But now that my taxes are enroute to the IRS fires of hell burning in Delaware, Philadelphia or Hartford ( we get our choice of the the circles of hell) and I have a tiny interim between the mailing and my inevitable audit I thought I’d share some of my recent reading with you.
Click on most images to enlarge
Books can lead us down strange paths. In a second-hand bookstore a while ago I came across the “The Life of William McKinley”, a book written in 1901. The book’s sub-title is “The Complete Story of His Assassination” and truth to tell, the book is mostly about the latter. There were a number of things that interested me about the book. First, it was history about a period all but forgotten today but in 1901 the entire nation was aghast at the President’s demise, much as the way we were when President Kennedy was killed. Then there there are the photographs in the book, strange amalgams of print-making and photography. Also of interest was an entire chapter on the Boogieman of the day, the anarchist. McKinley was was assassinated by ‘an anarchist” named Leon Czolgosz. It later turned out Czolgosz was also an unemployed steel worker with an unpronounceable name and a history of mental illness who was so extreme in his anarchist views that even the local anarchists rejected him.
Leon Czolgosz, shortly after his arrest
There were and are many kinds of anarchists but basically anarchism is a political belief that all authority, laws, and governments, especially capitalist governments, should be abolished in favor of a classless society where everyone is equal. Anarchism contained many elements of Marxist thought with the significant difference being that Communism believed that equality of man was achieved by an authoritarian central government. Originally a pacifist movement in Eastern Europe, when it came to the United States some anarchists adopted tactics of violence and the Haymarket bombing of 1886, in Chicago cemented the image of the anarchist as dangerous bomb-throwing revolutionary. By the turn of the 20th century, anyone who had a lot of consonants in their name, and who was dark and foreign-looking was considered an anarchist even though the majority of these immigrants, like those today, were mostly interested in finding work. More often than not they came from eastern Europe and were also Jewish, and as a result faced hostility, not only from gentiles but from the more established German Jews as well.
These days, anarchists ( which are still with us today in much diminished form) are considered comic figures, the stereotype being a small dark, foreigner carrying a round bomb with a sputtering fuse. But at the turn of the century, after McKinley was assassinated and after the Haymarket bombing and a number of other attempted assassinations, they seemed anything but comic; in fact, they filled normally reasonable Americans with sheer terror. Many foreigners, anarchists and innocent bystanders alike, were jailed without the benefit of habeas corpus ( sound familiar?) and in at least one case, a Jew who had recently immigrated from Russia was murdered by the Chief of Police in Chicago in 1908 who said he thought he was being confronted by an anarchist. It turned out the victim only had a few mildly seditious books in his possession and knew little about the movement. But more on that in the next posting.
Gavilo Princep
A few years later, the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a small, dark fanatic from Bosnia who was immediately branded an anarchist but who turned out to be a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip who had little sympathy with the anarchists. This event ignited events which lead to World War One and eventually some 20 million deaths.
In my youth, the boogiemen of the day were Communists, also strange foreigners from the East, who caused me and my classmates in school to spend considerable time under our desks waiting for that fatal white flash of light. Somehow despite barrages of propaganda, I always had difficulty feeling any hatred towards Communists, perhaps because when I was ten years old I had the good luck to meet an ostensible Communist ( he may not have been an actual party member), the Polish poet and writer, Czelaw Milocz, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2003.
In those days the name of Czelaw Milocz was not a celebrated one; Milocz was a minor diplomat in the Polish embassy, and he rented an upstairs room from my father in Washington just after World War Two. All I knew about him was he was a kindly man in his 40s who would often inquire about my daily activities with an air of being deeply interested. He and my father used to discuss writing and poetry now and then ( always avoiding politics) despite the fact that other adults on the scene muttered that he was a Communist spy not be trusted, and certainly not to be treated as a fellow litterateur. But the potential spy soon left Washington ( for Paris, I think) and before long was forgotten. So you can imagine the family’s astonishment some decades later when they realized this minor Polish government official ( or possible spy) whom they had trouble remembering was in fact a major writer and poet and the winner of the Nobel prize for literature.
Czelaw Milocz, ca. 1947
Anyway, he put the human face on Communism for me, as did Khrushchev and later Gorbachev, and their faces were a bit more kindly than the face of Senator McCarthy, the hunter down of all things Red. Although it wasn’t hard to believe that Stalin was a monster, it was also hard to believe Communists, or I should say Russians, were evil incarnate; whatever the shortcomings of their government they seemed to be human beings like us.
Telegram from Sen. Joseph McCarthy to President Truman.1950
But now our boogiemen are Muslim terrorists from the Middle East, dark and foreign, who like to bomb innocent people in the name of various nationalist causes and Islamic fundamentalism. I have been lucky enough to have had students over the years from the middle East, men from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iran and they were often the brightest, most intelligent students I had. So instead of regarding these Muslim fanatics as the enemy, I tend to see them as human beings, often the victims of both their ideologies and governments, their own, and more often than not, ours as well.
This is not to belittle the atrocity of 9/11 or any of the other horrendous acts of terrorism enacted by Muslim fanatics but I can’t help but thinking that our reaction to 9/11 was overblown: wars in two countries, Stalinist secret prisons around the world, the systematic violation of American principles in Guantanamo and in our own country. The dead from our reactions to 9/11 far outnumber the victims of all the terrorist acts in America and Europe combined. And every time I read the names of the American dead soldiers, often young men from the South barely out of their teens, they seem as much victims of Government policy and ideology as do the thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who lie nameless under the earth as a consequence of our militaristic policies.
A topic that certainly deserves a more sophisticated treatment than this and probably doesn’t belong in a blog about photography but then photography is life and can’t be contemplated without also acknowledging the context in which it is considered and for now that seems to be a context of political upheaval, terrorism, war, and financial ruin
So the McKinley book led me down this dark path from anarchism to terrorism but it also contained a number of compelling photographs that in a sense illustrate my diatribe above. These images were my original reason for purchasing the book. Most were photographs rendered by some sort of reproduction process that made them look like drawings or prints. But underneath these drawings one could still sense the photograph; it was as if the drawings or engravings were lying on top the photos.
And here is President McKinley’s final train trip. There is something almost childlike about these images. it’s partly the process, and perhaps also, the lack of irony which permeates much contemporary imagery …
I came across other photographs related to McKinley’s assassination such as the operating room in which doctors made a vain attempt to save the President’s life.
This stark image, powerful despite being a fourth or fifth generation away from the original, reminds me of a series by Lynne Cohen. Cohen photographs interiors in which sometime in the past something momentous happened, something that was often horrendous. She doesn’t specify the past incident, instead simply documents the space in the present.
Lynne Cohen
Eugene Atget’s work in the streets of Paris early in the last century are often described as appearing to document the scene of a crime and Cohen’s work has that same stillness, that air of oppressive anticipation that is never resolved.
Eugene Atget, Rue-de-Seine, Paris, 1924
We are seeing more and more work like Cohen’s which use text or captions to add an extra psychological or social layer to images already visually satisfying on an optical level; the eye sees one thing; the mind another.
Another photographer involved in this kind of transformation is Stephen Chalmers. This is from his series ‘Dumpsites”. As Chalmers describes ”Dumpsites”: Images of locations in the west where serial killers have disposed of the bodies of their victims, located through Freedom of Information Act searches, police reports, true-crime novels, and other source.
Stephen Chalmers
I thought I’d add one of my own pictures which shares some of these qualities…
90 minutes in a doctor’s examination room, 2006 Mark L. Power
Finally, I came across this curious document: a photo of the needle that was used to sew up President McKinley’s stomach wound.
This got me to thinking about the ‘aura’ of an original compared to the loss of that aura in a reproduction of the same image.
What withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura.
What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.. Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin is a critic often quoted but seldom read, and I have to confess I am one of those who have only read fragments of his work, and that with difficulty, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about his ideas which are provocative in the best sense, that is they may be opinions, not facts ( like all criticism!) and often outrageous opinions at that, but doesn’t stop your mind to arrive at insights that that a pedantic devotion to accuracy often blocks. In other words, in reading theories about photography I prefer the provocateurs like Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Vilém Flusser or Jean Baudrillard whose ideas are designed to stimulate as much as inform.
When I look at this image, the needle that pierced the assassinated President’s flesh, the bloodstain, the doctor’s handwriting, and even the paper containing the needle, are elements of the aura enhanced by the photograph, not diminished by it. Somehow, I have the feeling that if I were to hold this relic in my hand it would have less power than its photograph. Perhaps the physicality of the object is reduced by the photograph so that simply becomes a flat object of contemplation: absent are the senses of touch and smell and awareness of an environment; all we have left is optical contemplation and we supply the missing sense impressions from our imagination.
Not long ago, a friend recommended a new novel, “The Lazarus Project” by Aleksandar Hemon. You guessed it. One of the central characters in the novel is a real-life anarchist. I am beginning to think I’ve been singled out by Emma Goldman, one of anarchism’s more vociferous organizers in the 1920s. But I’ll save my thoughts on this work for the next post.
Emma Goldman
