insig.ht » Conversation

On (Not) Being Able to Put Your Finger On It

Hannah Pierce-Carlson — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:25:27 +0000

Every time my husband attempts to utter something in Chinese, I don’t exactly laugh in his face, but it’s a little funny. He hasn’t yet got the phonetics. His mouth over-rounds and it seems as if he makes new shapes, any shape, to account for the language’s new sounds. But it’s all in the tongue, sweety. Control the tongue and the mouth shape follows accordingly, like a lone trailing gymnast’s foot on a soft blue mat adjusting for the landing. Likewise, a bounding Nadia knows that the feat of her perfect landing is really all in the strength of her back. Those pretty extended limbs are graceful distractions from an otherwise brutal exertion of power.

Underneath all things, as in communication, as in gymnastics, there is a structure that can’t be manipulated from the outward going in. There is no forcing the mouth to look like a talking Chinese mouth in order to make the sounds come out in Chinese. Telling a joke or a story is obviously no different. It requires no less than a seemingly hidden consistency. If you tell a joke and it wins a laugh, then you’ve told it right. But what exactly is telling-it-right? “I can’t put my finger on it,” goes the idiom. I can’t touch the underlying organ that governs telling-it-right’s awesome landing to my ears. But I know it when I hear it; and, in photography, I know telling-it-right when I see it.

Jacob…K hails from flickr. From what I gather, he’s a Funny Dad, an FD. Some of his photos make me laugh like no others made by more “serious” photographers. When he lands a good one, his images are super concentrated scenes of American weirdness. He calls them “silly pictures” in his profile and sometimes I jealously wish I had taken them. He takes his kids, or ventures alone, to strange Deep South U.S.A amusement venues, and catalogs them fairly tirelessly. Here are two scenes that may well summarize the gamut of American fervency. A.) Sitting among Collectible Cabbage Patch doll owners as they watch the “birth” of a doll in a “hospital” in Georgia known as Babyland General and B.) A “funeral” from a hard line Christian youth event called Eternity House where participants are goaded into “knowing Jesus” might their souls be eternally damned.

Wandering at large, there are many FDs taking pictures of weird Americana and posting them to flickr, but Jacob…K has consistency that allows me to appreciate them. The moment’s often right, the composition isn’t too heavy-handed, nor is it too loose. Everyone’s perfectly who they need to be to make the scene snap together. His organ of telling it right maybe works like this: he goes to these outlandish places ready to laugh, and he snaps the funniness that he sees in front of him, doing nothing more than transferring that scene into the frame at just the right moment.

I don’t take for granted how difficult getting that moment really is. My husband and I have often used the phrase, “I can’t make a picture out of it,” despite the richness of a particular scene in front of us. What it suggests is that a picture is not “there” by default of the availability of interesting ingredients floating freely in front of you. Our vision of the elusive moment is sometimes obscured by other factors, let’s say the impassioned “not feeling it” barrier to getting in the frame what’s so plainly in front of us. There is also the mitigating fear that if we work it too much, we break it. More notably, there is the plain oblivion that we are mostly always in. There are more obscuring elements at work on how we see than there are clarifying ones. When a photographer consistently gets in the frame what’s really in front of him/her, at a time when it’s most significant, this is akin to landing that back handspring or finally being able to communicate something useful in a foreign language. It is no accident that it is achieved, it is owned only by the trudging through a trail of previous wipe-outs.

Mark Powell is a photographer who consistently lands his handsprings. The funniness of his photographs, like that of Jacob…K’s, is ratcheted-up by a real moment and keen framing. However, Powell’s pictures usually depart from the mere touch of comic timing. His overall vision, the arch of his entire body of work, operates on a way of seeing that transcends the obviously funny. There’s little reliance on being in a funny place to see a funny moment, but rather he makes funny where we’d never expect it could be. It’s a funniness about life that’s really a bit harder to put your finger on.

This is funny to me: her portable TV, its cord hanging limply, the weird little flower arrangements, her hair-netted head cocked in what seems like a temporarily adequate escape from some other thing going on in her life at the moment, I presume. Or this older boy, grown too big, straddling the last toy vestiges of his being a boy in a manner that anticipates the way in which he will try to be a man. They’re both so tenderly funny in that way we once described as the “human condition.”

This man smiling into a mirror is funny immediately and then it’s funny again in a different way, when I imagine Powell actually being there to take it.

A humor that engulfs the mere chuckle is a more somber universal one. There is a joke on us that everyday unfurls itself under our feet, potentially undermining our ego at any given moment. This humor finds its expression in pathos and self-deprecation. I might argue that even if we have to mine these self-deprecating punch lines from the guarded moments of innocent bystanders, does not the miner hold the eyes to see the gold? That is, how can we see what we don’t already know for ourselves? At the base of us all is something a bit helpless and pathetic, which somehow makes laughing at others okay. We laugh at babies when they fall and the delayed agony takes grip on their face before we finally hear the cries. We laugh because we know it’s never real agony.

The go-to American humorist, Mark Twain, wrote, “Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.” Is that wisdom the ability to quickly index the catalog of everyday lived absurdity and grief, pull out something amusing, and then charge on blithely?

When looking through Powell’s work, or any photographer I admire, it seems as if they could find a quiet absurdity anywhere they end up. Around any corner, potentially, a Powell, or an Eggleston, or a Whoever X scene awaits, or so it seems. Are they teleologically in with the universe or does the the universe disproportionately offer things up just for them to find? That answer is “No,” but perhaps a photographer like Powell might be receptive to the universe (a set of possibilities by another name) in a way that his/her vision for what’s already there is less obscured than those who might choose to impose on the scene, rather than to humble themselves to it.

I wrote Mark Powell and other photographers who take humorous pictures to see what they had to say about humor and (not) being able to put your finger on it. I also wanted to see what images that they find funny. Here’s what Powell gave me.

Powell: “I do like a direct funny picture, but the quick laughs die an equally quick death. I have a hard time remembering jokes no matter how funny they are–the ones I do remember are a little dirty and twisted. So, I picked an Enrique Metinides photograph of an accident scene and the people gathered around a smashed up car. Well at once, I find it funny that Metinides always implicates the people in his photographs until they are not even about the accidents anymore, but just about the people left over, gathered like flies. He uses accidents as a very practical excuse to get the shot that extends meaning a little over the horizon of the event. I like that punch line, it lingers over me and allows me to watch again and again.”

Powell’s response reminds me that humor, when it’s forced to be laid out, ends up in a buffet of adjectives: sick, twisted, fluffy, witty, dark, satiric, ironic, cute, straight, absurd, weird, stupid, slapstick, funny haha, funny strange; and essentially, like fussy kids we only eat what we like. I hate listing these adjectives. When I see them, there seems to be a glaring limitation to all these one-note words. Perhaps the effect of funniness is best demonstrated physically, rather than lexically. Because there’s not always an outward laugh, perhaps nothing even close to one, laughing on the inside is more what goes on. A laugh like this escapes in a huff from the nostrils, or causes a muscle to tense on one side of the face, leaving the other side of the face in something like a non-smile, a huff-smirk.

Powell said he’s a little twisted, and though I suspect that adjective hardly describes what he means, but Mark, I know what you mean. There is a playful darkness to us photographers, and I should now mention it via drawing an anachronistic metaphor…

…If this dark sense of humor could be our anthem, and we were all sitting in a dusty parlor room swaying to it… It’d be the sound of tinkling un-tuned keys of a warbly old player piano (a piano that plays itself) at which sits our man, a drunken character whose biggest fault is loving too many things with too much gusto, the kind of character who pretends like he has never fully learned his lessons so that he can take what he wants and run away to someplace alone to pride himself for having grabbed it– but he has half-hearted accepted his foolishness for the miraculous glimmers it sometimes offers to his perception, a fun house mirror set of eyes in which to fumble through the world– with his hands fumbling over the keys, believing he was the master of the tune himself. We’d laugh to ourselves, at our pathetic kin, and we might love him for being so photogenically pathetic in front of us.

Mark Twain on the photograph and, presumably, the devils who make them:

“No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody–hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the meekest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look serious when he sits for his picture the photograph makes him look as solemn as an owl; if he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down as an ass. The sun never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a “negative”–a contradiction–a misrepresentation–a falsehood. I speak feeling of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Soloman, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot, and I am neither.” – Letter to the Sacramento Daily Union, July 1, 1866

Eliot Shepard comes to mind when I read these lines. I think of the title of his small set “Basically Dishonest” and how these two words ring true, and yet it still matters little to me. Oddly, I sometimes trust that my photographic lies make my lived truth more easily seen, if to anybody, then to me only. Honesty, whatever that means, probably doesn’t matter so much to Shepard either.

Shepard thinks these pictures are funny: Winogrand gets a taste of his own medicine and a cheeseburger-cigarette holding hand. It’s not hard to see how his own images are imbued by a familiar strange sensibility.

Zhang Xiao is a photographer shooting around the central Chinese province of Shanxi. His pictures are understated and fixedly Chinese, whatever being Chinese means. There is no hand-holding the audience to the punch line and the humor is not concentrated like a good ol’ FD picture. Rather, there is an atomized vapor of weirdness hovering over all of his scenes. And not being so easily got, the humor may waft over the heads of some and it might shoot directly into the nasals of others. “A humorous story is told gravely,” writes Twain in How to Tell a Story, “…the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.” And don’t Zhang Xiao’s gravely-told stories almost whisper their awkward punchlines?

However, I was caught off guard when I received what Zhang Xiao sent. He writes,

“My friend FengLi’s picture often make me laugh…I see this picture, I think this is a surreal scene. The children are too fat. It has been very funny just he lying there. Don’t need too many reasons. And this isn’t ridicule. He is so lovely.”

At first I was interested, and then I was gradually confused, and finally, sad. I can’t say that the image sits on my side of the funny buffet. Zhang Xiao’s pallet might be more darkly noted than mine. I’m an FD at heart, but yet I’m capable of accepting how this can be funny to someone coming from another range of cultural and personal contexts, those that I can’t quite grasp, nor do I really want to. To paraphrase my insig.ht comrade, James Hendrick, knowing that someone somewhere thinks this picture is funny, I’ve learned something.

What is humorous within photographs is only half the story when we compare it to what is funny about the practice of photography itself. I’ve often thought, as I stand dorkily holding my camera up to a scene involving no more than a pile of stuff, how funny I must look to anyone who cares to pay more than a second’s glance. How often would I make a lampoon-able character for a funny photo? No other online work, in my opinion, has poked more gentle fun at the act of playing photographer than the self-reflexive writing, photographs, and experiments of the funny Ross Evertson. He keeps a highly readable blog called “Addressing the Vest” (an overly pocketed classic photojournalist meets amateur birder vest) in which he muses/embraces various deservedly mocked photographic tropes, such as this touchstone: “Imply Significance for Free.”

“Statements” is one of the more clever and funny projects I’ve seen. It’s an experiment that treads that awkward bridge between worlds: between those of the artist and his/her audience; between those of the people who take photography seriously and people who might be indifferent to its supposed significance; and uniquely, between the outsourcer and the outsourcee by using overseas paid-for-hires to write a 2nd hand artist statement for his work. He writes:

“Using the Amazon outsourcing service Mechanical Turk, I hired workers to visit my website and describe my work. The results were then typeset and printed, including the unedited text of the responses, along with the associated, anonymous worker number.”

I conclude by trying to redeem myself for making fun of my husband’s funny Chinese pronunciation by telling you this story of his, which I love and always makes me laugh. It’s about photography, or rather about being a photographer, and the seriousness to which we clamor for a photographic nugget lying ready to be plundered. It’s about how being a photographer can make you experience the world in ways that are in their own way funny, funnier than if we just mentally noted something and kept walking, likely forgetting anything worth a longer consideration, however small, however maybe ridiculous.

Michael was walking around his then NYC neighborhood. He came across a bull dog sitting in an old glass shop front like a yard ornament. The dog was petrified, transfixed, weirdly not-real with his saliva downward looping to just almost the ground. Michael must have laughed the kind that comes out short and hard, like a honk. Without a camera, his pulse surged and his photographer’s shoulder devil must have shouted, Fuck! So he took to a fast walk in the direction home, soon turning to a full on sprint, weaving through the intermittently populated lazy obstacles of the sidewalk, around the usual slow oblivious types, running with what must have been a bouncing smile on his face, with an urgency in his heart to get home to that camera.

Charging down the long forever blocks and finally pounding up the front steps, jangling with the the keys through the front door, and then another five flights up, around and around the stairwell he went, and then jangling with the keys again, he charged into the apartment running headlong into his friend, Cary Conover, also a photographer. Cary: “What’s wrong, man?” Michael: “Picture! Picture! Picture….” yelling as he carried on. Cary: “Oh, yeah, go get it.”

In and out of doors, and in and out of camera bags with zippers and pockets. And then down and back through all of it again, racing to what he knew would be long gone, in a full sprint, already admonishing himself for not having had the camera he should be carrying all along, if he were any photographer worth his salt. The smile turning to a strain attached to a mental projection of a failed opportunity, to the thought that maybe it’s pointless to run to a thing already dissipated, that it is plain silly to even be running to take a picture of a dog? It was really ridiculous when he thought about it. But still he begged the universe of chance: Please, still be there. Please, still be there. And then he arrived, after twenty minutes of self-inflicted entropic chaos, to the scene as serene and perfect as when he first saw it, an unflinching bulldog in a window in a funny world that sometimes might wait for you to get the joke. Sometimes you get your finger right on it.

So tell me, what’s funny to you?

The Insiders

Hin Chua — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:19:01 +0000

When I belatedly discovered photography several years ago, a book being consistently recommended as an essential component of my self-directed education was David Hurn and Bill Jay’s On Being a Photographer. Eager and anxious to make up for lost time, I acquired a copy and began devouring it as rapidly as possible. Upon reaching page 89 however, I distinctly remember being stopped in my tracks, forcing myself to repeatedly reread the text:

Examine the lives of people who have truly excelled in any of the arts – music, theatre, dance, sculpture – and they all have one characteristic in common: the capacity to commit themselves wholeheartedly to their chosen disciplines. They do it every day. No excuses.
…
The fact is that photographers at the highest level have committed themselves to continuous and dedicated practice. Fierce single-mindedness and self-motivation are essential. It is very, very rare to find a part-time photographer in the front ranks. This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion.
…
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the very best photographers of the past and present – whether reportage photographers or artist-photographers – have been/are professionals.
…
Through professional photography (they) practice their craft on a continuous basis and, in so doing, become better at it.

Despite the obvious logic underpinning the argument, I found myself almost irrationally perturbed by that statement. Having just relocated from Australia to London and ensconced in a job that was both interesting and well-paying, I had no option or desire to abandon it all for the haphazard existence of a freelance photographer. So then, barely a year into photography, were my legs to be severed from beneath me before this grand new adventure had truly commenced? Was I doomed then to remain a weekend warrior, an effete dilettante spending more time talking about photography on the Internet than actually doing it?

In an attempt to avoid this fate, I knew that it was essential at my stage of development to photograph regularly somehow. After considerable to-ing and fro-ing, an accommodation was eventually reached, one that was more on my terms: I began bringing a camera along to work, photographing my surroundings. And as this project progressed and I slowly learned my craft, I became increasingly fascinated with other photographers who had been in a similar situation, those who had found themselves recording their own jobs:

The Insiders.

Michael Julius

For ten years, Michael Julius worked as an emergency medical technician in Putnam County, Florida. Over that time, his experiences coalesced into the body of work called Rescuing Putnam. He currently lives in Taiwan, teaching English with his wife Hannah.

My friend Michael David Murphy first introduced me to Julius’ work; I was immediately captivated and began a dialogue to find out more about the project. I began by asking him about Putnam County:

This community that I spent the last 10 years in is about as Southern as it gets (or as a nod to nearby China: ‘Southern with Florida Characteristics’). In a draft for a statement, Hannah and I constructed a setting that still feels true to me:

“The residence of Putnam County, North Florida sprawl across a rolling 827 square miles of sand, pocked with hundreds of small lakes, and tucked in tangly forests. They live in trailers and shacks, along webs of unpaved roads. Their automobiles tend to be permanently coated in sugar sand. This is the South of sweet tea and collard greens, Jesus and short, hard falls from salvation. At least, that is what I saw ten years ago when I arrived as a new paramedic. As a rookie I was characteristically gung-ho for getting caught-up in this tangle.”

Putnam County is listed as the 7th poorest county in the state of Florida. It’s what I heard often from administrators and officers in the rescue service but I never had any real facts. I just now confirmed it but these numbers are from the 2000 census. With the economy as it is I’m sure that it has worsened. In particular among those who have often found their way into my ambulance the means of living tends to be in the semi-skilled trades. Most of my former patients work in various manual labor jobs and many are basically self-employed. They do a roofing job on occasion, clear some land with a borrowed bush-hog, grind stumps or find their way to a construction crew to work for some shaky contractor. Money is always tight but they do the best that they can with what they have. I have on occasion given money to family members so that they could put enough gas in the work truck to pick up sick relatives from the hospital.

I then asked Michael why he began photographing his job:

I have been a photographer for most of my life…but never in any professional sense. It has long been my way to go live and just record things. Photography has always been, for me, a way to just be in the world. I have spent so long practicing this craft in such a specific way that it is basically impossible for me to have any kind of substantive or fulfilling life as a professional photographer. I actually ended up as a medic because I knew it was going to be an experience. I ended up in the woods in an ‘everyman’ place like Putnam County because I trusted in providence to deliver me to a place that would be interesting. Putnam County was the first rescue service to offer me a job.

I photographed my job on again and off again for 10 years. But there were times when I didn’t have anything particular on my mind, so it wasn’t any kind of organized intent. I also spent a couple of years during this time living in New York and working as a photographers’ assistant. I came back for the holidays when there was extra money to be made in overtime and in the summer when many people took their vacations.

One of the reasons I found ‘Rescuing Putnam’ so stimulating was that it was shorn of many of the dramatic and frankly hackneyed visual conventions associated with photojournalistic projects of a similar vein. To me, many of the photographs seemed almost exhausted, with the protagonist trapped in a bizarre dream world. I enquired about this:

When I first got into this line of work the opportunity to see something important, and more than just see – to participate, was probably my biggest motivation. I wanted an ‘essential’ experience. I wanted to help and I wanted to see life lived (then not) at the edges of our physical existence. Perhaps it sounds morbid but I wanted to be involved in a space that people pass through. My first fundamental and life-changing experience of this was a save early in my career. My partner and I were delayed by, of all things, a gray fox that ran in front of the ambulance, leaped into the woods then back again two more times. When we reached the residence, the patient’s wife was in the yard screaming, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” In the house we intubated this prone man. We were already familiar with him. He had chronic respiratory problems and a tendency to call us just before he would slip into respiratory failure. He was blue and his heart rate was slowing; however, our interventions were successful and his skin color improved. He began to regain consciousness, though it wasn’t until we were at the hospital that he really began to recover.

Beginning with that damn fox, what happened at that call changed me forever. My partner, the son of a Baptist minister, was steeped in this kind of peculiar Southern elemental experience, yet we both still get a little breathless when we recall that night. It was also the night in which I became a clinician. Watching his skin color change, which was at first subtle, then dramatic, gave me a new set of eyes. But something else happened. When I was intubating I had a very clear image of extending a hand to a man slipping down the steep slope of a hole. It’s real enough in my mind that it’s all wrapped up in my recollection as an actual part of that night. It was very moving and reminded me how important the work is. A few months later, he did finally fall in. He called too late. I will never forget him.

Statistically, this is a career that doesn’t lend itself to a lengthy service. The average career span for your basic garden-variety medic is 3-5 years. For me, the burnout was as much about the physical toll on the body as anything. Every three days I would essentially stay up all night. This, compounded by the repetitive aspect of the job, is exhausting. By repetitive I mean that I eventually realized that I was seeing the same people over and over. Some are actually sick though many are not, or at least not in an emergent sense. The skill-set to evaluate the needs of your sick and hurt patients eventually became a hindrance because I saw how so many of them were in fact not sick at all. It’s frustrating. Towards the end of my career I told a drug seeking patient, who had just finished performing a hilariously bad seizure, “You know, seizure patients usually urinate on themselves.” I wanted to see her piss herself. That’s pretty cynical.

We end up at the same houses. Houses full of thieves and alcoholics, with the same adolescent boys sitting on fence posts, or car hoods, or tossing footballs; and, when we arrive they pitch their thumbs, mumbling, “They’re in the back.” And in the back are the same old patients, face down in their vomit. It breaks my heart to see these boys conditioned to this. The very last patient of my career spit on me and said, “Clean that up, bitch”. It’s a river of misery and it goes on forever.

In the last couple of years I began to entertain the idea that what we do is often not so helpful. To the truly sick and injured we are a godsend, and to be involved in their care is something I can barely describe. It’s a euphoria. It’s a sense that you are involved in a seriously important part of life, and not just their life but life in its larger sense. We really do participate in that space that people pass through. It’s a privilege. To the rest, which is to say ‘most’ of my patients, I have often wondered whether we actually harm them by taking away a certain amount of self-reliance.

But please don’t confuse this with simple disenchantment. I am certainly not done with healthcare. When we return to the states I will continue my career as a nurse, and eventually, a Nurse Practitioner. I want to be involved with helping people help themselves. I may drive an ambulance to see myself through the schooling but only to transfer patients from facility to facility. I can’t serve as a medic the way that I did. I don’t want to go back down there.

‘Rescuing Putnam’ is a prime example of why I find insider photography so compelling. It doesn’t suffer from many of the constraints of ‘straight’ documentary work: there is no requirement for objectivity and seriousness, or to paint the subject in a respectful politically correct light. By very definition, the photographer cannot be an unbiased observer and instead is an active participant in the work. The gloves of detachment can be removed, to be replaced by stronger, often darker emotions.

The long-term immersion inherent in many such projects also often lends a different atmosphere and almost claustrophobic intimacy to the photographs. Unlike many traditional projects, it’s harder to take time out, to switch subjects or change locations if inspiration wanes. In many ways, the photographer is almost trapped, forced into creating something meaningful within a strictly defined combination of physical and temporal constraints.

The following works are some notable insider projects that I’m aware of:

Can you think of other good examples?

Corey Arnold

Corey Arnold spends half the year working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska.

Compare and contrast his work to the Magnum photographer Jean Gaumary’s seminal Pleine mer.

A NPR interview with Arnold can be found here.

Andy Summers

Andy Summers played guitar for the Police.

Summers’ photographs were published as the book I’ll Be Watching You: Inside the Police, 1980-83.

A review by the Sydney Morning Herald can be found here.

John Pilson

John Pilson worked on weekend and night shifts for a Manhattan investment bank between 1994 and 2000.

Pilson’s photographs were published as the book Interregna.

A review by Jeff Ladd on 5B4 can be found here.

Juliana Beasley

Juliana Beasley worked as an exotic dancer for eight years.

Beasley’s work became the book Lapdancer.

An interview with Beasley on the Modernist can be found here.

Chris Shaw

Chris Shaw spent ten years on the night shift in various London hotels.

Shaw’s experiences were published as the book Life as a Night Porter.

A review by Douglas Stockdale on The PhotoBook can be found here.

A review by Jeff Ladd on 5B4 can be found here.

Arnold Odermatt

Arnold Odermatt was a traffic policeman in Switzerland from 1948 to 1990.

His experiences were made into the books Karambolage and On Duty.

A review by Frieze Magazine can be found here.

A review of Karambolage by Lensculture can be found here.

A review of On Duty by Jeff Ladd on 5B4 can be found here.

Hin Chua

As for myself, between 2005 and 2007 I was employed at a multinational investment bank in the heart of London’s financial district, the Square Mile. A dense, organic maze of passageways and alleys interconnecting a series of distinctive, futuristic high-rises, it became to me the most visually stimulating area in the entire city. During a period of unprecedented financial prosperity and excess, there were distinctive, often surreal scenes to be chanced upon and I was soon photographing extensively both inside and outside of the workplace. So for two to four hours each weekday in good weather and bad, I found myself exploring and cataloguing every nook and cranny of this weirdly wonderful hive of capitalism.

In many ways, the work that constituted this project became my photographic education. I was able to shoot on a consistent basis and gradually teach myself some of the lessons required for conceiving and executing a long-term project. Ultimately this didn’t just assist in my development: it bought me the time to ascertain what I really wanted to photograph, to find out what I was best suited for. After eighteen months I left my job to travel and upon returning to London, there was no real appetite for resuming the project. By this stage I had already discovered other rainbows to chase.

Has the era of the “iconic image” passed?

Ben Roberts — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:07:41 +0000

I followed a tweet yesterday from the Magnum feed to a photo of the week by Paul Fusco.

USA. California. 1968. California Grape Strike. Cesar Chavez. © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

It is a protest photo from a workers strike in California from the late 60′s. In itself it isn’t a particularly remarkable photograph; however what gave it resonance for me was a sense of time and place; I can feel the photographers presence – the fact that Fusco was there at all lends weight to the purpose of this demonstration.

It made me think – in 40 years time, will similar images from this generation come to hold the same weight and gravitas as Fusco’s? My gut instinct is “no”. When I think back over protest photography from the last 20 years, the only picture that instantly springs to mind is that of “Tank Man” from the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

Beijing, June 5, 1989, by Jeff Widener (The Associated Press).

After a couple more minutes of thinking, this 9/11 image by Thomas Hoepker drifted in from my memory banks as well:

Young people on the Brooklyn waterfront on Sept. 11 2001, ©Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

That’s two photographs from the last twenty years. I wasn’t alive in the 60′s, but I have this romantic idea in my head of photojournalists of that era being brave men and women who were driven by a passion for truth and a desire to show the world the political issues of the time. While these ideals may not have changed, perhaps it is the sheer number of practising photographers and the rapidity with which images get distributed and shared that has served to dilute the waters; While there are plenty of fantastic working photojournalists out there, it seems to me like the time when one photographer could make an era defining photograph of a single event are gone. When I look back to the biggest event so far in London this year, the May Day Protests, there isn’t one particular image that stands out. All I can remember is a deluge of photographs, several of which seemed to include more photographers than protestors….

May Day Demonstration, 1st May 2009, London. (Photographer unknown)

I’d be interested to see some conversation about this. Maybe I just have a brain like a sieve, and there are others out there who can think of dozens of iconic images from the last twenty years of photojournalism. I’d like to think this is quite specific aswell – I can think about many iconic photographs from a “non-news” context – I just feel that news photography and the coverage of big events are so swamped by the sheer volume of imagery, that the chances of one particular photograph becoming iconic have diminished.

What stands out as your iconic news photograph of the last twenty years?

Are you a photojournalist? How do you feel about the current state of news photography?

How can I believe what I see, when the truth is a show?

Ben Roberts — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 23:19:49 +0000

In the years after I graduated from photography school in 2006, Edgar Martins’ photography was on my radar. His “Topologies” series in particular was compelling; Martins insisted in his artist statements and interviews that he used no digital manipulation in his work; Everything was captured “in camera”…

“This is all found imagery, I’m not consciously referencing anything.” (via Shoot the Blog)

“Though my images are minimal in tone, they do not pare down my experience of place. In my work there is scope for so much more. What seem like highly controlled and manipulated photographs are but a product of illusion. The illusion of the photographic process. This is especially evident in “The Accidental Theorist” series. Most people assume that these image are manipulated. Or perhaps even staged. In reality, there is no post-production work, no darkroom or computer manipulation.” (via The Morning News)

I discussed Martins’ photography with other photography friends – specifically when we saw his work at the Photographers Gallery in London in 2006; we couldn’t work out how he had photographed the beach scenes in “Topologies”; However I was prepared to take Martins’ claims of authenticity at face value.

Martins spent the autumn of 2008 on commission for the New York Times making work on the real estate collapse in the United States. When I saw the slide-show (which has now been removed) on the NY Times website, something felt a little bit wrong. I’ve been making work in a similar vein to this in Spain since 2007. “The Brick Business”, which I am now continuing thanks to funding from the BJP and Nikon, is a study of the effects of the economic crisis on Spain’s residential landscape. I’ve made several trips out to Spain’s Mediterranean coast, with many days spent wandering through desolate housing estates, half finished construction sites and downtrodden suburbs. With this experience in mind, what disturbed me about Martins’ images was that they were just too perfect – when did you last see a half built house with almost perfectly clean floors?

So when the essay (titled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age”) was pulled from the NY Times website, I was dismayed but not completely surprised.

In a bizarre follow up to the removal, Martins has since collaborated with Joerg Colberg and composed a response to the accusations of image manipulation. I have to be honest and say that it’s perhaps the most overbearingly pretentious artists statement I have ever had the misfortune to read, and it completely fails to answer the issue at hand – why did he lie about using digital manipulation in his work?

It’s a shame really – if Martins had been open about his methodology from day one (or simply not boasted that he didn’t need to digitally manipulate his photographs) then I would still like his work, which is obviously beautiful; but why would he openly lie to his audience? It was inevitable that one day he would get found out. As a viewer and previously an admirer, I can’t help but feel cheated.

Finally, now that Martins has been exposed as a liar, why would he then continue to treat us like idiots by offering a load of pompous drivel instead of a frank and honest explanation? I find the whole sequence of events baffling, particularly as it could have been so easily avoided.

Edgar – some advice – find someone else to handle your PR.

Mark Powell – Mexico XXI

Ben Roberts — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:00:01 +0000

When we began discussing the content of insig.ht, we all agreed that we should be looking outside our own group for both written and photographic material. We intend to make interviews a key part of the site. We’re delighted that our first featured photographer is Mark Powell. American born but based in Mexico, Mark’s photography stirs up a strange brew of emotions in the viewer – one moment complete joy, the next confusion and even shock.

When I first discovered his work, it was like being taken by both shoulders and shaken – I had never seen anything like it before and it took me a while to really work out what all the fuss was about. However the more I explored Mark’s vast archive of images, I found threads appearing, and a strange rhythm in the photographs that urged me to keep looking. We’ve tried to ask Mark questions that reveal some of the methodology behind his practice. The interview is based around a new body of work called “Mexico XXI”. We’ve featured some of the photographs from this series in the interview, but you can see a wider edit over on Mark’s website.

First of all, can you give us a brief insight into your photographic history and how you came to be a photographer?

In 1986, I spent a year as an exchange student in Vereeniging, South Africa, a predominantly Afrikaner city south of Johannesburg. Coming from Michigan, it was altogether another planet for me. At the time, it was at the end of the Apartheid era, everything was still censored and tense. I would ride in the black-only sections of trains, police were everywhere, and dark clouds of smoke rose up from burning tyres from the violent clashes in the segregated township Sebokeng just outside of Vereeniging. Meanwhile, I lived with my rich white host family who lived in a very privileged almost unreal bubble. The whole experience gave me a rebellious and messed up feeling and changed my world view—I knew then I wanted to be a photographer. I started taking my camera most places and having adventures. When I got back home I enrolled myself in a photography courses at a local community college with a fantastic photographer and teacher named Linda Menger. She showed me lots of work of other photographers and really encouraged and mentored me to take my work to the next level.

(Hin Chua) How do you go about assembling your images into a larger body of work? To my eyes they appear to be of a relatively open-ended nature. What themes and guiding principles informed your choices during this process?

I know more what I don’t want than what I want in a photograph. It is a growing search, I am collecting, editing down. I put my photographs into “number ones” and then all the rest. A number one is when I really hit on something and I think about that photo for awhile. The photographs I am working on right now are for a new book tentatively called Mexico XXI. It is a mixture of portraits, mostly a cast of male characters and sprinkling of straight scenes and landscapes taken mostly in Mexico City. I like to start with one picture and build upon that mood or feeling, pictures with hopefully long shelf lives–because a lot of pictures just putter out and I don’t want to look at them anymore.

(Ben Roberts) Are your influences photographic or from a different sphere such as literature or film? Can you specify any of your influences?

Of course, I love looking at photographs. My favorite photographer in Mexico is Enrique Metinides, a photographer who worked for the “Las Nota Rojas” the violent working class newspapers in Mexico City. I just learned last week that he is basically housebound now and sets up backdrop pictures of fires and explosions, bloody crime scenes, then re-shoots scenes as lego-like fantasies, just as if he was out photographing like before. It is a little heartening because he can’t stop his photographic impulse, like a cat chasing a string. He now develops all his film cheaply at Costco stores too. That is pretty cool. I admire his non-self-conscious style, his pure eccentric passion, with no real art intentions except to make pictures.

I also have a big regard for movies made from the late 60’s to early 80’s, movies like Badlands, El Topo, The Mechanic, The Getaway, Straight Time, The French Connection, Westworld, The Shining. I am content just to enjoy seeing movies and not consciously take anything from them– The best inspiration is when it is slippery and unclear, though people tell me over and over my pictures give them a movie still feel, so yes it may come from my joy of movies.

(Hin) The scenes that you photograph, indeed your entire viewpoint, appear off kilter, unreal and larger than life; yet in some way they still represent a version of reality. How do you go about seeing this way?

I think my photography is driven foremost by my personality. I’ve got a pretty critical eye and I immediately try to take the obvious out, I like it when something is in front of me and I can’t quite see it just yet. I let the camera do some work and later a nice result of the unexpected comes through. So there is that initial inkling and it is important to recognize that first feeling that something could be there—where to point the camera, who to approach, what things to say, how big my smile is– all those small game changers that allow for imagination to enter and make interesting pictures – and they either workout or they don’t…

(Ben/Hin) Following on from the previous question, do you actively seek out people and situations that suit your vision, or do you feel that your photographs are an accurate cross section of the geographical area in which you shoot?

I am pretty active in seeking out people. Just yesterday, I met a lady in the street who had a collection of gaudy, colorful knitted yarn bags used for carrying pop bottles. She looked quite young but had all white hair, very blue eyes. There seems to be law of attraction and people respond in an immediate spontaneous and real way when I take an interest in them. I got her number and plan on calling her up because I didn’t have my camera with me then. Maybe it will be an easy picture, maybe it could be a little too direct and too “charactery,” but for sure would make a nice adventure. She is definitely whiter than most Mexicans, “una guerita.” (I just called her house, no answer). Who knows what other pictures could come out of it? I imagine her as kind of scary, colorfully knitted spinster, like Sissy Spacek’s mom in the movie Carrie—Ok, there is a movie reference. I tend to go for those contrasts of what is usually not expected from Mexico, or how people should look like here, maybe because they stand out a lot more. Recently, I have been seeing Tarot card readers and getting my fortune read then I take a portrait or something—the fortunes are equally cool! But, I still rely on the day to day unexpected meeting of people I find in the street.

(Hin) Did there come a time when you knew that “VIP” was complete? What have you learnt from VIP
? (note – “VIP” is Mark’s monograph from 2006 – you can read more about it in this article on 2point8)

I was discovering digital then and everything was new, I was getting my feet wet, meeting strangers, I mainly used my little 4 megapixel Canon G2 camera and a 1 megapixel Rollei d7. I knew I was going to do something with them one day, but was just photographing everyday not thinking too much about when I would finish. In the end, I really couldn’t take any more pictures because my cameras had fallen apart. It took about a month to edit about three years of work for the eventual book. Though the characters themselves fit well with the Very Important Person theme, I think I learned that to make photographs is an important choice. In the end, you say something more about yourself than about the people you are photographing. Because the people and things we are attracted to probably say something deeply about why we are attracted to them in the first place. We all chisel out the world into our own little VIPs and everyone has a different kind of list. I had to go through those attractions in VIP in order to get to the people and circumstances I am photographing now.

(Hin) How strongly connected do you feel your work is to Mexico and Detroit? While the locations are obviously deeply infused within your images, do you feel that they are integral to your process? Do you have a desire to make work in other places?

By my own circumstances I have made pictures from Detroit and Mexico City. I don’t think they are integral to my process. Though these two cities have definitely given my photographs a certain feel that I don’t think I could get from any other places. I would love to go to Los Angeles and make pictures. I have never been there and a lot of people tell me there are things in common with Mexico City. Here in Mexico, I want to spend more time in Acapulco, Merida and Tijuana. I would love to eventually go to Brazil too. I hope that my pictures remain consistent no matter where I go and you could tell that I made them.

(James Hendrick) You are working across divides of culture and nationality. What are your thoughts on photographing Mexico as a foreigner? Does it constrain or Liberate you? Does having the ‘outsider perspective’ provide a unique value?

I think I feel pretty much at home in Mexico now – next year I will become a Mexican citizen, though I am sure I will never shake that otherness, outsider feeling I get here – heck, I feel that same feeling in Detroit too, and really anywhere I go. Taking pictures makes anyone into an instant outsider, looking through the glass. I think that is an important grasping point when taking pictures. You don’t need to be traveling or be a foreigner to have an outside perspective, but certainly that point of view has to be turned on at some point and that is perhaps when traveling and living something different is a great tool and button to push. Because when you go back home you gotta “hit it while it is hot” before the illusion of familiarity seeps back into view and creates a visual stupor of sorts. So it is always nice to brainwash yourself into seeing things as if they were for the first time or take trips. Plus that is a good way to keep you sharp.

(James) Have you found differences in how you are regarded as a photographer in Mexico, versus in the US? Have these differences helped you or challenged you?

Well in Mexico I can make jokes with my accent in Spanish and pretend to be the stupid Gringo. Back home in Detroit I can be the funny weird white boy in the hood. Both give me some degree of advantages. In that way photography is definitely a hustle to get the shot.

My dad is a life insurance salesman and I learned from him how to put the foot in the door. It is very manipulative and a little deceitful. In Mexico you can always be the tourist, so maybe it is a bit easier here. But in the States people really like attention while Mexicans can be are generally little more shy and reserved. But of course there are always exceptions.

(Ben) In Mexico XXI, there seems to be a few story strands woven amongst a larger whole – represented by repeated motifs. One theme that jumped out at me was that of people sleeping – but I couldn’t help linking this in my mind to the issue of mortality in the context of Mexico’s current atmosphere of violence. The place that these people (usually men) choose to sleep are streets and sidewalks; they make the viewer question momentarily whether these are violent images or merely people sleeping. was this intentional?

Society out there is pretty destructive in really direct ways and we see this splattered on the headlines on a daily bases, with the drug wars and all the decapitated heads found in coolers, the kidnappings, the general apocalyptic, deathly smog, now influenza scares–chaotic world which is Mexico City. But, I think there are a lot of sleeping lions in everyday experiences in Mexico and where we can’t quite see that sensational bite.

I honestly don’t want to directly photograph the heads rolling per say, the violence— I am content to try to find the less direct pictures or the quiet-violence or the pictures that go up against the everyday saying of “no pasa nada,” “nothing ever happens.” It seems that Mexico is always on the verge of pulling itself from failure, yet eventually sinks again into a dark and unsure time, slumbering into a world that tries to make everything seem fine again.

There are hints of this in my picture of the football team lying down meditating before a game which approaches something like a massacre but isn’t and then there is the very real picture of a long trickle of blood flowing from under a sheet that covers a man, footprints still there from when he arrived to work that morning and not knowing he would fall that day from scaffolding while painting a sculpture of a giant horse.

I kept on thinking that day how unfair and absurd that was and I thought of his family and how overpowering and how unforgiving a city can become; of course that picture wouldn’t be the same if you could see the dead body.

(Raoul Gatepin) There’s an image in your Mexico XXI series of two women holding brooms. It’s an odd scenario; did you direct the subjects in this photograph?

I wanted to take picture of the maids that were cleaning the sidewalk outside a residence. I asked them if I could take a picture of their brooms. The said ok and they unpredictably faced each-other in a mirror-like way. They were both very shy. Fantastic, I thought, and I took the picture.

(Raoul) Do you rally against setting up portraits, or are you comfortable with it?

I am very comfortable approaching people to ask them if I can take their picture. A lot of the portraits I do are done very quickly, under a minute sometimes, I like working in a rush because I don’t get too familiar to what is in front of me and fail to react to odd special moments —ultimately, the environment, background and situation inform choices as well. Approaching someone is unpredictable – people exert their own particular gravity and move in their own universe. Unexpected things happen when you are in this space photographing with someone. So the setting up process is allowing for unexpected things to happen. When people ask me if I set something up in a picture, I tell them that I really just don’t have that kind of imagination.

If you have any further questions for Mark, or think you would like to expand upon any of his thoughts, please follow up in the comments. We’d like to thank Mark for his time and patience in answering our questions. As part of the PhotoEspana 2009 festival, Mark is showing his work at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. All photographs in this interview © Mark Powell