Tag Archives: John Edwin Mason

John Malmin. Aug. 13, 1965: National Guard troops secure a stretch of 103rd Street, dubbed Charcoal Alley, in Watts to help Los Angeles authorities restore order. This image is looking east from Compton Avenue.

City Lost and Found

Note: This originally posted on NJWV.

Baltimore on my mind

Paul Rudolph. Lower Manhattan Expressway, New York City. Bird’s-eye perspective section. Rendering. 1970
Paul Rudolph. Lower Manhattan Expressway, New York City. 1970
John Malmin. Aug. 13, 1965: National Guard troops secure a stretch of 103rd Street, dubbed Charcoal Alley, in Watts to help Los Angeles authorities restore order. This image is looking east from Compton Avenue.
John Malmin. Watts. August 13, 1965
Helen Levitt. New York. 1972
Helen Levitt. New York. 1972
Bertrand Goldberg. River City I, Chicago, Illinois, 1972/79
Bertrand Goldberg. River City I, Chicago, Illinois, 1972/79
Wall of Respect. Ebony Magazine. December 1967.
Wall of Respect. Ebony Magazine. December 1967.

Seeing Princeton’s City Lost and Found show a week before Baltimore blew up* was very interesting timing. It’s weird to be working through my reactions to a show while a real world event unfolds which essentially references everything I’m working through. But this show covers the 1960s and 1970s in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Which means it covers the Harlem riots, Chicago riots, and Watts riots—all of which are extremely relevant to the discussions we’re having today about Baltimore. We still haven’t learned the lessons from 1968.

*I’m really curious to see how that Wiki page changes since the whole riot/protest/rebellion/uprising discussion is also ongoing.

The show isn’t about the riots, but rather the way cities were evolving in the 1960s and 1970s as the demographics and industry changed. A lot of people and industry moving out. And a lot of people and infrastructure being left behind in ways that the powers that be viewed as requiring renewal or fixing or controlling.  While the backstory is missing in the show, even the gist of it is enough to get started.

We get to see urban renewal plans, municipal commission documents, documentary photographs, street photographs, photojournalism, investigative art projects, performance art projects, guerrilla art projects, and more, all capturing various ways that the city was in flux and various groups were reacting to the changes, proposed changes, or lack of changes, that were going on. It shows us what the cities were like ~50 years ago and what the primary issues were then. Looking at everything, even before the Baltimore protests erupted, I was struck by how little had really changed since that time period.

The issue between balancing the need to improve aging cities with being fair to the people who still live in the cities* with addressing the injustices that have left many of those people in, or a single catastrophe removed from, poverty is not just a difficult problem we have to solve, it’s the problem we have to solve.

*Whether they’re blacks living in formerly redlined neighborhoods or artists who need affordable housing or immigrants trying to start new lives here.

And the cities do need to be improved and renewed. While urban renewal is frequently code for gentrification or the destruction of existing communities, neglect and non-investment* are just as destructive. The plans all look glorious. Wonderful mixed-use developments. High density—affordable high density—living coupled with urban parks and communal greenspaces. Transportation** accessibility as a key feature of everything. Even a lot of balancing new developments with old architecture by incorporating the old buildings into the design. I look at these plans and wish that they’d built them since they address almost all the issues*** currently afflicting cities.

*Let alone actual theft in the form of subprime mortgages or “buying” homes on contract or the systematic destruction of property and businesses if, against all odds, these areas actually do flourish.

**One of the few things that betrays the age of these plans is how car-focused everything is. Though it is interesting to note that while New York was trying to improve access for cars, the LA plans were trying to improve walkability.

***Public transportation being the notable absence.

A new city built along these lines would be a thing of beauty. The plans still look futuristic because we just can’t do things like this. Part of me wants to tear my hair out because we’ve known that we need to do this for decades. The other part of me looks at the plans and understands why we can’t.

Because I also look at these plans and notice that the ideas for renewal all involve destroying and rebuilding entire swaths of the city. And I know that to do any of this, city government will have to eminent domain the cheapest available land occupied by the least-politically-powerful people. And that the land is cheap because of racist governmental policies and white flight. And that the new growth, even if truly affordable, will not—cannot—replace the former neighborhoods.

And I look at the photos of those neighborhoods and remember the Leonard Freed book in my parents’ house and see that while they look worn down and in need of upgrading, people live their entire lives there and take pride in their neighborhoods.

And this is all ~50 years ago and things are basically the same and this wasn’t a new problem even then and no wonder people are pissed and frustrated and the real wonder is why these kind of demonstrations don’t happen more often.

The reality on the ground and the promised beauty of the plans are two threads that this show is unable to reconcile. This feels like a weakness in the exhibition as much of my time in the galleries involved being frustrated by what felt like the absence of a thesis statement for the exhibition. But this absence also feels honest and when I wasn’t frustrated I was nodding my head in agreement and recognition of this. I want to see an easy answer. We wish there were an easy answer. There is no easy answer.

The only conclusions I can draw from the exhibition require me to think about what I didn’t see there. There are no plans that treat the city as something that needs retrofitting rather than being a complete teardown and rebuild. None that view anything beyond the architectural legacy of the area to be worth considering for selected salvation.* None that involve the communities and give them any agency over what they need. All of these are projects and visions that, if they exist, would live in the disconnect which is on display. I suspect though that they don’t exist, whether 50 years ago or today.

*Not that I disagree with saving architecturally-significant buildings. Just that it says a lot about priorities when it’s only the architecture that’s considered worth saving.

Photography as social document

Richard Nickel. Untitled (Construction of McCormick Place), 1958/60
Richard Nickel. Untitled (Construction of McCormick Place), 1958/60
Aaron Rose. Untitled (The demolition of Pennsylvania Station), 1964-1965
Aaron Rose. Untitled (The demolition of Pennsylvania Station), 1964-1965
New York City Planning Commission. Spread from Plan for New York City. 1969
New York City Planning Commission. Spread from Plan for New York City. 1969
Department of City Planning, Los Angeles. Spread from Concepts for Los Angeles. 1967
Department of City Planning, Los Angeles. Spread from Concepts for Los Angeles. 1967
William Reagh. Bunker Hill to soon be developed. 1971
William Reagh. Bunker Hill to soon be developed. 1971
Thomas Struth. West Broadway, New York. 1978
Thomas Struth. West Broadway, New York. 1978
John Humble. 300 Block of Broadway, Los Angeles, October 3, 1980
John Humble. 300 Block of Broadway, Los Angeles, October 3, 1980

Aside from the general reactions I had to this show, it’s also very interesting from a photography point of view. While a lot of the photos on display were intended as art photos, they’re not being used as art here—despite being exhibited in an art museum. These are photos as social history, social documents, items that tell us about the place, who lived there, how it’s changing, what life is like on the ground rather than from the planning offices.

It’s not about the photos as objects: Some of them are vintage prints. Some are slides. Some are mechanical prints. Some are halftones in magazines or books. Some—as with the Itinerant Languages of Photography exhibition—are digital prints from scanned negatives. It’s about the photos and the stories they contain.

I still looked at the photos with an eye toward the art side of things. But even as someone who often looks at the social context around the photography* I was even more tuned into this element here. The photos—and the rest of the art in the exhibition—were telling me the stories. I didn’t have to pull them out on my own. And there are too many stories to mention so I’ll just go over the ones that caught my eye.

*cf. my Winogrand writeup.

Danny Lyon and Aaron Rose’s photos of the destruction of lower Manhattan at first have some ruin porn vibes going on except that rather than capturing the superficial beauty of decay and abandonment, these are about change and questioning the idea that progress requires destroying the past. These photos get compared to the photos that show new buildings going up. Same metal frames, same men in hard hats, and the same dust and dirt of power tools. Just a different side of the coin.

The planning commission documents contain essentially photo essays of street photography as a way of understanding that people live in the city. Where street photography often has a bad reputation, these documents show what it does well. It’s not just about the tropes and getting that decisive moment where everything in the frame lines up perfectly. It also captures a sense of place and time in a way that no other kind of photography really can.

There’s plenty of street photography on display just by itself too. Classic black and white work by Garry Winogrand or Leonard Freed. Color work by Helen Levitt or Bruce Davidson. In a different show I’d be appreciating the photos individually. In this show, between the planning commission documents and the magazine photo essays,* I’m fitting the rest of the photos into my own imagined social documents of how the city works and what it’s like to navigate one on foot.

*Including Gordon Parks’s Harlem Family and Ebony’s Wall of Respect.

Street photography is a human’s-eye view of the city. Even in the age of the automobile, this perspective is necessary to keep in mind. No matter how much the cities need to be fixed, if they don’t work on the street-level human scale they don’t work at all. And while I appreciate Martha Rosler’s attempts reject the theatricality of traditional street photography, the way she added distance between herself and her subjects resulted in a point of view that felt closer to a car’s-eye view of the city. There’s something about being in the middle of things in the city that’s absolutely necessary.

This is of obvious import in a city like New York but it’s also relevant to Los Angeles. There are a series of photographs by various photographers looking at the demolished but undeveloped Bunker Hill site in downtown Los Angeles. These photos are coupled with images of different redevelopment plans that were attempted over the years. Some were not pedestrian-friendly, others were. Part of the problem with the site is that the less pedestrian-friendly plans were tried first and they just didn’t work. The resulting buildings were not a place anyone wanted to be.

This emphasis on the importance of scale comes up in a lot of the more landscape-like photography in the city too. From Thomas Struth’s super-precise photographs of New York to John Humble’s photos of LA, you can see the contrast between new developments and the way they dwarf the older, human-scale architecture. We need both types of building in the modern city and making sure they work together is the challenge.

Other highlights

Art Sinsabaugh. Chicago Landscape #117, 1964
Art Sinsabaugh. Chicago Landscape #117, 1964
John Divola. MGM #12 1979-80
John Divola. MGM #12 1979-80
Asco. Instant Mural. 1974
Asco. Instant Mural. 1974

I really liked Arthur Tress’s Open Space in the Inner City* in that it felt like one of the few instances where the photography and plans where being discussed at a local level. These were originally mechanical prints rather than fine-art prints and the goal was to discuss locally about reclaiming existing open space into real parks. I’m not sure it ever got past this stage but it’s one of the few examples which even kind of sits in the middle of the divide between planning and local input.

*Holy crap he has a Blurb presence and you can get Volumes 1 and 2 there.

Art Sinsabaugh’s panoramas are also great. I’m kind of a sucker for panoramas in general but I enjoy the way these show the commitment to the automobile. One of the things missing from the New Topographics is focusing on the architecture of the highway system itself. Sinsabaugh’s work is interesting to view with that context in mind.

Hans Haake’s real estate holdings piece isn’t photography per se but does rely on photographs of each location to really make concrete the point about the way so few people control so much of the land. And how labyrinthine the holding companies are so as to obscure who’s actually in charge.

Yasuhiro Ishimoto was a nice discovery for me. His quieter Chicago cityscapes feel a lot closer to the kinds of photographs I enjoy making and I’ll be looking more into his work in the future.

John Divola’s MGM lots are a brilliant addition to the show in that they blur the lines between fictitious and real urban decay and the way it’s presented in the media.The lots are fake creations meant to look like New York or Chicago or anywhere else, but they’re also open space that will eventually be developed into self-contained modern cities with Los Angeles.

It’s always nice to see Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Especially now with more and more Google Street View projects occurring, it’s nice to examine one that predates them all.

Bruce Nauman’s LA Air meanwhile is one of two references in the show to explicit environmental issues in the city.* It’s funny and snarky but also points out one of the things that is an issue now but which wasn’t under consideration ~50 years ago. The environmental movement in the 1970s and 1980s is barely mentioned in this exhibition despite all the grand plans involve improving automobile circulation in the city. While a lot of the race issues would remain the same in a similar exhibit of today’s cities, I’d expect a lot more LEED-certified or Cradle to Cradle ideas in the aspirational city plans.

*The other is Documerica which, while environmental, also feels like a slice of everyday like in the 1970s.

Another blind spot involves non-black ethnic groups in the cities. I understand why the exhibition is so black-focused but other non-white communities are also an important part of the New York, Chicago, and LA experience. I only noticed mentions of these other groups in a few photos by Jonas Dovydenas documenting ethnic enclaves in Chicago, Luis Medina’s photos of Latino gang members in the 1980s, and Asco’s Chicano activist work.

Of those, Asco caught my attention since they combined Latino traditions like mural painting with Chicano activism about how Latinos are mistreated in the city. Asco’s work, by being self-representational, also pointed out how little non-white self-representation was present in the rest of the exhibition.* As with the environmental stuff I’d expect a lot more self-representational work in a modern version of this exhibition.

*I think just Gordon Parks and the Ebony article. Though there’s also a collage by Romare Bearden on display. 

I would also expect a lot more Asians—both traditional Asian communities under pressure to gentrification and the rich Asian gentrifiers who are displacing a lot of the old-time residents. But that’s for the modern show which also has to include the rush back to the city by booming businesses and young professionals alike.

shea_blisner

Tropes, gaze, and objectification

Note: This originally posted in a slightly different form on NJWV.

Kukkurovaca and I have had an on-again, off-again discussion about doing a photographic Aarne-Thompson or photography version of TV Tropes. It’s a super interesting and often quite amusing idea since photography is incredibly trope-driven to the point where many times the appeal of a photograph is actually in the execution of the trope. I don’t see this as a bad thing most of the time* but tropes can be a double-edged sword.

*I think that the idea that good photography has to always be something new, or of something that’s never been photographed, is dangerously misguided.

If we ever did do a photographic Aarne-Thompson, a significant portion of it would have to be dedicated to racist or damaging tropes in the depiction of people—including how these tropes are typically created by white culture as a way of representing non-white culture.

I’ve recently taken to listening to Floyd Westerman’s Here Come the Anthros—mentally substituting “anthros” with “photogs” in the lyrics. It’s a much more fun description of the kind of photography which bores me and really gets at issues of representation and tropes and how people resent always being studied and depicted by outsiders. It’s why self-representation is so interesting to me and why I side with the ability for anyone to take a photo as being more democratizing than the ability of anyone to have a photo.

The history of black liberation movements in the United States could be characterized as a struggle over images as much as it has also been a struggle for rights, for equal access.

—bell hooks
(read John Edwin Mason’s post for more info)

A lot of self-representation goes right at the tropes: Carrie Mae Weems, John Edmonds, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zun Lee, etc. all show black women, men, families, fathers, bodies, etc. in ways that both differ from and explicitly call out the representational tropes in art photography. They’re filling in gaps in the way they have been represented and taking control over those representations. It shouldn’t be novel or noteworthy to see gentle portraits, working families, or caring fathers, but many of these projects still get picked up in a semi-viral “as you’ve never seen them” way.

There’s so much historical baggage and objectification going on that it’s difficult to subtly critique things here. Tropes gain strength through repetition and riffs, so getting close to a trope tends to result in getting subsumed by that trope. This blunts most intended critiques. It’s not that people don’t understand the point a subtle critique is trying to make, it’s that they’re triggered by the trope and decide that the critique failed to make its point effectively.

I’ve been thinking about this again because of a series of exchanges on tumblr last month over an image by Daniel Shea.

Daniel Shea. Untitled (Fishing Diptych) from Blisner, IL, 2013.
Daniel Shea. Untitled (Fishing Diptych) from Blisner, IL, 2013.

The initial exchange involves a response by Je Suis Perdu to the image and then a response from Shea to Je Suis Perdu. There was some pile-on after this which I found distasteful* but the initial back-and-forth got me thinking.

*Mostly tone policing of the “we’re on the same liberal team so stop being such a bully” type which directly dismisses the validity of Je Suis Perdu’s original reaction and tries to silence him for some kind of liberal solidarity.

I read the initial response as a gut-level reaction rather than a fully-realized critique. Tumblr, like twitter and any other stream-based media, encourages quick reactions where responding first is often preferable to responding best. So I tend to give responses I see on there the benefit of the doubt of being an opening statement in a conversation rather than a complete critique. The statement in this case indicates that something in Shea’s images triggered Je Suis Perdu’s white-gaze spidey sense.

It’s a perfectly legitimate response. One of photography’s racist tropes is the dehumanizing gaze with which it treats black bodies—especially young, fit black men—as objects to be admired and/or feared. This photo, without any additional context, can easily be read this way. If you’re a white guy and toss a portrait of a young, fit, shirtless, black male on tumblr without much additional context? You shouldn’t be surprised that it’ll raise a few hackles.

I like most of Shea’s response. He starts well by acknowledging his gaze and trying to deal with it. Unfortunately he also tries to claim he doesn’t have white gaze and is instead trying to be engaging and neutral. While he goes on to say that he doesn’t believe photographs can be neutral, it’s reads to me like he’s trying to have it both ways in saying “I have white gaze and am trying to critique it” while also saying “white gaze is evil of course I don’t have that.”

I don’t think the white gaze is inherently evil. My major problem is that it gets conflated with neutral—implying that everyone else’s gaze is non-neutral. It’s not, it’s merely the most dominant gaze, which is why it, and its tropes, are worth thinking about. The issue isn’t “white gaze or not” but rather “damaging trope or not.”

This isn’t about the idea that white guys should only photograph white guys or that they shouldn’t be “allowed” to photograph non-whites.* It’s about acknowledging your gaze, owning your point of view and the fact that it’s inherently non-neutral, and being willing to listen to the way other people react to your work—especially if the reaction is critical.

*Heck, all too often, instead of listening to why someone may have been upset, the immediate response is to paint the offended party as trying to censor free speech by using the “not allowed” language coupled with the “you’ve offended us by calling us racist when we’re not” claim.

When I say “own” it’s in the sense of not running from the label (or criticizing the reaction) if it gets thrown out there. It’s entirely possible to be both enlightened and racist—or both feminist and misogynist. It’s nearly impossible to grow up in this society without absorbing any of that bias and working on correcting that stuff is not an overnight process. Learning the tropes that we’ve internalized, understanding how they’re triggering, and figuring out how they work is the only way we can actually critique this kind of stuff.

The Mirror in our Memory

(Scott Strazzante, The Chronicle)

(Julla Carrie Wong)

(Joe Vazquez, KPIX)

These striking photographs are from a protest against police violence that took place about a week ago in Oakland. Some of the protestors brought mirrors with them to hold up to the police, and the resulting news photographs present striking images.

“I was holding up the mirror because I wanted the police to just look at themselves. Especially if they were about to take some kind of action just so they had to acknowledge what they were doing,” protester Nichola Torbett told KPIX 5.

Demarco Robinson, also a protester, said, “We want that person to look at themselves so that they can realize they’re not a badge. They don’t have to follow the system that they don’t agree with.”

KPIX

These mirrors are emblematic of a part of the national reaction to police conduct particularly in Ferguson, MO (but not only there): an acute sense that police are acting in a way that should be impossible for people who understand that they are visible.

Don’t they know they’re on camera? Don’t they know we see them? Can’t they see what they’re doing?

Race, Privilege, and Visibility

My first thought was to say, “we are shocked,” at the seeming obliviousness of, for example, police officers explicitly threatening violence against journalists while on camera. But that suggests that these things are universally surprising, which is not true. The degree to which “we” are surprised is on a spectrum, correlated to the degree to which each of us has to live with the reality of police violence.

For some, these things are totally shocking, and can only be interpreted by analogy to distant times and places — thus the spate of comparisons to police conduct during prior decades of civil rights struggle in the US, as well as comparisons to war-torn regions in other parts of the world today. But for others, what we are seeing is neither a revival nor alien: it is everyday lived reality.

Note: I am not referring just to shock at the extent or severity of racially based police violence against citizens, but also and more specifically to our reactions to the apparent lack of concern over its visibility.

In institutions, there is usually (or should be) a significant gap between levels of misconduct that are accepted or tolerated (or even encouraged) depending on whether or not they are subject to prominent public attention, news coverage, and perhaps future legal action. The default level of citizen cynicism expects bad behavior to be pointedly (and temporarily) suspended or made covert in the wake of a public relations crisis.

And yet, what we’ve seen recently in Ferguson is an apparent eagerness of police to repeatedly double down on illegal behavior, all while in the public eye. They seemingly believe that they can get away with almost anything while the world watches — and the gap between mainstream coverage and what twitter has surfaced, along with the appalling racial gap in public perception, show that (depressingly) they might not even be wrong.

How surprising this is (or isn’t) probably has a lot to do with how accurate an intuition you have of the relationship between white privilege, white power, institutional racism, and police authority. We aren’t talking about a certain percentage of police officers having personal racist pathologies — and we aren’t even just talking about certain police agencies having baked racism into their policies.

Privilege and power shape perception across a society. Racism, as a societal process, tends to blind those involved to its effects.1 So, for the police, racism acts as a kind of invisibility cloak, screening actions against people of color from scrutiny and exempting the police from self-reflection.

This runs counter to assumptions we tend to form in the absence of an awareness of racism. We know, bone deep, that being seen changes how we behave. This knowledge expresses itself constantly in our interactions with each other. Institutions utterly rely on it for purposes of social control. The panopticon is the sociological and philosophical specter of our time. And remember that it does not even necessarily matter whether we are actually being watched; the point of the panopticon is that just the idea of being watched influences behavior.

But racism changes what it means to see and to be seen. And power determines the meaning of observation in any (real or metaphorical) panopticon.

Racism is a Defect of the Eye

I don’t know whether holding up a mirror to a police officer in riot gear is likely to reveal anything to them.2 Racism is a defect of the eye — both the collective public eye and the individual gaze. It is not suspended just because the eye is turned back on itself. The kind of self-reflection that reshapes self-image and behavior is unlikely to be triggered by a single provocative gesture in a charged, antagonistic setting.

But it forms an eloquent gesture for the journalist’s camera, crystallizing in one physical moment a complex and for many people counter-intuitive critique.

In a sense, it is also an implicit critique of the journalist’s camera, and of its inadequacy for changing our understanding of events. The mythologies of journalism and photography want us to feel that images change minds and shape understandings. We want to believe the camera has that power — we want to believe that when a photograph shows others what we see, they will be able to see it, too.

The photograph is supposed be “the mirror with a memory,” and in the hands of journalists, it is supposed to be able to induce personal and societal reflection. But if the mirror with a memory had that power, would people have to be in the streets holding literal mirrors up to the helmets of riot cops?

As John Edwin Mason recently pointed out in two great posts on iconic photographs (Part 1, Part 2), our mythology of photojournalism’s purpose and power is far from the reality. The meaning and significance of even the most powerful, disturbing photographs depends on what viewers are willing and able to see in them.

Time had to catch up with the photographs. More correctly, attitudes had to change, and change they did. But they didn’t change without struggle.

The civil rights movement, the American anti-apartheid movement, and, of course, South Africans, at home and in exile, created movements that convinced the vast majority of Americans that segregation and apartheid were wrong. The anti-Vietnam War movement (and the utter futility of the war itself) led a majority of Americans to support its end.

The photos of King and those of Phan Thị Kim Phúc became icons retrospectively. They don’t reflect the past, they reflect what we now think about the past.

The photos that I posted here are unlikely to become iconic in any case, because (despite the national character of the struggle over police brutality, of which Oakland owns a huge part), these particular photos are at the edge of what’s happening in this historical moment. But there are photos that have come out of Ferguson that should be and hopefully will be iconic — if they can come to stand for a change in how America sees what is happening now.


  1. Think of it as meme, in the original Dawkins sense. More like an idea parasite than an outdated view. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Even though memes are a useful idea, Dawkins is still an asshole whom you should always ignore.) 
  2. And of course, this protest happened in Oakland, not in Ferguson. OPD doesn’t exactly have a spotless record, but they tend to get treated as a proxy for cops at large, much as Oakland’s residents do.