Think in Pictures

A news photograph of F.D. Roosevelt, circulated in 1928, four years before he was first elected as a president, shows a well-dressed man in a confident posture. It is visually demonstrating his ‘good standing’ to the electorate. But otherwise, it could easily pass as an unremarkable photograph among many other official photos of politicians. ‘Candidate with a cane’ could be the generic title as Sally Stein remarks in a recent article (2006).

But on closer inspection, the viewer might discover a well hidden second cane which provides support to Roosevelt’s impaired body. Since 1922, he was not able to stand or walk without external form of help.  

Images are very important in electoral campaigns. The ways that leaders and politicians stand in their representations are heavily invested by visual indications, which aim to convince the viewers that they are appropriate to govern. So, this visual manipulation with the hidden support can be understood within the context of U.S. democracy, which has shown little deviation from the theatrical norm of leader: a male, WASP, heterosexual individual with a very sound mind - though religious persuasions are accepted - and very sound body (Stein, 2006).

Such political manipulation of the ‘inappropriate’ body continued long through his political career and involved a series of tactical decisions. For example, he consistently avoided any photographs together with the fellow patients of the polio clinic which he was regularly visiting… His bright steel leg braces, particularly seen when he was seated, were painted black to avoid reflecting in flash photography… He used others to hold him when walking in public, especially his sons, in order to avoid using canes and wanting to appear as walking by himself… He deliberately gave all his public speeches from a standing position, though the podium was appropriately reinforced so that the necessary support was provided…

An endless effort of appearing active and strong, according to the dominant norms, and against the stigma of disability… was met by a cooperative press and a desperate nation wanting to believe in ’strong’ leaders.      

Nevertheless, Roosevelt had a successful political career; although many have argued that this was precisely because his impairment and disability was masked. As we enter another election period in U.S. with probably another candidate who deviates from the norm, I’m wondering how Barack Obama will deal with his situation and way of representation. And how obssessed the electorate will be with maintaining the dominant forms of representation, the appearances…

     

There is one video - linked in my last post - that keeps coming back in my mind. I am talking about that tv clip showing how the sculptor Cosimo Cavallaro got attacked by a representative of a religious group, who in the name of their version of Catholicism and rigid moral order, launched a series of bullying tactics and threatening acts against everyone associated with Cavallaro’s work: a statue of Jesus made by chocolate.

The scandalous point for that religious group was not its chocolate nature of course. It was its anatomically correct representation.

I’m glad that Cosimo Cavallaro has eloquently exposed the morally and conceptually empty stance of his attacker during the TV interview. Yet, if the latter believes that this is “one of the worst assaults against Christian sensibilities ever”, as reported in the news, which he then conveniently uses to justify a wave of violent reactions, should we overlook him with disdain for manipulating reality and ends, or start worrying about the state of our political thought and the undermined role of art?

I am wondering how to perceive this whole incidence. For example, as evidence of some remaining parochial figures which keep providing a source of identification for easily-led authoritarian personalities? Or, given their apparent capacity to terrorise, to threaten with violence or enforce economic boycotts, is this evidence of the continuing political power and effectiveness of extreme right-wing groups and their discourses?

For many, this represents a kind of anachronism within modern society. Certainly, an example of its current contradictions. Many sociologists, such as Giddens, have viewed these groups in terms of modern fundamentalisms. They try to defend tradition but in a way which refuses public dialogue and examination of their ‘truths’. But, as it is asserted, we live in times and places where truths have to be decided. Consequently, these fundamentalist movements of religious, or national and other traditional discourses, can lead to violence.

Violence is in the air, no doubt about it. Although, I would say that this violence arises, not only from the non-dialogic position of such traditional groups (of religion, nation, sexuality, gender, etc), but also from the emotion-based and non-rationally understood reactions of the threatened individuals which comprise them. (In other words, their intolerance might not be responsive to rational approaches).

Now, whether these individuals of fundamentalist groups face real or imaginary threats to their beliefs and identities, could be the next big question. I leave it to everyone to think about it, whether being one of those individuals or not.

I’ll just continue with three relevant visual traces of thought.

a

The religious representative above was trying at some point to explain what finds offensive by evoking a comparative image, which would show the artist’s mother to the public, being naked with her genitals exposed.

What would be offensive or threatening about that?

A photograph entitled Flesh by Japanese artist Manabu Yamanaka (© 1995) comes to my mind.

Yamanaka, who practiced as a nurse among the elderly for years, shows us a photograph of a naked old woman against a white and empty background. Nothing to soften the image, no beautifying techniques or other trycks. Neither the subject makes any attempt to hide her naked bodily existence.

If the viewers feel, however, an emerging emotion of disturbance or embarrassment, contrasting in fact the subject’s comfortable approach, this owes much more to their own problematic attitudes and fears, rather than the photograph itself. Fears of mortality, or chaos, or secret fascination, or whatever else, can and have to be resolved by the viewers themselves, not the subject or the artist. And if for many the photograph comes as a shock, they should probably question our wider culture which makes images of old age rare and invisible, which is obsessed with health and youth, and which associates nude with young female bodies.

b

Let’s go to Vertigo, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most fascinating movies. I remembered a point made by the well known scholar Slavoj Zizek.

In the plot of the movie, Scottie (James Stewart) saves Madeleine (Kim Novak) when she fell into the waters of San Francisco Bay. Later we are back to Scottie’s flat where she has been recovering sleeping in his bed and he is waiting for her to wake up.

In the meantime, the camera zooms around Scottie’s flat and shows us Madeleine’s clothes hanging in the little kitchen room. So it makes clear that Scottie has undressed Madeleine off her wet clothes before placing her to bed. (After all she later wakes up and questions what happened).

But just a moment! If we focus carefully into the picture of those clothes we realise that there is no underwear shown. There is a chance that they are further away, behind the wall, and so not shown in the image, but we can also observe a bizarre piece of clothing hanging there.

Zizek has argued that there was a censorship issue there with a particular ideological twist. It was imperative that no underwear should be shown, (thus they were replaced by some irrelevant old cloth), because the regulators were concerned that the viewers would otherwise assume that Scottie had seen Madeleine naked. The image of underwear hung to dry was seen, in other words, as the signifier of a scandalous act. Its omission was rendered as the appropriate way to avoid evoking such a conclusion into viewers’ mind.

But, of course, someone would simply ask: Since we, the viewers, know that Scottie has undressed Madeleine and thus we know that he has seen her naked why do we need this kind of symbolic protection?

In the same way, if people know that their god was at some point an ‘anatomically correct’ man, in terms of genitalia, then why are the regulators of their public morals go to such effort to make sure that an artifact which shows that must not be produced? What, in the end, are we protected from?

c

The absurdity of modern life often hits us in the face fully-clothed and fully-regulated. Whether it is found in its limits or consists its integral core, and whether it is an issue of collective lies, are not a matter of the image alone.

“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven - a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. Revelation:12″

This was the introductory quote by Diane Arbus in her unpublished article ‘Bishop’s Charisma’ (1964). It included 3 photographs and text written by her. Here’s part of it.

“On a cliff overlooking the Pacific, in a cemetery in the sun, a small lady in damask robes with hair of a phosphorescent pink holds aloft a styrofoam cross encrusted with smaller crosses and raises her eyes till they pale at the vision of Jesus Christ. She is called Bishop Ethel Predonzan of The Cathedral Of The Creator, Omnipresence, Inc. Christ, she declares, has summoned her there to Santa Barbara, California, all the way from Astoria, Queens, to await His Second Coming on December 4th of this year.

I followed the Bishop across the country to hear her story and to listen to God’s voice on a 45 rpm record, as he says to her: “I appeal to you for the future of this earth to lead the people, my dear. You are their Guiding Star. Do not fail Me now that I stand before you. . .” etc. [...]

“He has a gorgeous voice,” she says. “What a diction. There is no one on this earth that can speak the diction of The Father and Christ.” Sometimes while the Bishop is talking, a strange sound interrupts her speech. This is how Jesus kisses her in the throat, she explains, blissfully, “like a butterfly.” Occasionally, she relates, He tells her: “I am going to fly with you tonight. You must be pure like a glass of water.” And then He comes, she says, His wings like a hurricane, and takes her to the Heavens (”Ooooooh, what a feeling”), to the different planets. “My Lord, my Lord,” she cries out to Him, “I’m going to fall,” but He touches something in the back of her neck and she is no longer afraid.”

Now I am wondering about something else. Why was this article by Diane Arbus not published?

Untitled photograph (nude 2) by Christos Stavrou © 2008

I wish I could send you a chocolate Jesus, maybe that abandoned one which they failed to exhibit last year in New York… But in the end, I guess you’ll be equally satisfied with few mint chocolates in a box and a photograph of an almost chocolate body… It is my easter present of course. Chocolates and one sudden thought, if my bath is running hot enough, make me realise that you are always around here.

* * *

“How did beauty begin? Earth-cult, suppressing the eye, locks man in the belly of mothers. There is, I insist, nothing beautiful in nature. Nature is primal power, coarse and turbulent. Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.” (from the book Sexual Personae by C. Paglia © 1990).

* * *

Chocolate Jesus by Tom Waits:

Soon after I took this photo above, standing by the entrance of Leeds University, and as I was waiting for a sudden wave of rain to pass - among shiny bikes and a man whose posture and reflection had intrigued me… well, very soon after that a security guard came out from his box running quickly towards me.

He bombarded me with questions, who I am and what am I taking pictures of… My mind was still wandering in search of aesthetic pleasures; how to find the best angle, selecting shutter speed and aperture. I was not prepared and got surprised from his sudden attack. I simply said, I take a photo of bikes and a back-lit silhouette… (Should an aspiring conceptual photographer ever admit these casual things, I thought…)

But the security guard was not friendly. He insisted making questions. I noticed his threatening body language and persistent eye-contact in order to intimidate. Later he revealed that he used to work for some kind of special forces. His glorious and authoritative past, who knows why he was dismissed, was obviously filling him up with pride and nostalgia.

The treatment was unacceptable. After all I had been running the University’s Photosociety for two years in the recent past and we always used to practice making rounds in the campus. Not to mention the hundreds of graduates taking pictures of each other around those areas very regularly. Maybe it was about the beard in my face and my foreign accent didn’t help either… (Should I start shaving every time before using my camera outdoors, I thought…).

But he even used all sorts of lies and excuses trying to intimidate me, about how a special licence is required from the media services (something they denied later when I asked them), about his official orders to follow this procedure with everyone, even threats about calling the police were thrown to me… I replied that yes, he’s welcomed to call the police and look very silly when try to explain the reason of calling them. But the whole incident was not simply redicilous and patronising, it was also offending and very upsetting.

This happened two summers ago. I’m afraid though things don’t get better rather worst. The Metropolitan Police (click at the poster below) has just launched its five-week counter-terrorism campaign asking members of the public to report any suspicious behaviour. Yes, you guessed well. Taking photographs is a suspicious behaviour.

It seems that now you can - or have to - call the authorities every time you feel reporting a suspicious photographer. What exactly is suspicious, what is an ‘odd’ photograph? Well, not easy to answer… Sometimes an act appears odd just because someone looks odd and different, or because of our own preconceptions. And anyway, everyone has their own ideas about it, it cannot really be defined… But, in fact, this is probably the point: To spy and report each other! The poster states it clearly: Report it and “Let experienced officers decide what action to take.”

I know. Many readers have already began wondering in despair: Isn’t this campaign an open invitation to arbitrary and/or selective abuse? Isn’t this another badly disguised excuse for further erosion of our freedoms? Actually, isn’t this quite naive in its assumed counter-terrorist potential, when considering its adverse social effect by increasing fear and paranoia, and posing a high risk of weakening the social bonds, is therefore rather undermining than strengthening the sense of security?

Fear and paranoia.

Remember these words. These were the underlying forces of the security guard’s over-reaction against me, and that was what in turn he wanted to install upon me. Now, with even a seemingly official support in place, the absurdity is reinforced… Photographers of this country be aware and prepared. And resist the identification of terror.

The scary, and final, thought is that these practices remind how the Gestapo used to operate in Nazi Germany. Unlike the general belief, the Gestapo was not a huge and omnipotent organisation. As historian Robert Gellatel (see wikipedia) has shown, it was mainly made up by clerical workers and bureaucrats, who “were for the most part dependent upon denunciations for information about what was happening in German society. The willingness of ordinary Germans to denounce one another supplied the Gestapo with the information that determined who the Gestapo arrested.”

* * *

On Tuesday 11 March 2007, 6pm, there is a relevant and interesting public talk taking place in the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU.

The title is: “How Safe Do You Feel: Surveillance, Photographers, and the Privatisation of Public Space Post 9/11“

It is presented by freelance documentary photographer, writer and researcher, Dr. John Perivolaris (click at his photo above to visit work from his recent documentary project). The seminar is open to everyone and here is the abstract of the seminar as published in the website of the hosting University:

“On the streets of cities in the United States and Europe we are witnessing a dramatic proliferation of surveillance cameras trained on citizens’ every move through increasingly privatised public spaces. For example, the average Londoner is daily caught on camera 300 times. But, while the citizen is constantly watched, they are increasingly restricted from photographing those same spaces. What is the place of independent photography and image-making of public space post-9/11? How are photographers to resist the plethora of restrictions to which they are now subject in the name of security? Is the right to watch swiftly becoming a monopoly of the state? Is democratic citizenship also now a struggle for the right to see as well as to be seen?”

* * *

At the same time that these important questions are posed here, in another country Greece, left over surveillance equipment from the Olympic Games, costing over $250 million, has divided the country over its use to spy citizens. As reported by the BBC (see below), the emerging debate is around not only the question whether Greece will be following Britain’s example of spying its citizens, but whether it can resist the powerful march of the cameras. The costly surveillance equipment has taken its own reified form of existance. Note that Olympics are coming to Britain in few years time.

The Rolling Exhibition began as a simple photograph taken while Kevin Connolly was skating down a backstreet in Vienna some time ago. Kevin kept travelling balancing his torso on a skateboard, and now, after rolling through the streets of 31 cities in 15 countries, he exhibits what he collected: the stare.

The stare, or ‘the gaze’, the expression of social power, which normalises and disciplines populations of our times, according to Foucault and other scholars, has captivated and excited - with its conceptual potency - our understanding of society and self.

What is the power relationship here? It is between able-bodied and non able-bodied people as social actors. What does this mean in actual terms? In brief, that the different power these groups have, and had in recent centuries, has heavily influenced and crystallised, or ‘naturalised as they say in sociology, the way that we see or know things. Social norms are constructed, and made to appear as natural, pre-existing our societies; which then used to discipline those who deviate, assumed to breach the ‘natural order’, but also used to regulate all of us.

And any kind of natural and normal able-bodiedness is of course just and only an assumption. That people must have a particular bodily and mental structure, that there is something called ‘normal humanity’ or ‘normal human body’, let’s say something which requires to have two legs, is just the effect of theological, social, political and economical discourses which forcefully and violently have achieved this to be seen as ‘truth’. In brief, any idea of what is a ‘natural human body’ is a result of social processes, not of any natural norms. And to claim the opposite, that yes there is a natural biological body does not stand well to criticism. Not historically (because it changes meaning through time and space), or logically (the metaphysics of western reason), or empirically (the social normalisation of any difference involves, for example, even such practices as those by doctors who surgically shape new-born babies’ genitalia to ‘appropriate’ form, if these do not conform to the dualist social norm male/female).

So, Kevin Connolly has turned the gaze back, he is taking the photos of his viewers. From an object of the gaze - and devaluation - he becomes the active subject. He seems to want to record but also to make people think and narrate the content of their thoughts. Constructing the narratives, approaching the origins of their stories, the viewers -those who were photographed or us who view the photos- may become able to encounter and question one of the deepest and most hidden socially constructed identities, one which people who are entitled to they never even use it to identify with: being ‘able-bodied’.

You might remember an earlier post here presenting a text by Susan Sontag: “Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.” Kevin Connolly’s photographs is an attempt to introduce a new and different way of seeing.

So, how is this all responded to? I can speak for one source found through Kevin’s website, an article in the ABC News website (1/1/2007): ‘Man without legs harnesses public gaze‘

Pardon? Something is deeply wrong in this article and can be sensed even from the title! Although, it tries hard to leave behind the traditional melodramatic ‘tragic but brave’ attitude to disabled people (oh, how heroic that he can take a photograph!), in the end it sinks deep in the same boring and stereotypical presentation of disability.

Instead of going through an analysis of the photographs and the involved meanings, it focus on the photographer. Certainly, the low viewpoint that characterises Connolly’s photos does not provide much to analyse in terms of originality in abstract, it is all of course in the context that which matters.

But the article fails to talk about this context. It fails to talk about the subjects of the photographs and their projections… or any challenging implications… or the meanings we have analysed above… or how the writer/viewer feels having to identify with the gazers (is this guilt and anxiety coming through?)… or even how ‘lucky’ Kevin is to be able to have access to a photographic project because he actually can use a tool (skateboard) made for able-bodied people… Instead, it talks only and about the photographer, his medical record, his upbringing, his customs, how he deals and manages with his condition etc.

In other words, despite what Kevin Connolly tries to show with his work, the stereotypical response of the media is to refuse the re-arrangement of the stare, and politically return the gaze back!

In all its naivety the article just briefly talks about the viewers’ stares as an example of ‘human nature’ (a concept often used in order to disguise the lack of social analysis), whilst describing how cultures approach him differently, from beggar to holy man. This is something not surprising at all! Actually it confirms how tied is any, changing understanding of ability and disability with its particular society of making (not the human nature).

One final note. I felt very happy to see Kevin Connolly rejecting prosthetic legs and any other forms of normalisation. It speaks something loud and emotive. to me personally and I hope all those currently removing disabling physical barriers from all areas of social life. It’s about how agency and personal ideas, and of course difference, must be accounted and accommodated, for the potential of any new adaptations to ever become effectively enabling.

Here, at left, maybe relevant in its assumptions of a standard uniform body, Le Corbusier’s modular man. It was used as a measuring device for his architectural work and reflects his understanding that ‘man is a geometrical animal’ based upon the conception of a normal biological body. Physiological difference and diversity were simply absorbed into a system of fixed and universal standards of function and performance (Rob Imrie, 2006).

the kiss

How does it feel to know that one of the most romantic images ever made was staged? The famous ‘Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville’ by Robert Doisneau, captured in Paris in 1950, was no other but a manufactured image. Alas, this was revealed by its creator himself in a court trial in the 1990s when, in mid of controversy, Françoise Bornet, a former actress and the woman who was featured with her boyfriend in the photo, sued Doisneau for $18,000 and a share of the royalty in the image.

Her case was dismissed. Doisneau died the next year in 1994. But in the end, few years later, Ms. Bornet sold her original print of the photograph for over $200,000 at an auction (BBC News 25/4/2005) while the rights still remain with Doisneau’s agency.

So does it still feel an iconic image to you, a quintessential Parisian image of passion, a symbol of romantic spontaneity and  desire?

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“In the early fall, I drank coffee with several generations of the Conner family, the close air of their kitchen settling across my shoulders like a shawl. I explained what I was doing and, as so often happened, their initial suspicion gave way gradually to caution and then to curiosity and a guarded acceptance. They agreed that I could photograph Kelly.

At dawn at the first day of hunting season they called where the deer were beheaded and hung. As I set up the camera, Kelly appeared, buttoned up, accompanied by her mother, her aunt and uncle, her grandparents, cousins, and a few other family members. Arrayed behind me, they remained watchful and intent.

As I pulled her jacket back, to separate her white-shirted figure from the darkness of the shed, I thought I might have heard a murmur. After few minutes I relaxed enough to identify the prevalence of the V shapes in the scene and without thinking I asked Kelly to spread her legs. This time the murmur was audible, but I could see that the picture was complete.”

Text and photograph (above) by Sally Man; from her book ‘At Twelve. Portraits of young women’ (© 1988, Aperture Foundation).

A major photographic exhibition is coming to the North. Representing the first half of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s career (which spans from 1932 to 1946), a photographic material which was carefully selected, printed and mounted to a scrapbook by himself after the World War II, will be shown in the National Media Museum in Bradford from 7th of March to 1st of June 2008.

As the museum’s website reports, “these photographs documented both his extensive travels and his encounters with Surrealism and modern art. They were conceived as an initial selection for a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a show that would catapult Cartier-Bresson onto the world stage and bring him international recognition. All the original photographs have now been brought together for a new exhibition, showing for the first time in the UK.” (photo left: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mexico, 1934)

The story about the scrapbook’s making entails few very interesting twists. During World War II, and following Cartier-Bresson’s capture by the Nazis, the curators of the Museum of Modern Art were making arrangements for a posthumous exhibition of his work. But Henri, after three years in prison camps and two unsuccessful attempts, he managed to escape in 1943 and then survived in hiding. Few years later, he found out with pleasure about the MoMA plans and decided to collaborate and curate the exhibition himself, bringing 300 self-made prints glued in a scrapbook to New York!

Cartier-Bresson began photographing the world in 1930, first with a brownie box camera and then, two years later, with his trademark Leica. His photos from expeditions in several countries were published in major journals and he had his first exhibition in Madrid in 1933.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Madrid 1933

Cartier-Bresson was also drawn to the cinema and worked as an assistant director in Jean Renoir’s film ‘The Rules of the Game’ (1939). He also became interested in documenting the Spanish Civil War. At the outbreak of World War II, he was drafted into the French army where he was a corporal in a film and photo unit captured in the Vosges Mountains in June 1940.

The MoMA exhibition, celebrating his survival, opened on February 4, 1947. (Note that the same year he also joined Robert Capa and David Seymour in founding Magnum).The collection includes portraits, such as of Matisse, Picasso and others, as well as street photography, assigned photo essays and reportage of France’s war years.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gestapo Informer, Dessau, Germany, 1945.

The ‘Scrapbook’ has been published in its entirety for first time last year by Thames & Hudson. Cartier-Bresson turned his attention to it in the 1990s again, realising its great importance - especially since the selection of the photos was his own choice. In fact, he rediscovered it in a suitcase in his parents’ house after his mother died. But he was not really ‘a man living in the past’ - as described in the interview below - and left it in the bookshelf. Following his death in 2004, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, the present owner of the prints, finished the job of restoring the photographs, and made their wider publication available.

Llisten here to Martine Franck and Agnès Sire of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about the history of the Scrapbook. This is an interview hosted in the website of the International Centre of Photography, New York, where the Scrapbook was exhibited last year.

All photographs by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved.

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Leeds under construction. The city deconstructed.

Photograph by Christos Stavrou © 2007. All rights reserved

I opened a classic book tonight, The Americans by Robert Frank (1958). A friend left it here with couple other books before Christmas. I went downstairs to search for it. I was left with Robert Frank’s spectators.

In page 37 a young girl working in a cafe or a similar place, is staring towards an unseen space at the left. It could be anywhere in America in the 1950s, when Frank went on the roads with his camera - in fact, the book does not provide any caption for this photo.

Above her head we can see the advertising signs for the shop products. They speak almost louder than her. ‘Steak sandwich’ reads one sign at the far left, and another one just straight in front of us offers ‘jumbo size hot dog’ with big letters - bigger and better than ever, it adds.

And between the signs a seasonal plaque with Santa Claus and Merry Christmas wishes. He is smiling, he seems to know what he is doing, she is not. But their faces echo each other.

I remembered that we just had all those semi-religious western holidays at the turn of the year, accompanied with the usual consumerist noise and emptiness. I think I was a child, about after ten, when first got disappointed by the empty promise of those holidays. A repetitive hedonistic apotheosis, and far too much myth over the capitalist dream of hapiness, the invented needs, which inevitably faded away any personal meaning and importance over the years. Yet, someone always would come these days trying to offer me descriptions of all their wonderful recent shopping. Why, I don’t know. But I stare at their excitement trying to guess, is it real?

Robert Frank captured the commodified transformation of the banal into spectacle. And as Derrick Price argues in his essay Surveyors and Surveyed (2004) , “the people in these photographs are not constituted as ‘poor’ or ‘workers’ or, indeed, as any particular kind of social being. They exist as spectators, gazing out at some invisible scene: other people, the road ahead, a movie screen, a parade going by. In these closed, watchful faces we can read no significant facts, and if we have a sense of ‘being there’, it is as a witness to nothing of any great importance.”

In page 53, a photograph of a Cafe in Beaufort, South Carolina (above). Jack Kerouac writes in the introduction of The Americans that “after seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.”

Robert Frank’s approach paved the way and moved along new understandings of documentary photography, away from its traditional ties with major social events and facts, following political situations or causes (see for example our previous post about Margaret Bourke-White). Its subject-matter could now be what interests or fascinates the photographer. The new and expanded field of exploration could now penetrate the commonplace life and deal with subjectivities, identities and personal meanings. A jukebox could equally be sad or sadder than a coffin.

Despite my unfortunate absence for few weeks, and now just by the last day of January, here is the first post of the month and the year… The most exciting thing recently meeting my senses, which is no less than an omen of those promising and welcoming things to come.. So…

Let the new year begin!

‘Dissemblance en série’. Montage vidéo de ma dernière production chorégraphique présentée en avril 2007 à l’Agora de la danse. (‘Serial Dissimilarity’. Contemporary dance choreography presented at Studio de l’Agora de la dance, Montreal, april 2007).

Interprètes: Julie Bessette, Cathy Bourgoin, Caroline Carreau, Caroline Charbonneau, Gabriel Doucet, Marie-Pière Durocher et Audrée Hotte.

Musique: Les 4 saisons - L’été - Presto • Antonio Vivaldi.

Choreography and vdeo by Pascal Desparois.

“It was a piece about feeling different and not fitting in, and realizing that everyone felt the same way. It also talked about our trueselves vs the projected image of our selves and the disfunction between the two (the reason for the mirror & the videos).” Pascal Desparois

“In the modern way of seeing, reality is first of all appearance - which is always changing. A photograph records appearance. The record of photography is the record of change, of the destruction of the past. Being modern (and if we have the habit of looking at photographs, we are by definition modern), we understand all identities to be constructions. The only irrefutable reality - and our best clue to identity - is how people appear.”

 

“Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.

It is the ineluctably ‘modern’ way of seeing - prejudiced in favor of projects of discovery and innovation.

This way of seeing which now has a long history, shapes what we look for and used to noticing in photographs.”

 

“The modern way of seeing is to see in fragments. It is felt that reality is essentially unlimited, and knowledge is open-ended. It follows that all boundaries, all unifying ideas have to be misleading, demagogic; at best, provisional; almost always in the long run, untrue. To see reality in the light of certain unifying ideas has the undeniable advantage of giving shape and form to our experience. But it also - so the modern way of seeing instructs us - denies the infinite variety and complexity of the real. Thereby it represses our energy, indeed our right, to remake what we wish to remake - our society, our selves. What is liberating, we are told, is to notice more and more.”

[Excerpts from Susan Sontag's essay 'Photography: A Little Summa' found in her recently published book At the Same Time (2007), New York, Farrar Straus Giroux]

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The British soldiers first saw the lights along German trenches on that Christmas Eve in 1914. Then they heard the music and the songs. Although they might not have known the German language, they recognised the “Silent Night” and responded by singing carols in English that crossed the few hundred feet of No-Man’s Land dividing the two enemies.

And on Christmas Day the British troops learned the flickering lights they’d seen the previous night were burning candles on fir trees. Before long, the two groups of soldiers were exchanging holiday greetings, cigarettes, food and gifts. They collected and burried the dead, they were introduced to each other, took photographs and in one place they even played a football match.

A Christmas truce had broken out.

The term ‘Christmas Truce‘ refers not to a single event but rather to a number of spontaneous expressions of comradeship between the front line soldiers of both sides in December 1914.

This spontaneous truce, which was initiated and apparently confined to the more friendly German units made up by Saxons; which occurred in several and not a sigle place; and was arguably influenced by the proximity of the fighting forces and the uncomfortableness of the trenches; was definitely frowned upon by the higher authorities. Horrified by the news of fraternisation , the leadership on both sides issued orders of condemning and forbidding such tendencies, threatening direct penalties. Such acts were not repeated in subsequent Christmases.

[Sources: i) Christmas Truce: The Western Front December 1914 by Malcolm Brown & Shirley Seaton, Macmillan, London, 1994. ii) Freepress.com iii) H.B. Lee Library of Brigham Young University ]

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The caption of the above photograph, from The Illustrated War News, January 20th 1915, reads:

“A SCENE OF FRATERNISATION : BY ONE OF OUR TRENCHES

Much publicity has been given to the fraternising, at Christmas-time of British officers and men and German officers and men facing one another in the trenches: the German authorities are said to have issued strong orders against such friendliness between enemies. In a letter accompanying our photographs, a private of the London Rifle Brigade writes, from the Ypres-Armentieres neighborhood : “No. … Company went into the breastworks (which have, in most places, round here superseded the flooded reserve trenches) on Wednesday night. Soon after dusk on the 24th the Germans put up lanterns on the top of their trenches and started singing; and their shooting practically ceased. Firing ceased on both sides, and both Germans and English ventured out on the top of their trenches. After daybreak on Christmas Day small parties on both sides ventured out in front of their trenches, all unarmed, and we heard that a German officer came over and promised that they would not fire if we did not.

Apparently during the morning small parties of Germans and English fraternised between the trenches, and when … and I and some of our pals strolled up from the reserve trenches after dinner, we found a crowd of some hundred Tommies of each nationality holding a regular mother’s meeting between the trenches. We found our enemies to be Saxons.

One of the Germans had been a waiter at the Savoy; and another a West-End barber’s assistant. Talk and souvenirs were exchanged. There are those who did not appreciate this cessation of hostilities, even on Christmas Day !”

(source: ‘The Great War in a different light’ website)

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The Imperial War Museum London will commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Armistice (11 November 1918) with a major exhibition during the next year (September 2008 to March 2009).

According to the museum’s website, In Memoriam: Remembering the Great War will focus on the individual experiences of men, women and children: the front line soldier, sailor and airman; the munitions worker and the nurse; the prisoner-of-war and the internee; the artist and the writer; the disabled and the shell shocked; the widow and the orphan. Their stories will be told through personal objects ranging from a bierstein which was presented to the British captain of a winning football team in the Christmas Truce of 1914 to a rosebud from a wreath which lay on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in 1920.