the literate lens

Living with Books

“Are libraries obsolete now?” my husband asked a few months ago. We were staring up at the main branch of the New York Public Library—the magnificent Beaux-Arts building designed by Carrere & Hastings and opened in 1911—and I was outraged. I couldn’t conceive that anything as grand and beloved as this great institution could become obsolete, no matter how steadily Google, Wikipedia and Amazon are becoming our go-to sources of information.

Sure, there’s a ton of convenience associated with electronic information. I love the fact that I can tote around more than thirty books at a time on a single, lightweight device, and that I’ve been able to do a huge amount of research on my historical novel without leaving home. I love the feedback and reading communities that have emerged through social media, and that my son never has an excuse for not doing his homework. (Left your reading book at school? No problem! Here’s the e-book.)

But physical books have character! On my bookshelves at home, there are novels I’ve read so many times they’re like old friends; others I’ve reviewed professionally or have kept for sentimental reasons. There are art and photography books I might not open often, but that comfort me with their presence (and yes, also flatter my idea of myself as an arty person). These books are windows into my past. I like the way that collectively, they help me define an identity and reveal it to visitors. Needless to say, I also love browsing other people’s bookshelves and seeing how they’ve incorporated books into their lives.

The creators of Living with Books must have felt the same way. This French book, which has just been issued in paperback, looks at how a variety of people live with books. Photographer Roland Beaufre and journalist Dominique Dupuich scrutinized the collections of dozens of book lovers, from the hyper-organized libraries of rare book collectors to the more haphazard hoards of artists and writers.

The book is organized into eight sections, mostly by occupation: designers, journalists, writers, artist. This is basically an interior design book, so everyone here is of a certain class—not just culturally elite, but also comfortable financially. Consequently, all of the interiors are rather upmarket and stylish, even the one owned by the bohemian painter who hangs out in Paris’s red light district.

But along with their wealth, these people have an intense bibliophilia that, at times, jostles uneasily with their chic design aesthetic. Books add an element of disorder to any room. They slope to one side; they come in different sizes; they’re not color-coordinated. There’s something reassuring about this lack of uniformity; it speaks of human warmth and unpredictability.

And let’s face it, there’s an element of pretentiousness too. Which of us hasn’t wanted a potential friend or mate to look at our shelves and conclude—from the clustering-together of Lolita, White Teeth and Backlash—that we must be an unusually perceptive, intelligent and sensitive person? “My bookshelves were more successful with Veronica than my record collection,” says the narrator in Julian Barnes’ 2011 Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending. “In those days, paperbacks came in their traditional liveries: orange Penguins for fiction, blue Pelicans for non-fiction. To have more blue than orange on your shelf was proof of seriousness.”

What will we do when these markers disappear? It’s hard to imagine a time when nobody displays books on their shelves—but then again, how many people do you know who still display their 33-rpm albums or even their CDs? Perhaps someone will soon devise a virtual bookshelf, similar to those electronic photo frames that cycle through different family pictures.

Given how quickly digitization is changing the publishing industry, the book Living with Books already seems a bit quaint. It’s like a dispatch from the 1980s, when Jay McInerney and Madonna were cutting-edge. There’s no discussion of how digital culture might be changing these readers’ habits or physical space. Indeed, although many of these photographs are of people’s workspaces, there’s hardly a laptop or a modem in view.

There is, however, proof of the enormous value people place on their books, and the central place they occupy, both physically and emotionally. “It can’t be denied that we love books,” Dupuich writes, and that we love them “with an obsessive passion that can transcend our social and professional environment.” So, books and libraries becoming obsolete? Not so fast. I, for one, intend to continue living with books for many decades to come.

FURTHER READING

This article by the President of the New York Public Library talks about how the library is changing with the times.

Salon.com’s Laura Miller writes about the NYPL’s innovative programming and why libraries still matter, here.

There is another book called Living with Books, written by the Prince of Wales’ librarian Alan Powers and published in 2003. It covers some of the same territory as the book discussed above, but looks to have richer (and wittier) textual content.

Photographs Not Taken

A sentence can be rewritten, a painting repainted — but a photograph, once missed, can rarely be retaken. This evanescence, the delicacy of transient light, movement and atmosphere, gives photography its unique position in the arts. It’s what led Henri Cartier-Bresson to talk about the “decisive moment” when a photograph acquires the magic it didn’t have a split second earlier or later.

Numerous photographers I’ve interviewed over the years have talked about the moments when, for various reasons, they didn’t take a photograph, so I was naturally excited to see the new book Photographs Not Taken, a collection of mini-essays edited by New York photographer Will Steacy. Sixty-two photographers—some famous, others up-and-coming—contributed to the book, and their reflections on the theme are appropriately diverse.

I met Steacy, and several of his contributors, at a signing event for the book recently at the International Center for Photography. The ICP was showing Murder is My Business, an entertaining and informative exhibit about Weegee, the 1930s-era murder scene photographer who, I’m pretty sure, had few scruples about clicking his shutter.

Steacy told me the theme of untaken photographs is something he’s thought about for many years. “As photographers, we all have endless inventories of what-ifs that haunt our conscious,” he said. “I often found myself at the bar trading these personal experiences with other photographers over beers, and I loved listening to my buddies’ stories.” Figuring that a book full of his own personal what-ifs would be “self-serving, one-dimensional and ultimately, boring,” Steacy decided to draw instead on his friends’ and mentors’ recollections.

I’m glad he did, because the essays in the book are remarkably varied and interesting. As critic Lyle Rexor writes in the introduction, there are many different reasons for not taking a photograph. They range from self-doubt to ethical dilemmas to being in the right place at the wrong time. Or you could simply be slow on the draw or forget to bring your camera.

Some of the more memorable essays in the book use words to summon up a strong visual image. Todd Hido writes about once seeing his mother “wearing her torn nightgown and a single sock, posing suggestively for my father.” (The snapshot his father took survives and has informed Hido’s own aesthetic.) Elinor Carucci, famous for raw images of her family, writes about seeing her twins: “Emanuelle naked holding tight to me in the bathtub. Eden bleeding in the emergency room.” These are pictures she hasn’t made because “the photographer declared war on the mother,” her protective instinct winning out.

In the “right place at the wrong time” category are Mary Ellen Mark and Lisa Kereszi, who both write that they regret not documenting their adolescence. “Those were such visual years,” Mark writes mournfully. Kereszi, who grew up in a colorful blue-collar neighborhood, regrets focusing inward rather than outward as a young girl, endlessly posing her Barbie dolls and “photographing my fantasies and not my real life,” she writes. Making up for lost time, she now has a book upcoming about her family’s junk yard business, she told me.

Of course, those are mature reflections—it might be hard to photograph one’s adolescence while caught up in its roiling emotions. Still, Mark writes that when she teaches high school students, she urges them to photograph their lives, feeling “it’s something that they’ll surely thank me for later in life.”

On the flip side of those luminous missed opportunities are the disturbing ones, the images not taken out of a sense of moral duty. Ed Kashi, coming across a horrific road accident in Pakistan, decided “to be there as a human being, not as an observer/documenter.” Similarly, Tim Hetherington writes about a road accident in Liberia that he didn’t photograph, honestly admitting that he was simply too exhausted, “my brain… like a plate of scrambled eggs.” Hetherington, of course, was killed last April in Libya, becoming one of the conflict victims that he was previously conflicted about photographing. An exhibition of his work (including the image below of a sleeping soldier in Afghanistan) goes on display at the Yossi Milo Gallery on April 12th for a month.

There’s plenty more in the book, too, including Sylvia Plachy’s moving memory of seeing a large, dust-covered man walking robotically uptown on 9/11, and being unable to photograph him. “Diane Arbus would have done it,” she remarks ruefully. And Thomas Bangsted writes compellingly about an eerie scene he came upon in Denmark, a dead cow with a gas-bloated belly, its calf moaning nearby and a cat slinking by with a rat hanging from its mouth. “The sight was like a picture postcard that had taken a wrong turn—a case in point of dread in near-perfect equilibrium with the banality of bright daylight,” he writes. In this case, Bangsted didn’t actively decide not to take a photograph—he’d left his camera behind, he told me—but the scene remained etched in his memory, his evocation of it an example of Steacy’s belief that “a photograph can exist in words.”

As I said, these are varied, thought-provoking responses. Ultimately, says Steacy, this is a book not just about photography but about living, and the spontaneous decisions we all make on a daily basis. “It is my hope that the experiences described in this book will provide the catalyst for each reader to recall and dive into their own photograph not taken,” he wrote to me in an email. “We all have one. When you boil it all down, the stories in this book aren’t as much about photography as they are about being alive and being human.”

For the next post I’ll delve into my own archives and present thoughts by other photographers on the images they didn’t take.

Clover Adams and Photographer Suicides

Witty, clever and rich, Clover Adams had almost every advantage in life. Born in 1843 to a prominent Boston family, she received an impressive education for a girl at that time. At twenty-eight she married Henry Adams, a brilliant intellectual and presidential descendant. The couple lived in Washington, where their dinner guests included cabinet secretaries and generals. Clover took up photography at forty, embracing it with passion—then, at age forty-four, she committed suicide by swallowing some of the potassium cyanide she used in her darkroom.

The mystery of her death is probed by Natalie Dykstra in the new biography Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life. Dykstra writes that depression ran in Clover’s family, leading to suicide in at least one other case. For Clover, the depression was sudden, triggered by several events. Her beloved father’s death; her husband’s increasing emotional distance; her grief over never having children—together, these were the perfect storm that led her to take her own life.

Photographically, Clover seems to have been an inspired amateur rather than a pioneer. Her photographs are often melancholy, showing isolated figures and trees—even when there are several people in the frame, they’re looking away from each other. As Dykstra notes, “creativity can be compensatory, redemptive, a release, a reach toward freedom and hope. But this is not always the case. …Things can sometimes go the other way. Creativity also undoes, overwhelms, gives power to hidden undertows. What’s brought forward in expression is exposed and becomes irrefutable.”

Reading Clover Adams made me think of other photographer suicides. Next to writers, photographers seem like a relatively life-loving bunch—Wikipedia lists hundreds of writer suicides, compared with just eleven photographer suicides. Nevertheless, there have been some notable photographer suicides—most prominently, Diane Arbus and Francesca Woodman.

In both Arbus and Woodman’s cases, like in Adams’, hints of a troubled psyche lurk in the images. Arbus was almost magnetically drawn to misfits, from her giants and dwarves to the mentally disabled patients she photographed at the end of her life. Woodman, on the other hand, focused almost exclusively on herself, shooting haunting, intense self-portraits in barren landscapes and dilapidated houses.

Only twenty-two when she took her life, Woodman had already amassed an impressive body of work. Some of her images seem anguished, others are more playful. Depressed over losing a grant and a boyfriend, she gave way to the darkness that hovers at the edges of her images. Arbus, too, was depressed over a lack of assignments—compounded by the fact that she felt she’d lost her creative drive. In Patricia Bosworth’s 1984 biography Diane Arbus, sculptor Nancy Grossman describes an encounter with Arbus two weeks before her death:

“She spoke… about her work, which, she cried, was giving her nothing back… And listening to her, I thought this must be the most devastating thing for an artist—to lose one’s need to discover. What does it mean when suddenly, inexplicably, we’re no longer nourished by our work and it gives us nothing back?”

This reminded me of a passage in Clover Adams, where Clover laments to her sister that she has lost her very sense of self. “Ellen, I’m not real—Oh make me real—you are all of you real!” she cries.

Although all of these three cases are women, I wouldn’t want to draw any hasty conclusions about women photographers and suicide. Women photographers often create intensely personal, probing bodies of work, but there are many who do so—Imogen Cunningham, Sally Mann, Elinor Carucci—without tipping into darkness in their personal lives. I can also think of  male photographers who’ve mined their own psyches and life histories in their work (Robert Mapplethorpe, Duane Michals and Keith Carter come to mind), and male photojournalists like Kevin Carter who’ve committed suicide as a result of the atrocities they’ve witnessed.

I think of suicide as being a bit like a plane crash, in that several key elements—in this case, chronic depression and a sudden trigger or impulse—need to come together. In the 1990s, I spent two years staffing a suicide prevention line in the Bay Area. The callers ranged from people who were a little down and needed a boost, to people whose depression was chronic and paralyzing. Our training taught us to conduct a risk assessment, but I suspect it wasn’t very accurate, and that some of the perky-sounding callers might have been the ones who ended up taking action. Mostly I was there to listen and be sympathetic; to acknowledge the caller’s pain and make them feel, for a few minutes, not quite so alone.

Most suicidal people don’t make that call, though. They make up their minds and pursue suicide efficiently—just as Adams, Arbus and Woodman did. It’s hard to look at these women’s work now without sensing some of the pain they must have felt at the end of their lives. At least it’s comforting to know that they created unique bodies of work, finding release—however brief—through their photography.

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FURTHER READING:

A 1994 article from the New York Times about writers and suicide. The author suggests that writers like Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath liked the idea of suicide as a metaphor or grand flourish to end their lives; that it provided “a means of controlling their life story.”

This page has depictions of suicide in visual art through the ages.

This About.com page has a list of artists who committed suicide and how they did it.

Colorizing History: An Interview with Sanna Dullaway

This week, Sanna Dullaway’s colorized versions of famous historic photographs went viral on the Internet, drawing both admiration and alarm. Dullaway had picked some truly iconic photographs to colorize, from Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother to Eddie Adams’ famous shot of a Vietnamese general executing a Vietcong prisoner during the opening stages of the Tet Offensive. The young Swede (who has just launched a business colorizing old family snapshots) displayed these color versions side-by-side with the originals. Suddenly, figures and scenes long burned into our minds in their original black-and-white incarnations were popping out in glorious color–rusty reds, rich golds, the blue of cornflowers and irises. The images spread quickly on news sites and Facebook feeds—and then some people got mad.

“A parasitical one trick pony grazing on the shoulders of giants,” Dullaway was called in one Facebook photography thread, while someone else excoriated her for “coloring that like a coloring book.” “Sickening” and “inexcusable” were other adjectives thrown out. Some were more generous, admiring Dullaway’s technique and color choices, and writing that it had given them a new appreciation of the original work.

I was intrigued by this response, and by the protectiveness people felt toward these images. Personally I found them fascinating, and not confusing or deceptive since they were printed side-by-side with the original black-and-whites. (In that way it’s not like watching a colorized movie on TCM, where you have no reference to the original.) Granted, I’ve seen the colorized versions put up on web sites on their own this week, but that wasn’t Dullaway’s intent.

Once you understand this as an exercise, I think it’s fascinating to see how we respond to the colorized images. The best ones come alive, dissolving the distance between past and present. You notice different things: the clear blue sky in the Adams image, dirt on the kids’ necks in the Lange image. You’re engaging with the photograph in a new, interesting way.

Colorized photographs are nothing new. People have even put colorized versions of iconic photographs online before, as in this version of the famous Lange image. What was new here was the sheer volume and range of Dullaway’s work, her cheerful appropriation of everything photographic. Included were not just portraits of long-dead presidents and celebrities, or powerful images from the Great Depression, but also shots from the Vietnam War—an event recent enough that the photographers could have chosen to shoot color images themselves.

In all the noise this week, one thing that wasn’t being heard was Dullaway’s voice. I was intrigued to see what her intent was in colorizing these images, and how she felt about the reactions, so I contacted her over email. She was cheerful and responsive, eager to set the record straight as she spoke about the media attention, the criticism and the act of colorizing history.

LL: You’re a very good colorist. How did you learn your skills?

SD: The technique is available for everyone: Color Mode in Photoshop. My sense of color and lighting is self-taught, I’ve never taken any art classes. I’ve been a hobby photographer for years and I think that’s where I “learned” how colors work in photographs. For example grass is not only green, it is lit up in the yellow warm sunlight and toned down in the shadows’ blue tones.

LL: When did you first get the idea to colorize famous historic photographs, and what was your intention in doing so?

SD: I was listening to Rage Against The Machine and I saw the album art of the burning monk [a close-up of Malcolm Browne's iconic 1968 image]. I was impressed by the photo but I thought it would be more impressive if the fire was the color of fire, because it looks really dull in black and white. I’m pretty decent with Photoshop and by accident I found that Color Mode did magic to the photo and colorized the fire. It looked all right, so I tried painting the rest of the photo.

LL: What do you want people to gain from looking at a colorized version of an iconic photo?

SD: A new perspective on the historical context. I’m pretty sure it’s a fact that most people of my generation find black and white photos dull. I think a color photo makes you feel that history is much closer. I never want to replace or improve the photographs, as some papers, blogs and commenters have written. It’s very frustrating seeing people making up their own story as if it’s exactly how I wanted it. Of course some people don’t like the colorized version and I respect that. Even I think some of the photos I colorized look aesthetically better in black and white.

LL: How do you choose colors for these images? Do you do any historical research, or do you simply make aesthetic choices? Do you try to replicate the look of early color films?

SD: I try to research as best as I can, but I’m only human and I make mistakes. For instance I now know that the soldiers’ trousers in [Timothy O'Sullivan's] A Harvest of Death were sky blue. But others I’ve been more successful with; for the [Alfred Eisenstadt] Times Square Kiss I Googled “times square postcard 1940″ and it turned up some hand painted postcards, which had the colors of the buildings and even some of the same billboards. If I can’t find any information, I try to choose colors that fit with the era. That’s artistic freedom I suppose.

LL: Can you describe your process a little? What Photoshop tools do you use most, and how much time does it take to do a full colorization of one of these images?

SD: People don’t believe me when I say I only use one layer and it only takes an hour to colorize most photos. The first photo I colorized (the burning monk) took me 4 hours, but the average now is 1 hour. I use mainly the Brush tool in Photoshop’s Color Mode, which works as a saturater and desaturater as well.

LL: Some of the early photographers whose work you’ve colored didn’t have the option of working in color. With the Eddie Adams and Malcolm Browne images from the 1960s, however, those photographers chose black-and-white film over color. Did you hesitate more about colorizing those images?

SD: A little, but in the end I did it anyway. I think it’s worth it considering how much new light has been put on the historical events. Their world was not in black and white, it was in color, just like ours! And like I’ve said before, I REALLY don’t want to replace or improve the original black and white photos; they are still there. That’s also why I always show them side by side. I’m simply showing a new perspective by colorizing them. It’s up to people to decide if this makes them think differently about the historical context or the photograph.

LL: Have you looked into the copyright issues governing how you can use these images?

SD: Some, I’ve heard different facts from different people and tried to ask around. Most papers and blogs’ legal teams told me this work fell under “fair use” since I was not going to sell or use the photos as promotion for my work. Like I said before though, many blogs and papers wrote without my comment and credited me in an unfair way to the original photographers. I can only wish they would rephrase this. I’ve notified the biggest blogs and papers and they’ve corrected and even taken down photos where it was uncertain whether the colorization would still be categorized as fair use.

LL: Have you been surprised by the amount of attention these images have received?

SD: Yes, I’m definitely surprised. I’ve posted photos before on Reddit but I never expected this much attention. I woke up to hundreds of emails, comments and articles.

LL: There was quite a lot of chatter about your images on Facebook this week. Some of it was positive, from people who praised your technical skills and found the images fascinating. Some was negative, from people who felt these images shouldn’t be altered. They called you a thief, and worse. How do you respond to those people?

SD: I don’t claim the works as my own, only the choice of color. I wanted to show a new perspective on the historical context and that you can color any black & white photo if you want to. If people had had access to color film in those times they would certainly have used it. The sun shined on our grandparents and their world was in color, too.

LL: What do you plan to do with these images now?

SD: Nothing, just hope it will continue to interest people in history and what colorization might add to it. If anything I hope this can aid education, enlighten and make people interested in past–but still close–events and people.

LL: Do you have a favorite among the historic images you’ve colorized?

SD: I don’t actually, all of them have some kind of emotional value to me. However, in the original album I colorized some images of my relatives which I understand most blogs and papers did not show since they’re not “historical.” They’re historical to me though, and feel more alive to me than to anyone else.