Category: Blog

The purpose of these weekly blog assignments is to raise the bar of my cultural consumption. When I was in my twenties, I listened to John Zorn and read John Ashbery. But I got lazy after drinking the midlife cocktail of career and kids. I might have a dozen foreign documentaries in my Nexflix cue, but when the kids finally get to sleep, all I want is to do is take a bath in Breaking Bad.

I thought a lot about the different roles that culture plays in one’s lifetime while watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker, and reading Geoff Dyer’s recent book-length homage to the film, Zona. Dyer first saw Stalker in his twenties and it has haunted him ever since.  Midway through the book, Dyer discusses the role of age in his response to the film:

The prominent place occupied in my consciousness by Stalker is almost certainly bound up with the fact that I saw it at a particular time in my life. I suspect it is rare for anyone to see their – what they consider to be the – greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it’s extremely unlikely. After fifty, impossible.

The most important film in my life was Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) by Wim Wenders. Like Stalker, it is a late-70’s art house film that challenges viewers with a slow pace and nearly three-hour running time. In the case of both films, the way this time is experienced is largely what makes it potentially life-altering. But excluding the benefits of a good nap, can one’s life be altered significantly by a film after the age of forty?

It turns out I was thoroughly engaged by Stalker. Like Kings of the Road, it is something of a road movie. Three men take a forbidden journey into “the zone” in search for “the room” where all of one’s wishes are realized. While there isn’t much of a story, there is suspense. Will they safely find the room? What will happen when they get there?

What I enjoyed most about Stalker was the amount of time I had to consider these questions (and many others) during the course of the film. A traditional thriller is often described as a roller coaster ride. In Stalker, the peaks and valleys have been flattened and the viewer has time to look out at the landscape and consider the meaning of the journey. This is literally the case in a railroad scene that Dyer names “one of the great sequences in the history of cinema.”

While putting this post together, I looked up the YouTube clip of this scene. It is fascinating to see how utterly stripped of meaning it is when viewed as a three-minute excerpt on the web. “Stalker is a literal journey that is also a journey into cinematic space and – in tandem – into time,” writes Dyer. So to experience this scene outside of that space is to not experience it at all. I’m reminded of the way I watched The Tree of Life on an airplane monitor over the course of two transatlantic flights.

Here is a quote by Tarkovsky and Dyer’s response:

‘If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.’ This is Tarkovsky’s aesthetic in a nutshell. At first there is a friction between our experience of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last – and no one can concentrate on anything – for longer than about two seconds.

The great pleasure of watching Stalker was to finally have an escape from moron-time. But was my life changed? Can such a thing even happen to someone in his forties? The more I think about Stalker, the more this seems to be the very subject of the film. The three characters in Stalker are all middle-aged and world-weary. All are coming to the Zone in hopes of changing the course of their lives. At the end of the jouney/film, all three men return to the bar where they started. While they have all experienced something monumental, none appears fundamentally changed. Only the one child in the film seems capable of channeling the room’s magical forces.

I loved Stalker. But it couldn’t quite take me to the same transformative place that Kings of the Road did. Perhaps that kind of epic transformation is reserved for the young.

A recent study suggests that “Facebook envy” affects one in three users of the site.  Family happiness was noted as a particular source of grief and vacation photos the greatest cause of resentment.

I confess I felt similar pangs of envy while reading Tamara Shopsin’s memoir, MUMBAI  NEW YORK  SCRANTON. The book starts with Shopsin and her husband vacationing in India. It didn’t help that I read about their travels while on my own family vacation to Wisconsin Dells. While Shopsin and her husband visit neglected museums and hunt for arcane mementos, I was staying at Kalahari – the 2^nd largest indoor waterpark resort in the country – with several thousand other miserable Midwestern families.

Nor did it help that Shopsin’s husband is Jason Fulford. Not only is Fulford one of my favorite photographers and publishers, he appears to be an unusually sweet husband. He calls Shopsin “beach ball,” sends her postcards while they are traveling together, and comforts her by resting his chin on her eye.

Like the most lyrical status updates you’ve ever seen, the couple’s photographs and illustrations sprinkled throughout the book are only more cause for envy. But even without the artwork, Shopsin and Fulford are able to make a trip to the grocery store charmingly romantic:

Jason pushes the cart. He calls it a “buggy.” This and calling any kind of soda “Coke” are all that’s left of his Southern accent

People study meditation for twenty years to clear their minds of worry and distraction. Jason and I go to Wegman’s.

The first stop is always produce. Jason gets the standards. Green beans, Fuji apples, baby carrots and so on. I find the curve-balls like fennel or beets. The fish department has misters in the cases. We hold hands and pick out a salmon fillet because it has omega-3. I remember we need peanut butter and am rewarded with a kiss. The ritual takes an hour, costs $125, and will feed us for a week.

Not only did reading this make me envious (why don’t I grocery shop with my wife, much less while holding her hand?), I felt guilty for feeling envious (why can’t I be more self-assured like Tamara and Jason?).

After drowning my self-pity in Amstel Light on the fake beach of Kalahari, I read on. It actually takes a long time for Shopsin to get to the “harrowing adventure” described on the book’s dust jacket. On his Facebook page, Shopsin’s friend John Hodgeman describes it this way:

There is a THING THAT HAPPENS in this book, and I knew what it was, and what a devastating surprise it was, and what happened after…

And when I finally did reach the moment where THE THING THAT HAPPENS started to happen, I audibly gasped in surprise, which I never usually do. I realized suddenly that every sentence led to this inevitable thing, and hinted at it, and I should have known all along.

I too was surprised by THE THING THAT HAPPENS. And it was fascinating to see the way it shaped my understanding of everything that preceded it. Suddenly, the stroll through the supermarket made sense. Shopsin was seeing the scene with the precision of an artist and the gratitude of a survivor. My envy vanished.

The morning after finishing MUMBAI  NEW YORK  SCRANTON, I discovered the omelet bar at the Kalahari’s breakfast buffet. I loaded up my bowl with onions, mushrooms and jalapeno peppers. When the omelet was done, I smothered it in Tabasco and Sriracha. I sat next to my wife and enjoyed every bite.  I even considered posting a picture on Facebook.

It is a humbling experience for a bookmaker to troll the endless aisles of the New York Art Book Fair. But it also provides an invaluable learning experience. After scanning hundreds of books, one invariably jumps off the table demanding attention (and acquisition).

One of the books that did this for me this year was Dalston Anatomy by Lorenzo Vitturi. The first thing to catch my eye was the book’s cover. Or covers. The 500 copies of Dalston Anatomy are bound in a variety of vibrantly patterned Vlisco fabrics. The books cry out to be touched. Fortunately this tactile quality isn’t lost when opening the book. If anything, Dalston Anatomy is an ode to the sensual pleasures of the bustling marketplace.

All of the images in Dalston Anatomy were all made at London’s Ridley Road Market. We see a cacophony of texture and color: Afro’s and braids, fruit and balloons, bright paint and windswept tarps. Intermixed within this sensual frenzy are Vitturi’s sculptures made on site at the market.

One of my favorite things about Dalston Anatomy is the way these sculptures are so seamlessly intermixed with Vitturi’s photographs. This book isn’t a boring treatise on the distinction between sculpture and photography. It is a fluid, almost musical incorporation of different mediums and cultural influences.

In last week’s Popsicle, I discussed Tim Davis’s essay on the fear of humor in photography. Davis claims that the artists most likely to feature humor in their work are neither self-proclaimed photographers nor A.W.U.P.s (Artists Who Use Photography). “The nakedest and least ashamed photographers,” he writes, “are usually sculptors.”

Vitturi’s unpretentious use of sculpture in Dalston Anatomy isn’t just humorous, it’s joyous. The fact that this joyousness makes the book sing should be a lesson for photographers and bookmakers. Whether it is in the crowded markets of Ridley Road or PS1, audiences will always be drawn to jubilant music.

The purpose of this weekly Popsicle assignment (I tell myself as I frantically write under a self-imposed deadline) is to remember to take pleasure in my cultural consumption. The truth is that there hasn’t been a lot of consumption these last couple of weeks. I’ve been too busy playing Ping Pong.

But I did manage a little bit of airplane magazine reading. It has been years since I’ve subscribed to a photo magazine, but the redesigned Aperture is a must read. Not only is it larger, thicker and more lushly printed than before, it is chock-full of text. After the endless waves of Insta-Tumblr, what a relief to be forced to shut my phone off on the plane and engage with thoughtful writing about photography.

The theme of the current issue is ‘Playtime’ and there are excellent pieces on Erwin Wurm, Christian Marclay, Jacques Tati, American conceptual humorists of the 60’s-70’s and contemporary Swiss photographers using comedy. But my favorite essay is ‘Photogeliophobia: Fear of Funny Photography’ by Tim Davis. “There are no published case studies of Geliophobia, the fear of laughter,” writes Davis, “but the History of Visual Art mostly is one. Despite how unbearable life would be without it, artists get anxious letting laughter leak into their work.”

Later in the essay Davis goes on to quote the patron saint of these Popsicle essays, George Saunders:

I just started writing these Dr. Seuss poems after seven or eight years of doing just Hemingway. And that night I just brought it home and threw it on the table…and after the kids were in bed I heard my wife laughing in the other room. Like Christmas morning I peeked around the corner and she’s laughing at my stuff, actually having pleasure in it…I had just written a 700 page novel…in a Joycean voice…so to see someone taking pleasure in it was just unreal…After that I said OK, so, you are heretofore permitted to be funny.
-George Saunders, The Sound of Young America Podcast

During the course of an interview with Araki last week in Tokyo, he looked at my book Sleeping by the Mississippi. “Why do you take pictures that are so sad,” he asked, “they all look like graves in a graveyard.” One of the answers, I suppose, is that I too have suffered from geliophobia. But in the years since working on Mississippi and Niagara, I’ve tried to loosen up and give myself permission to be lighthearted.

One result is LBM’s most recent book Ping Pong. This project came about after years of collecting vernacular pictures of my beloved semi-sport. The thing I cherish about these photos is their whimsy. Ping Pong isn’t boxing; it isn’t a brutal metaphor for our primitive aggressiveness. As Pico Iyer writes in the book, “Ping Pong is a lifestyle, a training in attention, a diversion, a mad passion and a way of not taking anything important too seriously and taking some tiny things much too seriously.”

Last Friday night LBM hosted a Ping Pong party in New York. In attendance I saw Paul Graham, Todd Hido, Susan Meiselas and many other acclaimed photographers. It was glorious to see all of these fantastic artists having fun and not taking themselves too seriously. I hope that now and again photographers allow themselves to convey this same spirit in their work.