Re: [Leica] ELEKTRONIX

[Johnny Deadman <john@pinkheadedbug.com>]

on 8/14/01 9:40 AM, Henry Ambrose at henryambrose@home.com wrote:

> John Brownlow wrote:
> 
>> Robert Frank shot his eyeball-burning photographs as Robert Frank. He
>> wandered the country and shot what fixated him. Who are we to second guess
>> him? It was his view of the country. I bet the fact that he was a Swiss Jew
>> had a lot to do with him experiencing it differently to H Ambrose or anyone
>> else resident in Tennnessee (no putdown intended at all, Henry). My first
>> exeperiences of the US were radically re-orienting and still I have problems
>> with the notion of Manifest Destiny which I dare not express even in liberal
>> US society for fear of upsetting mine hosts.
> You're welcome to think whatever you like about M.D. What does M.D. have
> to do with photography? Do you think that I see the American west as a
> Marlboro ad?
> Do you think I believe us all to be John Wayne/Davy Crockett/Daniel Boone?

nope not at all. What I was trying to say not very clearly is that an
outsider's perception of our own land is often radically different to our
own, even those of us who consider ourselves critically informed about our
father/motherland. 
 
> Sure Frank shot what fixated him.
> Its the fixation to which Dave referred to start this battle.
> Its a mildly misanthropic fixation. And that is fascinating to lots of
> folk.

he was an isolated individual for sure. He had a funny accent and a funny
little camera and he just came from a continent ravaged by war where Jews
like him (not Swiss ones fortunately) had been massacred in their millions.
I'm not surprised he was a bit misanthropic. But that doesn't make any
pictures he took 'lies'. They are versions of reality.
>> 
>> But in the end all that matters is that R Frank bagged the Guggenheim and
>> hired the car and shot the damn pictures. I remain convinced that the only
>> really valid criticism of photography is other pictures. Does Eve Arnold's
>> 'In America' answer Frank? Hardly. Which does not mean that a passionate
>> advocate could or should not put another point of view. But you have to go
>> and shoot the pictures and then we will be all ears (eyes?).
> But YOU can be so authoritative without the requirement of "shooting the
> pictures"?

No I think all critical writing about photography is somewhat suspect
including mine. However as you know I do try to take the pictures and there
is certainly a sense in which my pictures are a reflection of and inspired
by Frank's, and so (to me) a more interesting criticism than anything I
could write about them.

> (not a comment on your work, which as you know, I admire)
> I'm pretty sure we don't have to have a huge body of work to be able to
> comment. Critics rarely do. ; >)

screw the critics, Henry! we are photographers. I'm not saying you have to
have a huge body of work to comment, I'm saying that TO ME the only *really*
valid criticism of photography is another photograph. Writing about it
doesn't quite hack it really. So we can both say all we like about Frank but
it is when we go out and take another picture which depicts another version
of reality more resonant with our own worldview that we move forward.

>> Ditto Avedon. I love "In the American West" very much. Others see fashion
>> photographs, I now realise, but that is a brutal way to categorise a very
>> passionate photographer. Avedon is no fool and the pictures are deeper than
>> that. But, you don't like his work? Do better. And then show it to us.
> A brutal way to categorize a passionate photographer? I did not call him
> a fool.
> I called his pictures "fashion photography" I did not say he was a bad
> photographer.
> Jeeeshhh!!!!

to call them fashion photographs is to dismiss any deeper intent, isn't it?

how would you like it if you shot a heartfelt project and someone called
them 'corporate/stock'?

ITAW has given me enormous pleasure over the years and never once did I
think of it as fashion. In fact when I bought it I had no idea who Avedon
was. 
>> 
>> FWIW I find HCB"s american photographs very unsatisfactory. The nearest I
>> can find to an alternative to Frank's dystopic vision is actually O Winston
>> Link, or perhaps Robert Adams, or even straying from photography Hopper is
>> the real answer. Personally I have recognised more Hopper in everyday
>> America than almost any other artist's vision, dystopic or utopic or
>> whatever. And let's not forget Disfarmer.
> 
> Wow! - Hopper - I can agree with that.
> Eggleston? Yeah, that looks like home.
> (not my fav. by any means but it looks like the US)
> 
> So the first time you came to the US did you see it as somehow like
> Frank's version?
> I would REALLY love to hear about this.

yes and no

I can remember my first experiences of America very clearly (this was
Boston, MA in 1987). What jumped out at me then (I don't necessarily stand
by any of this now) was

- -- the racial divide
- -- myriad patchworked ethnicities
- -- aggression
- -- crassness & tackiness
- -- nice cars
- -- jingoism
- -- friendliness
- -- classlessness
- -- endless construction
- -- ignorance of Europe

You have to understand this as the perspective of an arrogant 23-year old
arriving from Oxford University, a supposed pinnacle of European culture.

I had also ingested Frank's and Klein's photographs before arriving, which
had no doubt conditioned me.

(There is a saying in the photo-book publishing world that books critical of
America always sell well in Europe)

Now I don't see America this way at all. Despite my above first impressions
I went back to England totally converted to the idea of America and in
particular the classlessness. By comparison Britain is practically a feudal
society. Now I am far more aware of the hospitality and generosity of spirit
you encounter daily in North America. And I am much more sympathetic to the
national pride that flies US and Canadian flags on every other house. You
have to understand that to many Europeans fierce national pride is a
troubled concept.

I also have come to realise that there is no one America, that LA and Boston
and South Carolina and rural Michigan and no doubt Tennessee are really very
different from one another.

But Frank's vision was close enough to what I saw that when I first took out
my camera I found it easy to find the same shots (not as good, I mean the
same subjects).  The question then is how you go beyond that, which is what
I mean by photographs being the real criticism of photographs.

> btw: 
> dystopic is not in my dictionary. I guess you mean opposite of utopic
> (utopian)?

yeah = bad place in Greek as opposed to Utopia = good place

Thinking on about Frank, it is not just his pictures of America that are
misanthropic (I'm not even sure that's the right word, I think melancholic
is better). All his photographs are shot through with the same melancholy,
veering into tragedy. Like THE LINES OF MY HAND, which I think is very
moving. It's not as if he moved on from America to shoot happy pictures of
anywhere else. Photographs are always a dual reflection of the photographer
and the thing photographed. Frank's photographs don't reflect so much a
literal truth as a personal truth about America.

The thing that surprises me most of all, and did when I first learned how
the photographs were received on publication, is the strength of feeling
they generated amongst Americans themselves, because to me having seen the
photographs and having just experienced America for the first time, they
didn't seem that problematic, or that far off the mark.

I can't quite think of a parallel where a photographer shot England and I
felt it was a lie. Frank's photographs of England are very acute, if also
very stuck in the 50s, like Britain was. You look in vain for any sign of
the 60s that were about to happen. Eggleston's few pictures of England seem
to me to have only scratched a very obvious surface... his pictures of
'English' roses don't look like English roses to me. Part of the problem is
that the white-bread version of England you see in tourist brochures,
castles and kings and lords and ladies and sirs and carriages and monuments,
is such a MASSIVE lie in itself that by comparison anything else looks more
like the truth. And I continue to be amazed at how far people buy this
version of England (the more so the further west you go in the US by and
large). I continually read scripts written by yanks describing British
aristocrats as they may perhaps have been in 1805 but set in the present
day. If Americans feel as misrepresented by Frank as I do by those scripts
maybe their reaction is more understandable.

- -- 
John Brownlow

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com

ICQ: 109343205