Category: Blog

“I never think about photography…it doesn’t interest me.” Henri Catier-Bresson, 2003

“Maybe photography isn’t an art any more. Maybe it never was.” Robert Frank, 2008

Why did two of the most legendary photographers of the twentieth century give up on photography? I found myself asking this question often while viewing the beautiful new retrospective monograph, Sergio Larrain, published by Aperture.

Larrain was a recluse. After little more than a decade of professional practice, he gave up photography in the early 1970’s to live in the Chilean countryside and practice yoga. His primary form of creative expression during these years was letter writing. I recently spoke with Joseph Koudelka who reminisced about the barrage of letters Larrain would send him and his fellow Magnum photographers proselytizing his spiritual practice. Koudelka was clearly unaffected by these letters, but I wonder how Cartier-Bresson felt? Cartier-Bresson had great respect for Larrain. In fact, it was Cartier-Bresson who invited Larrain into Magnum in 1959. The Aperture book reproduces a couple of letters that Larrain wrote to Cartier-Bresson. This one was written in 1960, a year after Larrain became a full member of Magnum:

Dear Henri,

Thank you for your little note. I am always happy to hear from you. Here I am, mostly writing…doing [few] photographs.
I am puzzled…

I love photography as a visual art…as a painter loves painting, and [I] like to practice it in that way…work that sales [easy to sale] is an adaptation for me. It is like doing posters for a painter….at least I feel I lose my time.

Good photography is hard to do and takes much time for doing it. I [tried to adapt] myself since I entered your group in order to learn and get [published]…but I want to get serious again…there is the problem of markets…of getting published, of earning money…I am puzzled as I tell you and would like to find a way out of working in a level vital for me…I can’t adapt myself longer…so I write…So I think and meditate…waiting for a clear direction to grow in me…

Good bye, my love for you

Sergio

Three years later, Larrain wrote Cartier-Bresson another letter in which he seems more confident in taking the uncommercial path:

I try to do only work that I really care for. It is the only way for keeping me alive photographically, and I take as much time as I [need]. I keep myself in a slow peace, with much time for myself and doing other things, and see how photography develops…if it continues to develop… I do what I want the way I want, I feel that the rushing of journalism – being ready to jump on any story, all the time – destroy my love and concentration for work.

Unfortunately the book does not reproduce any of Larrain’s letters to Cartier-Bresson or other photographers after he quit photography in the early 1970’s. But it does include a 1987 letter he wrote to the book’s editor, Agnès Sire, a former art director at Magnum and current director of Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson. Here are some excerpts:

Good photography, or any other manifestation in man, comes from a state of grace. Grace comes when you are delivered from conventions, obligations, convenience, competition, and you are free, like a child in his first discovery of reality. You walk around in surprise, seeing reality as if [it is] for the first time….

That is why people that do creative work have to isolate themselves, they are all hermits, one way or another….

In Magnum we [saw that] with Bruce [Davidson] for example. When he just came, it was pure poetry his NY gang and what he did at that time. He got, from there, a contract with Vogue NY, as I remember, to do 4 stories a year, he got money, and the miracle has gone forever…sometimes it came back, but never [like] in the beginning…then how do you keep the light alive?

The art is to live in happiness, with love, with truth, with purity, not swallowed by mechanization…Henri did preserve that for many years.

I don’t know if Cartier-Bresson’s decision to give up photography was influenced by Sergio Larrain, but Larrain did seem to have an acute understanding of the way success corrupts artist vision. “The photographer’s tragedy is that once he achieves a certain level of quality or fame, he wants to continue and he gets completely lost,” said Larrain in a rare interview in 1976.

Another photographer equally distrustful of success is Robert Frank. In the introduction to Sergio Larrain, Agnès Sire writes about this connection:

Larrain has often been called the ‘Latin American Robert Frank’ and it is true that they shared the same desire to make room for an inner life, while continuing to integrate the heritage of classic documentary photography. Both of them also chose to turn away from photojournalism when they were quite young in order to move on to something else, and both believed that success (including and above all in the press) is dangerous for the poet.

What is peculiar about Larrain is that he had nowhere near the same level of success as Frank or Cartier-Bresson when he gave up photography. And while I very much like a number of the photographs in Sergio Larrain, I don’t think his work reached the same level of either of these masters. Nevertheless, Sergio Larrain was easily one of my favorite photo books of the year. But a large part of my admiration for the book is my fascination with Larrain’s decision to quit photography. In some ways, this desire is expressed in Larrain’s best pictures, such as the two pictures depicted on the front and rear of the book:

But ultimately the best expression of Larrain’s desire to retreat is his letter writing. Here is another passage from Larrain’s 1987 letter to Agnès Sire:

You see, in our work of hunters of miracles we have the happiness of the magic, but also the impossibility to control it…we have to be open to the muse, as they used to say … and keep eating, clothing, paying the rent…etc. I suppose it has always been like this, when the kayak hunters went to the sea, they never knew if they were going to find the whales or a storm…when we try to control things completely, boredom establish its reign; and we degrade…and at the same time, life has to keep going, always…that is why to make a good use of the hunt [we need] wisdom. To get oil for the lamps, leather for the shoes and clothing, [to] make harpoons with the bones, etc. To keep this miracle of life, in happiness, in tenderness, forming children, preserving elders, listening elders…

In the eternal moment which is reality Agnès, you have to give time to rest, to renew, as with the land, if you exhaust it, by permanently asking fruits, you disorganise the rhythm…the breathing…Silence, peace and loneliness are necessary to receive inspiration, [to] be empty for the new…for the reign to come, daily…adios.

With those words as inspiration, I think I’ll say adios to these weekly Popsicle posts. I’m wiped out after the recent Texas Triangle marathon (shooting, exhibition and publication in less than a month) and need a break from these weekly assignments. While it is frustrating to only complete 46 of the 52 posts, it isn’t like I’m quitting photography…yet.

 

It’s been a wild first week in Texas working on the LBM Dispatch. Brad Zellar and I and our terrific assistant Lily Brooks are having a ball whipsawing between megacities and cow towns in equally contrasting weather conditions. Follow our travels on Tumblr and pre-order your copy of Texas Triangle:

Also be sure to check out our pop-up show of the work in Austin at the Ransom Center, Friday December 6th at 7pm. More info HERE

Since conversing with the brilliant August Kleinzahler on stage a couple of weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of people have asked why he and I were paired together. The obvious answer is that I included his poem “Sleeping it off in Rapid City” in the catalog for my traveling exhibition, From Here To There. What’s peculiar is that I’ve never once been asked why that poem is in the book.

My simple answer is (1) I once slept off the most extreme hangover in my life at the very same historic hotel described in the poem (2) the poem is about my favorite subject: “the middle of the middle of the heart of this great land.”

Beyond this interest in place, Kleinzahler and I share an affinity for the imagery produced by the movement through place. Just look at the titles of his collections. Along with Sleeping It Off In Rapid City, there’s The Strange Hours Traveler’s Keep and his new book, Hotel Oneira. So many of the poems are about transportation and transience. Here’s a passage from the title poem of the new book:

Look at them down there by the ferry slip,
the bridal party, organza, chiffon and lace, beside themselves,
being wonderful, desperately wonderful, a pastel foam.
Behind them a tug pushes a rusted barge upriver.
Helicopters, small planes, passenger jets above.
They behave, these girls, as if this is their last chance to be thus.

You can feel the rumble of trains
vibrating up the steel of the hotel’s frame.
They move only very late at night, from three or so until dawn
north along the river and then west.
There is going on just now a vast shifting inventory
from the one place to the another. I can feel it, inside my head.

“Kleinzahler’s thematic framework generally involves exotic travel via eclectic means of conveyance,” Aaron Belz recently wrote in the SFGate, “He takes us on ferries, rumbling trains, jets, “a handcar,” “a black Hupp-Yeats” (electric automobile) to places like Zaragoza, Bockenheim, Lake Toxaway and “the fogbound Ginza.” What’s interesting to me is that Kleinzahler rarely writes about the most commonly romanticized form of transportation, the automobile. “I’m not big on road trips,” Kleinzahler once wrote in an article on Travels with Charley.

As I write this post, I’m in ‘the middle of the middle’ en route to Texas from Minnesota. I’m sometimes embarrassed on my reliance on the road trip as a source for inspiration. All I can say is that it works. For me the act of driving is analogous to the art of photography. While I move through the world in my minivan, I’m simultaneously separated from that world by the lens of the windshield. I’m there, but I’m removed, watching.

In advance of this trip to Texas I grabbed from my bookshelf Drive, They Said: Poems About Americans and Their Cars. There are plenty of clunkers and clichés and Kleinzahler is notably absent. However, the book has a poem by another one of my favorite poets: Russel Edson. This poem manages to evoke my love of driving, and the aesthetics of driving, in a totally fresh way:

The Automobile

A man had just married an automobile.

    But I mean to say, said his father, that the automobile is
not a person because it is something different.
For instance, compare it to your mother. Do you see how
it is different from your mother? Somehow it seems wider,
doesn’t it? And besides, your mother wears her hair differently.
You ought to try to find something in the world that looks
like mother.

    I have mother, isn’t that enough of a thing that looks like
mother? Do I have to gather more mothers?
They are all old ladies who do not in the least excite any
wish to procreate, said the son.

 But you cannot procreate with an automobile, said father.

   The son shows father an ignition key. See, here is a special
penis which does with the automobile as the man with the
woman; and the automobile gives birth to a place far from
this place, dropping its puppy miles as it goes.

   Does that make me a grandfather? said father.

   That makes you where you are when I am far away, said
the son.

    Father and mother watch an automobile with a just married
sign on it growing smaller in a road.

 

Last week I attended the opening reception for Project Los Altos – a multi-site exhibition in which seven artists, myself included, were commissioned by SFMoMA to make new work. Group shows of commissioned work can be hit or miss affairs, but I found Project Los Altos to be an unusually strong offering.

One of the most compelling things about the exhibition is that it doesn’t have a fixed location. During my visit I walked around town and saw work in storefronts, street corners and orchards. It feet like a treasure hunt. In order to see Mike Mills’s installation, I had to walk past the counter of an old costume shop to a storeroom in back. Even without Mills’s thoughtful installation, the shop itself was worth the trip.

One of the things Mills presented was a facsimile printing of a locally owned weekly paper, The Los Altos Town Crier, from April 7, 1976 ­– the same week that Apple was founded out of Steve Jobs’s garage in Los Altos.

While I expected the newspaper to be a shockingly dated look at social media before the advent of the personal computer, it didn’t differ all that much from current community papers. Here are some of the headlines:

Residential burglaries show 58% increase

Local groups to paint bicentennial fireplugs

Housing committee to urge aid for elderly

Couple teaches class for mature travelers

Nurse, MV policeman to pledge wedding vows

Eagles whip Spartans, 7-1

Weekly community newspapers like the Los Altos Crier inspired the work Brad Zellar and I do with The LBM Dispatch. While on our various rambles working on the Dispatch, it always comes as a bit of surprise that community life carries on. As cynical as we might become about the various social and environmental affects of our current age, people still gather in community centers, fireplugs are still painted. Looking at this issue of the Los Altos Crier, life doesn’t seem that much better or worse than it was thirty-three years ago.

But what about the future? As part of his installation, Mills made a fantastic video in which he interviewed children whose parents work in the tech industry. He asked 8 to 12 year-olds for their predictions about the future. “It’s kind of dark,” says Mills of their responses, “so many of the kids think that in the future there’s not going to be nature, there’s not going to be animals, people are going to be not as smart as they are now.“

The video is both funny and saddening. But I wonder if the children’s cynicism is unique to our age? In the 1976 Crier, I read the following:

Everyone seems to have an opinion – and usually a strong one – about whether or not our High School District should reduce its graduation requirement for English from the present three years to two.

Not long ago the requirement was for four years of English.

If the change is made, students would supplement their two years of English with two years of “communications” courses, which could include English, or such subjects as computer programming or a foreign language.

Times are changing. Maybe the fact that many of today’s kids are weak on writing skills is telling us something – possibly something slightly frightening – about the future.

The future is always frightening. There’s always a new, scary technology changing us. But as I stood in the affectionately tattered Costume Bank in Los Altos with a handful of strangers, I felt encouraged. With a little bit of effort, we can still find authentic and meaningful communal experiences.

The three or four people who follow these Popsicle posts might have noticed the lack of writing about music. The embarrassing truth is that I just don’t give it much attention. When I was young, I was a passionate record collector. I loved studying the album’s lyrics and artwork alone in my bedroom, but I lost interest when CD’s came along.

Live music has never played a big part of my life. I guess I was too much of a loner and felt self-conscious about waving a lighter all by myself. So for twenty years, music has mostly been background noise. But every now and then something causes me to prick up my ears.

Last week a random magazine assignment had me photographing a legendary underground musician who performs under a pseudonym. I took the assignment because I was intrigued by the mystique. But when I saw him perform, I was underwhelmed. The music only seemed to exist in service of propping up the fabricated persona.

The next morning while driving to work I turned on our local public radio music station, The Current. Despite being public radio, The Current mostly features a rotation of not-Top-40 but still widely circulated contemporary pop music. But on this morning they were featuring a ‘theft of the dial’ segment in which a musician takes over the DJ duties and so the rotation was disrupted.

In this case the DJ was another singer who works under a pseudonym, Father John Misty, aka Josh Tillman. I’m not sure what to think of Tillman, but I will give him credit for introducing me (and the rest of the drive-time audience) to an incredible piece of music:

When this came on the radio, I was immediately carried away into the universe of the song. What a relief, I realized later, that none of this had to do with persona. I didn’t know that Hurley, aka Dr. Snock, recorded this at age 22, a few days after being released from the psychiatric wing of Bellevue Hospital. Nor did I know that it was recorded on the same reel-to-reel machine that taped Lead Belly’s Last Sessions.

“If Michael Hurley were just a little crazier, he’d be huge,” wrote the LA Weekly, “If he wore a funny hat like Sun Ra and was obsessed with, say, lawnmowers or parakeets, maybe more people would pay attention.”

After hearing “The Tea Song,” I realized that I should pay more attention. – not just to Hurley, but to music generally. I might just go out and buy the record.