Waiting by the side of the road
For day to break so we could go
Down into Los Angeles
With dirty hands and worn out knees...

The ranger came with burning eyes
The chambermaid awoke surprised
thought she'd seen the last of him
She shook her head and let him in...

(Tom Petty, Crawling Back to You)

EXT. DENNY'S RESTAURANT - HOLLYWOOD - NIGHT

We drift along the red bricks past the payphone, along the
wall until we come to the corner. Slowly we round the corner
and move to a dark alley. There amongst the dumpsters and
trash cans is the dark silhouette of a figure. We move closer
to the figure. It is the bum and the bum sits. We move
closer and the bum's face fills the screen. Its face is
black with fungus. Its eyes turn and they seem to be red.

(David Lynch, Mulholland Drive)

- posted by cjb @ 11:30 PM

 

In Nevada, with Tolagson, a camera, and the cats.

I can't imagine a better end to 2005.

Many thanks to brother dru, SGB, Peter Culley, Adam Harrison, Stephen Tong, Constant Readers Gwenedd Pickett, John Latta, Reiko Tagami, & James Nadiger, the Vancouver artworld, & etc.

Back mid-January.
- posted by cjb @ 10:17 PM

 
Phone: Ring!

CJB: Pulpfiction Books.

Bellowing Lady: THE BOOKSTORE?

CJB: The same.

BL: DO YOU HAVE ANY ALBANIAN COOKBOOK?

CJB: Let me think. No.

[click]

Albanians have always struck me as too tough to cook.
- posted by cjb @ 11:46 AM

 

Honore Daumier, Mountebanks Resting, 1870
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California

My favorite among the Norton Simon's dense holdings, and a picture I'll be visiting next week, as part of a two week road trip to California, Arizona, and Nevada, along with Jamie T., the cats, the camera, and far too much camping gear. The plan is to make a "portfolio" of between twelve and sixteen images of the US Southwest, but plans change, and the result could be anything from a single oversize image to some kind of limited edition self-published book.

Other plans? Soak in Spencer's Hot Springs, visit the Black Bear Diner and the Original House of Pancakes, scramble up Oak Creek Canyon, and, with a little bit of luck, lounge at the rail of a low-limit craps table.
- posted by cjb @ 9:11 PM

 

Untitled (Jigsaw), 2005
- posted by cjb @ 10:18 AM

 

Merry Christmas from the Incredible Talking Cats & me!
- posted by cjb @ 7:53 PM

 
How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name

George Baker, "Photography's Expanded Field," October 114:

"Now, I have been drawing Klein groups and semiotic squares ever since I first met Rosalind Krauss, and the reader by this point will not be surprised to learn of how fondly I remember sitting in her office conjugating the semiotic neutralization of things like the terms of gender and sexuality, some twelve years ago."
- posted by cjb @ 7:40 PM

 

The Long Journeys of Dinesh Desai -- a Lawrence Weschler character writ large. Well written and illustrated accounts of kayaking the Salton Sea, hiking across Death Valley in the middle of July, & etc. There is more than a little artist-in-general in Mr. Desai; I admire his excellent prose, great sense of humor, and totally undiminished sense of wonder.
- posted by cjb @ 9:35 AM

 
Jean-Francois Chevrier's "The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography" (1989), finally translated in and the highlight of the Walker's Last Picture Show catalog:

"The restitution of the picture form (to which the art of the 1960s and 1970s, it will be recalled, was largely opposed) has the primary aim of restoring the distance to the object-image neccessary for the confrontational experience, but implies no nostalgia for painting and no specifically 'reactionary' impulse. The frontality of the picture hung on or affixed to the wall and its autonomy as an object are not sufficient as finalities. It is not a matter of elevating the photographic image to the place and rank of the painting. It is about using the picture form to reactivate a thinking based on fragments, opennness, and contradiction, not the utopia of a comprehensive or systematic order. There is a return to classical compositional forms, along with borrowings from the history of modern and premodern painting, but that movement is mediatized by the use of extra-painterly models, heterogeneous with canonical art history -- models from sculpture, the cinema, or philosophical analysis."
- posted by cjb @ 8:43 AM

 
Wildlife Author Killed, Eaten by Bears He Loved -- from the Anchorage Daily News

"Treadwell's films of close-up encounters with giant bears brought him a bounty of national media attention. The fearless former drug addict from Malibu, Calif. -- who routinely eased up close to bears to chant 'I love you' in a high-pitched, sing-song voice -- was the subject of a show on the Discovery Channel and a report on 'Dateline NBC.' Blond, good-looking and charismatic, he appeared for interviews on David Letterman's show and 'The Rosie O'Donnell Show' to talk about his bears. He even gave them names: Booble, Aunt Melissa, Mr. Chocolate, Freckles and Molly, among others.

A self-proclaimed eco-warrior, he attracted something of a cult following too. Chuck Bartlebaugh of 'Be Bear Aware,' a national bear awareness campaign, called Treadwell one of the leaders of a group of people engaged in 'a trend to promote getting close to bears to show they were not dangerous.

'He kept insisting that he wanted to show that bears in thick brush aren't dangerous. The last two people killed (by bears) in Glacier National Park went off the trail into the brush. They said their goal was to find a grizzly bear so they could "do a Timothy." We have a trail of dead people and dead bears because of this trend that says, "Let's show it's not dangerous."'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:47 PM

 

To Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, which I somehow missed this summer.

The best film I saw this year, and one that, twenty-four hours later, I'm still struggling to assimilate. Largely composed of footage shot by pathologically idealistic Timothy Treadwell (foreground), prior to being attacked and eaten by a fuzzy pal (rear). Edited by Herzog, who adds voice-over narration and riveting interviews with Treadwell's friends and family, the bush pilot who dropped him off in the Alaska wilderness every year for thirteen summers, the coroner who performed the autopsy on the four "plastic bags of people" retrieved from the dead grizzly's gut, & etc. This sounds like black hubris-meets-nemesis comedy, and some of it is (the grotesquely overacting coroner; Treadwell bounding on stage to shake David Letterman's hand; the revelation that Treadwell was the #2 choice, after Woody Harrelson, for the bartender role on Cheers), but ultimately Herzog's film is a moving study of a man who, for complex internal reasons, could not fit into his own culture, a problem for which there was and unfortunately is no solution. Herzog also admires Treadwell as a fellow filmmaker, and his thoughtful "mix and translation" of Treadwell's raw footage is remarkable for how it simultaneously opens up Treadwell's troubled personality and his profoundly moving attachment to "his" animals and the Alaskan landscape.
- posted by cjb @ 9:12 PM

 

Main & 8th, mid-December.
- posted by cjb @ 9:07 PM

 

George Bowering reads Q&A in Pulpfiction's living room, summer 2005. Photograph by my friend and co-conspirator Chris Clarke, a striking image I've been waiting to share for a long time.


Q&A
by George Bowering


Where are the snows of yesteryear?


Don’t bother looking around.
Either they have long melted into the air
that fish glide through,
or they are heaped behind your heart
where no one will ever see them.


Who killed Cock Robin?


I’d guess someone with snow
heaped behind his heart. Robin
offered love and wisdom, two things
people with a frozen chest cannot
abide. Forget yesteryear, remember
last night.


What is the meaning of life?


The condition or attribute of living
or being alive; animate existence.
Opposed to death. Whoever killed
Cock Robin holds the key to that
mystery. You do not, no more than
do those fish below the pier.


Why do we have to die?


That is not even a mystery,
we say at first, until someone
asks us to define all our terms, such as
heart-beat. Some people say we die
to make room for strangers, does that
answer your question, stranger?


Is it nothing to you?


Nothing, I agree, is sacred, zero
is to be worshiped, there is nothing
in the heart, next to nothing in the
imperfect life. Caring is another thing,
there is nothing behind true caring.


Are you kidding?


Our subject here is death. That and life.
Do you think I would kid you about that?
You who do not even know the whereabouts
of the snows of yesteryear? You innocent!
When I am kidding about death and life
you will be the first to know. Make that
the last.


What’s the difference?


When I took on the job of answerman,
I planned to reply:
Wouldn’t you like to know?
How should I know?
That’s for me to know and you to find out.
Search me.
If I told you, we’d both know.


What’s the score?


All I can tell you, little fish,
is that you are not winning. Your chance of winning
is zero. Follow your heart if you like­­
it’s not going anywhere. The game, if that’s
what it is, is as good as over. You don’t want
to know the score.


What’s for dinner?


It all depends. If a certain guest shows up,
you are for dinner. If not, we are serving heart.


Why me?


Do you believe in a Supreme Deity?
He hates you like the dickins.
He hates you so much that whenever you are around
he likes to kid about death and life.
If you weren’t so tied up with the meaning of life
you might have learned something. Where’s
your sense of humour?


How­­?


Whoops, I asked a question there.
I’m not supposed to ask the questions around here.
I don’t give a shit where the snows of yesteryear
might be. Sorry, you were saying­­?
Whoops, that was a question mark, eh?
Whoops!


Are you finished?


Ask your heart. Look behind your heart
where the cold is, ask the dinner guest,
ask your Supreme Deity. You don’t even
know who I am. Why are you asking me
all these questions? Whoops, there I go again.


Where are you going?


If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you, stranger.
Ask around, somebody ought to know,
don’t you think?
- posted by cjb @ 2:02 PM

 
Don't Dream It's Over
- posted by cjb @ 11:18 PM

 

Untitled (Illuminated Tree), 2005
- posted by cjb @ 9:26 PM

 
Lovely English accent:

"D'you have any Shirley Coombs? Detective stories. By Doyle."
- posted by cjb @ 2:07 PM

 

Untitled (Petro-Can), 2005
- posted by cjb @ 10:29 PM

 
Tecopa Hot Springs, California -- is it January yet?
- posted by cjb @ 10:11 PM

 

Mr. Isaac Hayes, his ecstatic Wonderful (1974) on high repeat here at Main & Broadway tonight.

"Yes it is, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you..."
- posted by cjb @ 9:59 PM

 
Kits mom-'n-dad arrive at the counter with a Cinema Sewer calendar in tow.

KM: Would this be a suitable gift for a twenty year-old who's into "independent" culture?

CJB: (wincing a bit) Sure!

[cash transaction]

KM (reading a Cinema Sewer trivia question): Sex act....sex act....say, do they print the answers with these?

CJB: Yep. There they are, see? Upside down.

KM: That can't be right. It says, "fisting."

CJB: Uh-huh.

KM: But the answer's supposed to be "a sex act!" That doesn't make any sense at all!

(beat)

KM: (to KD) ...do you know what fisting is?

KD: ....no.

KM: (to CJB) Do you?

CJB: Uh-huh.

KM: Well?

CJB: http://www.sextutor.com/fisting.shtml!

Feel free to fill in the rest of the dialogue yourself, concluding with me locking the door and pouring a much-needed beer.
- posted by cjb @ 9:26 PM

 

A Fence Secured to a Tree, 2005
- posted by cjb @ 11:50 PM

 
To Seattle, to scout up some pre-Xmas stock. Back Thursday.
- posted by cjb @ 2:55 PM

 

Rembrandt, The Night Watch, 1642
- posted by cjb @ 10:57 PM

 

Rembrandt, The Star of the Kings, c. 1651

I was actually thinking of this little etching from a VAG show a year or two ago. A lot of Rembrandt's night pieces have this quality about them; most of the image is impenetrable, with just a few faces or stray details emerging into legibility. Your eyes "adjust" to a Rembrandt night piece just like they'd adjust to a darkened room.

(Soundtrack: King Crimson's thematically kindred The Night Watch:

Shine, shine, the light of good works shine
The watch before the city gates depicted in their prime
That golden light all grimy now
Three hundred years have passed
The worthy Captain and his squad of troopers standing fast

The artist knew their faces well
The husbands of his lady friends
His creditors and councillors
In armour bright, the merchant men

Official moments of the guild
In poses keen from bygone days
The city fathers frozen there
Upon the canvas dark with age

The smell of paint, a flask of wine
And turn those faces all to me
The blunderbuss and halberd-shaft
And Dutch respectability

They make their entrance one by one
Defenders of that way of life
The red brick home, the bourgeoisie
Guitar lessons for the wife

So many years we suffered here
Our country racked with Spanish wars
Now comes a chance to find ourselves
And quiet reigns behind our doors

We think about posterity again...

And so the pride of little men
The burghers good and true
Still living through the painter's hand
Request you all to understand)
- posted by cjb @ 10:43 PM

 
My Favorite North American Bookstore

A Novel Idea Bookstore, in bustling downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. Youngish owner, youngish staff, resident cat, great stock, great prices, killer Mexican restaurant and the Midwest's best collection of jazz and soul CDs just around the corner.
- posted by cjb @ 10:26 AM

 
No Reply At All

The shop's email is currently hooped, and will likely remain so for the next 24 hours, courtesy my pals at Telus. With friends like these....

Anyone needing to get in touch in a hurry, please call the shop.
- posted by cjb @ 2:49 PM

 

Alley Illuminated by Theatrical Lighting, 2005
- posted by cjb @ 9:50 PM

 

Untitled (Chili), 2005
- posted by cjb @ 9:49 PM

 
Reply to Adam Harrison

1. Black and white is an abstraction of the colored world we experience daily. A b&w picture should be b&w for a reason; it should enable us to perceive something that color would only make illegible or obscure.

2. Because photography was almost exclusively black, white, grey and silver for so long, artists working in b&w quickly developed very sophisticated means of conveying information that did not rely on color's presence. Hence the "modernity" we readily perceive in the compositions of artists like Fox Talbot and Atget.

3. Color photography (and by this I mean works made with color film, and not tinted or painted images, like those of Edward Steichen) suffered from early critical and commercial neglect. It is amazing, for example, to learn that Stephen Shore's were the first color photographs to be acquired (as opposed to exhibited) by the Museum of Modern Art, or to read contemporary reviews attacking the images presented in Sally Eauclaire's The New Color Photography (1981).

4. Art should never simply reprise the "look" of the past; this is called "conservatism" (I am thinking of figures like painter Odd Nerdrum, or photographer Michael Kenna). When I claim that b&w is something to work against, I speak as a photographer who admires b&w's capacity for abstract truth-telling, and realizes that these compositional strategies can't simply be mapped onto color. Color must find its own way of condensing information, its -- in Greenberg's words -- "own proper means." This seems to me an extraordinarily open path to pursue. I don't think that this represents any kind of foreclosure or diminishment of creative potential. If anything, the opposite is true: photography is a Janus-faced medium, and we learn by first turning one face toward the light, then the other, and studying the difference in the shadows cast there.
- posted by cjb @ 9:08 PM

 

Adam Harrison writes at length regarding black and white photography:

"While I am interested in what you have been saying about black and white
photography, it seems that the strictures you have created for yourself
can only be counter-productive to good picture-making. As I believe you
also do, I think that really great art has only ever been made by a
simultaneous reverance of the past and a blind leap towards the future.
But I don't think that looking forward means restricting the forms of
the 'past' from one's repetoire. Painting is not obsolete because it
still exists; therefore it is contemporary. Same goes for black and
white photography.

There are new possibilities for b&w; ones that did not exist in the days
of Atget, or of Evans, or even until this decade. No one, for example,
that I know of, has made serious black and white work using digital
technology in the way that, say, Scott McFarland has. It was not even
concievable to make a truly monochrome digital print until very recent
inkjet technology.

The figures you name -- 'Atget; Hill & Adamson; Winogrand; Evans; the
Bechers; Friedlander; Fox Talbot; Julia Margaret Cameron; Nadar & etc.'
-- are not black and white photographers, but rather photographers, or
simply artists. They have not exhausted the possibility of black and
white any more than Velazquez, or Vermeer, or Newman have colour.

Things look a certain way, depicted in the manner they are, and looking
at things in different ways can only be fruitful, never redundant. The
'private museum in your head' is not watching from above, but rather
more like the figures all but invisible in Jeff Wall's Night; deep in
the shadows of all of your images, waiting there for you to do them
well."

(Image: Adam Harrison, Tree Trunk, November 15)

- posted by cjb @ 9:02 PM

 

Spiny Dogfish, Squalus acanthias

"These are curious and harmless sharks that will often closely approach divers and on occasion accompany them on their dives. If divers are buzzed by a dogfish they can often be recalled by tapping two stones together. The dogfish seem to find this irresistible and will repeatedly return to satisfy their curiosity. If engaging in dogfish feeds it is possible to play tug of war with these little sharks. Care should be taken to avoid their mildly venomous spines."
- posted by cjb @ 9:35 PM

 

Killing a Dogfish

To North Vancouver, to have the Subaru's leaky CV joint examined. Then, with the rest of the day off, and few hours left before Peter Schuyff's opening, to Dundarave, and the West Vancouver seawall. Three or four kilometers of concrete sidewalk, just above the high tide line.

Hustling along in the cold flat light. Late afternoon sun reflected on the big mirrored windows of the apartments on Bellevue Avenue. Diving ducks bobbing just off shore, a bulk carrier angling under the bridge into the inner harbor. Kayakers, the plash of their paddles clearly audible on shore.

My friend Steve's parents, who I haven't seen since his Toronto wedding (pre-Anodyne), out walking.

"Is there a name for this kind of photography you're doing?"

"Just making pictures."

Out on the 14th Street Pier. Fishing lines ranged off the pier's far rail, twenty feet above the ocean. A group of young guys in puffy ski jackets, two Koreans and two eastern Europeans, stand in a semicircle. One of the Europeans half-kneels, jerking hard with his arm.

"Look, shark," says one of the Koreans to me as I approach.

A big grey dogfish, as long as my arm, lies gasping on the pier's wet boards. The other Korean has his foot on its spine, holding it motionless. The kneeling European has a pair of pliers in his hand and is viciously trying to extract a hook from the side of the shark's jaw. "Fuck," he says, working the pliers back and forth. "Fuck."

"...leave it in," says his friend.

"I'm not leaving a $2 hook," he says, and jerks back the pliers. Blood flows from the shark's mouth. It convulses, thrashing from side to side, unbalancing the Korean whose foot holds it in place. He swears and stamps down hard, once again pinning the animal. The European yanks once, twice, and extracts his hook, along with a long strip of fish-flesh.

The Korean with his foot on the dogfish grabs it by the tail and lifts it up. Its grey face and white belly are smeared with dark blood. It thrashes from side to side as the other Korean takes its picture with a digital camera. Pop of the flash in the failing light.

"Big fucker," says the European with the pliers to his friend. "Fucker tried to bite me."

The Korean with the camera retrieves a black plastic garbage bag from a bench and holds it open. The other Korean guides the thrashing, bloody dogfish inside, ties the top of the bag with a clumsy bow, and sets it down beside his bait-box.

The Europeans drift back to their own lines. The Koreans lean beside one another on the pier railing. The one with the camera shows his friend the picture he took on the camera's display screen.

The garbage bag still twitches from side to side. No one acknowledges it.
- posted by cjb @ 8:41 PM

 

Untitled (Pudding Cup), 2005
- posted by cjb @ 9:43 PM

 
[Out-of-focus picture temporarily off-line; remake in the works]

Fraser Street, en route to a mystery collection in Steveston. Blue Rodeo's sprawling (7 minute!) Five Days in May (1993) on the radio at the stoplight, a song I haven't heard in years:

"Sometimes the world begins
To set you up on your feet again
and oh, it wipes the tears from your eyes.
How will you ever know
The way that circumstances go
Is gonna to hit you by surprise
Oh I know my past
You were there
In everything I've done:
You are the one."

Organ and piano gliding together, traffic moving again, red taillights in the rain, the new wiper blades clicking over.
- posted by cjb @ 9:20 PM

 
Not Elliot Ness

Courtesy the Pulpfiction inbox (spelling & grammar errors preserved in situ):

"Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:

Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

*** Federal Bureau of Investigation -FBI-
*** 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Room 3220
*** Washington, DC 20535
*** phone: (202) 324-3000"

(attached: an Internet worm and assorted other malware. You'd think a big organization like the FBI would be able to afford virus-whacking shareware, wouldn't you?)
- posted by cjb @ 8:04 PM

 

Or to approach the problem from a slightly different angle, consider Harold Bloom's notion of the "anxiety of influence." The cumulative impact of all those collections of black and white photography in the side office -- Atget; Hill & Adamson; Winogrand; Evans; the Bechers; Friedlander; Fox Talbot; Julia Margaret Cameron; Nadar & etc. -- could only result in sweats and shaky hands. It's just like the Web, in miniature! Any approach I could conceive of has already been anticipated, and thoroughly explored with more panache than I could ever hope to bring to the proceedings.

(For the record, conceptual art feels similarly overdetermined to me, largely due to the plethora of catalogs raisonne and retrospectives pouring in over the transom, which make the movement transparent to me in ways that it probably wasn't to those artists lucky enough to experience it firsthand).

Color photography, on the other hand, particularly digital color photography, still seems open-ended enough to work with. That Evans Polaroids catalog really feels like the dictionary: an embarrassment of riches, just waiting to be picked up and transformed. And like Baudelaire says (cranky old Baudelaire, who hated photography so profoundly that his criticisms of it remain truly up-to-date) the world is a dictionary too.

(Image: Henry Peach Robinson, When the Day's Work is Done, 1877. Albumen print from six negatives)
- posted by cjb @ 9:12 AM

 

Henry Peach Robinson, photographer, 1830-1901

"Bookseller Henry Peach Robinson taught himself photography by using the instructions written by Dr. Hugh Diamond in the 'Journal of the Photographic Society.' In 1857, he abandoned his career to open up a photographic studio that specialized in portraits. Robinson made combination prints that joined multiple negatives to form a single image."
- posted by cjb @ 11:57 PM

 

And Your Problem With Black and White Photography is...?

Well, first off, I'm speaking not with my critic/historian hat on, but as someone making images.

My inveighing against black and white pictures wasn't meant to extend to every practicing photographer, just to me, personally. It's a kind of "rule" I was surprised to find myself telling myself I had to obey. As a critic I like and admire artists such as Hill & Adamson, Friedlander, Evans & etc. But my sense of whole categories of B&W imagery being available, "readymade," makes me think that if I'm to make pictures that don't look too much like someone else's, then I should probably stay away from B&W.

Plus, I can't print to save my life, can't compose through a viewfinder, and have zero interest in Zone System style tech talk. Again, these prejudices are particular to me, but they guide and direct me toward the "realism" of (unfiltered or digitally unmodified) color, and away from the "abstraction" of B&W.

(For the record, my picture-making hat also tells me that digital modifications of contrast, light levels, etc., like those characterizing the accomplished work of my friend Scott McFarland, are off-limits to me, but that digital manipulation of an image's composition (eg., Henry Peach Robinson-style combinations of multiple exposures into a single seamless image) is perfectly OK. Why this is I don't know.)

(Image: William Henry Fox Talbot, Lace, 1844)
- posted by cjb @ 11:35 PM

 

Speaking of musical recommendations, I found Geoffrey Hayden's Quintet of the Year on the remainder table yesterday at Obnoxious Large Canadian Chain Bookstore: a 300-page account of the 1957 jazz concert at Massey Hall, featuring Charlie Parker (white plastic sax, originally billed as 'Charlie Chan'), Bud Powell (keys), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Max Roach (percussion) and Charles Mingus (bass). Very much in the spirit of Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful, and equally brimming with musical analysis and biographical anecdotes:

"Max Roach told me that one night, when they asked Parker how they could be like him, he offered his disciples this analogy: He said, 'My cup runneth over. You take this glass of water here. The empty glass is you. Water is musical knowledge. When the glass is full, to the very top, all you have to do is just blow at it and it runneth over. Ideas just gush out of you. But it takes time to fill your cup.'"
- posted by cjb @ 8:48 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Mr. Al Green's Sha-la-La (Make Me Happy) -- two and half minutes of swivelling horns, string flourishes, and a sneaky bass beat counting the whole marvellous thing down.

"I'm trying, this feeling just won't die,
oh, sha la la la-- la la la, make you cry,
it's something that just gets down in your bones, baby,
and once I see you I can't leave your love alone..."

If I had to leave tonight for Nevada with only one disc in the car, this is the one I'd take.

- posted by cjb @ 8:37 PM

 

Readymades

Curses! Foiled again!
- posted by cjb @ 4:33 PM

 
Scary Personals -- almost as good as Vice magazine's much-maligned fashion column.
- posted by cjb @ 1:28 PM

 

At Home Depot, en route to buying a new window lock for CSA Space. I'm writing a long, W.G. Sebald-ish critical essay about this cool character, Lee Friedlander, and small format photography. It's called The Photographer and the Snowman, and I'll post it here when it's complete.
- posted by cjb @ 10:44 PM

 

Untitled (Arrow), 2005

The Untitleds don't come with extended captions, but if this picture had one it would simply read, "For Walker Evans."

There is a terrific Lee Friedlander portrait of Evans in the big retrospective catalog on my desk (fig.388, "Walker Evans, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1972," p.229). Evans sits upright in his hospital bed, hair askew and bleary-eyed behind his trademark hornrims. You get the impression that he's pulled himself together for his visitor, that he's acting better than he really feels. His striped housecoat is open to reveal a creased undershirt beneath. He's smiling, neat white teeth in the scraggly white beard that he affected as he aged.

I was thinking of this portrait yesterday while shifting books in the apartment. Then I ran across the catalog Walker Evans: Polaroids. A nice bit of serendiptity. There's a lot of good late work in this book, a startling number of new approaches from a man in his late sixties or early seventies, a man whose career and place in art history was secure and who thus had no need to reinvent his relationship to every major pictorial genre with what was then considered a novelty camera for amateurs.

As Frank Stella says of Morris Louis, "If his promise were read rightly -- if the structural potential of his spatial dynamics were understood and the disjunctive intensity of his color appreciated -- his [pictures] could lead to a new beginning."

There are lots of sidewalk arrows among Evans' Polaroids. Also painted signs, a decrepit watercolor paint kit, young Yale cuties, overgrown shacks and clapped-out trucks. I admire the street signs most of all, for their indecipherability, and for their strange blunt plainness.

I suppose this image is also a kind of half-assed attempt to make a black and white picture. You can't look at Evans or Friedlander (or Hill & Adamson, or Wall's Volunteer, or Adam Harrison's recent night scenes) and not be drawn to black and white. Yet to me b&w still seems something to work against, not toward.
- posted by cjb @ 9:40 PM