Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.

Nina Katchadourian is an artistic opportunist, to be sure.

Armed with nothing other than a couple of scarves, a beret, the airline seat pillow, a few artfully arranged tissues, and a face that could rank alongside Maria Falconetti’s in expressiveness, she reaches toward the sublime while balanced above the toilet bowl on a long-haul flight. I am awestruck with admiration.

Black and Weird

From Black and WTF, “A photoblog of really strange black & white photos”.

Guard of honour

Staff of the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Centre let the chimps watch the burial of Dorothy, an elderly chimpanzee, so they could come to terms with her loss.

From Times Online.

Shorpy

Michael Leddy coined the wonderful expression ‘dowdy world’ to describe glimpses of bygone times that occasionally pop up in old movies, television shows, or anywhere at all. His definition: “modern American culture as it was before certain forms of technology redefined everyday life”.

Well, ‘Shorpy’ is the dowdy world on rollerskates.

It is one of the handful of websites I can’t live a week without visiting at least once, and I love it with an ardent passion.

My favourites are the bizarre pics from from the archive called the National Library…

…and the breathtakingly detailed images of turn of the century city architecture, like this one of the Philadelphia Post Office in 1900.

The site describes itself: “Shorpy.com: History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.”

It appears to be a shared site where a very select number of contributors upload images in very high definition. They appear to have been scanned from the original negatives. This is astounding because the site has a large collection of truly classic images, including many pictures by the greats Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.

Most of these pictures are not the recogniseable classics from photographic history, but the now vast collection is a more comprehensive picture of each photographers’ working practice than would be possible in even the biggest survey exhibition. In the case of Lewis Hine in particular, I’ve had to reassess my view of his significance to the medium.

When I was taught photography, the conventional view of Lewis Hine I intuited was that he was a great documentarian but whose credentials as an artist were somewhat in question. A view was that the haunting quality his pictures so often had was more to do with the heartbreaking subject matter of child labour and exploitation that he did so much to reveal than any completely conscious and expressed aesthetic intention.

Certainly the subject matter is compelling (and there is art in that), but there’s clearly more here than just the handprint of a great documentary photographer. Very frequently, too frequently to be an accident, he invests an apparently utilitarian image with the grace and insight of a true portrait.

The achievement becomes all the more awe-inspiring when we consider the circumstances under which many of the images were taken. His period of greatest activity in the social documentary field was the first decade of the century, when he worked for social activist magazines and for social documentary projects like the Pittsburgh Survey. He also worked for the National Child Labour Committee for eight years and published two books of his pictures, ‘Child Labour in the Carolinas’ (1909) and ‘Day Laborers Before Their Time’ (1909).

Taking these images often involved working under great pressure. To gain access Hine sometimes hid his camera and posed as a fire inspector.

In 1916 Congress eventually agreed to pass legislation to protect children. Owen Lovejoy, Chairman of the National Child Labour Committee, wrote that: “the work Hine did for this reform was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the need to public attention.”

Hine had great difficulty earning money from his photography. In January 1940, he lost his home after failing to keep up repayments. Lewis Wickes Hine died in extreme poverty eleven months later on 3rd November, 1940.

Here’s to Shorpy Higginbotham and to Lewis Hine, who sought to record his existence, reflect his experience, change the conditions under which he worked and to create art.

Michael Lusk’s disciplined eye

Originally uploaded by finsmal…Low & Slow.

A quality I sincerely admire in photographers is something I call “a disciplined eye”.

I suppose I mean an ability to seek out and find pictures in the world, even in the most unremarkable and apparently chaotic places. By ‘pictures’ I don’t just mean images, since anyone with a finger can make an image. I mean something with structure, whose features amount to an aesthetic argument of some kind, the evidence of a discriminating consciousness.

It’s a quality that is so easy to miss in others, since our landscape is saturated in images so that we come to think that such things are part of nature. But they’re not. They have be constructed from educated sensation. If you don’t think it’s difficult, just try it.

I found this person (photographer Michael Lusk) somewhere in the photographic dumpster that is Flickr.

Phineas Gage: wonders are always fascinating

A daguerreotype made public last week is believed to be the only known image of Phineas Gage (1823-1860).

Gage was a 25-year-old foreman, fit and well-regarded. His crew were digging a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vt. Late on the afternoon of Sept. 13, 1848, he wielded a specially made iron – it measured 3 feet 7 inches long and weighed 13 pounds – to pack blasting powder into rock.

An explosion erupted. “And we think the tamping iron went all the way through the skull – like a missile,’’ said Dr. Ion-Florin Talos, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

A close examination of the object clutched by the man in the picture shows an inscription matching the engraving on the tamping iron, which reads in part, “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage.’’

He has had enduring fame as the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients.

“It’s kind of a wonder,’’ Dr. Talos said, “and wonders are always fascinating.’’

From the Boston Globe.

Another fascinating account of the case appears at Neurophilosophy.

Awkward family classics

Sometimes, words just aren’t enough.

There’s plenty of room on the couch.

From the joyous awkwardfamilyphotos.com.

Daily Telegraph story on Awkward Family Photos.

Never take a bad picture again!

Something about the more things change? George Eastman pitched the first small portable camera to the world in 1888 with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”. It was given the onomatopoeic name ‘Kodak’.

Samsung are trying the same message, taken to the most extreme, unbelievable lengths with their latest lines of digital cameras. We are informed that the NV100HD contains a feature called ‘Beauty Shot’:

Make every photo perfect. Improve the way you look – without surgery. The quick and easy way for a better-looking you. The Beauty Shot feature is like having your own make-up artist-right in your camera. It automatically identifies imperfections such as blemishes and dark spots on the face, and retouches them so that faces appear brighter and smooth. And with different level settings, you can control the amount of retouching that takes place – it’s that simple!

History according to Life

“Soldier holding tattered flag of the Eighth PA Infantry, during Civil War, 1864.”

An enormous archive of Life magazine photographs has gone online at a certain famous search engine. They are available to view by decade, but I couldn’t go past the 1860s; surely the most remarkable decade in the history of the United States.

We are told that the collection contains images dating back to the 1750s. I suppose they would be drawings and etchings, since the invention of photography was only announced to the world in 1839.

Andrew Curtis, nocturnal emissions

Andrew is best known for his figuratively and literally dark images of the industrial landscape and its antique vestiges. At first glance, his new show ‘Cell’ at Christine Abrahams Gallery is a departure, but despite appearances these new pictures are recognisably the products (emissions?) of the same hand.

They recall Andrew’s earliest works, of industrial hulks and ageing bits of machine effluvia shot at night with long exposures, caressed by a soft hand-held light source that gave many of them an unearthly glow, collapsing notions of scale or context in the process and energising them with life. These new pictures have that same sense of discreet action illuminated by pools of hot light, a palette of primary colour against blackness.

Young women out on the town, in their natural habitat, stare longingly into the screens of their little electronic avatars, while they are watched, apparently without unease but without the slightest sense of obligation, by us, the impotent observer.

‘Katie’ reminds me in a strange way of Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘At The Moulin-Rouge’. They have a similar wide view of a nightclub scene and they evoke the same lonely disconnection that can come upon us in a crowded night club, a feeling of desolation, that I could only ever be a voyeur in such a space, a watcher and never a participant.

Andrew’s pictures capture that sense perfectly.

There is no mistaking these for the work of a woman, or not a heterosexual woman at any rate. These young women are palpably desired. There is no equivocating about the ‘male gaze’ here, they unapologetically embody it. But the smiles that play about these glossy mouths are not for the middle-aged bloke behind the camera, no matter how cool he might think himself to be (and Andrew is very cool). That boat has sailed, as it does for all of us, even if the most we ever did was gaze longingly from the pier. Desire, such as it might be, is for the love object on the other end of the text message, or for the device itself.

Greg Neville observed that the experience in the gallery was “like looking at tropical fish in an aquarium”, a perfect analogy. It captures the exotic nature of its subjects to the observer, but more importantly the sense that we are somehow separated from the world we observe, like gapers on one side of a sheet of glass.

I have a feeling that the subtext of specifically masculine desire might be a problem for some; I have already heard some critical voices along these lines. However, the pictures themselves are more subtle than such dismissal often allows. Several of them hint that the relationship between observer and observed is more ambiguous than a casual glance might suggest. Sometimes the picture contains other silent watchers within the frame, a blurred hand of indeterminate gender holding a lit cigarette, a shadowy profile in the foreground, one photo taken from the car’s passenger seat looking back at a woman in the back, implying the presence of at least three people. The expressions of the women themselves are ambivalent about the presence of an observer, and I suspect there are many potential readings of those expressions possible.

I love the ambiguity of the word ‘Cell’. It is most obviously the name for the object of desire itself, the cell-phone. But it is also a prison cell – of the single consciousness, at a remove from all that might be going on around it while that thin line is still connected.

A single frame of cinema film is also called a ‘cell’, and these images are certainly cinematic, in that they each have a highly constructed mise-en-scene complete with character actors and background extras. A single frame of cine-film is only a one-twenty fourth section of an unfolding event but these pictures are in another category. They are complete in their stillness, there is no sense that anything significant has proceeded either before or after the action.

My only criticism is that the presentation doesn’t really add anything that is not already there in the images on the gallery website. The hanging is a bit crowded and unnecessarily traditional with big prints under glass. Such furtive, nocturnal subject matter could have done with low lighting, on darkly painted walls.

Andrew’s elegant website contains the whole current series as well as examples of former works both commercial and otherwise