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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

My photography of Shanghai is included, along with an essay, in a forthcoming book of essays bearing this title.

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Copyright The Guardian

In 1998, I met an ex-professional boxer and martial-arts expert in Japan, and we became friendly. He introduced me to these two yakuza, and we went for dinner in a small tempura place in the Ginza district of Tokyo.

My father was a racketeer type, so they got along with me and I got along with them.

I know their background of respect, and generally they’re polite. Some of the low-level yakuza that I’ve seen in an area of Tokyo called San’ya are really nasty and vicious, though - not nice people, and quite dangerous.

The guy who is having his cigarette lit is about 5ft 6in tall, and just as wide. When I first saw him, he was wearing a bright yellow suit. The other guy invited me to his house and told me all about his wife, who was a model and had just come back from Paris. He also told me that he can never get into the US because he’s got tattoos all over, and they don’t want yakuza in the country.

I don’t know exactly what these two guys do. I think they must keep order in the area. They work for some upper-echelon boss, and I’m sure they make good money. They have to cut their own finger joints off if they do something wrong, and my boxer friend was missing a piece of his finger. I didn’t look to see if these guys were, and you can’t quite tell in the picture.

After dinner, we went to a coffee shop, and I saw them lighting cigarettes. I took a picture with a Leica M6 and a hand-held flash while they were doing it, and then I asked them if they could repeat the gesture and I took three or four more. The big guy having his cigarette lit has the most fantastic expression. That’s what I love about it. The way he’s looking at us, like he’s looking right through us. You just know that these are tough guys.

Click to see the Gilden image

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Copyright The New York Times

Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.

It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.

That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.

Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.

Naturally we see the work more clearly now. We know that it was not cheap. The dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used, adapted from advertising, was the most expensive color process then available. It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.

And compositions that at first seemed bland and random proved not to be on a 2nd, 3rd and 20th look. The tricycle was shot from a supine position so as to appear colossal. The woman on the curb sits next to a knot of heavy chains that echoes her steel-mesh bouffant. The affable guy on the bed holds a revolver, its barrel resting on his vintage country quilt.

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Copyright Vanity Fair

In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson’s legend has grown—the tragically short life, the “crossroads” tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats—but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he’d found a third. Schein’s quest to authenticate the picture only led to more questions, both about Johnson himself and about who controls his valuable legacy.
by Frank DiGiacomo November 2008

In June 2005, Steven “Zeke” Schein was killing time on his home computer when he logged on to eBay and typed “old guitar” into the auction site’s search engine. Classically trained as a guitarist, Schein had turned his longtime passion for the instrument into a profession when, in 1989, he had joined the sales force at Matt Umanov Guitars, in Manhattan’s West Village. In the more than 15 years that Schein had worked there, he had cultivated a regular clientele that included Patti Smith, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and record producers Daniel Lanois and John Leventhal; he had also sold guitars to Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp, among other celebrities. His job had also exposed him to the painstaking, detail-oriented detective work that often goes into identifying and authenticating vintage guitars. Even when the make, model, and serial number of an instrument are apparent, pinpointing its age and value sometimes requires scrutinizing the idiosyncrasies of its construction. The design of the instrument’s tailpiece, its headstock, the number of frets embedded in its neck, its paint job or finish—all could be identifying factors.
Possibly a photo of Robert Johnson, left, and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines

The photograph bought on eBay by Zeke Schein, who believes it depicts Robert Johnson, left, and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines. © 2007 Claud Johnson.

Schein enjoyed this aspect of the business, and when he had nothing better to do, he would sometimes log on to eBay to test his knowledge against the sellers who were advertising vintage guitars on the Web site. At the very least, he found it amusing that some people had no idea what they were selling.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-claxton13-2008oct13,0,4633702.story

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2008/10/william-claxton.html

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4936102.ece

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Copyright The New York Times

Published: November 6, 2006

During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America�s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.

But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives, where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.

Adams portrayed the internees in the now-infamous camp at Manzanar, Calif., in heroic poses, lighted against the backdrop of the majestic Sierras mountains. Lange�s images � nearly a hundred of which are being published for the first time � tell a starkly different story.

The pictures in �Impounded� (W. W. Norton) bear the hallmarks of Lange�s distinctive documentary style. (She is best known from her photographs of migrant farmers in the Depression for the Farm Security Administration.) Seemingly unstaged and unlighted, the pictures of the internees compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

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Copyright - The Boston Review

8 In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called �What is the Good of Criticism?� This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn�t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn�t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, �passion … raises reason to new heights.� A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought �to transform my pleasure into knowledge��a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire�s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us �to love wisely what we before loved well.�

By �pleasure� and �love� Baudelaire and Fuller didn�t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic�s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic�s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature�and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most meaningful�hell, most alive�when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? For these critics and others�those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition�cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Randall Jarrell, certainly no anti-intellectual, wrote that �criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness … All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.� Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic�s skill, he argued, �begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.�

The great exception to all this is photography criticism. There, you will hear precious little talk of love or passion or terrible nakedness. There, critics view emotional responses�if they, or their readers, have any�not as something to be experienced and understood but, rather, to be vigilantly guarded against: to these writers, criticism is a prophylactic against the virus of sentiment. When we enter the world of photography criticism we travel far from Baudelaire�s exploration of his pleasure; for there is little pleasure to be had, and even that is condemned as voyeuristic, pornographic, or exploitative. Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven�t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography�not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself�with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a �community of interest� with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.

* * *

Susan Sontag�s On Photography was published in 1977, and it remains astonishingly incisive. It has been, rightly, immensely influential on other photography critics. And immensely influential, too, in setting the particularly reproachful tone of photography criticism. Look, for instance, at Sontag�s description of photography in the first chapter of the book, which establishes a voice, an attitude, an approach that is maintained throughout. Sontag describes photography as, among other things, �grandiose,� �treacherous,� �imperial,� �voyeuristic,� �predatory,� �addictive,� �reductive,� and �the most irresistible form of mental pollution.� A typical sentence reads, �The camera doesn�t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate�all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.� Metaphor indeed! On Photography was written by a brilliant skeptic.

So, too, was Roland Barthes�s Camera Lucida, first published in France in 1980. Delicate and playful, this book is a love letter to the photograph. Barthes celebrates the quirky, spontaneous reactions that photographs can inspire�or at least the quirky, spontaneous reactions they inspire in him: � A photograph�s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).� Still, Camera Lucida is a very odd valentine, for Barthes describes photographers as �agents of Death� and the photograph as a �catastrophe�; also as �flat,� �platitudinous,� �stupid,� �without culture,� and�most unkind�� �undialectical.� The photograph �teaches me nothing,� Barthes insists: it �completely de-realizes the world of human conflicts and desires.�

Continuing this classic-modern tradition of photography criticism is John Berger, the most urgent, morally cogent critic that photography has produced. �My first interest in photography was passionate,� Berger has written (as a young man, he wanted to compose a book of love poems illustrated with photos), and when you read him, you believe him. Berger has frequently worked with photographs, producing, among other works, four books with the Swiss documentarian Jean Mohr. More important, he has argued that photographs represent an �opposition to history� by affirming the subjective experiences of ordinary people that modernity, science, and industrial capitalism have done so much to crush: �And so, hundreds of millions of photographs, fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.�

And yet in Berger�s canonical photography essays he took a decidedly dark view of the practice. Photographs of political violence, he insisted, were at best useless and at worst narcissistic, leading the viewer not to enlightenment, outrage, or revolution but instead to a sense of �his own personal moral inadequacy.� (In Sontag�s last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, she softened her stance toward photography, but she too concluded that photographs of war do nothing to bridge the chasm between victims and voyeurs: �We don�t get it… . Can�t understand, can�t imagine.�) More generally, Berger described the photograph�all photographs�as a form of �violence� and, drawing on a metaphor clearly derived from the atom bomb, as a �fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.� Berger allowed that photography is a �god,� but he called it the most �cynical� one�and one that, he believed, made amnesiacs rather than critical thinkers of us all.

In the 1980s, the postmodern children of Sontag, Berger, and company transformed this skepticism into outright antipathy. Indeed, for the postmoderns, suspicion of the photograph was an ethical stance, though I see it as closer to a pathological one. For these critics, the photograph was simply a tool of late capitalism, exploiting its subject and duping its viewer. Thus, Abigail Solomon-Godeau charged, the documentary photo�or what she grandly called �the regime of the image�� commits a �double act of subjugation� in which the hapless subject is victimized first by social forces, then by the photographer and viewer. John Tagg went further: photography, he wrote, is �ultimately a function of the state,� deeply implicated in the ruling class�s �apparatus of ideological control� and its �reproduction of … submissive labour power.� (In an interview, Tagg explained that he drew on the work of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault to formulate his ideas, though it is not clear why these two theorists were the best guides to understanding a photograph.) And it was not fashion or art photographers who incited the wrath of these critics but, rather, socially conscious photojournalists, with their foolish belief in such old-fashioned fictions as progress, truth, and justice. �The liberal documentary assuages any stirrings of conscience in its viewers the way scratching relieves an itch,� Martha Rosler scoffed in a seminal, oft-quoted piece. �Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy.�

Most important, these critics denied that a scintilla of autonomy�for either photographer or viewer�was possible; denied, that is, that the photographer could ever offer, or the viewer could ever find, even a moment of surprise, originality, or insight through looking at a photograph. To think otherwise was to partake in a sham: �The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude,� Victor Burgin wrote. In the view of these critics, it was impossible to ever see the world anew, for the gaze of both the photographer and his audience was predetermined, and irreparably infected, by reactionary ideological forces beyond our control; in their scheme, we are all simply helpless spiders caught in capitalism�s web, which is spun, apparently, not of silk but of iron. (As Berger would tartly note, �Unlike their late master, some of Barthes� structuralist followers love closed systems.�) Indeed, Burgin condemned the actual activity of looking�an odd stance, one would think, for a photography critic: �Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking,� he insisted. In short, these critics regarded the photograph as a prison and the gift of vision as a crime. �Abandon hope, all ye who enter here� might well have been the epigraph to their books, which are no fun at all to read.

Compare all this�this obsession with victimization and predetermination, this utter refusal of freedom, this insistent moroseness�to the opening pages of Pauline Kael�s essay �Trash, Art, and the Movies,� written in 1969. Kael, too, set a certain tone, both for her readers and for numerous other critics. Here it is:

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can … make you care, make you believe in possibilities again… . The movie doesn�t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy of just a good line. An actor�s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

Kael continued, �Because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions�� that is, the reactions of the moviegoer sitting in front of the screen�� can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.� � Trash, Art, and the Movies� was written by a brilliant lover.

Kael had two great insights in this piece. One is that trash, far from blinding viewers to art, actually prepared them for it; or, rather, that through understanding one�s visceral enjoyment of trash, a viewer could begin to formulate her own, independent aesthetic that could lead to an equally visceral enjoyment of art. Kael�s second truth was that the only capacious and intelligent way to experience movies was to combine one�s deepest emotional reactions�which should never be disowned�with a probing analysis of them. She did not, as some have mistakenly thought, champion unadulterated emotion or unexamined fandom; on the contrary, she insisted that the viewer who approaches movies in such unthinking ways �does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities.� But this, after all, is the same insight that Baudelaire had come to when he wrote of seeking �the why of his pleasure�; it was the view of Randall Jarrell when he wrote that the good critic combines the �sense of fact� with the �personal truth�; it was what Alfred Kazin meant when he wrote that �the unity of thinking and feeling actually exists in the passionate operation of the critic�s intelligence.� It is this quest for the synthesis of thought and feeling�and the essentially comradely, or at least open, approach to art that it implies�that photography critics reject. The question is: why?

* * *

Photography is a modern invention�one that, from its inception, inspired a host of conflicts and anxieties. Indeed, when we talk about photography we are talking about modernity; the doubts that photography inspires are the doubts that modernity inspires. Photography is a proxy for modern life and its discontents.

What are some of these troubles? From the first, the essential nature of photography was puzzling. It tended to blur categories�which can be both exciting and unsettling. Was photography a kind of art? of commerce? of journalism? of science? of surveillance? Was it a form of creativity, a way of bringing newness into the world, or was its relation to reality essentially mimetic or, even, that of a parasite?

One thing was clear, early on: photography was, and perhaps still is, the great democratic medium. Baudelaire, who launched his famous diatribe against photography in 1859, hated the new form for many things, one of which was certainly its populist character. �In these deplorable times,� Baudelaire warned, �a new industry has developed,� one supported by what he called the �stupidity of the masses.� Like an Old Testament prophet, he railed,

An avenging God has heard the prayer of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah… . Our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on the metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism, took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that every butcher, baker, and candlestick maker�at least in developed countries such as England, Germany, France and the United States�would be able to purchase photographic reproductions. But with the introduction of lighter, cheaper cameras, which began in the late 19th century and continued throughout the 20th, it became clear that the butcher and baker could not only purchase photos but could make them, too. Even more startling: they could make good photos. This is one of several things that sets photography apart from the other arts. Most people, after all, can�t paint a wonderful painting or compose a wonderful poem or write a wonderful play. But lots of ordinary people�with no training, no experience, no education, no knowledge�have taken wonderful photos: better, sometimes, than those of the great artists. Yet this, too�and the leveling tendencies it implies�is troubling. (This is what Sontag meant, I think, when she wrote of the �disconcerting ease with which photographs can be taken.�) For where such egalitarianism dwells, can the razing of all distinctions be far behind? Who can admire an activity�much less an art�that so many people can do so damn well? Photography�s democratic promise has always been photography�s populist threat.

Then, too, photography stirs up our anxieties about, our love�hate relationship to, technology. Unlike painting, writing, dancing, music making, and storytelling, photography began not thousands of years ago with innocent, primitive man but less than 200 years ago with compromised, modern man; and unlike those other arts, it is dependent on a machine. It is, therefore, an impure and highly contingent art, and we have approached it with that trepidatious mixture of expectation and distrust, of glorious hope and tremendous gloom, with which we approach the machine age itself.

Yet beyond all this, there is something else at the heart of photography criticism�s peculiarities. Most photography critics�Sontag, Berger, Barthes, and certainly the postmoderns�were heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School critics: especially Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and, through him, Bertolt Brecht, who was Benjamin�s friend and comrade. In fact, none of these men wrote mainly about photography, but what they did write has been treated with biblical respect�and undergone hermeneutical scrutiny�by late-20th-century critics.

It would be false to say that Benjamin and Kraucauer hated photographs. On the contrary: as great dialecticians, they (and especially Benjamin) believed the photograph held out liberating, indeed revolutionary, possibilities. In his now enormously influential essay �Little History of Photography,� originally published in 1931, Benjamin argued that photography had created a �new way of seeing� and would enable people �to achieve control over works of art.� Several years later he wrote of the ways that film and photography contributed to the smashing of tradition: �Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual… . Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice�politics.�

Equally important, Benjamin understood the subjective power of the photograph, its spooky ability to make us want to enter into the world and even, sometimes, change it. For Benjamin, the photo wasn�t a dead thing; on the contrary, it could embrace not just the past but the future. Looking at one photograph�a 19th-century portrait of a man and his fianc�e (she would later commit suicide)�he mused.

Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realize to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us… . The beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.

At the same time, these critics were highly suspicious of photography and the passive, aestheticized society they feared it would help create. Benjamin wrote that mass events�including �monster [political] rallies, … sports events, and … war�� were all �intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography.� He believed that photography was a form of mystification, for it �can endow any soup can�� did he foresee the age of Warhol?�� with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.� And he charged�somewhat bizarrely�that with the rise of photography �a new reality unfolds, in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions.� (Instead, �One appeals to the lens.�) Both he and Kracauer regarded the photograph as a kind of diminution: �The photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her,� Kracauer wrote. �The photograph annihilates the person.� And while many artists and journalists working in Weimar Berlin�s cacophonous, newly uncensored press�notable for its plethora of heavily illustrated publications�viewed the photograph as a harbinger of modernity, Kracauer was decidedly unimpressed. �The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,� he charged. �Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding… . The �image-idea� drives away the idea.�

Most of all, though, I believe it is Brecht whose shadow hangs over photography criticism. Brecht, it�s fair to say, really did dislike photographs, or at best deeply distrust them; in 1931 he described them as �a terrible weapon against the truth.� In �Little History,� Benjamin quotes Brecht: �Less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG� the massive German armaments and electric companies, respectively� tells us next to nothing about these institutions.�

These two sentences have been quoted ad infinitum and launched a million Ph.D. theses. And on one level, there is no doubt that Brecht was right. Photographs don�t explain the way the world works; they don�t offer reasons or causes; they don�t tell us stories with a coherent, or even discernible, beginning, middle, and end. Photographs live on the surface: they can�t burrow within to reveal the inner dynamics of historic events. And though it�s true that photographs document the specific, they tend, also, to blur�dangerously blur�political and historic distinctions: a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Berlin, circa 1945, looks much like a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Hanoi, circa 1969, which looks awfully similar to a photograph of a bombed-out apartment building in Baghdad from last week. Yet only a vulgar reductionist�or a complete pacifist�would say that these three cities, which is to say these three wars, are fundamentally the same cities or the same wars. Still, the photos look the same: there�s a very real sense in which if you�ve seen one bombed-out building you have indeed seen them all. (�War is a horrible repetition,� Martha Gellhorn wrote, and this is even truer of photographs than of words.) It is this anti-explanatory, anti-analytic quality of the photograph�what Barthes called its stupidity�that critics have seized on with a vengeance and that they cannot, apparently, forgive.

But the problem with photographs is not only that they fail to explain the world. A greater problem, for Brecht and his followers, is what photographs succeed in doing, which is to offer an immediate, emotional connection to the world. People don�t look at photographs to understand the inner contradictions of monopoly capitalism or the reasons for the genocide in Rwanda. They�we�turn to photographs for other things: for a glimpse of what cruelty, or strangeness, or beauty, or suffering, or love, or disease, or natural wonder, or artistic creation, or depraved violence, looks like. And we turn to photographs, also, to find out what our intuitive reactions to such otherness might be. (This curiosity is not, as the postmoderns have charged, an expression of �imperialism,� racism,� or �orientalism�: the peasant in Kenya and the worker in Cairo are as fascinated�if not more so�by a picture of New Yorkers as we are by an image of them.) None of us is a creature solely of feeling, and yet there is no doubt that we approach photographs, first and foremost, on an emotional level.

For Brecht, of course, this was the worst possible approach to anything. Brecht�s entire oeuvre is an assault not just on sentimentality but on sentiment itself; indeed, for Brecht, the two were synonymous. Brecht regarded all feeling�any feeling�as dishonest and dangerous; he associated emotion with the chaos and irrationality of capitalism. As George Grosz once remarked, Brecht �clearly would have wanted a sensitive electric computer instead of a heart.� And George Grosz was a friend.

There is much that is bracing, and revelatory, and so wonderfully challenging about Brecht�s emotional astringency. Who can not admire a man who, in one of his very first poems, announces to the women in his life, �Here you have someone on whom you can�t rely.� What is often forgotten, however, is that Brecht�like Moses�was a particular man who lived in a particular time and place and who observed particular things. Brecht�s time and place was Weimar Germany, and he saw�correctly�that his compatriots were drowning in a toxic bath of unexamined emotion: of rage over their defeat in World War I, of ressentiment against Jews and intellectuals and others, of self-pity, of bathos, of fear. Brecht saw�correctly�that this poisonous mix of increasingly hysterical feeling, and the voodoo conspiracy theories to which it lent itself, was the perfect incubator for fascism.

Like Brecht, we live in dark times, which is to say times of confusion, violence, and injustice. And yet there are real differences between our darkness and Brecht�s. We do not�unlike Brecht�live in a society that is the precursor, much less the architect, of Treblinka and Sobibor. Brecht�s relentless war on emotion was ethically, politically, and artistically necessary for him, but it has been taken up in an all too uncritical way by Anglo-American photography critics working in very different times and places and facing a very different set of challenges.

For the entire article, please see the link below.

Susie Linfield is the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at New York University.

Posted at 12:49 PM · Comments (0)

Please have a look at this link. This festival is an incredible opportunity for photographers and for the people of Cambodia:
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Posted at 9:16 AM · Comments (0)

This is my latest toy. I’m still learning how to use it, perhaps 25 rolls into the purchase (in April). I’m always surprised by how differently different camera-lens combinations handle light and shadow and color. This box, with the M-Hexanon 50mm f/2 lens that came with it is totally different from my medium formats in that regard. I’m learning to love it, though. The camera is quick and quiet and small and feels great in my hands, and the lens is capable of great things, once you know its strengths. The bokeh is pure butter.
Try to find the hidden person here, on my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aglimpseoftheworld/157308586/

This review of the camera appeared on the Luminous Landscape’s Sunday Morning column, written by Mike Johnson: The Konica Hexar RF. I was a great aficionado and staunch admirer of the original Hexar (I bought several of them), and the Hexar RF is a much better camera than the Hexar was. All discussion of the Hexar RF is tainted by the inevitable comparisons to the camera whose form it mimics, the L-word. But forget that if you can. Pretend for a moment you came upon the Hexar RF afresh. If you love classic 35mm photography, street and reportage photography, personal snapshot photography, or art photography, you just can’t help but be charmed by this beautiful designed and beautifully made box. It’s heavy and solid as a rock, with a lovely, wide, clear viewfinder that’s a joy. It’s quiet, fast, and easy to use, with nary an extraneous control anywhere and a built-in motor (although after years of using Leicas, I confess my thumb kept feeling for the wind lever! Does the name “Pavlov” ring a bell?). The Konica lenses are absolutely top-class, the equal of the Zeiss lenses for the Contax G cameras and the M lenses for the Leicas. Too bad almost all discussion of this camera is caught up in the political and status-oriented battle of Leica vs everything else; taken on its own terms, the Hexar RF is lovely.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/sm-03-01-26.shtml

Posted at 11:46 PM · Comments (0)

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20060511/2.html

Posted at 11:02 AM · Comments (0)

http://www.democraticbooks.org/HTML/books.htm

The link above is to a small, downloadable version of a forthcoming book about Kyoto by Stuart Isett.
I know this work for having pored over it, in rapture, and for having traveled a fair amount with Stuart on assignment.
This is sublime photography and black and white at its best.

Posted at 2:04 AM · Comments (0)

A must see. Slate has done a great service running Magnum stuff on all sorts of topics daily. :

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20060207/10.html

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2006 Copyright The New York Times

PARIS Henri Cartier-Bresson wasn’t always more famous than those he photographed, but by midcareer he was certainly as renowned as many of the literary, artistic, fashion and movie figures before him. How did this affect the power relationship between recorder and recorded in what Cartier-Bresson liked to call a “duel without rules?”

A new show of his portraits, running through April 9 - his first solo exhibition at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation here since his death at 95 in August 2004 - touches on this question in its very subtitle, “The Inner Silence of a Consenting Victim,” borrowed from one of the photographer’s phrases.

Of inner silence, there is plenty. Even when posed, people seem caught in moments of reflection. But there is also external silence: chatty though he could be in private, it is hard to imagine Cartier-Bresson engaging in light banter before getting down to business. Of the 85 portraits in the show, only a couple of anonymous women offer faint smiles.

In that sense, perhaps the duel is over who sets the rules: the photographer decides when to press the shutter, but the subject can decide how much he or she reveals.

Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, accompanied her husband to just one - probably atypical - portrait session, that of the poet Ezra Pound in Venice in 1971, a year before his death at 87.

“There was a tremendous, heavy silence,” recalled Franck, herself a photographer. “Pound didn’t say a word. He just seemed to condemn the world with his eyes. We were there for about 20 minutes. I stayed to one side. I huddled in a corner. Henri took seven pictures.”

What Pound felt is impossible to know. Years earlier, he had been interned for mental illness, and in 1960, he lapsed into long periods of depressive silence and stopped writing. And yet, in the image selected by Cartier-Bresson, Pound’s wild hair, burning eyes and tense hands seem to speak volumes about an old man raging against the dying of the light.

In most cases, consent was implicit in a person’s agreement to sit for a portrait. Here, contact sheets would presumably offer some evidence of how these sessions progressed. Nonetheless, the pictures in this show illustrate how Cartier-Bresson often staged his portraits, either through stylized composition or by using props.

Thus, a large cross appears above the head of the painter Georges Rouault. With Andr� Breton, photographed behind a desk covered with “primitive” art, an obsidian Maya face mirrors Breton’s profile. Alberto Giacometti lies in bed beneath a painting of the Virgin and Child. The composer Igor Markevitch’s folded hands repeat those in a painting behind him.

With some subjects, Cartier-Bresson said he tried to go unnoticed while they worked. “When I went to see Matisse, I’d sit in a corner without moving,” he recounted. “No one spoke. It was as if I didn’t exist.”

Cartier-Bresson was only 35 when he photographed Matisse. That same year, 1943, he visited another painter, Pierre Bonnard.

“Bonnard’s nephew told him that two dealers wanted to photograph him,” Franck said, “and Bonnard said, no, because ‘little’ Cartier-Bresson was coming and he needed to earn his living. Henri had just escaped from a German labor camp.”

The picture of Bonnard in this show suggests that he had little interest in being photographed. In contrast, in other portraits, the calm, even passive expression of the sitters suggests they felt totally at ease in the photographer’s presence.

But Cartier-Bresson, who coined the phrase “the decisive moment,” also caught people off guard. Of an appointment he had with the French physicists Ir�ne and Fr�d�ric Joliot-Curie in 1944, Cartier-Bresson recalled: “I rang the bell, the door opened, I shot, I then said good morning. It wasn’t very polite.”

How natural can a portrait ever be? The image of the philosopher Roland Barthes in this exhibition shows him almost consuming the lens. “Very often (too often in my view) I was aware of being photographed,” Barthes observed. “So from the moment I feel I am in the camera’s eye, everything changes: I begin to pose, I immediately create a different body, I change even before the image.”

In the late 1960s, Cartier-Bresson abandoned the photojournalism that had taken him around the world and devoted himself to his first love, drawing. But he continued to do portraits. And by then, his “victims” - the actress Isabelle Huppert; Franck; his daughter, M�lanie; several friends - were definitely consenting.

By then too, of course, the “duel” was over: the importance of the portrait was now its photographer, not his subject.

Posted at 10:48 AM · Comments (0)

Published: January 22, 2006 Copyright The New York Times
EVEN by the elevated standard of the New York art world, the rumor was exceptional: a tin of negatives buried in Africa for three decades that, when opened, revealed the work of a photographer who was neither “outsider” nor “indigenous” but spectacularly modern. And so the bejeweled and bohemian showed up at the Gagosian Gallery the evening of Oct. 18, 1997, wearing Fulani bracelets beneath their Charvet cuffs, blouses referencing Matisse referencing North African fabrics, Xhosa men in dinner jackets.

Courtesy of Association Saydou Keita, Bamako; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; and JM Patras
A portraits made in the 1950’s by Seydou Ke�ta of Bamako, Mali, of middle-class subjects.

The Ghosts of Seydou Keita

Forum: Artists and Exhibitions

Courtesy of Association Saydou Keita, Bamako; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; and JM Patras
A 1949 self-portrait of Mr. Ke�ta, who died in 2001, at about 80.
As accustomed as they were to art-world rumors, as familiar as they had become with exaggerations in the photo market, they could not help but be impressed. They saw mural-size black-and-white portraits in which the intricate designs of tribal costumes were set against backdrops of arabesque and floral cloths, the subjects disappearing into dense patterning that suggested Vuillard. A number of the photographs sold immediately, at prices of up to $16,000, and by the end of the evening, many in the crowd stood childlike in front of their limousines, waiting to catch sight of the photographer whose images they would never forget.

He finally appeared, old and regal.

The show was uniformly well received. Margarett Loke, writing in The New York Times, described Seydou Ke�ta as “the man who brought renewed vitality to the art of photographic portraiture.” An article in Artforum praised the show, noting that the photographs “were very successful with sophisticated New Yorkers.”

Not long after the exhibition, I received a phone call from a man I knew as Ibrahim. He had something to show me. A trader from Mali, Ibrahim would frequently appear at my door with garbage bags of fetish figures that he had brought back from his trips to Africa. The objects that I did not buy he took to others, and at the end of the day, to a mini-storage facility in Chelsea where West African traders do business, play music and entertain their relatives.

That day Ibrahim carried no bags. After a few minutes of conversation, he reached into his pocket and extracted a small piece of paper. On the front was the image of a young African woman. The contrast and density of the blacks and whites were minimal, the light modest, and the patterns on the costumes barely visible.

I turned the photograph over. “Ke�ta Seydou, Photographe Bamako - Contra en face prison civile Bamako (Sudan Fran�ais)”. And then a date: “3 Avr 1959.”

I was confused. This photograph was nothing like the colossal high-contrast portraits that I had seen at the gallery. But this, Ibrahim explained, was an original. This was what Mr. Ke�ta’s modest photography studio made. I was later told that there were only a handful of such prints. (I bought it for several hundred dollars and went on to buy other prints; they are no longer a part of my collection.)

The story of this discrepancy - how a pocket-size print, sold for a few dollars in a neighborhood shop in West Africa, became a wall-size photograph that sold for $16,000 in an upscale SoHo gallery - begins in colonial Mali in the 1930’s and continues into the future: a new show of Mr. Ke�ta’s work opens at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea on Friday.

It is a story that includes screaming fights, a lawsuit and charges of theft, forgery and perjury. It survives the photographer himself, who died in 2001. And it touches on the broadest channels of human history, from colonialism to capitalism to revolution to race. But it also involves a conflict of the most rarefied sort - a philosophical disagreement over the nature of photography and the concept of authenticity.

IN the 1930’s, Seydou Ke�ta, who was then young, uneducated and working in his father’s carpentry shop, received a Brownie camera (producing a 6-by-9-centimeter negative) from his uncle. In 1948, Mr. Ke�ta (pronounced kay-EE-tah) set up a commercial studio in downtown Bamako, across from the city’s prison and down the street from the train station. He was poor, so he made prints, using a 5-by-7-inch view camera, by placing the negative directly against the photographic paper, used his bed sheet as a backdrop, and photographed outdoors using available light.

Despite this, his portraits were a success.

Unlike his predecessors, who had photographed Africans to encourage missionary work or justify colonization, or as erotica, Mr. Ke�ta made photographs of Africans for their own personal use, and he revealed them as they had not been seen before: wearing Western suits and bow ties (his own), sitting on motorbikes or holding radios, or cradling a single flower, a reference to the Symbolists taught in Mali’s French schools. For the others, it was a mixture of Western dress and African poses, African dress and Western poses - people defining themselves at the uneven edge of modernity.

Okwui Enwezor, a scholar of photography and curator of a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that included Mr. Ke�ta’s work, maintained that in the amount of information he conveys about his middle-class subjects, in the controlled complexity of the portraits and the high level of quality maintained over a great volume, his work is “comparable to the portraiture of Rembrandt.” What makes this all the more astounding, he added, is that Mr. Ke�ta was “working outside any aesthetic discourse” - that is, he was uneducated in the history of art and photography. Mr. Ke�ta claimed that when he set up his studio, there were only four other studio photographers in Mali.

Following that nation’s independence in 1960, he was told to close his studio and work for the government. When he resisted, he once recounted, a general visited his studio. Mr. Ke�ta closed up shop, locking his roughly 7,000 negatives in a tin and burying them in his yard.

Fifteen years later, near the day when he retired from government, someone broke into his studio and stole his photography equipment. To support himself, he began to fix mopeds, converting his studio into a repair shop.

It was there, in 1990, that he met Fran�oise Huguier, a French photojournalist. Ms. Huguier arranged for a small number of Mr. Ke�ta’s photographs to be exhibited outside of Africa, where they came to the attention of Jean Pigozzi, heir to the Simca car fortune and one of the world’s pre-eminent collectors of contemporary African art. In 1992 Mr. Pigozzi sent Andr� Magnin, the curator of Mr. Pigozzi’s African collection, to Bamako to find the photographer, and Mr. Magnin returned with 921 negatives.

He made prints from those negatives, which appeared a couple of years later at an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and then in 1997 at a solo show at the Scalo Gallery in Zurich, accompanied by a book called “Seydou Ke�ta: An African Photographer.” Walter Keller, curator of the Scalo show and editor of the book, said the prints at both those shows were 20 by 24 inches - bigger than the originals (5 by 7 inches) but not yet enormous. By the time the new prints reached the Gagosian exhibition four months later, some had grown to 48 by 60 inches.

Mr. Magnin sold the prints he made to Mr. Pigozzi and to other collectors, galleries and museums. Mr. Enwezor credits him with bringing Mr. Ke�ta to the attention of the world.

Mr. Ke�ta, however, was not pleased. Jean-Marc Patras, a well-known agent for African artists and musicians, said that Mr. Ke�ta believed that Mr. Magnin was making unauthorized prints and signing them. “I absolutely deny these accusations,” Mr. Magnin said. “Seydou Ke�ta was involved in every decision, was aware of every print made, and signed every print that has his signature. We were also very careful about giving him an accounting of the money that we received for the prints.”

Mr. Pigozzi said on Tuesday that without Andr� Magnin’s and his efforts, Mr. Ke�ta “would have been totally forgotten.” They published an important book, he continued, and got his work into the collections of major museums. “Also with our help, Ke�ta was able to finally make a lot of money by selling his prints in a very orderly way,” Mr. Pigozzi said, adding that Mr. Patras, however, had managed to make a mess of things.

At the time of the Gagosian show, Mr. Ke�ta met with Sean Kelly of the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. “Ke�ta,” he said, “was not pleased with what Pigozzi and Magnin were doing with his photographs, which is why Ke�ta approached me.” But it wasn’t until 2001 that the photographer severed his ties with them.

A relative of Mr. Ke�ta, Kader Ke�ta, a former diplomat who was present for a meeting between Mr. Ke�ta and Mr. Magnin, said: “Seydou was furious about the possibility that Magnin was forging Seydou’s signature. Seydou also wanted the negatives back.” He assigned the exclusive rights to sell his photographs to Mr. Patras. The negatives were not returned. Mr. Patras went to work on an exhibition of Mr. Ke�ta’s photographs at the Sean Kelly Gallery. Weeks before the exhibition was scheduled to open in 2001, Mr. Ke�ta flew to Paris to confront Mr. Magnin, Mr. Patras says. But within days of his arrival, Mr. Ke�ta was dead at around 80.

see the complete article at the link below for a very rewarding read.

Posted at 11:45 AM · Comments (0)

Thursday, August 18, 2005; C01

If you could pick one photograph that tells the story of Africa, what would
that one photo show?

Would it try to capture the origin of humanity, wildlife, famine, despair,
genocide? Would it try to juxtapose sorrow and political corruption,
incredible wealth against incredible poverty, birth against death by AIDS,
the ugliness of war or the simple beauty of a land called the first and last
place on Earth?

If you had the job to decide — if you were leading National Geographic
magazine, famed for its photographs — what single shot could capture the
complexity of that continent, tell its history and its future?

The new editor of Geographic decided it couldn’t be done in one photograph,
and so for the first time since 1959, the magazine has a cover with no
picture.

Instead, the September cover is simply a white background with the word
“Africa” in brown ink, followed by a statement: “Whatever you thought, think
again.”

And in another Geographic rarity, the editor decided to dedicate the entire
issue to one topic. Only a handful of issues have been on a single subject
in the magazine’s 117-year history.

Chris Johns, the magazine’s new editor in chief, spent 17 of his 30 years as
a photographer covering Africa. He said his goal with the issue was to
highlight the complexity of the continent, its stories of renewal and
ingenuity as told by Africans, stories that would serve as a balance to the
daunting headlines of disease, poverty, war and extinction.

“Africa is not just a place; it’s a million places. It’s a million voices,”
Johns said in an interview yesterday. “We felt no one photograph could
capture the mystery, the diversity and the surprise of Africa as it moves
forward. Our issue is a very forward look at Africa.”

Johns took over as editor in January, and the September issue is the first
produced completely under his leadership. The magazine’s team of editors
wanted to be provocative, he said.

“This is our coming-out party to some degree,” he said. “I could say,
‘Africa: Whatever you think, think again.’ That could be applied to National
Geographic. We could say, ‘Whatever you think, think again.’ “

Johns said he wants to make the magazine, which he estimates is read each
month by 44 million people throughout the world, a must read. “We want you
to find stories that are relevant, [that] you can apply directly to your
life. Surprising, in-depth, contextual stories that help us make good
decisions about the future.”

This issue focuses on Africa “because Africa is one of the most hopeful
continents in the world. It is a continent with a bright future and a great
tradition of storytelling.” Johns said he believes Africa has the potential
to fix itself and serve as a model for sustainable development.

Johns put together a team of writers and photographers who traveled the
length of the continent, covering stories about the environment, oil,
culture, wildlife and AIDS. They returned with thousands of images and
stories.

The issue includes a tale from biologist J. Michael Fay of the Wildlife
Conservation Society, who set out with writer David Quammen and photographer
George Steinmetz to trace the “Human Footprint” and document the impact of
humans on African land. They spent six months flying over Africa, covering
21 countries and taking more than 100,000 photographs to document the
changes in the ecosystem. Their Cessna 182 was equipped with a camera that
shot high-resolution photos every 20 seconds. They captured the sprawling
grave sites of AIDS victims in South Africa, slums in Nairobi, hippos
thirsty for water in Tanzania, a herd of lechwe in Zambia. They documented
the disappearance of wildlife and discovered that little remains of wild
Africa.

“Degradation is a continuum,” Fay said at a news conference yesterday. “In
virtually every ecosystem we visited, humans have colonized the landscape.
Very few places are wild. The places to find wildlife are in protected
areas. This is a good indicator of how deeply human species has penetrated
the continent.”

One of the first photographs in the issue shows an elephant walking right
through the lobby of a lodge in Zambia. The lodge had recently been
remodeled, blocking the elephants’ traditional path to a favored mango tree.
The remodeling didn’t stop the elephants for long; they just lumbered
through the lobby, the most direct path to the tree.

“Though the image is whimsical at first glance, it points to a profound
issue: Both elephants and people have laid routes across Africa, many of
them crisscrossing one another,” the caption says. “Now it’s up to us humans
to figure out how to coexist in these shared spaces.”

� 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted at 7:07 PM · Comments (0)

Afilm festival is like an art gallery. As you move past the exhibits, or they move past you, some leap out to seize your interest, some arouse no response at all, some please, some displease, and some - often the best and most enduring, the ones that mystify a little before showing their magic - make you think: “I’ll come back to that later.”

The Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien has been having this effect for 25 years. His City of Sadness (1989), a dense but extraordinary historical movie that won the Golden Lion at Venice, was the first Chinese-language art film to become an international hit. This year’s Cannes entry Three Times - a jewelled enigma about love and time - won a special tribute from the Golden Palm-winning Dardenne brothers, who called Hou their mentor. This week the Tokyo-set Cafe Lumiere, premiered at Venice and made in centenary homage to Yasujiro Ozu, Japanese cinema’s great domestic miniaturist, opens in London.

For newcomers there are two facts - or runic wisdoms - about Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films. One: nothing happens in them. Two: everything happens in them. Look at Cafe Lumiere. Its themes include art, life, death, love, parenthood and national identity. Yet its plot is an unassertive meander about a Japanese girl (Yo Hitoto), pregnant by a now-discarded Taiwanese boyfriend, who strikes up a friendship with a young bookshop-owner (Tadanobu Asano) obsessed with studying the Tokyo rail network. No less geekily - yet no less illuminatingly, as Hou treats it - the girl is researching the music of a dead Taiwan-born composer.

The labyrinths all link up and the film is ultimately as diffuse as a laser beam. Yet when I met Hou on a Venice hotel terrace, on a Mediterranean evening as lambent as one of his films, my first question was: why does he make his stories so opaque? So seemingly actionless? Does this tell us something about eastern versus western sensibilities?

“I spend a lot of time reflecting on the language of cinema,” he says. “Recently I read a book by Italo Calvino called Six Lectures on Literature. There’s one sentence where he says: ‘What is depth in art? Depth is on the surface.’ I call this ‘traces’. The message of a film comes through the traces left by actions or emotions. Cinema has this unique potential to convey meanings beyond words.”

I point out the wonderful - to me - contrariness of two scenes in Cafe Lumiere. At key moments of self-

exposure, when the heroine tells first her parents and later her friend that she is pregnant, we do not even see her face. Her back is turned in one scene. In another she is momentarily obscured on a busy street.

“I once met Akira Kurosawa and he said he was impressed, or bewildered, that in my films you often have some outside characters walking in front of the camera and obstructing the view of the main characters. This is heresy in mainstream cinema or Hollywood cinema! But it is partly the difference between east and west. For instance in Peking Opera you have a completely abstract stage, with no sets, so that everything is expressed through the movement of actors.”

There is another reason why Hou often keeps his camera at a distance. It goes back to his beginnings as a director. And it pinpoints the difference between Hou’s cinema and Ozu’s. “Ozu worked in a studio, during a very flourishing period for Japanese cinema. He had his own family of actors. When I started filming in the late 1970s, Taiwan cinema was quite unstable. You had to film outside studios, because there were no studios. And there were very few good actors, so I had to work with non-professionals or friends. Since these people weren’t trained, you couldn’t move the camera right in front of their faces. The only way to overcome this was to have the camera at a distance.”

Today that sequestered lens, prying into present reality as if spying on

the eternal, is a signature Hou trope.

It is the perfect device for a cinema that in film after film - from his semi-autobiographical A Time to Live and a Time to Die (invoking his troubled childhood with an ailing father and suicidal mother, and the lasting sense of displacement felt by a refugee family from mainland China) to the delicate density of City of Sadness - insists that the personal story runs parallel with larger social or historical perspectives.

The railway network in Cafe Lumiere, with its mad but orderly arabesques, could be an image of Hou’s cinema. Only this degree of complexity can deal with Taiwan’s own history

of serial ownership and interlinked

destiny.

“My father moved to Taiwan in

1947 to work there, but after 1949, when Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists moved in, we couldn’t go back. Taiwan has always been an immigration

society. It started early in the 1600s when Holland occupied it, then Spain; later Japan and China. It was always a place where outside forces came in one after the other. There has always been this feeling of instability, of chaos waiting to happen.”

Yet the three stories in Hou’s Cannes-premiered Three Times show that some things remain constant - such as the pain of love - in widely sundered decades (1966, 1911, 2005). And the plot and themes of CafeLumiere, which echoes its Taiwanese-Japanese co-production origin by meditating on the relationship between separate cultures, muse obliquely on an ideal world in which that separation would not exist. Could such a world - or such an Asia - come about? Could cinema help it to?

“There are two sides to this question. One is financial. A single country can no longer finance a good film. It’s quite usual to have one actor each from, say, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, and to shoot in each place. That way you easily find the money and also attract the public if you’ve got favourite stars from each place.

“So on the one hand you have this convergence, with many people, including artists, having this vision of a new ‘union of Asia’. On the other hand many of these nations have a heritage of rule by European powers, and when those powers left, the countries inherited their philosophies of nationhood. It’s very difficult to move beyond that today, to break down national borders. As you in modern Europe are discovering! But it is for cinema always to keep trying … “

Posted at 12:13 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve been slow in getting this material online (and there is much more to come). Editing and posting these pictures is proving to be a lot of work, but also, readily confessed, a lot of fun. The Berlin and Paris shots are from a trip to Europe taken in early October to attend the Ulysses Prize deliberations, in which “Continent” was a prize candidate.
A few days before my arrival in Berlin, a city I had never managed to visit before, a show of Friedrich Christian Flick’s collection opened at the Hamburger Bahnhoff Museum to great controversy. The collection was extraordinary, as is the story behind it, a few snippets of which are told below in excepts from a characteristically strong Michael Kimmelman essay in The New York Times, and a Peter Bild review, published in The Guardian. See the jump below for the text. The link to the gallery is here:
Click to see photos

Posted at 11:07 PM · Comments (0)

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