Mari vs. Bush: TKO to the kid

"Mari & Kyla at the pond, W. Barnett, VT, 1998," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Mari Oye, the 18-year-old daughter of our old friends Ken Oye & Willa Michener, made the front page of the Boston Globe yesterday for handing George Bush a letter urging him to reject torture & treat terror suspects humanely. The occasion was a White House ceremony honoring Mari & 149 other Presidential Scholars. She had handwritten the letter the night before & persuaded 49 of her fellow winners to sign it with her. "I really felt l could not just go down and smile for the camera and not say anything," she told the Globe.

We've know Mari (she's on the left in the picture above with our daughter Kyla) since she was a tiny baby. Bravo, Mari! We're proud of you.

You can read a transcript of the interview with Mari & two other signers on CNN's "American Morning." (Ironically, I found it on News Busters, a site dedicated to strafing so-called "liberal" media).

There's also a good story here (with video) on WBZTV's site. Or just go straight to the video.

Van Gogh & Expressionism

"Self-Portrait with Straw Hat," oil painting, Vincent Van Gogh

"Van Gogh and Expressionism" is heading into its final weekend at the Neue Galerie & -- my opinion -- you ought to do whatever it takes to see it if you can. For once, the show's curatorial concept, which explores "...the enormous influence of Van Gogh on German and Austrian Expressionism," is more than crit speak. You can really see it in the paintings.

Van Gogh learned how to deconstruct light & color from the Impressionists. His muscular brush strokes & emotional palette were then adopted at the turn of the century by Germans & Austrians, who were the first champions of his work. These Expressionists carried his ideas further -- to wholly subjective, emotional color, even more prominent brushwork & an attempt to "penetrate the essence of nature." In Paris, Cubism was cooling painting down, but in Germany & Austria, Expressionism was heating it up. Like Van Gogh's , the best of the Expressionist canvases in this show vibrate with conviction & feeling.


"Maskenstilleben (Masks Still Life)," watercolor on paper, 1911, Emil Nolde

Plus -- the Neue Galerie is, to my mind, the coolest museum in New York. Set in a Fifth Avenue mansion once lived in by Mrs. Cornelia Vanderbilt III, it's certainly grand, but I think Mrs. V must have lived alone (with servants of course!). The staircases are marble & the rooms are huge, but there aren't that many of them. The paintings are on two floors -- six rooms altogether, plus hallways -- so it's possible to go through all of them in an hour or two. Afterward, you can get amazing coffee & sweet things at a Viennese-style cafe downstairs.


"Adele Bloch-Bauer," Gustav Klimt

There's a lot to see on those two floors, including the gold-leaf-covered Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (above), called "the most expensive painting in the world" after it sold in 2006 for $135 million. There are some very famous Van Goghs -- on loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam -- & some that you've probably never seen before. To me, with my limited knowledge of painting, the Germans & Austrians -- Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein & others -- are a revelation.

A confession: at painting shows I love to lean close & mentally/visually surf the paint strokes. Completely absorbed, I can do this for a long time, amazed at how intricate the painting is -- how bold & confident. I realize this is absurd, a kind of imaginary painting-- like playing air guitar while listening to Eric Clapton -- but after all, I'm a fan, not a player. It was a weekday so I got to do this as long as I wanted, step back, step close, my eyes no more than two feet from the gorgeous surfaces of paintings I truly adore. It was that intimate, that uncrowded. Neue Galerie is across from the Met, only a few streets uptown (on 86th), but it hasn't been discovered yet by the tourist hordes(I can't vouch for the weekends). The guards, however, as you can imagine given the wealth in the room, are not your usual sleepy types, so don't try to step over the black tape line in front of the paintings or try to take a picture.

Almost got it...at the Mermaid Parade

"Mermaid Parade 2007," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

Along with about 10,000 other photographers, I was at Coney Island on Saturday blazing away at the willing exhibitionists in this year's Mermaid Parade. For those of you who don't know, the parade is a Brooklyn seaside event, created in 1983 by local artists as a jokey carnival of sun, sea & summer. This year I heard a lot of complaints about how big & commercial the parade has gotten, but the separation between participants & spectators is still pretty porous & -- it seemed to me -- wacky (& raunchy) amateurism remains the rule.

I got a lot of good shots (above is an almost random example) but no winners. I'm not too disappointed. I think you just don't get many with this kind of on-the-move, small camera street shooting. With big restless crowds, multiple scenes & stories happening all at once it's like shooting inside a kaleidoscope -- instinctive, unplanned, gestural, reactive. You need some luck. If you're technically competent, open to possibilities & you work hard, you definitely raise the chances of getting lucky. But, like any gambler, sometimes you have to wait.

On his 2point8 blog Michael David Murphy recently did a great interview with veteran street shooter Richard Kalvar that touches on this point. Here's an excerpt:

2point8: When you’re out shooting, you know when you’ve got a particular shot.

Kalvar: You know when you might have something.

2point8: Right.

Kalvar: What counts is the result. It works or it doesn’t work. You may think after you’ve taken a picture that you may have something. And then you find out that you don’t have anything, that you almost had something – but that in fact, you pressed the button at the wrong time. That you took a lot of pictures, but you were on auto-pilot - that instead of waiting, you shot buckshot at it, so you missed the one that might really work.
But every once in a while, I look at my contact sheets and I discover something I hadn’t even seen. That’s possible, too.

2point8: True surprise.

Kalvar: Yeah, I take a lot of lousy pictures, and sometimes it turns out that one of the ones that I didn’t even think about was in fact pretty good.

A couple of years ago I got what I think are a couple of keepers at the Mermaid Parade. Here's one. I'm still fascinated by this kind of shooting. I'm going to keep doing it.

Keith Dannemiller's 'LuzTranslation'

"Christian punk rocker with this dog," 2006, Keith Dannemiller, All rights reserved

Keith Dannemiller is an American photographer who lives in Mexico. In addition to journalistic & corporate work, mostly for American clients, he has been making street-level, color portraits of Mexicans for three years. The project is called LuzTranslation (translated light) & Dannemiller is up front about the difficulties. The pictures, he explains, are a translation "...from a multi-dimensional world of temporal elements to the Cartesian plane of the photograph," but, even trickier, from one culture to another.


"Young woman training to be a boxer," 2006, Keith Dannemiller, All rights reserved

Of the creative leap across cultures Dannemiller writes: "This too then surely is a translation. The photographer/interpreter of people selects the way to present character details that will resonate with others while retaining the person's essential, descriptive oneness. Unfortunately, as a foreigner, I can only hope for an exact translation. Some facets of the experience here will always be off my radar screen. My best is an approximation of Mexican reality."

This needs to be said. But it could as easily be said of the life's work of August Sander, the great German portrait photographer these pictures made me think of. And Sander, don't forget, was attempting to "represent" his own culture. In fact, such a modest, even tentative, approach ought to be taken toward the making or the viewing of any photograph, I think. This in no way diminishes the magic of the medium -- or of Dannemiller's powerful portraits.

Merge

"Merge 1,2,3," Tim Connor, All rights reserved

New work at Nelson Hancock Gallery

"Three girls on Friday night," Nelson Hancock, All rights reserved.

Artist/gallerist Nelson Hancock’s “Kamchatka: Photographs from Russia's Far East,” are on display till July 28th at his gallery in DUMBO. A highly accomplished photographer, Hancock brings an anthropologist’s sensibility (he has a PhD from Yale) to these brilliantly lucid & direct black & white portraits.

“Most in the US who have heard of Kamchatka at all know it as a good place to launch an attack on North America in the Cold War board game Risk,” [Hancock writes]. “Russians consider the region the consummate backwater; the provinces are one thing, but Kamchatka is beyond provincial. It is beyond Siberia, beyond everything, on Russia’s Pacific, about a thousand miles north of Japan.”

One of the many things I like about Hancock’s portraits is that this “otherness” is not the point, as it so often is in National Geographic-style depictions of other cultures. Hancock’s decision to use black and white and shoot in large format is part of this, but mostly it’s a matter of approach. There’s no unspoken pretense that these people are any more “exotic,” or unfamiliar with cameras & representation than people in, say, Michigan. The pictures are not trophies. They’re about the subjects, not the photographer and his excellent adventure.



"I-95 Branford," Keith Johnson, All rights reserved.

I’m sorry I missed Keith Johnson’s recent show at the same gallery. Reflecting a somewhat different anthropological approach, Johnson’s pictures matter-of-factly document oddities that don’t seem to know they’re odd – turf farms, for example, or shrink-wrapped fields or giant plastic whales. He says, “I am endlessly entertained by what I see” and “humor is a major component.” But there’s much more to his pictures than a quick laugh.

Working mostly in landscape mode, Johnson may share to some extent the intention to shock one feels behind Duchamp’s famous urinal. But I’d guess the proportion of cynical to wide-eyed in that work is higher than in Johnson’s. Johnson doesn’t seem angry. He seems to have a sympathy for absurdity. With no obvious axes to grind, his photography is more like a form of pure play. After all, from somebody’s point of view, the weirdness makes sense.

We're shorter, we're fatter, we want to be perfect

Today the left & right pillars of the NY Times editorial page, Paul Krugman and David Brooks, do an inadvertent Jon Stewart-style routine on our increasingly wacky (U.S.) national obsession with body image. Krugman notes that recent scientific studies show Americans -- once famous as the tallest people in the world -- have now become "...shorter (and fatter) than Western and Northern Europeans. In fact, the U.S. population is currently at the bottom end of the height distribution in advanced industrial countries." Widely viewed as "indicative of how well the human organism thrives in its socioeconomic environment," height in our case turns out to have nothing to do with wealth. Still the richest citizens per capita, Americans are squashing down & out, Krugman believes, because of too much reliance on fast food, forced on us because we work too much -- way more than our European counterparts. Hmm. Meanwhile those wily layabouts, the welfare-state Dutch, now the tallest people in the world, are no doubt doing it all because they can't wait to kick our butts in basketball.

OK, on to Our Mr. Brooks. He reports on the astonishing popularity of businesses that sell sperm & eggs from genetically "superior" donors . Apparently, Americans can't get enough of browsing online (at work no doubt) "...through page after page of donor profiles, comparing weight, noses, personality and what one site calls 'tannability'." What do these shoppers want? Well, the male versions would be "...blue-eyed, blond-haired 6-foot-2 finely sculpted hunks who roast their own coffee."

In his column Krugman predictably concludes that in its pursuit of wealth "...America is a land of harried parents and neglected children, of expensive health care that misses those who need it most..." Brooks -- who has become increasingly snarky as the avatar of his party is increasingly revealed to be a lethally incompetent idiot -- first of all distances himself from the trend & then says it's impossible to stop it. "There's no way people are going to foreswear the joys of creative genetics," he sighs.