Bill Cunningham New York

After moving to New York City in 1981, one of the first people I began to recognize with frequency was a slim man on a bicycle, with a camera who would seem to be just about anywhere at any given time, transversing downtown, Midtown, the Upper East Side, etc.

I don't know when I became aware that this fellow, looking boyish and agile, with fine bones & smooth hair, was Bill Cunningham; nor do I remember when I became aware of his photo spreads in the New York Times. In those lean pre-internet days, the hefty Sunday edition would be a weekly weekend ritual: going out to get the paper to go with my morning coffee;  and when I lived in the Lower East Side, picking up a bagel with cream cheese at a place nearby on Essex Street, to eat while looking through it. Bill Cunningham's spreads would be about fashion trends, although identifying them strictly as fashion does not really describe them at all: there's an anthropological delight at work in finding commonalities in the chaos of urban crowds, making structural comparisons. In the numbing din of an urban setting there is great attention and focus, and a sense of life in movement.

Cunningham worked elsewhere too: in the Annie Flanders iteration of Details, for Women's Wear Daily - all of that was off my radar, although I did look at Details in those days, which was like a report from the then edgy East Village.

The photographs themselves are deceivingly artless: done with a telephoto lens, or cropped to emphasize a particular item, there's no apparent photographer directing the images. These are not quite surveillance photographs, what we see are an archive of fragments of life passing on the streets, from an ambiguously neutral position, fashion-reportage from the "field." There is a sense of the street as a living theater of display.

This idea of the street as shared theater came out of the industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century, in the revocation of sumptuary laws, and the blurring of social positions in the upheavals of modernity.  The invention of photography offered a scientific mirror of resemblances which could also, in apparent paradox, conceal meaning too. In the Poe story The Man of the Crowd,  the narrator, seeing a stranger, shadowing the stranger as if to unpack his secret (what secret?), leads to no conclusions except exhaustion and an uneasy truce with un-knowing.

Bill Cunningham's photos could be seen as our equivalent of Baudelaire's distinctions about the temporal beauty that comprises the work of Constantin Guys: a delight in the moment which has no shelf life in itself, transposed into the frieze of modern life. In the case of Cunningham and the New York Times, in the modernist layouts of the newspaper, this also touches on scrapbooking, motion studies, and collage.

The idea of being in public also seems in eclipse in the world we live in. Is Bill Cunningham a valiant knight of modernity in this sense? Holding up a collage of dandyism that is for both ourselves and others? Do people feel like they are even outside anymore or is the street simply a movement from one inside to another?

The Richard Press film Bill Cunningham New York is an amazing window into the milieu of Bill Cunningham, his daily work, and the range of his world, from photo lab to diner to New York Times to  rarified social orbits to his studio in Carnegie Hall.

In his ubiquity on the streets, on his bicycle, looking refined yet never imposing, Bill Cunningham is able to render himself more or less invisible. This lack of aggression is the opposite of classic street photography, in which there is a downright macho approach to the idea of being outside, among others, with an individual, alienated, abstracted camera frame at the foreground. Bill Cunningham comes off as a Fred Astaire figure - graceful, charming, humorous, attentive. The gestures and postures of those photographed are rendered with as close a photographic objectivity as possible. What keeps this from being machine-like is Cunningham's sensitivity to fashion, to display, and attraction.

The film is also a great document of the kinds of lives which could be lived in New York City that are now becoming obsolete in the harsh economic shifts of our present day, whether as an artist or "jobber" in the Fashion District. Seeing the studios of both Cunningham and Editta Sherman in Carnegie Hall should remind everyone that we are living in a shrinking, regulated world of less in our daily lives. Cunningham exemplifies thrift in some respects - the uniform-like nature of his clothes, his basic cot surrounded by file cabinets and books, his diner and take-out meals - he also has a measure of freedom which he attributes to living without money, which in so many ways seems impossible now except in terms of being homeless.

In the tapestry of dandyism, high society, and journalism detailed in the film, at the onset Cunningham mentions the work of Japanese designers in the 1980s, in particular Rei Kawakubo, looking at the homeless as inspiration for her work. This is also mentioned in one of the essays in John Waters' Role Models. Cunningham's mention is a weird flash, as it were, in what seems a fairly stable social fabric, even if Cunningham's eviction from Carnegie Hall is part of the narrative, which when mentioned in the film Cunningham responds with stoic indifference. Cunningham is a figure of constant paradox: a shy person who lives entirely in public events; a very sharp observant person who has little to say for himself. The difference may be partially generational, but I think we also live in a culture wherein disclosure of the self can lead to as much as "smokescreen" of concealment as saying little or nothing. The words we use enclose a subject rather than liberate it.

Beyond the interest in Cunningham that drives the film, I want to point out some of the virtues of the film itself, primarily its simplicity and its discretion.

 Near the end Cunningham is asked if he ever had a love in his life. "Do you mean 'Am I gay?'" Cunningham asks back, to which he adds that that is what his family feared - beyond that Cunningham didn't answer the question. I feared the film would lapse into a sort of emotional breakdown, a la the end of Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason or any Barbara Walters interview, but it veers away from any resolution beyond that awkward moment. What we see as we saw throughout the film is the oblique independence Cunningham and his devotion to his work. That gives a moral lesson beyond our contemporary world of stage-crafted personalities. The film ends with a birthday party at the New York Times with the crew singing a parody of the song "Kids" from Bye-Bye Birdie, transposed to "Bill" which includes the refrain "and you always get your way!" Enough said there.

Enrico Natali, Detroit 1968

Why do I find the images in Enrico Natali: Detroit 1968 to be uncanny?

The recent bankruptcy filing by the city of Detroit may act as a marker for legal and financial definitions of decline or catastrophe, but does it tell us much beyond civic bureaucracy? In media, Detroit in recent years, has become as exotic a place as Berlin, where one can still find traces of World War II, or Havana, closed off from the splendors of the West by dint of its revolution, whereas Detroit is the ruin of industry, of capitalism, on a grand scale. Camilo Jose Vergara's "immodest proposal" to cordon off downtown Detroit as an Acropolis of Industry dates from 1995. "Crisis" was how industry ran, no stranger to generations of the city; but if one were to sense a sea-change, it would be that in the past, a crisis would necessitate change of some sort which would be considered to lead to some sort of resolution, however provisional that may be; whereas now, where do we go? The solutions of the past were in relation to industry, but now there is no industry, just people and a place. The cynical machinations of the Kwame Kilpatrick administration, illuminated through Kilpatrick's various trials and serial imprisonments could be seen as the the fulfillment of entrepreneurial stewardship: he was just doing what you would do in that situation, getting what he could get. Or, as Kilpatrick wrote in one of the numerous texts to his mistress, as reported in the Detroit Free Press: you're only busted if they see you. A state-appointed supervisor, working above the city's government, illustrates another endgame of bureaucracy: make more bureaucracy. Along with the continual crisis of the the economy, the stopgap measures of a failing government lay out a weird cycle of damnation and futility pulling the puppet strings of the the terrible world of Capitalism, in which God's grace is measured in financial terms.

The Fordist principles that transformed Detroit from a small-ish manufacturing center in the late nineteenth century to a hub of automobile manufacturing and the "arsenal of democracy" during World War II were structured around the idea of production, of a potential unlimited production. It also meant folding the workers into production and consumption, making the workers synonymous with their work. Looking at the policies of the Sociological Department and English School at Ford we can see a thorough process of institutionalized assimilation at work. From the Ford archives:

The culmination of the Ford English School program was the graduation ceremony where students were transformed into Americans. During the ceremony speakers gave rousing patriotic speeches and factory bands played marches and patriotic songs. The highlight of the event would be the transformation of immigrants into Americans. Students dressed in costumes reminiscent of their native homes stepped into a massive stage-prop cauldron that had a banner across the front identifying it as the AMERICAN MELTING POT. Seconds later, after a quick change out of sight of the audience, students emerged wearing “American” suits and hats, waving American flags, having undergone a spiritual smelting process where the impurities of foreignness were burnt off as slag to be tossed away leaving a new 100% American.

Assimilation also means erasure and forgetting. A place like Detroit, expanding outwards into the flat fields outside the city, allowed people to emerge in a New World made of industry, shopping, and a family home. The centrifugal patterns of development would emerge later as a more disastrous pattern than anticipated when the core of the city,from  which all radiated out long avenues, became hollowed out by abandonment.

The Sociological Department appears in Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex, which includes a very precise geography of Detroit and an account of the processes of assimilation for immigrants. The Sociological Department  functioned as a panopticon for Ford: keeping track of the workers, making sure they were of proper character for the work place.

Which take me back to Enrico Natali's photographs, which are from the late 1960s. The decline of the Big 3 was already in place, or at least the decline was local: the Big 3 were moving factories to North Ireland and South Africa. The 1967 riot had been very destructive and polarizing between city and suburbs, but Detroit was still a very wealthy city.

We can see a little of that in Natali's photographs. It's a shock for me now to see the downtown streets crowded, that there had been a sense of it as a place in which to circulate, to shop or see a movie (sorry to miss Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! on the big screen).. The predominantly white population downtown are in movement: downtown reads as an excursion. & so many f the people in groups look like they are in uniforms, too, of some sort. Natali's street images could be read in contrast with Garry Winogrand's - Winogrand's images are composed in a more gothic, anamorphic way - we become aware of the camera and its use more than any subject. Whereas Natali works with methods related to the documentary projects of the 1930s: there's less intervention in framing, the images have a contemplative aspect to contrast with what were busy, circulating streets. In the prints I've seen there's an immaculate technique in terms of exposure & printing, and an operative kindness towards the people in the photos. Another aspect of the images that could be explored is how gendered the groups are - men with men, women with women, along with any racial divides that could be seen, too.

The feyness of the two boys in front of the movie theater makes me wonder: in contemporary terms the image reads as queer, but historically, would queerness have existed like that? Or are these proto-metrosexuals? The boys exude a sense of privilege, which may be the privilege of just being very young with the blitheness that they occupy the place. An industrial city like Detroit was not a tolerant space for queerness in public.

Earlier this year on line I found another Detroit photographer, Bruce Harkness, with work from the 1970s. Harkness worked in the Cass Corridor, the slum just north of downtown, with some images from a transvestite bar The Gold Dollar Show Bar and another local place, Verdi's Bar, which shared clientele. Harkness's photos remind me of Anders Petersen's Cafe Lehmitz somewhat, with a Weegee flash and that old industrial Midwestern sense of grimness-in-daily-life. But my point in this is: the sense of exclusion and concealment, the afterhours as refuge at the Gold Dollar or Verdi's were the reality of local queerness in Detroit. Harkness was totally off the map for me prior to finding his website.

There are other Detroit photographers, such as Bill Rauhauser and Brad Iverson who have significant bodies of work done in Detroit. Nancy Barr has curated exhibitions of photographs of Detroit at the Institute of Arts: Detroit Revealed, Motor City Muse, and Robert Frank - Detroit Experiences 1955 which are significant expansions of its visual history. Another contemporary photographer who works with images of Detroit past & present is Dave Jordano. The artists in Detroit are perhaps its best reporters - they still work outside a globalized post-Fordist economy, there's still a locatable sense of agency to practice, they're outside the absurdist theater of local politics or the viciousness of industry. Who to consult in this invidious world?

The Natali image of the two boys exudes a pungent sense of outrageous arrogant privilege in a stroll down Woodward Ave: next stop, Ibiza!  I see so many of the contradictions of daily life in Detroit. The boys return me to Middlesex, to the "Obscure Object" for Cal/Callie when in high school in Grosse Pointe, to the adolescent abyss of seeing someone attractive, outside of oneself, and cruelly self-contained and unattainable. In the emotional aftermath of that realization one could echo on a personal level, the city of Detroit motto, penned by Father Gabriel Richard, the founder of the University of Michigan, in 1805 following a fire which destroyed the entire settlement: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cieribus - We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes.

from Gerhard Richter, Atlas (begun 1964)

Guy Tillim, Avenue Patrice Lumumba @ the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis

The first book by Guy Tillim I saw was Jo'Burg. Jo'Burg is physically small, an accordion book of urban views of Johannesburg, South Africa, bound in stiff boards. The images are of a derelict spaces occupied by an urban poor who have moved in to what had been a bourgeois modern metropolis. Johannesburg looks remarkably like our cities in the US which have followed paths of expansion and collapse. If there is a spectral aspect, a sense of a lost past, it is in a sense of prosperity and progress, inscribed in the now grimy, unkempt architecture.

What appeals to me primarily in this work is its delicacy in terms of depicting habitation, its lack of sensationalism in terms of dealing with individual instances of poverty. Compared to a document such as Bruce Davidson's East 100th Street, it is downright cool. In Davidson's book, the lush, intimate photographs become their own parallel universe of community, cohesion and sentiment. In Tillim's images the sterile, generic architecture overwhelms  us in its wrecked indifference to the difficult lives it contains. The architecture enacts a historical narrative by itself, as a container.

The built environment assumes an even greater presence in Tillim's book Leopold and Mobutu, which documents the physical residue of Leopold II of Belgium and Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, following their stewardships of the country. The traces of monuments, bureaucracies, names on a land appear as metaphoric lash marks of history as disaster: looking back, it is one big catastrophe. In contrast with Jo'Burg which can still be read as a more conventional form of journalism, Leopold/Mobuto involves looking at that which is now discarded or concealed - it explores detritus as potential evidence of retrospective horrors, gussied up in monumentality, which now litters the world in fragments, a post-colonial Ozymandias.

Architecture as a scaffold of history is even more apparent in Tillim's book Avenue Patrice Lumumba, which I saw as an exhibit this past winter at the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota. The title itself alludes to both the nomenclature of post-colonial self-rule in southern Africa, transposed in street names, as well as one its first tragedies, the imprisonment and execution of Patrice Lumumba. Avenue Patrice Lumumba shows the remains of a not-so-long-ago colonial architecture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Madagascar, Angola - generic modernist structures which in the West appear as universal, ahistorical, totalizing, in a perpetual present tense: a modernity from which there is no going back. In Tillim's images the decayed remnants of colonial organization have been adapted and retrofitted. It has always seemed to me that modern architecture is not meant to age or decay, and when it does it looks similar to ruins - Pompeii or Herculaneum.

The potential of such ruins in contradistinction to our mortal lives comes up in a brief scene in the Rossellini film Voyage to Italy, of tracking shots of antiquities in the museum at Naples, in contrast to the domestic abyss wrought by Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders - how small they seem compared to a sense of eternity. The same edit is invoked in Godard's Contempt, with the film within the film, The Odyssey, directed by Fritz Lang.

But in consideration of Tillim's photographs, such a sense of the eternal becomes unmoored, it seems so Western. Instead I think of a remarkable video I saw several years ago by the Stalker Group, about a 1970s housing complex on the outskirts of Rome, Corviale. Considered a disaster, Corviale has nevertheless evolved its own infrastructure, its own communities within the superstructure of the architecture. These pragmatic movements seem the truly radical gesture. In Tillim's photographs, in their somber colors and lighting, one can see, nevertheless, a movement towards autonomy.

from the bus

Several years ago at ICP I heard Walter Rosenblum lecture. Rosenblum began his lecture with a rhetorical question to the audience, asking who there had gone into debt for an education? & Rosenblum saw that as a problem, that for a photographer, to do that, it put one in a permanently vexed situation: there would always be a debt to repay, and a certain amount of obedience to a paycheck, which would inform any voice that the photographer may have, whether directly or indirectly.

Walter Rosenblum was speaking long before our artificial bubble of prosperity broke. In a certain sense his alarm at the excesses of credit was not dissimilar from what I had heard as a child as a "Depression mentality" which was considered commonplace for the world of my grandparents, & a residual effect for my parents' generation: a distrust of banks, a suspicion of credit, a fear of losing what little there is. In the bright illusory lights of the post WWII boon economy, extended decades further into the excesses of our recent times, this all could sound a bit dour & old-fashioned.

By the same token this could also be perceived as a way to apprehend the world. One of the themes of Robert Frank's The Americans was the contrast between an unreal boosterism almost wholly missing yet still informing the streets & highways traveled in the images: Is it poverty or alienation which is depicted? & whose alienation? In Frank's photos the suggestion that it is a near universal, that there is a shared abjection, behind the godawful illusion of America, which floats like an European colonialist concept of deliverance & domination gone amok, like some sort of cruel deity. (I can hear a line which is repeated in a few of Mike Leigh's films, "We're on the top of the world" which is uttered when that idea seems all too pathetic).

On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum the other day, in the galleries for Drawings, Prints & Photographs, I saw a gorgeous Frank print from his series "On the bus" . But what is beautiful about this? It is a scene from a street, presumably New York City, & the composition is based on chance, randomness, it has no distinct order or scenario, it is fragmentary, it reveals nothing.

On a physical level it occurred to me: Frank isn't shooting through the glass of a window, he could open the bus window. The street is a thoroughfare but it also is not pure moving traffic, either. These people are using the space of the sidewalk differently. It's not just a passage, or a passage which is without anything other than flow. New Yorkers can mention "pedestrian rage" with blitheness: it must have been worse then!

On the other hand, what was lacking then was the systematic planning and design which turn every second in a public sphere into a kind of utility. We live now in a world that is not dissimilar from the futuristic fantasies of total planning, in which every process of being in a place becomes part of a calculated system. Well maybe it's not a new concept at all - the Hausmannization of Paris did this as well, but without the excess of sensory prosthetics which now determine our everyday. All of us, including the wealthy shoppers of Fifth Ave are marching in step now, to the greater order of the official street. Our machines turn us off to the actual world around this, & the camera itself is implicated in this.

Perhaps that is what seems strange & engaged about the Frank photograph, & also the current show at the Jewish Museum, The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951: what one sees is the camera as a conduit of emotions. There's a sense of commonality in the idea of the photographic image which is social as much as it is personal & particular: it can reflect both & it can be shared.

The Photo League itself was a small scale, grassroots organization, which facilitated the work of people who became professionals as well as those who could be categorized as "hobbyists". As I understand it, there was a lot more ambiguity about the distinctions between such forms - perhaps because of the small paycheck involved. At the Photo League class cost between 4 - 7 dollars & it had no glamour, no sex appeal, & no class - it was there for those who were interested. & in its brief fragile history, one could have encountered the likes of Lewis Hine or Paul Strand - it still boggles my mind that I have met people, like Morris Engel, who learned from them.

At this point in our sordid economic history this now seems implausibly enchanted. While the streets of New York were never far from darkness - never far from the Poe story, The Man of the Crowd, with its conclusion of never-knowing, of pure "modern" chaos incarnate facing us down, it still managed to have a presence, even when it is stylized such as in William Klein's New York book, or the early Stanley Kubrick film Killer's Kiss (filmed in Times Square, Washington Heights, Chelsea), which in our virtual world is now ignored. Attention to the world at hand seems possible in this work.

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.

Housed at the Alice Austen House

The Alice Austen House in Staten Island is the former home of the Victorian photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952), which had belonged to her family & which bears the name Clear Comfort. The house was built initially in the 17th century but was updated through the mid-19th century. It is a "gothic cottage" on a lawn sloping down to New York Bay, just north of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which links Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with Staten Island.

The Austen house is absurdly pastoral & quaint in a city not usually known for such aspects. I walked from the ferry terminal in St. George, which took about an hour, & passed through different communities as well as strip malls, industrial areas & areas of such oblique nature I was reminded of the Rem Koolhaas essay "Junkspace."

At the end of long lonely industrial street I walked there was a short fence & sloping lawns & trees & in the midst there sits the white clapboard house, smaller than I expected. The ceilings are low, & the rooms are kept as a museum of Alice Austen's everyday, although Austen in her lifetime lost her family money in the 1929 stock market crash & died in 1952 in a poor house, called the Staten Island Farm Colony. Austen lived with her companion Gertrude Tate (1871-1962) in the house from 1917 until they were forced to move.

The discreet tact of the term "companionship" between Austen & Tate, the impossibility of knowing its exact nature, yet seeming quite clear as a loving relationship (unconsummated old maids? or a Boston Marriage?) informs a very sweet small show of photographs in the house for the summer, entitled Housed, curated by Joseph Maida & Katie Murray. The two key images in the show are a modern print of an Austen image of 2 girls in masks, lighting a cigarette together, dressed in underwear, which is next to a contemporary image by Catherine Opie of a drawing of a house with 2 stick figure women outside it, cut into her back.

There are thousands of negatives extant from the Austen estate. Many of the images are reportage of Staten Island & New York City. Austen also photographed private events. The images are a curious window into times past & unknown social circles. The images are remarkably candid. I find the party images the most interesting as they show a great deal of spontaneity & also a very direct engagement w/ the camera as a thing, as part of a social practice. Most fascinating of all are her staged images, which the masked girls could be considered part of, as well as a series of Austen & her girl friends dressed as men & posing as such. These are remarkably earthy & casual & seem much more modern than studio portraiture or art photography of that time.

The very subtle exhibit, Housed, touches on the idea of the "home" as a kind of private theater of shifting identities & perimeters. In addition to the Austen & Opie images, the other resonant image for me in construing a theme for the show is one of Peter Garfield's images of a destroyed house flying in the air (falling, I am assuming, like the house in The Wizard of Oz - or in the context of the show, a conventional house rent from its foundation, spinning in the ether). Or perhaps it is Peter Stanglmayr's fashion photo of a "girlie-boy" - a very pretty androgynous boy posing for a knitwear company's catalog. These images all show both a sense of an imposed social order & its transformation, for whatever needs that may arise (& these can remain oblique even if they seem very apparent). This is an invigorating show in a truly wonderful setting. All of us at the opening, sitting on the porch w/ a cooler of chilled rose (thanks to Peter Stanglmayr), with people playing badminton & croquet on the lawns, while ships passed in & out of the bay, below - we all commented that we wanted to live there. The Austen house is truly cozy. I found the house such a generous site & so lovely. It's something to think about. A refuge in the general storm of life.

The simultaneous visibility & invisibility of the Austen/Tate household reminded me of other such examples in the realm of photography. There are remarkable images of the actress Charlotte Cushman by Matthew Brady and Southworth & Hawes which are of remarkable gravity & presence, as strong as any of the other "great Americans" photographed by either firm. What is also apparent is Cushman's self-possession & lack of "feminine" mask. & in the 20th century, while working as a portrait photographer in Paris, Berenice Abbott photographed a remarkable array of "Sapphic" characters from the upper classes & artistic spheres. Abbott herself would not associate herself with lesbian feminist groups in the 1970s when approached for support (& also a sense of historical continuity) - despite her long-term household with the photo historian Elizabeth McCausland. I have heard the same of Djuna Barnes, who is the same generation as Abbott, & also a subject of remarkable photographs by Abbott taken in Paris in the 1920s. & the writer I knew in the 1980s, Marguerite Young, by then elderly & outspoken, would nevertheless deliberately obscure her sexual orientation & in fact criticize others (I recall a conversation in which Iris Murdoch was referred to as a bull-dyke, in an emphatically pejorative moment, & she would use the term fairies to describe some men, while always surrounded by a coterie of gay friends).

My former student L., who defines herself emphatically as a "butch dyke," would say "My kind are invisible, but it's not like we're not there." While not quite a contradiction of the inequalities & prejudices of the world we live in, the Alice Austen Houses of the world show us a much more diverse planet, nevertheless.

flower power

(in memory of Susan Kleckner, July 5 1941 - July 7 2010)

One evening in the mid to late 1980s (I cannot date it any more precisely than 1986-1989) with my friend L., we went out with her childhood friend, Andy Sherwood, visiting town. L. & Andy had gone to the Grace Church School & the Friends Seminary on E. 17th St. They grew up in lower Manhattan in the late 1950s, early 1960s, which from their descriptions sounded like an entirely different city (L. mentioned running away from home & renting an apartment on Avenue D for $13/month).

Andy had relocated to Paris where he taught harpsichord & he also did some photography. Andy knew my friend C. in Paris. C. left NYC for Nicaragua in 1985, returning to Paris in 1986. Andy detested C. & told me so in emphatic tones, which is how the evening began. "Do you really like this horrible person?!"

Andy took L. & me to a loft on Washington St. in the West Village where a couple, the Harris' lived. They had a theatrical background. On the wall there was a poster for The Angels of Light, which was led by their late son George. The poster for The Angels of Light was from a small theater in Paris, the Theatre Campagne-Premiere, which by coincidence had been owned by my friend C.'s father, Andre. George & Ann Harris mentioned that they were owed money by the proprietor of the theater, which, after the circumstances of my earlier conversation regarding C., I did not mention this further connection to them.

Also framed on the wall was a photo of a boy inserting a carnation into the barrel of a rifle held by a National Guardsman. The boy in the photo was the Harris' son George in 1967, outside the Pentagon at an anti-war rally, before George relocated to San Francisco & incarnated himself as the performer Hibiscus.

My memory is rough about this, but I think George may have modeled at some point. There were numerous photos by L.'s friend Andy of young George in the house.

I hadn't thought of the "flower power" photo in quite a while, but it came to mind reading the blog Amber Waves of Brain.

& then, today, 2 days later, Phyllis Levine, "Communications Director" at ICP, where I work, brought in a luscious print of the Pentagon photo from her archive (the photographer's name is Bernie Boston) for possible identification as no one in Exhibitions knew it. The image is not obscure by any means - it was a nominee for a Pulitzer Prize after it was published in a newspaper (the Washington Star), but it brings to mind others, such as a similar image by Marc Riboud.

While I do not have a belief in a greater significance to coincidence or of a secret cosmic order, these immediate serendipities were still somewhat reassuring: I can appreciate an apparent trace of order in what usually seems random & disconnected. It brought back lives I & others have lived, lost worlds & fragile connections.

& it brings to mind the weird potency of photography, how it embodies both the known & the unknown it its stimuli; it shows us something we didn't see & will never be able to see directly, except as a photograph, &  that experience can permeate our memories, or as Siegfried Kracauer would term it, replace them.

Outside of such harsh reckonings, I can admit a kind of succor in such technological fantasies - found in blogs, websites, magazines, newspapers & paper archives as much as my memories. & while I cannot cite Hibiscus with any authority, what a splendid figure to invoke this week.

My friend S. died this week after 6 years of struggling with cancer. S. was a rebellious character - in the hospital her sister said, "I don't know why she didn't teach fighting - she was certainly good at it - " in consideration of S.' past as filmmaker, photographer, performance artist, writer, teacher, & a non-denominational minister (I'm not quite sure what that means). I think of S. as primarily a teacher & her relentlessness in it - she also taught up until a few weeks ago, getting around with a portable oxygen tank.

S. made the daily papers in 1987 when she climbed the Berlin Wall & took photographs from that vantage point, getting arrested by the Germans. The Berlin Wall itself was not that large physically - what was massive about it was the constant policing it required.

I first saw S. in the mid 1980s when I worked at Film Forum when it was on Watts St. & S. spent a year living in the window at Sohozat which was 2 blocks away on West Broadway, just above Canal. I didn't know her then - we met years later. I recall joking to another friend, in crisis about looking for a place to live, that maybe when the window at Sohozat was unoccupied . . . I never saw any of the films S. made with Kate Millett. There were rumors as to what those included (nudity, sex). S. did a partial reenactment of the Sohozat window in the window of New Museum, as part of the Martha Rosler retrospective held there & at ICP - in this case it became a home office.

In the hospital the other day, while S. lay in a coma, a minister from the hospital came into the room for last rites. The minister was shooed away like a nasty pest; instead a friend of S. enacted a ritual w/ healing waters, which we all passed to one another in a circle, making faint streaks on the palms of each other's hands, while someone else read from a book of anti-war poetry from Vietnam from the 1960s.  The ejection of the hospital minister had a comic aspect otherwise absent in the room as we all sat with S. as she expired. The healing waters & anti-war poetry were also hard to take. It made me aware that even in a group I would be mourning alone.

Climbing the Berlin Wall with a camera does not seem dissimilar to the carnation stuffed in a rifle. How lucky we are to have photos of such acts & to have had any encounter w/ those who would do such things.

Sigmar Polke, 1941-2010

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Photographic history is still such a fresh topic, less than 100 years old, basically, that to survey it seems downright capricious, even as it has merited some truly fascinating chroniclers. What is it? Is it a technology? Its economic underpinnings reveal quite a bit about industrialization, & also how industry intersects & affects daily life. Or is it an art? Various attempts to define its formal qualities have also illuminated its visual impact in modern society. What is this weird thing which has made imaging a daily practice, seemingly without a script? A gesture we all do. & yet many of us don't. Is it special or ordinary? Or both? What a paradoxical instrument.

The Museum of Modern Art has been exemplary in collecting & exhibiting photography throughout its history. Along with the publication of texts by Beaumont Newhall & John Szarkowski, as well as that consummate bestseller, The Family of Man, it gave an institutional imprimatur to otherwise disparate materials. Without being hyperbolic, I would suggest that MoMA created the official artistic careers of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander & Garry Winogrand (the 3 participants in MoMA's "New Documents" exhibition in 1967). Another exemplary show & publication were the POP reprints of the unknown E.J. Bellocq by Lee Friedlander - another truly extraordinary gesture. & then going back to the 1930s - there is the truly seminal publication by Walker Evans, American Photographs.

What an outrageous claim for any museum: It basically created its own subject.

The current installation of the permanent collection http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1041 is an attempt to make a revisionist outline if the very history it wrote initially, but using examples only by women photographers. As a teacher of photo history I have often made fanciful allusions to such a narrative- also stating that it would be curious to make a trajectory out of Black, or gay photographers - or changing continents entirely - a narrative based on Asian or African photographers, as opposed to the French-British-US monopoly of such an imperial timeline. This was a caprice on my part & I was very curious to see the MoMA reinstallation, which will be up for a year. MoMA has truly enviable, deep collections. What would they do w/ such a prospect?

I don't know if the collections show anything we haven't seen before & there is little narrative disjuncture from any previous history, but again, one can see such fine work on display. Among the 19th century work there are examples by Anna Atkins, Clementina Lady Hawarden & Julia Margaret Cameron. Lady Hawarden in particular has emerged in more recent times w/ what were considered private "artistic" views of her lovely daughters, to instead be looked at as a somewhat radical, intense image-maker - is she a dilletantish aristocrat or someone who made distnctly unsettling & proto-expressionistic photography? Part of the fascination of photography is its blurring between professional & amateur skill sets & results. In the long history of criticism this also distinguished Julia Margaret Cameron - often viewed primarily as an eccentric, as opposed to someone who very consciously played w/ the craft of wet collodion negatives & albumen printing, utilizing chance (irregular surfaces, uneven printing, the effects of "accident" in the process) which would be overlooked as an artistic strategy until Diane Arbus began to exhibit prints w/ stains & uneven borders in the 1960s & 1970s. This aspect to Arbus' printing is often overlooked in lieu of her strong subject matter, but is I think integral to its conceptual power - an almost Brechtian sense of the print as itself a kind of meaning. One is always aware that the print is a kind of screen - the image is not direct, although one sees perhaps too much.

My greatest delight may have been in an album by Gertrude Kasebier, who I would regard as among the greatest Pictorialist photographers. Kasebier was both pragmatic & aesthetic, working professionally as well as in an artistic sphere. Kasebier, along w/ Cameron & Hawarden came to photography as a middle-aged person. One could cite that much of her work follows the visual schemata of that time, but I would point out its very tactile sensuality as a transcendence of any convention, & there are some images of a Native American model, Zitkala-Sa, which are amazingly contemporary looking. Consider the source: a middle-aged woman in Brooklyn, working for cash money. Kasebier's resources are so ordinary, but look what she did. MoMA includes a portrait of the self-styled "Baron" de Meyer, born Adolf Meyer - himself an excessively fey, elegant self-creation, looking quite chic & other-worldly, years prior to when he would adopt the spiritualist name "Gayne."

The 20th century view of "women photographers" is much more extensive & includes: Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, & Nan Goldin. I placed these names in a chronological order. Maar & Miller were overshadowed by their romantic affiliations in their lifetimes, but both have done photographic work which merits attention. Maar is often viewed visually as the prototype for Pablo Picasso's "weeping woman" of the 1930s, most prominently appearing in the painting Guernica but also appearing in innumerable other images.Picasso may be the ultimate male artist who besides having "periods" of styles, could also make a timeline of his career using his various lovers as calendars. In any literature, Dora Maar, emerges as a very strange, troubled character, who went from being a member of Breton's surrealists to following the Catholic Church. As someone whose partial education was by French communists who were also devout Catholics (merci, Mme Tool et aussi Sylvie Carduner), I can understand this, although I would say it perplexes me somewhat. Maar's photographs have been seen primarily since the 1980s exhibition of surrealist photography at the Corcoran Gallery curated by Rosalind Krauss & Jane Livingston, "L'amour fou." One cannot locate a distinct style in the images, or a consistency between them, but they can be quite compelling to look at. Maar had been trained as a commercial photographer - regardless of the skill set involved, there is a lively & strong visual intelligence to the work

Also in terms of writing history, I would say history is rewritten, not written - it is a continual process of reinvention & "the history" of photography made by women is but one prism of a multi-faceted crystal.

For sheer extravagance the career of Lee Miller warrants the various books & exhibitions that have been made of it. Miller would be known simply by the many gorgeous photographs made of her, primarily by Man Ray, as well as her presence in the Jean Cocteau film Blood of the Poet.. A girl from Nyack, NY, she had been a fashion model before becoming involved in the Parisian demimonde in the 1920s. While one could cite her role as an artists' model as her primary achievement, a look at her photography, which as a war correspondent in WWII was fairly extensive, shows a very distinctive presence.

War photography is so strange: how does one judge it? by formal qualities? Does that suffice? The gravity of most war photography is very intentional - it has an agenda & it was for a particular publishing purpose. If one were to look at possibly more eccentric examples wherein graphic qualities are brought in - I would cite the work of both Cecil Beaton & Lee Miller. Beaton as a kind of aesthete managed to make highly beautiful pictures of the UK military, as well as ultimately becoming a kind of in-house portraitist for the House of Windsor. Beaton's soldiers are hot - their asses are round & delicious. One gets distracted by their exoticism & their eroticism. Beaton's images are about erotic & aesthetic possibility - his colonialism is as erotic as it is military.

Lee Miller made what is in my estimation one of the greatest photographs ever: her self-portrait, taking a bath in Hitler's bathtub, after his death, in his bunker. Visually it isn't so much, but the absolute weirdness & egotism of it are I think a truly special moment. It is pure concept. & it intersects w/ a global history - most of us feel quite shy about such things. Who enters such a sphere of power via the bathroom? & then treats it as a photo op?

The photo ops of various governments (such as that used by the various Bush administrations) can't hold a candle to this, although they warrant their own study. Lee Miller distinguished herself w/ a social aplomb I cannot imagine (nor do I expect to ever be in proximity to Hitler's bathtub or its equivalent, in my time).

I am curious to see how the years reveal Diane Arbus, now that her archives are at the Metropolitan Museum (which also houses the archives of Walker Evans). My sense is that there is much more work there than one would expect. Arbus was a working magazine photographer, with constant deadlines. The 2 official documents of her work - the 1972 MoMA catalog, & the Met publication Revelations are 2 very discontinuous books. The MoMA catalog is one of the seminal photographic publications & events of the late 20th century. Contemporary students seem a bit unimpressed, but I would cite its publication as one of the truly important moments of photographic history - for my generation (already too young, a full generation later) it was one of the most provocative photographic occurrences available. Lucky are we to have it. Given the potential tediousness of most photography books, this was so skewed, so in depth & so incorrect (outlining all sorts of visual taboos) & it offered no way out - it was entirely unredemptive! LIfe is miserable & strange & if you're lucky, you're retarded! I hate to put it in such bald terms but when I think of what is important about it, is its absolute lack of propriety.

Given the apolitical formalism of much 1960s art, it's emphasis on form, the work of Diane Arbus is like a a kind of mold eating away at any structure. The apartments she looks in in NYC are dirty w/ nicotine residue, they are populated by unhappy sorts. it sucks. NYC is a miserable global city of people who are never quite settled there & are barely in control of themselves. Everyone is in a kind of lumpen hell. If I make may one suggestion, it would be that Arbus' social orbit could be seen as well in the context of the New American Cinema, promoted by Jonas Mekas. The Ken Jacobs film Little Stabs at Happiness may be the most interesting cinematic parallel. But Jacobs & also Jack Smith offer a more holistic vision, & honestly, that's saying something. Neither Jacobs or Smith could be accused of being so hopeful.

There is so much to see in the show. I don't think it realizes any deep revision of photography, but it offers some stunning examples of some great women photographers . . .let's hope that the next history will change history.

Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore: Detroit Disassembledis a picture book of Detroit, of the decrepitude which can be found throughout the city: office towers, theaters, factories, schools, houses. The images were all made with an 8x10 camera, with color film, which has been printed digitally, intensifying the color palette. Moore has published books of photographs of Havana and also Governor's Island in New York City (in tandem with Lisa Kereszi) which is an abandoned outpost of the Coast Guard, a once fully developed community, which is the site of numerous plans for redevelopment.

The city book has been a staple of publishing - a casual list off the top of my head would include Berenice Abbott's Atget Photographe de Paris, her own book Changing New York, Bill Brandt's The English at Home, William Klein's Life is Good and Good for You in New York, Daido Moriyama's Shinjuku 19XX-20XX. The camera, the book & cities are intertwined technologically: each one of us can be an armchair flâneur. (I am ignoring the innumerable glossy tourist volumes about which I have nothing to say, except perhaps that they are the most common examples available).

There's a certain charm in realizing that Detroit has become as exotic as place as Havana, enough so to become a subject of a book(Detroit has also been photographed by Robert Polidori, who also published a book of Havana). American Ruins by Camilo Jose Vergara is a less sumptuous, less aesthetic view of the shrinking industrial cities of the US, but offers more sociological analysis, more tangible data-gathering of the canker in the rose of our formerly grand cities. In 1995 Vergara published an article in Metropolis proposing downtown Detroit become a monument like the Acropolis - the remains of an industrial economy, now defunct, an economy of the past. While his proposal shows a certain irony & darkness, a kind of black humor, it informs my own viewing of both Moore & Polidori's images which emphasize a much more sensual unselfconscious rendering of the truly fantastic environment of the city. In his photographs Vergara also revisits sites over a period of years, which in a bald, inartistic way imparts a time-line of continuous decay and/or demolition absent from the work of others.

As poignant as Moore's images can be, as "extreme" as the dereliction can be, the images are so beautiful, that one is compelled to hope they remain as such, somehow. Both Moore & Polidori's images remind me of the view pictures made in Italy in the 17th century by Canaletto and Giovanni Paolo Panini, which included tourist destinations such as St Peter's, or St Mark's, as well as various ruins such as the Coliseum - which were for a clientele of cultivated travelers, as markers of cosmopolitanism & erudition.

Andrew Moore's images (along w/ Polidori & many others) show a remarkably high skill set & an aesthetic view of what for locals is simply the world in which they live. I am reminded of the state motto of Michigan: Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circum spice: If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you. Indeed! Perhaps we (it may be unfair to include myself) Detroiters are now finding ourselves like the Italians in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun - a last vestige of pastoral peasantry interfacing with a decadent cosmopolitan society which has descended on the city in search of artistic inspiration, a nobility of sensibility inferred in the contemplation of the centuries of ruins in and around Rome.

What also comes to mind is that the photograph, like the stereograph in Oliver Wendell Holmes' essay, replaces the thing itself. In our economy this translates into real estate. As gorgeous as both Moore's & Polidori's views of Havana are, I sense an invidious shadow lurking (not on the part of the photographers themselves but of greater corporate powers, which include publishing) behind such fragile worlds of diminished economies.

In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity by Edward Dimendberg the destruction of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles haunts (in the future) the use of Bunker Hill in the films Kiss Me Deadly & Joseph Losey's remake of M. One sees a world about to disappear. & that it can be defined as such facilitates its total destruction.

From a distance it may seem as if what has occurred is relatively new, but the upheaval in the city has been an ongoing process for approximately 50 years, at this point. One could cite the development of expressways to Oakland & Macomb counties, beginning in the 1950s, as facilitating an exodus of an emerging middle-class out of the city to new suburbs. The 1967 riot exacerbated the polarities between city & suburb, defining them in terms of race & class. As a child in the 1970s in Oakland County I remember a common bumper-sticker "Visit Detroit - The Murder City." Considering the average dumb-wholesomeness of the average Midwesterner, that's quite a dark message to convey from that beacon of cheap-ass ideology, the car bumper.

My sense is that the hatred of the urban pandemic to the suburbs of Detroit has been a long-term anxiety about more diabolical issues at hand: there has been a continual exploitation of resources, based primarily in the automobile industry, in which obsolescence is always forthcoming. Sustainability & renewal have never been part of an economic equation which has been based in boom-or-bust short term profits. The city government itself has proved itself a kind of thin mask for larger corporate concerns, which ultimately have no specific site. There is no loyalty to place, & the pink slip is just around the corner. The message is: we are expendable.

One of the paradoxes in looking at photos of the "ruins" of Detroit is relative freedom it allows - an ability to experience some solitude, & to look at something in an unguided way. As per Camilo Jose Vergara, one can enter a space built by premises of capitalist expansion of the 20th century, & view it retrospectively, even as it exists still, before us.

It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes off my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here,
in thought, I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck
seems sweet to me in this sea.
- Giacomo Leopardi

Death, Destruction and . . .

In conversation w/ D., about the photographing of ruins.

Ruins were common subjects in the first decades of photography: there are exemplary examples of such, as daguerreotype, calotype, wet plate image, etc. As a technical consideration, the immobility of any site, it's stationary aspect, facilitated its imaging by processes which were time-intensive. & in these images one can see a cultural shift in the use of the image to delineate time as a physical residue, residue which can be simultaneously historical & touristic.

We can see the Acropolis or the excavations of Pompeii with the new technological vision of the camera. The sites tend to be much dirtier & unkempt than in our present day, or so it seems - it could be a problem w/ early orthochromatic films. It is as the places do not know how to be seen - how awkward they can seem. Or I think of the views by Roger Fenton of fantastical gothic ruins in England, with tiny figures randomly placed in the overgrown sites. This reminds me of how different it could be to experience such sites, physically, in different times. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess could run off to Stonehenge in her great solitude, whereas nowadays one would be on a very controlled guided tour.

The photograph also has air of judgement in it's seeming ability to discern what is to be preserved & what is to be discarded. For example, the survey by Charles Marville of Paris before the expansion of the city by Baron Hausmann had obliterated the medieval city is an inventory of what is to be destroyed, after it has been recorded by the camera. This is a concrete manifestation of the assertion by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his article about the stereoscope: Form is henceforth divorced from matter. The image is what is necessary, not the thing itself.

Images of war, as the urgency of the conflict fades from memory, become quaint & fascinating for their visual qualities. From the US Civil War, George Barnard's images following William Tecumseh Sherman's "March to the Sea" have an uncanny solitude, like Pompeii, which in no way imparts the aggressive fury of a military campaign of massive destruction. Such a duality in images - their ability to succor us from the horrors which they represent, is where I want to begin w/ my talk w/ D.

There are 2 photo books out this spring of Detroit - Detroit Disassembled, by Andrew Moore, and The Ruins of Detroit, by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre. I have my own ongoing photographic project of Detroit, which includes images of the abandoned Michigan Central Station, & Victorian ruins in Brush Park. More on this another time: but is Detroit a "disaster" or the outcome of capitalist logic played out, & played out on home turf? Isn't it about economic obsolescence? An end that is now in sight?

From there the conversation led to Robert Polidori's book of photos of New Orleans, after the flooding of Hurricane Katrina, Robert Polidori: After the Flood.

For D., the viewing of ruins is a romantic activity. & less substantial than, say, the lyrics of Shelley's Ozymandias. No judgement is in the image itself, no (excuse the pun) point of view; the photographer is more a camera operator than an interpreter, with a technological recording at hand. The oblique photograph does not hone one's perspective but instead offers distraction & a puzzlement of meaning. In more general terms, the photograph reduces all to tourism.

Polidori's images of New Orleans are a fairly exhaustive inventory of damages from the hurricane & subsequent flooding, yet do so in a richly pictorial style we know from Polidori's earlier work, with it's sharp focus, rich colors, & intense details. I am partial to Polidori's book of Havana, for example, which although of a poverty on a scale we ignore in the US (& also of a past sumptuousness equally foreign to our more Puritanical shores), does not read necessarily as a kind of victimization except as a manifestation of an Exotic Other (although I suspect it may function as a prospective real estate brochure for those waiting for the fall of communism in Cuba).

The images of New Orleans are structured entirely around the flood; the images also manage to aestheticize the disaster
& have it read as natural. As if it is the high waters & mold lines constitute the issues at hand, rather than the class warfare & bureaucratic neglect which facilitated the true disaster. & this is where the work becomes troubling, in its delectation of a ruined city, for no other purpose than it's aesthetic consumption, in a simplified equation of cause & effect.

That said, I find that the void I sense looking at these images is what compels me to continue to look.

Anthony Hamboussi, Newtown Creek - A Photographic Survey of New York's Industrial Waterway

Newtown Creek: A Photographic Survey of New York?s Industrial Waterwayby Anthony Hamboussi is a journey around the perimeters of the Newtown Creek in New York City, an industrial canal which separates north Brooklyn from the western perimeters of Queens, flowing westward towards the East River. It is a self-propelled project, which began with Hamboussi's knowledge of the area, beginning in a childhood in nearby Maspeth, Queens. A seemingly casual project became an obsessive chronicle of several years. The images are presented chronologically which suits the essentially private nature of the enterprise, that of Hamboussi's journey into a polluted heart of darkness within New York City limits. Thoroughly researched & plotted, Hamboussi's itinerary also incorporated intuitive aspects, which can be seen in the fitful un-mappings of the area, giving it more the fitful mutability of dreams, in its starts & stops & divergences, while it inventories a large area of mixed industries.

I have been struck by how many New Yorkers do not know where the Newtown Creek is, although it is a ubiquity to those living in Greenpoint, Bushwick, Long Island City, Maspeth. The community with the most unlikely name in such a gray mess is Blissville, which straddles a cemetery & a Best Western Motel, on the Queens side. The creek stinks. It is poisonous. Its most notable landmark is the sewage treatment plant through which flows 3/4 of New York City's waste (& which now features a remarkably innovative park within its facilities). Good friend of mine once lived in Greenpoint, at the end of Manhattan Ave., on the other side of the Pulaski Bridge from the sewage treatment plant, which when the wind blew in a certain manner, mixing with the scents of a nearby scented candle factory, the area would be imbued with odors of intense sweetness & shit, even for those with a high gag threshold. There are now 2 centuries of industry layering its shores, & within it the boundaries have blurred between public & private, as streets mysteriously disappear into the gated confines of corporations, as maps mutate with no reason other than as the residue of decades of corporate aggression homesteading on these filthy borders. Seemingly deserted, it is actually active & dynamic as an economic nerve, sinking below the horizon of freeways, warehouses & factories.

Perhaps the most acute irony I could discover about the area is that in the 18th century, before its industrialization, the Newtown Creek gave its name to the first cultivated apple in the US: the Newtown Pippin. Grassy meadows sloping down to sweet waters, a peaceable kingdom of fish & fowl, a New World . . .

At this point we can only take someone's else's word on this. Hamboussi's photos show a diverse area of industry & infrastructure. While the frontage on the East River is now being developed as a corridor of high-rise apartments, the filthy core of the creek is still a crazy-quilt cross-section of industries & abject histories.

What will happen to the parking lot for the Fink Means Good Bread trucks? What pollutants were left behind by Phelps Dodge, before its site was taken over for the Fresh Direct warehouse? How can National Grid justify legally its prohibition of photography at its perimeter, outside its fenced borders?

Hamboussi looks at the Creek with the eyes of both an insider & an outsider. Given the lugubrious tally of industry & its aftermath at hand, Hamboussi's photography has a contrasting lightness of touch. While I know the work he has put into it, the images flow with their attention to detail, to the ability of Hamboussi to guide us through a landscape which would be so easy to ignore in its harshness, yet which reveals so much about the world we live in.