Misreading Eggleston

I was a shut-in all weekend, desperately trying to finish the slideshow for my book tour, and missed the entirety of the first annual New York Photo Festival. Smart move or what? So I relied on The Jackanory for snappy coverage of all the razzmatazz. Now comes Robert Wright with a smart take on Various Photographs, one the four main shows at the festival, curated by Tim Barber.

So I am back to [Tim] Barber. His show [Various Photographs] demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.

Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic?

It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.”

It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.

Read the rest.

Preventive War: Heresey of the Marxists

From C. Vann Woodward's essay "The Irony of Southern History," published in 1953.

In this portion of his essay, Woodward is discussing Reinhold Niebuhr's book The Irony of American History: "In clinging to our infant illusions of innocence along with new power, writes [Niebuhr], we are 'involved in the ironic perils which compound the experiences of Babylon and Israel' — the perils of overweening power and overweening virtue. "

Woodward continues:

There are many perils, both for our nation and for the world, inherent in this situation — and they do not all come from abroad. We are exasperated by the ironic incongruities of our position. Having more power than ever before, America ironically enjoys less security than in the days of our weakness. Convinced of her virtue, she finds that even her allies accuse her of domestic vices invented by her enemies. The liberated prove ungrateful for their liberation, the reconstructed for their reconstruction, and the late colonial peoples vent their resentment upon our nation — the most innocent, we believe, of the imperial powers. Driven by these provocations and frustrations, there is the danger that America may be tempted to exert all the terrible power she possesses to compel history to conform to her own illusions. The extreme, but no means the only expression, would be the so-called preventive war. The would be to commit the worst heresy of the Marxists, with whom it is dogma that they can compel history to the pattern of their dreams by the ruthless use of force.

"The Irony of Southern History" appears in Woodward's collection The Burden of Southern History.

Breach of Peace: The Tour

The Breach of Peace Book Tour debuts at the Smithsonian in DC this Thursday. Appearing will be Freedom Riders John Lewis and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Roger Wilkins, who wrote a terrific introduction to the book, and me. The event starts at 6:45 at the S. Dillon Ripley Center on the Mall. Buy tickets and get more details.

Next stop is Symphony Space in NYC on May 28. Appearing will be Freedom Riders Joan Pleune, Hezekiah Watkins and Albert Gordon, and me. Starts at 7:30 PM. Buy tickets and get more details.

The rest of the book tour dates are here.

links for 2008-05-10

• New evidence from earliest known human settlement in the Americas
  (tags: monte verde)

It's So Hard, Communicating

That's what my friend Robert said to me the other day, trying to explain what he'd meant in a googleChat when he'd written . . . which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all.

Earlier in the day I had come across these observations on the futility of conversing by Osmo Wiio, a Finnish researcher of human communication. For some reason, I find them heartening.

• If communication can fail, it will.
• If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
• There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
• The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

Found at 37Signals. More here.

Breach of Peace in May Oprah

Now on the newstands: The May issue of O the Oprah magazine has an excerpt from Breach of Peace. Look for the cover with Oprah holding a big red flower.

Now on the web: I've launched a web site for the book, conveniently called breachofpeace.com, where I will be publishing new material not in the book -- interviews with the Riders, archival documents, archival newspaper coverage of the Freedom Rides and more.

First posts -- "Hank Thomas: My First Arrest" and "Barnett to Kunstler: What If Your Daughter Married One?"

Two Songs for Spring

I just discovered the Great White Jenkins (myspace), a band in Richmond, VA. To me they're somewhere in the Heartless Bastard and Arcade Fire zone.

First song: (Cast Your Shit to the) Wind

Second song, though this is more the blackberry winter part of spring: O Night

The two songs are sort of indie power ballads. "Wind" is from Mussel Soals; "O Night" is from Where is They Sting?, which is available on iTunes.

Thanks to Aquarium Drunkard for the introduction.

links for 2008-04-04

• Paging Charles C. Mann: Researchers find pre-Clovis human DNA
  Wishing I could get Mann's spin on this. ""If our DNA evidence and radiocarbon dating hold up . . . then we have broken the Clovis sound barrier."
  (tags: pre-Clovis, DNA, New World)

The MIssing Criticism: Papageorge on Robert Adams and 'What We Bought'

In 2000, the Yale University Art Galley acquired the 193 prints that comprise Robert Adams' book What We Bought: The New World (cover right). Two years later, Tod Papageorge wrote this critical appraisal, which also includes a significant amount of details about Adams' working method, derived from conversations with the artist. The essay originally appeared in the Yale University Art Galley Bulletin.

Download the essay here (PDF).

My intention here is not to “valorize” Robert Adams (or this necessarily imprecise version of him), but to illuminate — or simply surround — what I consider a remarkable moment in the history of recent art. If, as I believe, Adams’s work of this period stands as one of the most significant, and original, achievements produced by an American artist in the last thirty years, it was an accomplishment created and fed by the stringency of the decisions, both personal and aesthetic, that he made in the universal tumult that was 1968.

The pictures that Adams began to produce that September were resolute in their determination to eschew any type of pictorial effect in favor of a direct, matter-of-fact descriptiveness that just avoided triviality. Rather than failing through cleverness or excess or by straining for beauty, these photographs risked that possibility by appearing to be little more than the record-keeping snapshots that architects, contractors, and developers jam into their project-files. The drama in them, such as it was, occurred in the air, as sunlight and figured clouds took on the role of Chorus to the mute prairies, highways, four-way stops and agglomerations of building-types below, elevating them into places worth … cherishing? No, not quite, but certainly worth contemplating as they sat there, so irrefutably present in their nakedness.

Originally published in 1995,What We Bought is currently out of print, though copies are available from the usual sources online, starting at around $400. (Click on the cover image here to see sample spreads from the book). However, the Yale University Art Gallery is planning to publish a facsimile edition next spring. The gallery will also issue an new, expanded version of Adam's Denver next year as well.

Aperture has just published a new edition of Adams' The New West, and reports that "a major traveling exhibition" of the photographer's work will begin touring in 2010.

Papageorge has been the Director of Graduate Study in Photography at the Yale School of Art since 1979. Aperture has recently published his book American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War in Vietnam. Last year, Steidl published his book Passing Through Eden: Photographs of Central Park.

This is the second in an occasional series, Photography: The Missing Criticism, which aims to bring great writing on photography back into print. The first was Papageorge's essay on Walker Evans and Robert Frank.

Bottom-Up History

One of the things that so appeals to me about the Freedom Riders is that they were, for the most part, regular folks. Yes, there were movement leaders and future leaders on the buses and in the cells: James Farmer, James Lawson, Wyatt T. Walker, Stokely Carmichael, among others. But for the most part, the Riders were citizen soldiers who dropped whatever they were doing to go to Mississippi (and elsewhere in the south) in 1961. So I'm happy that Breach of Peace plays a part in recording their place in history, and getting their recollections about their experiences into print.

At his New Yorker blog, Rik Hertzberg writes a brief review about a book just out in paperback that uses the contemporary observations of Union and Confederate soldiers to write a history of the Civil War:

“What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War,” by Chandra Manning (Vintage Books), is a consistently absorbing work of bottom-up history. It is based on the writings of ordinary soldiers on both sides—letters home (some of them dictated by illiterate troops to their lettered comrades), letters to political figures (notably President Lincoln), articles from regimental newspapers (a species of periodical I hadn’t known existed), and resolutions passed and forwarded by the rank and file of military units in the field (another genre new to me). It is the first book by Ms. Manning, who is an assistant professor of history at Georgetown, and it is a work of heroic research, skillful synthesis, and clear writing. . . .

The book is terrific. Taking her title from “When This Cruel War Is Over,” a mournful song that (with very slightly different words) was sung more than any other in both North and South, Manning argues, and pretty much proves, that the war was over slavery and nothing but slavery. The soldiers on both sides understood this very well and, for the most part, understood it earlier than the folks back home did.

Order it from Amazon.

Stephen Shore's Spitzer

Stephen Shore may be making one of his one-day iPhoto books today. From a 2005 interview with the photographer:

One series of books I started a couple of months ago. I think of them as time capsules, and I do them on days when the New York Times has deemed it worthy to have an eight-column headline. You can go a year and not have one, or you can have two in a couple of months. So last week it was when Scooter Libby was indicted, and the last time was when the levy broke in New Orleans. And so on those days I start with a picture of the front page of the New York Times, with the headline, and then I go around and take pictures of what's going on that day. Suddenly I'm thinking about style, and what clothes look like, or cars, or the prices of things. But I'm also interested in what ordinary life is on that day.

In the "60s I was spending a lot of time in Europe, and I was in Europe in '68, when a lot of shit was going down, as they say in the States, including the Kent State shootings. I remember reading the Herald Tribune every day, and it just seemed that the country was falling apart. But a year or so later I was in Europe again, and it didn't seem like there was anything as dramatic going on, but again I had the feeling of things falling apart. And I realized that it was because all I was getting was the news. And the news wasn't reporting that bees were pollinating flowers in Dutchess County today, and the sun rose at 6:51 just as predicted, and that the law of gravity held today as one would hope. If all you're getting are these points of news, you're missing the fact that the world's not falling apart. It's the real stuff, the stable stuff, that doesn't get reported. And so the books, my time capsules, have some of that in them too. So there are things that are very specific to a period in time, what movies are playing, but also just what ordinary things look like.