Michael h. Webster Photography

Michael h. Webster Photography

Media Criticism

Slow TV

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My wife is really into what they call “police procedurals,” and the like. Things like NCIS, Bones, Castle, and who knows what else as there are so many and it is difficult to tell the difference between them. Last night it was “Wisdom of the Crowd.” Anyway, I can’ help to notice that they are all fast paced and centered on violence, most often – if not always – murder.

I noticed this, or noticed it yet again, because I’ve been watching two much slower moving shows that are centered more on regular people.

I really enjoyed “Patterson,” reviewed here by Glenn Kenny, which is definitely slow moving. It may even be a great movie. Time will tell, of course, but it is easily my favorite by Jim Jarmusch so far.

“The film feels like one in which nothing is happening, but it’s not happening beautifully…” writes Kenny.

Nice line, and I don’t mean to do Glenn any disservice, but a lot is happening, and it is happening beautifully.

Just one thing: Living out here in this bizarre 90+ percent white America, the film made me nostalgic for the real America found more often in the cities and surrounding metropolitan areas. The film in no way does anything to draw attention to it, but the entire plot takes place in a diverse culture, with different looking people from radically different backgrounds interacting in a friendly and polite manner – or you could say, just like real life. Only one scene is at all violent, but by any modern standard it is not very violent, and it succeeds in deepening our understanding of the character, or at least opening up a mystery. And there’s a lot more to the film than those elements. Kenny suggests that multiple viewings are rewarded with deeper understandings. I look forward to seeing it again.

On Netflix I’ve been watching Detectorists, which is a slow-moving British comedy about metal detector enthusiasts. What more needs to be said, really? A British comedy about metal detector enthusiasts. Dry humor? Pathos? You betcha. Violence and murder? Not so much.

More on Photo Critiquing and Contests – and Plug for Harper’s

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Screen Shot 2016-07-18 at 9.13.54 PM
In addition to great writing, Harper’s regularly publishes great photography.

It’s been one of the great sadness’s of my life that in the past year, I let my subscription to Harper’s lapse (yes, I’ve enjoyed a privileged, and very lucky, existence). When it last came time to renew, the cost had gone up to over $50, which I’ve found is farther than I am willing to go, no matter how much I love the individual magazine and want to support print publishing in general. But today, I clicked on the subscribe link on the annoying popup that kept appearing while I was reading my free article for the month, and found I could renew for just over $30. Yippeee. I am, again, at peace with myself.

I think part of the reason I was so cheap as to let the subscription lapse was the exit of Editor Lewis Lapham and the resulting drop in interest I had for the Easy Chair column. After Lapham left, Easy Chair has been handled by a variety of eminent writers, all very talented, including Thomas Frank and Rebecca Sonit; but none of whom I found right for the job.

But today, I read Walter Kirn‘s latest go at it, “Atlas Aggregated,” and then his previous two, and hope he gets the gig on a permanent basis. “Atlas Aggregated” is about the website Literary Hub, which bills itself as the Rotten Tomatoes of literature.

In addition to the high quality of the writing, its fit in the Easy Chair, and the overall intent of the piece, there were a few quotes that related to some of my hobby-horses about photography. Namely, critiques, contests, and old-fashioned technical skills.

Kirn on critiquing:

“Book reviewing, as I conceived of it and strove to practice it, was chiefly descriptive, not evaluative, and what it described was not the book itself but my encounter with the book. It tried to make manifest the act of reading in something like the way that travel writing dramatizes journeys. It wasn’t scorekeeping. It wasn’t grading. It didn’t break down into 8’s and 8.5’s.”

Kirn on grading, which I apply to contests:

“The site has many worthy features… but the grading business undermines it all. Works of literature are among the most intricate and elusive of human artifacts, the crudest of which requires more creativity than twenty trillion acts of aggregation. A site created to celebrate them now aimed to reduce them to an alphabetic omega point.”

Kirn on skills:

“Still, the elites, or whatever remains of them — those rare and lonesome worthies of skill and courage — deserve some protection from us, the aggregate. Prestige, irreducible and absolute, has its uses, and the very highest is inducing people to do hard things, things that take a lot of time to learn and exceptional nerve to execute, like building a child a new ear and reattaching it in such a way that blood flows through it and it doesn’t die.”

Put into photo context, I think the descriptive, personal approach as opposed to evaluative is a good direction. And contests inevitably grade, ultimately saying that some photographers, or even one photographer, is objectively better than others. A photograph, or photo essay, as Kirn says about literature, is “among the most intricate and elusive of human artifacts.” And I do believe that technical skill is still important. Oh, I know there are plenty of photographs where it was totally unnecessary, but there are far, far more where the result would have been impossible without the skill, which came from long study and practice.

Semi-Apology to the New York Times

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Eggleston photo of red tricycle with golden ration overlay
Photo used in illustration by William Eggleston.

In a previous post, I said something to the effect that the NYT did not do serious photography criticism. Now I come across this great piece on Steve McCurry by Teju Cole, which argues that the immensely popular McCurry is a hack (I have no position on this, just relating what Cole says).

His argument is the McCurry produces beautiful photographs that cater to his internal prejudices rather than reality, and that the result is “another picture with easy, classic composition,” rather than something more “exciting and discomfiting and grounded.”

Cole continues with some astute explication:

“How do we know when a photographer caters to life and not to some previous prejudice? One clue is when the picture evades compositional cliché. But there is also the question of what the photograph is for, what role it plays within the economic circulation of images. Some photographs, like Singh’s, are freer of the censorship of the market. Others are taken only to elicit particular conventional responses — images that masquerade as art but fully inhabit the vocabulary of advertising. “

That is just one article in Cole’s monthly On Photography column for the New York Times Magazine. Unfortunately, it’s the only one that offers a negative take on a body of work, and it’s kind of piling on poor McCurry who was getting it rough from much of Photo World at the time over some lame Photoshopping.

But even though he doesn’t do much explaining, outside of the McCurry take-down, why works of particular people are not good, he does a great job of getting at what separates the pedestrian from the transcendent:

“Beginning photographers are often tempted to reduce photography to rigid rules. The rule of thirds — thinking of the picture plane in terms of a grid made of three equal vertical and three equal horizontal divisions, with the points of interest placed at the intersections of these lines — is a common starting point. More sophisticated is the
golden ratio (two quantities are said to be in a golden ratio if the ratio of the larger to the smaller is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger). Imagine a triptych in which the center is about 0.618 as wide as each of the wings. Because this ratio is often found in nature, it is credited as the mathematical logic behind many efficient and visually pleasing phenomena: certain flower petals, or mollusk shells, or spiral galaxies. These codes can be helpful for looking. But the reality is that there is usually a much more improvisatory and flexible mathematical order at play in a successful photograph.

There’s no single right answer, just as there’s no photographic formula. Each successful picture taken on the sly by Cartier-Bresson was one original solution to a set of circumstances he was encountering for the first time.”

Yes, that is very well-said.  Each great photograph is an original solution to a unique set of circumstances. On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time overlaying the golden ratio on great photographs, and it’s quite often a perfect fit. There are infinite ways to be discomfiting within a classic composition.

David Alan Harvey Photo with Golden Ration overlay.
Photo used in illustration by David Alan Harvey

Anyway, seeing Teju Cole’s byline on that article seems one of those weird cosmic convergences as I’ve been half paying attention to David Alan Harvey’s collaboration with him on an upcoming article for the NYT mag. A great writer and a great photographer collaborating on an important story. Can’t wait to see what they come up with.

The Rich Will Always Be With Us

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Picture of youth in jewelry store on Church Avenue in Brooklyn

Those who know me a little bit have probably noticed that I am often critical, or at least deeply skeptical, of the wealthy. This is true in relation to the wealthy as a class. Individuals, of course, are just that.

I’ve been accused of hating the rich, which is simply not true these days. I don’t hate anybody, and I consider no one an enemy.

I confess, however, that for many years I did hate the rich. I spent many of the formative summers of my youth and adolescence at a segregated country club where my father was a member. Mom would drop me off early in the morning for swim team. After practice, I’d usually play a round of golf with friends. Then I’d spend the rest of the day hanging out at the pool until mom would pick me up in the evening.

So I got to know the rich, or at least snobby people who considered themselves wealthy,  pretty well; and I really came to despise them. African-Americans could be neither members nor guests, and they were constantly referred to in racist terms. I don’t know if the club discriminated against Jews. I don’t recall there being any Jewish members, but I really didn’t have any concept of Jews being distinct from whites at the time, so maybe there were Jewish members. Thinking back, however, I kind of doubt it. None of the people I now know to be Jewish were members.

But it wasn’t just people of African descent, and possibly Jews (there were no other ethnic groups in our little town back then). The club members, particularly the older ones, were snobs towards anyone they considered “not the right sort of people,” many of whom were white folk with as much, or more, wealth than the country club snobs themselves. Looking back, I think that pretty much anyone whose work might raise a sweat was considered “not the right sort of people.”

I came to see these country club folk, those leading citizens, as little different than the criminal class who bought and sold drugs, committed petty thefts and vandalism, and generally hated the straight world; only they seemed worse for their hypocrisy. I figured I’d rather be a member of the criminal class than the country club. Fuck those assholes and the golf cart they rode in on. That was my motto.

Anyway, my close proximity and inevitable run-ins with these assholes gave younger me a generic hatred for the rich, at least for the country club variety, but as I quit going to the club in high school, and then went off to college and the world, all that mostly faded from mind. It would really only show up in knee jerk type reactions. While most people’s knee jerk reaction was to admire the rich, mine was always to question them. Not for a nanosecond did I ever believe they were better than anyone else, nor more honest or moral.

But then when I got to New York, I came to know a whole different level of rich. Part of it was working with CEO’s and top executives in my various jobs. Most of it was through my kids’ schooling, as both of them went to one of the better independent schools. For the ten years I had a child in an independent school, and also in the year-plus I spent researching them before picking a school, I came to know many wealthy people, several of whom are actual billionaires. I also came to know their children, their children’s teachers and have an intimate knowledge about the independent school systems in which they are educated.

In short, I met many good people, and was incredibly impressed with how the wealthy are educated. In many ways, the people I knew actually are better. Not for their wealth, but for their open-mindedness, high level skills, and genuine care for their children. Of course I know that a small sample of decent New York liberal rich folk does not absolve the whole class, which I’m sure is still better represented by country club assholes in the sticks; but it did help me let go of those old childhood hatreds.

Still, although I was able to stop hating the rich; my hatred  for the system that creates and perpetuates their wealth grew exponentially. I saw close-up how the advantages of wealth play out for the children of the wealthy. I experienced first-hand the incredible advantages kids get by attending the best independent schools, and going on to the choice colleges – not just for the actual educations, but for the networking as well. In the competition for good jobs, the odds are horribly stacked in favor of rich kids. Most regular, middle class people truly have no idea what their kids are up against.

I think that photography, especially documentary photography, has to be one of the worst professions in terms of favoring the wealthy. Photography is an activity that a lot of people really enjoy practicing. With the devastation of the old-time publishing industry and the ubiquity of high quality cameras, there are few photography jobs that pay more than diddly squat. And, if you take the most tried and true road to success, it costs a lot of money to fly all over the world and spend long stretches in war and/or poverty zones.

A regular kid with a passion, through study, hard work and skill may be able to pull it off, but it’s a hell of a lot easier for a trust fund kid to pull it off with the same hard work, granted, but with money not being much of a concern, and having been better prepared skill-wise through school and maybe workshops – and possibly knowing, or his or her parents knowing – editors, publishers, curators or NGO directors who can hire them or get them work.

So I try real hard not to blame the wealthy and connected photographers who benefit from the system. From what I’ve seen, they are for the most part decent, caring and talented individuals. But I do blame the system that gives them all of those unearned advantages.

Everyone should have access to great education. No one should be born a prince. We should all start out as commoners. Then, we’ll see who rises and falls. Then, we can feel much better that they truly earned whatever it is they got.

 

 

Forced Entries

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Curious People

I recently noticed champagne party type photos from the Magnum and VII agencies showing up in my Facebook feed. Those kinds of photos make me uncomfortable. The more I pay attention to Photo World, the more I see what could be argued are excesses in self-congratulation, especially considering that most of these people are making a living photographing the poor and downtrodden. On the other hand, I’ve been there and done that and can sympathize with people who need to decompress through excess after spending time in horrible situations. Perhaps the proper thing to do is to not be so fucking public about it, as it kind of gives off a reek of gilded age crap, even if it’s not.

Anyway, I usually find that by posing the questions, Karma finds a way to provide answers, or at least different ways of looking at things. I’m currently reading Jim Carroll’s “Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973,” which is kind of a follow-up to “Basketball Diaries.”

And I come across this:

“I believe I have moved closer to my heart. I feel comfortable in reclusion. I don’t need the vacant flux of parties. I don’t need my own attendance at “Art Happenings” which are, for the most part, excuses for the party afterward. But I don’t want to become a cynical prick. It is, after all, a human universe. Knowledge, the hunger for detail, even the leased trivia, does give way to wisdom. If you don’t push. If you sit back and remove the clutter of lips and claws and capsules and punch. I know I am a cold motherfucker, but I have moved closer to my heart.”

Yep, well said. I don’t want to be a cynical prick. But I don’t want to be an enabler, either. What to do?

I think criticism, both art and social, is a good thing and the ability of an artist or medium to take it, consider it, and possibly learn from it, a sign of maturity and confidence.

Glenn Kenny’s unremittingly brutal take-down of Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film “The Neon Demon” in the New York Times made me think along these lines as well. The Times is a powerful pedestal and Kenny’s review will go a long way toward defining the film in the minds of a lot of people. Is Kenny being a cynical prick?

A lot of people will probably be hurt by that review. Not just the director, hundreds of other people who in some way worked on making the film. Yet I believe that reviews like that are necessary for art, any art – and especially photography. Glenn Kenny is not some internet troll. He is one of the more astute and knowledgeable critics, and I think the art of film benefits from having people like him critique it. I can’t look into his heart and know if he’s a cynical prick or not, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is if his critique holds water.

I am unfamiliar with any similar critics or outlets for photography. From what I see and hear, the Photo World and most of the people in it strive to be supportive first, or keep their mouths shut, second. I’d like to see a few more unsympathetic observers. If there are publications that employ professionals like Kenny to critique contemporary photography like there are for film, I am unaware. The New York Times certainly doesn’t. Please let me know if there’s something I’ve missed.

Washington Post Botches Take on “Reality”

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Member of Washington Post Editorial Board considers different scenarios for the 2016 presidential race.

This should come as no surprise coming from a publication whose fact checker doesn’t understand the basic definition of the word “fact.”

In a what-would-otherwise be a jaw dropping failure to understand the meaning of the word “reality,” a new editorial by the Washington Post’s editorial board accuses Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of launching an “attack on reality.”

Sanders’ alleged attack on “reality” took several forms. First, the Post’s Editorial Board objected to him characterizing Hillary Clinton’s claim that he had made personal attacks on President Obama as a “low blow.”

In the very first paragraph, the Editors write “while she made his criticisms out to be more personal in nature than they were…”

So, according to the Washington Post Editorial Board, falsely claiming someone made personal attacks does not fit the definition of a “low blow.” But if making personal attacks is a low blow, then falsely claiming someone made them is as well. At least in the moral universe most of us inhabit. That’s reality.

Then they proceed to the talking point that argues only incremental change is possible. Yea, tell that to Franklin D. Roosevelt, or Martin Luther King, or Lyndon Johnson, or Ronald Reagan, or thousands of others in the history of the world who have accomplished revolutionary change in a short time frame. That, again, is reality.

And although this particular anti-Sanders editorial doesn’t mention it, his plans for universal healthcare and access to higher education are also loudly deemed unrealistic by establishment Editorial Boards, right wing propagandists and the Clinton campaign, but a quick look at the western-style democracies in Europe, Canada and elsewhere show that their “reality” has nothing to do with actual reality.