Mark Power Blog

Writer Geoff Dyer is an inquisitive Englishman who is not only  known for his  fiction but also for his opinions on many other things that catch his  fancy. A polymath, in other words.

 

 

 

Geoff Dyer photographer unknown

 

So aside from some provocative novels, the most recent which I recently read with pleasure “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi”, Dyer has also opined on yoga, T.E.  Lawrence, John Berger,  jazz,  and now photography with “The Ongoing Moment”.  I say “now” but it’s only now for me; the book actually came out in 2005.

I thought I’d do a book review in the form of an interview with Self, a literary form I encountered a while ago  in that fine film of Irish life and music, “The Commitments” although privately I have done many interviews with Self  before and after seeing that  tribute to the great Wilson Pickett.

Wilson Pickett photographer unknown

 

Self:  What, we’re going to Motown? What happened to Geoff Dyer’s book?

MLP:  Not Motown, Memphis. But you’re right, the great Pickett deserves his own post so back to Geoff Dyer.

Self: So what do you like about this book?

MLP:  It’s a fascinating mix of  original and provocative observations on the medium mixed with biographies and occasional bits of gossip which detonate amidst the exposition. For example,  just when you’re about to be swamped with theory comes the revelation that Walker Evans had a big cock.

Self:  Yes, suddenly the eyes fly open. I hope you didn’t mean to suggest the exposition is in any way boring.

MLP: Quite the opposite, like Susan Sontag’s seminal “On Photography” which has not aged at all, Dyer intends to provoke, to pose interesting questions rather than predictable answers.
One thesis he follows through much of the book is to link images of like subjects by diverse artists.  You see “the same ‘battered fedora’ in imagery  ranging from Dorothea Lang to Garry Winogrand. There’s a collective fascination with windows and open doors, with signs, with unmade beds, a subject which prompts Dyer to note an unmade bed with its faint imprint of a body, is like a portrait.

Self:  I’ve noticed an extraordinary number of artists who photographed people in pools of water, two well known examples being  Edward Weston and André Kertész.

 

 

André Kertész  Swimmer, 1917

Edward Weston, Nude Floating, 1939

 

MLP: And then there’s the number of artists who have photographed blind people, beginning with Strand of course, but including many other artists from Lewis Hine to  Weegee, to Evans, to  Avedon. Dyer even includes Ed Clark’s famous picture of the accordionist playing at FDR’s funeral – he could see  but he was blinded by his tears.

 

 

Ed Clark, FDR’s Funeral 1945

 

Self: Not to mention the fact that many of these blind subjects were also playing accordions. Dyer doesn’t speculate on the meaning of those coincidences but he does floats the  theory is that photographers are drawn to photographing the blind because of their primal terror of going blind themselves.

MLP: Sounds reasonable to me. I’ve never photographed a blind person but the fear is there. Arbus said she liked photographing blind people because “they can’t fake their expression”.

Self: Or you could say blind people all have pretty much the same expression.

MLP: When we were much younger and looking at a lot of photography for the first time we noticed many artists had an affinity for the same subjects. It didn’t appear to be a stylistic affinity, rather an intuitive response to certain archetypal images –women in pools, for example – look at the pre-Raphaelites - which actually seemed to have little to do with individual vision. We began imagine it was the cameras themselves discovering these images, cameras directed by a collective subconscious eye rather than by individual artists.

Self: Dyer reports that Bill Brandt, the great English photographer, had the same thought: “Instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing” which reminds me that another English artist, David Hockney  said “the camera only sees what you see.”

 

 

Bill Brandt by Michael Birt

 

MLP: While those two are arguing, I recall Edvard Munch once said: “I do not paint what I see - but what I saw.” He introduces time into the debate.

Self: That may be true of painting but it seems like every photograph is an image of present time no matter when it was made…

MLP: I would argue a photograph acquires a veneer of the past as it ages, when we look at a Robert Frank picture we’re seeing a scene as he experienced it in the present tense but for us it is in the past tense, that’s what special about a photograph, unlike a memory, it can seem real in both temporal dimensions at once…what we don’t see is what has happened between those two time-states; as Dyer says: “photography is the negation of chronology”.

Self: That’s the pathos of every image; it is forever trapped in the present tense, its future unknowable and we’re there, the godlike viewers, knowing both its future and its past.

MLP: Despite its casual tone, Dyer’s writing has large ambitions.  Jorge Luis Borges        ( speaking of blind people) , photographed by many, and quoted by even more, felt despair, Dyer noted,  because his medium, words, could never describe the simultaneity of everything occurring at once in a given moment in our universe  - the  ur-realiy of our visible universe – because words ( and photographs) are successive, not simultaneous.  But Dyer persists: “ To reconcile the simultaneous and the successive; that is one of the ambitions of these pages”  he writes. Of course, he doesn’t succeed  -  no more than our own individual experience of the world succeeds -  but it’s the effort that impresses as much as success.

Jorge Luis Borges’ grave. The motto reads: “And who did not fear”.

Photographer unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self: Another strength of this odd book is its biographical stream-of-consciousness: There’s a mention of Strand and Stieglitz eyeing each others’ wives (with their cameras, of course) and somehow Lewis Hine and Edward Hopper lead us into an account  the feuding between Kertész  and Brassai and then suddenly we’re back again with Georgia O’Keefe  giving Dyer a chance to spend two pages  bemoaning  the lack of detail in Stieglitz’ famous  picture of O’Keefe’s crotch!

MLP: The mixture of biography and gossip brings these famous photographers to life better than any history could –  we learn these icons are much like ourselves with their ambitions, their petty dislikes, their schemes, their triumphs and failures. It takes the skill of a novelist like Dyer to bring these artists and their times to life. I’ve been reading about people like Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston and Kertész  all my life but they only really came to life for me with this book.

Self: Does it bother you that Dyer’s thoughts on photographers and photography don’t go much beyond the 60s?

MLP: Well, he does go on for several pages discussing the implications of color photography, even asking if an orange can really be an orange in black-and-white since presumably its essence  is its orangeness.

But the fact that he pauses more or less at the end of the black-and-white era hopefully means we might see a sequel.

 

an orange which might not be an orange

 

Self: Are you reading this, Mr. Dyer? Get cracking!

Books on Demand:

For the past nine months when not blogging away and dodging the IRS and occasionally surfacing to teach a class, I have been doing a series of  printing-on-demand books, working with blurb.com’s design software. To date I have done ten POD books with Blurb.

My primary reason for doing these books was to archive some of my past work in a form that would be readily accessible to a viewer. The book form is ideal for this purpose as unlike a boxed portfolio of prints, a book tends to be self explanatory – a book shows how a photographer thinks with his or her images.

When resurrecting past work, I couldn’t resist changing the work, in some cases slightly, and in others, drastically. Some of the books are more recent work, done in the last several years.

Books of past work:

Cross of Gold: 13×18 inches, hardcover only: photographs of Mexico and Holy Week in  Spain, the result of three trips from 1964 to 1985.

Sample double page spread from Cross of Gold

My Heart’s in My Mouth: a fictional rendering of a family album by the actress Rita Hayworth, a project first exhibited in 1975. An experiment with words and images.  Extensively revised, 2008.

Sample double page spread from My Heart’s in My Mouth

The Collaboration: 13×19, ( with Victor H. Carroll)  hardcover only: an  experiment with fiction consisting of text and images, exhibited in 1982 and much revised and  expanded for the book. Primarily a book of  writing with accompanying photographs.

Sample double page spread from The Collaboration

War Stories: 8x10, hardcover; softcover: my first experiments with digital images, 1984. A treatment of  appropriated images from World War One.

A Date with Dan: 1997. 8×10 hardcover, softcover.  A documentary work:  color photographs of a found young girl’s diary.

Sample double page spread from A Date With Dan

Beauty and the Beast, 1975, 8×10, soft and hardcover. A photographic exploration of the fable, revised 2008.

Sample double page spread from Beauty and the Beast

Recent Work:

Fibonacci’s Face: 13×19, hardcover only.   Text and images exploring a photographer’s ( who may or may not be me!) relationship with the medieval mathematician, Fibonacci. The first version of the idea was in 1997 with text and black-and-white photographs. For the book I did a completely new set of color photographs, most taken in 2007 and 2008.

Sample double page spread from Fibonacci’s Face

The Red Book 2008: 13×19, hardcover only.  A ‘daybook’ of the photography done in 2008.

Hands of the Masters: 8×10, hardcover and softcover. Photographs of how various renaissance {mostly) painters rendered hands. Color work done in 2008.

Sample double page spread from Hands of the Masters

Foreclosure: Documentary work done in Lehigh Acres, Florida  in 2009. See posting: “Dspatch from Ground Zero”.

Previewing books:

All of these books and others can be previewed at www.blurb.com. The links above should take you to the preview site for each book.

Purchasing books:

My main interest in doing the books was to get my work into a coherent form for viewing. Sales were not my primary purpose in producing the books but of course, sales are welcome.

You may purchase any of the books directly from www.blurb.com. Most are available as either hardcover or softcover versions or with a dustcover. The softcover versions are the most economical way of purchasing the books although the larger books don’t offer a dustcover.

If you do purchase a book and would like it signed, mail it to me with return postage and I will be happy to sign it and then return it to you.  I’ll answer any questions concerning the books if you email me at markel45@gmail.com.

I am also offering a signed original inkjet print from any book you purchase, printed archivally on 13×19 inch paper, for $400. Please email if you’d like to take advantage of this offer.

OK, time to ‘fess up. This dispatch is from really from further north, Silver Spring, MD,  and there is snow on the ground and the tropical grace ( and squalor) of the Keys  is but a collection of languorous memories.  

 

click on “open image in another window” to see larger picture.

 

And happy memories or so I thought until I began to look at the photographs. Apparently once I raised  camera to my eyes another photographer emerged, one perhaps influenced by a daily reading of the New York Times in which  day after day, clouds of doom and gloom hung over every page.  In any event, most of the photographs are on the melancholy side, a mood completely absent when I didn’t have a camera in my hands. 

 

 

 

 

 

In fact, to be in the Keys was to be in denial. Key West seemed little unchanged from years past; roosters strutted the tropical streets, happy tourists filled every restaurant with their margarita-fueled laughter and conspicuous consumption glittered from every window. 

 

 

 

Tourists of another day: “Instant relatives for a dollar”. 

 

We were particularly taken with the window of  the Duck and Dolphin antique shop in Key West, where all the cultures of the world seemingly came home to roost.

 

 

I had my eye on  a art deco crucifix, memorable if only because it was so far removed from the original: a persecuted Jew destined to change the world, hanging from a cross of wood.

This romantic Christ, the creation of a French artist in the late 20s, was gold plated and cost about $2800, way over my crucifix budget. I will be happy with a framed print on my wall, conscious that like many of us, I am settling for less these days. 

 

 

 

The sun worshippers were out in force, gathering in Mallory Square to salute the descending globe every evening surrounded by court jesters and jongleurs that probably aren’t much different from their counterparts in medieval days. Cats leap through hoops, clowns totter on stilts, pretty women eat fire, a turbaned fakir shuffles his cards. It would not have surprised me to see a few Egyptian sun gods strolling through the crowds,  golden orbs sitting atop their jackal heads. That would have tempted me to raise my camera but in lieu of gods I found myself photographing bare walls and a lone rabbit in a setting as artificial as a Hollywood set.

 

 

And back on Cudjoe Key, after spending days fishing or lolling in hammocks and reading Ken Follett and Tom Clancy ( I found his detailed descriptions of weapon systems to be oddly soothing) my Other Self rose up and decided to photograph along Route One, the one hundred and fifty mile long snake-like highway that connects the Keys to the mainland. I began in color but it was the kind of color that soon faded to black-and-white.

 

 

 

 

As I said it was as if someone else took these pictures because when not photographing, I couldn’t get enough of the balmy air, the wild palms, and the emerald sea stretching as far as the eye could see. But as Fellini once said, I don’t direct these movies; they direct me. 

 

 

After Cudjoe Key I ended up in the real Florida, Lehigh Acres, a vast exurb of Fort Myers ( twice the size of Manhattan), recently described as the “Ground Zero” of foreclosures.

 

      double click on “open in new window” to see larger images. 

 

Unfinished construction, Lehigh Acres, Fl.

 

Both the New Yorker and the New York Times have written recent articles on Lehigh Acres, and even President Obama made a lightning visit to Fort Myers last month to see what was going on. 

Abandoned foreclosure, Lehigh Acres, Fl

 

What is going on is the American Dream turned inside out. Most of the houses, built between 2004 and 2006, at the height of the housing boom, are one story concrete block-and-stucco structures, sitting low on the ground.  I imagine they would withstand a hurricane pretty well  but evidently the developers weren’t prepared for the economic hurricane, a high wind  tearing silently through the mostly deserted streets.

 

 

Lehigh Acre streets, flat and as long as airport runways, are laid out in grids as precise as those in video games. Some are paved and some are not. Flood control canals hide behind some streets, some filled with water; most dry as a bone.

 

Floods are a long way from people’s minds these days.  If Key West was a green that hurt the eyes, Lehigh Acres is a parched  brown that hurts the spirit. The palms droop despairingly, the overgrown Florida lawns are broken up by fire ant nests, and for sale signs hang unread everywhere. 

 

 

The unbelievable fact is that some houses in Lehigh acres have lost  as much as 200% of their value.  Many are “underwater” foreclosures, so called because the  houses are abandoned because they are worthless, not because people can’t keep up the payments. And once they walk away, in many cases leaving even their possessions behind, some dream of schemes of how to buy another house.

Real estate prices  in Lehigh Aacres are probably lower than their equivalents were during the depression of the 30s. Twenty-five thousand can get you a two bedroom house with two baths and fifty thousand will get you a pretty good three bedroom with a lanai and a pool, lanais being Florida speak for enclosed patios. 

 

The optimism of yesterday

 

The reality of today ( from a real estate website)

 

But if you yield to that enticement above you’d have to live with the silence. It’s the absence of  cars that make it so quiet.  People didn’t really walk away, they drove away, leaving behind garages filled with discarded appliances.

It’s also the absence of children; you see discarded  toys in the backyards that more resemble unkempt cemeteries.

 

 

Another oddity in Lehigh Acres is that there are no fences to delineate properties; one  overgrown lot segues into another. On every block you see houses abandoned in mid-construction or sitting on half-graded lots.  But many abandoned houses look new; you have to look carefully to see the signs of neglect: the empty driveways, the ripped apart cages in which air conditioner units once sat, the satellite dishes lying on the ground, the abandoned pools turning green as algae flourishes.

Abandoned pool and lanai

 

Back in Washington life seems as unreal as it did in the Keys. Our aging suburb ( as it usually described)  doesn’t look any different although the houses are said to have lost about 4% of their value. 

Silver Spring, Md

 

 People around here are hunkering down, not walking away … yet. The Federal Government, our local rooster industry, lurches along, flinging  heaps of money into the air, and we are told that in another  year or two the sun will rise again. Called “rooster” because our government reminds me of a practice in some Asian funerals: when a deceased person is being carried to the grave, a rooster is perched atop the remains: if the corpse stirs, the rooster is supposed to crow…    

 And although we returned home  to find a blizzard whistling about our ears, we notice the snowdrops are poking their heads above the ground. Soon it will be Spring. We’ll get out our Florida T shirts and shorts and make a resolve to stop reading the New York Times. It will be  the year of the Rooster ( not to mention the Ostrich) until that hurricane begins to steal down our streets.    

 

 

Yes, it is cold today in Florida…and windy; even the birds are blown about in the impossibly blue sky. If your only sense was sight you’d think it was delightfully warm; the wind-blown palms sparkle in the  sun as if it were 80 degrees out instead of 57.  But at least two hardy souls refuse to believe the evidence of their senses.

 

 

 

 

One of the attractions of a beach vacation is adapting yourself to that that strange environment known as a  beach house. As with most other beach houses I have inhabited from New Jersey to Florida, our genial host makes an aggressive attempt to whip us into leisure-time frenzy. There is a sign saying the Tiki lounge ( our kitchen) is serving various tropical drinks. A plastic parrot advises  us to forget about work. An extravagantly  be-hatted girl urges us to be nice or go home. 

 

 

 

 

But the predominant theme is Piscean:

 

 

 

Finned creatures of every garish color and shape swim through every room, inhabiting  every depth from floor to ceiling. These are the fish of our dreams – or should I say nightmares? – which bear little resemblance to actual denizens of the deep.

 

 

 

 

 

Living in this beach house is like being underwater in a aquarium designed by Walt Disney, an aquarium that for a while strangely smelled of pine-sol.

 

 

And if it isn’t fish, it is palm trees -palms on the chairs, on the shower curtains and occasionally on the walls.

 

 

But still no match for the real thing…

 

 

More to come …