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Interview: Martin Parr

Boundaries Merely Exist in People’s Minds

by Maarten Dings and Joachim Naudts (2007)

On the 25th of October of last year, Magnum photographer Martin Parr was a guest at the Profiles event at the Antwerp FotoMuseum. He gave a reading and participated afterwards in a roundtable on the ‘Photographic Magazine as Medium.’ FotoMuseum extra Magazine had the chance to talk to him earlier that day.

Just like his work as a photographer, Parr’s work as a curator and editor stands out thanks to his unconventional take on the medium. He cultivates his role as an outsider but does not shy away from commercial interests. In 2005 for instance, he made a series of photos for Sony Ericsson with the camera function of a cell phone, while recently surprising friend and foe by acting as a judge on Picture This, a show in search of photographic talent on British commercial tv station Channel 4.

As a photographer, Martin Parr is more than happy to keep his distance from the pompous, academic approach to photography. But whereas his own visual work is quite often tongue in cheek, he provides a much more nuanced perspective as curator and editor. Martin Parr seems to be on a mission. He puts all his weight behind photography in general by making it more accessible to a wider public. According to Parr, it is in this light that his participation in Idols for Photographers should be viewed. He gave in because he maintains that “the photographer’s art isn’t valued in Britain in the same way it is abroad.” In Parr’s own words, photography should crawl out of its ghetto and explore the limits of the medium.

Extra: As a documentary photographer, you don’t seem reluctant to get involved in the commercial scene.

Martin Parr: No, not at all, photography is a commercial activity. Even high art photography wants to be commercial, because everyone wants to sell prints. I mean, the wealthiest photographer in the world is probably no longer fashion photographer Steven Meisel, but Andreas Gursky, who is at the top end of the art market. So it is interesting that the art market, financially often regarded as the poor cousin of commerce, is now way ahead of the commercial fashion industry. You can ask any photographer what he or she wants and they’ll probably answer: I want to do my own work, I want to sell my work as prints. Ultimately that is a commercial goal. So we’ll never be far away from the notion of commerce.

Extra: But don’t you think you can react to this dominance of the economic in the arts by rejecting it?

Martin Parr: I don’t see why you would want to reject it. Commerce makes things happen. One doesn’t want to be in the publicly subsidized ghetto, speaking to one percent of the population. Photography has the ability to be democratic, promiscuous and easy to digest. If you get out of the ghetto you have to get involved with the commercial end. With fashion people, advertising, posters, billboards. These are of course also ghettos. It’s just a bigger ghetto. You could say that visual culture is a ghetto, but that we’re surrounded by it. If you live in the western world nobody is exempt from that. Whether it’s advertising or family snapshots, we are surrounded by images. Everyone is a photographer now, remember. That’s the great thing about photography. Its audience should be growing all the time and as soon as people start using photography, why not apply some intelligence to it.

Extra: A lot of these ‘image flows’ are clichés or, a word you often use, propaganda. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Martin Parr: Most of the images we see are a form of propaganda because they have an agenda. Although all photography has an agenda, photography in the advertising and commercial world in particular is only good for selling an image. Or in case of a family snapshot, it is to sell the notion of the perfect family. I am not saying that independent photographers don’t have an agenda, because they certainly do: you can send two photographers to the same city and they would come up with entirely different pictures. One a very positive, one a very negative.

Extra: So do you think it’s important that independent photographers go through this fashion or advertising area, because it could give them a different point of view?

Martin Parr: No, I am not telling people what to do. But when I look around I feel it is all too safe and predictable. And part of the fun and enjoyment of photography is the ability to push ideas and boundaries. Most people are quite comfortable in their little niche, and do not play with boundaries. Good for them, but I think a photographic community should have more ambition. It’s our job, if you like, to make photography more accessible and to expand the audience. And the audience is there. Photo sharing sites on the Internet for instance have millions of subscribers who want to approach photography differently. Flickr is only two or three years old and, in the uk, two million people have subscribed and are discussing their work in an intelligent way. That’s quite an achievement. So, the potential audience – I don’t know how big Flickr is in Belgium for instance – is huge. What’s more, nowadays everyone has a camera on their phone, so everyone is a photographer. That is why photography is in such a healthy state, because more and more people are joining in and are becoming fascinated with photography.

Extra: Do you consider these changes in photography today as the beginning of a new medium?

Martin Parr: No, it’s all the same. Photography’s central role is to be the absolute medium of the day. It is fantastic that there is no longer any technical intimidation. When I first started learning how to take photographs, you had to spend the first six months figuring out what an f-stop was. Now you just go and take pictures. Nobody thinks about technical issues anymore because cameras or camera phones take care of that automatically. On the other hand, you still have the option of controlling every technical aspect. It’s the most accessible, democratic medium available in the world. This has to be celebrated, and we must continually remind photographers of this.

Extra: Speaking of digitalization, behind the backdrop of the Internet and the way photography is currently undergoing such profound changes, it struck me that, at a time when the image is becoming increasingly non-material, you focus on the photo book, i.e. the photo in its printed form. Is that a kind of reaction to this new, immaterial character of photography?

Martin Parr: No, they are only slightly separate as today everyone can print a book with the help of new technologies. It is truly amazing: for forty Euros you can send your pictures to a company and they’ll send you back a book. Isn’t that fantastic? I love and collect photo books and I’ve been trying to compose their history, because their position has always been somewhat underrepresented in the history of photography while I think they are essential to its contemporary practice. With The Photobook: A History, I tried to redress that and I think the book succeeded to a certain extent. Although there are more books published now than ever before, the problem is that they tend to stay inside this photo ghetto. It is possible yet extremely difficult to find books that have a wider appeal, so in that regard it is very encouraging to see that Stephan Vanfleteren’s book Belgium has gained a wider audience. He has touched a nerve, and although he presents a very nostalgic view of Belgium that I don’t particularly like, it is great to see that his book is able to draw a crowd. I applaud him for making photography more accessible and it are these rare moments of triumph that show you that photography books need not indulge in high art. There is a slight contradiction in what I am saying here. I’m asking photography to get out of its ghetto, but at the same time I’m professing my love for the photo book, which is entrenched in that ghetto. But I am very happy to be a hypocrite (laughs).

Extra: Which photo books do you consider to be your personal favourites then?

Martin Parr: I would like to mention two books. To my mind, the most influential and radical photo book published in the last century was William Klein’s New York. Unlike Robert Frank’s equally influential The Americans, Klein succeeded in changing the way photographers created books. His radical approach to design, his ability to capture energy and dynamism in his photography, all the effects of his work rippled across the world; you could see it in Argentina, in Portugal, all the way to Japan. During the sixties and seventies, while Europe stuck to the conventions of the photo book – with two white pages and a picture on the right, such a hallow, respectfully beautiful format – Japan was throwing out those rules. Japanese photographers adopted Klein’s spirit and used it to change the way of presenting books entirely. Daido Moriyama’s Bye Bye Photography for example was as radical as Klein’s New York because he tried to tear up the rules of conventional photography. He threw away his negatives, he scratched them and made this energetic book, which took Klein’s idea one step further. So Bye Bye Photography is probably my favourite photo book. But we should always keep in mind how radical Klein’s book was in 1956, and how radical it still is today. It forever changed the way photographers make books.

Extra: There is another way in which you seem to turn to the past. You have worked with image archives, like the Lotz ghetto album or the Ed van der Elsken archive, found images and traditional genres like the self-portrait in commercial studios. In other words, in this digital era you are focusing on the photographic tradition and its specificity.

Martin Parr: I always look back to work from the past because I feel its contributions have been overlooked. By virtue of this platform I have, I feel it’s my duty to help promote neglected bodies of work. The history of photography is very subjective, and it is also, if you look at Beaumont Newhall for instance, very rigid. It just needs a bit of lightening up because certain people had a very narrow view on what photography should be. Today, we all acknowledge the contribution of things like vernacular photography which has become mainstream over the past twenty years. Previously, just like with colour photography for instance, it had just been sidelined. So we constantly have to reinvent and revise the past because there is no such thing as a ‘true’ history of photography. So when looking back at the past, I am just taking part in that ongoing process. Of course, my fascination with the past has as much to do with promoting upcoming photographers.

Extra: Do you think that your different positions in the field enrich each other?

Martin Parr: Yes, they feed off each other. It used to anger me that a lot of photography curators are so lazy, and just wait for things to be handed out on a plate: they hardly travel, they aren’t restless, they aren’t on the lookout for the new. Then it struck me: why not curate myself? That’s how I started. Like all the other projects I’ve done I just think: well, if I don’t do it, no one will. The same holds for curating: I have to do it, because if I don’t, things will not get a platform or receive the oxygen they need.

Extra: So you see curating also as a way of communicating?

Martin Parr: Yes, it’s like filling a gap. You look at what’s going on and you suddenly realize it is insane that this or that has received no attention. For example, I did a show this summer called Colour Before Color for a New York gallery, with ‘colour,’ in the British, hence European spelling, and ‘color,’ reflecting the us spelling. The exhibition examined European colour practice during the seventies, which had been largely ignored. The history of photography always taught us that American photographers such as William Eggleston, Stephen Shore and their generation pioneered colour photography. So my theory was simply to look at things in Europe and to focus on six European photographers who were also working in colour during the seventies. But because they worked in isolation and had no institutional support, they were largely ignored. So I formulated a counter argument to what is now accepted as received truth. Of course I am not trivializing the developments in America during the seventies with the MOMA show and William Eggleston’s efforts, but this is not the full story. It’s much more complicated than that. So part of my idea behind this is to single out anomalies and make a small contribution in correcting them.

Extra: You will also be curating a show at the New York Photo Festival. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

Martin Parr: The exhibition is entitled New Typologies. The working title was ConDoc, which stands for ‘Conceptual Documentary.’ To me, it seems to be one of the emerging genres. Some of it is typology, some is not. We live in a chaotic world and the rigour of the analysis that conceptual documentary brings can help make sense of the chaos of the modern world.

Extra: Like Hilla and Bernd Becher’s work for example?

Martin Parr: Yes, of course. They have been very influential in steering European photography more towards this dry way of looking, which seems entirely appropriate. So we have to give them credit for starting out on this path.

Extra: Lately you’ve been travelling to Latin America. Judging from your Magnum blog, you seem very enthusiastic about photography over there. Why is that?

Martin Parr: I actually just came back from the Latin American Photo Forum where I saw lots of books and magazines. Surprisingly, a country like Brazil has a very healthy publishing program since there is this law stipulating that companies must reserve five percent of their profits to endorse cultural projects. This money mostly goes towards the publication of books, but the downside is that they tend to incorporate safe images and ideas. If you have a project in black and white focusing on indigenous Brazil, you will have no trouble getting subsidized. However, if you have a more contemporary project, dealing with, let’s say, Saõ Paulo, that would be seen as too controversial. Big corporations tend to avoid such projects, so what you end up with is a publishing policy that it too nostalgic; Brazilian photography books give this impression. The country where things are really happening is Argentina, which has combined a European sensibility with this sort of inherent Latin craziness. There is some very interesting work coming out of Argentina at the moment.

PDF of the interview HERE

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School starts back up on September 7th and for those of you who are debating whether or not to follow along this semester, here is what I’ll be taking. I’ve decided to to step outside of my photo comfort zone and learn more about video and performance art. I want to try to have as much new sensory stimulation as possible to help shape and inform my work. We’ll see how it goes!

History of Video Art 1965-1985

David Ross

What is referred to as “video art” has become a ubiquitous feature of 21st-century art practice, yet it is an art form whose emergence is still a relatively fresh aspect of contemporary art history. This course will explore the origins of video art, examining its sources in film, photography and performance art. Through screenings of key works; discussion with artists, critics and curators, and in directed readings, students will be exposed to important works and individuals associated with the first two decades of video. Special attention will be paid to an understanding of the cultural and social context that supported the emergence of video art. We will focus upon the evolution of video art from both a technological perspective as well as the development of a video’s critical and institutional framework. Artists whose works will be viewed and discussed include Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Peter Campus, Vito Acconci, Frank Gillette, Juan Downey, Joan Jonas, Chris Burden, Lynda Benglis, Stanton Kaye, Iras Schneider, Andy Mann, Martha Rosler, Allen Sekula, Shigeko Kubota, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Mary Lucier, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Ilene Segalove, William Wegman, Tony Oursler, Klaus vom Bruch, Muntadas, Keith Sonnier, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Lynn Hershman, Dara Birnbaum, Ant Farm, TVTV, Videofreex, Marcel Odenbach, Thierry Kuntzel, David Hall, Dan Graham, Valie Export, Douglas Davis, Doug Hall, Marina Abromovic, Eleanor Antin, Richard Serra, Adrian Piper, Terry Fox, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and Ernie Kovacs.

Master Critique III

Patty Chang

Group critique seminars are the focal point of student activity in any given semester. Assisted by their peers, and guided by prominent figures in the visual arts, students will concentrate on producing a coherent body of work that best reflects their individual talents and challenges the current boundaries of their media.

Thesis Forms I

Penelope Umbrico

This course is required as a preparation for the second-year thesis. Students will finalize the central ideas for their thesis projects, and consider appropriate strategies for the form, presentation and distribution of these ideas. In a highly practical way, the course considers the history and features of various visual solutions available to photographic artists, depending on their audiences and goals. Books, exhibitions, installations, interactive presentations—the course helps students identify the questions each form raises, and work through them to find appropriate answers for their own projects.

Criticism & Theory: Critical Reading

Jan Avgikos

This course will combine a format of reading and classroom discussions aimed at providing critical perspectives on the issues that inform the practice of contemporary art and photography. Readings include texts by artists, writers and theorists of the past three decades that bear upon the practice of the students’ art-making today. Students will be required to develop a framework from these readings that is relevant to their own objectives. Discussion will be based on interdisciplinary study, screenings and exhibitions.

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Tod Papageorge

Tod Papageorge:

I have no real argument against so-called set-up photography, at least as a process. The fact that I’ve had many successful students doing it in different ways I think makes my case. I also think that the reason they’ve felt free enough to work in this way at Yale is because I profoundly believe in—and teach—the proposition that photography is inherently a fiction-making process. Don’t speak to me of the document; I don’t really believe in it, particularly now. A picture’s not the world, but a new thing.

That said—too briefly—my argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the IMAGINATION of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis. That’s all. Remember, T. S. Eliot made the clear, brutal distinction between the art that floods us with the “aura” of experience, and the art that ‘presents’ the experience itself. ANY artist, I feel, must contend seriously with the question of which side of that distinction he or she is going to bet on in their work. Obviously, I’m with Eliot—and Homer—in this, believing that the mind-constructed photograph almost necessarily leads to a form of illustration, the very epitome of aura-art.

Read the entire interview over at Alec’s archived blog HERE.

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Camouflage 2008. Sniper under the twigs and branches on the left. Simon Menner

Images From the Secret STASI Archives. Simon Menner (Be sure to check each sub category. This is from Dressup.)

Minefields 2007. min053. Simon Menner

Objects - 2010. HITTING DEVICE sock, cloth, broken cup. Simon Menner

some images of graves of jews with the name adolf 2009. Adolf Lachmanski. Simon Menner

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David Maisel. Library of Dust, 1834. 2005

David Maisel. American Mine (Nevada 1), 2007

David Maisel. Oblivion 2n, 2005

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About David:

David Maisel’s large-scaled, otherworldly photographs chronicle the complex relationships between natural systems and human intervention, piecing together the fractured logic that informs them both.

Maisel’s aerial images of environmentally impacted sites explore the aesthetics and politics of open pit mines, clear-cut forests, and zones of water reclamation, framing the issues of contemporary landscape with equal measures of documentation and metaphor. As Leah Ollman states in the Los Angeles Times, “Maisel’s work over the past two decades has argued for an expanded definition of beauty, one that bypasses glamour to encompass the damaged, the transmuted, the decomposed.”

Library of Dust depicts copper canisters containing the cremated remains of patients from a psychiatric institution. Vibrant minerals bloom on the urns’ surfaces, as the copper reacts with the ashes held within. The New York Times calls Maisel’s Library of Dust monograph “a fevered meditation on memory, loss, and the uncanny monuments we sometimes recover about what has gone before.”

David Maisel was born in New York City in 1961. He received his BA from Princeton University, and his MFA from California College of the Arts, in addition to study at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Maisel was a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2007 and an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2008. He has also been the recipient of an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was short-listed for the Prix Pictet in 2008. Maisel lives and works in the San Francisco area, where he has been based since 1993.

Maisel’s photographs, multi-media projects, and public installations have been exhibited internationally, and are included in many permanent collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. His work has been the subject of three monographs: The Lake Project (Nazraeli Press, 2004), Oblivion (Nazraeli Press, 2006), and Library of Dust (Chronicle Books, 2008).

links:

Lens Culture 1
Lens Culture 2
Von Lintel Gallery
David’s Website
Institute For Artist Management

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Olivia Arthur Part 1

Olivia Arthur Part 2

Olivia Arthur Part 3

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Philip Blenkinsop

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The Robert Adams who took the photo shown is: THIS ONE
The Robert Adams making the statements is: THIS ONE

Writing and photography – is a picture really worth a thousand words?
by Sean O’Hagan

Photographers such as Robert Adams and Stephen Shore aren’t just fine photographers – they’re insightful critics. But is it possible to write words that keep out of the way of the pictures?

We make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honour what is greater and more interesting than we are’ … Robert Adams captures students protesting the enrollment of black pupils at West End High School in Birmingham, Alabama 1963. Photograph: Robert Adams/Polaris/Eyevine

“For photographers, the ideal book of photographs would contain just pictures – no text at all” photographer Robert Adams once wrote. He went on to admit that he “once worked through more than a hundred drafts of a four-paragraph statement for a catalogue, all to find something that would just keep out of the way of the pictures”.

Finding words that keep out of the way of the pictures and yet shed light on the nature of photography is nonetheless something that Adams has excelled at, in two books of essays: Why People Photograph (from where that quotation is taken) and Beauty in Photography. Like Stephen Shore, he is a brilliant photographer who also happens to be a gifted and incisive writer. Adams’s main subject is the American West, the encroachment of the man-made on the natural. In his writing, he champions clear and concise language, whether visual or in the written word. Often, he writes against the prevailing academic and curatorial thrust towards theoretically-driven conceptual photography, the kind of photography, indeed, that relies most heavily on words, whether to explain or obfuscate its meaning.

“At our best and most fortunate,” he writes in Why People Photograph, “we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honour what is greater and more interesting than we are.” I would also recommend Adams’ book, Along Some Rivers, Conversations and Photographs, in which he almost convinced me that Dorothea Lange was a better photographer than Walker Evans. Almost.

If Adams seems unconcerned with appearing old-fashioned, Stephen Shore is, for want of a better word, a modernist. His groundbreaking colour photographs from the early 70s showed us a vernacular America that was so everyday as to be almost invisible, an almost banal place of brightly lit diners and dowdy motel rooms. Shore photographed armchairs, faded lampshades, bedspreads, curtains, even the food he ate every day. The photographs in Uncommon Places and American Surfaces evoked a sad, ever-spreading hinterland that novelist Raymond Carver also mapped out in his minimalist prose.

Shore also shared with Carver a passion for fly-fishing and, in his short “artist statement” for his first book, Uncommon Places, originally published in 1982, he compared the rituals of his favourite pastime to the demands of his vocation. It remains an illuminating piece of writing:

“As I wade a stream, I think wordlessly of where to cast the fly. Sometimes a difference of inches is the difference between catching a fish and not. When the fly I’ve cast is on the water, my attention is riveted to it. I watch the fly calmly and attentively so that when the fish strikes, I strike. Then, the line tightens, the playing of the fish begins, and time stands still. Fishing, like photography, is an art that calls forth intelligence, concentration, and delicacy.”

Shore is also a successful teacher of photography at Bard College in upstate New York – a secondary career of which, one senses, Adams would not approve. “When I have been asked to teach photography”, he muses in Why People Photograph, “I have found myself puzzling over three questions: ‘Can photography be taught? Ought it to be taught? If so, am I the one to teach it?’” He concludes that the doing and the teaching are not totally exclusive, but that “there are not many people in whom the enthusiasms are balanced”. Stephen Shore, though, would seem to be such a one. His text book, The Nature of Photographs: A Primer, is a kind of ideas manual for aspiring photographers. It is a somewhat (wilfully?) dry book, but it does go off into some interesting places that you won’t find in many photography primers – particularly in the third section, The Mental Level, which is a kind of Zen-like meditation on awareness and perception in photography.

For years, though, my favourite piece of writing about photography was William Eggleston’s brief but intriguing afterword to The Democratic Forest (1989). It begins with a description of what, for Eggleston, was a photographic epiphany. When out taking photographs around Oxford, Mississippi, he realised “it was one of those occasions when there was no picture there. It seemed like nothing, but of course there was something for someone out there.” So Eggleston simply pointed his camera at the earth and began “taking some pretty good pictures”. Later, over dinner, a friend asked him what he had been doing all day and he replied, “Well, I’ve been photographing democratically.”

Eggleston, as I have found out on more than one occasion, is a photographer who, in interviews, can often be inscrutable and/or resolutely unforthcoming about what he does, but here he gets as close as anyone to pinpointing his prevailing aesthetic. Later in the afterward, the tone of his voice changes as he talks scathingly about the “blindness” of those who use the word “snapshot” when referring to his work. “The word has never had any meaning,” he says, “I am at war with the obvious”. That final sentence has come to, if not define then at least hint at, the singular attitude that underlies his democratic way of seeing.

In the same piece of writing, Eggleston cites Henri Cartier-Bresson’s book, The Decisive Moment, as an influence. Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 essay remains one of the key pieces of postwar writing on photography. His sporadic essays and reflections are collected in the thin, but invaluable The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. “To photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality,” he wrote, neatly defining the moment of suspended reality that occurs when the shutter opens and closes in an instant. “It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

There are too many great photographers who also write well about photography to cite them all here, but I would like to mention William Gedney’s journals which now belong to Duke University library. This is a different sort of writing: a mixture of insight, gossip, theorising and reflection, the flavour of which can be tasted here. The description of a dinner in honour of Edward Steichen is priceless: “I do not relate to the affair of the people, dull speeches, pompous … the self-glorification is disgusting … The Times’ cameraman sat at my table … He is such an ass.” In the next entry, though, Gedney’s tone changes to pure wonder as he looks again at E.J. Bellocq’s book, Storyville Potraits.

“How beautifully lucid and strong the pictures are … I was struck now in looking at the book how in just 34 pictures, so complete a world is rendered, an all encompassing wholeness. Each one of his photographs seems to contain the germ [of] all his work. If only one of his pictures existed (all the rest had been destroyed) you would still sense he was a great photographer, at least I get that feeling. So consistent and concisely clear is his vision.”

That sense of wonder, expressed by one photographer for another, speaks volumes about how the work of great photographers impinges on the consciousness of those that follow them. I’ll give the last word to Robert Adams. “Your own photography is never enough,” he writes. “Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too – photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.”

From The Guardian

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Grave marker in Smelter cemetery, Asarco Smelter Works. Danny Lyon, South El Paso, Texas, July 1972

Many years ago I was being driven along central park west in a NYC Taxi and talking with Robert Frank whom I sat beside. When I spoke of using words with photography, texts, as part of what were then called “photography books”, Robert said, “well, then that’s the end of it.” . The year was 1969, and it was “not the end of it.” As a young photographer, deep into a career of making picture books, with texts, I couldn’t help but feel that Frank’s comment smacked a bit of kicking out the ladder. After all, the work of Frank that had stunned the world was a virtually wordless portrait of America, done with a Leica and a couple lenses. 1

Thirty six years have passed since that conversation in a taxi cab, and as I sit here at the east end of Long Island, watching my fishing boat “the Nanook” bob and dip at its moorings, pounded by strong southwest winds, I wonder if I am recreating Frank’s error with what I am now writing.

I first began to make pictures seriously in 1960. At that time, photography appeared to me as a new art. Prior to around the middle of the 19th century, photography did not exist. In 1960, in historical terms, the 19th century seemed just around the corner. My own grandfather, who I lived with, had been born in 1871. I knew enough about Art to know that great, perhaps unsurpassed achievements in sculpture went back to the Ancient Greeks. Great paintings has been made since the Renaissance. (In fact the Romans and Greeks also left great works in painting, though I think I was ignorant of it at the time.) But photography? Photography was new. Here was a field whose great practitioners I could count on my fingers, or at least count. Frank himself, who was recognized then as having made a single enormous achievement in the field had published his book a mere six years before I was holding it in my hand. I could go out and buy one, an original of both the French and American editions for, I think they were about seven dollars each. And the other stars in the firmament of realistic photography? Gene Smith, still alive, still photographing: I recall when he got beaten into near blindness working on a story about “pollution” a word that meant little to me at the time, the early 1970’s. Walker Evans, also still alive, whose brilliant accomplishments were done in the late 1930’s, much of the work done in a couple years. Cartier-Bresson, then going back in time, Hine, Atget, O’Sullivan, Mathew Brady, none of the people or what they did seemed that long ago. And before them, nothing. The process of photography was invented in Chalon-sur-Soane, France, in 1842. I was born exactly one hundred years later in Queens.

In the apartment that I grew up in, at the corner of Metropolitan Avenue and Park Lane South, in Kew Gardens, Queens, my father Ernst, a doctor and an immigrant, kept a small darkroom in a closet at the end of the hall. He had been making pictures since he was a teenager across the ocean, in Germany. Like most photographers he pictured most of the things around him and then using paper photo corners, preserved his small silver prints in photo albums. These pictures include what he saw when he leaned out the window of his bedroom in his village, from the third floor above the shop that was owned by his father, Eugene Lyon. And what Ernst saw as a teenager leaning out of his apartment, is what we see today when we look at his little album prints. Below him and down the street was a photography store with a large “Agfa” sign hanging out onto Keiser Strasse, a street that even more distant relatives, that lived in the same building left written accounts of having seen Napoleon Bonaparte ride down as he entered Germany. When Ernst made his little prints, or any prints, the room smelled of Dektol, or the Agfa equivalent, and when I made my 8 by 10 prints in Chicago, the ones of bikers and tough kids standing by stained city walls that later became so valuable to collectors, I smelled of Dektol too. I also used Agfa paper because at the time, the mid 1960’s, I thought it was the richest paper you could buy. Last week Eastman Kodak announced that it would immediately cease manufacturing silver gelatin printing paper. Agfa has also stopped making silver paper. Recently I did series of pictures in China, and have made all the prints on a paper in France. This month I heard that the factory that makes that paper has closed.

I am also a filmmaker. Recently I completed my eleventh film. I mean a 16mm film shot on B&W Kodak negative, Double-X and Plus –X, which at the time of this writing is still being manufactured. Most of the sound for these films was recorded on a Nagra 1/4 inch reel to reel tape recorder and then mixed and appears as an optical audio track on the edge of the final composite print of the film. When my last film was finally mixed and printed , I screened it with a professional timer. The timer is the person that looks at the print and the negative, shot by shot, and sometimes frame by frame, and adjusts the exposures to get the maximum result from the negative, not unlike the calculations a printer makes when he exposes paper in a darkroom. This particular timer used to work at another lab I had made films at in Manhattan, called TVC, that has been closed for years. “When I was at TVC (in the 1970’s) we had 3,500 members of our union” the timer said to me. “Now (in 2005) I am president of the Union, and we have fifty members.”

All over New York City, once the center of photography for America, and the major center for motion pictures, outside of Los Angeles, digital is replacing film, and everyone who made their living as printers, or worked with film, or sold paper and chemicals, are losing their jobs. Film and photography labs have been closing or falling by the wayside for years. Few remain. A world, the smell of Dektol, the sprocket driven technology that went back to Edison who invented it in New Jersey, the world of Gene Smith, of Frank, silver gelatin prints, mounting tissue, negatives, drying racks, and small black and white things of enormous beauty and power, that until now has had an unprecedented life of six generations and has altered how the world is seen and known for all time, is coming to an end. It is the end of the age of photography. It is an undeniable fact. Just look around.

The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says “no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras.” They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rollieflex and when you strike someone with one, that is take your camera and use it as a weapon, they know they have been hit with something substantial. When I was a civil rights photographer (two Nikon Reflexes), I recall a news camera man who had a 16mm (wind up) cast iron camera. When I admired it he said it was “good to hit people with”. That’s a camera. When my twenty-one year old daughter went, along with 25 other students to Athens, I sent her off with a small (black!) Nikon Reflex. When she phoned from Greece she said “Dad, I think I’m the only one here with a real camera.”

I have always admired real professional photographers, the journalists who sometimes on a daily basis go out into what we used to call ‘the real world” and photograph the mess around us. Years ago I argued with a colleague over the fact that she was shooting 35mm chromes, not B&W. “That’s what Time magazine wants,” she said. Now it is routine for most journalists to shoot their work with digital cameras and submit what they have done over the internet. When the actor-assassin that had murdered Lincoln was finally captured (Booth himself was murdered by a shot in the back in a burning barn by a trigger happy and out-of-control soldier), his body was transported back to Washington on a ship that also carried the great Scottish born photo-journalist Timothy O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan, who used a large view camera, made a picture of the assassin’s body. He made a glass plate negative. One. The military caught him, broke the negative and threw it over board. Whomever our next major assassin will be, their will be no negatives made of him.

Is this kicking out the ladder? Film and photography have for me always been a form of realism. That is the invention that shook the world six generations ago. What Neipce and Daguerre had done was to invent a way to replicate and to capture reality absolutely.

Once a year in Sandoval County New Mexico, Chuck Kelton, the B&W printer, and I teach the Willie Jaramillo Memorial Documentary Project Workshop. The students are all teenagers from the Jemez Pueblo, one of the oldest occupied villages in North America. The Jemez tribe predates the European invasion of North America by five centuries. Digital still cameras are prohibited at the workshop, and all the students are given either Nikons and Pentax Reflexes or Polaroid cameras. The darkroom work which Chuck teaches them is B&W printing from negatives. We are teaching these children a craft that is completely obsolete.

Cameras are machines, and almost all accomplishments in the field can be discussed in terms of the technology used in the work. The civil war photographs, can never be separated from the large plate process that was used by Gardner, Brady and O’Sullivan. Robert Frank’s use of a Leica and fast film cannot be separated from his, then, revolutionary social and visual aesthetic. Arbus used a medium format hand held, a Weegee-like camera and bounce flash and her pictures show it. Nan Golden’s use of color is part of her realism. Now comes before us the digital age. The three chip digital video camera, with which the camera-person records his own audio simultaneously with recording his “film”, is an absolute revolution in the process of filmmaking. In the past there have been many examples of filmmakers taking their own sound as they used a motion picture camera, and the process was always extremely challenging at best. The digital video camera is both a motion picture and audio recorder in the same instrument.

The internet and movement of pictures as electronic data similarly trumps the magazines, which have not been much good for the last thirty years anyway, as few important works have penetrated the archaic minds that have usually controlled them. While websites are not exactly on a level playing field, they do represent a revolutionary access for both contributors and viewers to a global audience.

The one survivor, for now at least, in this digital holocaust, are books. Scanning and the use of digital technology to reproduce photographs using printers ink in books has made quality reproduction more spectacular and more widely accessible for publishers than it has ever been. People no longer purchase picture books, they “collect” them. The very word implies that they know that we are on the edge of a vanishing world and that their own personal libraries might one day serve as museums. That is truly ominous, for as every street photographer knows, there is nothing as boring as a museum.

Part Two: The Age of Realism…

One would like to think that the age of photography, ushered in something new, and good, and that it is something will continue, as long as cameras are used, no matter what medium that light passing through a lens falls on. I have always thought of it – that period that began with the invention of photography, as an age of realism. For from then going forward a person could operate a mechanical device that permitted them to pick and choose from reality. The use of the camera has always been for me a tool of investigation, a reason to travel, to not mind my own business, and often to get into trouble. The word history was first used by Herodotus, over two thousand five hundred years ago. It means “investigation”. Herodotus was a Greek from Asia Minor, who was not permitted to live in Athens, and spent his life in an Athenian colony in southern Italy. He created by himself the History of the Persian Wars, As the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski brilliantly points out, Herodotus traveled to as many as twenty countries, interviewed hundreds of people, then wrote his 600 page History, in a room lit by an oil lamp. He did all this without Microsoft Word, electricity or a bicycle.

Herodotus’s book of 600 pages is the single oldest volume, to survive in its entirety from Ancient History. One reason it survived is no doubt because it was a very popular read, and many copies were made. It remains a very exciting read today and predates all our so called fields of anthropology, sociology and oral history, and history itself, all of which he invented or practiced without Goggle.

The question confronting a young photographer today is not a technical question, but an ethical question. Man has made unlimited progress in science and no progress at all emotionally, socially, or ethically. That would help explain the fact that we sit here in the wealthiest society the world has ever known which simultaneously is a war society that, it is beginning to seem, is constantly at war, and conveniently these wars only occur on our soil via television. We don’t actually see or feel or smell the civilians that are blown apart, maimed, raped and burned as a result of our intelligent democratic decisions.

Further we are conveniently able to blame this unpleasant situation entirely on one man, who was elected, or his administration, which he appointed. America sits across a vast empire, like Athens, and later Rome, and wars and brutality are routinely used to try to retain that empire.

So this is the setting for the question of digital verses film.

The real question faced by a photographer or journalist today is not of course the type of film that is inside their camera, although that matters. The real question is what’s inside their head. That has always been the question and will always be the question.

Every project that I choose, either in publishing or film had an ethical and ideological motive that was built into the project, and that mind set continues for me to this day. I don’t have to tell you that this country is quickly going down the shit hole of history, and it is not possible to pick up a camera, or a pen, for that matter, without taking this into account.

Because my own choice made many years ago, was to enter what is now called “the media” I naturally blame the media for the disaster that this country has created for itself. I have never personally be able to understand how the people that directly contribute to bolstering up and supporting a criminal government and political positions that bring misery to other human beings, can live with themselves. The list of people in the media who “are the problem” as they used to say in the sixties, rather than being “part of the solution” is endless. The obvious answer to the question of why intelligent and educated people would sink so low, is of course money.

Money has corrupted virtually every field in this country. But in addition to money these people seek Fame, which ultimately amounts to the high esteem they are held in by the people around them, and even by people like us. Though we cannot do much to deminish the money they receive, we can make it clear, and must make it clear, that these are people we do not esteem.

I will give two examples, however strange they may seem. The first is from the sixties, a time when I was active or witness to many of the social and political movements that created this age. The first is Walter Cronkite – I always felt that Walter Cronkite was a war criminal. Because, when it mattered, in 1965 and 1966, he was perhaps the most visible figure rallying this country into a murderous and senseless war. He had lots of company by the way. Don’t believe the bullshit that contemporary news media bombard you with about how the media helped stopped the war. They helped create the war. Then when it was absolutely unavoidable, some of them, including Cronkite said “Gee, maybe isn’t such a great thing after all.”

My second victim is Ken Burns. What in the world does he think he is doing? This media darling has re-created a war that we actually won (without the Russians, who only had 20 million casualties), and has now managed to get a picture of a handsome young GI that we can adore and root for on the front page of USA today, and every other newspaper. In the midst of a real military and murderous social and economic disaster, Ken Burns has handed us 15 hours (Cronkite was only on for 15 mins), of All American Victory that will be piped into every home, not only for fifteen hours this fall, but probably for years to come.

So whatever you do with your digital cameras don’t model yourself on Ken Burns. It is much better to wake up in the morning and not want to vomit when you look at yourself in the mirror. And if you survive and, and make silver prints and wash them a long time, if you then live long enough, you will have plenty of fans, and can sell your silver prints for much more than they are worth. This is a big country, or what the people like to call “a big market”. You are also much more likely to be listened to, gain respect and an audience doing something that you believe in, and not something you think people want to hear. The more unfundable the project is, the better.

I close with this story. Forty years ago inside a Texas prison cell I made an analogue recording on quarter inch tape of a man singing a song about facing the electric chair, which the inmate called My Last Mile. Billy McCune had been sentenced to Death in Fort Worth,Texas, in1952, but after many miserable years the sentence was reduced to Life. After many years in prison, I met him, and recorded him, Billy was set free, and for the final 30 years he lived his life alone, and in freedom, far from the torment of his Texas jailors. Then about three weeks ago, in Kansas City, Billy McCune, age 78, died. Three days later National Public Broadcasting played the recording of Billy singing his song. On October 6th at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, forty years after I recorded it they broadcast Billy McCune singing My Last Mile. Thirteen million people heard it.

Danny Lyon, Stanford, Oct 20 2007

1 The first French edition of Les Americains, by Robert Delpire had a paragraph of text facing each picture. The subsequent first American edition, by Grove Press, which no doubt Frank preferred, and which has been re-issued many times, dropped the text, and used only Kerouac’s brief introduction.

Bleak Beauty

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