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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The New York Times

If this were a perfect world, everybody would see the photographer James Nachtwey’s astonishing shows at the United Nations and at 401 Projects in the West Village.

Medics with a wounded marine in Iraq, included in “The Sacrifice,” a show at 401 Projects in the West Village.

Sadly, as Mr. Nachtwey knows, this isn’t a perfect world, a point he brings home in the work shown here. “Inferno,” the title of a 1999 book of the photographs he shot in Kosovo, Rwanda and other hellholes, aptly describes the horror in these two exhibitions.

For years, in Time magazine and elsewhere, he has demonstrated the good uses to which art can be put. Since 2000, he has crisscrossed Southeast Asia and Africa, documenting the resurgence of tuberculosis related to the global AIDS epidemic. (The show at the Visitors Center at the United Nations was timed to coincide with World TB Day last Saturday.) He has also photographed the war wounded in Iraq, where he himself was injured by a grenade a few years ago, and traveled with Medevac units to field hospitals and emergency rooms.

The series of Iraq pictures, some of which were first published in National Geographic, are called “The Sacrifice.” The title refers to the medics and physicians who treat everyone, including wounded insurgents. The insurgents are given goggles so they can’t see and later seek out to kill the Iraqi translators helping the medics, for which reason Mr. Nachtwey doesn’t photograph translators. He does photograph an Iraqi child mangled in a suicide attack: the boy is screaming beneath his oxygen mask.

The title also refers to American soldiers whose work daily forces them to play Russian roulette with roadside bombs, soldiers regularly sacrificed in the war. Mr. Nachtwey devised a collage of photos (grainy, black-and-white, shot under the fluorescent glare of military trauma centers) suggesting the choreographed chaos in which American doctors tend to failing patients. The last of the pictures, a mordant coda, shows a dead soldier on a gurney under a blanket, a chaplain’s arm reaching into the frame and holding up a dog tag.

It matters not a little that Mr. Nachtwey is such an artful composer of images, that his work, although almost too painful to look at, is so graphic and eloquent. He snaps a picture just at the moment that the arms of rushing, dodging medics trading scalpels and scissors form a perfect zigzag of thrusting lines ending with a nurse pressing a fist into a patient’s head wound — the punctum of the image, to borrow Roland Barthes’s term. The nurse’s gesture has a strangeness that carries something of the quality of grace.

He finds the same encapsulating detail, concentrated by simple geometry, in a photograph of two doctors. (You just see their arms.) They’re gingerly examining the spine of a rail-thin woman with AIDS; she is sitting on the floor and facing away from Mr. Nachtwey so that only her bare left foot, leathered, turned toward the camera, reveals her advanced age. One of the doctors presses his index finger into her back — another memorable motion, subtly conveying care and dignified by the stately, condensed order of the picture.

Beauty is a vexed matter in scenes of suffering, cruelty and death. The difference between exploitation and public service comes down to whether the subject of the image aids the ego of the photographer more than the other way around. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Along with bravery and perseverance, Mr. Nachtwey’s pictorial virtue makes him a model war photographer. He doesn’t mix up his priorities. His goal is to bear witness, because somebody must, and his pictures, devised to infuriate and move people to action, are finally about us, and our concern or lack of it, at least as much they are about him and his obvious talents.

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Posted at 6:27 PM · Comments (0)

An Interview with Garry Winogrand

Copyright Barbara Diamonstein

Garry Winogrand is one of the most important photographers at work in America today. His sophisticated snapshot-aesthetic pictures celebrate ordinary events, and transform them with precise timing and framing into astute visual commentaries on modern life.

Barbaralee Diamonstein: Garry, the New School is not unfamiliar ground to you. As I recall, you studied here for a short time in the early part of your career.

Garry Winogrand: Yes. It might have been 1949.

D: You began to photograph just at that period when you were less then twenty years old. How did it all begin?

W: Cameras intrigued me.

D: You started out studying painting, though, didn’t you?

W: Yeah, well, cameras always were seductive. And then a darkroom became available, and that’s when I stopped doing anything else.

D: How does a darkroom “become available”?

W: There was a camera club at Columbia, where I was taking a painting course. And when I went down, somebody showed me how to use the stuff. That’s all. I haven’t done anything else since then, It was as simple as that. I fell into the business.

D: You started out supporting yourself with commercial work — advertising photography and such things.

W: Yes, and magazine work, industrial work. I was a hired gun, more or less.

D: Why did you decide to give all that up?

W: I enjoyed it until I stopped. You could travel and get around. I can’t really explain why, I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

D: That wasn’t very long agoà

W: Well, it was 1969 when I got out of it, more or less.

D: And then you turned to teaching, as well as your own work?

W: Well, it was strange, because the phone rang and a teaching job turned up that sounded interesting. And I always did my own work. The Animals and a lot of Public Relations were done while I was doing commercial work.

D: When you refer to Public Relations, you’re really talking about the title of a book that describes a very extensive body of material you started in 1969 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. During that period, you decided to photograph the effect of the media on events. And you studied ritual public events that very often were planned for the benefit of those who were recording them. What did you find out about that period, and what were you trying to tell us in your photographs?

W: I don’t think anything happens without the press, one way or the other. I think it’s all done for it. You saw it start, really, with Martin Luther King in Birmingham. He did the bus thing. And I don’t think anything that followed would have happened if the press hadn’t paid attention. As far as my end of it, photographing, goes, all I’m interested in is pictures, frankly. I went to events, and it would have been very easy to just illustrate that idea about the relationships between the press and the event, you know. But I felt that from my end, I should deal with the thing itself, which is the event. I pretty much functioned like the media itself.

D: But weren’t you the media then?

W: I was one of them, yeah, absolutely. But maybe I was a little slyer, sometimes.

D: How so?

W: Well, at times people in the press were also useful to me, you know.

D: As subjects?

W: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

D: I’m reminded of a picture of Murray Kempton and Norman Mailer in that series at Mailer’s 50th birthday party, that has been widely reproduced and discussed in critical essays. Are any of those events ever held just for fun or for the sheer relief of the participants? Are they always done to promote an idea, a cause, a person, or a product?

W: In my experience, I think it’s the latter. I mean, people are going to have a good time, you know. One can go have a good time at these big openings in museums. And people go to have a good time. But the thing has another purpose.

D: What is the larger purpose?

W: In the case of museums, it’s always got to do with money, people who donate and things like that. And I believe a certain kind of interest has to be demonstrated. The museums want large crowds coming to the shows — it’s the same thing. It’s hype. Absolutely. But there’s nothing evil about it.

D: Are you really saying that it’s marketing?

W: A lot of it is. And then, of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there’d be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you’d have a women’s rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

D: How was it to look at?

W: Well, it was interesting; it’s an interesting photographic problem. But if I was doing it as a job, I think I’d have to get paid extra. If I ever hear “Power to the people” again, I’llà I just found out that John Lennon wrote that song, “All we are saying is give peace a chance.” I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was terrible; I hated that song. They used to bring out the Pete Seeger wind-up toy to sing it. Tiresome.

D: I hope that what I’m going to bring up won’t be tiresome for you, tooà The term “street photography” and your name have been synonymous for quite some time. But the streets are not the only place where you’ve worked over the last twenty-five years or so. You’ve worked in zoos and aquaria, Metropolitan Museum of Art openings, Texas rodeos. There must be some common thread that runs through all of your work. How would you describe it?

W: Well, I’m not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like “street photographer” are so stupid.

D: How would you prefer to describe yourself?

W: I’m a photographer, a still photographer. That’s it.

D: If you don’t like “street photographer,” how do you respond to that other ætiresome phrase’, “snapshot aesthetic”?

W: I knew that was coming. That’s another stupidity. The people who use the term don’t even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they’re talking about snapshots they’re talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs. Everybody’s fifteen feet away and smiling. The sun is over the viewer’s shoulder. That’s when the picture is taken, always. It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happened. People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

D: That’s an interesting point, particularly coming from someone who takes — or rather, composes and then snaps— lightning-fast shots.

W: I’ll say this, I’m pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it’s irrelevant. I mean, what if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can’t prove otherwise. You don’t know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really. But every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.

D: Well, what would be a better way to describe that?

W: See, I don’t think time is involved in how the thing is made. It’s like, “There I was 40,000 feet in the air,” whatever. You’ve got to deal with how photographs look, what’s there, not how they’re made. Even with what camera.

D: So what is really importantà

W: Is the photograph.

D: àis how you organize complex situations or material to make a picture.

W: The picture, right. Not how I do anything. In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.

D: Does it really not matter what kind of equipment you use?

W: Oh, I know what I like to use myself. I use Leicas, but when I look at the photograph, I don’t ask the photograph questions. Mine or anybody else’s. The only time I’ve ever dealt with that kind of thing is when I’m teaching. You talk about people who are interested in “how.” But when I look at photographs, I couldn’t care less “how.” You see?

D: What do you look for?

W: I look at a photograph. What’s going on? What’s happening, photographically? If it’s interesting, I try to understand why.

D: And how do you expect the viewer to respond to your photographs?

W: I have no expectations. None at all.

D: Well, what do you want to evoke?

W: I have no ideas on that subject. Two people could look at the same flowers and feel differently about them. Why not? I’m not making ads. I couldn’t care less. Everybody’s entitled to their own experience.

D: You describe very complex relationships photographically, in a very sympathetic way, but a very humorous one. Often you do that with juxtaposition, whether in zoos or rodeos or museum celebrations. Let’s talk about your animal project. There, as in so much of your work, juxtapositions and gestures that usually pass unnoticed are very significant. You find them worth recording. Here you were, a city boy, how did you come to do a project that involved spending so much time in zoos? Do animals interest you that much?

W: Well, zoos are always in cities. Where else can they afford them, you know? When I was a kid in New York I used to go to the zoo. I always liked the zoo. I grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. And then when my first two children were young, I used to take them to the zoo. Zoos are always interesting. And I make pictures. Actually, the animal pictures came about in a funny way. I made a few shots. If you could see those contact sheets, they’re mostly of the kids and maybe a few shots where I’m just playing. And at some point I realized something was going on in some of those pictures, so then I worked at it.

D: Consciously?

W: Yes. Then at some point I realized it made sense as a book. So that’s what happened.

D: How important are humor and irony in your work?

W: I don’t know. See, I don’t get involved, frankly, in that way. When I see something, I know why something’s funny or seems to be funny. But in the end it’s just another picture as far as I’m concerned.

D: When you looked at those contact sheets, you noticed that something was going on. I’ve often wondered how a photographer who takes tens of thousands of photographs — and by now it may even be hundreds of thousands of photographs — keeps track of the material. How do you know what you have, and how do you find it?

W: Badly. That’s all I can say. There’ve been times it’s been just impossible to find a negative or whatever. But I’m basically just a one man operation, and so things get messed up. I don’t have a filing system that’s worth very much.

D: But don’t you think that’s important to your work?

W: I’m sure it is, but I can’t do anything about it. It’s hopeless. I’ve given up. You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I’ve got certain things grouped by now, but there’s a drudgery in finding them. There’s always stuff missing.

D: You sold your very first work to the Museum of Modern Art. How did Edward Steichen come to know your work?

W: I had an agent. When Steichen was doing “The Family of Man”, I went up to the office one day. I think Wayne Miller, who assisted Steichen with “The Family of Man,” was up there and pulled out a bunch of pictures. So I got a message: “Take these pictures, call Steichen, make an appointment and take these pictures up there.” And that’s how I met him.

D: Did the museum buy any?

W: Yes, they bought some for that show.

D: How many did they buy? That was about 1960.

W: I don’t remember.

D: Do you remember how much they paid for them?

W: Ten bucks each. Nobody sold prints then and prices didn’t mean anything. In terms of earning your living, it was a joke.

D: Did you ever expect the public to celebrate the works of photographers either aesthetically or economically?

W: No. First of all, I don’t know if they’re celebrating. But yeah, I’m shocked that I can live pretty well, or reasonably, or make a certain amount of my living, anyway, off of prints. I guess it’s nuts. I don’t believe in it. I never anticipated it; I still don’t believe it.

D: How do you explain the current rise of interest in photography ?

W: Oh, I’m sure some of it has to do with taxes, tax shelter things. There are all kinds of reasons. There are people who like photography; there are people who are worrying about what’s going to happen with the dollar. They want to get anything that seems hard. I don’t know, but I think it’s got to do with economics. Now and then you get somebody who buys a picture because he likes it.

D: What about all those young people who are so interested in photography?

W: They don’t buy pictures. Young people don’t have money to buy pictures. I don’t really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it’s all about finances, on one side. And then there are people who are socially ambitious. If you go back aways, the Sculls, for instance, had a lot of money and they were socially ambitious. If you get an old master, it’s not going to do you any good socially.

D: Besides, you can’t get enough of them.

W: And likewise even French impressionists. So the Sculls bought pop. It was politics, and they moved with it. And I think that could be happening, to some degree, with photography, too. It doesn’t cost as much to do it, either.

D: Then you don’t have much faith in the longevity of the surge of interest, either economic or aesthetic, in photography. Do you see it as something typical of this moment?

W: I don’t know what you mean by aesthetic.

D: Well, we’re assigning the surge of interest to economic reasons, rather than the fact that more and more people think of photography as a legitimate art form.

W: I don’t care how they think of it. Some of these people are acquiring some very good pictures by a lot of different photographers.

D: For whatever motivationà

W: Right. Who cares?

D: But if their interest is economically engendered, then photography could be a short term pursuit.

W: Possibly. I’ll take one day at a time; that’s enough! I have no idea what’s going to happen. Who knows — if they can’t afford to buy a boat, maybe they buy a print. Who knows what happens with their buck?

D: When I was taking your photograph earlier today, with well-intended whimsy I tilted my camera in an attempt to make my own Winogrand. From what I understand, that’s not how it’s done. What is the meaning of the horizontal tilted frame that you often use? And is your camera tilted when you make the picture?

W: It isn’t tilted, no.

D: What are you doing?

W: Well, look, there’s an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference. And if you study those pictures, you’ll see I use the vertical often enough. I use either edge. If it’s as good as the vertical edge, it’s as good as the horizontal edge. I never do it without a reason. The only ones you’ll see are the ones that work. There’s various reasons for doing it. But they’re not tilted, you see.

D: How do you create that angle, then?

W: You use the vertical edge as the point of reference, instead of the horizontal edge. I have a picture of a beggar, where there’s an arm coming into the frame from the side. And the arm is parallel to the horizontal edge and it makes it work. It’s all games, you know. But it keeps it interesting to do, to play.

D: There is another photograph that has an arm coming in from that edge, in almost Sistine Chapel fashion. That arm and the hand on the end of it are feeding the trunk of an elephant.

W: Oh, you mean the cover of the animal book. That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about now. It’s just that I carry an arm around with me, you know. I wouldn’t be caught dead without that arm!

D: Has teaching affected the way you take photographs?

W: I really don’t know.

D: Do you learn a great deal from your students? Do you have any new ideas, any reactions to their reactions?

W: No, the only thing that happens when I’m teaching is that I hope there are some students out there in the class who will ask questions. Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see. Teaching doesn’t relate to photographing, at least not for me. But now and then I’ll get a student who asks a question that puts me up against the wall and maybe by the end of the semester I can begin to deal with the question. You know what I mean. It’s not easy.

D: Several years ago a student did ask you which qualities in a picture make it interesting instead of dead. And you replied with a telling statement describing what photography is all about. You said you didn’t know what something would look like in a photograph until it had been photographed. A rather simple sentence that you used has been widely identified with you, and that sentence is: “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” That was about five or six years ago. And I know there are few things that displease you more than being bored. So I would hope that you have since amended or extended that idea. How would you express it now?

W: Well, I don’t think it was that simple then, either. There are things I photograph because I’m interested in those things. But in the end, you know what I’m saying there. Earlier tonight, I said the photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else. It’s about transformation. And that’s what it is. That hasn’t changed, largely. But it’s not that simple. Let’s put it this way — I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I’m saying the same thing; I’m not changing it. I photograph what interests me. I’m not saying anything different, you see.

D: Well, what is it about a photograph that makes it alive or dead?

W: How problematic it is! It’s got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that’s what’s responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not. There are photographs that function just to give you information. I never saw a pyramid, but I’ve seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like. There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest. Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that’s boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let’s say that an artist deals with banality. I don’t care what the discipline is.

D: And how do you find the mystery in the banal?

W: Well, that’s what’s interesting. There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

D: Does that discreet context make it more descriptive, and by transforming it give it a whole new layer of meaning?

W: You’re asking me why that happens. Aside from the fact of just taking things out of context, I don’t know why. That’s part of a mystery. In a way, a transformation is a mystery to me. But there is a transformation, and that’s fascinating. Just think how minimal somebody’s family album is. But you start looking at one of them, and the word everybody will use is “charming.” Something just happened. It’s automatic, just operating a camera intelligently. You’ve got a lot going for you, you see. By just describing well with it, something happens.

D: There are a number of photographers who have things happen in their work that you have responded to over an extended period of time. Whose work have you found was of importance to, or influenced, yours?

W: Well, we could talk about hope, that’s all. I hope I learned something from Evans and Frank andà I could make a big listà

D: In what way did they inform your work, your vision, or your life?

W: I’ll just talk about Evans’ and Frank’s work. I don’t know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be. I think it was the first time I was really moved by photographs.

D: Did you know Walker Evans?

W: No, not really. We weren’t friends.

D: Cartier-Bresson and Kertesz?

W: I met Bresson once in Paris. Kertesz I probably know a little better. But I’m not friends with those people. I’m not friends with Robert. I’ve known Robert for a long time.

D: But you are closely associated with a number of contemporary photographers, your contemporaries.

W: Oh sure. Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge.

D: Tod Papageorge, a first rate photographer in his own right, was the curator of an exhibition of yours called “Public Relations.” How did that come about, that one photographer not only is the curator of another’s exhibition, but also writes the introduction to his work?

W: Ask John Szarkowski. It wasn’t my idea. I mean, he did ask me if it was okay with me, and I was delighted.

D: Did you all stalk the streets together?

W: No, we don’t work together. We might meet for lunch or something, and maybe happen to saunter around a bit in the process. But we don’t do expeditions.

D: Just exhibitions. In 1967 your work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, with Lee Friedlander’s and Diane Arbus’. Do you feel that the three of you were a likely combination? Or were there important differences? Were you part of the same school?

W: Oh, we’re all radically different. John gave the show a title “New Documents”, and there was a little bit of written explanation. I would go by that. I don’t remember what was written, though.

D: Has the Museum of Modern Art been very influential in your own career?

W: I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with what I do. Probably has made some differences in my sales, I wouldn’t be surprised. Again, you have to ask other people, because I don’t have a measuring device. There are photographers whose shows I try to make it my business to see, if I’m in the city. There are photographers I have no interest in at all.

D: Tell me about the ones that interest you.

W: Tod or Hank Wessel, Bill Dane, Paul McConough, Steve Shore. Robert Adams, for sure. I’m ready to see what they do. Nicholas Nixon, also, I would make it my business to see. There’s a lot of people working reasonably intelligently.

D: How important is that much criticized aspect æof photography — the mechanical, duplicatable printing aspect — to the quality of the work? How much time do you spend in your darkroom? Do you develop your own work?

W: I develop my own film. And I work in spurts. I pile it up.

D: How far behind are you?

W: There’s two ways I’m behind, in developing and in printing. It’s not easily measurable. I’m a joke. That’s the way I am; I mean, that’s just the way I work. I’ve never felt overwhelmed. I know it gets done.

D: Do you have any assistants who work with you?

W: Well, I have a good friend who’s a very good printer. And he does a certain amount of printing for me. I do all the developing. If somebody’s going to goof my film, I’d better do it. I don’t want to get that mad at anybody else.

D: How often does the unexpected or the goof happen when you work? And how often does it turn out to be a happy surprise?

W: I’m talking about technical goofs. I’m pretty much on top of it. The kind of picture you’re referring to would have to be more about the effects of technical things, technical phenomena, and I’m just not interested in that kind of work at all. I’ve goofed, and there’s been something interesting, but I haven’t made use of it. It just doesn’t interest me.

D: Are there any of your photographs that you would describe as being key in the development and evolution of your work?

W: No, I don’t deal with them that way either.

D: How do you deal with them?

W: I don’t know. I don’t go around looking at my pictures. I sometimes think I’m a mechanic. I just take pictures. When the time comes, for whatever reason, I get involved in editing and getting some prints made and stuff. There are things that interest me. But I don’t really mull over them a lot.

D: Well, what interests you the most? What’s the most important thing to know about your work?

W: I think there’s some stuff that’s at least photographically interesting. There are things I back off from trying to talk about, you know. Particularly my own work. Also, there may be things better left unsaid. At times I’d much rather talk about other work.

D: Your work, particularly in Public Relations, has often been compared to the work of that master press photographer, Weegee. Do you see any comparisons or similarities?

W: No, I think we’re different. First of all, he dealt with very different things. I don’t know who makes that comparison. It doesn’t make sense to me at all.

D: Tell us about your new book.

W: It’s called Stock Photographs. It was done at the Fort Worth livestock show and rodeo. I was commissioned to shoot there by the Fort Worth Art Museum for a show. You shoot one year and the show is the next year, when the rodeo is in town. It was a big group show. I was the only photographer. There was a videotape guy and some sculptors: Red Grooms, Rauschenberg, Terry Allen. I think I hung some, I forget, sixty or so pictures in the show. And at the opening, somebody asked me if I was going to make a book out of it. And I knew I wouldn’t. I mean, if I was going to make a book, I’d want to shoot more. You know, you do a book, and you want it to be a crackerjack of a book. Anyway, this person gave me the idea, the next year I went and did some shooting, and then the following year I did some more. And that was it. I probably shot a total of fourteen days, give or take.

D: You were teaching in Texas then, so you had some familiarity with cowboys and the West. It’s been said that those rodeo pictures don’t tell very pleasant truths. The image of the cowboy hero is somewhat deflated. Was that your intent?

W: My intention is to make interesting photographs. That’s it, in the end. I don’t make it up. Let’s say it’s a world I never made. That’s what was there to deal with.

D: But one does select what one photographs, and what one doesn’tà

W: Well, if you take a good look at the book, it’s largely a portrait gallery of faces — faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that’s all it is, I think. They’re in action; there’s people dancing. Plus some actual rodeo action and some other animal pictures, livestock stuff. That’s the way we’re living. It’s one world in this world. But it’s not coverage; it’s a record of my subjective interests.

D: There is another record that you made of one of your interests, at least at the time! I’m referring to the book on women. How did you assemble that collection?

W: It’s the same thing, you know. I’m still compulsively interested in women. It’s funny, I’ve always compulsively photographed women. I still do. I may very well do “Son of Women are Beautiful.” I certainly have the work. I mean, I have the pictures if I wanted to try to get something like that published. It would be a joke.

D: Do you intend to?

W: No. That’s all we need, another book like that! The thing that was interesting about doing that book was my difficulty in dealing with the pictures. When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don’t think I always got it straight. I don’t think it was that straight, either. I think it’s an interesting book, but I don’t think it’s as good as the other books I’ve done.

D: Which book did you enjoy most? Are there any projects that were more satisfying to you, while you were putting them together or when they became public, in books or exhibitions?

W: No. I enjoy photographing. It’s always interesting, so I can’t say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it’s own difficulties.

D: When Tod Papageorge was the curator of one of your exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, he observed that you do not create pictures of significant form, but rather of signifying form. What does that phrase mean?

W: I think that’s what photographic description is about. That’s how a camera describes things.

D: Throughout your work, there is a narrative voice, and an active one at that. Do you agree?

W: I generally deal with something happening. So let’s say that what’s out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening. Almost the way puns function. They call the meaning of things into question. You know, why do you laugh at a pun? Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it. So a pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we’re not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.

D: In much of your work you’ve described contemporary America. Do you find any recurring themes, or any iconography that either engages your attention or should engage ours?

W: Well, you said it before, women in pictures. Aside from women, I don’t know. My work doesn’t function the way Robert Frank’s did.

D: What are you working on now?

W: I’ve been living in Los Angeles and photographing there. That’s it.

D: Any particular subject matter?

W: No. I’m all over the place. Literally.

D: And then you’re going to look at those contact sheets and realize once again that the work comes together — as a book, or something elseà

W: I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That’s part of the discipline. My only purpose while I’m working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act — a later consideration. Certainly while I’m working, I want them to be as useless as possible.

D: What made you move to Los Angeles?

W: I wanted to photograph there. But I’ll come back to New York. I think I’ll start focusing in more on the entertainment business. I have been doing some of that already, all kinds of monkey business. But I’m all over the place, literally.

D: When you say the entertainment business, do you mean things that relate to movies?

W: Yes, movies. You know, the lots, et cetera.

D: Rather than the “stars”?

W: Whatever. I may very well move in. I just don’t know. I can’t sit here and know what pictures I’m going to take.

D: Is environment — location — a very important influence on your photographs?

W: Well, Los Angeles has interested me for a long time. I was in Texas for five years, for the same reason. I wanted to photograph there. And the only way you can do it is to live there. So I’m living in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I’ve been a gypsy for quite a while. It’ll come to an end. I’m going to come back to New York. I’m a New Yorker. Matter of fact, the more I’m in places like Texas and California, the more I know I’m a New Yorker. I have no confusions. About that.

D: We’ve talked about the influence of people like Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, of course, on your work. How would you contrast your work to theirs?

W: I wouldn’t. We’re different, I think. With Evans, if nothing else, it’s just in terms of the time we photograph. And my attitude to a lot of things is different from Evans’. Let’s say I have a different kind of respect for the things in the world than he does. I have a different kind of seriousness. This might be misunderstood, but I certainly think that my attitude is different. And generally the cameras I use, and how I use them, are different. The things that he photographs describe a certain kind of exquisite taste. And let’s say the things I photograph may describe a lack of that. You know what I mean? He was like a very good shopper.

D: And you?

W: I think the problem is different. I was thinking about him and Atget. The things they photographed were often beautiful, and that’s a hell of a problem, to photograph something that’s beautiful to start with, you see. The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed. I deal with much more mundane objects, at least. I don’t really; actually, I deal with it all. I can’t keep away from the other things, but I don’t avoid garbage.

D: Do you think that some of those mundane objects are a holdover from your early commercial work?

W: No, no, I don’t.

D: You worked in advertising for a long while. Did that influence your work?

W: I doubt it. I mean, I was able to work with two heads. If anything, doing ads and other commercial work were at least exercises in discipline.

D: Would you advise a young photographer who had to earn a living to turn to teaching or to commercial work like advertising?

W: You’d have to deal with a specific person. There’s all kinds of people teaching who don’t do anything worth a nickel. Likewise in advertising. Then there are some people who do get it together, so I wouldn’t make any generalizations. You know if a specific person was asking me such questions, I might think I could tell well enough to say. Or I might say nothing. I don’t know.

D: What general advice would you give to young photographers? What should they be doing?

W: The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time. You see. I mean, you’ve got to bounce off better work. It’s a matter of working.

D: Do you photograph every day?

W: Just about, yes..

D: But you don’t develop every day?

W: Hell no! No way.

D: John Szarkowski called you the central photographer of your generation. That’s very high praise.

W: Right. It is.

D: But it’s also an enormous burden.

W: No, no problem at all. What has it got to do with working? When I’m photographing, I don’t have that kind of nonsense running around in my head. I’m photographing. It’s irrelevant in the end, so it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s not going to make me do better work or worse work as I can see it now.

D: Did you ever expect your life to unfold the way it has?

W: No, of course not. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I had no idea. How can you know?

D: What did you have in mind?

W: Surviving, that’s all. That’s all I have in mind right now.

D: Flourishing, too?

W: That’s unexpected. But I’m surviving. I’m a survivor. That’s the way I understand it.

D: What are you going to do next? Do you have any exhibitions or books planned?

W: No, nothing cooking, not at the moment. Just shooting, that’s enough. It’s a lot of work organizing something, whether it’s a show or a book, and I don’t want to do it every day.

D: You have enormous curiosity that propels you from one project to the other.

W: I don’t think of them as projects. All I’m doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn’t a project.

D: Do you think that’s the way most photographers work?

W: I don’t know. I know what happens. I have boxes of pictures that nothing is ever going to happen to. Even Public Relations. I mean, I was going to events long before, and I still am.

D: Have you ever had any particularly difficult assignments or photographic moments?

W: No, the only thing that’s difficult is reloading when things are happening. Can you get it done fast enough?

D: You obviously have some secret because you are known as the fastest camera aroundà

W: Well, I don’t know if I’m really the fastest. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think of it as difficult. It would be difficult if I were carrying something heavy, but I carry Leicas. You can’t talk about it that way. I’m not operating a shovel and getting tired.

D: You said earlier that you sometimes think of yourself as a mechanic. Do you also think of yourself as an artist?

W: I probably am. I don’t think about it, either. But, if I have to think, yeah, I guess so

Posted at 4:49 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

March 28 2007

This is my last Asia column before I have to retire shortly from the
Financial Times, after 39 years. It is an irresistible opportunity to
draw together some lessons and impressions gathered while covering the
region and to explode the odd myth. I shall also hazard a few
predictions.

First, not all east Asia is an economic miracle: today, it is
overwhelmingly a China story. China has generated more than half the
growth in developing Asia, including India, this century. A
surprisingly large number of other countries have performed
disappointingly. Japan, the region’s largest economy, is still re-
emerging from its lost decade. South Korea, the third largest, is
floundering. Taiwan and Thailand are performing well below their
potential.

Second, China has no grand master plan. Its one constant is the
Communist party’s ruthless dedication to keeping its monopoly on power.
In practice, the leadership’s claim to political legitimacy hinges on
its ability to keep living standards rising for as many people as
possible. The pursuit of that goal is essentially pragmatic and based
on trial and error. That is a prudent choice, the political equivalent
of portfolio theory, when, as is so often the case in China, there are
so many unknowns, even to those in power. The biggest of all is where
economics will ultimately drive the country politically.

Two other factors make governing China a tightrope act. One is the
centre’s never-ending struggle to control headstrong local officials,
who have taken all too literally the injunction to enrich their regions
– and themselves. The other is the growing influence of vested
interests that have asserted themselves more strongly under a less
radically reforming leadership. Lobby politics is now at least as
important in shaping policy in Beijing as in Washington, which is why
it is often hard to read.

Third, economics rules Asian diplomacy. In a region riven by mistrust
and age-old hostilities, the interdependence created by trade and
investment – particularly in the form of cross-border production
networks – is the most powerful underpinning of stability. However
great their political differences, Asian countries have not let these
threaten their common pursuit of export-led growth. Given the limited
diplomatic options, one can only hope that economic logic continues to
prevail and that Asia does not suffer the same fate as Norman Angell’s
prediction in 1913 that European countries had become economically too
intertwined ever again to wage war against each other.

Fourth, it will be a long time, if ever, before Asia forms a closely
integrated economic bloc. In addition to mutual suspicions between
nations, rivalry for regional influence between China and Japan – and
probably, in time, India – will make meaningful agreements hard to
achieve. Furthermore, the institutional co-operation that deeper
integration would require is frustrated by Asian governments’ jealous
defence of sovereignty and the weakness of many of their domestic
institutions.

Fifth, the importance of Chinese “soft power” is overrated. Most of
Beijing’s diplomatic overtures around the world are driven first and
foremost by economic need, above all its quest for secure supplies of
energy and raw materials. That it has stolen a march on the US is due
more to Washington’s neglect than to Beijing’s undoubted political
marketing skills.

Truly effective soft power is based on the projection of intrinsically
appealing national ideals, principles and values. However wantonly the
Bush administration has squandered those assets, I suspect most Asians,
given the choice, would still opt for the – tarnished – American dream
over the harsh constraints, relentless materialism and spiritual
poverty of contemporary China.

Sixth, Europe is irrelevant in Asia, except as a market and a producer
of luxury goods. Those in Europe who envisage Asia basing its future
development on the European “model” delude themselves. The only
European models that Asia would like to embrace are to be found on
catwalks.

Seventh, the west should moan less about manufacturing going east.
Manufacturing is what you do if your only alternative is eking a living
from the soil, or what lies beneath it. Automation is making it less of
a job creator, competition is brutal and the really big money lies
elsewhere, in product design, marketing and branding. That is why, from
China to India, companies yearn to graduate beyond mere metal-bashing.

Eighth, denying free expression is wrong economically, as well as
politically. Most Asian governments dream of creating “knowledge”
societies capable of fundamental innovation. However, severe setbacks
such as Korea’s faked human cloning scandal show how far they have to
go. It is telling that almost all Asian-born Nobel scientific laureates
have been honoured for work done in the west.

Genuine innovations are often serendipitous and rudely challenge the
established order. But even in countries where repressive regimes do
not punish such behaviour, hierarchical attitudes and traditions of
deference often breed intellectual conformism. Changing that will take
far more than big research budgets.

In the past 28 months, this column has given me the ultimate
journalistic privilege, a ringside view of history in the making. It
has been stimulating, often surprising, sometimes amusing and always
fun. I have frequently benefited, too, from the wisdom of readers. Some
have become friends. I wish them all, and Asia, well.

Posted at 4:31 PM · Comments (0)

A brief except from an excellent and lengthy piece published by the New York Times.
Copyright The New York Times

I first met Angelo at a meeting of the group in mid-January. (I was given permission to sit in on the condition that I not divulge the participants’ last names.) The meeting took place in the bright, cheerfully decorated back room of a community mental-health center in North Finchley, an affluent, grassy suburb in the northern reaches of London. The gathering was small but eclectic. In addition to the group’s facilitators — Jo Kutchinsky, an occupational therapist, and Liana Kaiser, a social-work student — five men and women assembled in a circle of bulky wool-knit chairs around a worn coffee table. Besides Angelo, there was Stewart, a young, working-class Londoner with a shaved head and a hoop earring; Jenny, an affable woman in her 50s who spoke of her fondness for arts and crafts; Michelle, a heavyset woman who dominated the session with her forceful opinions; and David, a 60-something man with a thick gray beard and a pageboy haircut who slumped in his seat and dozed throughout much of the meeting.

Angelo was the newest member of this group — it was his third visit — and he did not seem inclined to participate fully. When Kutchinsky opened the meeting by asking each member to discuss the previous week’s experience hearing voices, he softly mentioned that his voices made it difficult to read, then quickly ceded the floor. What followed was sometimes painful. Stewart in particular was visibly agitated. His hallucinatory life, as he described it, was chaotic and irrepressible. He heard voices pleading to him for help; he heard the voices of strangers; he heard the voice of his father. Sometimes he heard the voices of military commandos, who offered to defend him against this confusion. “I haven’t been well for a long time,” he said glumly. Yet most of the members spoke of their voices in the way that comedians speak of mothers-in-law: burdensome and irritating, but an inescapable part of life that you might as well learn to deal with. When David’s name was called, he lifted his head and discussed his struggle to accept his voices as part of his consciousness. “I’ve learned over time that my voices can’t be rejected,” he said. “No matter what I do, they won’t go away. I have to find a way to live with them.” Jenny discussed how keeping busy quieted her voices; she seemed to have taken a remarkable number of adult-education courses. Michelle expressed her belief that her voices were nothing more exotic than powerfully negative thoughts. “Negative thoughts are universal,” she said. “Everyone has them. Everyone. What matters is how you cope with them: that’s what counts.”

I had trouble gauging Angelo’s reaction throughout these testimonies, so afterward I pulled him aside and asked him what he thought. “It’s interesting to hear people’s stories,” he said. “Before I started coming, I hadn’t realized just how long some people have suffered. I’ve heard voices for six years. Some people have heard them for 15 or 20. It’s amazing.” I asked him if this knowledge reassured or frightened him. “It’s a bit scary, in a way. I think, I could be this way for a long time.” Still, he appeared to appreciate the camaraderie. For years, he had been socially isolated. He spends most of his time with his parents and a sympathetic older sister. His neighbors know only that he is “off work.” It was comforting, he said, to speak at last with people who understood.

The meeting that I attended in London is one of dozens like it affiliated with a small but influential grass-roots organization known as Hearing Voices Network. Based in Manchester, Hearing Voices Network (H.V.N.) has since its inception, in 1991, developed a range of services related to the phenomenon known as auditory hallucination: a hot line for people who suffer from the experience, a series of educational workshops for mental-health professionals and 170 support groups across Britain, with more in development. H.V.N., which openly challenges the standard psychiatric relationship of expert physician and psychotic patient, might be said to take the consumer movement in mental health care to its logical endpoint. Although H.V.N. groups meet in a variety of settings — from psychiatric wards to churches to the organization’s headquarters — all must be run by, or there must be active plans for them to be run by, voice-hearers themselves. What’s more, H.V.N. groups must accept all interpretations of auditory hallucinations as equally valid. If an individual comes to a group claiming that he is hearing the voice of the queen of England, and he finds this belief useful, no attempt is made to divest him of it, but rather to figure out what it means to him…

Click to read more

Posted at 11:25 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: March 27, 2007

CHONGQING, China, March 23 — For weeks the confrontation drew attention from people all across China, as a simple homeowner stared down the forces of large-scale redevelopment that are sweeping this country, blocking the preparation of a gigantic construction site by an act of sheer will.

Chinese bloggers were the first to spread the news, of a house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped piece of land like Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France, in the middle of a vast excavation.

Newspapers dived in next, followed by national television. Then, in a way that is common in China whenever an event begins to take on hints of political overtones, the story virtually disappeared from the news media after the government, bloggers here said, decreed that the subject was suddenly out of bounds.

Still, the “nail house,” as many here have called it because of the homeowner’s tenacity, like a nail that cannot be pulled out, remains the most popular current topic among bloggers in China.

It has a universal resonance in a country where rich developers are seen to be in cahoots with politicians and where both enjoy unchallenged sway. Each year, China is roiled by tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations, and few issues pack as much emotional force as the discontent of people who are suddenly uprooted, told that they must make way for a new skyscraper or golf course or industrial zone.

What drove interest in the Chongqing case was the uncanny ability of the homeowner to hold out for so long. Stories are legion in Chinese cities of the arrest or even beating of people who protest too vigorously against their eviction and relocation. In one often-heard twist, holdouts are summoned to the local police station and return home only to find their house already demolished. How did this owner, a woman no less, manage? Millions wondered.

Part of the answer, which on meeting her takes only a moment to discover, is that Wu Ping is anything but an ordinary woman. With her dramatic lock of hair precisely combed and pinned in the back, a form-flattering bright red coat, high cheekbones and wide, excited eyes, the tall, 49-year-old restaurant entrepreneur knows how to attract attention — a potent weapon in China’s new media age, in which people try to use public opinion and appeals to the national image to influence the authorities.

“For over two years they haven’t allowed me access to my property,” said Ms. Wu, her arms flailing as she led a brisk walk through the Yangjiaping neighborhood here. It is an area in the throes of large-scale redevelopment, with broad avenues, big shopping malls and a recently built elevated monorail line, from whose platform nearly everyone stops to gawk at the nail house.

Within moments of her arrival at the locked gate of the excavated construction site, a crowd began to gather. The people, many of them workers with sunken cheeks, dressed in grimy clothes, regarded Ms. Wu with expressions of wonderment. Some of them exchanged stories about how they had been forced to relocate and soothed each other with comments about how it all could not be helped.

From inside the gates a government television crew began filming.

“If it were an ordinary person they would have hired thugs and beat her up,” murmured a woman dressed in a green sweater who was drawn by the throng. “Ordinary people don’t dare fight with the developers. They’re too strong.”

Earlier this month the National People’s Congress passed a historic law guaranteeing private property rights to China’s swelling ranks of urban middle-class homeowners, among others. Some here attributed Ms. Wu’s success to that, as well as her knack for generating publicity.

“In the past they would have just knocked it down,” said an 80-year-old woman who said she used to be a neighbor of Ms. Wu’s. “Now that’s forbidden, because Beijing has put out the word that these things should be done in a reasonable way.”

Between frenzied telephone calls to reporters and city officials, Ms. Wu, who stood at the center of the crowd with her brother, a 6-foot-3 decorative stone dealer who wore his brown hair in jheri curls, stated her case with a slightly different spin.

“I have more faith than others,” she began. “I believe that this is my legal property, and if I cannot protect my own rights, it makes a mockery of the property law just passed. In a democratic and lawful society a person has the legal right to manage one’s own property.”

Click to read more

Posted at 1:57 PM · Comments (0)

My work from Shanghai is featured in the March issue of Photo China magazine, which has published 10 of my images from “Disappearing Shanghai”. Click to read more

A quality printing of the catalog of this show, which made its solo debut in Berlin last October is available for $15, plus handling: Click to see some of the images

and here, in on Italian website that featured my work: Click to read more

To order, contact me at globetrotter@howardwfrench.com.

Posted at 11:44 PM · Comments (1)

March 16, 2007

LONDON - Another Africa film - this time the riveting “Blood Diamond”, last month the superbly acted “Last King of Scotland”, and “Out of Africa” still vibrates in my mind ten years later. But am I alone in being rather cross when my 16 year old daughter asks me yet again, “Is Africa really like that?”

I tell her part of Africa WAS like that. Some of it, a diminishing portion of this vast continent, is still like that. But most of it never was and today it certainly is not.

I have covered war and revolution in Africa. I have seen political opponents hung from the bridges of the main thoroughfare in Conakry. I have been falsely imprisoned in Sierra Leone. I have lived for months the village life in Lesotho and Tanzania. I walk the streets of Nigerian towns at night (parts, but not all, of Lagos excepted). But I have very rarely been afraid - perhaps only when travelling on some dilapidated Nigerian airline like the one that crashed shortly after I disembarked in Port Harcourt last year.

Africans are usually the most courteous, hospitable, forgiving and cheerful of all the peoples I have met on God’s earth. And now I rejoice mightily when I see the old continent, so beset by inhospitable terrain, demanding climate, poor soils, the legacy of the slave trade, self-interested colonialism and imperialism and, in the south, apartheid, really beginning to move forward economically and politically. Indeed, I have to confess that aspects of colonialism and the missionary activity that accompanied it put down some rather good foundations and Africa has only learnt to progress when it stopped fighting the shadows of the white man and started to work with him rather than against him.

It is all going very fast yet most people still seem blissfully unaware of what is apace. But turn to the December issue of “Finance and Development”, the periodical of the International Monetary Fund, and read Michael Klein, chief economist of the International Finance Corporation: “When the history of the 21st century will be written, it may become clear that Africa today is where East Asia was in the late 1950s - just about to surprise the world”.

He argues that economists now believe that the majority of African countries have a good chance of achieving annual growth rates of 10%, like India and China. “Thus it is conceivable that Africa could, on average, reach the income level of recent entrants to the European Union by 2050. Were this to happen, today’s children in Africa would leapfrog all history’s stages of development in a lifetime.”

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, dead in the water for so long, weighed down by the rocks of malign dictatorship and corruption, now hums with economic activity and democratic exuberance. On the other side of the continent Tanzania, for so long a failed Christian socialist experiment - kind but dirt poor was the best way to describe it - has now embraced capitalism, albeit a version with a human face, and is experiencing such rapid growth it has the tax revenue to spend on the things that the socialists only dreamed of - a school and clinic in every village.

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Cocoa and coffee? Yes, it continues. But in recent years the much more profitable cut-flower and fresh fish business in Kenya and Uganda with overnight flights to Europe has blossomed. “Nollywood”, the Nigerian film industry, has overtaken both Hollywood and Bollywood in the number of films produced each year. It provides jobs for a million people.

Productivity, that key to economic progress, is improving fast. According to the IMF, African textile and garment firms are almost as productive as Chinese ones on the factory floor. Economic reform involving privatisation, bank shakeouts, business registration and trade liberalisation is common almost everywhere. Tanzania and Ghana were in the world’s top ten reformers last year. This is why foreign direct investment has increased from $12 billion in 1980 to well over $100 billion today. Investors seem particularly confident in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. In Nigeria, Mittal is resuscitating the old giant Soviet-built steel works. Virgin has essentially taken over the role of the old, moribund Nigerian Airways. Chinese motorbike manufacturers are churning out thousands of machines and still can’t meet demand. Two storey houses now dominate the towns- you have to go out into the remoter villages to find a traditional mud hut.

There is still much to do - why not stop grumbling about Europe and the U.S. blocking the Doha ground and simply reduce trade barriers on a non-discriminatory basis by opening domestic markets to all African trading partners?

This year I am taking my daughter to Africa to see for herself.

Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Power

Posted at 10:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Bookforum

In early April 1968, Ralph Ellison took part in a literary festival hosted by the University of Notre Dame, where he joined the likes of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and William F. Buckley Jr. on the program. When he took the stage on the evening of the sixth to deliver his remarks, the moment could not have been more charged. The nation was in crisis: Two days earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated; across the country, cities had exploded in scenes that seemed uncannily to mirror the apocalyptic final sections of Invisible Man, still one of the handful of truly indispensable American novels. But there would be no resounding statement or mournful eulogy; instead, Ellison talked about the function of the novel in American democracy.

It was a signature Ellisonian gesture, perhaps too modest for the hour, but forceful in its way. Fifteen years before, he had put his invisible man down a hole in an attempt, he said in his 1953 National Book Award speech, “to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction.” Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, as intellectuals and writers clenched their fists and took to the barricades, Ellison appealed hopefully to America’s literary past as a way to transcend the country’s racial fractures and ferocious contests of identity.

His stubborn faith in that tradition was breathtaking. Some were baffled by what they saw as his scholarly aloofness; others were outraged. (During his life, he was accused of all kinds of things: of not writing protest fiction à la Richard Wright, of being too cozy with whites, of spurning the civil rights movement.) But to Ellison, being engaged did not mean marching in the streets. Operating in the higher frequencies of culture, Ellison, in scores of essays and talks, commemorated the synthetic genius of the American vernacular style and the moral vision of a cherished group of writers—Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane—who both nourished his growth as an artist and provided the seeds for democratic renewal. Whatever America’s social and political strain, the work of Ellison’s literary heroes pointed beyond the impasse. “These writers,” he said, “suggested possibilities, courses of action, stances against chaos.”

As essayist, cultural theorist, and novelist, Ellison would return again and again to these concerns. And the trajectory of his life—his Oklahoma boyhood, his passage to the Deep South as a student at the Tuskegee Institute and then northward to Harlem during the ’30s, his toil on his masterpiece, his literary celebrity and legendary failure to complete a second novel—is itself a remarkable, contradictory study in courses of action and possibilities, many realized, others unfulfilled.

Given that Ellison published only one novel in his lifetime, the amount of material confronting his would-be biographer is enormous. One could write a book on just the particulars of the years leading up to Invisible Man, when the young writer was a disciple of Richard Wright and active in Harlem’s communist literary circles, as Lawrence Jackson did in Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (2002), an intellectually rigorous first attempt at an Ellison biography. Still, that approach has a way of letting the triumph of Invisible Man blot out other achievements. Ellison died in 1994, and he published many of his greatest essays in the decades after his literary debut, all the while trying to harness the unruly pages of his second novel. With Arnold Rampersad’s Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Ellison now has a life in full, though perhaps not the one he deserves.

Rampersad, a respected scholar of black literature and the author of a definitive, two-volume biography of Langston Hughes, casts Ellison in a tragic light, as a man, unmoored by personal instability, whose hard-won literary integration came at the expense of his aesthetic vision and whose prickly views on other black political and cultural figures cost him dearly. “That critical instinct,” writes Rampersad of Ellison’s fierce intellectual bravado, “freed him to ascend, without inhibition, the heights of the Euro-American artistic and intellectual tradition (but it may well have been a decisive factor in his eventual decline as an artist, because it took a toll on his imagination and morale.)”

Ralph Waldo Ellison could be downright arrogant, but, as he saw it, his choice of inheritance was never an either/or proposition. Hybridity was his natural inclination, his birthright. Growing up in Oklahoma City, where he was born in 1913, sharply honed his creative outlook. Though his father died when he was three and his mother toiled as a domestic worker, Ellison looked back fondly on his years in Oklahoma—”the Territory,” as he called it, in homage to Twain and to the region’s freewheeling mixture of black, Indian, and white idioms. Segregation was a reality, and Tulsa saw some of this country’s worst antiblack violence, but Jim Crow had not set hard. (For descendants of freed slaves, Oklahoma was a “territory of hope,” Ellison wrote.) A trumpeter in his high school band, Ellison came at writing through music—this would form a central connection in his aesthetic. As a young man, he bopped around Oklahoma City’s thriving blues and jazz scenes and soaked up black church music, tutoring himself in a free-for-all of conflicting styles.

Against Ellison’s almost nostalgic regard for this time, Rampersad stresses his angry vulnerability and poverty, which would prick at him when he attended Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship. Ellison chafed at the school’s provincialism and battled with his teachers, but his transformation from musician to writer had begun. A librarian became a mentor. Steeped in black musical and literary traditions, Ellison pointed out again and again in his writings that Twain, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Malraux, Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot were no less decisive in his formation. Like the narrator of Invisible Man, Ellison was a specialist in perception; he had a gift for seeing around corners. He wanted the hidden connections between styles revealed. For Ellison, there was only a short distance between jazz and “The Waste Land.”

A search for a summer job led the chronically hard-up Ellison to Harlem in 1936—he would not return to Tuskegee—and into the hubbub of big-city life. There, Ellison met Wright (an encounter brokered by Langston Hughes), who would prove a major influence. Wright, who headed up the Daily Worker’s Harlem bureau, encouraged Ellison to review books, steered him to the ferment of left-wing politics and black cultural nationalism, and got him a gig with the New York City Federal Writing Project researching black life. Drawn into the orbit of the Communist Party, Ellison became, at least outwardly, a rather doctrinaire Stalinist and began contributing to the communist weekly the New Masses, where he published some of his first efforts in criticism and social commentary.

Later, Ellison’s feelings toward Wright would be marked by an ambivalent respect, but Wright’s impact on him was profound. In Wright, he found a kinsman. “Hating racism, both men were also haunted by what would soon be called a sense of existential chaos in life,” notes Rampersad. “Both were hungry for fame, in love with art and ideas, and adoring of Western learned culture. Both Wright and Ellison admired and yet had also grown more and more critical of black culture. They had become especially disdainful of its political and religious leaders.”

More than 1940’s Native Son, which Ellison praised, the publication of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in 1941 hit him with the force of dynamite. A documentary hymn to black America, it unleashed a torrent of powerful emotion in Ellison. To Wright in the year of its release, he confessed bitterness and rage in a letter of searing frankness: “I know those emotions … which tear the insides to be free and memories which must be kept underground, caged by rigid discipline lest they destroy, but which yet are precious to me because they are mine and I am proud of that which is myself.”

It’s an extraordinary statement, dipping low, rising into a Whitmanesque crescendo, bursting with many of the themes Ellison would pour into his essays and fiction. (It’s almost a prophecy of Invisible Man.) Discipline was a key concept for Ellison, referring both to the techniques imposed by the artist, who must master and shape his materials, and to the carefully modulated repertoire of attitudes Ellison saw in black life. These different psychological registers—ironic, forbearing, indifferent, mocking, contemptuous—formed a protective bulwark against political and social oppression.

From the mid-’40s onward, charged by Wright’s example, Ellison would spin out considered (if sometimes pedantic) essays on black culture and begin his turn toward Invisible Man. In “Richard Wright’s Blues,” an appraisal of Black Boy, and in other pieces, Ellison elaborated a wide-ranging theory of black life that went beyond racial cheerleading. America’s racial predicament could never be reduced to a simple equation of white oppression = black suffering. For the pragmatic Ellison, it was important to acknowledge the way black people, despite this predicament, had built a fully human culture that most whites either diminished (he jabbed at well-meaning whites who subscribed to the “‘Aren’t-Negroes-Wonderful?’ school of thinking” that reduced blacks to simple, happy primitives) or refused to see at all. “Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs,” he wrote in 1944. “Why cannot Negroes have made a life upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” In a whole range of black cultural expression—jazz, blues, Negro spirituals—Ellison located a certain paradoxical freedom “implicit in the Negro situation.” For both him and Wright, the blues, “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically,” were a way of getting beyond the tempting certainties of communism.

At the same time, he put American culture on the couch. Lamenting the white denial of Negro humanity, Ellison began to develop a powerful countermyth to the narrative of white supremacy. From 1776 to 1876, “there was a conception of democracy current in this country that allowed the writer to identify himself with the Negro,” he wrote, invoking a pantheon of his heroes—Whitman, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau. (For Ellison, Huck’s raft symbolized a lost racial fraternity.) Only after the tawdry betrayal of Reconstruction “was the Negro issue pushed into the underground of the American conscience and ignored.” As a result, America had become a “nation of ethical schizophrenics,” unable to deal with its racial situation, a vital segment of its humanity cut off, anesthetized by a steady drip of “hypnotic ritual and narcotic modes of thinking.” Despite all this, Ellison found—or made up—a homegrown tradition he could identify with. He wanted to find a place in the total American scheme, a project that would become his lifework.

All this feverish speculation spurred Ellison’s growth as a writer of fiction. Indeed, the publication of Invisible Man can be seen as the explosive culmination of a decade’s worth of theorizing and emotional turmoil. Whatever his ideological fervor—his zeal was, in part, a career move—Ellison never fully submitted to the rigid categories of Marxism and black nationalism. Always seeking to make connections between traditions, Ellison imbibed the tricks of modernism. Taken with the aesthetics of surrealism, he made an advance toward fulfilling his vision in “King of the Bingo Game” (1944), probably his best short story. In this harrowing study of bewilderment in the city, a black migrant from the South who chances everything in a bingo parlor sees his luck turn viciously against him. “You’ve written some kind of crazy thing there, man!” Wright told him. Still, for all his admiration of his mentor, Ellison did not want to follow the elder writer’s path in his own attempt at a novel…

See the link below for the entire article.

Posted at 11:20 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
Published: March 23, 2007

SHANGHAI: Terrified by the prospect of a world where one third or more of its people are elderly, Chinese intellectuals have issued the first murmurings of a broad reappraisal of one of the most sweeping government measures of modern times, this country’s “one-child policy.”

Placing such a momentous policy on the agenda has not been easy, and one can readily understand why. Already twice in its brief history in power, the Chinese Communist Party has invested its prestige and authority in truly epochal shifts in population policy, with one move representing nothing less than an abrupt about- face from the other.

A proper dictatorship of the proletariat would like to preserve as much of an air of infallibility as possible, but that has become increasingly difficult with China and population matters.

Obsessed with national strength, Mao Zedong equated population with power, and in the 1950s, in a move heavy with consequences for all of humanity, called for Chinese people to go forth and multiply. “We should break down the superstition that it’s disastrous to have many people or disastrous to have less land,” Mao said, speaking at a conference in Chengdu in 1958.

Moments later, as if for emphasis, he added, “At present, we still lack people.”
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By a good distance, China was already the world’s most populous nation. In the space of a mere two decades, however, the enthusiastic response to the chairman’s call saw the country’s population increase by more than 50 percent, reaching 998 million in 1980. That was the year that the one-child policy took effect.

With pressures on the land, resources and housing spiraling out of control and Mao gone, the government scrambled to put the brakes on, applying a near-blanket birth control policy, the likes of which mankind had never seen.

The one-child policy can be said to have worked, indeed worked very well. Paradoxically, it can also be said to have been something of a failure, perhaps even a monumental failure. This is for having produced unforeseen or at least unavoided side effects that China will struggle with for decades to come and that could conceivably extinguish the economic miracle that we have grown accustomed to witnessing.

In the latest twist, however, there are signs of hope for both China and for the world. In the margins of the recently completed Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or congress, 29 Chinese political advisers spoke out against the one-child policy, calling for it to be abolished because of the looming age trap that it has set for the country.

Whatever the outcome, this represents progress compared with a time when Mao alone was able to launch huge movements at great cost to the Chinese people and to humanity, or even to the about-face of the one-child policy, which was carried out without public debate.

The point is that with matters so consequential, no nation can afford to forgo a real conversation. Governments, of course, are not infallible, and when mistakes are made over population, whether because of ego or ignorance, their effects tend to linger disastrously, spawning conflict, famine and, perhaps worst of all for a world that suddenly seems to have awakened to the issue, environmental devastation.

Indeed, this is China’s lesson to the world at a time when the fuse is fast burning down on a new population bomb arguably even more frightening than the Chinese one of the 1960s.

Consider Africa, for example. With the same alacrity that is driving its own development, China is building huge bridges to Africa, epicenter of the coming explosion.

The Chinese arrive with money to invest and with a gigantic appetite for Africa’s natural resources. What they don’t arrive with much of is advice, or even overt expressions of concern, for the continent’s many problems, with arguably none more pressing than its galloping demographics.

In the name of a policy of “noninterference,” China is locked in a see- no-evil approach to Africa, and this has the makings of a huge loss of opportunity for all concerned.

If demography is destiny, for Africa the numbers tell a haunting story. Between 1960 and 2020, the continent’s population will have increased more than sixfold, roughly matching China’s population today.

It is when one considers individual countries, however, that one’s head begins to spin.

According to United Nations projections, Nigeria, which has not conducted a proper census in more than a generation, will add more than 50 million people between 2005 and 2020. By 2050, Africa’s most populous country, a nation that is half again the size of Texas, will have 288 million people, or about the same number as the United States.

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Posted at 11:26 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

March 21, 2007, at 6:47 PM ET

Illustration by Robert Neubecker. Click image to expand.On Saturday, Taliban guerrillas punished a group of Afghan truck drivers suspected of collaborating with U.S-led troops by chopping off their ears and noses. Can the victims still hear and smell?

Yes, but with more difficulty. The outer part of your ear, known as the pinna, funnels sound into your ear canal, like a megaphone in reverse. If someone cut it off, everything would sound quieter. (A wound that scabbed over would make the sound suppression more severe.) The pinnae also tell you where sounds are coming from: The ridges and grooves shape sound waves differently depending on where the sound originates. As a result, the brain learns to associate certain amplification patterns with certain directions. So, if you lost your ears, you might be able to tell what music you’re hearing, but not where the speakers are.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Posted at 12:29 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Kap, who I got to know a bit in Berlin a couple of years ago,’ these last few weeks. Have been rereading a lot of his stuff, too.
Some of the stuff, reread many years after the initial discovery of this writer, have been a bit of a letdown (cf. The Soccer War). I feel his later works border at times on the atrocious. And I’ve felt deeply ambivalent about the way he has made light of the facts writing about Africa here and there, and nowhere more so than in this book. One couldn’t get away with that writing about, say, Eastern Europe, and keep one’s reputation intact. Africa, though, has always been a special case.

Having said that, even it is not, strictly speaking, journalism, or history, or whatever, The Emperor is great in long, sustained bites. Take this, and then buy it and read it for yourself:

An empty envelope! Mr. Kapuchitsky, do you know what money means in a poor country? Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things. In a rich country, money is a piece of paper with which you buy goods on the market. You are only a customer. Even a millionaire is only a customer. He may purchase more, but he remains a customer, nothing more. And in a poor country? In a poor country money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud because of your hedge. You have money; that means you have wings. You are the bird of paradise that everyone admires.

Can you imagine, for instance, a crowd gathering in Holland to look at a rich Dutchman? Or in Sweden, or in Australia? But in our land — yes in our land, if a prince or a count appears, the people run to see him. They will run to see a millionaire, and afterward they will go around and say ‘I saw a millionaire.’ Money transforms your own country into an exotic land. Everything will start to astonish you — the way people live, the things they worry about, and you will say, “No, that’s impossible.” Because you will already belong to a different civilization. And you must know this law of culture: that two civilizations cannot really know and understand one another well. You will start going deaf and blind. You will be content in your civilization surrounded by the hedge, but signals from the other civilization will be as incomprehensible to you as if they had been sent by the inhabitants of Venus. If you feel like it, you can become an explorer in your own country. You can become Columbus, Magellan, Livingstone. But I doubt that you will have such a desire. Such expeditions are very dangerous, and you are no madman, are you? You are already a man of your own civilization, and you will defend it and fight for it. You will water your own hedge. You are exactly the kind of gardener that the Emperor needs.

Posted at 11:34 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Economist

AT SOME point in his career—neither date nor time being important—Jean Baudrillard took a large red cloth, draped it over a chair in his apartment, and sat on it. He may have smoked or thought for a while, or scratched his nose; a large, doughlike nose, supporting glasses. He then got up, leaving an impression of his body behind. The image pleased him: so much so, that he took a photograph.

Since he made no comment on the event (beyond the fact that the chair was later broken), the exact details are conjectural. But by putting the cloth on the chair, and sitting on it, Mr Baudrillard added to the plethora of signs, objects and symbolic acts that made up, in his philosophical system, the whole woof and warp of the 20th century. By getting up, he left behind a “simulacrum” of himself: the truth, as he teasingly put it, that hid the fact that there was no truth there. And by photographing the chair he made it “hyperreal”: an image, which could be reproduced unendingly, of an object that claimed to have meaning and, in fact, had none.

Then he went to lunch.
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Pourquoi pas? When a simulacrum is also a French philosophe, perhaps the most popular of recent decades, he needs a bottle of Merlot from time to time. And since he spent his days considering the seductive power of images and objects, it was fun to observe that he himself had such a power over the woman in the butcher’s who wrapped up his foie de veau, just because she had seen him on television.

Whether Mr Baudrillard’s world was utter nonsense, or whether it was a profound critique of a consumerist civilisation drowning in its own meaninglessness, was a matter for lively debate. Many of his French colleagues found him too much: noisy, mischievous, attached to no school (though he had sat at the feet of both Henri Lefebvre and Roland Barthes in his feverish years at Nanterre, when teaching had been interrupted by clouds of tear-gas and cobblestone-throwing). He said things that got him into trouble. His enthusiasm for the événements of 1968 painted him as a man of the Left, where philosophes belonged as naturally as fish in water; but Mr Baudrillard later broke with Marx, and called him a conservative. What he meant was that both communism and capitalism made human existence a matter of production and exchange, while he preferred to stress its symbolic side.

In any case, in his world, both the liberal and the communist narratives of history had collapsed. “The end of history” was no longer universal capitalism and democracy or the victory of the proletariat. It was summed up for Mr Baudrillard by a lone man jogging, oblivious to his surroundings, hearing only the music of his own sound-system and aware only of the statements he himself was making: health, fashion, endurance. He was running straight ahead, but with no end in view.

Posted at 7:52 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By Howard W. French
March 20, 2007

SHANGHAI: When Chen Rui reached 50, the retirement age for women here, she immediately did what millions of people of her generation have begun doing: She scrambled to find a new job.

While second careers are common in the West and are often embraced as a chance to satisfy long-held ambitions, for huge numbers of Chinese city dwellers like Chen, a widow and career accountant, eking out another decade or two of paid work is more a matter of survival.

In this sense, Chen is anything but alone.

The proportion of elderly people is growing faster in China than in any major country, with the number of retirees set to double between 2005 and 2015, when it will reach 200 million. By midcentury, 430 million people — about a third of the population — will be retirees. That increase will place enormous demands on the country’s finances and could threaten the underpinnings of the Chinese economy, which has thrived for decades on the cheap labor of hundreds of millions of young, uneducated workers from the countryside.

Changes in China’s population structure are taking place hand in hand with changes in the structure of the family. The country’s so-called one-child policy, which began in 1980, means that, beginning with the current generation of young adults, couples will face the stark task of caring for four parents through old age. By the same token, the ratio of workers to retired people will decline from about six to one now to about two to one by 2040.
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Of course, raising the retirement age from the current 50 to 55 for women and 55 to 60 for men to bring them more in line with international norms would ease a substantial amount of pressure on the pension system. But raising the retirement ages presents another set of problems for the government, social security experts here say.

Last year, for example, 4.13 million young Chinese graduated from universities, and fully 30 percent of them are still unemployed.

Unemployment is high among non- university graduates, as well. Prolonging employment for older workers would make this predicament worse, possibly with volatile consequences.

Meanwhile, breaking a lifelong promise and abruptly extending the retirement age would create another large class of malcontents. As a result, the government has been unable to reach a consensus on how to handle the problem, which is leaving people like Chen in an increasingly difficult position.

Like most women her age, Chen is the mother of a single child, a legacy of stark population control policies introduced in 1980, which means that with only a skimpy state pension and one child to help her out she must fend for herself in her old age.

“I’m saving money for my daughter’s dowry and for myself when I get old,” said Chen, who now works in a small trading firm along with several men. “My daughter promised to take care of me after she gets married, but I don’t want to burden a young couple. Anyway, it’s not easy for two young people to take care of four old parents.”

The bind that China finds itself in takes form in an often-posed question: Can the country grow rich before it grows old? Increasingly, experts here say the answer, which also has huge implications for the global economy, appears doubtful.

In its rush to modernize, China has rebuilt its economy, opening up to foreign investment, privatizing state- owned industries and greatly expanding higher education — 70,000 engineers earn graduate degrees each year, for example.

Under China’s sweeping pro-market reforms, since the 1990s millions of workers have been laid off from money- losing state enterprises. The state’s obligations to these workers for their so- called “legacy pensions,” together with more recent obligations under the newer, market-oriented retirement system, amount to over $1.5 trillion, according to the World Bank.

“I think that most people have not realized how tough the situation will become,” said Li Shaoguang, director of the Institute of Social Security at the School of Public Administration at Renmin University of China, in Beijing. “We’re already aware that the percentage of old people in our population is large and is growing fast, so in order to pool more people in the system to pay for current retirees, the government is trying to include more migrant workers in the system. This could alleviate pressures now, but it also means that you will have larger pressures to face when the migrant workers grow old.”

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Posted at 9:10 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Wilson Quarterly

By Christopher Ross. Da Capo. 262 pp. $­26

The declaration last year by Japan’s new prime minister that he intends to rewrite his country’s constitution, which renounces war, came too late for Yukio Mishima. The ­world-­famous writer resented the pacifism imposed on his country after World War II and wanted Japan to turn aside from what he saw as its drift into Western decadence. In the end, he sacrificed his life for the cause. On November 25, 1970, after a botched attack on a Japanese defense base, he committed ­seppuku—­ritual suicide with a ­sword.

In the eyes of many, Yukio Mishima (the pseudonym adopted by Kimitake Hiraoka, b. 1925) was a ­right-­wing fanatic and a national embarrassment. But he was also a phenomenally talented and prolific writer, three times nomin­ated for the Nobel Prize, whose novels and plays still fascinate Western audiences. The very day he committed suicide, Mishima mailed his publisher the final pages of the fourth book in his epic tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, a work of historical fiction that blends the brutal drive for ­self-­destruction with the beauty of ­reincarnation.

The history that has intervened since Mishima’s death makes him ripe for a re-evaluation, but such is not the project of Christopher Ross, an adventurer whose previous book narrated his experience working as a London tube station assistant. Instead, he has written an entertaining ­mash-­up of a biography that blends elements of travelogue, memoir, and martial arts manual, illuminating some of the mysteries of Yukio Mishima, Japan, and, of course, Christopher ­Ross.

Mishima admired the traditional values he saw embodied in the samurai, who disap­peared along with Japan’s feudal system, and he strove to imitate these warriors. But if Mishima styled himself a samurai, he was a strange one: a sickly and effete child who eventually developed a ­well-­muscled physique, a preening celebrity who courted the spotlight, a homosexual who lived with a wife and children. Above all, he desired to become famous and to die ­heroically.

His ­death—­whether heroic or ­not—­is what inspired Ross’s search for Mishima’s legacy. But though Ross comes across as clever and worldly, he lacks the requisite nihilism. And he can’t keep from inserting himself into Mishima’s story, as when he disrobes and descends into a torture chamber to meet someone whom he believes to have been one of Mishima’s lovers. (He discovers that the man had instead been conscripted to witness Mishima pretend to commit ritual suicide, a variety of ­role-­playing Mishima found immensely arousing.)

Because Ross is such a charming rogue, we don’t mind that he never decides if the book is about Mishima or himself. Or that he can’t refrain from digressions into the comically ­obscure—­metallurgical arcana, say, or the ways a human body can be dismembered. The book gains traction when Ross focuses on his search for the antique sword that Mishima used to kill ­himself.

At last, a mysterious phone call reveals its whereabouts. But succeeding in his quest leaves Ross cold. When he sees the sword, he writes, “I am no longer thinking of death.” And this is where he and Mishima part ways. For a short time, however, Ross grew very close to his protagonist. We know because he tells us that while he was writing this book, he was stricken with severe pains in his abdo­men, pains he eventually realized were the pangs of a phantom ­seppuku.

Posted at 2:53 PM · Comments (0)