Harlem

The Studio Museum In Harlem has left a deep imprint on my own inner landscape. I have yet to leave an exhibition at the museum without feeling as though my world has been turned upside down with possibility. So it was with great enthusiasm that I accepted a second commission from the museum to make a body of photographs for the museum's journal, Studio.

Harlem is unlike any place that I have been in the world. The streets pullulate with an energy that gets me back to the places in Kenya where I was born and raised, where culture comes to you in the places in your body where you feel the beat of a drum. The deep African American and African roots in Harlem combine with a century of metropolitan life in New York City to create a place that is unique in the world, and is one of its treasures.

And so it was with a lot of trepidation that I began my first work in Harlem in 2006. I am in no position to comment with authority on all that Harlem stands for historically, culturally and politically. After much thought I decided to simply go there and walk, as if I was entering any other landscape in the world, and let the place take me where it would.

This second time, now more familiar with the neighborhood, I began to work simply with the word "earth" resonating in the back of my consciousness. This was not the western notion of earth which is something that we consider to be largely tamed by now, something that needs to be protected from us, but rather the Kenyan concept of "nchi" with which I grew up. The word means "land" in Swahili, but instead of referring to western ideas of the scenic or to a retreat from normal life, it refers to the vessel of all that is. The land is the home of the spirits, alive with unseen portent and containing an invisible world as influential and real as the visible one.

To put this into Post-Modern parlance, the western notions of signifier and signified are significantly altered. The land itself is a signifier for another world that is full of meaning outside of the visual. The signified is understood to exist on a spiritual plane, and there is no need for photographs or any other kind of picture to mediate the exchange.

It has been and continues to be my goal to explore this western need for pictures to place us in relationship with our environments. My hope is that these images resonate as having emerged from Harlem, rather than being about it.

Above is a selection of images from my recent work this past winter. You can see a complete edit of all 32 images from both commissions under the title "Harlem" in my archives.

The Sadness of Men

Philip Perkis is one of the most widely respected American photographers, yet his work is little known outside of professional circles. In this fifty-year retrospective, and first published collection, his inimitable vision is brought to the public. With a gift for capturing moments of heartbreaking honesty and unparalleled beauty, he presents a world on the brink of transcendence. Taken in the most humble circumstances—snapped from the driver's seat or taken at home—these images are so much more than the sum of their parts. The electric fury of barking dogs in the streets of Mexico, the white stillness of Israel, and the silence of a sleeping mother, carry within them complexities of gray, of raw emotion and metaphor. These images are the gift of a master observer with an eye tuned to the almost imperceptible miracles of everyday life. They are not one-line gags or jaded images of the poor or suffering, rather they are evocative explorations of the lovely sadness of life and the wild, sweet rhythms of the world. 125 duotone photographs.

Publishers notes, The Sadness of Men, by Philip Perkis, 2008 Quantuck Lane Press.


With a gift for capturing moments of heartbreaking honesty and unparalleled beauty, Perkis presents a world on the brink of transcendence. The photographs, in both the book and the exhibition have been carefully sequenced, to build upon each other like a visual fugue, an expression of the profound. The result is both universal and intensely personal, exalting and deeply humbling. It is impossible to step away from these pictures unmoved.

From the show announcement of Perkis' 50 year retrospective at the Alan Klotz Gallery in New York City.

Now over a decade ago, I studied with Perkis at Pratt Institute for two years. I was a painting student who was interested in seeing how I might explore the abstract and material aspects of seeing in the camera. As an early assignment, he had me sit in a room and look at the light on a wall for several hours as afternoon turned into evening. In order to tolerate this--it is not easy to sit still and see--I built a camera that would record in long exposures the entire experience. And then I sat looking. As the white wall was illuminated in the transitioning afternoon, it became clear that even this plain white wall was many things. It changed, had a life of its own. It told a kind of story with no beginning or end. A single sentence in a long continuum. A door was opened up to me then that has never closed.

In Perkis' own words:

To simply see what something(s) looks like: the light, the space, the relationship (visual) between the distances, the air, the tones, the rhythms, the texture, the contrasts, the shape of movement… the things themselves… not what they might mean later, not socially, not politically, not psychologically, not sexually (a cigar is not even yet a cigar).

Not to name, label, evaluate, like, hate; no memory or desire. Just to see.

This is the hardest thing to do, but that’s all that can be photographed. The camera records the light emitted from the surface of that which is placed within its field of view.

P e r i o d.

To experience the meaning of what is. To stay with it for even a few seconds is no small task. The sound of voice without language, a musical line, a ceramic vessel, a non-objective painting. The presence of it, the weight of it, the miracle of its existence, of my existence. The mystery of the fact itself.

Maybe it’s the second law of infinity where you keep going halfway there forever. Cutting in half to eternity, and ‘grace’ is needed to jump the gap. I keep taking pictures hoping something will help me across.

- - Philip Perkis
Teaching Photography – Notes Assembled
OB Press-2001

(Thanks to Suzanne Revy for reminding of this quote.)

In a world where millions of pictures compete to perform in service to politics, power exchanges, ideologies, "news", class distinctions and many other functions, it is a gift to be in the presence of work that resists these masters and starts with light on a surface, reflected into the camera. And, from that phenomenological starting point, begins to explore the infinite complexities of beauty and sadness.

Whatever happened to AlecSoth.com/blog?

I checked in on the Alec Soth blog today to find that it seems to have
entirely disappeared. Back in October, 2007, Soth ended posting with the statement that he was hanging up the blog for a while and was sick of email, so if you wanted to reach him, write a letter. Now all links back to his blog come up dead. Is this a transitional thing? Social media have been touted as photography's next wave of marketing. Soth was a leader in that experiment.

Soth's blog had been used as an example of how social media were able to carry the conversation with and between photographers to the next level. There had been some very interesting exchanges, such as when Soth criticized Robert Polidori's work and started an exchange with him that was eye opening for sure. In the old media world, it would be rare to get a chance to see such a candid exchange of words between such art stars in the public arena. Soth's blog has been quoted as being the inspiration for others at Magnum to start up their own social media experiments. Most notably, David Alan Harvey who has been assigned a role as Magnum's "Minister of Education" and has actively pursued his conversation with the public in his several blog forums.

Of course it is exhausting to sustain a continual conversation with the world. It is also creatively depleting to feel like you have to do so on a steady basis. Blogging is as much about flow as it is about content. The blog needs a steady input of new material that keeps the audience coming back for it to thrive. There is a word for that. It has been around for a very long time and it is nothing new. It's called publishing, and people have been making very good livings at it for generations. They also often have to work 60+ hour weeks in order to succeed at it.

Artists have always carefully crafted their public personae, putting out work that is painstakingly edited and ready to take on an aura of finished completeness. The creative process itself is often a very personal and private one as well. The informality and public availability of the blogging arena seems to completely disarm those processes, or at least offer ways around them. I'm very curious to know what happened here with Alec Soth and his experiment.

Alec?

Anyone?

(Addendum 5/29/08: The blog is back up, in a new format.)

(Addendum 7/9/08: Rob Haggart interviews Alec Soth to answer this very question.)

The World in Miniature

For an image that is put out on the open wire to get into publication, it must pass through a series of tests that eliminate 99% of the images that are out there. That figure isn't scientific, but you will soon see that it is in fact probably generous. I would guess that fewer than 1% of images put on the open wire make it into publication.

A former colleague of mine is a photo editor at a major weekly magazine. In the normal course of her job, she edits a section that requires her to edit through, on average, 18,000 images a week to pick less than 20. Most of this editing takes place over the course of two days. As she goes through these images that are coming in off of the open wire, she knows that her competitors are looking at the same images as well. If she misses one great image that is picked up by another magazine, there is going to be some answering to do. Talk about pressure. I'm not even sure the human brain has evolved yet to handle that kind of volume in visual stimuli. It wouldn't surprise me if we find out that this is neurologically harmful. But that is a story for another day.

The technical way that almost all photo editing gets done these days is through editing programs that allow hundreds and thousands of images to be searched for by keywords and then browsed through as thumbnails. See something you like, double click on it and you get the full size preview. And here is the limiting factor. Almost any image going through this system must have some appeal as a thumbnail or it is almost sure to be overlooked. In other words, if your image doesn't look good at one or two inches on a computer screen, it isn't likely to make it through the editing process at all.

Due to the volume that editors are handling under tight deadlines, this is a necessary evolution. It also is a great limiting factor on the kind of work that gets published. Loud, colorful, dramatic work tends to win the day. Quieter, more complex work has a tough time competing on this level because it doesn't work at that size and in that format. We can look to another related medium, painting, to see more clearly how this works.

An early lesson that a beginning painter must learn is that scale and format really do matter. Before a painting begins, the shape and size of the surface have to be determined, and those decisions will shape the effect of the painting right through to its completion. The next lesson is that painting a larger painting is not at all like making a small painting only bigger. Increasing scale changes everything.

On the larger painting, detail at the surface level is the same, only in the larger painting there is a lot more of it, and to make an integrated piece, the detail must be related to the entire piece. Which is to say that making an 8 foot by 10 foot painting requires approximately 144 times the attention to detail than an 8 inch by 10 inch painting, since the larger painting has that much more surface area.

But, making the larger painting is not like making 144 of the smaller ones, because the entire surface must come together to make a whole. All the ingredients, including the scale, must be necessary for it to work.

What does this mean for photography? The same thing. Making a bigger photograph is very different than making a smaller one. Scale matters, but the ingredients in the photograph must require that scale in order for it to be necessary. There must be sufficient detail, resolution and interest in the photograph to hold up at scale. Since venues for larger images are shrinking while smaller images get into distribution easily on the web, the aesthetic of the thumbnail is winning the day in popular opinion.

A few years ago I went to the opening of a gallery show exhibiting some recent photojournalism. Many of the images were familiar from their appearance in popular magazines. What was surprising to me was that the images, printed at 30x40 inches, seemed in many cases to have less impact at that size than they did at full page and double truck sizes in the magazines. On the wall they started to fall apart. The scale wasn't necessary for the final object.

Years of working in 8.5x11 or 11x17 as maximum scale had made those photographers maximally effective in that format. With one notable exception; all work shot with a Leica on black and white negative. The grain just got sexier as it went up in size. The compositions were tight and the teeth of the film carried through. Digital images blown up past their prime need real help to make it. They tend to lose surface appeal.

The web is one of the easiest ways to distribute photography and it is one of most limiting ways to view it. Almost all of the problems I have detailed above play out over the web. Images have to be small to be viewed properly. There is significantly less tonal range in most capture devices than there is in a finely made print. Detail is sacrificed because the resolution of a computer monitor is quite a bit lower than the resolution of a well made print. Each step of the way something is thrown out. By the time the image reaches you on the other end of this computer exchange, it is but a shadow of its real self-- the final, beautiful, perfect print.

Hate Speech, John McCain, and the 2008 Campaigns

You are a pathetic and plastic excuse for an American...jumping, hooting and howling...This 'feminist' piece of work...you could not tell the truth if we waterboarded your worthless ass !....can't keep his dick in his pants... stick to you like your ugly face...Your single pathetic platform...He could not do it if you tortured him...all of these towel-headed morons in the Middle East...all these other nut jobs...those other assholes in the sheets, the Saudis...

Excerpts from an anonymous email currently circulating in support of John McCain for president.

The full email dropped into my inbox like a bomb. It is an anonymous piece of text that "endorses" John McCain for president and systematically reduces the campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to some of the worst racist and sexist stereotypes that our country has to offer. The language intimidates, dehumanizes and demeans both the candidates and their constituents. Because the language has no identifiable author, it can circulate freely without accountability among those who wish to spread it.

John McCain is himself no stranger to an anonymous racist smear campaign. One of the nastiest political moves on record may have cost him the Republican nomination in 2000. As the South Carolina Republican primary approached, McCain and George Bush were in a close race. Bush had to have a win in South Carolina if he was to go on to win the nomination. A few days before the primaries, anonymous push polling, faxes and emails in the South Carolina primary asked voters, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"

McCain had been campaigning in South Carolina with his daughter Bridgette, who he and his wife Cindy had adopted from Bangladesh. She is darker skinned and the racist attack played off of the picture of the two of them together. McCain's polling numbers plummeted. A few weeks earlier he had beat Bush in New Hampshire by 19 points. On voting day in South Carolina he lost by 11 points. As we all know, Bush went on to win the Republican party nomination.

Some sources attribute the design of this attack to Karl Rove, but it had been Charlie Condon, a former State Attorney General in South Carolina, who orchestrated the actual campaign. McCain left the Republican primary saying that there was a "special place in hell" for those who engage in these kinds of tactics.

Now, eight years later, we are facing the first presidential election in the history of the United States in which one of the main two candidates will not be a white man. The barrier is being broken. If the white man vs. white man campaigns of the recent past have generated such brutal and hateful tactics as those used against McCain in 2000 and the swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004, it can only get worse with the introduction of racist and sexist prejudices into the equation.

While we don't know who wrote this current anonymous hate speech, what is clear is that the demeaning, dehumanizing and intimidating qualities of these words being distributed in service to the McCain campaign work to destroy any platform on which a genuine political conversation can take place. They wipe out the civic playing field and replace it with a war zone.

John McCain must come out with a categorical denunciation of this kind of hate speech and he must promise that any member of his campaign, or anyone even affiliated with a member of his campaign, caught creating or distributing this kind of material will be immediately be terminated, followed by a full apology and retraction of the words. The stakes are too high here. Language that is racist and sexist erodes the very platform that both parties stand on and must be stopped immediately.

As for Charlie Condon, the man behind the racist South Carolina smear campaign in 2000? His work then hasn't hurt his current marketability. He recently was employed to run another Republican primary campaign in South Carolina.

This time by John McCain.


Katherine Powell contributed research to this post.