Mark Power Blog

Yes, the mine is moving on to a new home at Tumblr. And a new name, SIMULACRA. I tried to move the Mine to its new location but I discovered a hip-hop gentleman had gotten there first. Hence the new name to symbolize a new beginning. So I gave the miners their notice and they seemed quite happy to be above ground and several thanked me  – in four years we didn’t have a single mine wall collapse. Let’s hope the hip-hop world enjoys the same safety record.

Not that we didn’t have our share of mishaps. Readers of this blog have kindly pointed them out wherever they occurred and I’m very grateful to all those who took the trouble to see what the Mine was about. Also thanks to Letterpress who put up with me despite my forgetting to update. And many thanks to my IT expert who led me through many a treacherous path in the Mine -he’s my esteeemed son-in-law, “Chopi” Chopra who lives in Cape Cod.

I hoping I’ll see some of you over at Simulacra, my new home at http://markelpower.tumblr.com.

Fondly,

Mark L. Power

As a preamble to their performances, traditional storytellers in Majorca would say, “It was and it was not so.” David Shields, Reality Hunger

I guess I started to think about the reconstructed photograph when I first saw Sally Mann’s lovely yet disturbing photographs of her children in the now classic book, Immediate Family. She unabashedly revealed she sometimes staged events in her children’s lives after they happened, and what caught my attention was not the strategy so much as the reconstruction in no way lessened the psychological truth of the event; in fact, if anything, it heightened it.

This was in 90s when it was becoming obvious that a photograph’s veracity is as much concerned with psychological truth as it is with the literal description of a present moment; that every photograph almost without exception contains multiple and sometimes conflicting, even contradictory meanings, and shades of meaning, particularly once divorced from written explanation. Sally Mann’s family pictures were among the harbingers of this attitudinal shift which was later accelerated by the advent of digital photography with its chameleon-like ability to effortlessly change meaning with often only a tangential relationship with what actually has transpired in front of the lens.

 

 

 

 

 

Sally Mann, the Fall

The reconstructed event is fairly commonplace in the history of photography as some of the 20th century’s most iconic images were re-enacted for the camera ranging from the flag raising at Iowa Jima to the  ( it is suspected) Robert Capa’s falling soldier of the Spanish Civil War. Modern art photographs are often reconstructions too, although sometimes the event reconstructed only existed to be photographed, as in the work of Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall.

 

Gregory Crewdson

Crime reconstructions are commonplace in the world of forensic photography with one crucial difference; there is no pretense in forensic crime reconstructions that the event referred to is the reality. The past event has been replaced by a theatrical shadow event. The participants, like actors going through a first read-through, make it obvious that tragedy has been replaced by bureaucracy. The actors, often office workers hastily recruited to stand in for murderers, crime victims and suicides, stand about with their props – knives, guns, clubs – and with  glazed eyes make it obvious they are performing a task no more exciting than any other during their work day. Somehow this tension between the original event charged with terror and shock and its banal recreation as an office routine make the images all the more fascinating.

 

Bill Wood: where the hit-and-run occurred

 

 

What spurred these reflections is an interesting book which came out in 2007, The Shock of Modernity: Crime photography in Mexico City by filmmaker Jesse Lerner. The book mostly features the work of the Casasola brothers, Agustín and Miguel, who operated a commercial photography business in Mexico City in the decades before World War Two. The resulting collection is simply known as the Casasola archive and is housed in the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City. Like Weegee in New York and other Mexican photographers such as Enrique Metidines, the Casasola brothers specialized in crime photography, a sub-genre of which were reconstructed crimes.

 

Casasola archive: crime reconstruction

 

 

Casasola archive: crime reconstruction

 

Although artists, many of them famous, recalled crime scenes in sketches based on witnesses’ memory such as this woodcut by the Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, which depicts the murder of a child ( curiously, the child looks more like a miniature adult.)

 

 

Generally, photography was preferred for crime scene reconstructions and the Casasola brothers were eager to oblige.

 

Casasola archive: crime reconstruction

 

 

In 1929, one of the Casasola brothers ( Casasola photographers were generally not credited) photographed Tina Modotti recreating the assassination of her lover Julio Mella.

 

Casasola Archives: Tina Modotti re-enacting the assassination of Julio Mella

 

Wikipedia: “On January 10, 1929, Modotti’s comrade and companion Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated, ostensibly by agents of the Cuban government. … Modotti — who was a target of both the Mexican and Italian political police— was questioned about [the] crime amidst a concerted anti-communist, anti-immigrant press campaign, that depicted “the fierce and bloody Tina Modotti” as the perpetrator…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tina Modotti by Edward Weston

 

Reconstructing the dramatic events in the life of Tina Modotti, actress, photographer, a model for Diego Rivera, and Edward Weston (a lover of both),and later a revolutionary in the Spanish Civil War would seem a natural for a novelist or a filmmaker. To date, as far as I know, none have been tempted although she has attracted a number of biographers and there are several books of her photography on the market.

 

The Unmade Bed, 1957 by Imogen Cunningham.©  1957, 2011 The Imogen Cunningham Trust

 

Tina Modotti, The Puppeteer’s Hands

 

As a somewhat grisly postscript there are companies which supply props to those reconstructing crimes. From forensicbody.com you can purchase plaster heads filled with blood-like substances which gives you the opportunity to experiment with blood splatter ( a hot subject since the advent of Showtime’s program Dexter) and the same company can even supply faux corpses in any stage of decay you desire.

 

Dual shot spatterhead

 

Row of bodies: 9 Females, 1 Male. Fresh bodies with no trauma, except one has a rash on her leg.

 

UPDATE:

May 13, 2011: The Washington Post‘s Paul Farhi reports that the White House was caught  re-enacting the President’s speeches and other events for the camera after the events were over. Captions accompanying the re-enacted photographs  made it seem like the event was photographed in real time.

A embarrassed White House spokesman said such re-enactments, if necessary,  would have a caption identifying them as such.

 

In a post last year, plagiarism was the topic, citing the example of Steve Burdeny whose photographs had more than a casual resemblance to Chinese photographer Sze Tsung Leong’s images. A number of readers were unconvinced by my arguments and preferred to go with Burdeny’s explanation that the similarity came by happenstance. Others believed as I do that most likely Burdeny re-photographed ( or scanned) the images in question then with minimal alterations declared them as his own.

But often what might appear to be plagiarism or blatant borrowing is simply a coincidence of ideas: photographers often arrive at the same place unbeknown to one another which is not terribly surprising seeing that we swim in the same cultural ocean and are subject to similar influences. Thus the common phenomenon of movies on similar subjects appearing simultaneously as was the case a few years ago with films about Truman Capote. Other coincidences come about due to a shameless scramble to leap onto a passing bandwagon for example, the resurgence of the undead shuffling onto many a silver screen. But as discussed in another previous post (“August Sander & Company, September 2008) sometimes coincidences come from a deeper place where Jungian archetypes live and I gave as examples the numerous images of people floating in pools of water ( usually women) by such diverse artists as Andre Kertesz and Edward Weston. I was reminded of this again because recently I came across yet another example, this one by the photojournalist John Stanmeyer.

 

Andre Kertesz, Swimmer 1917

 

Edward Weston, Nude, 1939

 

 

 

In the same post I discussed artist Jon Haddock’s take on the phenomenon of internet pornography. Haddock’s imaginative leap was to remove the human beings from the porno scenes so that we were left with domestic backgrounds,  strangely demure, yet anonymous, like bedrooms in a model house. Jon Haddock alerted me to two other artists working in this vein: video artist Paul Pfeiffer and Matisse’s geat-granddaughter, Sophie Matisse who did a “Removal’ series, taking away the subjects from famous paintings such  Gustave Courbet’s “Origin of the World”.

 

Sophie Matisse: a “Removal” from Gustave Courbet’s “Origin of the World”

 

Jon Haddock, from the ISP series

 

Jon Haddock, from ISP series

 

Lately I came across another coincidental example of the same idea, this time by Laura Carton who considers herself a “media artist” rather than a photographer. In her book :”Stripped” Laura Carton downloaded a variety of pornographic images from the Internet and like Haddock, removed the human beings so that what remained were “the … fictions of domestic space, suburban melodramas, utopian ideals and fantasies.” In this case, unlike the Burdeny work with its uncanny resemblance to another photographer’s images, it’s the idea that’s similar, not the images particularly.

 

Laura Carton, from the book “Stripped”

Personally I regard ideas as floating through the air somewhat like dandelion seeds whereas images are anchored to the ground, pinned there by personality, specificity, style and form. An idea can appeal to a number of people simultaneously but the resulting images are unique, shaped by who we are. There’s nothing sadder than seeing an artist become protective about an idea because dig deep enough you’ll find someone else has had a similar thought, and often the second interpretation of an idea is more interesting than the first.

In fact, why not ‘cover’ ideas the way classical musicians interpret composers or pop singers cover songs? A favorite country song of mine, “There Stands the Glass” was first recorded by the plain-singing Webb Pierce ( but never the plain-dressing: Pierce wore more rhinestones than Liberace).

There stands the glass

Fill it to the brim

While my troubles go dim

It’s my first one today

Webb Pierce and his horned car

 

Subsequently the song has been covered by many: Van Morrison, Conway Twitty, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Loretta Lynn to name a few, and each artist brings his or her shadings to this mournful tune of addiction. But my favorite version is the one by Ted Hawkins, who sings There stands the Glass with pain in every syllable, recorded thirty years or more after Webb Pierce had his hit in 1953. So why not regard Laura Carton’s ‘Stripped’ as a cover version of Jon Haddock’s work? Or vice-versa; I’m not sure who came first and it doesn’t really matter; both takes on the subject deepen our understanding of contemporary culture.

 

Conway Twitty ‘covering’  Elvis

 

In fact, photographic concepts have often been ‘covered’; after Robert Frank’s The Americans came out in 1966, there have been many other versions, some as homages, many unacknowledged, and it is only a slight stretch to consider Robert Frank’s own work to be a visual equivalent of his friend Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road.

I have my own experience of the simultaneity of ideas; I once attempted series of collages of cows and pastoral landscapes and after I exhibited this work I came across an artist who was making her own cowscapes, Rachael Sudlow. The dandelion puff had alighted on us at the same time but the resulting images were only superficially similar.

 

 

Mark L. Power, Cowscape

 

 

Rachael Sudlow, Cowscape

 

 

 

 

My daughter very thoughtfully gave me a book for Christmas, “ How to make Good Pictures” put out by Eastman Kodak in the 50s, and curiously bearing no author’s name. In the darkroom section of this historical relic I came across a mention of Kodak’s Velite paper, a contact printing paper that apparently was so slow you could develop it in “moderate room light”.  I thought I had at one time or another experienced all the late lamented photo printing papers that Kodak offered but I had never run across Velite before.

Knowing that many readers have probably not used contact paper or for that matter made a ‘wet’ photo print, I will elaborate a bit: contact papers were very slow ( i.e. relatively insensitive to light) black-and-white photography printing papers which were too slow to use for enlargements. They were only useful when the negative was in direct contact with the photo paper, hence the name. The standard bearer was Kodak’s Azo contact paper, a paper with exquisite tones – unlike Velite it required a safelight. But if you were a view camera photographer you could get some lovely prints with the material – just ask Brett Weston. As the slogan said: “Print on Azo and make the most beautiful photographic prints that your negatives are capable of yielding.” And for once the hype wasn’t far off the mark.

 

Brett Weston, Ivy and Leaves, 1978

 

Once I ran out of enlarging paper in the middle of printing for a deadline and all I had left was Azo contrast number two. It was late at night so I couldn’t run down to the local photography store. It was the one time I was not happy to see a box of Kodak Azo. The average exposure on my enlarger was a minute and half with the lens at maximum aperture. ( as compared to less than 10 seconds with enlarging paper) and Instead of my usual practice of diluting the paper developer I had to use it at full strength to try to suck an image out of the contact paper. It made for a very long night and a very overheated enlarger and sadly some very ordinary looking prints!

 

 

Making a contact print . . .

Apparently Azo has joined the other great Kodak papers in the dust of history although there seems to be is a lone ( as of 2009) Azo dealer left; go to http://www.michaelandpaula.com to see if they’re still selling this wondrous paper.

Making an enlargement

 

Azo wasn’t the only fine Kodak paper. Some of the Kodak’s enlarging papers haven’t been equaled either, particularly the warm-tone papers, most of which originated during the pictorial era of photography. Their names conjured up luxury like the badges of fine cars. There was Opal and Platino paper, both very similar, and Illustrator’s Special, an Opal-type paper that apparently was Paul Strand’s favorite and I was quite fond of it myself: like most of these papers it yielded deep, lustrous bronzed tones which could be extravagant or muted, depending upon which chemicals were used. There was also Ektalure, Aristo, and Medalist, a slightly cooler paper. And the surfaces of these papers rivaled the finest printmaking papers; in the matte papers alone there was smooth , fine-grained and suede matte, the latter more like fine leather than a photo paper. You had more choices with the luster finish, or as Kodak liked to spell it, lustre, including ‘high lustre’ and tweed. And if you didn’t like Kodak’s papers, there were a number of others available, including those made by DuPont, with a list almost as distinguished.

The beginning of the end came with the introduction of variable-contrast papers in the 60s -certainly more convenient, they gave you serviceable prints but rarely great ones. Pretty soon you were down to glossy, semi-glossy, and matte when it came to surfaces. And then the death knell: the introduction in the 70s of resin-coated paper, even more convenient but most would agree, of even lower quality.

 

So you can’t blame the demise of beautiful photography paper on digital photography; in fact, you’d have to go back to the decline of pictorialism in the 40s; certainly by the 60s when I was a young photographer these papers were getting difficult to find, almost as difficult as finding a pictorial photographer (outside of camera clubs!)

 

Actually digital technology reintroduced fine paper to photography, making it possible to print photographs on the finest imported printmaking papers with a variety of surfaces, sadly none of which bear a once-great trademark: that of Eastman Kodak.

Digital print on Hahnemuehle bamboo paper  – photo by Scott Nichol

 

 

You may have read about Miroslav Tichý on other photo blogs; in any event, he is a recluse from the Czech Republic, a trained artist, who in his old age has become better known for his furtive photography made with a home-made camera.

 

 

His photographs are almost invariably images of women; as  his fellow countryman ( or woman) Jarka Hálková  wrote: “He used to hide in bushes and take pictures of unaware women and girls with his home-made cameras. Once developed they were thrown away and Tichý didn’t care about them anymore.”

 

 

Well, that needs a bit of amplification; once developed, Tichý would make a print of a negative, apparently rarely more than one, and then he would staple decorated cardboard to the prints as a frame, and often rework the images with pencil or pen. Some of the prints he’d keep in a box by his bed; others were thrown to the floor where they kept company with vermin and insects. And there they languished. numbering in the hundreds, if not the thousands, until the photographs came to the attention of a childhood friend. Their purpose, it seems fairly obvious, although few commentators dwell on this aspect, was to provide a lonely old man with sexual gratification.

 

 

 

In his younger days, Tichý attended an art academy and for a few years he had a successful life as a painter. But at some point, the artist suffered a “psychotic breakdown”, was institutionalized, and once free, renounced Socialist realist art, or maybe all art, and retreated to his home town of Kyjov, in the Czech Republic.

As he became older he became ever more eccentric, dressing in rags, and subsisting it was said on a gulag diet of little more than soup and potatoes. His one expense seemed to be film; exposing up to three rolls a day, using cameras and lenses cobbled together from discarded equipment, he prowled locations where women would gather – parks, pools, and the like -  in order make his secretive erotica usually without his subjects’ knowledge.

 

 

 

Some commentators have attributed his voyeurism to be deliberate acts of misogyny and others have suggested his life is a protest against the totalitarianism of the Czech Communist regime. I think the second premise is more likely; basically the Socialist government denied him the right to make the art the way he wanted so his rejection of the government took the form of a rejection of society. But I’m not as comfortable with the misogynist charge; if anything he seems to loves women but probably thinks he too old and shabby to approach them directly, and in the end is he any more voyeuristic than most men who photograph women? Why does the name of Jock Sturgis float into mind? To me his so-called misogyny is no more complicated than a lonely old recluse yearning for the comfort of women; in other words, a shy and possibly mentally disturbed man who takes surreptitious photographs of women, not to demean them, but to gratify his needs. Art does creep into this motivation; why else bother with the strangely calligraphic frames? Self-disgust also appears to be part of the psychological picture; witness the abandonment of many of the images. One might also attribute his image-making to the yearning of art itself; it is easy enough to cage your muse but art has a way of breaking free and there is no doubt in my mind that the poignant images move us like the best art. And finally, given the improbable chance of being recognized as an artist at his late age ( and condition), he readily took advantage of it. Perhaps he is not as mentally impaired as everyone seems to think: His rare pronouncements give hints of a canny mind lurking behind the bizarre lifestyle ; he has said of his work “If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”

The world became aware pf Tichý’s ‘outsider’ art mostly through the efforts of a childhood friend, Roman Buxbaum, whose family had collected Tichý art while he was still a painter. With the aid of a caretaker-neighbor and the old man himself, Buxbaum began to collect the photography and by 2009 his efforts paid off handsomely: Tichý’s work had been shown in Seville, Zurich, Paris, Arles, and in February of 2010 the International Center of Photography in New York put on a Tichý show.

It is somehow not surprising that in 2009 the newly famous “stone-age photographer” decided to sever all connections with Roman Buxbaum, saying that Buxbaum had violated both his trust and copyright. And as far as I know, there it remains: an old perhaps mentally impaired man once again sinking into obscurity, besotted by private fantasies which have become quite public, not to mention lucrative, for a number of others, if not the artist himself. Perhaps he will resume his photography although it is doubtful; he is now 84 and has not picked up a camera for twenty-five years. Or maybe find another patron or reconcile with the zealous Buxbaum; nothing would surprise in this strange tale. In the best of worlds, an institution would find a home for his work and provide a sinecure for the artist in his remaining years, but sadly, we don’t live in the best of worlds.

 

Like most who come across Miroslav Tichý, I am conflicted: I am attracted by many of the photographs which are mysteriously beautiful yet I am unable to consider them without also considering the man who made the work.

One of my students said to me, imagine you knew nothing of the artist and all the pictures were well-exposed and printed wouldn’t they just be routine girly pictures? That’s the suspicion lurking behind the photographs ( not to mention suspicion of a fraud perpetuated by some imaginative art school students) but of course you can’t separate image from process; with these photographs it’s not how well they’re seen but how they’ve been altered by the mind of the artist; the ‘bad’ printing, the scratches, the torn paper, the crude frames, even the footprints of rats  give the work an unmistakable aura of thwarted desire.

A critic for the New York Times, Karen Rosenberg, summed up the speculation about the artist’s life and work by observing ” … No single [theory] quite captures the photographs’ uncanny fusion of eroticism, paranoia and deliberation.”  Tichý himself says ” “A mistake. That’s what makes the poetry.”  I’m happy to give him the last word.

 

 

UPDATE: Miroslav Tichý died on April 12, 2011. Thanks to Bill Crandall

for the notification.

All photographs by Miroslav Tichý.  Wikipedia’s entry on Tichý lists many sources as well as the titles of his books, some of which are available on Amazon.