Mark Power Blog

 

The  dustcover of my daughter Nani’s fourth book, Feed the Hungry, “a memoir with recipes”. Her other three books are novels, also bursting with delectable edibles both for the mind and the stomach. ( quotes from the book in italics).  

Feed the Hungry is a book about hunger…it is the invisible chain that threads our memories to our hearts..woven of culture and nostalgia…

 

 

click on most photos to enlarge

Nani in 1962, not yet a year old, photographed in Los Angeles where she was born. I was going to art school at the time, hence this arty picture. I was prevailed upon to dispense with artiness so I dutifully recorded Nani as Jackie Gleason, a resemblance that was mercifully shortlived.

 

 

In her memoir, Nani describes the descent to my parent’s basement kitchen as: the smell was earthy stone and a healthy waft of moss..one felt an unconscious surge as one came down the stairs, a Jungian journey into something unspoken and magical…

 

1967: Nani, five years old

 

The book is indeed a Jungian journey  through  a maze of family joys and secrets via the alimentary canal. When the child Nani wasn’t reading cookbooks and experimenting with recipes she was observing with a sharp eye: Nobody cries at funerals or anywhere, dry little conversations, handshakes, ham biscuits, bourbon…things are not what they seem, appearances are everything.

 

The dustcover picture, Nani, ten years old. 1972

 

Food and family: the food is love; the family is loss. Is this what it’s like getting old? All the foundations crumble until you’re alone on the sand..when did everything change? When did the islands fade, the family become scattered across continents like confetti?

 

1974: Nani, age 12. Rachel, her half-sister in the pool

 

But if memories only wound, there is always food for solace: You’ll find recipes for lobster rolls, fried green tomatoes, Virginia ham, squash casserole and damson pie…and many more.

 

 

Nani at 17: 1979

So we went chop, chop, chop, across the water, hair flying.

 

As Nani broadened her horizon, the recipes and the adventures became ever more exotic. I have traveled through countries by route of the stomach..there were years ..of black beans and smoked meats, forofa and cachaca because I was immersed in Brazil..or a sushi mat, sushi vinegar or a prized sashimi knife…

Traveling in Peru, Nani observed: a spectacular woman sung in a red satin sheath, I didn’t catch the lyrics, I just heard amor, amor,amor

 

Wedding portrait, July, 1990

 

But still the family turns the screw: My grandparents.. did not come my wedding ..was it because [my husband] was Jewish?

I hasten to add these were her maternal grandparents; my parents only attended in spirit as they had died earlier. Aside from noting her grandparent’s absence,  Nani doesn’t talk much about her wedding in Feed the Hungry but I can tell you about it since I was there. It was on July 4, 1990, out at our farm in Virginia. Her maternal grandparents may not have come but everyone else was there, including all three of my wives.

The service was ecumenical with my old friend, the Reverend Elijah White (Episcopal) and a young rabbi amicably paired as representatives of their various deities. Came the moment when Lige asked, is there anyone here who wishes to object to the union of this man and woman? and I distinctly heard my Uncle Ross, a staunch Roman Catholic, mutter, “Well, somebody should.” At least he had the grace not to object with his absence.

It was unbearably hot and humid and we had no air conditioning except for one window unit which went into the living room. Soon the wedding broke into two groups: a covey of old ladies, pallid and hollow-eyed, huddled about the air conditioner in the living room, and everyone else on the lawn sweating, drinking, hollering, and of course, diving into mounds of incredible food. It was a memorable Fourth.

 

 

Nani’s Persian period, 2005

 

Caviar, quormeh sabzi,..saffron and rosewater … a clear glass of amber liquid fragrant with bergamot, small sweets, shirni…tiny sour pickles, olives, stuffed grape leaves..checlo kabob..basmati rice..braised lamb shanks in saffron…

 

The ‘official’ book portrait by Yvonne Taylor, a Nani I have never met!

 

On cooking and writing: These impulses, cooking and writing come from the basic seed of love. We have been moved, touched, by the sensual experience of a great meal, a moving book. We would like somehow to harness this power and give it to others…stories start to tumble out as quickly as the memories of food, because they are all intertwined, food and memory, love and taste, all piecemeal of this lovely sensual world we live in…

 

An except from an email I sent Nani:

I am bowled over by your amazing memoir. it is a very fine book, your best piece of writing yet I think. I think the expectation was by me and maybe many others too, that it would a light-hearted look back along with some juicy recipes. You ease us in with the dustcover, giving little hint of the contents therein, and then you follow with your charming first chapter which is like a tinkling bell which hardly prepares us for the sturm und drang to follow. But soon we are witness to the agony of a family falling apart, more or less simply from the wheel turning, the effects of time, the tragedy that all is subject to change, no matter how hard you push to keep it from happening.

It is a  sad book, funny too, but filled with loss…and not only do you lay your mother’s family bare, you do the same to yourself which makes it a very honest book. …

I particularly liked your Peruvian section, why I don’t know exactly, it read like a novel. In fact, almost all the sections could make their own novel which gives the book its weight and gives you something to do for the next ten years!   Your last chapter was also especially good, wrapping things up with the opposite of the first chapter, not a tinkling anymore but a deep and rueful note of the bell.

 

More at www.nanipower.com.

 

 

A childhood friend died on June 19: Carl William Kimes, aged 71, of a stroke in Bethesda, Md.

I knew him by three names during his lifetime, Billy, his name during our childhood, Koonie, his nickname as a teen-ager, and Carl, his given name, by which he was known as an adult. To me, of course, and to his other friends from childhood, he was always Billy Kimes, although later we took to using his nickname of ‘Koonie’, how acquired a mystery to all.

Billy was an easygoing little boy, always amenable, always ready for any adventure. We did all the things boys in that Huckleberry Finn period before adolescence do: we rode our bicycles exploring the town we lived in, Leesburg, Virginia, then a little Southern village, now threatening to become a metropolis with strip malls covering our fields of play. 

Billy was exceptionally smart with an inclination towards science, and even as a boy he was an expert on geology ; he knew the names and ages of rocks and could find a gem as well as arrowheads in the dirt without much trouble. He was an good boy scout and with a skill I envied, could make maps with the aid of a compass almost before he could read. 

We were avid science fiction fans, devouring every copy of Amazing Planets we could find. We dreamt of a future with aliens threatening from the skies, automated cars and robots stalking the land, a future strangely devoid of people, economics or politics. But if Billy was disappointed by the future we later found ourselves in, a future, pretty much like the past, embroiled in politics and wars, he never let on. In fact, he seemed content  with the American bubble we inhabited; he had his two cars and his house more than four times the size of the house he grew up in, and he was obviously pleased with that aspect of the American dream.

 Billy grew up in what we would call marginal circumstances today although he and his family seemed unburdened by their situation. In the 50s his father, a skilled carpenter,  had a new car every other year; they fed themselves from an ample vegetable garden, and they owned a house. But it was a small bungalow, four rooms essentially, and Billy spent most of his childhood sharing a room with his grandfather, a circumstance about which he never once complained. I can tell you it made me a bit more circumspect about complaining about my own family situation – at least I had a room to myself.

However, I mention this because I think it had something to do with his life choices. He dropped out of college after a year, and went to work for Ma Bell, as the C&P telephone company was popularly known. When I asked why he didn’t stay in college, he said he was going to work his way up in the telephone company so he could retire at the age of 55. He was 17 years old when he plotted out this future, and sure enough, I found myself at his retirement party some 36 years later. He was 53.  I often think his years in that bedroom with his grandfather had a lot to do with that life decision when he put security ahead of risk. I never passed judgment because had I grown up in the same circumstances who’s to say I wouldn’t have done the same?

 We didn’t see much of one another as teen agers, our lives had gone in diffeent directions, but once in a while in a while we‘d get together and chase girls who always seemed to be a step ahead of us. Billy, by then known as Koonie, was not lucky in love. Nevertheless , he later managed two marriages and two sons and a daughter and  perhaps he found that kind of love a more than adequate substitute for the yearnings of romance.  

 As adults , we saw even less of one another as our lives, tastes, politics, and circumstances had almost completely diverged and all we really had in common,  if truth be known, were those few years in our  Huckleberry Finn childhood. But in the last decade or so, Koonie, ever the loyal friend, stayed in touch and when we would infrequently get together, most of our talk would be about those years which had entered into myth.

Koonie was found in his driveway, the victim of a severe stroke. I envy him his manner of death, fearful myself of a stay in those institutions which postpone death as long as possible. He was a few weeks older than me and of course, also lying in that driveway was part of my childhood.  

Koonie was not much of a sportsman, although he enjoyed fishing once in a while. He played golf in a manner which suggested he was scoring a 65 instead of the 100 plus recorded on his scoresheet. He was equally determined about tennis which he played as if the game was baseball. In other words, a good deal of time was spent looking in the woods for lost balls.  Koonie fervently believed in the second amendment and he had an impressive collection of firearms. Once in a while, he’d come out to our farm in Virginia and shoot up some targets with his black powder musket.

 

Here he is on one such day ( ca 1995) standing in front of my 8×10 camera with his son, Austin.

 

Carl ‘Koonie’ Kimes and Austin Kimes  

 

click on image to enlarge

 

When we are 15, we all feel as if we are beginning to become somebody else. Lise Sarfati

 

Lise Sarfati, Magnum

 

... the rites of passage, the birthdays, the bat mitzvahs, sweet sixteen parties, proms, online diaries, the first bra,  whispered secrets…The stammers, the pimples the awkwardness, the flush of embarrassment..

 

 

Rebecca Drobis

 

Coming of age, a common theme in literature and films, is no stranger to photography..as critic Sarah James observed in 2007: “Several young, newly prominent women photographers have more in common than their rising reputations. Trained in graduate programs in the late 90s, they tend to use adolescent girls as their subjects, prefer staged scenes to candid shots and often inject narrative elements into their pictures.“

 

 

Julia Fullerton-Batten

 

Since James made that observation ‘several’ has become many and as Sarah James observed, most are female photographers, most are relatively young, and many if not most, were trained in various graduate programs around the world.

 

 

The theme is adolescence; in particular, young girls ( with some exceptions) confronting their sexuality, their identity, their role in life. These young girls seem to want to escape from the frames of their images, and many avert their eyes, shielding themselves from the camera.

The artist’s strategies range from documentary narratives to surreal tableaux, and ‘candid shots’ are a stronger element of this collective work than critic James allows. And as Kelli Connell observes about her own autobiographical work “A questioning of sexuality and gender roles that shape the identity of  the self in intimate relationships” is often a component.

 

 

Hellen van Meene

 

Precursors to this movement, if it is a movement ( all it needs is a name; suggestions welcome) are Sally Mann’s work with her family and to lesser extent, Cindy Sherman and Tina Barney’s work. Reneke Dijkstra’s portraits have undoubtably been an influence and I would imagine there’s a touch of Nan Goldin in some of this new work also.

 

 

Reneke Dijkstra

 

Here are nine women photographers who at various times have explored the world of the female adolescent and no doubt there are others:

 

Kelli Connell,  Rebecca Drobis, Blake Fitch, Julia Fullerton-Batten,  Anna Gaskell,  Annaleen Louwes, Hellen van Meene,  Michelle Sank, and  Lise Sarfati.

 

 

               

Anna Gaskell

 

These artists with their common themes,  span the globe: Kelli Connell is American, as is Rebecca Drobis, a colleague of mine at Photoworks in Glen Echo, Maryland, where we teach. Blake Fitch is from North Carolina. Julia Fullerton-Batten lives in England. Anna Gaskell is from Iowa. Annaleen Louwes is Dutch as is Hellen van Meene. Michelle Sank, currently living in England, is from South Africa. Lise Sarfati is Algerian, grew up in France and was educated in Russia.

 

 

Michelle Sank

 

Annaleen Louwes

 

Postscript: Alert reader Space Traveler pointed out another photographer working with adolescent girls: Lauren Greenfield. Lauren is also the creator of a number of evocative videos on that subject and many others. Here is the cover picture for her book Girl Culture:

 

 

Lauren Greenfield

 

 

 

Sites where you can see more work from these artists:

Blake Fitch:www.blakefitchphotos.com/
Rebecca Drobis: www.rebeccadrobis.com/
Julia Fullerton-Batten: www.juliafullerton-batten.com
Kelli Connell: http://www.kelliconnell.com/
Michelle Sank: www.michellesank.com
Hellen van Meene: http://www.yanceyrichardson.com/artists/hellen-van-meene/index.html
Anna Gaskell: http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_work_md_191_6.html
Annaleen Louwes: http://www.vanzoetendaal.nl/annaleenlouwes/
Lise Sarfati: www.magnumphoto.com ( search Lise Sarfati)

 

 

Jeffrey Gettleman has written a very disturbing article for the New York Times ( June 8, 2008) about the plight of albinos in Tanzania, Africa.

Two paragraphs from Gettleman’s story sum up the incredible situation:

“…at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.
Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here.

“Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.”

 

Pieter Hugo: Sam Klein Karoo

 

News from today’s Africa generates one shock after the other: Darfur, genocide, Kalashnikov-bearing children marching to war, famines as regular as the monsoons, the ravages of AIDS, rapacious dictators, gang rape as a political tool, the Janjaweed wreaking destruction from the backs of camels. Even nature weighs in with tsunamis, floods and earthquakes.

We in the West sit in the comfort of our bubble and tut-tut as news of the latest atrocity rolls in, but the truth is we’re exhausted. We can’t absorb it all; the tragedy of post-Colonial Africa seems larger than our comprehension. Photojournalism and reportage , history in the making, only adds to the feeling of helplessness.

 

Pieter Hugo: Aside

 

Gettleman’s story itself is testimony to that exhaustion: normally a story in the New York Times is picked up by the media across the country: what you read on Monday is on TV by Tuesday and in countless other newspapers across the country. But by and large silence has greeted the Gettleman story: it appeared on Sunday and aside from seven minutes on NPR and summaries by a few minor media outlets, by the following Sunday, June 15, the story seemed dead; journalism’s restless gaze was fixed elsewhere.

 

Pieter Hugo: Mikhonzemi Welcome Makma

 

The work of the South African photographer, Pieter Hugo rouse us out of our apathy in a way that words and conventional photojournalism do not.

 

Pieter Hugo: Tabalure Chitope, aged 30, and her guardian, Eletina Nedi,

 

Ironically, if his name is any indication, Hugo is a man of Boer descent. The Boers, according to Wikipedia, are not only descended from the Dutch and the Germans; their ancestry also includes Scandinavians, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Scots, English, Irish and Welsh people; in other words, for all their imperfections, they are us: Caucasians standing across a divide from a world of darker-skinned peoples, whether that world is here or in Asia, the Middle East, or indeed, the Dark Continent.

 

Pieter Hugo:  Medisone Baja

 

Pieter Hugo is a man who sees far beyond that divide. Conventional photojournalism treats albinos - or for that matter, famine victims or refugees - as illustrations to a story; they are more symbols than human beings. But Pieter Hugo’s photography says all you need to do is to look in the eyes of these very real human beings and you’ll see the discrimination, the pain, and suffering that comes along with being a despised minority.

Hugo’s work is rarely explicit about atrocities. Yet his photographs speak volumes of the misery in present-day Africa. His portraits of the the African ruling class, judges and lawyers, his street people, the faces of those who have died from AIDS and his recent series of men who scrape out a living by exhibiting brutalized wild animals – these images form their own map of the troubled continent.

 

 

Pieter Hugo: The Honorable Justice Moatlhodi Marumo

 

Pieter Hugo: Mailam Mantari Lamal with Mainasar

 

 

Pieter Hugo: Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara

 

 

Pieter Hugo: Abdullahi with Mainsara

 

Look at the series “Hyena and Other Men” a group of photographs recently shown in New York to deserved acclaim. in these deceptively simple images you see it all, the poverty, the fury, cruelty, the tragedy. Look at the trash-strewn backgrounds of these pictures, littered with ravaged buildings and the wrecks of cars, where not even a plant seems to survive. Tarzan would not be at home in this apocalyptic Africa. Look at the powerful hyenas, animals as reviled as albinos, crouching abject and furious at the feet of their captors. They remind me how kidnap victims indentify with their captors as a survival mechanism. Look at the captors themselves; their stony faces, and their tattered clothing, a mixture of native dress and cultural cast-offs from the West; in fact, one man’s shirt bears hip-hop inscriptions. Are we surprised that that these men form a family ( seemingly without women) or that their children relate to hyenas and baboons the way our children relate to family pets? Not really.

 

Pieter Hugo: The Hyena Men of Abuja

 

I urge you to spend some time on Pieter Hugo’s website. You’ll see images that penetrate to the heart of the African psyche.

In my post on Pascal Dangin, image-enhancer ( The Artist and the Artisan) I said:

But with the advent of so-called ‘photo-based art’ it has become increasingly evident that the photographer steps aside after taking the picture; the making of the fine-art object involves the handiwork of a shadowy coterie of retouchers, printers, exhibition designers and framers.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight, 2001

This is certainly true of one photographer, Gregory Crewdson, and it is to be expected; after all, Crewdson’s elaborately produced scenarios are like film stills, and almost as expensive to produce as a film. Nevertheless, the sheer number of people required to realize the photographer’s vision is staggering. I recently received Crewdson’s book, “Beneath the Roses” – a fine book with remarkable images – and in the back there are three pages of credits acknowledging the efforts of literally hundreds of people who assist Crewdson in the making of his photographs. There are familiar titles from the world of cinema – “best boy; “gaffers”; “key grips” - and other roles which are baffling such as “greensman” and “acquarist”. There are more familiar credits for “set dressers”, “production assistants”; “carpenters” and even a credit for “weather prognosticator.” But nowhere do I find a credit for digital image-enhancement. In the “post-production” section there are credits which come close: There’s a “master printer/digital artist”, a “visual effects supervisor”, and a “computer graphics supervisor.”

And speaking of the final image, the one person who isn’t credited in these back pages is the artist himself, Gregory Crewdson. How unlike the world of film where the film director often gives him or herself three or more credits to everyone else’s one. What would Crewdson’s credit be? “Visioneer?” Or more radically, “photographer?”

After writing the above, I came across Aperture’s website, where many of the roles of Crewdson’s collaborators are explained, including that of Kylie Wright, Crewdson’s “master printer/digital artist”. I only wish they had included these interviews in the book itself. For the rest, in the interest of keeping a post short I recommend you go to http://www.aperture.org/crewdson/

The book has a fine essay by one of my favorite writers, Russell Banks, in which he knowledgeably discusses the photographer’s relationship to the world of film. Oddly, he scarcely touches on the locale of most of the photographs which are the dispossessed factory towns of New England. The dilapidated houses of such towns as North Adams, Ma., built during the Great Depression or earlier, give the photographs their aura in which people seem to inhabit a kind of purgatory where they are doomed to re-live ambiguous moments from their past.

Gregory Crewdson, Twilight 2001

This too, is the territory of Russell Banks who might be considered a poet of that hard-scrabble New England where time seems to have stopped. I lived in New England myself for a number of years and a while ago I copied this word-picture from Bank’s writing because it rang absolutely true:

“…Past the pink and aqua house trailers along the road, the two-room shacks with rusted stove pipes poking through the roofs, the old farmhouses boarded up or halfcovered against the winter with flapping sheets of polyethylene, the fields compulsively cleared by long-dead generations of Yankee farmers gone now, in this generation, scrubby choke- cherry and gnarled stunted birch, saw the gap- toothed children with matted hair and dirty rashes on their round faces playing by the side of the road, glimpsed in windows the blank gray faces of young women and the old men’s and old women’s faces collapsing like rotted fruit, the broken toys and tools and ravaged carcasses of old cars lying randomly in the packed-dirt yards, the scrawny yellow mongrels nastily barking from the doorsteps at my passing car… Scattered over the fields in no discernible pattern were ten or twelve rusting shells of windowless cars and trucks, some of them further decomposed and more nearly destroyed than others, also … an outhouse lying awkwardly on its side, rusty bedsprings and swollen mattresses spitting yellowish stuffing onto the ground, a pile of fifty-gallon oil drums, an engine block and a transmission housing, both lying atop a child’s crushed red wagon which lay atop an American Flyer sled in splinters, next: to a refrigerator (with the door invitingly open, I noticed ), and a red, overstuffed couch which had been partially destroyed by fire…”

Russell Banks from his novel “Hamilton Stark”.