Seattle

I am quietly proud of this.

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Outtakes

This is what I would normally have done with these three photos - eliminated any skewing because the camera wasn't quite straight, eliminated as much of the background clutter as possible (literally, on the stage, guitar cases and cables and the other things we subliminally edit ourselves, watching the speakers and following the conversation), making formal structures of lucky or accidental - or, occasionally, moments I can prepare for because there's a repeated pattern of movement.

I'm not a photographer in any accepted sense - no name badge, no enviably long lens for zooming past the clutter and architecture of the setting, and these factors are compounded by a certain lack of technique and, ultimately, limited talent. I can't move up to the stage or speakers without being rude. Sitting in the front row is about the best I can do.

What I can do, if we've snagged front row seats, is look at the stage and setting and listen to myself react to what has been assembled. Projections on the screen above, the lines of the room, the size of the figures on the chairs or standing at the podium in relation to the size of the room. The figures are often constrained by these lines, much as I feel and see people constrained by forces and events.

And so I rotate and crop, partly because off-kilter horizontals or verticals distract and annoy me so much I can't concentrate on the image itself, partly because the image will look sloppy otherwise, partly to draw attention to the heart of the image and the reason for producing it.

(Rotating and cropping are necessarily the same action with a defined (square or rectangular) format. But the difference between the darkroom - as far as I remember, it is so long since I've been in a darkroom - and digital photo editing is this: in the darkroom you could end up with a smaller image, and that would be OK. The proportions within the frame would remain the same. Or you could, in extra steps, enlarge and so alter them if you chose. In digital editing, with the kind of low-end editor I use for lack of time to use more complex software, after rotating/cropping, the remainder of the image floats and fills the area of the original. The edited image is an enlarged selection of the original.

And so these first three images in particular came to appear more...formal, monumental, than they had been in the taking.

And that gave me a lot to think about. Although these photos were taken at a staged event they are a subset of street photography. Which:
a) depends on intuition, experience, and luck
and
b) possibly because it is so serendipitous, so unlike studio photography, is often despised by the gatekeepers of "art"

But art it is. It is only the continued snobbery of studios and gatekeepers that says otherwise.* Photography began as street photography: the standards have been set by people like Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vivian Maier, combat photographers from the American Civil War to Stalingrad to Tokyo, wildlife photographers, National Geographic photographers, photojournalists of all stripes (including their founder, Margaret Bourke-White)... And so I crop and rotate, hoping to make the image stand (up to the tradition, to the expectant gaze, against the expected view).

Suddenly confronted with formal, straitened images, I looked and compared, compared and looked, and decided in this instance to post the originals instead. They were truer to the good humour and relaxation of the moment. There's a laughter and liveliness to them that was worth showing.

The first reverts to this:

The second to this:

And the third to this:

Later that same day there was a panel with three speakers. One of them had to leave early so I couldn't get an individual photo of her. I didn't post any of the individual pix I did get because leaving someone out would have been... rude. However, I'm delighted with this example of purest luck.

There was a piano onstage. I might have mentioned it. Unmovable, ungetaroundable. By chance the woman sitting next to it was dressed in black, and if I squirmed around a bit in my seat I could make the two black masses merge. There were silver beads in the weave of the woman's stockings. I took several photos - and in this one she is looking up, her face is catching the light, her clothing merges into the cropped mass but distinctive shape of the piano. The frieze fragment's curve on the wall echoes the piano's, the black edge of the projection screen above her points down to the figure like a kind of large arrow, the woman's fingers indicate the tension of her focus and also echo the upward thrust of her face.

A good image by compositional principles, something snatched from the clutches of Time, something I did.**

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* It is not photography in the studio sense, where the lighting is controlled and the composition likewise, and all elements indicate the photographer's understanding of the requirements of painting. (Which was the dominant earlier form of image-making, the standard to be no worse than - that's is the origin of studio snobbery: fear of being confused / dismissed with the lowly street.)

** When I bought my first SLR I had to think very carefully about what made me want to take pictures (I didn't have the money to spend on all those lovely accoutrements.) The answer was always: something I saw that made me want to keep it, hold it still against the flow and subtractions of Time. 

Rivers of Time

Orpheus in Melbourne - 2000

We Can Be Heroes

A couple of weeks ago I was looking through a new book at my local County Facility, a history/memoir of the Vietnam War. One photo drew me: black and white, the author in uniform, standing next to his wife, with his baby daughter in his arms. They were in 3/4 view, a nice column of light falling down the figures, profiles, baby blanket, uniform jacket, beret, knife-edged trouser-crease - It was a semi-relaxed, semi-formal portrait of a soldier about to leave for war.

And it struck me then, that this is the story. Not the war and what happens there, the battles, wounds, deaths, wreckage, survival. That is the aftermath. The story is this: a man leaves the company of women and children to enter the company of men. Only then is he able to be a man. Only then is he able to find or create or be part of a story. Only men have stories. Women and children don't have stories.

(And that's why The God of Small Things was such a massively popular book. It resonated particularly with women and children. They loved it. Among other things, for me, it reminded me of the hard work of being a child; how hard it was to learn buttons and buttonholes, work cardigan sleeves over the long sleeves of a blouse, not lose the bus-fare in my pocket while I was running around at lunchtime, playing chasey.)

By chance the Faithful Dinner Companion and I were catching up with Season 1 of True Detective (DVDs from our local County Facility) a few weeks ago. And there was the same story: 2 detectives, reluctant partners, over many years & through many vicissitudes, solve the case and come to accept each other's fundamental humanity. Both get divorced during the course of events.

We are inveterate watchers of bonus material, the Faithful and I, and so we heard the writer describe the detectives as heroes, flawed human beings, certainly, but heroes.

It seems I keep having to be reminded of the tenets of patriarchy. It's like trying to see the air itself, they so surround us. The hero narrative depends on taking men out of the company of the women and children, separating them from themselves and each other and then, in the current orthodoxy, having them overcome vicissitudes to re-recognize brotherhood, if not wider community. 

Considering the way increasing numbers of the poor and dispossessed have battle to survive, we should completely rejig the notion of heroism.

In fact, we should junk the current hero-narrative. It is a form of self-aggrandizement; it enables the self-deception which allows those in power - who have power or who take it - to act as they please in relation to everything outside themselves.

And the Answer Is -

In the little time I have to read I have been pursuing* Joseph Anton, Rushdie's account of his years in hiding after the Iranian fatwa /death threat issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

I find the publishing details fascinating, and the identification of both courage and cowardice compelling. Of course they surround or compose Rushdie's concern with free speech and free movement and the horrendous stacking of power which is addressed in the U.S. Constitution in the non-establishment clause.

Around the middle of the book he writes a letter to Religion. The final paragraph of the letter reads, in part:

What sort of club is it that makes it compulsory to be a member? I thought the best clubs were exclusive and tried their damnedest to keep the riffraff out.

And it occurred to me, the kind of club which makes membership compulsory: a protection racket.

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*I never peruse books; I'm always behind, trying to catch up -

Delicate Marvels