Mark Power Blog

Dropping into the Salt Mine, I was rather surprised to see the last entry was written last Summer …and now suddenly it’s the first week of the new decade and somehow Fall slipped away, and we’re surrounded by canyons of snow…

Truth to tell after an extended bout of work in which I completed two new books I found myself the victim of blogblock, an unpleasant sounding condition which simply means I have nothing really to say, and even if I do, I seem to lack the will to say it.

A common condition of writers and I suspect a condition common to anyone after a difficult or protracted period of work. The vessel is empty; the battery discharged: pick your own metaphor to describe  a rather pleasant emptiness in which time doesn’t pass, it drifts, as if the sofa you are on is a boat being carried towards some unknown destination. It’s not unlike watching television: people undergoing improbable lives briefly flicker into existence but when you’re asked what you were watching you have no memory of watching anything.

Not a bad state to be in at Christmas, a time filled with distracting trivia, not a time to embark upon tasks of any significance even if you felt so inclined. So instead you hug all your loved ones and give them tokens of your affection and drink on the nights you’re supposed to drink and suddenly you’re lifting your glass to salute another year and another decade and another January week of bone-chilling cold and tree-toppling winds.

Winter sky, Maryland

So here I am reminding my readers that I haven’t forgotten you and sooner or later the old urge will return and my ruminations will once again fill these pages … or not, in which case this blog, like many others, will quietly descend in ever-decreasing circles into a large hole of forgetfulness.

BOOKS:

But before possibly journeying into that unknown, I want to note that I’ve moved my books from the blog posts to the PAGES section to the right of this page. There under “Books by Mark L. Power” ” you’ll find the newest books, The Dinner Party and SATX82, and all its predecessors too.

The Dinner Party is another experiment with a fictional text and images. In this short narrative a group of friends at a dinner party realize that one time or another they have all lived in the country. As the friends relate their rural experiences during the meal I illustrate their recollections with black-and-white photographs of animals.

A sample page from The Dinner Party

right click then “view image’ to enlarge

SATX82 is a collection of color photographs made in and around San Antonio Texas in 1982. There is a back story to this collection which is outlined in the BOOKS page. Here’s a page spread from SATX82:

The picture on the left was a San Antonio fixture, a haberdashery where many a young Texas lad donned his first pair of long pants in order to  confront the future.  Now the Pincus emporium is gone as is the man on the right, the celebrated San Antonio photographer, E. O. Goldbeck.

Goldbeck, famed for his group shots of military outfits and equally remarkable panoramic photographs made with the Cirkut camera, died in 1986. The Cirkut camera was an extraordinary piece of machinery with a rotating lens and film that measured  eight inches by five feet. Goldbeck was the undoubted maestro of the Cirkut and he had even devised a way to make enlargements of the unwieldy five foot long negative.

E.O. Goldbeck counting the day’s proceeds, 1982

Goldbeck at work, probably a self-portrait. ca. 1940s

Goldbeck reminded me of O. Winston Link in that he seemed more proud of his technical accomplishments than  his images. In Link’s case it was innovative ways of flash-lighting speeding trains at night; with Goldbeck it was ingeniously designing group photographs with no less than twenty thousand soldiers upon occasion ( to get that kind of crowd in his pictures Andreas Gursky has to resort to a computer!) as well as inventing an enlarger for the Cirkut camera. Both men tended to dismiss the art in their work, preferring to think of themselves as jobbing photographers which of course they were, but the fact remains that both produced work of exceptional authenticity and beauty that went well beyond the limitations of most commercial photography.

“American Flyers”

right click then “view image’ to enlarge

One suspects Goldbeck might have dismissed this panoram — after all, it didn’t involve thousands of men and probably only took a few hours to plan instead of days. Nevertheless, as well as any of his more famous images, it reveals his singular eye. The delicacy of space, the subtlety of figures to ground, the symmetry which is actually asymmetric  and add to that,  the rueful tug of time past– masterful.

Another photographer in SATX82 is the man above, Clarence John Laughlin, not of San Antonio, but rather the pride of New Orleans. Clarence knew he was an artist, and he would tell you so at the slightest opportunity, although not without a twinkle in his eye. But unlike most blowhards, he was a real artist, an old time surrealist who remained faithful to his muse through times good and bad. From the Laughlin image below you might get the impression his muse liked to frequent ante-bellum mansions and you’d be right. Laughlin took many of his most telling images in those beautiful decaying palaces.

Farewell to the Past, 1946

When I made the portrait in SATX82 some three years before his death in 1985, Laughlin gave me a tour of his extensive library consisting of some thirty thousand volumes, housed in a cinderblock building behind his suburban bungalow in Metairie.  Ever the contrarian, Laughlin seemed most proud of his collection of books on black magic and witchcraft, and his library is now  at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

One of Laughlin’s books, Ghosts along the Mississippi, must have had one of the largest press runs in history as I’d see copies of this book almost every time I found myself in a second hand bookstore. I have two copies and I’ve given away one or two. But no longer – booksellers have belatedly realized the value of photography books.

Carousel, Glen Echo, Md.

Contemporary ideas in Photography: Theory and Practice

Recently at Photoworks in Glen Echo, Maryland  I have been teaching  a class called “Contemporary ideas in photography: theory and practice”, a somewhat ponderous, if not portentous, name for a class that examines the kind of fine-art contemporary photography one is likely to encounter these days in art fairs, museums, galleries and the auction houses: in other words, conceptually-driven large-scale, glossy, front-mounted photographic art objects.

Andreas Gursky’s art objects

To keep things interesting, I also ask the photographers in the class to try some of the ideas encountered in the presentations with their own work, the idea being if they walked in someone else’s shoes they might gain a more visceral appreciation of the concepts discussed.  So every other week ( in an 8 week class) I alternate PowerPoint presentations and discussions with critiques of assignments.

I’ve done the class three times now, counting the online version  described further along and  my expectations were that the photography coming out of the class would mostly be  ‘fun’, especially since the participants only had a week come up with new work. Well, the work submitted was fun, but a pleasant surprise is how much potentially serious work came out these assignments as well. In recognition of that we have instituted several follow-up classes, one being a printing on demand book  course, designed to allow the photographers an opportunity to expand the work done in the CIP class.

James Steele

A number of the students are talented hard working professionals who have successfully toiled in the fields of editorial, wedding and portrait photography without having the time to investigate what’s happening on the other side of the fence, as it were and their knowledge, curiosity and eagerness make them a pleasure to work with.

CIP class, Photoworks, Spring 2009

Beyond the Image

When I lived in England, one hundred miles east of London in the Norfolk broads, , the marshy area riddled with canals that Henry Peach Robinson placed in the history of photography a century and a half earlier, I also taught a number of project-oriented classes under the title “Beyond the Image” and discovered a similar group of hard-working amateur and professional photographers who had been toiling in isolation,  guided only by  the occasional workshop and work encountered in books and magazines.

In the village of Pulham Market, Suffok, UK

After five years of  conducting “Beyond the Image” classes and arranging numerous student exhibitions in various venues ranging from an abandoned shoe factory in Norwich to a mayor’s office in a small village, to various village art galleries, I returned to the USA in 2004.

BTI installation, Pulham Market, UK, 2003

After I left England , a number of my former students decided to continue their  work by starting a cooperative gallery in Thornham Magna, a village in Suffolk,  and I was very flattered when they named the gallery after the class.  The Beyond the Image Gallery has now survived for five years now, a very commendable record when you consider that many galleries like restaurants and fireflies, have a tendency to shine briefly, then expire.

Beyond The Image Gallery, Thornham Magna, UK

Beyond the Pond

Recently the Beyond the Image gallery decided to host  a show of their  counterparts in the American chapter of “Beyond the Image” and  I was happy to be one of the participants myself  in the show, ‘Beyond the Pond”.

starting with top left: Mimi Levine; John Borstel; Laurie Sand

Davis Balderston; Grace Taylor; Mark Power

The Video Conference

In conjunction with the exhibit, “Beyond the Pond” I was  scheduled to visit the gallery and conduct a workshop but then the collapsing economy intervened so I wasn’t able to make the trip. But in lieu of a personal visit we decided to give the  newfangled technology of video conferencing a try and with the help of an IT guru on their side and Apple’s iChat we launched the online version of “Contemporary Ideas in Photography” which went on for three hours a week  through some of May and all of June.

the CIP videoconference ( UK side)Laurence Claxton photo

I think the participants in the online class seemed pleased enough with the results but once the novelty wore away I didn’t find it a very comfortable way to conduct a class. First, it was  frustrating seeing old friends as electronic apparitions. As if I had suddenly been cast in a Cronenberg film,  I had fantasies of stepping into the computer screen  and there they’d be, a number of surprised flesh-and-blood humans on the other side. Another off-putting factor was that give and take in conversation was virtually impossible due to limitations in online audio; it was more like talking on a CB radio. At any moment you expected to hear Burt Reynolds bark 10-4 , good buddy! while popping his gum. Critiques  were difficult too because the resolution was too low to really see the images so we had to resort to e-mail critiques, a procedure almost as limiting as using a CB radio. Admittedly, we were at the low end of the technology ( read: free); I imagine employing professional video equipment would have made the results closer to the experience of holding a live class. Nevertheless for now anyway, I think I’ll leave videoconferencing to the talking heads  on TV.

Martin Parr

Martin Parr talking about Martin Parr

So it’s been a Summer of interesting contact with professionals of all kinds including a  lecture by Martin Parr in Charlottesville, Virginia in which I discovered the man is an avowed contrarian: he consciously seeks out subjects that other photographers deliberately overlook. For example, “I thought it might be interesting to photograph the worst English cuisine rather than the best.” The result were images which simultaneously repulsed and attracted, including a record of the inexplicable English fondness for tasteless white bread.  Many English delicacies, like spotted dick and beans on toast, are foods you have to encounter early in childhood to have any reaction other than puzzlement and  nausea.

Martin Parr

Of course, cultural satire rendered in  bright, garish, postcard color is Parr’s specialty and the lecture and  an onstage conversation with photographer John Gossage gave much insight into how he arrived at that signature way of expressing himself.

Martin Parr

So that’s the Summer so far; who knows what the dog days will bring?

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!

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.