The Weight

Cartoonist Alan Moir in the Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 25 October.

Welcome, America

“Welcome, America, to the world of universal health care. It will be alright. Really. Trust me. We’ve been there. We’ve had it for years, and we’re doing well, thanks very much.”

– The Rest of the World

Design for Obama

It was an experiment in linking grassroots activism with the political machine using new technology, and it is being studied by wonks around the world.

Hundreds of artists and designers expressed support for the Obama candidacy by designing posters and submitting them to designforobama.org for free download. Many of these were actually taken up by the campaign, and others just travelled the superhighway as viral emails, making their point on their own.

Taschen is publishing Design for Obama. Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology This selection of the best, curated by Spike Lee and Aaron Perry-Zucker, is a visual document of this most inspirational U.S. presidential campaign.

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.

The ironic revolution

It was socialists who saw the dangers of Communism first and most clearly. In 1918, at the dawn of the Soviet era, Karl Kautsky, who had personally known Marx and Engels in his youth, wrote a diatribe against Lenin’s use of the vague Marxist term “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Kautsky insisted it had been meant metaphorically, and that genuine class struggle presupposed genuine democracy. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat “always leads to the dictatorship of a single man, or of a small knot of leaders” and to a situation where ordinary people “only become instruments for carrying out orders.”

From Andrew O’Hehir’s review of ‘The Rise and Fall of Communism’ by Archie Brown, in Salon.com.

One thing was not a historical fluke or accident, though: the fact that a political system based on some half-baked utopian musing by Marx and Engels, and their bogus claims of scientific certainty, was not going to work out well for anybody.

There’s room for argument about whether it had to turn out quite as badly as it did, and plenty of room for discussing the continuing validity of Marx’s insights into capitalism. But there’s no denying that the works of a philosopher who championed human creativity became the basis for a social system devoted to crushing it. It’s the platonic ideal of historical irony, to which other historical ironies can only aspire, and suggests some very dark possibilities about human nature.

W’s tragic combination

Luke Davies anticipates a new Oliver Stone film and in asking whether he would give us some insight into George W’s character, manages to answer himself in a way I found strangely compelling:

“Would [Stone] give us some insight into a man known, in personality at least, only through his comportment at press conferences? I had always thought that anyone with a competently functioning human radar would spot in Bush, in any given press conference, that unmistakeable mixture of feckless arrogance and happy-go-lucky thickness that would be priceless, were it no so tragic.”

From “Big Thoughts, Empire Burlesque: Luke Davies on Oliver Stone’s ‘W'” in The Monthly, December 2008.

Errol Morris for Obama

This is a very recent ad by the film maker Errol Morris for Barack Obama. You might know Morris as the genius behind films like ‘Vernon, Florida’, ‘The Thin Blue Line’, ‘The Fog of War’, ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ and so many others.

This ad again uses Morris’ unique method of shooting through plate glass, which in concert with a large mirror, allows his subjects to be looking directly at him, while also looking directly at the camera.

Head of skate

Say it ain’t so!

Christopher Hitchins

A question occurred to me in the middle of the night:

Would Christopher Hitchens have supported the US invasion of Iraq if, instead of a military dictatorship, Iraq had been a communist dictatorship?

Given his political and intellectual history, and his attitude to US anti-communist misadventures in the past, I think probably not.

Court cites Lewis Carroll as precedent

It’s not often you hear Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ quoted in open court, but it’s a habit that should be encouraged.

An American federal appeals court found that accusations against a Guantanamo Bay detainee who had been held for more than six years were based on slim, unverifiable claims, the New York Times reports. A three-judge panel said the government was affectively contending that its accusations against the man should be accepted because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the declaration by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Snark’: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

The Justice Department declined to comment. It is known, however, what Lewis Carroll would have thought.