Category Archives: Art

Paul Fussell R.I.P.

Art, War

Paul Fussell died a week or so ago and I didn’t know until Michele read his obit in Time late last night. Fussell was a writer who I very much admired. Not so much for how he wrote – although he was a very good writer winning a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award – but for what he wrote about. At a time when most writers glorified war with books like A Band of Brothers, he wrote – in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and The Boys’ Crusade – about the horror of war, about  how people die in war in agony,  mutilated, and disfigured. Fussell wrote about a war that was not honorable, a war that is is gruesome.

He knew first hand, having been a front line infantry officer in Europe when the turn over in junior officers was 100% every six months. One story that is burned into my psyche is how his platoon slaughtered a group of trapped Germans. And that was not the gruesome part, the gruesome part was that the story of the slaughter became a joke told to cheer people up when they were down, Remember the turkeyshoot? when we killed all those Germans trapped in the basement?

Fussell also wrote about Class in America, a topic I know by personal experience to be taboo. His book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is a classic and, even twenty years after it was written, still dead on.

I won’t say that I will miss him – like I miss David Foster Wallace – but I am saddened that he is no longer with us.

On the road to Vegas with two lenses

Around home, Art, Camping, Photography

 

Ed Dieden and I took three days to drive to Las Vegas last week, camping as we went. The basic plan was to drive south along the coast until we got to about the southieness of Vegas and then we would turn left and drive east. For me, one of the main attractions was a chance to spend some time making photographs. I was getting my camera back from Canon and we would be spending three days in the kind of country I love, big spaces.

I did get the camera back, but it still didn’t work. After a lot of screwing around, including going back to the camera store,  I began to realize that the camera did work with my wide angle and tele zooms but not with my primary lens. My favorite lens! The lens that I use all the time. Shit!

I am re-reading  The Zen of Creativity by John Daido Loori and – I think – it helped keep me centered on the problem. What I wanted to do was spending some time photographing and being outside and not having my primary lens – my crutch – didn’t change that. In some ways, it could enhance it. It could help me see from a different point of view.

As planned, we drove south on Highway 101 and then turned east on State Highway 58. As we went inland, the country which was already pretty dry, got drier, the spaces got bigger, and the light got softer.

It also got windier and our camp site hunt became a lets find a place with as little wind as possible hunt. Strangely, that was a place pretty much in the open.

The wind stopped, the air got cooler, we put a some sausages and veggies on the grill and I had a couple of glasses of red wine. It was a very nice place in which to sit and feel the day end. (Double click to enlarge and notice the lonely power poles going across the valley.)

I don’t particularly like camping, I camp because I do particularly like being out in spaces like this at eventide. Feeling – more than seeing – the day slowly, slowly, drift into night; seeing the first star come out in the dusk – this spring it has been Jupiter, the king of the gods and the god of sky and thunder according to Wikipedia – feeling the darkness and stillness sop up the light. It is the witnessing of an ancient ritual in a huge cathedral. For me, it is being with The Sacred.

 

The genius of Richard Misrach

Art, Death Valley, Photography

I have been going to the California desert – on a pretty regular basis – for about 35 years. The great majority of that time has been when the light was hot and flat, washed out, the colors dull. Almost every photographer working in the desert shoots during what is called the sweet light or golden hour – between about an half hour before sunrise to about two hours after sunrise and the reverse – sort of – around sunset. Richard Misrach shoots during the middle of the day when the light is flat and washed out and his photographs looks like the desert actually seems to look when most people are actually looking at it.

Most “fine art photographers” tend to not use normal lenses, especially in the desert, with the wide angle being a perennial favorite. So there is some point of interest in the foreground but the real photograph is often the background. Art Wolfe is a terrific photographer; he is a photographer who does – more or less – conventional images in a conventional way better than anybody.  I love his shots but their strength is that they are not what most people see when they go to the desert.

Richard Misrach strength is that his shots show what most people see and are impacted by in the desert.

I love Misrach – his images – and he has had a huge impact on my photography but I have never been quite sure why I am so attracted to them. I have never been sure how he made them work. Over the weekend, we saw the same Misrach photographs displayed at both the Oakland Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. (It was interesting how the same photographs took on a different feel – tone is better – when they are displayed differently. I preferred the Oakland show, BTW.) More importantly, for me, the two shows helped me understand Misrach’s photography much better.

Now, I think that the genius of Misrach is not in the content of his photographs – which are often pretty mundane – but in how that photograph is played, for lack of a better word. First his images – photo talk for pictures – are huge – like five by six feet huge – and that makes a big difference. And sharp; 8″ by 10″ camera sharp (or, if shot today, huge megapixel sharp).  It is easy to almost get lost in the photographs, they almost become a real life view. He has had the guts to just go for an outrageous size and the impact is worth it (except that they are too big for most homes. Second, the images are desaturated. Just like the desert light, at any time but the golden hour, is desaturated.

It will be fun to see how this plays out in my photography.