The End of Photography

This has been going on for a while and it is effecting more than just photography. Music copyists and typographers were the first to go (anyone remember them?) Journalist and photographers are trying to think of ways to reinvent themselves as their professions are transformed. It was described in a rather famous article and book from a few years ago, The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

There are not as many clients as there used to be for high-end professional photography and the expectations have changed a great deal. I work at an ad agency—exactly the kind of large big-city ad agency that kept dozens of local photographers well-fed a decade or two ago. We still use a lot of photography, but more and more of it is destined for 72 ppi reproduction on the web (2 inches tall) rather than 300 dpi magazine spreads, transit posters or billboards (30 feet across). A great deal of this photography is done by a new kind of professional. Not the old-time professional photographer with the big studio and staff but the new breed of art director-photographer who shoots in a converted conference room down the hall, ten minutes later is editing the photo on their Mac and can show you the finished layout later that afternoon.

Are they as good at photography as the old-time pro? Not usually. But they are good enough for what they need—and from a concept and style perspective know exactly how to get what they are looking for. Advertising photography is headed the same place that advertising typography went. The market will no longer support trained specialists. To make a career you need to combine photography, typography, design, layout, sometimes even coding and programming. These non-specialists may not be as good at any one thing as the old pros. But the best work that is coming out of ad agencies today is far superior to what was done a decade or two ago.

Irving Penn

Sad about the news that Irving Penn has died. I heard about it earlier today and mentioned it to several colleagues at work who responded with blank stares and uncomprehending looks. I was fortunate to know and work for Irving Penn—Mr. Penn as he was always known to us. His studio was above Broadway in the photo district of Manhattan. Unlike most studios the photography area was relatively small and the office area was large and spacious. It was also unusual for being absolutely silent—there was never any radio, TV or music of any kind. He kept meticulous records about everything. I half suspect he could have told you the current whereabouts of any print he ever made.

He kept 1 oz. bars of Platinum and Palladium in a safe. They were a hedge against the wild fluctuations in price for those metals which he used to create his trademark 20×24 inch platinum/palladium prints. When he needed more he would take a bar down the chemist and have it transformed into the metallic salt needed for printing.

I used to work in his darkroom doing B&W printing and making the large format negatives for platinum. One day he saw a print I was working on that showed a large thumbprint on the negative. I saw him frown and I immediately knew what he was thinking. He chided me for being careless and asked if I had tried to clean the thumbprint off the neg. I said that I had seen the thumbprint and had tried gently cleaning it but thought it would be less dangerous to retouch the print as the thumbprint on the negative was probably older than I was. He looked at the neg and sure enough there was a very old and yellowed stain on the negative. Based on the date of the photoshoot I suspect the thumbprint was at least a decade older than I was! It was one thing to be printing my own photos from last week but quite another to be working with Mr. Penn’s iconic images that spanned many decades. His famous photograph of the Cuzco Children of 1948 has frozen them forever as adorable children even though they may now have great-grandchildren of their own.

To See the Future

Sun Jul 27 22:25:49 2008

“Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they must necessarily have the same results.”

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, III: 43

The Art of Love

Use a thousand means, since there are thousands of ends.
Earth brings forth varying yield: one soil is good for the olive,
One for the vine, and a third richly productive in corn.
Hearts have as many moods as the heaven has constellations:
He who is wise will know how to adapt to the mood.
      —Ovid, Ars Amatoria

 One’s own person becomes an instrument in the practice of the art, and must be kept fit, according to the specific function it has to fulfill. With regard to the act of loving, this means that anyone who aspires to become a master in this art must begin by practicing discipline, concentration and patience throughout every phase of his life.
     —Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Seid nur nicht so faul und so verweicht
Denn Genießen ist bei Gott nicht leicht!
Starke Glieder braucht man und Erfahrung auch:
Und mitunder stört ein dicker Bauch.
     —Bertold Brecht, Choral von Manne Baal

 You ask how loving can happen—the emotion of loving. She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe. She says: Through a mistake, for instance. She says: Never through an act of will. You ask: Could the emotion of loving come from other things too? You beg her to say. She says: It can come from anything, form the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, form the approach of death, from a word, form a crime, of itself, often without knowing how.
     —Maguerite Duras, La maladie de la morte

They drop the book when it grows clear to them
that the two people in the book are themselves.
     —Jorge Luis Borges, Inferno V, 129

More Truth and Method

23 May 2009 at 7am
In order to have a good conversation each side needs to take into consideration the knowledge and background of the other. One does not speak at a lecture to the general public the same way one would to a seminar of academic professionals. An article for the newspaper would need to be different than one for a scientific journal, even if they are on the same subject. You do not speak the same way to a judge that you would to a child. The dynamics of each of these “conversations” is different.

This is similar to the kind of conversation Gadamer is talking about in Truth and Method, except that the conversation is not between individuals but between the past and the present. The present must always negotiate its relationship with the past—how to translate it, understand it, apply it, make use of it. The present is always changing (albeit slowly) otherwise it would be the same as the past. We know that is not the case as there would be no remembering, nostalgia or history. As the present changes, so must its relationship with the past. It must comprehend, describe, and communicates the past in terms that make sense to the present.

For a truth to be universal it must be a living truth. It must be a vital and important part of a living, hence growing and changing, tradition. Are there any truths that do not change? Yes, truths that are no longer connected to a living culture no longer need to change; they no longer can change. They are static because they are irrelevant and forgotten. They have become lifeless, dead, unchanging.

Hoplites and Homer

Sat May 23 00:13:51 2009.
An interesting article by Hugh Bowden, “Hoplites and Homer” (War and Society in the Greek World, ed. Rich & Shipley) suggests that what we see in the Iliad does not represent several layers of historical material: Mycenaean, Dark Age and Archaic. Instead the Iliad contains material more focused on an early hoplite form of warfare based upon a developing polis society without which it might never had have the level of popularity and sacred importance it had for the polis-centered Classical era Greeks.

The gods, of course, do not represent physical events on the battlefield, although they might represent some kind of larger social, cultural or religious ideas. There is ample evidence of hoplite style warfare in the larger battle scenes. What is different is Bowden’s suggestion that the basileis or hero does not represent an individual man acting somehow outside or in front of the clash of massed infantry but, like the gods, is a personification. Each basileis represents the hero cult of his particular polis. The chariot is not a strange and useless battlefield accessory, but suggestive of the iconography of the hero, as in the civil procession where the image of the hero is borne in a chariot to the acropolis.

I find his argument explains many puzzles of the Homeric epics and suggests the need for other ways to look at the Mycenaean and Dark Ages. “Indeed, if the Iliad is a poem about the society of the early Greek polis, then we cannot use it as evidence for earlier ‘pre-polis’ society, or for ‘pre-hoplite’ fighting. In that case, we ought perhaps to question whether the Dark Age was ‘aristocratic’ at all, and to look at other possibilities.” (Bowden, p. 61)

2009 Van Cliburn competition

I have a somewhat tentative and suspicious relationship with technology, but there are times when it really makes me happy. Today is the first day of the 2009 Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth, Texas. All the performances are being stremed live at www.cliburn.tv. The schedule of concerts (sadly without a listing of the performers and works) is available on the Van Cliburn Foundation Website. The highlight of the afternoon performance was Ran Dank’s performance of Douze Notations by Pierre Boulez which segued immediately without a pause into Beethoven’s Sonata in E-flat major, Op. 27, No. 1, “Quasi una Fantasia.” That was followed by Scriabin’s Sonata No. 9 in F major, Op. 68, “Black Mass” and he concluded with Liszt’s Réminiscences de Norma. More to come at 8:30 pm ET, and for the next two weeks, so don’t miss it.

Gadamer’s Dynamic Truth

“Truth is not a static concept, but a dynamic one; … Truth arises in the context of language, which must be properly interpreted according to the community or tradition from where the language originates.”
Micah Carter on Hans Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method

The idea of dynamic truth as described by Gadamer is not nearly as dangerous and menacing as some reactions make it sound. It is not postmodern and is relativist only in the very mildest sense. When properly understood it is not a strange idea and might even seem  obvious.

We have very little choice but to use language in the communication of any truth. The context of language is based on the traditions of the community using it. You cannot understand the truth of the Pentateuch directly because, at the most basic level, you must have it translated out of ancient Hebrew into the language and idiom of 21st century English.

There are other ideas that make sense in the cultural tradition of Moses that would need some explanation, to have them make sense in our context. For example, what is the significance of the Ephod in Exodus 39? It is not obviously apparent to us. This idea benefits from an understanding of the cultural context and might be explained with a metaphor. But the metaphor that best explains the Ephod to us may be different from the one that best explains the Ephod to a tribesman of New Guinea. There is no one static concept that makes this idea clear to everyone. It is in that sense that Gadamer claims that truth needs to be dynamic.

Kleos and Hubris—the myth and life of Susan Sontag

5/18/09
In Notes on Sontag, Philip Lapote provides us a sympathetic yet honest treatment of an iconic American intellectual. Her essays were widely read and introduced many Americans, myself included, to a wide range of ideas and writers. Like Lapote, my favorite collection was Under the Sign of Saturn, which brought together essays on Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Roland Barthes, Leni Riefenstahl and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. While I never really found the essays to be informative, enlightening or memorable, they did provide a list and a motivation—a road map and compass for a world of ideas I was just beginning to discover.

On several occasions I attempted to read her novels but never got very far. They seem fall into a genre of book that is written for an audience of writers and not readers. The novels are not intended so much as to make someone want to read them, but rather make a particular kind of person wish they had written them. They seem to be not so much novels but self-conscious literary gymnastics. One imagines that she started her process of writing—not with an idea, a plot or a character—but with a book review.

Ultimately, Locate does for us was Sontag was never able to do herself. To present her with a human face and elicit our sympathy for the tragic figure she was. Lapote’s Sontag was a woman of great abilities undermined by an even greater hubris. She was so haunted and driven by her need for recognition, status and excellence that she was unable to enjoy, appreciate and share her remarkable erudition and vast encyclopedic learning. Unable to achieve real pleasure and satisfaction from her intellectual abilities they became the tokens to palter and dicker for money, status and an impersonal and ultimately unrewarding form of public admiration.

I think that Charles Weinstein in his March 23 Amazon.com review “Much Ado About Noting” summarizes  in a few phrases the merits of Lapote’s book.

“Phillip Lopate, warm and sane as ever, labors diligently to persuade us that Sontag is a major intellect and a permanent writer. He fails, of course, but that is Sontag’s fault and not his own. Lopate can be faulted for his Manhattan insularity, his dated cinephilia, his excessive loyalty to formative youth experiences (the latter accounting for both his datedness and his insularity). But these are human frailties, and Lopate is never less than attractively human, something which can hardly be said of Sonatg.”

I have been far less loyal to my formative youth experiences, have long outgrown any lingering cinephilia, and I never managed to achieve the insider status that could have made my Manhattan experience insular. Perhaps that is the reason my admiration for Susan Sontag, the self-cultivated intellectual myth, could not survive my encounter with Susan Sontag, the living person. She crafted the myth of a cutting edge European-style bohemian intellectual—brilliant, encyclopedic, cosmopolitan and most all, sexy. We needed and encouraged the myth—and from the reactions I have seen to Lapote’s book, many of us still do—but never quite knew what to do with the person.

Linear B

Sun May 17 23:12:57 2009
Many of the surviving Linear B tablets are quite similar in their content to
Linear A tablets. They are often accounting records of inventories or disbursements and follow the same pattern that combines syllabograms (usually for names or titles), logograms (for commodities) and numbers (for quantities).

The Phoenician script used to write Linear B does not correspond exactly to the Greek language. Each syllabogram represents a consonant-vowel combination. As a result they are unable to represent some sounds in the Greek language—double consonants, consonant endings or the differentiation between “L” and “R.” This, as well as the similarity between some syllabograms and logograms and the use of syllabogram abbreviations can make reading Linear B tablets challenging.

The accepted interpretation of the above tablet reads “O-pi-ri-mi-ni-jo (received) armor, chariot, horse.” With O-pi-ri-mi-ni-jo probably representing a masculine Greek name “Opiliminios” (which could also mean “[he who lives] beyond the lake” in Greek). As there are no numbers associated with the logograms so we assume there is only one of each chariot, horse and suit of armor. However, there appears to be some latitude for interpretation. The syllabograms for ri, mi, ni, and jo are similar to, respectively, the logogram for woman (or man), an older logogram for a jar or vase, the syllabogram abbreviation for figs, and the logogram for barley. It is possible that in addition to the chariot, horse and armor, there was a dispensation of supplies (figs and barley) as well as a slave, servant, assistant or driver.

In either case this leads us to believe that military supplies were centrally owned and coordinated by the palace complex and that they were dispensed to individuals as needed who were then in some way responsible for those supplies and equipment.