukrainian photographer Yevgeniy Kotenko has captured quotidian life in a beautiful series called On the Bench since 2007.

He photographed the view from his parents’ kitchen window in Kiev throughout the seasons.

At this very moment the images strike me as tragically poignant, wondering what all these individual people are going through, likely for years to come, if they survive.

And survival is doubly imperiled for people with life-threatening illnesses, in hospitals that are either not functioning due to dire lack of medication and supplies or being attacked themselves. The World Health Organization reports that shortages of cancer medications, insulin and oxygen supplies are reaching hazardous levels. Hospitals have been hit with cluster munition, according to the Human Rights Watch, and sick children are moved to make-shift bomb shelters in hospital basements.

Ukraine had put particular efforts into the care of sick children, beyond medical treatments. Here is a link to a project that provides children’s wards in hospital with constructed environments that support healing through play and discovery.

“The design studio Decor Kuznetsov and the Vlada Brusilovskaya Foundation have teamed up for CUBA BUBA, a project that transforms hospital rooms throughout Ukraine into sensory wonderlands for young patients. Complete with comfy seating, reading nooks, and even open-air chimes, each module is compact and intended for children to rest and relax as they undergo various treatments.The group recently installed its sixth iteration, “CUBA BUBA SUNNY,” which features a shelved room full of greenery and sculptures. Suspended below the light is an ornately carved ceiling that shines a unique pattern onto the eclectic collection. To inspire play, an earlier design’s facade is comprised entirely of holes, allowing kids to wind rope throughout the structure into a vibrant web.” (Ref.)

What was. And what is today:

Here are options to help by Razom for Ukraine and a list offered by VOX.

Today’s poem is befitting the times and the unimaginable braveness of the people invaded or protesting the invasion.

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

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Staged/Un-Staged

Lots of pictures today. They continue the theme that I introduced at the beginning of this week, varied approaches to memory and change across time.

The first round concerns a German photographer, Birthe Piontek, who is now based in Canada. I came across her work when looking at a review of a current exhibition in Brooklyn, NY, that offers new angles on food photography. Other than that edibles are involved, the inclusion of Piontek as food photography struck me as farfetched – but then so did her artist statement for the staged work, below. It is too bad, since the work itself is creative, clean, with superb workmanship. Meaning must, I guess.

“Janus is another iteration of my ongoing inquiry into the topics of memory and change. All photographs in this series were taken in the same corner of my studio as I am interested in how an artist can find inspiration in the limitations of a specific space. …

In some images, the objects are photographed alone; in others, I perform with them. In the combination of body and object, a kinship is revealed. Much of the series rests on the idea of an alikeness of all organic matter that is exposed to the forces of change. We all adapt, mutate, grow and decline every day, even if this transformation is mostly invisible to the eye. Like the ancient Roman god, Janus – the god of beginnings, transitions, and endings – we always try to look into the future while being informed by our past. Thus the current moment, in which change is happening, usually slips by unnoticed.”

Birthe Piontek Pear/Knee
Birthe Piontek Grpefruit/Armpit
Birthe Piontek Parsnips/Hand
Birthe Piontek Strawberries/Elbow
Birthe Piontek Sliced Pumpkin/Back

The second round is devoted to an artist whose work was introduced to me by a friend. (Thank you C.N.!) Deana Lawson uses staged images as well, this time on steroids. Or maybe I should prefer the term grand scale or regal, as it is offered in various glowing reviews of Centropy, her current exhibition at the Guggenheim.

The winner of the 2020 Hugo Boss award, Lawson approaches strangers who she feels drawn to and then elaborately surrounds them with scenes and props that confuse all sense of being rooted in a particular time – they point to past, press, future simultaneously – yet the artist herself calls it time stopping. The exhibition itself adds holograms and light prisms that enhance a sense of the surreal. Here is the entry of the exhibition blurb of the museum:

“… creates images that are rooted in a moment from the tangible world, but ultimately exist in the shimmering in-between space of dreams, memories, and spiritual communion, where the everyday is transfigured into the uncanny and the magnificent.“

Then again, when you approach her short film that describes her approach to her work and offers interviews with and about many of her subjects, you are guided by an introduction that points to

“. ..the creation of images of Black diasporic identity that powerfully evoke the self-possession and divinity of her subjects.”

One last take (in line with the relentless praise machinery surrounding the artist): the NYT headlines a detailed review of the artist and her work with this interpretation:

The Artist Upending Photography’s Brutal Racial Legacy

Deana Lawson’s regal, loving, unburdened photographs imagine a world in which Black people are free from the distortions of history.

Can we PLEASE just have the images speak for themselves?

Actually, nope. Because we would miss, (many if not most of us, I certainly,) what is potentially disturbingly problematic with this work, including the art critic’s worries about the abject objectification of Black bodies, of a continuation of degradation and exploitation central to historic photography of Blacks, and of misrepresentation of religious practices in the diaspora. Add to that active suppression of art criticism of this work by the artist and those making money around her art. Sorry, more reading required. Then make up your one mind.

“Young Grandmother,” 2019.Credit…Deana Lawson, from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
“Ms. Bell at Home,” 2021.Credit…Deana Lawson, from Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Deana Lawson, “Chief” (2019),Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)
Left: Deana Lawson – Nation, 2018 / Right: Deana Lawson – Grace with Woman (Arbeitstitel / working title), 2020. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Deana Lawson – The Garden, 2015. © Deana Lawson. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Alternatively, you can peruse today’s un-staged photographs from yesterday’s visit to a friend’s garden. They document neither history, nor change, nor the future, but simply the persimmons, apples and pears ripened by this summer’s unusual heat. At times I’m content to look at just what IS.

Looking at was is, and listening to somethin else…..

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Defying the Laws of Gravity

Todays’ blog is brought to you by my garden’s hummingbirds. Now that the Buddleia is in bloom they are regular visitors. It takes some patience to stand under the bush (while cursing under my breath because my camera’s focus function has decided to be uncooperative, another spendy repair in the offing) and wait for the birds to appear. Of course they do not defy the laws of gravity, but it looks as if they do when they arrive and seemingly hang still in the air, sucking nectar.

Thoughts of physics reminded me of a photographer, Berenice Abbott (1889 – 1991) who excelled at photographing principles of physics. Her interest in documenting scientific principles and teaching the role of science in photography came late in her life, after she had already a stellar career excelling in all kinds of subject areas within the domaine of photography. Early in life she gained renown by her portrait photography of European artists and intellectuals of the Paris of the 1920s. In the 1930s she turned to documentary photography of the city of New York (funded by the FAP) and rural America in the aftermath of the Depression. Eventually she focussed on science, becoming the photography editor for Science Illustrated and producing scientific images for the textbook American High School Biology. The Physical Science Study Committee of Educational Services published a new physics book in the 1950s with all of the images almost exclusively by Abbott.

Circular Wave System Photograph MIT Museum

My kind of woman, always willing to take a risk to pursue her passion, never narrowly focussed on one single domain, and open to acknowledging the giants who paved the way (she had an absolute crush on the work of Eugene Atget, one of the pioneers of documentary photography.) In fact, she managed to rescue his collection of plates after his death and promoted his work throughout her lifetime.

I first saw her work at the MIT museum. One of the reviews of a solo exhibition claimed:

“Berenice Abbott’s science photographs invite us to contemplate the wonder of creation. As photographs utilizing the latest technology to illustrate scientific principles they are quintessentially modern, but the principles they illustrate came into being simultaneously with the Big Bang, so the images are also timeless, taking us both backward and forward throughout eternity. By making manifest the invisible forces that act upon the material world, they do for physics what the mandala does for Hindu theogony, or Kabbalistic diagrams of the sefirot try to do for the Ineffable.”

Hmm. Do we have to reach into the religious accomplishment-drawers to establish the value of photographic images? I’m certain she would have scoffed at that kind of comparison, seeing the wonder of creation too often subdued or undermined by a different kind of invisible hand – the economic and political forces that ruthlessly ignored the distress of the poor. As the photo-historian Terri Weisman explains, Abbott was interested in “how the things in the world reveal the world.” Abbot was labeled a communist by the McCarthy administration. Her life-long distrust of politics and economic institutions led to a catastrophe in late life: she had put her considerable life’s earnings converted to gold coins in a home safe and boxes stored in her house, all lost during a burglary in 1984. A great biography of Abbot can be found here.

The chain of associations while sitting under my butterfly bush eventually hit on the talents of a younger generation explicitly inspired by Abbott’s work and interests. Here are some ingenious images of the base quantities of physics generated by Greg White. As defined by the International System of Quantities (ISQ), these are time (second, s); mass (kilogram, kg); length (metre, m); temperature (kelvin, K); amount of substance (mole, mol); electric current (ampere, A); and luminous intensity (candela, cd). White captured all with props, ingeniously arranged and camera, no other manipulations. (Photos from his website, linked above.)

Electric Current
Length
Luminous Intensity
Mass
Amount of Substance
Temperature
Time

I’ll stick to capturing my little birds, wondrous in their own ways, and reading about all these interesting minds coming up with ways to depict the rest of the world. Not least because I always struggled with physics.


Hummingbird Music by Leonard Cohen, from the album Thanks for the Dance.

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Documenting Past and Present

Give me an example where you felt triumphant and demoralized at the same time. Nothing comes to mind? Here is one of mine: two days ago I drove myself to Sauvie Island for the first time in 5 months, taking the first solo photography walk there since my surgeries. Feeling triumphant that I dared (and was able to,) demoralized because I could only get so far and at a snail’s pace. Also, the heavy camera was shaky in my hands, as evidenced by the out-of-focus quality of some of the birds, but hey, I did it.

I eagerly wanted to visit the ospreys during their nesting season. Part of that motivation came from the need for appropriate photos for today’s topic, the work of a photographer who turned from photojournalism documenting armed conflicts to working extensively on environmental issues. Christian Åslund, an award winning Swedish photographer, often focuses on the High Arctic and the Arctic Ocean, in need of saving from the oil industry and commercial overfishing, forces of destruction of the natural balance, raptors included. He, some years back, even joined an expedition skiing to the Northpole to call for a global sanctuary of the region. If he can ski at the North Pole, I can toddle along Rentselaer Road, observing the nests…..

The link to the photographer’s name above leads to some magnificent photos of the ocean ice. I want to focus, though, on his documentation of the changes of a particular range of glaciers. As I have mentioned before, people are both hesitant or unwilling in acknowledging what is going on around us, particularly if t seems to occur in a far away future, with the loophole that science might rescue us in the intervening years.

Looking at something concretely, at a change that has happened and is in the process of continuing to happen might be a wake-up call that is harder to ignore. Visual evidence is sometimes more effective than abstract ideas. Aslund was able to find archival photos from 100 years ago of Svalbard Glaciers courtesy of the Norwegian Polar Institute. He then set out to photograph the very landscape from identical angles, ingeniously adding a modern human figure into the mix when the old photo contained one as well – making the interaction between nature and human salient.

The series can be found on his website, which is, as websites go, remarkable for the wealth of information and quality of the design. With easily accessed links you can get written factual information, pause the slides and enlarge them, as well as find different topics at a glance. Might not matter to you, but for someone who is interested in photography websites this one scored big. Ok, I digress.

“The archipelago of Svalbard, a land of ice and polar bears, is found midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Its capital Longyearbyen on the main island of Spitsbergen is the world’s most northerly city, some 800 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

Svalbard is also home to some of the Earth’s northernmost glaciers, which bury most of the archipelago’s surface under no less than 200 metres of thick ice. Taken together, Svalbard glaciers represent 6% of the worldwide glacier area outside the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.”

The danger of these glaciers melting completely is not just one of raising water levels of oceans and feeding into the cyclic nature of global warming. Freed from ice, these areas will be much more accessible to both mining industries and tourism, further disturbing excessively shrinking habitat of endangered species, in this particular case making it harder for polar bears to survive.

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Which brings us back to the Oregon ospreys and, for once, good news. Their population rapidly declined due to deforestation and pesticide use until about the 1970s. They have recovered, though, partly because they have found nesting sites on power poles and river channel markers, helped along by utility companied and the U.S. Coast Guard that see to the safety of the sites, or take armloads of previous used nesting materials to sites that they build near by. (See below.)

Ospreys are migrating birds, going to warmer climes in Mexico and South America for 6 months of the year. The couples separate during that trek, but then reunite upon return during March in Oregon, with great fidelity to the old nesting site which they rebuild. The chicks usually hatch mid-May, flying in July, and then depart for the wintering grounds in mid-August. (I saw one nest with two chicks on my walk, and another one just being built – timing obviously varies.) The female is in constant contact with the chicks for the first month or so, then perches nearby and occasional hunts, something the male did all along. About 375 pounds of fish are needed to sustain an osprey couple with two chicks in the nest – note what that implies for needing clean rivers with healthy fish populations….

If only we could do for the polar wildlife what we were able to do for the raptors here. Work like Aslund’s might help, if enough people were to see it.

Here’s to the next generation of preservationists, learning early!

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Imagined Past and Future

These days I have a hard time remembering all the stuff I read during the course of a week. By all I mean not necessarily the storylines of the current novels on the bedside table – I can still keep those in my memory, if barely. But the rest, the various articles, essays, commentaries, headlines, art reviews or tweets, you name it, seem to leave fleeting impressions. Except when they don’t.

The current duo that stuck its tentacles into my brain comes from very different corners of my intellectual universe: one an artistic project of the most visual kind creating a glimpse of a potential past, the other a philosophical essay of the more cerebral kind envisioning a scenario of a possible future.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Avion Pearce is a NYC-based photographer who has a knack for telling stories through series of photographs that are staged. She manages to produce work that accomplishes both, strong stand-alone images and an unfolding of a story across the series – not an easy feat to pull off. Location, props, costuming, mask and staging are all her doing, as is lighting. She has a large technical repertoire when it comes to the latter, with an unfailing eye for what lighting tells the story best.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Her latest project, Shadows, tells the story of two Black female lovers in Louisiana of years gone by, hidden in a cottage at the banks of the Mississippi, going about their daily routines. The artist and a friend portrayed the women. It is remarkable how the mundane and the erotic, how pride and furtiveness all come across in photographs that are neither particularly dramatic nor particularly subtle. They are not shy of being pretty either, and if I had to translate them into speech, I would think we’d listened to a tenderly told tale, with lowered voices in a private setting, relating joy. Something we don’t come by easily these days, and likely not in those earlier ones either. (Images are all from the link to Pearce’s work.)

Photo: Avion Pearce

Joy is not the thing that comes to mind when thinking through the topic of Agnes Callard‘s essay: our willingness to acknowledge and prepare for a future without humans. Callard teaches Ancient Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Chicago and writes a monthly essay in The Point – a magazine for the examined life, which is one of the more interesting publications out there. Like Pearce, she tells stories or snippets of stories. Her’s embody philosophical or ethical insights in a way that the rest of us laypeople can actually grasp, in a language that is easily understood.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Her essay The End is Coming points out that there will be a future without humans on this planet (whether in about 700 years as many scientist argue or at some later point, relocation to Mars non-withstanding….) because the extant climate conditions will make it impossible to sustain human life. Callard wonders what will happen to humans when they know they are the last ones. Much of the meaning of life for us and those who came before us, if not all of it, rested on the assumption that there will be further generations in whom we live on, for whom it mattered what we created, in all areas of life from art to science. Will the knowledge that there will be no further generations lead to ethical and political collapse?

How do you care about self and others, be passionate about things, find meaning in something when you face extinction, whether as an individual or as a species? How do you overcome our resistance, one likely lasting close to (or beyond) the point of disaster’s arrival, to face the facts? Callard does not pretend to have the answer, but argues that we have the obligation, or humanists have the obligation, to face the scenario and help equip that last generation with courage.

Photo: Avion Pearce

“The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, …, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy. “

Here’s my optimistic (?) alternative. By the time extinction comes around, there will be very, very few of us, with heat, cold, famine, and flourishing pandemics having wiped out most of humanity already. Maybe we’ll regress during these remaining 700 years to a point where we are not aware of the finiteness of existence, where we move through our short lives more like the mammals we originated from. Spared that conscious knowledge, the very last generations will feed, mate, die in due natural cause, with an experiential horizon that barely extends the Now and prevents anticipatory anxiety. And then it’s curtains for a species that was driven by greed and hubris to speed up its very own extinction.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Not what you needed to think about on a Monday morning? Here is cheerful distraction: Gottschalk was born in New Orleans in the 1800s and lived for some years in Cuba. The music goes well with Pearce’s Shadows.

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Paris-Match (2)

Photographer Gisèle Freund (1908 – 2000) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, growing up around art (her father was a notable collector) and receiving a first rate education. She studied art history and sociology at the University of Freiburg and then Frankfurt, becoming acquainted with the Frankfurt School folks around Adorno, friends with Walter Benjamin, portraitist of Berthold Brecht, and engaged in antifascist student organizations.

She barely made it to France in 1933, answering the threatening questions of the police patrolling the train “if they had ever heard someone Jewish being called Gisela,” a classic German name, and handing over her camera that she had intuitively emptied of film in the train’s loo.

She escaped with few funds, but a lot of negatives depicting mass demonstrations and violence by the Nazis against leftist protests which introduced her as a photographer to an ever widening circle of friends and aquaintances in the literary and publishing circles in Paris. Her works can now be found at the Washington State University Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, depicting a veritable Who’s Who of (mostly) European intellectuals.

Prints include numerous portraits of: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Andre Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Andre Breton, Andre Gide, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, Henri Michaux, David Siqueiros, Andrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Max Ernst, G.B. Shaw, J.B. Priestley, Diego Rivera, Henry Moore, Herman Hesse, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Valery, Elsa Triolet, Simone De Beauvoir, Pierre Bonnard, Vita Sackville-West, Georges Mathieu, Ivan Illich, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Steinbeck, Philippe Soupault, Eugene Ionesco, Le Corbusier, Samuel Beckett, Jose Clemente Orosco, Iris Murdoch, Ivy Compton Burnett, Rosamund Lehmann, Christopher Fry. 1933-1974  She took the official photograph at the presidential inauguration of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981.

Here are some of the images:

Previous travels to Paris had already brought friendship with some of the surrealists, more doors opened after she became friends and then lovers (she was bi-sexual) with the famous bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier, which left the latter’s previous partner, Sylvia Beach, in the dust. Monnier published her doctoral thesis (part of the book I reviewed yesterday,) made the connections to the literary illuminati, and helped to find a marriage of convenience with a resistance fighter so that Freund could stay in France.

Until she couldn’t. In 1940 she had to flee Paris, eventually traveling to South America, all the while being published by major publications like Life Magazine, Time Magazine, Paris-Match and Magnum, starting a year after its founding, and being written out of its history when she became politically risky. Argentina threw her out of the country after she photographed Evita Perón in heaps of her jewels and with stashes of accumulated riches. She found a harbor in Mexico City, became friends with Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo and their circle, and was banned from entry to the US until the 1970s (!) because of her leftists associates.

She was described as a difficult person, temperamental, but I am in awe of the independence, the power to take risks and explore while forced to relocate under threat, and the flexibility to adapt to ever changing conditions. She also embraced color photography as one of the first influential photographers, scorned by many in the male establishment.

Postwar return to France saw her fame rise, details found here in an obituary that lamented, 20 years ago, that her work had been hidden from history for too long.

That is no longer true, and brings me to the question that reading her book and articles about her raised for me. How do you understand a person and feel free to interpret her motives for her work, when you can no longer talk to her? It is of course a task for many a biographer, but looking at photographs and interpreting them to infer the motivations of the photographer strikes me as difficult, particularly when their own recorded words stand in contrast to your interpretations.

Let me explain with an example, typical for many. A scholar of photographers in exile argues

“that exile by fascist regimes prompted certain European photographers to resort to human figuration in order to reconsider the possibilities of historical subjectivity at its moment of crisis…. Gisèle Freund, the color portraitist of the interwar French cultural luminaries, made a volte-face from the portrayal of the collective subject in the political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt into the individual faces of the French intellectuals after her exile in Paris…led them to instrumentalize the photographic medium not only to address the aftermath of the European avant-garde—especially the end of its utopian quest to envision political collectives through human figuration—but also to measure and critique the new American mass culture and subjectivity.”

Ok, I have no clue what historical subjectivity is supposed to mean. Not for want of trying, but the literature explaining it is impenetrable for this aging brain. My bad. I do know, though, that Freund never gave up on photographing collective subjects, even during exile, as can be seen in work documenting the British poor, and political movements and working conditions all over the South American sub-continent in her years of exile. Never mind, that she also portrayed individual people with a passion pre-exile.

I have watched interviews with the photographer herself speaking late in life about her intentions. For one, being hired for portraits in the 1930s meant a means of economic survival (the print media were happy to display pictures of the rich and famous.) Shifting to color made her feel she could capture more life-like impressions, serving her goal to “familiarize strangers with each other, potentially decreasing enmity among them.” The close encounters with people also opened avenues for what she thought most important in all of the world: friendship and love.

The interview below is, alas, available only in German.

It ends with a comment that I translated here:

“I believed for many years that you could change the world with photography. I later realized that was an error. People used my photos to pursue their ideologies and I understood that photography lies even though people assume it tells the truth.”

She abandoned photography, her life’s passion, in 1980, a full 20 years before her death of a heart attack in the year 2000.

Photographs, selected for the color that Freund so cherished, are from Coyoacán, Mexico City, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo, who was photographed extensively by Freund, lived. The blue house is now a museum – I wrote about Fridamania here.

And here we go down memory lane for my own youth…

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