Category: Blog

During our recent Summer Camp for Socially Awkward Storytellers, one of the participants made a compelling point about children’s books. He said that when he thinks about these books, he rarely remembers the story. For him, the book is more of a place than it is a story.

After reflecting on this argument, I found myself agreeing. The place that a story takes me is more important than the mechanics of how I get there. But the story, more often than not, is the vehicle for getting there.

But that doesn’t mean this vehicle needs to be anything fancy. In preparation for camp, I watched a video by Ira Glass on creating radio stories. Glass defines a story as simply being a sequence of actions. “A story in its purest form,” says Glass, “is someone saying ‘this happened, and it led to this next thing, and that led to this next thing.’” A story doesn’t have to have an Aristotelian arc, or any sort of plot whatsoever.

I thought about this simple definition while reading the nine short stories by the legendary Manga/Geika artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi collected in the book Good-Bye. Some of the stories in the collection have dramatic tension, but most are a straightforward series of actions.

One of my favorite stories, for example, is ‘Night Falls Again.’ It starts with a homely young man at a peep show being called a pervert by a stripper. He leaves, follows a pretty girl on the street, and gets called a pervert again. In a park, after seeing a couple make out, he masturbates. On the train home, he vomits. The next morning while walking in the park, he sees pigeons pecking at his semen from previous night. After going to work and being ridiculed by his boss, he walks the streets at night and stares at more women. The story ends with him going back to the peep show.

This story has absolutely no plot. And with the exception of the pigeons, noting memorable happens. But the desperately lonely place this story took me was unforgettable.

Would I be able to get to the place if the story was removed? I’m imagining a series of photographs: a stripper, a girl on the street, pigeons, vomit, more girls on the street. It sounds gritty and potentially engaging. But what about those pigeons? Without knowing the story of the protagonist, would the image be so unforgettable?

 

The other day while getting a haircut, the barber asked the dreaded question – what do you do? It’s an easy answer, but the inevitable follow up is deadly – What do you photograph? After my conversation-killing response – lot’s of stuff, it’s hard to explain – I slumped down in the barber chair into the quicksand of self-questioning.

The protagonist of Italo Calvino’s short story ‘The Adventures of a Photographer’ engages in a similar form of oppositional self-definition.

When spring comes, the city’s inhabitants, by the hundreds of thousands, go out on Sundays with leather cases over their shoulders. And they photograph one another…Seeing a good deal of his friends colleagues, Antonion Paraggi, a nonphotographer, sensed a growning isolation. Every week he discovered that the conversations of those who praise the sensitivity of a filter or discourse on the number of DINs were swelled by the voice of yet another to whom he had confided until yesterday, convinced that they were shared, his remarks about an activity that to him seemed so unexciting, so lacking in surprises.

Instead of just continuing to argue against the practice, Antonio experiments with a form of anti-photography. Whenever he’d see a family organizing itself for an impromptu portrait, Antonio offered to take the camera. But in each case he would “make the lens veer to capture the masts of ships or the spires of steeples, or to decapitate grandparents, uncles and aunts.” He insists that his reason for doing this isn’t mean-spirited, but philosophical.

“… Because once you’ve begun,” he would preach, “there is no reason why you should stop. The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. If you take a picture of Pierluca because he’s building a sand castle, there is no reason not to take his picture while he’s crying because the castle has collapsed, and then while the nurse consoles him by helping him find a sea shell in the sand. The minute you start saying “Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!” you are already close to the view of the person who think that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.”

Antonio’s argument is as good as any for why I hadn’t joined Instagram. But as the title of Calvino’s story suggests, Antonio eventually does become a photographer. “His antiphotographic polemic could be fought only from within the black box,” writes Calvino.  In a similar spirit, I eventually gave Instagram a try. Just like Antonio, I tried to make photos that were more about ideas than pretty pictures. But then, without irony or conceptual forethought, I felt compelled to post a cute picture of my cat. To make matters worse, this picture received more ‘likes’ than any other picture I’d posted. Just like Antonio, I fell into a philosophical tailspin.

What do you photograph?

The next time I’m asked this question, I’m just going to say my cat.

 

This week my daughter and I made an unplanned visit to The Walker Art Center. What’s the point of this? Carmen asked when we came across Sherry Levine’s Black Mirror in the permanent collection. I considered giving a clumsy lecture on Duchamp and Ad Reinhart, but just shrugged my shoulders and moved on.

In an exhibition on contemporary abstract painting, we came across a curled sheet of photographic paper by Matt Connors called Lisp (green). Once again Carmen asked for an explanation. Not knowing anything about Connors, and still not wanting to give the Duchamp for Dummies talk, I just said that art doesn’t need to be fancy, that it can be just about anything, even an idea. She gave me her patented I-see-through-your-grown-up-bullshit look.

Next we visited a mid-career survey exhibition of the Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas. Before she was able to ask me any questions, we both read a statement by Cruzvillegas on the wall:

For the first twenty years of my life I watched the slow construction of the house where my family lived; we all took part in the process. Against the background of a mass invasion of immigrants from the countryside, who needs – like housing – were very specific, the construction of my house, of my colonia (district), began in the 1960s, in an area of volcanic rock (Pedregales de Coyoacán) in the south of Mexico City…

Because it was built with no funding and no architectural plan, today the house looks chaotic, almost unusable, yet every detail, every corner has a reason to be where it is…

Buckminster Fuller said that matter should be organized by sympathy, a concept that I apply to my collections of objects, images, and sounds as well as my three-dimensional wok.

Through minimal transformations, with no explanations or stories and possibly without much skill, my work is the proof that I am alive.

The irony is that this wall placard was a story and as such provided a way into the work for Carmen (and her father). Cool, look at that – she said pointing to a very simple sculpture of scarves hanging off bamboo fishing rods. I’m still not sure if Carmen and I were responding to Cruzvillegas’ aesthetic sympathy or to his story, but as we circled the exhibition for a second time, we were utterly charmed.

To try to get a better grip on Cruzvillegas, I purchased the exhibition catalog, The Autoconstrucción Suites. Designed by Dante Carlos and Emmet Byrne, the book masterfully communicates the spirit of Cruzvillegas’ work. The highlight, for me, was the manifesto-like definitions scattered alphabetically throughout the book. Here are some of my favorites

affirmative: All projects to be made out of nothing, considering them both separately and as a whole, as a challenge for doing things as optimistically as possible, even in the worst situation, standing for something, believing.

blind date: Accepting work, art, reality, as a love affair: it can grow or it can collapse.

communal: Sharing, exchanging, bartering as dynamics in projects: information, experience, knowledge, technique, tools, language, are goods for this. It is a capital beyond money. Exhibitions and projects are generous this way as open fields in which individuals wander, finding peers to be with. Exhibitions are archipelagos of solitudes.

definitely unfinished: My identity. Exhibitions are places where nouns and verbs of sentences to be completed are presented. Artworks are only completed – many different ways, even contradictory – through interpretation. They are completed or transformed by people, curators, other animals, other artworks, context.

emotional: I can’t avoid being in love, sad, or angry, and it makes me cry.

fragmentary: Contradictory elements making a whole; there’s no chance for mistakes. Tales are short moments of experience or imagination. Married pieces from clashing contexts make beautiful conversations. A book of tales makes a universe.

generous: Providing things and/or knowledge to oneself is more generous than promising or pretending to give messages to anybody. I think of projects as shares or bits of my life-term research

happy: I’m pregnant.

inefficient: Well done, badly done, undone. Many times it is better to leave things undone, definitely unfinished.

joyful: Inventing the rules of a game to be played every day in different ways. Rules are dictated from specific needs; then it can be played capriciously, with ingenuity and pleasure. If the game can be played collectively, it could be better, depending on the people you invite and on their will to share, learn, and take risks together.

renewed: Renewing commitment and engagement is crucial to keep works and life fresh. Renovating the contract comes from opening the eyes, ears, and heart. Sometimes it’s necessary to conclude instead of renewing. You then renovate yourself, your practice, vocabulary, language, discourse, work. Destruction is not necessarily the opposite of construction: you can construct a new door by hammering a wall.

warm: A warm system means an organic organization of re-arrangeable elements, in which subjectivity, affection, emotion, but mostly needs, rule. An exhibition or a book can be warm systems.

After reading Cruzvillegas’ warm book and exhibition, I felt renewed. I walked outside and gazed upon the dead patches on our lawn (that none of our neighbors have) and my children’s scattered toys (that every other parent picks up), and for once wasn’t annoyed:

Not long after photographing this autoconstrucción, I decided to set aside my long held hostility toward Instagram and gave it a try. Would it be possible, I wondered, to approach this communal and fragmentary medium with the spirit of generosity as Cruzvillegas describes it (providing things and/or knowledge to oneself as shares or bits of life-term research)?

It’s too early to tell. All I can say is I’m Pregnant!

 

Since the family album is the progenitor of the photobook, I occasionally collect stranger’s albums to see what I can learn. I recently purchased an album of a Westerner named Frank traveling in Japan in the 1950’s. It is fascinating to try and read the visual clues and piece together his story. Is he a soldier who remained in Japan after the war? Is he on a spiritual quest (there are a number of pictures of a man he simply calls ‘The Priest’)? What is his nationality (he calls his pictures ‘Fotos’)?

In many ways, the lack of information, the freedom to imagine Frank’s story, is what makes the pictures come alive. If Frank were a family member whom I knew everything about, the same book would have an entirely different aesthetic engine.

I thought about Frank and the power of photographic mystery while watching Ross McElwee’s 2011 documentary film, Photographic Memory (available streaming on Netflix). Like all of McElwee’s movies, Photographic Memory is a first person autobiographical film that explores a number of big themes (parenthood, adolescence, creativity). But the central mystery that propels the narrative is this photograph:

This picture is of a woman named Maud who was McElwee’s girlfriend while he was a 20-year-old living abroad in France. McElwee was an aspiring photographer at the time, but he wasn’t the one who made this picture. In fact, he only took two or three pictures of Maud, all from a great distance. But this is the picture that he carried in his wallet for a year after leaving France. McElwee shows this photograph several times throughout the film, as though he is implanting it in the viewer’s own memory.

At the beginning of Photographic Memory, McElwee doesn’t even remember Maud’s last name. But over the course of the film, he returns to France and learns not only who made the picture but also the photographer’s fascinating back-story.

But will McElwee track down Maude? Late into the film, it is uncertain weather or not he will ever find her. Then, when he finally gets her contact information, he’s uncertain whether or not he really wants to see her. Will it destroy the mystery?

Having imprinted the beatific image of the young Maude into the viewer’s mind, the audience is left with a similar mix of curiosity and trepidation. Forty years later, will Maude’s skyward gaze have lost its buoyant, dreamy beauty?

Do you really want to know the story of Maude (or Frank), or do you want to imagine it? That is not only the central question of this film; it is one of the most vexing questions facing photographers and storytellers.

I still can’t tell you much about Frank. But if you want see what Maude looks like now, click here. But are you really sure you want to do it?

Of the twenty-two Popsicle posts I’ve written this year, my favorite was last week’s post on Reality Hunger. But it was also the longest one I’ve written. I’m certain that very few readers managed to make their way through the whole damn thing.  I was even more certain after reading an article on Slate entitled ‘You Won’t Finish This Article – Why People Online Won’t Read To The End.’

I’m as guilty of this as everyone else (I skimmed the Slate article). That is why I need a printed version of everything I want to read seriously. It is the only way I can truly digest the material.

Which brings me back to this quote from George Saunders (for the 3^rd time in 23 posts):

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another… The writer… can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit… The black box is meant to change us.

After reading Reality Hunger, I was interested to see how Saunders would treat the black box of non-fiction. Unsurprisingly, he’s very good. My favorite essay in the book is about a teenager in India meditating under a tree for months without food or water. The essay is very much in the spirit of Reality Hunger in that it ends up being as much about George Saunders, and the reader, as it is about the boy in India.

I noted two general reactions to the statement Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

One type of American—let’s call them Realists—will react by making a snack-related joke (“So he finally gets up, and turns out he’s sitting on a big pile of Butterfinger wrappers!”) and will then explain that it’s physically impossible to survive even one week without food or water, much less seven months.

A second type—let’s call them Believers—will say, “Wow, that’s amazing,” they wish they could go to Nepal tomorrow, and will then segue into a story about a transparent spiritual being who once appeared on a friend’s pool deck with a message about world peace.

Try it: Go up to the next person you see, and say, Hey, I heard this kid in Nepal has been meditating uninterruptedly in the jungle for the past seven months without any food or water.

 See what they say.

 Or say it to yourself, and see what you say.

 What I said, finally, was: This I have to see.

The thing that drives Saunders’ narrative, the reason we read to the end, is that we’ll eventually get to ‘see’ the boy too, through Saunders’ eyes.

How frustrating, then, to look up the article on GQ online and see a picture of the Buddha Boy at the very top of the page. (DON’T CLICK ON THIS LINK if you have any interest in reading this fantastic story). The picture completely undermines the suspense of the narrative.

In an essay entitled ‘The Perfect Gerbil,’ Saunders talks about storytelling:

When I was a kid I had one of these Hot Wheels devices designed to look like a little gas station. Inside the gas station were two spinning rubber wheels. One’s little car would weakly approach the gas station, then be sent forth by the spinning rubber wheels to take another lap around the track, or more often, fly out and hit one’s sister in the face.

A story can be thought of as a series of these little gas stations. The main point is to get the reader around the track; that is, to the end of the story. Any other pleasures a story may offer (theme, character, moral uplift) are dependent on this…

So if the writer can put together enough gas stations, of sufficient power, distributed at just the right places around the track, he wins: the reader works his way through the full execution of the pattern, and is ready to receive the end of the story.

My primary goal with LBM is to experiment with the combination of photographs and text in book form. Rather than serving as speed-bump illustrations, it is instructive to think of photographs as functioning like little narrative gas stations. Putting the picture of Buddha Boy at the beginning of the story is like putting all of the gas stations at the beginning of a road trip.

Midway through Saunders’ story, the subject of photography comes up when he finally encounters the Buddha Boy:

The young monk says something to Subel, who tells me it’s time to take my photo. My photo? I have a camera but don’t want to risk disturbing the boy with the digital shutter sound. Plus, I don’t know how to turn off the flash, so I will be, at close range, taking a flash photo directly into the boy’s sight line, the one thing explicitly prohibited by that sign back there.

“You have to,” Subel says. “That’s how they know you’re a journalist.”

I hold up my notebook. Maybe I could just take some notes?

“They’re simple people, man,” he says. “You have to take a photo.”

The problem with the GQ website is that they are basically saying the same thing to their audience: “They’re simple people, man.” This is essentially the thesis of the title essay in The Braindead Megaphone. So I’ll end with this gas station:

Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

Megaphone Guy is the storyteller, but his stories are not so good. Or rather, his stories are limited. His stories have not had time to gestate ­– they go out too fast and to too broad an audience. Storytelling is a language-rich enterprise, but Megaphone Guy does not have time to generate powerful language. The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don’t know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them­–if the storytelling is good enough–we imagine them as being, essentially, like us.

#1) While browsing in a bookstore for this week’s popsicle, it occurred to me that the act of looking for a book is often as much of a learning experience as the book I eventually read.

#2) On a fruitless search for James Wood’s book, How Fiction Works, I stumbled upon Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. Normally any self-proclaimed ‘manifesto’ written after 1960 is something I wouldn’t pick up, but then I got sucked in by the blurbs.

#3) I’ve just finished reading Reality Hunger and I’m lit up by it –astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed…It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous visionary volume. – Johnathan Lethem

#4) Opening the book, I noticed that rather than chapters, Reality Hunger is divided into 618 short sections. I read the first few.

#5) Number Three: An artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming. What are its key components? A deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional. (What, in the last half century, has been more influential than Abraham Zapruder’s Super-8 of the Kennedy assassination?) Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity, self-ethnography, anthropological autobiography; a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.

#6) I bought the book and devoured it as quickly as I could.

#7) Number Two-Hundred-Thirty-Nine: Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real,” semblances of the real. We want to pose something nonfictional against all the fabrication–autobiographical frissons or framed or filmed or caught moments that, in their seeming unrehearsedness, possess at least the possibility of breaking through the clutter. More invention, more fabrication aren’t going to do this. I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels.

#8) A lot of what Shield’s talks about made me think about the work I’ve been doing the last few years. He made one remark that might just be the mission statement for my current project, The LBM Dispatch.

#9) Number Five-Hundred-Six (excerpt): Walt Whitman once said, “The true poem is the daily paper.” Not, though, the daily paper as it’s published: both straight-ahead journalism and airtight art are, to me, insufficient; I want instead something teetering excitedly in between.

#10) As much as I enjoyed the book, there was one thing that was nagging at me.

#11) Number Five-Hundred-Fifty-Three: Literary intensity is inseparable from self-indulgence and self-exposure.

#12) James Wood writes about Reality Hunger saying “He [Shields] rants a bit, apparently fearful that if he were quieter we would not believe in his sincerity; hungry for his own reality, certainly, he also mentions himself a great deal.”

#13) Throughout the book, Shields makes reference to Phillip Lopate’s introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay. I tracked down a copy and was struck by one section entitled ‘The Problem of Egotism.’ All personal essayists “have had to wrestle with the stench of the ego,” writes Lopate, “A person can write about himself from angles that are charmed, fond, delightfully nervy; alter the lens just a little and he crosses over into gloating, pettiness, defensiveness, score settling (which includes self-hate), or whining about his victimization.”

#14) As usual, when I read about literature, I think about photography. More often than not this gets me to thinking about Robert Frank. What makes The Americans so great, I think, is that it is the work of a profoundly introspective artist looking outward. The scales are balanced. While I love some of Frank’s later work, much of it looks like it was made by a sixteen year old emo kid drowning in introspection. I wish he’d spent more time after The Americans pushing back out into the world.

#15) My least favorite Popsicle reading thus far was The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson. I wrote this in my post: “Johnson is adamant that art speak the truth. Though defining himself as a novelist, Johnson was opposed to fiction. “Telling stories is telling lies,” he famously wrote, “The two terms, truth and fiction, are opposites.” Consequently, the pamphlets in The Unfortunates read less like a novel than like artful Facebook status updates from a depressed, self-absorbed acquaintance.”

#16) One of the favorite things I’ve read all year was Jess Walter’s non-fiction essay that closes his book of short stories, We Live in Water. Entitled ‘Statistical Abstract for My Home of Spokane, Washington’ the piece consists of fifty numbered sections. Many of these sections simply consist of factual information about Spokane.

#17) Number Six: On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children’s BMX bikes than in any other city in the world.

#18) Intermixed with this data are personal stories and observations by Walter about his hometown.

#19) Number Twenty-Seven: I remember back when I was a newspaper reporter, I covered a hearing filled with South Hill homeowners, men and women from old-money Spokane, vociferously complaining about a group home going into their neighborhood. They were worried about falling property values, rising crime, and “undesirables.” An activist I spoke to called these people NIMBYs. It was the first time I’d heard the term. I thought he meant NAMBLA—the North American Man/Boy Love Association. That seemed a little harsh to me.

#20) I love that Walter balances his own experience with hard data about his hometown. Instead of being lost in the double mirror of solipsism, Walter keeps looking out the window.

#21) My favorite Robert Frank picture is his View From A Hotel Window in Butte, Montana. It is both a picture of Butte and a self-portrait:

#22) I lose Frank when he makes pictures like Sick of Goodby’s (1978)

#23) In 1977 Robert Frank said something in an interview that might just be the mission statement for the entire Little Brown Mushroom enterprise: “If I continued with still photography, I would try to be more honest and direct about why I go out there and do it. And I guess the only way I could do it is with writing. I think that’s one of the hardest things to do—combine words and photographs. But I would certainly try it. It would probably fail; I have never liked what I wrote about my photographs yet. That would be the only way I could justify going out in the streets and photographing again.”

#24) In Lines of My Hand (1972) Robert Frank shows four pictures of smiling high school kids from Port Gibson Mississippi:

#25) The picture is accompanied by the following text:

KIDS: What are you doing here? Are you from New York?
ME: I´m just taking pictures.
KIDS: Why?
ME: For myself – just to see…
KIDS: He must be a communist. He looks like one.
Why don´t you go to the other side of town and watch the niggers play?

#26) Shield’s ends Reality Hunger with a quote from Anne Carson’s book Decreation:

#27) Number Six-Hundred-Eighteen: Part of what I enjoy in documentary is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because one can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous. Let us see who controls the danger.