I can’t explain it, because there hovers an irrational element. Later, I’d squint and look in Mother’s eyes for a sign of her obscure confinement: Mom domiciled, Father’s bro Uncle Teddy on the inside, upstate. I heard something about his being “a white criminal.”
shift dresses, gender shifts
Role-playing inhabits family photos, and gender structures relationships in them—pictures are social relations, not just “mirrors” of them. Gender and image, from my POV as an ethnographer, are interactive. Nothing explains better that gender is a performance, which theorists since Sacks and Garfinkel have shown, than that the desire for changing gender must include an image of it. To perform a gender there must be an image to base it upon: this is how a woman sits, this is how a man walks.
Little Zeke once asked Mother: What is your work? She was an editor. She wasn’t just a mother or a housewife, she’d told that to Great Uncle Zeke: “No woman in her right mind would be a housewife.” Great Uncle Zeke laughed, he always laughed, because he was miserable. It made a big impression on me. I was seven, and I remember, because Father made a big deal about it, how I’d reached the age of reason.
What was reason? How could I tell the difference?
I witnessed my stuffy father doing manual labor, his hands BBQ dirty. He couldn’t change a light bulb. Or, wouldn’t. But Mother—I noticed how she stared into the space where her backyard must’ve ended, soft hands in her lap, one gripping the other as if strangling Father, maybe. She festered. I saw the woman she was and also wasn’t. I didn’t want my true self warped, when I believed in true selves.
the picture people: seeing is
believing what
How far can people stray from constructions that made them “what they are”?
My reasons for studying the effects of images can’t be excised from my person, my subjectivity, or neuroses. What I am. Impressive experiences and a procrustean trunk of unconscious images can’t be ripped from (my) thoughts and perceptions, also inextricable.
Photography augments society’s image of itself, (Or, once upon a time it did.)
In different environments societies have different needs. Some didn’t search for a way to capture images. Predictable images conform to appropriate versions of reality.
In the 1970s, when artists re-photographed photographs, appropriated images, and created illusions with photographs, the “truth” of photography, and of art, shifted. Ethnographic work did too. In the past people might photograph a longitudinal series, say, a farm and its workers over a period of time, the town, its inhabitants, etc. Narratives would be written, oral histories recorded.
Can a photograph tell what the written or oral story doesn’t? It presents an image. But the person’s willful, willing, or involuntary presence—what does that tell?
un-documenting the document
In the early 1990s, an exhibition of photographs was curated by Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, a photographer from North Carolina, an African-American. I saw the catalog when I was in grad school, then researched her work further.
She asked black families in her town to lend her their photo albums, then she selected and printed some of these photographs, snapshots then. So-called ordinary families who were black portrayed themselves. Not as soul-saddened, defeated, as often captured in so-called vérité images, “oppressed Negroes or poor blacks” or “black folk” shot by professionals on assignment in the South. These family albums consisted of individuals, often in groups, happy at graduations, birthday parties, characters playing ball, sleeping in the sun, hanging out, laughing. One photo especially blew me away: A young child, maybe two, standing in a crib on the lawn of a suburban house. The picture was shot from the child’s POV, from behind his head, so the shot was low to the ground. The child looked out from his crib, and the view was in a cone shape, of street, houses, a car. It was a child’s eye-view, a Christina’s world. A new theoretical world, with a new eye wide open.
Documentary photographer Lewis Hine (1874–1940): “There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated.”
Hine’s goal for his photographs can’t be realized (except in his own eye). The meanings he wants discerned may not be there, because a viewer decides for or against “correction” or “appreciation.” Pictures refuse to judge. A photograph records something, sure, SOMETHING gets recorded, is documented, shown, a moment in time, say. But WHO is doing the LOOKING. People glean images the way they think—yes, how they think makes the picture. Projection, right.
Documentary photography performed itself, whatever its subject, since its mission was photographing “others,” “image—
dooming” (my term) their subjects with set-idea-images or preconceptions, and to an idea of (what I call) “authentic in-authenticity.” Marshall-Linnemeier’s exhibition absolutely persuaded me, I’d been uncertain, to write my dissertation on family-issued photographs. Without my thesis director, a generous faculty member who follows James Clifford’s critique of anthropology, I’d have been in big trouble in my half-hoary department.
Clifford is partial to Stuart Hall’s theory of articulation, in which cultural formations are an articulated ensemble, linked, joined, not modeled on an organic living body with an “eternal shape.” This theory bypasses or eliminates the question of authenticity or in-authenticity. “It is assumed that cultural forms will be made, unmade and remade.” Totally, Clifford.
My article about Marshall-Linnemeier’s work appeared in Contemporary American Cultural Artifacts, “Documents of Authentic In-Authenticity.” I set in place ideas about the significance of the vernacular, and, through Marshall-Linnemeier’s, the uniqueness of self-imaging (before selfies). I raised strong objections to documentary work, I wasn’t alone, but included problems in ethnographic practices, with so-called objective findings, and, basically, muddied further the concept of field work, and also compared its problems with those of photography. Surface, depth, what story is being told, by whom, and what for, etc.
I could have disappeared down the rabbit hole then; but my thesis director was totally on board. Sympathetic, with her own agenda, and, already said, the times/the theories were a-changing. Cultural anthropology, a science, art, an approach, or a field of development and knowledge, is part of a nineteenth-century imagination: that human beings could know life objectively, part of the Enlightenment and positivism. People could know reality, separate from themselves. If human beings could know life objectively, arguments would be settled fast.
A viewer now may not be able to tell a doc photo or movie from a photograph on a gallery wall or a narrative film. The doc-genre has embraced its inherent fiction-making, because it had to, after post-structuralism, when makers couldn’t claim a lack of bias or POV, objectivity or neutrality.
I’m not saying the loss of presumed objectivity isn’t tough: totally consoling when you know what’s what, and can illuminate, preach the Truth. Confidence is cool, and indubitably, truth-hunger eats at all of us. When men were men and women were women, the whole enchilada. Sure.
back and forth
Lately, not sure when—time being what it is—I dreamed about Mr. Petey lying in bed beside me, don’t know if praying mantises recline, and maybe he was upright on a pillow, telling me what to do.
Mr. Petey had a role—to eat other insects. People have no discernible reason to live, except we’re here.
It’s weird. After sex some female PMs eat their mates. I didn’t know that as a kid. Don’t know what I’d have made of it. Petey’s life was instinctive, and I can’t imagine it, me, acting instinctively, although maybe if someone charged at me with a gun, I’d run without thinking. I hope I wouldn’t think I could talk him out of it.
Insomnia comes and goes. I was a sleepless kid, restless to explore the world that lay beyond the big backyard that stretched into state-owned woods, common land or public space, my father called it. Wandering around,
on my own, I felt existence had a wholeness and a me-ness it had nowhere else. I lived high in the Ordinary Imaginary, suffering from or supported by backyard light-headedness.
The green expanse transformed into Zeke’s wilderness. I started my active imagining there, I mean, knowing I was. I biked there, pretended I was racing in the Grand Prix, sweat running, breezes cooling me. I’d throw my bike to the ground and study the creepy-crawlies and dig for hidden treasure. (Could have suggested field work later.) Things buried deliberately, hidden for someone like me—or just me—to find centuries later.
I can see myself standing with my back to the house, patio behind me, my short legs solid beneath, but I’m shifting weight from foot to foot, then rocking back and forth on my toes, and I start running as fast as those little legs can carry me all the way to the end of the lawn, and back to the house, then do it again and again until down I flop, gasping, lying there, and breathing, and thinking, this was it, the best, freedom. I want to say, I felt really alive, happy, wanting the feeling to last forever. All alone, content.
Remember, I found Mr. Petey in our backyard—my earthly paradise.
Max Weber wrote, in a traditional society “the world remains a great enchanted garden.” Weber was cool.
Call my seminal moments “tradition-bonded.”
Oh, man, everything then—without precedent. That’s what new is, that’s what being a kid is—without precedent, expectation—you don’t know what’s coming, and you don’t know what’s hit you, and when it hits again, say, three times, habits form, reactions emerge. A vacuum gets filled.
In a semi-blank slate, I stared skyward, hoping for miracles, and found messages in tree bark, and communicated with consoling animals.
Father had allergies to animals, and I developed allergies to him.
My brief: like other indulged, privileged children from a prosperous middle class, I didn’t care what was around me, just knew it was there, therefore mine. OK, sure, lack creates desire, but abundance foments other desires, not only the desire not to desire more, but also the desire to FIND desire when you don’t need anything; after all, where does passion come from? The passion to achieve in life? Isn’t this why the scions of the super-rich often have no inclinations, nothing they really want to do? The need for renunciation is the source of American Buddhism, spirituality based upon rejecting the abundance of the overindulged, but also the desire that arises—to impede or obstruct even a satisfaction of desire.
Straight up: I wanted what I couldn’t have. I wanted a perfect life, a life I made, for me.
art values, my values
In different periods, artists “imitated life” differently, because, duh, life was different.
Turner painted clouds as furious abstractions. Before him, seventeenth-century Dutch artists imitated life, but mostly glommed onto material culture, except for their doing landscapes and cows. Pearly glass windows, crystal goblets—the Dutch mirrored life, and painted mirrors. Visual puns. A mercantile society inspired artists to render trade goods, glass and silver, imitations of their patrons’ bounty—their output makes aesthetic sense.
Andy Warhol figuratively lunged at his patron’s throat. He painted a dollar sign, a gift for Malcolm Forbes, capitalist tool magazine guy. His portraits of the wealthy are studies like Rembrandt’s.
The Dutch spanked their scenes with unnatural light and shadows. Vermeer, totally arresting case, thought to be inimitable but no one knows how many fakes are out there. Rembrandt: introspective portraits. My art history course zeroed in on landscapes, not portraits. The Romantics had an attachment to Nature that contemporary society has lost: Nature as a willful, indifferent enemy, not an ecology or eco-system, but as a symptom of God’s power and genius. To naturalists and pantheists, God was Nature. God was in the natural elements.
“God is in the details.” —Mies van der Rohe
Craft and skill once were the painter’s slam dunk. Along came the spider, photography.
Painter Jack Whitten: “The image is photographic, therefore I must photograph my thoughts … I can see it in my brain, and it’s reproduced. I’m using the word ‘reproduce’ in the same sense that you would use a Xerox copy machine or a computer—any form of a reproduction device.”
Gazing at clouds, another diversionary tactic—if an unwanted prof or student person crossed my path, I looked up.
I found relief, similar to consolation or faith, in clouds, stars, weather shifts, when I acted like a prognosticator in old movies. I took pleasure, pleasure must be taken or had, in subtle shadings, size, shapes, the wind stirring. Nighttime: Shooting stars, UFOs.
Here I go, here I go, here I go.
maggie, shot by passion
I met Maggie in college, in Frame, a photo-media group, seconds before digital absconded with a field that once trafficked in positives and negatives, celluloid, tactility, etc., when, figuratively and actually, she and I stood side by side and developed film, printed it, read photo and art theory. The group held intense discussions about aesthetics, and visited New York galleries, museums.
Maggie, she’s a New Yorker, with all the image implies, funny, sharp, deep, plus, she has famous parents: Her father is an Internet genius, who cashed in early, her mother a scientist, researching nasty viruses. These people live in and for the present, and for a future they glimpse (unlike my mother’s tribe sowing their historical oats). Maggie was adopted when she was an infant. And, yeah, she’s beautiful, like Little Sister, but with tawny brown hair. Her father’s an alcoholic, so we have that in common.
In college we all discussed photographer Harold Feinstein (1931–2015). He simply loved taking photographs. He was born in Coney Island—I dislike beaches, Maggie loves them—it became his major subject, and he shot there for more than fifty years. Feinstein: “There were so many things to shoot, the question was not how to take a good picture, but how not to miss one.” And: “The question is what we don’t see, and why don’t we see so much.”
Frame took its name from Stephen Shore’s brief treatise on it: any would-be image-maker could learn how to make a “good” picture. To find the picture, exclusion rules: what remains outside the frame is not the picture, but may become a viewer’s fantasy. Feinstein didn’t have to leave home or exclude home to make his art. We Frame people argued about this kind of love, and how his way of talking about the field was old-fashioned, but Maggie defended it, him, maybe she was a romantic then, and approved his ingenuousness.
In the 1958 U.S. Camera Annual, Feinstein wrote: “You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you; where you hold your breath while releasing the shutter, not because you are afraid of jarring the camera, but because you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life.”
No artist would now say “you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life.” Totally corny, right, but also the field has changed: many photog/artists don’t look at what’s there but construct their realities.
I have an affinity, I’m admitting it, with “the sweet pain of an image.” You feel me?
In Frame, I learned you can train your eye to think of the world as a picture, say, in a Wittgensteinian sense—a visual language game.
Artists train their vision—though all vision is trained involuntarily, since we perceive through cultural eyewear; let’s say, artists re-train, or “craft,” their vision, “de-culture” it as best they can toward other ways of seeing (see John Berger). Visual tutors can be artists who teach. People learn to see as well as think differently, up to a point (more later). First, people notice details bound up in their group’s interpretations, see them through the group’s paradigms.
There is no universality in sight, and none in a picture.
“You have a good eye.” When? In what context?
Maggie and I framed us, made us by the exclusion of others—lovers as border guards not allowing
others entry.
I worried about grades, wanted the best grad school; but I could fuck up, go off the rails, get frustrated, a tendency. Maggie lived unencumbered by grade-worry, she didn’t consider failure for herself or me—weird because her parents achieved big. Maybe because she was adopted, didn’t get that gene, because she didn’t have the anxiety of influence. Failure was my personal terrorist, but she carried a resistant strain of that virus (knew too much about viruses for comfort). Maggie was also doing anthropology, art, and writing, she especially got into Malinowski’s diaries, whose “honesty”—ambivalence—
caused concern in the field, and Mick Taussig’s books.
She denied human failure, which didn’t mean she had faith in our species, exactly; she believed in the fight for survival, for fighting for what you wanted. Maggie was all about that, survival. Maybe because she’d been orphaned.
The species had survived, might prevail, etc. (Why or over what wasn’t a question.) Successes and failures were fundamental for progress—Maggie followed Karl Popper here—trials and errors necessary to improve the species, in the larger scheme of things. Failures weren’t failures, since they produced growth.
No one, I’d counter, kind of kidding, lives in the bigger scheme of things, all life is local. (I once totally believed that.) She’d say, “Failure is not an option”; “Ants can’t fail, are we not ants?” I bought it for a long time, until I met failure. Faced it.
I was a cross-disciplinary major, anthropology and visual culture, and my best art guide, my Virgil, was a cool art history prof, handsome in a severe way. She took us around museums and galleries, notably into Philadelphia to see Duchamp’s Étant Donnés. Maggie and I didn’t know what we were seeing, maybe THE inexplicable, similar to when we watched Jack Smith’s infamous Flaming Creatures in an experimental film history course: we didn’t know what we saw. There weren’t men and women, there weren’t trans men or trans women, there were Smith’s characters, who defied any categories.
Men and Apparitions Page 9