The Gout Supremacist: Portraits of Bad People

Last week’s Time cover of Steve Bannon by Nadav Kander is useful for discussing portraits of bad people. Does Bannon look merely unattractive, evil or both? Or is it a neutral portrait? I see a gout-ridden man with a vicious Listerine habit. Bannon’s Breitbart uses the largest jpeg of the cover on their site, so it can’t be that unflattering.

Left: Nazi businessman Alfred Krupp, by Arnold Newman, 1963
Right: Steve Bannon, by Nadav Kander, 2016 pic.twitter.com/RUt1pqLBIN

— Clayton Cubitt (@claytoncubitt)

February 2, 2017

Clayton Cubitt compares the portrait to the famous Arnold Newman portrait of industrialist Nazi collaborator Alfred Krupp, which the composition slightly resembles. The reason the Kander portrait is better than the Newman portrait is because it’s not obvious what Kander’s intention is.

What white supremacists think they look like vs what they actually look like pic.twitter.com/QAqXb8CEXd

— dieworkwear (@dieworkwear)

February 2, 2017

I disagree with Jorg Colberg’s “The Need Right Now for Subversive Photography.” Both about what we need and what is actually subversive. We need more information and more uncertainty. Portraits provide a certain kind of information, but they don’t capture the sitter’s soul or let you read their mind. Portraits don’t condemn the sitter. The uncertainty that a viewer is left with is good. Uncertainty is the cousin of doubt and sweet skepticism.

The questions of what a subversive portrait is and can formal portraiture be politically subversive are worth discussing. Most people assume a subversive portrait happens when the photographer attempts to make the sitter look unattractive, which can sometimes mean making the sitter look sinister or evil. Perhaps there’s confusion between subversive photographs which attempt to humiliate a narcissist and politically subversive photographs. Which formal portraits are actually politically subversive? To a false populist, this is a politically subversive photograph.

Colberg accurately points out that Kander’s Trump portrait fits in Kander’s portfolio. Likewise, the Bannon portrait is not an outlier. It’s not subversive. It also provides Time a great cover. In terms of making Bannon or Trump look “evil,” compare the portraits to Kander’s Bernardo Bertolucci, Morrissey or Giorgio Armani. Did Kander admire Bertolucci’s films, but found him to be an asshole? Or the opposite? Uncertainty.

Colberg references the Jill Greenberg McCain illustrations of 2008 as an example of subversive photography. I wasn’t sure about that at the time and I don’t think they have aged well. A photographer drawing a bloody mouth and fangs on their own portrait is throwing their hands up. It’s an admission that either their personal photographic method is anemic or photography itself is insufficient. It could have been done by anyone with any stock photo of McCain. The portrait which featured her default style, and ended up on the magazine cover, offered plenty of information.

Newman made many great portraits, but Krupp isn’t one of them. The background story is more interesting than the portrait. There’s little that’s subversive about lighting a Nazi collaborator from below - eighteen years after the war ended.

The best portraits of bad people are neutral, in the way that Kander’s portraits are neutral in the midst of his portfolio. The most effective portraits of bad people illustrate the banality of evil. At the center of this discussion has to be August Sander. He was one of the last century’s best portrait photographers, he made portraits of the century’s worst people. Sander’s son was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1934, and died there in 1944. We can imagine he held some animus towards Nazis. Here are a few portraits Sanders made of Nazis, while the Nazis were still in power:

What we discover is not the face of evil, but dumpy middle aged men with sick ideas. Sander’s gift to the future was to show us that the worst human beings can look like anyone.

The most menacing Sander Nazi portrait I’ve seen is this 1941 portrait. The lighting is default Sander, he photographed this man as he did his artist friends. Did he instruct the Nazi to lower his chin? Did he set up the camera lower than he should have for the man’s height? Uncertainty.

Far more relevant to the current moment is Avedon’s masterpiece series, the Family. In the middle of the grid is a portrait of Henry Kissinger. We know this is as neutral of a portrait Avedon could make, because the entire series is framed and lit exactly the same. Cesar Chavez received the very same treatment. I don’t know what Avedon thought of Kissinger, who is widely accused of war crimes. (Read Christopher Hitchens’ book and make up your own mind.) Did Avedon think Kissinger was evil, but charming in person? Or the opposite? It doesn’t matter, because all the information captured in an Avedon portrait is there and we are left with all the uncertainty that a great portrait provides.

Mapplethorpe’s “Kitchen Sink”

One great aspect of LACMA’s “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium” is the exhibition of early sculptural work, altars and artifacts that most people familiar with his photographs have never seen in three dimensions. When he switched his focus to photography in the early 1970s, after a brief go at jewelry design, the sculptural work found its way into custom frame design. 

Mapplethorpe understood the limitations of art photography, both curatorial and financial. Using frames to create a specific objects around photographs increased interest and potential value in a market where photographs were worth very little. The exhibit has a good number of these works, the most significant examples are Tie Rack and Untitled (Nude with Spool).

“Kitchen Sink” from 1975 is a Mapplethorpe photograph I had never seen before and would never guess its creator if you had shown it to me. I don’t see mention of it in the catalog. On the web, seen flat, it’s not very remarkable.

In the realm of Mapplethorpe still life, it’s an outlier. Dirty dishes in a 1970s New York City kitchen isn’t Mapplethorpe content. From Greek busts to other studio compositions, most famously flowers, his still life always gravitates towards formalism. As with nudes and body parts, Mapplethorpe transformed what he found in New York clubs and streets with meticulous control in the studio. His formalism is not only in the composition but lighting. The bullwhip blocks the sunshine only when the lighting is just right.

“Kitchen Sink” seems to be shot on 35mm versus Polaroid 100 or later work in medium format. Looking at the faucet’s shadow (large jpeg of above), it appears this photograph was made using an overhead light, probably an existing light in the kitchen. The print seems to have a water stain or darkroom mishap, unclear if that happened before or after it went into the frame. Compare it to another work from 1975, a triptych called “Instant Coffee.” It has the same domestic content as "Kitchen Sink,” but is highly formal, using a gingham tablecloth, sugar cubes and spoon in multiple arrangements.

Looking at the dishes, it’s possible they are arranged. Humble subject matter does not exclude obsessiveness, going back to at least Edward Weston’s efforts to get the perfect exposure of his toilet (Excusado, 1925). Do the two sponges indicate something? The fork seems smaller than adult sized, maybe a salad fork? Perhaps there’s a contact sheet in the archive showing different arrangements.

If the “Kitchen Sink” photograph feels too loose to be a Mapplethorpe, the frame is the opposite. Like the X and Y Portfolio boxes, Kitchen Sink’s frame is carefully designed and executed.

The frame also has a pop quality of Oldenburg or Lichtenstein’s Portable Radio. Wall text indicated that Mapplethorpe made some of the custom frames himself, others he had fabricated; no indication if “Kitchen Sink” is one of these.

The frame is not formica, but that’s the impression it gives. The materials listed are cardboard and metal. In our granite countertop era, the shape and materials are no longer common in kitchens, but it’s referencing a 1950-60s countertop or kitchen table. My first impression of the design was pure Americana, a table at a diner with overstuffed booth seating.

The lighting at the exhibit was low, the wall paint color a muted grey with a hint of brown perhaps, which gave the leather/fetish work and portraits more elegance and mystery. You can see in my photos the lighting creates distracting reflections from the (presumably) aluminum border around the frame. 

Seen from the side, you can see how 1920s Bauhaus form and materials influenced consumer furniture in 1950s United States. From this perspective, Mapplethorpe’s Bézier curve is more commonly found in our pockets than in our kitchens. 

Paul Graham at Pier 24

The retrospective at Pier 24, the first exhibit by a single artist, is not a mid-career survey, but a survey of a portion of Paul Graham’s impressive mid-career. Much of the writing about Graham’s work of this period (1999-2011) focused on his method of avoiding the decisive moment and replacing it with sequences of frames. 

Brought together as The Whiteness of the Whale, the content in Graham’s trilogy, spread across a sprawling, concrete art cave, becomes as significant as his method. The exhibit reveals a rigorous investigation of the details and textures of contemporary America; the cars, fashion, rainbows of plastic, and debris. The people portrayed have an array of gestures and gaits that begin to feel distinctly American. The exhibit guide has a reference to Walker Evans, which I doubted at first, but was in agreement with after an hour in the exhibit. 

One feature of Evans’ America is how modern advertising made its way to every rural corner, no matter how remote, encroaching on any surface. He documented advertising’s incongruity with its surroundings. Graham describes American consumerism at a personal scale: the fonts on small liquor bottles, the bright colors of fast food and soda, a shattered jar of insanely red cherries that exists only for cocktails. From the intimacy of gambling to billboards for liquor always in the background, the designed environment strokes, cajoles and addicts. But just at the point the exhibit starts to feel like a structured social observation Graham intersperses the phenomenal.  

The earliest series, American Night, offers the most obvious statement. The fantasy of middle class America is laid out; new homes in California, depicted in a style worthy of advertisements, are alien ships plopped down in arid subdivisions. Surrounding them are whited-out landscapes with barely visible figures. This is Graham’s rejection of two-stop-underexposed contrast porn, that gritty cue so many documentary photographers have used as a crutch, like dramatic music in bad movies. I loved them in print, but on the wall the American Night prints are very large and look muddied by a white layer rather than luminous from overexposure.

In book form a shimmer of possibility felt like short stories without plot, in the unusual format of 12 small thin books, each with a cover of a different color. It was widely praised as one of the best book projects of the last decade. Seeing the entire series on the wall, which takes up the majority of space at Pier 24, is a superior experience. The work retains its poetry, each segment with its own wall or entire gallery, yet because of the print size it’s a more analytical and physical experience. You notice details in individual photographs, using your legs to scrub back and forth between the frames to decide which came first. Because of the layout at Pier 24, after seeing the complete series you can’t help passing back through a gallery to reconsider an earlier sequence. The only sequences that didn’t work on the wall are the two that juxtapose sunsets with people suffering in visible anguish. In the books, the viewer creates the contrast by turning the page, on the wall the curator has done it for you.

As with the whited-out landscapes of American Night, much of shimmer is not set in the dense areas of cities, but the in-between areas. These are places where people in cars don’t get out, and people without cars are stranded in. This is punctuated by one sequence (“New England”) in lush suburbia, an older woman checking her mail. Here the homes are fabrications of the past, but the mailbox is hulking, contemporary black plastic, offering security for the mail. 

Graham’s method intensifies with his final series in the trilogy, The Present. Shot on the streets of New York, spaces are condensed and the sequences are reduced to two or three frames, with light bouncing off glass buildings. The contrasting frames offer up obvious humor. These are not the subtle visual jokes of classic street photography that promote the photographer’s sophistication. The humor in the diptychs of The Present are dad jokes. A man with an eye patch paired with a man winking. A man with a turban paired with a man with a yarmulke. A man in a suit paired with a man in rags.

The prints are similar size to American Night, but every detail is luminous. Graham mentioned in an interview how quickly he abandoned film for digital, but at Pier 24 you can see, as with other photographers, there was a progression of camera technology and printing technique. Early digital looks like early digital. Whereas the earlier work are large prints you don’t want to get too close to, The Present prints are hung low to the floor, but invite you closer until you want to bend down to see them straight on.

While many photographers shoot street at f8 or f16, The Present favors wider shots that have a simple composition of a single person or couple in the middle of the frame. The depth of field is so shallow it sometimes feels as if Graham has deployed a tilt-shift effect. Negative takes on the The Present seemed based on the book, not on these prints. And perhaps my perspective is skewed in the other direction; I’ve seen the prints a number of times since their original exhibition in different settings (even a dreaded art fair) and they are great in every context. If you’ve read Graham’s Unreasonable Apple essay, you’ll recall he outlined a divide between the art world and straight photography. With The Present, he has offered his best apple to the art world, conceptually and in the quality of the merchandise.

“Perhaps instead of standing by the river bank scooping out water, it’s better to immerse yourself in the current, and watch how the river comes up, flows smoothly around your presence, and gently reforms the other side like you were never there.” - Paul Graham (wall text at Pier 24)

The sequence from a shimmer of possibility I’ve seen reproduced online and discussed most often is “Lawnmower man.” This is a handful of frames of a man mowing the lawn, and then it begins to rain. The sequence that caught my attention on the wall at Pier 24 that had not done so in the books was “Texas, 2006.” If you’re familiar with the work, we can call it “Pepsi 12-pack man.” Following a woman and the man with boxes of soda on his shoulder, we go from a wide scene, to a shallow depth-of-field shot to see he has a tattoo on his hand. Graham racks the focus and we notice the couple is passing a cemetery. He continues following them, turns to capture an unrelated scene of a child playing, and they continue off into the distance. In “Lawnmower man” the appearance of rain filtered through clouds feels like a climatic moment. In “Pepsi 12-pack man,” Graham dances around that moment with shifts of his attention. 

Photographers were using sequences in the 19th century, from panoramas made of multiple frames, to Muybridge documenting motion while simulating a static frame (that wasn’t actually static). In the last century Duane Michals used sequences for mystical parables and Chris Marker used stills to create a potent science fiction film. John Gossage’s The Pond is one of the great photobooks, which simulates walking along a path around a pond. Are Graham’s studies of flowing moments cinematic keyframes, a transition to something like Marker’s film? Is Graham’s wandering attention the limbs of Muybridge’s animals?

David Hockney’s critique of the medium created a list of problems to solve: photographs are flat, with single point perspective, capturing no sense of time. The experience of seeing is nothing like a single photograph, in reality the eye wanders, attention focuses in and out. Photographs are images that are not interesting to look at for more than a minute. Hockney’s solution was “joiners,” collages inspired by cubism made up of dozens of photographs. Not every object and surface is treated equally, things overlap, there’s no attempt at smoothness or cohesive forms, though his landscapes do end up feeling like a modern take on traditional multi-frame panoramas. The joiners are never as difficult to read as dense cubist paintings. 

Graham has solved some of Hockney’s problems with the narrative of attention. Hockney’s reference for still life and portraiture is painting. Graham’s subjects are not sitting still for their portraits. Graham assumes the viewer can follow if he turns his head left or right. Hockney’s portraits have a fixed period of time, while Graham’s walkabouts are open-ended and circular. In Walking In The Zen Garden, Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto 1983 Hockney studies his own movement, walking across a contained space that happens to be a rectangle. The time Hockney is capturing in his joiners is the meticulous quilting process of shooting dozens of frames. The time captured in Graham’s shimmers is flâneur time.

The Whiteness of the Whale continues down a path established at Pier 24 favoring an entire series, instead of the museum approach, which uses selects to draw the arc of an artist’s career or the history of the medium. If there were many other places, or any, using this approach it would seem curatorially mute and conservative. Instead, it feels like a patient, slow-motion survey of different photographic methods. Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Doug Rickard and Paul Graham, each method a harpoon hurled from photography’s Pequod, each somewhat insufficient for the beast that is the United States.

Also Read:

• In Conversation with Paul Graham (Aaron Schuman, 2010)
• Paul Graham interview (Richard Woodward, 2007)
• The Unreasonable Apple (Paul Graham)
• The Folding of Time (Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa)
• a shimmer of possibility at MOMA (Loring Knoblauch)
• Paul Graham The Present at Pace (Loring Knoblauch)
• Let’s Talk about Pier 24 (Jörg Colberg)
• “Here” at Pier 24 (Bremser)
  
• Fisher Collection at Pier 24 (Bremser)
  

Restore mpdrolet.tumblr.com!

Besides the fact that Mark has inspired thousands of photographers and photography fans, he’s a respectful, intelligent person. He has quickly taken down any and every post anyone has ever contacted him about. His blog is massive (thousands of posts) and popular, so it is inevitable that he will get a few complaints a year.

Tumblr needs to restore Mark’s blog not only because it’s one of the best resources for photography on the internet, not because Mark has poured so many hours into it, but because why should anyone else use Tumblr as a serious platform, if this might be the result? As I wrote two years ago, Tumblr still has no backup. Anything you make here can be deleted without warning.

MFA Books & Interview Music

Blake Andrews’ interview with Bruce Haley has a tangent about jazz, and being in the surprisingly large Venn overlap of jazz and photography fans, it caught my attention:

“I have a half-hearted appreciation for jazz. I can’t say I hate it but a lot of it leaves me cold. But that’s because I think a lot of it is musicians speaking to other musicians. It only makes sense if you can recognize the keys and shifts and references, most of which I can’t.

The reason I’m going off on this is I think photography can sometimes be the same way. A lot of it is made for other photographers, or is best understood by other photographers. Which is fine. But I think many photographers work under the illusion that their work will have mass appeal, when really the potential audience is about the same as for a modern jazz record. Small. And don’t get me started on photobooks. The target audience for them seems to be consciously shrinking. It’s basically MFAs talking to other MFAs. It’s like scientists communicating through papers in journals.”

Jazz musicians have succinctly described this issue:

“Along the same lines, there’s a thing we used to call interview music. You know what interview music is? That’s the music that sounds better when motherfuckers are talking about it than when they’re playing it.”
- Terence Blanchard

I’ve never done an MFA program, but I do enjoy some MFA books. I also listen to Interview Music, which causes my significant other some displeasure. Sure, let’s acknowledge how these things can be ridiculous, but I want a world that includes normcore photography.

As with photobooks, there are many lists of the best jazz albums every year (see here for a start). Two years ago, perhaps because it’s not possible with photobooks, I compiled a playlist of the jazz lists on the streaming service I use. And for the first few months of the new year, I listened to all those best albums. And only those albums. On headphones. 608 songs, 66 hours long.

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