252. Beyond The Silver Screens

        From video games to reality TV, we are inundated with narrative and swimming in storylines, says legendary scriptwriter Paul Schrader. Can traditional cinema keep up? Or are we suffering 'narrative exhaustion'?.                 Screenwriters love to complain. They are disrespected by producers, deemed dispensable by directors, not duly credited by critics, treated like employees by actors - although few complain about being historically and chronically overpaid. Another thing they don't complain about is "the exhaustion of narrative", though it weighs very much on their minds. For screenwriters to complain about the paucity of original ideas would be like a salesman complaining about a lack of inventory. It's not good for business. Writers have always known there are a limited number of storylines. Christopher Booker's Seven Basic Plots popularised the number seven, but others have argued for three, 20 and 36 basic plots - Rudyard Kipling said 69. That's not new. We do tell variations of the same stories over and over. That's not what I mean by the "exhaustion of narrative". What is new is the omnipresence and ubiquity of plot created by media proliferation. We are inundated by narrative. We are swimming in storylines.   Let's crunch some hypothetical numbers. Take a media-aware person of, say, 30 years of age. Call him Ollie Overwhelmed. When Ollie's great-grandfather was 30 he had perhaps seen 2,500 hours of audio-visual narrative (plot). His grandfather, age 30, had seen about 10,000 hours. His father had seen 20,000 hours. Ollie in 2009, age 30, has seen approximately 35,000 hours of audio-visual narrative. These are not hard numbers. I've read no polling to this effect. But this seems about right.   That's 35,000 hours of plot. Movies, television shows, cartoons, streaming video, YouTube clips. Storylines long and short: teen comedies, soap operas, love stories, crime shows, historical dramas, special-effects extravaganzas, horror, porn, highbrow, lowbrow, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. That's a lot of narrative. It's exhausting.   What does it mean? For a storyteller, it means that's it is increasingly difficult to get out in front of a viewer's expectations. Almost every possible subject has not only been covered but covered exhaustively. How many hours of serial killer plot has the average viewer seen? Fifty? A hundred? He's seen the basic plots, the permutations of those plotlines, the imitations of the permutations of those plotlines and the permutations of the imitations. How does a writer capture the imagination of a viewer seeped in serial killer plot? Make it even gorier? Done that. More perverse? Seen that. Serial killer with humour? Been there. As parody? Yawn. The example of the serial killer subgenre is a bit facile, but what's true for serial killer stories is true of all film subjects. Police families? Gay couples? Corrupt politicians? Charming misfits? Yawn, yawn, yawn."Nosotros servimos al publico. La medida no es el número de personas que entran a un museo sino la calidad de la experiencia. Medir esa calidad es difícil pero no imposible. Se pueden observar sus reacciones, podemos saber si vuelve o si e un visitante habitual. Si no quiere volver será una señal de que el museo ha hecho las cosas mal. El publico no se confunde, es inteligente, no hay que despreciarle, siempre me sorprende por su finura e inteligencia".   This becomes painfully clear to any writer who attempts to orally tell his story (screenwriting is closer to the oral tradition than it is to literature). You start to tell a story, try to catch the listener's attention, then watch as Ollie Overwhelmed packages your story and places it in a box. He has seen so much storyline that he has the boxes already prepared. Just drop quote marks around the premise and file it: oh, that's the "two couples on a road trip" movie or the "six men in a lifeboat" film. I know that film. Ollie's mind operates like that of story editor. "And then he goes to her place," you the screenwriter say - "and he finds her hanging naked from a hook in the bathroom," Ollie the listener thinks: I know that film.   Originality has always been in short supply. Does the proliferation of media mean that it is harder to be original today than it was 50 years ago? Well, yes. Today's viewers live in a biosphere of narrative. Twenty-four-seven, multimedia, all the time. When a storyteller competes for a viewer's attention, he not only competes with simultaneously occurring narratives, he competes with the variations of his own narrative. That's real competition. The bar of originality has been raised. The media marketplace puts a premium on anything "new" or "fresh" and, at the same time, inundates its viewers with continual and competing narratives.   Critics and commentators love to say things like "I love an old-fashioned love story," or a "good old-fashioned murder mystery". But what is their response when they are presented with just that? Adjectives such as "tired", "hackneyed", "unoriginal", "dated" and "prosaic". What's a writer to do? Work increasingly outside the confines of traditional storytelling, for one thing. This exhaustion of narrative is behind the rise of recent "counter-narrative" entertainments, such as:.   1. Reality TV. Any regular viewer knows that reality television follows its own scripted formulas, but the appearance of being unscripted is essential to its appeal. Weary of so much predicable plot, the jaded viewer turns to "reality".   2. Anecdotal narrative. The attraction of films such as Slacker and its mumblecore progeny is the enjoyment of watching behaviour encumbered by the artifice of plot. It is not "fake," not "contrived" (although of course it is)."   3. Reenactment drama. Whether based on famous events or lesser-known ones, reenactment entertainment sells the premise that these events actually happened and were not cooked up by a staff of writers (though, again, if not actually cooked up, they were seasoned and served by writers).. 4. Video games. The ability of the viewer to participate in the storytelling process creates an illusion of non-contrivance.   5. Mini-mini dramas. Part of the appeal of three- to five-minute stories created for cellphones, YouTube and original programming is the illusion of not being crafted narratives. Just bits of life.   6. Documentaries. A staple of filmed entertainment since its beginnings, documentaries, historically the poor cousins of commercial cinema, have grown in number and viewership, an increase owed in part to the desire of viewers to look beyond predictable narratives.   What else? Write for formats based on predictability and repetition (soap operas, crime procedurals, superhero cartoons), repackage old plots with new stars and search for that elusive "original" twist that makes an old storyline fresh. And wait. Wait for emerging media to define the new need for narrative.   Storytelling began as ceremony and evolved into ritual. It was commercialised in the middle ages, became big business in the 19th century and an international industry in the 20th. Today it is the ubiquitous wallpaper of the postmodern era. As screenwriters, we struggle with our own success. We have wallpapered our world and now we can't get anyone to notice the picture we just hung. This is not a big deal. Not a crisis. The "exhaustion of narrative" is not a standalone development. It is one of a set of crises that afflict current cinema.   Movies were the artform of the 20th century. The traditional concept of movies, a projected image in a dark room of viewers, feels increasingly old. I don't know what the future of audio-visual entertainment will be, but I don't think it will be what we used to call movies. Narrative will mutate and endure. Audio-visual entertainment is changing and narrative will change with it.   Paul Schrader's Screenwriting Masterclass is on 3 July at ScreenLit: Festival of Film, TV & Writing at Broadway Cinema Nottingham: broadway.org.uk/festival. Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters will play at Screen Lit and open at ICA, London, on 10 July.   Paul Schrader The Guardian Fri Jun 19, 2009         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/schrader/index.php  

Friday, 19 June 2009

254. And what should I be doing from now on?

    If there is one thing that is clear to me is that almost everything around me is changing faster than I can process. This was not always the case. Let see, all of a sudden the entire world seems to have jumped over a financial abyss. It's not like at other times, when one would hear that an economic crisis took place in a specific country; or that of a continent, such as Asia or Latin America, for instance; or in a certain zone, like the euro. Now the entire planet is involved and it all happened in the batting of an eyelash.   This comes to bear because we have come to a point when we no longer are surprised by very much, be that, that the largest car manufacturer in the world, General Motors, has declared bankrupt, or because in Ireland the Catholic Church finds itself mired in yet another sex scandal as those that it has already had in many other parts of the world. We wake up one day, to find we have a world wide outbreak of influenza, or that all our savings are gone due to bank frauds.   But don't think that such frauds are local or on a small scale by some fast talking charlatan, these frauds originated at the very epicenter of world finance: Wall Street, and such abuse heralded by many of its major institutions. If one of the biggest banks in the world, Citibank, can collapse in a matter of a few months, there is little left to surprise us, of what is possible that can occur. [To put things in perspective when in 1995 Mexico, a country of 100 million people, got a bailout, it was to the tune of 20 billion dollars. While Citibank, has received 300 billion from US taxpayers so far, and this is only one bank and the full story has not even ended. — (references)] thus there is little left to surprise us of what might happen when even such erstwhile solid institutions thought to be there forever, simply go bust.   We wake up each day to the news of how new technologies are changing at an ever faster pace. The music industry, cinema, the printed press, publishing industry, television, etc. all without exception have seen their usual operations overturned and they have had to adapt in order to operate differently today.   Just imagine that amidst this ocean of uncertainty, we find ZoneZero after a decade and a half of existence. Aside the questionable merit of just surviving, which in this day and age is no small feat unto itself, when as we have seen literally thousands of online projects have come and gone with the passing of time, we also adapted and changed time and time again, not only the content but also the form in which it was presented. One thing remained constant however, our mission statement? "from analog to digital".   In making an internal review with our staff here at ZoneZero, of what we have accomplished over these years, we concluded that this stage of taking photography from analog to digital, has been mainly accomplished. We believe that ZoneZero did contribute to the dialogue and debate around this topic on a global scale. The question now is, what follows? Much as every young person has to deal with as they grow older, "what should I be doing from now on? "   We are in the process of changing the design yet again, and we would like to invite you to write and tell us your thoughts about where you would like ZoneZero to be heading towards. After all if ZoneZero is to be understood as a community, then such a decision has to involve all of our readers. Share with us your thoughts if you will, in what is our search to find that voice and destiny in these very turbulent and chaotic times.   Pedro Meyer June 2009 Mexico City, Coyoacán         http://zonezero.com/editorial/junio09/june09.php    

Monday, 01 June 2009

256. Mario Benedetti (1920-2009)

  The World Bids Farewell to Mario Benedetti     In memory to my friendship with Mario Benedetti, photographs I took of him in the seventies. I met him this way and I will remember him so...   Pedro Meyer                 Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti died on May 17 in Montevideo at the age of 88.   The author of more than eighty books including poetry, novels, short stories, and essays as well as screenplays had been in delicate health since May 6 when he was discharged from the hospital following twelve days of hospitalization after a chronic intestinal ailment worsened.   During his life, he was awarded the Menéndez Pelayo International Prize (2005), the José Martí Iberoamerican Prize (2001), and the Reina Sofía Iberoamerican Poetry Prize (1999), among others.   Because of his leftist ideas, Benedetti was forced to leave Uruguay after the 1973 coup. During the Uruguayan dictatorship, he sought exile in Argentina, Spain, Peru, and Cuba, to then return to his country in 1983. Renewing ties with his country of birth was a central theme in his work.   His last published work, a book of poetry entitled "Testigo de uno mismo", was presented in August of last year and at the time of his death he was working on a new book of poems bearing the provisional title "Biografía para encontrarme."   A tribute to Benedetti was even planned for next Wednesday. Meanwhile, the Uruguayan government decreed a day of national mourning and his remains are to be lain in state in the Salón de los Pasos Perdidos in the Congressional building.       May 18, 2009         http://zonezero.com/magazine/obituaries/benedetti/index.php      

Sunday, 17 May 2009

258. Paradoxes / Paradigmas

  What’s up with photography in Mexico?   My first impulse is to suppose that the Photography Biennial could answer that question. And maybe it can indeed, but not necessarily. Or perhaps not necessarily in the way we usually think.   I’d like to say that the selection of works selected by the jury for the 13th Photography Biennial is representative of Mexican photography, but not in the essential sense that is generally attributed to the term “representation.” This group of works does not stand in place of Mexican photography. Its representative nature arises from the fact that it seems to sum up a norm. So, what is “normal” in contemporary Mexican photography?.   Almost a decade ago, I was naïve enough to write a text in which I reviewed the notion of “constructed photography” and its relation to an array of artistic traditions, ranging from Surrealism and Constructivism to Conceptualism and Post-Conceptualism. All of this to find a place, within what was regarded as normal, for several tendencies in Mexican photography, which to me, perhaps because of my foreign or “odd” way of looking at things, struck me as extremely coherent in terms of their times, as well as with their history.   At that time, it seemed not at all unusual to find some keys in Mexican photography that were common for photographic and artistic practice in many other cultural contexts. And it also seemed not particularly surprising to discover that these keys had ties with a tradition (a tradition of rupture, but nonetheless a tradition) that dated back probably to some of the modernist experiences. Now I find that these keys persist, with the sole difference that they have moved away from “normalizing” a situation that seemed much more subversive a decade ago.   I can almost literally repeat the words I uttered eight years ago: It has changed the way of conceiving of relationships of the image with reality, probably because it has changed the way of conceiving reality itself. The photographic image has ceased to be regarded as an object enclosed in its technical and linguistic specificity; now it is regarded as a mixed object, open to exchanges in languages and textual references. Events are staged, objects are invented, and subjects are disguised. The fiction may be simultaneously the subject, the support, the origin, the context, the epidermis, and the significance of the photographic image. The photo is presented as a document of a prior aesthetic event. The visual experience sums up a cognitive act that is in itself a sort of invention of the object of knowledge. All of this is in order to reconstruct its identity or to convey a highly subjective identity. The image exists as a paradox more than as a paradigm.     Beyond appearances and particular forms of intelligence employed in each creative process, these are some of trends within contemporary photography on an international level. They correspond to a state of visual culture that is transnational and eclectic. In that situation, local contexts open up, expand, and are juxtaposed. And it is easy to suppose that the illusion of “globality” in which we live has come to standardize all processes of representation in accord with a single referent, or even worse, an absence of a clear referent.   Nonetheless, what this body of photographs shows—if there is some utility in extracting a hypothesis for a display that is so “unrepresentative”—is that globalization entails its own counterpart: the tendency to emphasize minimum identities, micro-accounts, local contexts, which certainly are incomprehensible for ambitious nationalist discourses, but that also refuse to be dissolved into a suspect universality.   What is happening with Mexican photography is that it is defining its “Mexicanness” based on fragments, through shifting terrains (still not yet institutional), through discourses that are “fragile,” compared with the grandiloquence of the epic of times past.   In these processes, a weak realism is produced, that no longer seeks a specific paradigm to reinforce itself, and that, nonetheless, serves to explore specific cultural spaces and subjects that have historically been at the margins of representation. In those variants of realism, the portrait has assumed inevitable importance, because it seems to be one of the most appropriate tools for certain enquiries and lines of questioning regarding identities.     For example, Carlos Álvarez Montero makes portraits of young people of both sexes who are trained in boxing. In the same gym where they work out, these kids, who are barely older than adolescents, pose in front of the camera with expressions that show they are highly aware of the fiction. It is extremely interesting, because it seems as if each subject were aware that the result of the photographic act will only be a representation alien to him or her. Carlos Álvarez entitles each photo with the name of the subject, as if seeking to recover some part of those identities that the camera has placed in crisis. However, the swollen faces, the expressions of exhaustion, the detached (or alienated) air of the poses and the absence of sympathy toward the camera, could be more shocking to the viewers.   With equally ambiguous results, Andrés Carretero offers a series of portraits of albinos, entitled Phenotypes. They are also images in which the identity of the subjects, which should depend on their physical appearance, contradicts the fictitious air of many of the images. The poses add to this effect, because they display the theatrical approach of the subjects to representing themselves and to defining themselves in front of the camera. But the way the photographer himself also modified the relationship of coherence between each subject and context also has an effect, seeking settings in which the individuals photographed seem to be transplanted, as if it were their fate to feel uncomfortable in any situation.   At a certain point Carretero’s work touches on the ethnographic and that is where it is related to other projects, such as that of Lizzet Luna Gamboa, who started out with a survey and a computer program to develop a fictitious portrait (more of a model) of the ideal Mexican male and female. This work (in some ways recalls the series Anthropology of the Modern Body, executed by Marianna Dellekamp a decade ago) manages to filter, through forensics and anthropology, a gaze that does not cease to be ironic and critical when it comes to the induced and artificial character of patterns of beauty. In addition, José Luis Cuevas, with his series The Average Man, deals with that element of classification and typology inherent to ethnographic representations, maintaining an ironic tone. Even work such as that of Tania Jiménez D’Sahagún starts out with a methodology characteristic of sociological studies, and that is what determines the selection of subjects photographed and the formats that are shown in the portraits.       As can be seen, these approaches posit a notion of realism that is paradoxical, for it rightly points to the issue of “reality” in the photographic subject. It is a realism that takes on identities as representations, as aspirations, as staging or as transitional situations, never as permanent states. This notion of realism continues to be open to works that question the cultural, political, and social reality of Mexico and Latin America, with an ambivalent tone, as in the respective projects of Carla Verea Hernández and Arelí Vargas Colmenero (who, by the way, also play with typologies) or in a more direct way, such as the series by José Hernández Claire on migration in Mexico, or the photos of Livia Corona, on urban settlements in the northern part of the country.   Some of the works arose from that affinity that photography has always had with the fantastic and the mysterious. In the case of Gerardo Montiel Klint, this particular visual approach seems to be linked most evidently with his predilection for narratives that border on the absurd, that explore the limits of tragedy, and that always suggest a possibility of latent violence. In the works of Lucía Castañeda Garma, Oswaldo Ruiz Chapa, Miguel Ángel Ortega Bugarin, and the collective Sector Reforma, the photo emerges from a more “primitive” relationship between the subjectivity of the photographer, the contemplated reality, and the photographic tools, even when manipulation is a possibility. The photos of Fernando Montiel Klint, composed of multicolored settings and strident colors, have a mixed mood, hovering between unreality and hyper-reality, which blurs the distinction of the limits between manipulation and documentation.   There are also some examples of an almost obsessive fixation on the visual, in which the aesthetic effect comes from ambiguous, volatile, almost ungraspable structures, such as those produced by Zony Maya Zetune and Oritia Ruiz Pulido. And there are works, such as those of Sandra Valenzuela and Enrique Balleza Dávila that seem to be hypnotic reconstructions of light and color, semi-abstract reformulations of natural forms or proto-organic references to certain motifs already “marked” by modern art history. The video by Claudia Flores Lobatón also enters into this range, with an intensity that is derived from the combination of sound, fixed image, and moving image, which ultimately is a means of crossing different time frames.     The survey of all of these variants makes it clear that the list is not as brief as might seem at first sight. And that the whole, although articulated, does not fall into monotony. The options of realism achieve extremes, such as the video by Mario Héctor Gómez; it is an excellent example of a documentary short. Working with portraits becomes subtle and metaphoric in the domestic interiors by Blas Yuri Manrique. The snapshots in the public space shows Misael Torres as a photographer with intuition and talent. Marianna Dellekamp offers a sophisticated work that localizes the human being as the ultimate referent of the document. Fernando Etulain converts research on perspective into a refined interplay, recreating planes and textures, suggesting new possibilities for the collage, the intervention and appropriation of historical images.   I insist that we are speaking of what is “normal.” And I emphasize this point, because I believe that beyond this group, bolder, perhaps less solid, but no less promising, approaches can also be found. And I understand that the Centro de la Imagen will not overlook those other possibilities, with which new routes can be staked out for photography in Mexico and Latin America. The origin of these routes is inevitably a zone of risks and the unexpected.   By assuming the task of organizing a new Photography Biennial, we start out by recognizing that much of the impact that the Centro de la Imagen’s work is focused on those inaugural moments, at times promising, and always unpredictable. In that sense, it is the Centro de la Imagen’s influence on the development and training of new photographers and new photographic visions may be understood. We might even say that the work of the Centro de la Imagen over the years is much more evident in the field of “young” photography, as long as it is possible to divest the term of excessively generational implications.   What is important is the zone of influence that the Centro de la Imagen has fundamentally preserved through its educational programs, even when concrete results are generally visible through exhibitions and other promotional programs and the circulation of art work, in which the Photography Biennial continues to play an important role.   With this perspective, we have sought to integrate the diverse programs in the 13th Photography Biennial, imbuing the entire project with a broad character. This has led us to shift the center of gravity from the competition to the rest of the complementary projects and activities. Although the competition continues to be a useful tool for the promotion and stimulation of contemporary artists who work in photography, it is also true that the Biennial must take on a much more complex program, whose scope and objectives might become banal if they depended exclusively on the mechanisms of judgment and selection imposed by any competition.   Our principal aim is to organize the Photography Biennial according to a model in which different curatorial, investigative, promotional, and educational projects interact, balancing their importance and impact with those of the competition. Thus, we seek to achieve greater coherence between the Biennial and the overall work proposal of the Centro de la Imagen for the years to come.   Therefore, it is important to mention that at least six exhibitions converge at the 13th Photography Biennial, several international in character. From the prestigious Fotofest comes the exhibition Discoveries of the Meeting Place, with the work of ten artists selected by different curators, through reviews of portfolios during the 2006 Festival. The list includes artists from England, the United States, South Korea, Germany, Denmark, and the Czech Republic.   From the 2007 Photo Poland festival is the personal exhibition of Konrad Pustola, a Polish artist living in London. His work, along with that of five other photographers, was also selected through the joint work of several contemporary photography curators and researchers to represent the festival at different international events.   The Art Gallery of Ontario contributes a project that follows a fairly exemplary model to the 13th Photography Biennial. The Grange Prize is a competition that has been held annually since 2007, in which photographers from Canada and other countries participate and are selected by a group of curators. Once the final selection is complete, the public votes, through a website designed for this purpose, to designate the winner of the prize, which consists of fifty thousand Canadian dollars. On this occasion, the winner will be chosen among several Canadian and Mexican photographers. The works that are competing will be exhibited in Mexico as well as in Canada.   The exhibition of works produced by students of the Centro de la Imagen’s Contemporary Photography Seminar is another example of the intersection between educational programs and curatorial work. Finally, the Brief Anthology, which brings together participating works from prior biennials, serves to establish links between contemporary approaches and others that belong to the history or “memory” of this event.   What I have described here seems to be a sampling of all the attitudes that could be assumed when one is confronted with the language of photography. But it would be overly naïve to suppose that all the possibilities on this point have been exhausted. We are only before a partial group within an art world that is much vaster and that merits equal effort to be understood. Reviewing this group of photos has been like contemplating one of the many combinations of a kaleidoscope. After this experience, the most coherent act is to continue trying out other combinations. It could be a poetic way of probing the other limits of risk.   Juan Antonio Molina Coordinator XIII Bienal de Fotografía     XIII Bienal de Fotografía. Centro de la Imagen/CENART/CONACULTA. México DF, 2008. Pp 9-13.       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/molina/index.php    

Thursday, 07 May 2009

260. Photografic Collaboration

  One of my problems with photography, especially documentary photography, is that it is intrusive. To alleviate this problem, regardless whether it concerns press photos or portraits, photography needs the collaboration between photographer and subject.   "War Photographer", a documentary by Christian Frei about the work of the photographer James Nachtwey, was nominated for an Oscar (in 2002) and won twelve international film festivals.   Two mini video recorders placed on Nachtwey's camera allowed the viewers to see what the photographer was seeing. In Kosovo: a crying woman. People try to comfort her. She has just learned, one suspects, that someone close to her — maybe her son, maybe her husband? — was killed, or found in a mass grave? We are not told, we do not know, we are left guessing. Neither do we know what the photographer knows. We see what the photographer sees: a woman crying, her face full of pain, women who try to calm and comfort her. Nachtwey is getting closer and closer, he aims the camera at her face and ceaselessly presses the button. How is he able to do that? Doesn't he feel awkward, and embarrassed? Doesn't he have scruples?     On the website of this film, this quote by Nachtwey can be found: "Every minute I was there, I wanted to flee. I did not want to see this. Would I cut and run, or would I deal with the responsibility of being there with a camera?" In the film we can hear him more than once stressing the importance of having respect. He also says he understands himself as being the spokesperson for the ones he portrays.   I'm glad that Nachtwey's photos exist and remind us of things we would probably rather not be reminded of. I want to believe his good intentions. Yet, I also feel that there is something wrong with this kind of photography because the ones portrayed are used; they have no say in how they are depicted and later are put in pages of books, or hung on walls.   Let's look at Nachtwey's rationalizations.   I'm not sure what this is, "the responsibility of being there with a camera." Does that mean that because he is a professional photographer who goes to take pictures in war zones, he has an obligation to take these photos? According to whom? And if so, toward whom does he have this obligation?   Yes, respect is needed, it is imperative, but how does it translate into action? To hold a camera into the face of a grieving person is indefensible; it is the opposite of showing respect; it is the total absence of tact, courtesy and decency. Is he really their spokesperson? How can he be? How does he know that they need or want a spokesperson?   Photography is an intrusive medium. Quite a few photographers describe their business in somewhat aggressive terms as shooting pictures. One way of softening this intrusiveness — if one so wishes — is the collaboration between photographer and the ones portrayed. Such collaboration is not uncommon, just think of photo ops or portraits.   In the London Guardian of 18 January 2003, Liz Jobey quotes the next note by the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron on what she saw as her first successful photograph:   "At 1pm on January 29 1864, a little girl with cherubic features and scraggy, shoulder-length hair was buttoned into her winter coat, waiting patiently for her photograph to be taken. In front of her, a short, stocky, middle-aged woman fitted another glass plate into the back of her huge camera and begged the child to keep still. She was probably counting, too; it could take up to five minutes for the image to be fully exposed. If the girl was bored, she didn't show it. Her face, turned in half-profile to catch the light, was composed but alive, its curves heightened by the contrast between shadow and light. It was a happy result — we know, because the photographer wrote to the girl's father later that day: 'My first perfect success in the complete Photograph owing greatly to the docility & sweetness of my best and fairest little sitter. This Photograph was taken by me at 1pm Friday Jan 29th Printed Toned — fixed and framed all by me & given as it now is by 8pm this same day Jan 29th 1864. Julia Margaret Cameron.'"   Ten years later, in her memoir, Annals of My Glass House, Cameron expanded on this moment, "I was in a transport of delight. I ran all over the house to search for gifts for the child. I felt as if she entirely had made the picture."   More recently, Murat Nemet-Nejat (2003), in The Peripheral Space of Photography, also stresses the importance of the subject's behavior: "The pose is a photographic dimension which goes beyond the intention of the photographer and suggests the independence, asserts even the very existence, of the subject. The pose is the key to catch the independent, socially ignored, unsaid unacknowledged in the photographic act."   Agreed, but there are photographers who do acknowledge the importance of the pose. Lisa Kahane (2008), in Do Not Give Way to Evil, writes, "Despite the official cynicism about street photography, the people I met in the neighborhood were happy to have their picture taken. They stopped their cars in the middle of the street (very Bronx) and got out to pose for me. They were proud and generous. No one I met had more than a passing thought about taking my camera from me."   In times when (some) photographers hold celebrity status, it is useful to be reminded that a good photograph does not solely depend on the photographer's ability to choose the right subject, location and light, but also on the chemistry and the collaboration, between photographer and subject.   A good illustration of this is One Step Beyond, the multimedia project about landmines and their victims by the German photographer Lukas Einsele. Because Einsele makes his pictures with a large-format camera, staging is unavoidable because, as he wrote to me in an e-mail: "The camera is visible, the photo — its exposition — lasts such a long time that a certain acquiescence has to exist between photographer and subject. Sure, there are exceptions, but actually I'm looking for these common productions by which the subjects become co-authors of an image-reality."   When looking at works of photography, viewers often don't know whether such types of collaboration as those mentioned above have taken place. Sometimes viewers learn about it, more often they don't. Photographs invite us to ask questions: What do my eyes show me? How did the photo come to be? What doesn't it show? And so on.   Walker Evans, while working for the Resettlement Administration in the 1930s, took photos of sharecroppers in Alabama. He portrayed them in their daily lives, at times with worn-out clothes, dirty feet, uncombed hair and unshaven faces, because he wanted to document the circumstances they were living in. That, however, seems not have been to their liking, for there exists one photo — one that Evans did not use in his publications — that shows the family clean and combed and in their Sunday best. One can safely assume that it was taken at the request of the family.   Despite my deep sympathy for socially inclined photographers, when the people portrayed feel ashamed of their portraits, there clearly is something wrong with this kind of photography.   Hans Durrer April, 2009   References • Cameron, Julia Margaret (1874), Annals of my glass house. Compiled and annotated by Violet Hamilton. Retrieved on March 18, 2008, from: Victorian photographs: Julia Margaret Cameron. • Einsele, Lukas (2000-2005), One step beyond. The mine revisited. Retrieved on March 18, 2008, from: One Step Beyond. • Jobey, Liz (2003), First light In: The Guardian, January 18, 2003. • Kahane, Lisa (2008), Do not give way to evil. Photographs of the South Bronx, 1979-1987. Brooklyn, New York: PowerHouse Books. • Nemet-Nejat, Murat (2003), The peripheral space of photography. Los Angeles, California: Green Integer Press.       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/durrer3/index.php    

Monday, 20 April 2009

262. The Power of Sepia

An expert's take on that Madonna image     Madonna has released an image of herself holding Mercy, the Malawian baby she hopes to adopt. It's in sepia. Why?   Choosing sepia is all to do with trying to make the image look romantic and idealistic. It's sort of a soft version of propaganda. Remember when the colour supplements used to run black-and-white pictures of famine and hardship? Some still do. They do that because they want to make it look more authentic. But it's a fabrication. You can't shoot in sepia, so converting into black and white and then into brown makes everything feel less real.   Madonna is a clever person and this image is all part of a rigorous attempt to persuade the Malawian courts that her adoption should be allowed to go ahead.   As well as the photo being sepia, there appears to be a subtle soft pink hue on Madonna herself. I guess this is the colour of reassuring, concerned maternity. You can imagine Madonna and her team thinking this through in the same way an advertising campaign is orchestrated.   This predilection for sepia is all part of the baggage we have about photography. Despite all the above people seem to think it looks more real. Only 30 years ago, if you were a serious photographer, part of the art world, you had to work in black and white. You were almost scorned as commercial if you shot only in colour. When I first started doing colour in 1982/83 there had only been one serious exhibition in colour (that was Peter Mitchell at the Impressions gallery in York in 1979, with an exhibition entitled A New Refutation of the Viking IV Space Mission). It was a scandal in the world of photography. But it convinced me that colour wasn't the domain of the commercial and snapshot photographer.   Some, however, still harbour the notion of a black and white humanist photographer. Sepia in particular tends to make everything look a bit romantic and almost sentimental, hence the fact that it remains such a popular choice for wedding photographs.   It suggests old values, and in our days of modernisation, we hanker after that.   Martin PArr The Guardian, Wednesday 15 April 2009           http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/parr/index.php    

Wednesday, 15 April 2009

264. Galba Sandras

Date: April 9, 2009 8:06:08 AM   Dear Zonezero.   I am currently living in the northest os Brazil as a working photographer in the areas of advertizementt and fashion. I began experimenting with fine art photography latter turning to comercial but never living the fine art aspect of photography and allways exploring diferent ways to photrgraf the nude. I found out about Zonezero reading about a friend who was showcased on your website. As soon as I entered the web side I felt it was a place I would like to be in touch with for its quality, ayout and diversity of work and people from around the world.   Congratulations for your great work.   Galba Sandras   ps: I wiil soon submit some of my work for your apreciation  

Thursday, 09 April 2009

266. The Internet Will Force Us to Reinvent Museums

La Vanguardia.es | march 19, 2009         "The contemplation of art requires patience; we spend too little time in front of the works."             At the end of last month after thirty-one years as director, Philippe de Montebello left the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He left behind an impeccable trajectory, marked by excellence and quality, and an institution that today is a model of reference for the great museums of the world. Tomorrow Montebello will deliver the keynote address at the first course organized by the Prado Museum that will analyze the present and future of museums.   "One of the reasons I left the museum,” Montebello explained, “was because I am convinced that I am not the person of tomorrow for the museum. I am the person of yesterday and now is the time to redo things, to reinvent the model of the Metropolitan."     Is it the time for new technologies, or the Internet?   Yes. This is the communications medium of the new generations. And we are forced to communicate with them in their language. They do not read newspapers, they read screens. And this is something that someone like me, someone who was born before World War II, cannot do. The possibility that Google Earth offers to contemplate certain works of art in the Prado is something marvelous. You can zoom in on details that the naked eye cannot see, but what you see is false, because not even the artist or the viewer can do so. Technology helps, adds, inspires sight, but it does not take its place. Physical contemplation is necessary and the public knows it.     Is the Met still the model to follow?   I prefer to use a broader way of looking at things. I have studied the major museums in the world and each one has its role and acts in a different way for diverse publics. There is no model that serves for all of them. The Met is a special museum, truly encyclopedic, universal, spanning five thousand years of history, utterly unlike the National Gallery of London or the Prado, which are painting collections that focus on European art, or museums such as the one in Athens or Cairo, which focus on the art of their respective countries. There is indeed an ethic that we should all follow, based on excellence, on independent thought, on probity.   Is that independence possible in national museums like the Prado?   The Prado is not limited like other museums, which I will not mention, that depend on governments and ministers who can exert very direct influence over them. There is a very healthy balance at the Prado.   What tools help achieve excellence?   "Excellence is an abstract notion. A permanent feeling of always overcoming. Doing things better with each day, never falling into the trap of repeating things, taking a critical look at oneself. One can be excellent in aims, in the way one acts, in art itself. There is a hierarchy in the quality of works, there are very good ones, good, and mediocre ones, which in no way prevents excellence, and that we must recognize, because everything is not equal."   Are museums conditioned by public success?   "We serve the public. The measure is not the number of people who enter a museum, but rather the quality of the experience. Measuring that quality is difficult, but not impossible. Their reactions can be observed, we can know if they return, or if they are habitual visitors. If they do not wish to return, it would be a sign that the museum has done a bad job. The public makes no mistake, it is intelligent, and it deserves respect, it always surprises me for its discernment and intelligence."     Is it good to have the exaggerated prominence of some directors or curators?   It is not good, it is essential, they are the magicians, the soul of a museum, everything comes from the curators, from their knowledge, from their science, it is the reason why almost all directors were curators at one time or another.   Are there inherent differences between a history museum and a contemporary art museum?   "The difference resides in the art represented. If it really is a contemporary art museum, the works have not passed the test of history, they cannot be judged in the same way as ancient works whose value has been confirmed by many generations. Their activity is a gamble of the present and the future that entails taking a risk. In a certain way, a contemporary art museum is a contradiction; it should be more of a gallery. A museum is valuable for art to take root, but contemporary art is something alive. They are called museums because they are public, open, and they have curators."   Museums have sometimes been criticized for their extremely close ties to the market.   That’s reality. There is a market and artists need to eat, pay their rent, sell their works, and there are museums that buy them. Nothing can be done in this world without money. I think that speaking of business as if it were something evil is wrong.   What do you think about the Prado’s decision on “The Colossus”?   "We are forced to present the truth; we must not lie to the public. The Prado has shown its courage by diminishing the symbolic value of such a famous painting. With this action, it improves it public reputation and reinforces the public’s confidence in the veracity of other attributions."   You think of the museum as a repository of centuries of knowledge, but normally the visitor fixates on the formal aspects of the works. How can historical awareness be improved?   "The works must be accompanied by information that facilitates their comprehension and enjoyment. It is a mistake to think that if the label accompanying the work is lengthy, museum visitors only read without looking at the work; that’s not true. The reality is that if there is little information, the public glances at the work and walks away. On the other hand, they can learn something new if they spend more time contemplating the work."   Which museums do you prefer, big ones or small ones?   "In all things in life, I like variety. Museums are too big only if you want to visit them in a single day. Any museum larger than the Lázaro Galdiano is too big for one day. Listening to Beethoven’s nine symphonies one after another would be madness. The best way to visit a museum is to choose a few rooms, see them well, and then return another day to see others. The visit cannot be an inventory. It is clear that many museum visitors go for just a day, someone who comes from far away for just one day, does not mean they are stupid. People who live in Madrid can come to the Prado many times."   What are the works that you never miss when you come to the Prado?   "They change with every visit, depending on my mood. The painting that moved me the other day, tomorrow could leave me cold".   How would you explain the experience of contemplating art?   "It requires time and patience. We spend too little time in front of the artwork. One needs to stay and wait for the painting to speak to us, because most artworks do not burst out their message all at once, they share it slowly, it is a silent, very rich and profound dialogue."     Does it teach us to enjoy art?   "No. And this is a museum’s job, an educator’s job. Museums should offer a leaflet that teaches one to look at an artwork, how to approach it, and to let it speak. In museums, people stand too far away from the works, it is necessary to get close, without touching them, to see the brushstrokes, the lines, the handling of the material. Without being in a rush. In some lectures, I start with a blank image to gradually put the image of a painting together, choosing, as the artist did, the different possibilities in the composition, the figures, in their representation. It is something that fascinates the audience".   Have these two months out of the museum changed your way of seeing things?   "I am surely it will change, I don’t know how, but it will change. I used to spend all day in meeting after meeting. Now I have time to think, to reflect".     La Vanguardia.es March, 2009         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/montebello/index.php    

Saturday, 07 March 2009

268. Photo Phnom Penh Festival, in Cambodia

    The week of openings in the first Phnom Penh Photo Festival in Cambodia has been a resounding success in a country largely lacking a tradition of visual culture and training, with the exception of mass media based on television and the Thai model (i.e. that of the United States).               Most of the twelve exhibitions feature young artists. They have been mounted in prestigious galleries, such as the one in the National Museum with Laurence Leblanc’s work on Cambodia. The French Cultural Center, which began the project, displays the work of Thai artist Manit Srimanichpoon, of the young French photographer Marion Poussier, and Cambodian artist Lino Vuth. They attract both local people, who are somewhat stunned when they enter the exhibition because they have never before had a chance to see photo exhibitions, as well as foreigners living in the capital.   The most spectacular display is that of young French photographer, JR. He has stuck enormous faces in black-and-white, measuring three meters tall, of women from Africa and Brazil onto the two-hundred square meter protective wall around the French Embassy. It is the talk of the town. Motorcyclists stop in the road and it’s got everyone looking.       In private galleries associated with the event, there is a multitude of people who discover photos from India, China, Switzerland, France, and of course, Cambodia.   An attentive public has turned out for the lectures and projections. Thousands of people have come to see images from all over the world on the twelve screens dispersed on the esplanade of the temple of What Botum in the heart of the city for two nights.                     We have already enthusiastically begun to work on the program for the second festival for November-December 2009.   Christian Caujolle Artistic Director of PPP 2008     http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/caujolle/index.php      

Wednesday, 11 February 2009

270. The Gaza War in Review

  Dear HonestReporting Subscriber   Israel's Operation "Cast Lead" dominated the newspapers, airwaves and internet for its duration, with the aftermath still generating headlines and opinion. It is extremely important to expose those cases where the story became agenda-driven or when the media simply got it wrong. This has been graphically illustrated by an about-turn by the UN.   One of the most serious and damaging episodes for Israel during the Gaza conflict centered around charges, amplified by UN spokespeople, that Israel had deliberately targeted a UN school compound, killing 43 civilians sheltering there.   HonestReporting highlighted the Canadian Globe and Mail's investigation that concluded that the school itself was not shelled.   Following the publicity generated by the Globe and Mail report, the UN has been forced to admit that its initial claims were false. According to Ha'aretz:   It seems that the UN has been under pressure to put the record straight after doubts arose that the school had actually been targeted. Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, said Monday that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself. Gaylord said that the UN "would like to clarify that the shelling and all of the fatalities took place outside and not inside the school."   As commentator Andrew Bolt writes in response:   But it seems the real story is that 43 people, including at least two Hamas militants, were killed when Israel returned fire from Hamas mortars launched from among a crowd in the street. You might still not like what occurred. But it is very, very different to what was so widely alleged, and far more forgivable. And after the earlier evidence of the media repeating pro-Hamas propaganda and gross exaggerations of the death toll in Gaza, especially among civilians, we need to ask again: how much can we trust the coverage of journalists and welfare groups reporting from territory run by terrorists?       Mads Gilbert: Propaganda Doctor   Portrayed as the epitome of courage under fire, Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert appeared on television screens around the world and in the pages of many newspapers, including the BBC, CBS, CNN, ABC, AFP, Independent, Sky News, and New York Times.   Working at Gaza's Shifa Hospital, Gilbert tells news organizations of the "horrors" inflicted by Israel, including unproven accusations that "Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons."   But was Gilbert a neutral and objective observer? What the media didn't tell you was his involvement in solidarity work with Palestinians since the 1970s and his membership of the hard-left Norwegian communist party Rød Valgallianse, which disbanded in 2007. He has criticized international aid organization Doctors Without Borders for refusing to take sides in conflicts. Dr Gilbert is employed by NORWAC, whose partner organisations include Hezbollah's Martyr Foundation.   Asked by the Norwegian daily, Dagbladet, if he supported the 9/11 attacks, he said: "Terror is a bad weapon but the answer is yes."         More Unreliable Source   Gilbert wasn't the only less than objective source being used by the media. As Melanie Phillips wrote:   the [Daily] Telegraph carried this story on its foreign news pages by Ewa Jasiewicz, reporting from Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. It was exclusively about the suffering of civilians and children under bombardment by Israeli air strikes. It made no reference to any Hamas terrorists in the camp. Readers were given no indication that Ewa Jasiewicz was anything other than an objective reporter.   Yet the very next day, she appeared again in the Telegraph's foreign news pages -- but this time being interviewed by Tim Butcher as an 'activist originally from Kingston, Surrey' and the principal source of his story about two children being killed by a bomb from an Israeli warplane, an event which she claimed to have witnessed.   Indeed, Ms Jasiewicz is not a regular reporter at all. She is a highly partisan, deeply committed, experienced anti-Israeli International Solidarity Movement activist. She is an active player on the side of the Palestinians who are committing acts of terror against the Israelis -- which she would describe as legitimate and justified 'resistance'. Nor was this something she had hidden. Indeed, the web is heaving with examples of her hatred of Israel. Here she is in the Guardian spraying around claims that Israel was racist, that its democracy was a myth and that it deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians and activists for slaughter. Here is the statement she made after she was detained at Ben Gurion airport on 31 August 2004 by the Israeli authorities and told that she could not speak to the media, in which she justified Palestinian terrorism as   a liberation struggle – and a struggle of an occupied people that is thus justified under international law.   Read Melanie's full post here.         CNN'S STAGED VIDEO   Mads Gilbert also appeared in a CNN report, whose authenticity a number of bloggers questioned. Was the CPR being performed on a child staged for the cameras? Little Green Footballs and other blogs thought so with one LGF reader commenting: I'm no military expert, but I am a doctor, and this video is bullsh-t. The chest compressions that were being performed at the beginning of this video were absolutely, positively fake. The large man in the white coat was NOT performing CPR on that child. He was just sort of tapping on the child's sternum a little bit with his fingers. You can't make blood flow like that. Furthermore, there’s no point in doing chest compressions if you're not also ventilating the patient somehow. In this video, I can't tell for sure if the patient has an endotracheal tube in place, but you can see that there is nobody bag-ventilating him (a bag is actually hanging by the head of the bed), and there is no ventilator attached to the patient. In a hospital, during a code on a ventilated patient, somebody would probably be bagging the patient during the chest compressions. And they also would have moved the bed away from the wall, so that somebody could get back there to intubate the patient and/or bag him. In short, the "resuscitation scene" at the beginning is fake, and it's a pretty lame fake at that.   Such was the concern at CNN that the video was removed (although it currently exists on the archive).         France 2 Apologizes for Using Old Footage   France's public broadcaster, the station that produced the original Mohammed al-Dura footage, was forced to apologize to viewers after it mistakenly used amateur footage shot in 2005 to illustrate a report on the current Gaza conflict.   France 2 television broadcast part of an amateur video presented in a voiceover commentary as showing the fallout from an Israeli air strike on a civilian area in Gaza on January 1. Dating from September 2005, the video, which has been widely circulated on the Internet, actually shows civilians wounded in the accidental explosion of a pick-up truck loaded with Hamas rockets at a rally in Jabaliya refugee camp. Alerted by the French website LePost.fr, France 2 admitted its mistake and made a formal apology to viewers in its midday news broadcast.   "It is an error on our behalf. There was an internal malfunction in the checking of information," a France 2 executive told AFP. France 2's head of news reporting, Etienne Leenhardt, told LePost.fr that the sequence was "intended to illustrate the war of images on the Internet. The people who put it together worked too fast".       Australian Paper Apologizes for Anti-Semitic OP-ED   Melbourne's daily paper, The Age, has apologized for publishing Michael Backman's commentary (subsequently removed from both his and The Age's websites), "Israel living high on US expense account. No apology online, but Caroline Overington quotes from the print edition: A column by Michael Backman headlined "Israel living high on US expense account" was published in error. The Age does not in any way endorse the views of the columnist, apologises for the distress the column caused to many readers, particularly in the Jewish community and regrets publication of the column.   The column included some outrageous statements:   But Israel's utter inability to transform the Palestinians from enemies into friends has imposed big costs on us all. We have paid for Israel's failure with bombs on London public transport, bombs in bars in Bali, and even the loss of the World Trade Centre towers in New York.   It is not true that these outrages have occurred because certain Islamic fundamentalists don't like Western lifestyles and so plant bombs in response. Rather, it is Israel - or more correctly the treatment of the Palestinians - that is at the nub of these events....   Trekking in Nepal is fashionable among young Israelis.... But once you get on the trekking circuit and speak with local Nepalese guides and guesthouse operators you soon discover how disliked the Israelis are.... Rather, they say that the young Israelis are rude, arrogant, and argue over trifling amounts of money even though they clearly have means.         Hamas OP-EDS: Giving a Voice to Terrorist   We've previously questioned the morality and legality of giving the oxygen of op-ed space to terrorist organizations, as Hamas leaders have appeared on the pages of, amongst others, the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times.   This trend was repeated during the Gaza conflict as Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal was given a voice by The Guardian (republished in Australia's The Age). Presumably in an effort to portray "balance", both papers also published a piece at the same time by Israeli MK Shai Hermesh, thus creating a false moral equivalence between the Israeli politician and the Hamas terror leader.   Meanwhile, Hamas's Mousa Abu Marzouk appeared in the LA Times while Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh got his opportunity in The Independent, which bizarrely decided to give a posthumous platform to Yasser Arafat, reprinting the PLO leader's November 1974 speech to the UN.         Lauding a Dead Terrorist Prominent Hamas terror leader Nizar Rayyan, killed by Israel on 1 January, would have enjoyed reading his own glowing obituary in The Guardian, which categorized him as a "political leader" and described him as "a man of the street... He was famed for fighting alongside his men and being seen with them publicly. And he was not merely a fighter. He was highly regarded as an Islamic academic."   Given less prominence in his obituary - how Rayyan was responsible for a series of suicide bombings and attacks inside the Green Line, including the suicide bombing in Ashdod Port in 2004 in which 10 Israelis died. In a shocking illustration of his evil nature, Rayyan even sent one of his sons to carry out a suicide attack in Gush Katif's Elei Sinai in 2001. Two Israelis were killed.         Hate Speech on BBC Arabic TV   Dr Kamal El-Helbawy, the founder of the Muslim Association of Britain, appeared to justify the targeting of Israeli children. Telling a discussion program that, while he condemned the killing of civilians, he believed all Israeli children were "future soldiers". He said: "A child born in Israel is raised on the belief that the Arabs are like contemptible sheep.   "In elementary school they pose the following math problem - 'In your village, there are 100 Arabs. If you killed 40, how many Arabs would be left for you to kill?'. This is taught in the Israeli curriculum."   The BBC, referring to the school libel, admitted an error had been made.         Abusing the Holocaust   Comparing Israel to the Nazis or attempting to draw false parallels with the deliberate genocide of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust is a tactic regularly deployed by anti-Israel activists despite being classified as anti-Semitism under the EU's own working definition.   Nonetheless, many supposedly mainstream media and commentators saw no problem with resorting to Holocaust imagery to make a point. The Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, for example, asked: "How many Palestinian Anne Franks did the Israelis murder, maim or turn mad?" while Time Magazine's front cover of a Star of David behind a wall and barbed wire, made it impossible to ignore the parallel between Israel's actions in Gaza and the Nazi Holocaust - a false association employed by those who seek to delegitimize Israel.   Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis wrote on his personal website: "It now seems clear the last disastrous act of the Bush administration was giving Israel a green light to launch itsfinal solution campaign against the Hamas government in Gaza." This prompted a protest from HonestReporting Canada who called for the Sun to reconsider keeping Margolis on as a columnist.   As the fog of war recedes and the clearer picture begins to emerge, HonestReporting, with your help, will continue to expose cases of anti-Israel media bias to set the record straight.     HonestReporting.com         http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/honest/index.php    

Tuesday, 03 February 2009

272. ZoneZero Servers

  Just like every other website, ZoneZero is fed by a server. We must keep up with the pace of the advancements in technology, so all the users of zonezero.com and now pedromeyer.com and fundacionpedromeyer.com, can have easy access to all of our information and images at an increasingly greater speed.   Since we get our feedback from you, we want to share with all the ZoneZero community, the visual history of our server.                       Evolving                       http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/zz/index.php    

Tuesday, 06 January 2009

274. Singing to life

    A few days ago Nadia and I went to visit her gradfather who is 94 years old and lives with his new girlfriend, Blanca, in a retirement home for the elderly, near Mexico City. As we were leaving the home were they live with about another hundred elderly people, I came across the lovely lady in the picture sitting on a small chair across from the entrance door.   Upon seeing her I felt I was looking at something very special which I had to photograph, I took the picture without understanding my motives. I still had no clear idea, why this person who I did not even know, caught my attention so much. But after studying the image, and looking at it for a while, I discovered what my fascination was all about.   I concluded that indeed the way she looked was a song to life. On the one hand, women be they elderly or young, often like to dress in black while this woman was dressed as a rainbow that seemed to come from the palette of a painter. Where women usually flee from being photographed at the slightest wrinkle or blemish on their skin, this woman smiled to me with a great inner peace and joy, making me feel that it was quite all right for me to take a picture of her. She looked happy and the wrinkles on her face were just the outcome of a face that had seen quite a lot of life.   All her makeup while imperfect in execution, was yet another testimony that what was important was how she felt as a person rather than the tidiness of how the makeup was applied, all of this judging by how she looked at me through those blue-green eyes with such a fixed gaze.   I felt that the photograph was the perfect contradiction of everything that is desirable in society today in the manner women are depicted. From the perfect skin to the immaculate makeup, leaving on the wayside how women feel or even their own welfare. With the familiar claim that through digital means all traces of a full life can be prompty eliminated.   The problem is that at a certain stage in life, caring for all these aesthetic details, can be the difference between getting a job or not, as an actress, model or an executive, or even the votes as a politician. Or the approval of a boyfriend over the internet. The public image seems to be all that matters.   However, there is a time in life where everything changes, when we allow our wrinkles to be seen without any apparent problem or consequence. I think it is not a problem of age, but the conviction that we might have at whatever age it is, that appearances are just that, appearances.   I am sure that the irony will not escape you, that in these times where so much is discussed about the truthfulness of the photographic image, most people do not even want to see the truth, they prefer to live in a world of appearances.   Pedro Meyer January 2009 Mexico City, Coyoacán     We are grateful to Hsu Sheng-Yuan, one of our gallerists at ZoneZero, for his taking the initiative of translating our editorial into Chinese. By publishing it, he has generated many more publications, which we gladly present:   www.wretch.cc/blog/friendray/9224043 www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=34&t=902216&last=9873317 www.ecpz.net/viewthread.php?tid=33804&extra=page%3D1     http://zonezero.com/editorial/enero09/january09.php      

Friday, 02 January 2009