from Gerhard Richter, Atlas (begun 1964)

Hans-Peter Feldmann: The Hugo Boss Award

The quote, or more properly, misquote (probably), is from Thomas Bernhard: In one of the books he wrote that getting a prize is society's way of shitting on you. It has been many years since I first encountered what is probably a genuine misread, yet in whatever error it exists in my memory, it has somehow stayed with me, as a call to stoicism contra the capricious vulgarity of any sort of award.

At this point I am from an older generation when awards had a clearer caste system: When Pia Zadora getting the Golden Globe was kitsch both for Zadora AND the Golden Globe, for example (& one could appreciate Pia Zadora even more for being such an ebullient prize winner, but of what?). Awards add luster & validation to the most routine entertainments - my sense is in the future the database of awards will function as a social mirror much in the same way that advertisements can, as embodiments which seem full in their time, & afterwards act more as a graph of lost illusions.

Last week I saw the Hans-Peter Feldmann installation at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in conjunction with his award of this year's Hugo Boss Award, which comes with a grant of $100,000. Feldmann's installation is lining the walls & posts of the gallery with 100,000 US dollar bills, pinned in even rows, floor to ceiling.

The gallery is large. Before I saw the installation, I had wondered if 100,000 dollar bills covers a little or a lot. There is some overlap involved which makes me think that it did involve some creative geometry to include all the bills. US money is remarkably drab - the neo-classical graphics are lugubrious both in dull, narrow monochromic tones & in all-too-official, historicizing imagery. The sober tonalities line what is otherwise a brilliantly white cube contemporary gallery. The dollars look like some dull reptilian scale. That week, my friend S. whose interests are in the realm of haute couture & what he terms luxe, told me about a $40,000 handbag made of wild crocodile he had seen. Unlike such a luxe handbag (well, at least for some), seeing $100,000 pinned to the walls is extremely static & uninteresting, which is I am guessing, precisely the point, or a point - I think there's a lot going on with this installation.

The Hugo Boss Award is a global art prize: it presupposes a globalized art economy, presumably without national borders. There's a lot of conceit in this: one could still stake out borders within this magical Everywhere. "Global" is for a "global" class which excludes most of the globe. A "global" award functions like any global corporate action. It is not art which is the global Esperanto linking all, but the economy itself, & in things like the Hugo Boss Award, or the Guggenheim franchise (from NYC to Abu Dhabi), it is all luxe decoration, & perhaps not as satisfying as a wild crocodile handbag. One looks sadly for more purpose than that, & come up short. It reminds me of a visual pun in Jacques Tati: an office lined with travel posters for far-flung places of the world, all of which look identical.

The installation was remarkably empty, in fact it was downright peaceful. Other than seeing 2 boys stopped from photographing one another posing with wide-open arms in front of the plenitude of dollars, there isn't much to do in the gallery per se, although I found it remarkably moving, perhaps because of its visual spareness, & that it could function without the existence of any art object. If anything, going into the next gallery, for an installation of post-Impressionist paintings from the Thannhauser Collection, which included, immediately, a spectacular Van Gogh of the mountains of St Remy, & a Gauguin Tahitian fantasy of a near-nude boy with a horse in a jungle, both of which I could describe flippantly as masterpieces, was quite jarring. & if anything, $100,000 could buy a few inches of these paintings at best. & masterpiece quality aside, these paintings looked like psychedelic posters in comparison.

Feldmann's installation made $100,000 look insubstantial, even a bit unreal - excuse the pun, but it just didn't "add up." It was not like seeing the interior of Fort Knox like in Goldfinger - it had nothing precious or prized about it at all. & it was neither cynical or ironic - if anything it reminded me more of simply pulling a few dollars out of my pocket, when that is all there is, rather than any artistic strategy.

There were crowds, mostly of tourists, going into the Guggenheim, most of which was closed for the Lee Ufan show. A well-dressed woman pushed past me in the revolving door saying she was here "FOR THE FELDMANN!" as was I - & I never saw her in the gallery, either. The more show-stopping Van Goghs & Gauguins were mere steps away, after all.

The quietness of Feldmann's gesture of the installation impressed me, as well as the larger issues at hand: the airy symbolism of money, its teetering between worth & worthlessness, its use as a kind of black mirror in which one could see the commodity of art reflected in it. Money has a different presence for those with or without it. Given that almost any thing per se can be used in art-making in a "post-medium" art world (which is also global, of course), it still has a sense of being artless, even with the methodical if not decorative mode of pinning the dollars to the walls. The greenish tones of the dollars made the gallery feel like one were at the bottom of a very still pool.

I think of Feldmann's books & collections of ephemeral images - all of them modestly scaled. One of my secret tests with my professors & colleagues is to see how they react to Feldmann's work - does it have any impact or not? Feldmann is not that well known in the US & the only large-scale show with his involvement that I know of is The Last Picture Show which I saw at the Walker Art Center. I have a few rumpled issues of Ohio Magazine as well - another litmus test. Perhaps in the US the everyday is supposed to be be more special, & it can be jarring to sense that it actually not, visually, or otherwise.

greetings from Ithaca, NY

What hath God wrought? was the message Samuel Morse telegraphed between Washington DC & Baltimore in 1844 to demonstrate the efficacy of the technology. The telegraph lines were built by Ezra Cornell, who built a great fortune from such construction, which, in turn, funded the university where I will reside for 2 years.

Herve Guibert, Ghost Image

Herve Guibert's L'Image fantome was published initially in 1982. The English translation, Ghost Image (Green Integer), by Robert Bononno, I have came out in 1996, from Sun & Moon Press, and is available currently from Green Integer Press. The book is comprised of short written pieces which were published originally in Le Monde. A posthumous volume, La Photo, inéluctablement, was published in 1999, which has not yet appeared in English.

Guibert, known primarily for his books, also photographed. Several years ago I saw an exhibition of his photos at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, on upper Fifth Ave., just below the Met, & I have a book published by Schirmer/Mosel. From 1993! (It seems so not so long ago).

The pieces in Ghost Image are short, some the length of a paragraph. Although notable photographers are mentioned (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, August Sander), the pieces discuss photography in the everyday: Family photos, identity photos, album covers, film stills, etc., as well as the acts of photographing, the tensions & disappointments of it. I enjoyed particularly an account of an adolescent infatuation with a still of Terence Stamp in the Fellini film Toby Dammit (in which Guibert mistakenly refers to the Stamp character as the devil, when in fact Stamp is more a Swinging London version of Faust, who has sold his soul). There is a diaristic aspect to the writing - family episodes are recounted, memory is intertwined with photography - and it is public and brief, in a form that is perhaps more familiar to blog readers of today. Truly, it seems prescient of so much web writing now, although with a much more delirious perversity and greater powers of observation:

. . . I recall an incident that made a great impression on me when I was 8 or 9 years old. My sister was 12 or 13 at the time, and her breasts were just beginning to develop; high and firm, we had already seen them at the beach the year before, but that was the last time, because the following year they were covered up by a bra. That morning, it must have been a Sunday, my sister was locked in the bathroom. My father was at the door, camera in hand, trying to get in. He said, without hiding his intention, that he wanted to photograph his daughter's breasts, because at that age, the moment of their initial formation, they are at the height of their beauty, and if they weren't photographed then, that state of perfection would be lost. That was the extent of his argument. At the time, he sadly renounced his failed attempt at appropriation through the image and fought against that limit; he wanted to push back by a notch the phase of abandonment, of renunciation and at the same time, extend his role as a father in order to assume that of a lover within the conventions of voyeurism, for between the father and the lover, desire was probably not very different. . . "Inventory of a Box of Photographs"

Photography, in Guibert's book, is a multiplicity of effects. It is a technological reinforcement of morbid curiosities, it facilitates social controls, it supplants memories, dreams and perceptions, replacing them with its own mediated Olympus of illusions.In "Photographic Writing" Guibert finds photographic aspects in descriptive writings by Goethe and Kafka - looking backward from the perspective of the technological present to a pre-photography concealed in language. Without any direct quotations, I find traces of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes in Guibert's considerations of the social aspects of photography. Barthes makes an appearance as "R.B." in "The Photograph, As Close to Death as Possible" which is an account of Guibert approaching R.B. to photograph him with his ailing mother, who in the interim, died. Guibert presents his own lust for photographing in equivocal terms: it is morbid, it is fetishistic, it is selfish. & the compulsion can be sweet as well.

Written with almost aphoristic brevity, these episodes of photography seem both exceedingly particular & also informed with much larger ideas. To continue with photographic metaphors, these vignettes are like snapshots, fragments which indicate a much larger whole. I last read the book in what must have been 1996-1997, when the translation was published. Rereading it has been as stimulating as I can recall it to have been, with what seems new finds:

A Japanese dancer from the Sankai Juku group dances with a peacock. His entire body is very white, powdered with white clay, and his head is shaved. He wears nothing but a plain linen loincloth tied around his waist and stands out in relief against a wooden backdrop to which varnished fishtails and enormous fins from some cetacean have been attached. He embraces the peacock like a woman in a swoon, and the pattern on the bird's plumage extends his loincloth with a gold-flecked train. We can see that the peacock's thighs and feet are very muscular, like an ostrich, but the dancer keeps them bent, broken at the joints, and immobilized in his left hand, pressed against his side. His right hand encircles the peacock's neck, stretches it, plays with it as if it were a delicate instrument, squeezes it almost to the point of strangling it. Everything is limited to a few contractions, and to the flow of blood, which he must feel and control with his palm: the Japanese dances a kind of slow-motion tango with the peacock, he dances with the peacock's fear, with its vital fear of death. It really is an extraordinary moment, one of great tension, great beauty. But when the dancer releases the terrified peacock, we no longer know where to look, and our eye, which wanders between the dancer and the bird, loses its orientation. The peacock is nothing but a big terrified fowl who scratches around stupidly and snares itself in the cord that restrains its feet. The dancer is nothing but a dancer gesturing slowly. Our fascination has worn off, and rather than be deceived, we prefer to divert our gaze to the empty space between them, where the magic was created, the site of a latent photograph. Morever, when the Sankai Juko group came to Paris, many people, many photographers, returned to the performance with their cameras mounted on tripods. They bought seats in the front row and waited for the appearance of the peacock. They fired away - they were guaranteed beauty. That eminently photographic image, however, doesn't belong to them (what is it that eludes photography here, except the infintesimal movements of contraction of the peacock's neck, which are essential to the dance?), it belongs to the dancer, and he has decided that this will be a dance and not a photograph. And we might reiterate that beauty, like theater, is tied to the ephemeral, and to loss, and can't be captured. Only I would prefer that photographers put more dance (or theater, or cinema) into their pictures, just as the dancer had put photography into his dance. - "Dance"

The Corinthians - A Kodachrome Slideshow

The Corinthians - A Kodachrome Slideshow, edited by Ed Jones & Timothy Prus, published by The Archive of Modern Conflict, is a collection of anonymous Kodachrome slides, dated 1947-1974.

I became aware of the press through another book edited by Jones & Prus, Nein, Onkel, which is also of anonymous material, in this instance, snapshots of Nazi soldiers - material which is a bit more difficult, historically, especially in lieu of its innocuous banality and rich un-self-consciousness (the soldiers being innocuously ordinary, cute, without any distinction). As far as I know, Nein, Onkel is available in the US only through Dashwood Books, & I have never seen a copy of The Corinthians available except through the internet.

While The Corinthians does reference a specific historical conflict like Nein, Onkel, the title is taken from the book of Corinthians in the bible, a series of letters from St Paul which address a decadent society: thus the images hover between being a relic & being an ambiguous indictment. Kodachrome itself is of recent obsolescence, & like much analog film material, now represents its own historical passage in the past tense.

In terms of using the specific materiality of Kodachrome (color transparency, vivid hues with a palette akin to Technicolor)and its anonymous usage, there is Guy Stricherz's book Americans in Kodachrome 1945-1965, which is a much gentler, nostalgic collection. & this is not to diminish the Stricherz collection, either, which has its own fascinations. The title of the Stricherz book also reveals what is often unstated about nostalgia: that nostalgia has national borders, that nostalgia can be used as a technological fantasy of a shared & cohesive history, a Family of Man in lower-case letters. My guess is the images in The Corinthians are primarily from the US, & the sometimes gaudy hues & occasions to photograph are representative of a post-WWII glee, a kind of ascendancy of an ability to observe one's daily life, which over time detaches itself from any context & becomes cryptic. But the shared "American-ness" of the Stricherz book is not apparent in The Corinthians, where instead the images clash, they do not relate to one another, whether by year, region, practice, or taste. What is revealed can seem simultaneously obvious & opaque. What separates the collections of Stricherz and the Archive of Modern Conflict is in the choice of images & their editing. One of the remarkable things about the images in The Corinthians is that they are often uglier than beautiful. The interiors & family scenes can be claustrophobic if not downright unpleasant. This is so against the grain of the fading twilight of nostalgia, in which a partial forgetfulness is often equated w/ sweetness or tenderness, a slight regret along with a letting go - instead the images are jarring, & whether through accident or intent (the difference between we will never know), there is a crudeness, an awkward possessiveness which resonate w/ more craven aspects of the photographic process: the images force the participants into a pantomime of an image-self, as an illusion of what they would be, which is realized w/ an almost violent lack of skills. In this sense The Corinthians reminds me of the vertigo of the images in Wisconsin Death Trip. Vanitas vanitatum.

If one thinks of the billions of snapshots which exist, in utter randomness, the collection of whatever becomes the ad hoc solution to extract any sort of meaning what is otherwise accident & chance. Both The Corinthians & Nein, Onkel posit the amateur photo collection as a kind of black mirror to the past, in a Barthesian sense of lost time, & also in the excesses of detail which add strangeness & confusion to memory.

I would also recommend The Corinthians for it's unusual binding, which reproduces the cardboard mount of a Kodachrome slide, with a window cut in both front & back. This is anterior to the content of the book, but still references the original physical form of the slides. It shows a great deal of concentration to the enterprise, & its tally of vanishing forms.

Larry Sultan 1946-2009

Larry Sultan's work is most familiar to me from books: Evidence, Pictures from Home, and The Valley. The work also exists as gallery prints & has been used in magazines spreads. My personal attachment is to the books & the experience such a form offers: private, on my own time.

Evidence, made with Mike Mandel, is a collection of industrial photographs, which as a collection, leads to a kind of non-sense of imagery. Nothing relates, nothing really means anything, but the viewer is face-to-face with "evidence" of something somehow. There is a dry humor in the residue of corporate imagery, it's utter obscurity & obsolescence, but it is also a kind of psychic downward spiral, a tension between the kitsch of execution & a horror of banality.

Unlike a lot of work which uses vernacular imagery often as a kind of nostalgia, or a collection used to codify forms, Evidence uses imagery which traffics between the institutional & the ridiculous - as archaeology, the imagery is ultimately embarrassing in its weirdness, its cryptic passages between intention & effect.

There is an agitational quality to Sultan's work, an unrest, a meta-critique of the uses of photography which is most apparent in Evidence, in which the imagery is found, but which also informs the 2 long-term projects, Pictures from Home, which deals with the suburban culture of Sultan's parents, and The Valley, which is "behind the scenes" of the adult film industry.

Pictures from Home uses both Sultan's color photographs of his parents, living on the edge of a golf course, in southern CA, along with frame enlargements of home movies made by Sultan's father. The home movies are predictably bucolic & idealized - vacations, fun, high points. Sultan's photographs seem much darker in comparison, although in extremely lush color, in the brilliant SoCal light, in their acute focus & detail (contra the pictorial inexactitude of the home movies). Sultan's parents are used as kind of a test-case of post WWII prosperity & its retirement, figures placed in an artificial new world of synthetics, hovering in an ahistorical constant present. Sultan's parents become the post WWII nuclear family, severed from kith & kin, adrift in a sea of commodities.

In comparison, the images in The Valley seem the most illustrative, juxtaposed with both Evidence & Pictures from Home. The images can be read easily in either magazine or on a gallery wall: the behind-the-scenes of the adult film industry, on location in rented McMansions in the San Fernando Valley. The images concentrate on the absolute clutter of the houses as sites of filmmaking, in terms of the logistics of the set-ups as well as everything that is necessary to sustain the shoot. Also the images deal with the hours of waiting behind any film project - hours of tedium distinguishing the work involved. While it has some of the romantic appeal of a film like Boogie Nights& a general fascination with the adult film industry in our culture (a Puritanical vision of carnality at its most commodified, i.e. sensible form), the real subject seems to be the conformity & dullness of work, any work. The hideous McMansions of the Valley photograph extremely well: settings of baroque vulgarity, impersonal except for the particularities of bad taste from house to house, & even then nothing is ever unique or outstanding. Everything is prefabricated, mass produced, & strangely empty. The models for the films reiterate the alienation of the architecture & decor in their utter displacement from it. Everything looks kind of awful & inexplicably expensive.

Larry Sultan's photographs for The Valley, printed large, fit comfortably in art galleries, wherein large color photographs are a kind of contemporary salon painting. Akin to PL DiCorcia's images of pole dancers, or the more obscure images of porn sets done by Jeff Burton, which seem more about distraction & daydreaming on the job (Burton was also working for various companies). Still, Sultan's images have a kind of distancing & self-consciousness which keeps them from being pure commodity. The images are rehearsals for images, attempts, auditions, lapses, distractions. The models look mechanical & bored. The theme of scientific management seen in the images of Evidence is sublimated but constant throughout The Valley.

From Evidence to The Valley: dealing w/ corporate imagery, the family, suburbia & sex. Such an engaged & challenging use of the camera & the photograph.

Joachim Schmid, Other People's Photographs

Photography as a medium of originality can be explored in museum collections, from the rough-hewn negatives & positives of the calotype, to the MFA mandated images of today. If one were to consider photography not just as another medium, but as a social phenomenon, its ubiquity as well as its banality must be taken into account. From the introduction of the Kodak camera (& image) in 1888, which created a global amateur market, photography has had a role beyond its aesthetics, in the everyday.

The industrialization of imagery, its crazy ubiquity, as well as its acceptance, indicates a faith which may extend beyond the average. The lowest common denominator may be recognition, if nothing else. A tacit faith in doing something, with a machine, which in its objectivity, denotes a moment, its reality.

I first noticed the books of Joachim Schmid on the shelves at Printed Matter. There is a great deal of humor in Schmid's self-published books, such as Phantome, in which a sort of game is involved, matching up media images of criminals with their crimes. Schmid addresses the absolute & unconscious aspect of photography, the fact that it is accepted without a question, as well as its role in daily life, whether or not that is actually clear. It is simply there.

The books,"Other People's Pictures" are a series of POD books available from Blurb. Culled from flickr, Schmid has created his own taxonomies using appropriate key words, & utilizing the daily excess of on line postings. "Other people's pictures" indicates a willingness to share & to be like others as much as it will show a sense of standing alone. Photography is a lonely but ubiquitous enterprise. I is like others.

Schmid's books interject in a daily electronic culture, a vast every-expanding archive of virtual collections.

The apparent clarity of selected keywords ("Mickey" or "Digits" for example) become strange & exotic. Ostensibly each book ordered from Schmid is itself unique in its selection & editing. No two are exactly alike, yet all are so familiar.

Photography in Schmid's book becomes a shared technology rather than a singular expressive medium. Our fantasies are also someone else's & we can see so, easily. On sites such as flickr this may be the salient detail/ which prompts not only an excess of compiling images, but of circulating them in an efficient & globally open manner.

Las Vegas Studio - Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archive of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brownis a catalog for an exhibit at the Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, edited by Hilar Stadler & Martino Stierli, in collaboration with Peter Fischli. The book includes an essay by Stierli, a conversation "Flaneurs in Automobiles" with Peter Fischli, Rem Koolhaas, & Hans Ulrich Obrist, & an essay, "Tableaux," by Stanislaus von Moos. The images are from the archives of the architectural firm of Venturi & Scott Brown, & were made as part of a class they taught at Yale in 1968 in which the sprawl of Las Vegas was studied, resulting in the book Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. The class included prints, slides and films of Las Vegas collected as part of the research, some of which were used as illustrations in the book. The first edition was physically large and included more images, whereas the more commonly known second edition included images which are in miniature on the page, in a sense de-emphasized, but still crucial in the book's role as a kind of manifesto of the strip, of sprawl, of vernacular car culture as a site of learning.

As an amateur in the field of architecture I will refrain from saying much about Venturi & Scott Brown's ideas, but I will say I have always been struck by the images in the 2nd edition, regardless of their miniaturization, & that the catalog of their image archive is a delirious collection of what is now a long-lost world of unconscious automobile excursions (cheap gas, the charm of the highway strip) & "old" Vegas, before it became a place of Disney-scale family entertainment.

The photographs are emphatically not "fine" - they have none of the spectacular aspects of then-contemporary commercial architectural photography (Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, Balthasar Korab) & instead are executed in a laconic, amateurish, mechanical manner. It is easy to see parallels between the Venturi & Scott Brown images & the self-produced artists books of Ed Ruscha (Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Some Los Angeles Apartments, Twentysix Gasoline Stations), in scale & lack of visual inflection: & it is noted in the catalog that Venturi & Scott Brown visited the studio of Ruscha in Los Angeles & were well aware of his photographic work, as they began their work! Given the heroic scale of most architectural photography, one can see the images, which as much as they rely on chance, on the aesthetics of the amateur snapshot, as being quite deliberate & intentional. In tandem with the text of Learning from Las Vegas, this reifies a looking at the most common vernacular forms as a place of study. To quote Denise Scott Brown: What environment lies about us, and how is this different from what the media of a dominant culture suggest should be there?

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcardat the Metropolitan Museum explores what has been otherwise a footnote in the surveys of the work of Walker Evans: his postcard collection. & in relation to Evans' own photographic practices.

The premise of the exhibition flirts with kitsch. Evans is the great modernist photographer: as much as one can locate content in his images (the things they are of - Victorian houses, the families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, detritus of the Great Depression, etc.), the content is subordinate to the framing, the presentation, the bigger project of Evans' work as a whole. From a formalist point of view it all becomes radical composition, a kind of interrupted illustration, illustration aware of itself & pulling back from meaning, from function, but one could also cite it as an archive of relentless curiosity & disengagement. In Evans' work there is no progress, no movement; all is stasis, & without motivation. Avant la lettre, there is an existential repulsion to social engagement or meaning, as well as a relish of the act of doing, nevertheless.

At this point, institutionally, Evans has entered into an unimpeachable canon of Great Artists, which seems to do him disservice, turning him into a patrician expert, when what seems most vital about him could be described as neurotic, alienated, dissatisfied. Compared with other documentary photographers of the 1930s, from the politically motivated work of Ben Shahn to the spectacular magazine work of Margaret Bourke-White, Evans seems unmotivated, depressively aesthetic, unconcerned. & this gives the work a wider valence of sensibilities, a mood as opposed to the thing itself. Evans valiantly defined his work as "documentary style" as opposed to "documentary" which is perhaps a richer statement now, more meaningful, in what I honestly think is the twilight of documentary work as it disappears from mass media & migrates to the realm of museum practices.

There has been a serious amount of writing about Evans: Alan Trachtenberg, Tod Papageorge, John Tagg, are who I think of, but there is much more. Evans' images were appropriated by Sherrie Levine in the early 1980s in one of the great moments of post-modern photography. & there is not just 1 but 2 biographies of him, as well, in a world wherein there are next to no biographies of photographers (I tell my students that's because most photographers had such boring lives, that it's a dull existence & there's not much to say about it), as well as a fairly blunt memoir about Evans' last years before his death. One unspectacular but meaningful book for me has been Walker Evans at Work, which addresses Evans' work practices. There is a racy passage in John Cheever's journals about Evans, which is in dispute (did it really happen?), but indicates, at least, a psychological tension (for both Cheever & Evans) that is more Patricia HIghsmith than Clement Greenberg. How to add such a literature?

The Met, which now possesses the Evans archives, has done a truly meaningful exhibition & book exploring Evans' interest in the common mass-produced picture postcard. Genealogies of Evans' methods have been traced from the Civil War images of Matthew Brady to the extensive archives of Eugene Atget (inartistic images, factual, informational). The Met show shows another genealogy in strictly banal mass-produced imagery. & Evans, with his large collection (1200 or so), seems all the richer for his interplay with such drugstore imagery. Postcard imagery depends on its accessibility, its simplicity, its lack of hierarchy - anything is fit to be a postcard. & it shows the world now, which means postcards become obsolete, they will always need to be updated.

This obsolescence becomes historical artifact in Evans' collection. Say unlike most photojournalism which deals with a "spot news" aspect to history - seeing it as it happens, Evans' work & likewise the voluminous postcard collection, indicate a history only in retrospect. Evans photographed the detritus of happenstance. Postcards are of an unlikely objectivity, things as they are, presented as such, in an utterly dreary, banal way, which as such becomes quite fascinating.

The Met shows some of Evans indexing, his categories - town centers, industry, etc. These are vaguer & more opaque than what can be found at any flea market, but otherwise, just the same.

Lynching Photographs

Lynching Photographs (Defining Moments in American Photography) by Shawn Michelle Smith and Dora Apel is part of a new series from the University of California Press of books about photography, along with studies of Alexander Gardner's book about the U.S. civil war, and Weegee's Naked City. The books are small, basically extended essays - I am curious to see what else will be published.

Whereas the Gardner & Weegee books deal with photography which is seen these days primarily as artistic or in an artistic context - collected institutionally, exhibited, published & celebrated as such; the work discussed in Lynching Photographs has a much darker pedigree & history. Byproducts of lynchings, these images functioned as souvenirs & trophies for the participants, as residue of mob violence which invoked both the done deed as well as a threat of more to come. These are extremely unsettling images in their gleefully banal racism & sadism. Smiling children, smiling revelers - at these public murders. If anything, reading written accounts which detail the specifics of the lynchings is perhaps more to the point, in the thoroughness & extremities of the violence done, which is not articulated so fully in a photograph. Photographs in contrast are much more fragmentary, inarticulate.

The contingency of the imagery is discussed by both authors in the use of the photos by journalists and organizations such as the NAACP to decry lynchings. Both essays, by Smith & Apel, are fascinating in their discussions of how the photographs were used by White and Black groups, from the KKK to the NAACP to the Communist Party. Perhaps it is the relative unfamiliarity of the imagery, unlike say something like war photography which circulates constantly in print, on television & on the internet, & on the museum wall, but I find the photos themselves almost unbearable to look at, & the racist hatred which could generate them quite palpable. Looking at them too much seems to do very little except dull me to them, whereas reading about them does allow one some psychic room to understand them more. Another curiosity about the essays is that one author is a professor of American Studies, the other an Art Historian, & yet such specializations seem a moot point with the material - it would be impossible to distinguish one from the other if it were not pointed out who was who.

Reading the book made me go back to Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, which is the same collection which was on view at Roth Horowitz, which is discussed in the Smith essay, and later published by Twin Palms Press. The gallery show was extremely popular, & as cited in Lynching Photographs, without interpretation. While such a strategy may be suitable for a gallery exhibit, I cannot help but think that such work is near impossible to look at without some discussion. This may be just the ignorance of my own sheltered "Northern" existence, whereas as I understand it, the collector of the images, James Allen, is from the South & lynching is identified primarily as being Southern (although one can find examples from Indiana & Minnesota in the book). As a book, Without Sanctuary, is handsomely designed & printed, & there are trenchant essays included. Still, it is troublesome to see such a luxurious book of atrocities. As a book it may function a bit in the manner of Ernst Friedrich's War Against War, but the opacity of photography, its contingencies, is still a troubling mirror of our world.

Bill Wood's Business

Bill Wood's Business by Marvin Heiferman & Diane Keaton is culled from an archive of 4x5 black-&-white negatves of commercial work done by Bill Wood, a photographer & camera store owner in downtown Dallas, working from 1937-1973. There are a total of 20,000 negatives in the archive which was originally saved by the archivist Rick Prelinger, which was later owned by Diane Keaton, & is now a gift to the International Center of Photography. Heiferman & Keaton have collaborated on books of industrial images in the past such as Mr. Salesman; & Keaton is also a photographer. Her book, Reservations, is one of my treasured possessions - & when I go to Miami Beach I look in vain for what is now a lost world of Morris Lapidus & such designs, such as those seen in her images.

Bill Wood's photographs, all done commercially, are a fascinating insight into the social fabric of post WWII USA. An entrepreneur, a public figure, Bill Wood himself emerges as a resolutely cheerful, social figure - a Mason, a lodge member, his name emblazoned on his car & in neon over his store. If anything this shows us an aspect of photography as a kind of thread to the social fabric - from showroom displays to prizewinners to re-enactments of accidents to new buildings & streets - the photograph as a kind of proof & reinforcement of social values emerges, even when we can no longer identify directly what the uses of the images. Both familiar & strange, there is some uncanniness to the images, which are nevertheless deliriously cheerful & matter-of-fact. Lists of the subjects do not do the images justice. I am struck by their constant "can-do" spirit, their euphoric faith in the "new" world of the modern city & suburb, product & display.

As a collection, the book reminds me of Evidence, the book by Mike Mandel & Larry Sultan. Evidence utilizes the obsolescence of the images - that they have lost function & sense - to create a new narrative of images which become enigmatic in their lack of context, again utilizing their familiarity to lead us to a state of un-knowing. The Bill Wood photos do this with their eclectic subject matter(s), rendered as if all of one piece with the uniform clarity of film & flash, yet never revealing their "secret," if there actually is one. I am reminded of the worlds of my parents & their peers, their "new" world of subdivisions & products, from ready-to-wear clothes to frozen vegetables. Perhaps I am romanticizing this epoch, but I do believe they believed they had inherited a new world which was bountiful & extraordinary in the everyday - optimistic values not so apparent in our current world. If there is a "zeitgeist" to the ordinary, I believe it can be seen in this amazing archive of our once brave new world - we see what we have lost, or what is no longer available to us.