Drift, from mustardcuffins on Vimeo. (via kottke.org)
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Most videos of landscapes in stop-motion leave me a bit cold. I think people are still bowled over by the novelty of it all and are content to gape at neat visual tricks. Most videos in this genre have unimaginative soundtracks that impose an artificial rhythm on the pictures and don’t really in the end say very much. There’s something about this one that I like, though. True, there’s no real narrative (not that one needs narrative for something like this to work, mind) and it could easily have come off as just ambient visuals , but the soundtrack here, harking back to the still-camera roots of the piece, is quite evocative. And maybe I, now, am bowled over by the novelty of it all, but there’s a surreal dreaminess to these not-quite-smooth transitions that’s quite appropriate to the mood. There’s a sense that one is looking at a still image and a moving image at the same time. (It looks better in HD and bigger if you click through to vimeo.)
Firstly, if you’re in Australia, you can donate to one of these organisations. One of the things we ought to remember is that situations that are not as newsworthy as the Haiti earthquake need money too. These groups will ensure that any funds collected beyond what is currently needed for Haiti will still be useful. That said, it looks like Haiti will continue to need support for a while longer:
- UNICEF 1300 884 233 (Australia)
- Oxfam 1800 034 034 (Australia)
- Australian Red Cross 1800 811 700
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[image: Haitians set up impromptu tent cities through the capital, 13 Jan 2010, from the United Nations Development Programme photostream on Flickr, with a Creative Commons license. Click on the photo for a larger image.]
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What follows is a quick summary of some of the picture stories of the Haiti disaster and discussion around those pictures.
Prison Photography has a comprehensive list of links and summaries of photographic work, as well as discussions about the general Haitian situation and about the role of photography in the crisis. There’s a lot here, but it’s a good job of emphasising some of the more in-depth documentary work that’s been done, some of which preceded the earthquake.
dvaphoto offers a thoughtful round-up of various blogs and op-ed pieces. (Both of the above via Joerg Coelberg at Conscientious.)
“Preventing Haiti’s Next Crisis”, a NY Times story about the wider questions of development and economics.
“Disaster Photography: When Does it Cross the Line?”, an npr story about the potentially exploitative impact of photography on the situation. (Both of the above via Jim Johnson at (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography, who says that “the worries are more or less wholly misplaced [...] The images give us some sense. They help us imagine how horrible conditions really can become.”)
“The Disaster Pool”, from The New Republic, on the idea of pooling coverage in situations like this, so that the massive attention from Western journalists doesn’t hamper relief efforts. (via James Pomerantz at A Photo Student.)
The Lede Blog at the NY Times has good updates of the situation and links to coverages from lots of sources. The Lede is generally pretty good way of following the breaking news from whatever the current important world news story is.
The Lens blog, also at the NY Times, has good visual current and past coverage of Haiti. Also a good source of current picture journalism.
Médecins Sans Frontières has a Photo Blog, with the most recent pictures being from Haiti of course, but it’s a good chronicle of their work internationally. The Field News section of the MSF’s American website has photos and video; a good multimedia resource on their work.
Slate (with some good stories like “What’s the best way to dig through rubble?“) has a Magnum photo gallery of “Haiti as it was“, with pictures from decades ago.
“Requiem for Port-au-Prince” is a Foreign Policy feature; sort of a slide set that features excerpts of journalism and writing on Haiti, pre-earthquake.
In “Widening the Catastrophe”, Robert Hariman at the No Caption Needed blog steps away from the deluge of photographs to examine a single picture of a man, collapsed in an office, being offered some water. The location is the US, and the Haitian man has just heard of the deaths of his wife and family. Hariman makes some pertinent points about the need to widen our understanding of the situation beyond the crisis towards the network of inequalities that connect Haiti to places like the US.
A lot of these links and discussions aren’t just relevant to the immediate recent events; some speak to the wider situation and context, while others are good places generally for continuing discussion and visual stories.
Update 4 Feb: Late Night Live tonight had an interview with Sheri Fink, journalist & doctor, who was on the scene in Haiti. She discusses the medical and ethical questions but also made the point that disasters have happened before; why aren’t the relevant agencies learning from them to coordinate themselves better? It’s a point similar to Michael David Murphy’s, in a good post about possible alternative ways to photograph a crisis like this (via Conscientious).
After looking at Nadav Kander’s work in my previous post, I started wondering what Chinese photographers with similar approaches to landscape were doing. As it happens, a recent post on A Photo Student (a most interesting blog on the MFA journey of James Pomerantz at the School of Visual Art in New York) brought to my attention the work of Bo Wang (also in the SVA program) and his Heteroscapes series. Wang’s exhibition opens tomorrow at Gallery 456 in New York (alas, an ocean away for me). I’m not supposing a Chinese photographer will have a more authentic or accurate view of the Chinese landscape, it’s just that it’s a good and well-rounded thing to see what those who have a connection to a landscape by birth might be interested in looking at too.
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[image: © Bo Wang, 2009, from Heteroscapes series]
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Wang directs his camera to long views of the landscape but he also shows us the signs of a complicated and busy community too. This image above of what looks like a market suggests a few things: a scene early in the morning and, with the sheer profusion of Pepsi-signed marquees, an area that is likely soon to be full of people and noise and commerce. The new-looking and makeshift setup dominates its location, a terrace that by its architecture and lichen-covered surfaces appears much older.
[update: Bo Wang tells me in an email that this location is "an old town with a long history by the Jialing river". The area is where a lot of mostly older folks like to congregate to drink tea and play chess.]
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[image: © Bo Wang, 2009, from Heteroscapes series]
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Here’s a more stark image contrasting the old and the new. This time it’s the old that looks impermanent and the new that’s likely to last a few decades more. The two structures dominate the frame, but the wooden one appears more fragile. Not just because it’s the more rickety structure; in this picture it’s exposed to the sun and by implication to the elements, and it’s surrounded by rough foliage in a way that implies neglect. It looks trapped, static, decaying, while the concrete overpass is clean and new. Yes, the overpass is probably exposed to the sun on the other side, but in this picture, it is the structure that offers shade and protection. More than that though, it runs out of the frame, a long solid line that goes, well, into the future. The only human figure in the frame is a woman with a pink umbrella standing on an oddly-placed platform that connects the two different spaces (it’s curious that in this case the new structure adapts to the height of the old one). Is she waiting for someone? Taking a breather before the next part of her journey perhaps. In transition, certainly.
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[image: © Bo Wang, 2009, from Heteroscapes series]
And here, another overpass, this time providing the defacto ceiling to a canteen or food court. Some of the people in the frame are blurred, a condition necessitated probably by the slow shutter speeds and small apertures I’m guessing Wang employs to get his deep focus, but their blurriness is suggestive of the wider state of transition they are in, the wider state of transition that China itself is in. This space looks a peculiar combination of permanent (with the wooden railings on the periphery) and temporary (with those rough underpass beams forming the ceiling). It looks as if you’d need to be careful not to bang your head on the way out, towards the left.
[update: Bo also mentions that this functions as a meeting-place for divorced or middle-aged singles. It's underneath a highway, and the board in the middle is full of personals ads.]
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[image: © Bo Wang, 2009, from Heteroscapes series]
He has a few architectural images where the shot is not of a jumble of old and new, with either decaying old buildings protesting their tenous existence against fresh new concrete pillars, or where bright and shiny new structures insinuate themselves into the spaces in between older ones. These ostensibly less-complicated images are invariably of completely modern views. Who knows what older histories lie underneath the pristine new streets of this picture?
I’m not sure where these pictures are taken, but Wang in the project statement on his website (well worth a look to see the whole portfolio) suggests that many them are in Chongqing, a city likely to see an increase in its population from relocations because of the Three Gorges dam project. Perhaps the buildings of the last picture are apartments to house them. Wang calls China a “battlefield of transition”. The old, the ancient even, scraping up against the new. The makeshift becomes permanent, and it’s unclear how enduring the permanent is anyway.
Nadav Kander recently won the Prix Pictet, a prize for environmental photography that had on its shortlist very impressive group of photographers. I saw recently on A Photo Editor a slideshow of his recent China work, specifically examining the area around the Yangtze that was about to be flooded once the Three Gorges Dam was completed.
This video is interesting in its own right (of course I’d also love to see these pictures smooth and large, in a book or on the wall), not just because of the extra information we get about some images, because of the pace that Kander gives it, both with his sequencing and his narration. There’s a quietness, a solidity to the presentation that’s consistent with the tone of the images themselves. As he starts off by telling us how he is not one to approach the subject matter with a predetermined concept and being empty-minded, all we see is a black screen. It fades up into a shot of distant ships, sitting at the bottom of the frame that is mostly cloudy and almost white. It’s as if he’s asking us to take a breath and close our own eyes for a bit before we see the pictures. As the slideshow goes on his narration pauses for long moments, and in these silences, where all we can do is look, the images become more vivid. His voice provides a kind of frame. I find myself looking more intensely at these pictures because of this, partly because of the imposed pace of the slideshow (I can’t just click rapidly through them), and partly because the silences between his sentences are somehow more silent.
On the one hand, Kander claims to approach the subject with not preconceptions, but on the other, talks also about travelling around China “looking for the iconography that allowed me to form pictures that looked like my work”. I don’t think this is necessarily a contradiction, but rather a tension that’s inherent all attempts at representation, between being open to the place itself while at the same time translating it into some intelligible and personal form. I don’t for a moment think that Kander is telling us an untruth about China; in fact, through his pursuit of the less crowded corners of the land he shows us parts that we might ignore if the only pictures of it that we saw were in tourist brochures. I am curious, though, about what kinds of photographs he’s trying avoid when he talks about going there empty-minded.
These pictures aren’t of grand landscapes, as Kander indicates, but of “signs that we exist”. His work here is not so much to document the pristine country that will soon disappear, but rather that moment of transition, where the construction is already underway, but the waters have not yet flooded the houses.
There’s a similar scene depcited in the documentary Up the Yangtze. A poor farmer has a little shanty house right on the banks of the river. In a series of dissolves, the movie image shows us the gradual inundation of the field. The house falls and disappears, the cruise liners on the river (where on one the farmer’s daughter has found work) slide along unperturbed. Here are a couple of stills from that sequence:
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[stills from Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang dir, 2009]
It’s a quiet and moving scene. The documentary takes us into the aftermath, towards the present. Kander’s “pictures that can never be taken again” keep us in the past, suspended. Each set of pictures, in their own way, takes us into that period of transition where huge human forces dominate individual people. Each set of pictures asks us, amid what is being gained by those forces, to look at what is being lost.
What better way to kick off my beginning-of-year resolution to write more than with a quick look at some opening titles? Donnie Brasco, the 1997 movie by Mike Newell, with Johnny Depp as the FBI undercover man and Al Pacino as the mid-level mobster who is his pathway to this underworld, has a title sequence that shifts from still photographs to moving images. The sequence is by designer Kyle Cooper, and you can see it here, thanks to the The Art of the Title Sequence (and thanks to Andrew G for the recommendation, oh too long ago).
Still from Donnie Brasco main titles
On a black screen, we hear Dinah Washington’s ‘Stranger on Earth’ playing softly amid the clinking sounds of a bar. The first titles come up, with irregular kerning separating the letters. (A comment from Art of the Title Sequence calls it “uncanny” and suggests that this is indicative of familiar things being, at second glance, not quite right.) A fade-in to Donnie Brasco’s eyes comes up, and he is so still that it’s unclear if we’re looking at a photograph or a moving sequence. It’s grainy, and black & white, so it could be a photo. Eventually, the flicker of an eyelash. Then he glances up and the movie’s theme music starts as we are taken with some dissolves into a montage of neon lights and close-ups of 35mm contact sheets. The contact sheets are of surveillance photographs of the (presumably, at this stage) mobsters gathering on the street, in bars, by the pool. There are quick montages of successive frames that almost animate the action. There are a few similar successive dissolve shots of Donnie, but it’s unclear if these are more surveillance photos or part of the extra-diegetic framing of the movie. We see more shots of the contact sheet, sometimes with pencil marks on them, sometimes close and grainy, sometimes with the 35mm frame aligned neatly within themovie frame. There are brief moving clips in colour. Then there’s a medium close up of Donnie’s face as a still black & white image, which dissolves into the same shot, only moving now, and with the colour coming up. And finally, as he glances up towards the sound of a nearby conversation, we cut to a wide shot of the men he has been sent to infiltrate.
The sequence plays with our expectations of the images: what are we are looking at? Are they still or moving? The quick montage of stills almost turn the photographs into a movie, but not quite. Their status, like the status of Donnie Brasco himself—undercover, caught between two worlds—is ambiguous. In addition, because we see contact sheets we know from the beginning that these men are under surveillance, that despite whatever happens in the movie, however much they posture and pose and threaten, they will be brought in. There’s an inevitability about the narrative from the very beginning. It also implies the anonymous and more omniscient point of view of the FBI photographer, someone whom the men have no direct contact with but who is always there. It colours the rest of the film with our knowledge that whatever event is being played out in the movie there is likely, somewhere unseen, the watching FBI. It’s a neat way to summarise the themes (FBI investigation, the individual agent’s moral tussles) and tones (elegaic, rueful) of the movie.
It also demonstrates the inadequacy of photographs. If the FBI is able to so easily obtain these surveillance images, why do they need Donnie Brasco to spent risky years undercover? If we the viewers have these photographs at the beginning which suggest to us how things will probably end, why do we need the rest of the movie? The photographs themselves are not enough. In the story, other evidence needs to count: eyewitness testimony, an understanding from the inside of the mob’s structure, and so on. With we viewers, the photographs encourage more questions than answers. Now, this is probably to do with the structure of the opening sequence and what it witholds, rather than the nature of photographs themselves. But the photos are a useful means of taking us quickly into the world of the movie and leaving us there, ready with questions: is the guy with the hat their leader? will they all get caught? Not all of these questions get answered they way we might at first expect.
