That’s what happened to Jeff Jacobson. A former Magnum photographer known for his quirky style, Jacobson was one of the first art photographers to use color film exclusively. For his 1991 book My Fellow Americans he traveled the country, capturing the look and mood of a decade. His offbeat, stridently colorful images of faith healers and glitzy dancers conveyed the brittle, tarnished glamor of the Reagan years, nodding directly at Robert Frank’s seminal 1950s book The Americans.

Over time, Jacobson refined his style by using Kodachrome 200. He pushed it two stops in the developing process, which yielded a grain more typical of black-and-white film. This became his look, his signature. After his chemotherapy treatments, confined indoors at his home in Mount Tremper, New York, he started making a visual diary. At first, he was just thinking in terms of individual images. Then Kodak announced it was ceasing production of Kodachrome, and the project acquired new layers. No longer just about moments of grace amid personal loss, it was now also about enshrining a part of photographic history. His new book, The Last Roll, was born.

A tone poem, mysterious and radiant, The Last Roll celebrates life in all its messy glory. There are luminous, almost mystical shots of nature; raucous snatches of urban graffitti, and one or two shots that verge on the satirical–like the jangling, distorted image of John Edwards’ face on a flickering television screen, in which Edwards’ nose elongates to Pinocchio proportions. An escalator ascends incongruously through a desert landscape, as if to another world; a gorgeous, concentrated teal-blue sky is photographed through a car’s windscreen that seems to have a dead insect smeared across its surface. Jacobson acknowledges that the images in The Last Roll, and the way they’re sequenced, are full of ambiguity–but that’s the way he likes it. It’s the sensibility of a man battling loss, looking for meaning, finding transcendence in the everyday.

“This is the most emotional work I’ve ever done,” Jacobson says. “These are very direct translations of my inner psychic state.”

Images from The Last Roll are currently on view at the Center for Photography in Woodstock. Jacobson spoke to The Literate Lens from his home in Mount Tremper.

Literate Lens: First of all, how is your treatment going?

Jeff Jacobson: I’m doing an experimental drug trial, which has been fairly uneventful, but I had to do a round of chemotherapy first, and that was pretty awful. At some point they’ll be removing my T-cells, genetically modifying them to destroy cancer cells, and putting them back. I’ll run a high fever at some point and will have to go into hospital. So it won’t be much fun.

LL: The Last Roll is about mortality and ephemerality. You were close to your grandmother before she died. In the book you write about taking a picture of her in 1973, and how it started your love of photography. What was special about that picture?

JJ: It was the look of unconditional love on her face, no question. As a child I wasn’t close to her, but we became close at the end of her life. The picture is just a straight-ahead, black-and-white portrait outside her house, but she’s standing next to the house foundation, which is pebbled, and it somehow mirrors the texture of her skin. When I gave a print of it to my parents, my father got upset and told me I’d made her look old. I said, she is old! It was an early lesson in the power of photographs to get under people’s skin.

LL: You didn’t become a photographer immediately. How did you become a civil rights lawyer, and why did you make the transition to photography?

JJ: I grew up in Des Moines in the 1950s, a Jewish kid in a Christian American environment. I always had a sense of politics. Originally, my impetus to go to law school was to dodge the draft, which didn’t work because around that time they abolished exemptions for law school! But I was in school in D.C. in the late 1960s, when all hell was breaking loose on the national stage. I started getting fascinated in the law. Later, I worked for the ACLU in Atlanta and fought a case that ended up being a prelude to Roe vs. Wade. Meantime I was doing photography as a hobby, and in 1974 I did a summer workshop with Charles Harbutt, which was the breakthrough. At the time, Charlie was president of Magnum Photos, and doing the course with him made me realize I could live that life if I wanted it. I went back to Atlanta and promptly resigned from the ACLU.

LL: How did you get into shooting color film? Not too many ‘serious’ photographers in the 1970s were doing that.

JJ: When I worked in black and white, I wasn’t doing anything groundbreaking. Until I started working in color I don’t think I was doing anything terribly unique at all. The move to color happened by accident. George Wallace, who was running for president at the time, held a rally in Boston when I was working there. I went and shot it in color, playing around and doing long exposures. When I saw the film I never looked back. I knew right away that I saw in color, not black and white.

LL: What made you so sure?

JJ: For whatever reason, I could be a lot more playful in color. The images had an immediacy that my black-and-white images never had. I could never understand how you translated a world that was in color into the tones of black and white; that never made any sense to me. With color I could respond to whatever was in front of me and it was direct, not abstracted into grey tones.

LL: You went on the road, photographing the 1976 presidential campaign. What was that like?

JJ: After shooting the Wallace rally in Boston I quit my job, traded my old car for a van and started following the presidential primaries around the country. It was much easier to do that back then. It was great, a fantasy come true. I was at a very political stage in my life and it was a way to express all my feelings, learn the ropes without working for anyone. I covered both parties, it was a wide open year. Ford was an incumbent president but he wasn’t a strong candidate; Reagan was running against him and there were a whole lot of Democrats. The extreme right wing candidates were more interesting to me because the scene around them was strange. I have an image of Wallace speaking: he’d already survived an assassination attempt and he had security all around him. It’s just a picture of him on the stage with his security guys, but in my mind it looked a bit like Goebbels with Nazi brownshirts around him.

LL: Kodachrome 200 became your color film of choice. What did you like about it?

JJ: Kodachrome was a very unique film because it was so rich. It was basically a black-and-white film on which there were layers of dye, and that made it totally different from any other film. It gave me a color palette and a texture I just couldn’t get anywhere else. When I started pushing Kodachrome 200 two stops in the developing bath, I got a graininess I’d never seen before with color. I always loved grain in black-and-white film, so that’s what I did for the rest of the time I had Kodachrome.

LL: What was your reaction when Kodak announced it was discontinuing Kodachrome?

JJ: I remember the day they announced it. It was 2007, and I was on a trip for my wedding anniversary with my wife. It was supposed to be a nice time, but I was all upset and pissed off. Kodak had already screwed up the market for Kodachrome by making a new processing machine that didn’t work, so I knew it was coming, but even so, it was a blow.

LL: For The Last Roll, you were initially shooting inside your house while you recovered. Did being confined indoors change the way you started seeing?

JJ: I think it did, but I didn’t know it at the time. Like everything I’ve done, I didn’t set out to do this project, it just happened. I was taking pictures in my house because I couldn’t go outside, and it was only much later that I saw how this body of work was emerging. There are so many pictures in the book from that early period that, for me, are very direct translations of my inner emotional state. I really like them for that reason. At the time, though, I was just responding to what I was seeing, which I always think makes the most interesting photograph. For me, photography is an immediate medium. When you’re thinking too much, it becomes conceptual, which can deaden it. You’re killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

LL: Did knowing that you were shooting a nearly obsolete film make those last Kodachrome images seem more precious, more weighted?

JJ: I just didn’t go there. I bought up a lot of Kodachrome, and people gave it to me as well. Right at the end of the project, Alex Webb gave me fifty rolls of film. That kind of support was very satisfying, and I had plenty of film, it was all I could do to shoot it. I planned a couple of trips just to use it all up. By the end of the project, I’d really dealt with that whole issue of the preciousness of it.

LL: How do you work these days? Do you shoot digitally?

JJ: Ever since Kodachrome ended, I’ve been working with nothing but a digital camera. It’s totally different. Well, not totally different: it’s still photographing. I’ve been using a Lumix with a Leica lens: it’s a fantastic camera that looks like any tourist camera you’ve ever seen. I’m doing stuff I thought I’d never do, and I look like a tourist, so I can get away with things I couldn’t do before. What I don’t like about digital is its clarity and crispness, which can look unreal. But this camera doesn’t have a huge sensor, it’s funky, and I’m messing with it a bit, adding grain to the pixels. I have it with me all the time, and I use it like a diary.

LL: The last roll of Kodachrome was developed in 2010. What was it like to end the project?

JJ: By the end it felt fine. As a matter of fact, the reason I link Kodachrome with my cancer is that it was the same lesson. Cancer presented me with my own physical mortality, it said to me, hey, you’re not going to live forever. Kodachrome presented me with creative mortality. Kodachrome was the creative tool I’d used to create most of my work. Then gone, with the snap of a finger it’s gone. It reinforced the lesson that nothing is permanent. The only law of the universe is that everything changes. It was an exercise in letting go.

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The Last Roll is showing at the Center for Photography in Woodstock through June 13, 2013. For opening hours and directions, click here.

Visit Jeff Jacobson’s web site.

Buy The Last Roll and other Daylight books here.

You may or may not think that analog film, and the art of darkroom printing, are dying. Certainly, film has its vociferous defenders: many of them have shown up to comment on Magnum and the Dying Art of Darkroom Printing, the most widely-read post on this site. Nevertheless, nobody can deny that digital technology has delivered blow after blow to the industry that produces analog film. Considering the force of the blows, it’s remarkable film is still on its feet at all. It may not be for much longer.

In The Disappearance of Darkness: Photography at the End of the Analog Era, Robert Burley delivers a thoughtful visual essay about the end of the industrial film era. Burley, a photographer and professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, was prescient enough to see in 2005 that the industry was changing at light speed. With an assertively old-fashioned, analog view camera in hand, he began documenting a world in decline.

Burley’s approach is deep rather than wide. As he writes in his introduction, the size and reach of major players like Kodak and Polaroid “would have made any kind of comprehensive history of the industry unworkable.” Instead of aiming for broad coverage, he went to places he knew well, having visited them in the past or used their products for years.

Using his connections, he managed to gain access to areas and places generally off-limits (the film companies’ secrecy and paranoia about their products persists even as their markets are evaporating). Seeing these huge, abandoned industrial facilities, one comes to understand that a company like Kodak was, in many ways, sabotaged by its own success. In other words, the production facilities necessary for color film are so large and expensive that Kodak could only make profits if film was in every home. Once the market began to falter, the products were immediately threatened.

All the photographs in The Disappearance of Darkness are artful and beautifully rendered. Inevitably, some are more interesting than others. Photographs of the outside of drab industrial buildings, however well-composed and thoughtful, tend to merge together after a while. But then there are inspired shots, like the one of Betsy, a mannequin formerly used by Polaroid to test skin tones, staring out at a weed-filled courtyard from an abandoned Polaroid facility in the Netherlands. Or the sequence that involves the failed implosion of a Kodak-Pathé building in Chalon-sur-Saone, France–the building’s stubborn refusal to fold being a metaphor for a business clinging to life.

The most detailed portion of the book concerns Kodak Canada, a facility in Burley’s own back yard in Toronto. The plant closed in 2005, and Burley managed to get in immediately afterward. Cameras were never allowed behind what the workers referred to as “the silver curtain,” and it’s fascinating to get a glimpse into the former film hopper, where layer upon layer of light-sensitive chemicals used to be laid onto polyester film at punishingly high tolerances. As Burley writes, “After peering behind ‘the silver curtain,’ the phrase ‘economy of scale’ comes into sharp focus; it’s difficult to imagine how this process could ever be done successfully on a small scale.”

It isn’t all bad news. Burley also visits the Ilford Company in England, where black-and-white film and papers are still being produced on a small scale. Black-and-white film and papers are easier to produce than their color counterparts, and despite being forced into bankruptcy in 2004, Ilford has managed to survive. “If film is to survive into the digital era, it is likely that it will do so in its simplest and original form, black-and-white, and be manufactured solely as an artist’s material,” Burley writes.

In these days of tweets and soundbites, The Disappearance of Darkness is itself a bit of anachronism. An elegiac coffee-table book, its images and essays should be consumed slowly. In addition to Burley’s thoughtful introduction, American curator Alison Nordstrom contributes an essay that analyzes Burley’s work in the context of its historical moment, and French curator François Cheval remembers the history of the Kodak plant in Chalon-sur-Saone–the town where, in 1825, inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced the world’s first photograph.

How should we mourn the passing of film? Photography’s digital transformation has been so fast and overwhelming that having a book like this feels necessary, like going to a wake where the dead person’s life is celebrated through speech, image and song. But mournful as it may seem, Burley doesn’t intend for his book to be a Luddite’s lament for a simpler, better time. Rather, it’s a chance to pause and reflect on a changing medium. “Technologies are made to be transformed, and redefined, even reinvented,” he concludes. “If this book is a eulogy for film and the miraculous process it made possible, both now consigned to the past, it is also an article of faith that anything is possible.”

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Robert Burley’s web site.

Web site for The Disappearance of Darkness, with a trailer for the book.

No, we can’t all be there. Most of us hope we never will be. At the same time, having a visceral sense of wartime atrocities might be the only way we’ll be moved to find alternatives to the “unspeakable pain…the fear and the grief” Nachtwey talks about.

So we turn to photographs, film and literature.

Jennifer Cody Epstein’s second novel, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, is unusual in showing war from both sides of the battlefield. Covering approximately thirty years before and after the Second World War, The Gods follows five characters, both Japanese and American, as they deal with the build-up to war and the aftermath of Tokyo’s destruction.

A downed American bomber pilot, a Czech-born architect who loves Japanese culture, a London-educated Japanese beauty, a troubled soldier-turned-photographer: all are brought together by circumstances leading up to one of modern history’s most devastating acts of war, the firebombing of Tokyo. In delicate prose, Cody Epstein brings war’s brutality onto a human scale, as her characters struggle to find meaning amid catastrophic loss.

“My approach was to try to understand the full horror of the war by immersing myself in it from both perspectives,” says Cody Epstein, whose first novel, The Painter from Shanghai, told the story of controversial Chinese painter Pan Yuliang. While some characters in The Gods, like American pilot Cam Richardson and builder Kenji Kobayashi, are steeped in their own cultures, others—Kenji’s cosmopolitan wife Hana and budding photographer Billy Reynolds—have a foot in both east and west. At the center of the story is Yoshi Kobayashi, Kenji and Hana’s precocious daughter, through whose eyes we witness the worst of the war.

Throughout, photography plays an important role in the narrative. Given a Brownie camera for his tenth birthday, Billy, who’s growing up in Japan, is told by his mother to “document your life as it is now… it’s a wonderful place you are living… we won’t be in Japan forever.” Subsequently, the older Billy’s photographs will educate complacent American viewers about the scale of Tokyo’s destruction. And casual photographs taken one balmy dusk will create an enduring bond between Yoshi and her glamorous, tragic mother.

Cody Epstein, who (full disclosure) is a friend and mentor, spoke to The Literate Lens recently about the way she integrated photography into this story of ordinary people caught up in violence and devastating loss.

Literate Lens: You start each section of the novel with a photograph (or in two cases, an illustration). At what point did you start looking for photographs, and how did you find them?

Jennifer Cody Epstein: I really was looking for them from the very beginning. I find visual “prompts” really helpful when I’m trying to write; for my first novel (The Painter from Shanghai) I would surround myself with printouts of Pan Yuliang’s paintings and stare up at them when I got stuck. As I worked on Gods I kept a file of interesting images I came across. Most of them I found online, in the course of researching various elements of my story. Most I just sort of stumbled upon. Some, though—like the image of the Doolittle Raiders taking off from the U.S.S. Hornet—I specifically set out to find, to help me get a sense of what I was trying to write. It didn’t occur to me until well into the process that I wanted to actually put them in the book.

LL: Did any of the ones you found inspire characters in the novel?

JCE: I already had an image of Hana Kobayashi, the attractive British-educated woman who has trouble readjusting to Japanese life, in my head from some of the research I’d done. But when I came across the image “Dancer on a Rooftop” it really stopped me in my tracks. I just thought to myself: That’s her. There she is. I became a little obsessed by the image, actually—it just seemed to sum up so much of what I was trying to write about: West and East, modernity and tradition, serenity and wartime, hope and devastation.

Another image that helped shape one of the story threads was a chilling photo of an American POW about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer. I’d certainly read about the Japanese Army’s obsession with this sort of execution, but this particular image really drove it home for me. All I could think about was “What’s going through that prisoner’s mind?” Which, in turn, led me pretty directly to the storyline of Cam Richards, my fictional Doolittle Raider.

LL: Did many Western photographers (professional or amateur) take photographs in pre- and post-war Japan?

JCE: I don’t know about numbers, but I do know of one in particular whom I partly used as inspiration for the character of Billy Reynolds. His name was Joe O’Donnell, and he was a U.S. Marine who took extensive photographs of Japan right after the surrender—including some iconic images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

LL: What research did you do in order to write the character of Billy?

JCE: Ha! Well, I guess I just partly answered that. But I also did research into the sorts of cameras he would have had at various points in his life—what kind of camera his mother might have given him as a boy growing up in Japan (I opted for a Brownie) and what he may have used in the 1940s in Japan (I went with a Contax). I did a little research into photographic styles of that era, but for the most part I scoured the Internet for old photographs of postwar Tokyo and tried to imagine what he might have seen, what might have caught his interest.

LL: Can you tell us something about Hayashi Tadahiko, the Japanese photographer who took several of the photographs you feature in the book?

JCE: I discovered him through that photograph I mentioned before—“Dancer on a Rooftop”—but realized upon researching a little that he’d taken a few other photos I’d admired in the past, including an iconic one of the Japanese novelist Osamu Dazai about to topple off a bar stool in the Ginza. He was born in 1918 into a family of photographers—interestingly, his mother was the real talent in the family—so he learned the basics of the trade growing up, and was skilled as a portrait artist. He went to photography school in Tokyo, where he was apparently such a big partier (maybe how he got that great shot of Dazai?) that his family finally cut him off financially. He spent the latter part of the Pacific War in Beijing and then returned to Tokyo, where he took pictures of orphans (like “Shoeshine Boy,” which I also use in the novel) and the high life alike.

One thing that was particularly interesting about his style to me was that he wasn’t afraid to stage things: he clearly wanted his images to tell stories, and he would use props and other devices to tell them.

In another picture of his—of the woman walking in rubble, next to a pillar with “What was the point” scrawled on it (at left)—it is said that he actually painted the graffiti himself. His interest in narrative is also evidenced by the subject of his first book of photographs, titled Shosetsu no Furusato, for which he travelled around Japan photographing settings that have been described in various Japanese novels.

LL: Were there important photographs you found in the course of your research that didn’t make it into the book?

JCE: The one of the POW about to be executed didn’t make it—it was really just too grim, I thought. There was also a great photograph of a Japanese woman in a white dress sitting on a Western-style couch that also reminded me of Hana Kobayashi, but in the end I didn’t have room for it (though I use it on my site).

LL: In the final section of the novel, Billy’s photographs of postwar Tokyo are exhibited in California and a disbelieving viewer remarks, “maybe [the photographer] made it look worse than it was.” The comment really stings for the reader after witnessing the devastating violence of the Tokyo firebombing earlier in the novel–and it offends Yoshi, the survivor who overhears it. What were you trying to get at with that comment?

JCE: I think I was trying to highlight the fact that people—myself included, until I began writing this book–simply don’t consider the firebombing in the same way they do the atomic bombings. And while it’s certainly true that the atomic bombs were astoundingly devastating, and worked in a way that continues to fascinate and horrify us even today, the firebombs that LeMay used were also incredibly devastating and a far cry from “traditional” bombs used up until that moment. The attack on Tokyo actually killed more people initially than did the attack on Hiroshima, and had three times the fatality rate of Dresden. So I guess the main point is that bombing is a catastrophic event, no matter what the science is behind the bombs that are used.

LL: Billy’s photography is a thread that ties together a couple of sections of the novel, and it enables you to end on a very poignant note. At what point in the writing did you decide to end with a photograph, and why?

JCE: It actually came rather late in the game for me, and coincided with my decision to have Billy take snapshots of Yoshi and Hana in 1930s Karuizawa. That scene is one of the first in the book, but I wrote it well after I wrote most of the others. Which was typical of the way this novel evolved—it was anything but chronological! I’d originally imagined a very romance-novel sort of ending, where Cam the pilot ends up meeting Yoshi and the two fall in love. But…blech. Gag. Right? Every time I tried to write that it just seemed totally contrived, out of step with what the novel ended up being. But as I wrote the new openings, I realized those photographs that Billy takes so obsessively could be the things that bring the novel full-circle—and effectively reunite Yoshi with her mother. Which was really where the book really wanted to go emotionally.

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Buy The Gods of Heavenly Punishment.

Visit Jennifer Cody Epstein’s web page.

This idea, along with some recent stories about “smart” contact lenses, sparked comment in the New York Times and the New Yorker this week. Reading these columns, I was reminded of a shift that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both technological and moral, this shift also concerned selective vision. But ultimately, it had the opposite effect from the deletive future described above. Instead, it brought poor people sharply into focus.

In most American cities before the 1880s, the rich and poor didn’t have much of a window into each others’ lives. They lived, worked, shopped and played in different neighborhoods, which were arranged to minimize contact between social classes. It was much the same in other countries–especially in the mother country, England. The friendship and concern showed by Downton Abbey‘s aristocrats toward their servants is absurdly anachronistic. Real lords and ladies—even members of the rising middle class—aren’t likely to have known (much less cared) about the private lives of the poor.

Photography changed all that—not immediately, but gradually. As the medium overcame its technological limitations and became more flexible, various pioneers recognized that it could be used to increase empathy between social classes.

Jacob Riis wasn’t the first photojournalist (others included the Romanian Carol Szathmari and Englishman Roger Fenton). But he was among the first to focus on the poor, using flash photography to great effect in his groundbreaking book How the Other Half Lives.

In 1887, the Danish-born Riis was working as a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Shocked by squalor and crime in the Five Points neighborhood, he was looking for a way to portray it viscerally. He tried sketching, but found he had no skill. Read about the new invention of flash photography, he immediately recognized its potential. With flash, he could patrol poor neighborhoods at night and take pictures of the inhabitants, unaware and unposed.

Riis’s methods were crude. He often accompanied police on raids, shooting images as soon as a door was opened. You can imagine the fright the poor immigrants in the flophouse pictured at right might have had when, woken from a well-earned sleep, they had a primitive, pistol-shaped flash gun pointed at them and fired. Ironically, though, this startled (or sleepy) look on his subjects’ faces gave Riis’s images a rawness and authenticity that made them influential. For the first time, New York’s “haves” got an intimate view into the lives of those less fortunate.

But Riis’s desire for social reform was motivated as much by disgust as by empathy. (How the Other Half Lives describes the Chinese as “sinister,” blacks as “sensual,” and Jews as having “a native instinct for money-making.”) It took another photographer, Lewis Hine, to make the next leap—into a socially aware photojournalism that was also empathetic.

This was a leap indeed. As Daile Kaplan writes in Lewis Hine in Europe, “The appearance of indigent men and women in a ‘gentleman’s magazine’ might imply that some sort of relationship was called for between the reader (or viewer) and the person depicted: for a turn of the century nonprofessional, no such relationship existed. Until the emergence of the ‘social sciences’ the inclusion of such photographs in publications was seen as an invasion of privacy – not that of the people shown but of those who had to look at them.”

Hine’s rise as a photographer coincided with the emergence of Social Work as a field of study. His relationship with Paul Kellogg, a fellow student at Columbia University who became the editor of a progressive magazine called The Survey, was the key to his influence. Kellogg and Hine set out to create empathy for the poor, depicting them with delicacy and insight. Together, they took steps to reverse a prevailing mindset. Soon, looking at these kinds of images was no longer seen as an invasion of privacy. Instead, it was a moral imperative.

This was the foundation of the “concerned” photojournalism that flowered during the Great Depression and which has continued ever since. In the last couple of decades, though, there’s been something of a “deletive reality” in the media. The huge loss of editorial space for photo stories has made us less aware of the social issues around us. Photojournalists have had to become creative in finding outlets for their stories—using social media and art galleries, or partnering with nonprofits and corporations. There are also excellent sites promoting in-depth photojournalism, like SocialDocumentary.net. But the audiences for these places are often smaller.

Could the next step be a “deletive reality” where, in addition to not having the face inconvenient truths in the media, we no longer have to see them around us? It’s a stretch, but maybe not a ridiculous one. In the New Yorker blog post Upgrade or Die, George Packer describes a present where things are getting ever better for the top classes, and worse for the underclasses. Combine this widening economic gap with technological breakthroughs, and it’s not hard to imagine a time when those with the means to do so could remove unsightly or troubling items from their field of vision.

This would be reprehensible, of course, and an ironic coda to the work of visual pioneers like Riis and Hine. But perhaps the doomsayers are being too pessimistic. After all, what technology taketh away, technology can also give back. So who’s out there working on an empathy app?

Russell, a multi-media artist, is a bit of a reverse Cindy Sherman. Rather than morphing into different female characters, she has chosen to remain happily herself while lip-synching to found audio of interviews with iconic men of the 1950s, 60s and 70s (in addition to Kerouac they include Marlon Brando, Ingmar Bergman and Richard Nixon). Their words literally come out of her mouth, or that’s the illusion, which is sustained remarkably effectively.

A loose theme running through all these interviews is the men’s search for identity and meaning, which makes it pretty ironic that they’ve been appropriated by this contemporary woman. Russell says she wants to bring together the historical and present moments, in order to create “a kind of third space where meanings shift, judgments waver, visual cues are displaced, and the language hovers, unattached to the identity of the original speaker, and yet not quite able to attach to my identity, my image, my mouth, my gestures.”

See if you think she succeeds by watching the video below:

It’s a neat trick, for sure, but is it more than that? Certainly, hearing Kerouac’s words mediated through Russell’s appearance did make me feel a bit more open to them and him, and less inclined to think of him as a self-involved jerk (or just a self-involved jerk). The guy had a poetic sensibility, and although “go moan for man, go moan, go groan, go groan alone, go roll your bones alone” may not represent the apotheosis of his talent, you have to admit it has rhythm and originality.

I say this as a confessed non-admirer of Kerouac. When I read On the Road twenty years ago, it didn’t do much for me. The macho, whiskey-swilling wanderlust and availability of hot, undemanding women seemed like the stuff of febrile male fantasy. In fact, Carlo Marx, the Allen Ginsberg character in OTR, describes Dean Moriarty as “a ‘child of the rainbow’ who bore his torment in his agonized priapus,” which pretty much says it all. Neeedless to say, the women characters who enjoy sex are not glorified like this.

Still, after seeing Russell’s uncanny lip-synching Kerouac video, I cracked open On the Road again. Would her performance, or the intervening years, have changed my perceptions?

Yes and no. There’s a run-on, hynoptic quality to Kerouac’s prose that makes it entertaining, even when it’s rambling and shapeless. And although it’s a ridiculously romantic vision of America, in which a young guy “tremendously excited with life” can hitch across the country without befalling anything worse than the loss of a flannel shirt, meeting happy drunks and sexually accommodating women along the way, there’s something joyful and alluring about the fantasy. It was the template for a new genre of road books, movies and hippie road trips to come.

But there’s a ridiculous double standard operating here. Dean is described in the most romantic terms, as “a western kinsman of the sun”—a transcendent quality that excuses all his moral lapses. But to Dean, the moment Marylou gets tired of “mak[ing] breakfast and sweep[ing] the floor” and goes back to Denver, she’s “the whore.” For women of the Beat Generation, it appears that being liberated meant playing domestic goddess to a creative, promiscuous drunk—progress indeed!

This irony is explored in Joyce Johnson’s wonderful memoir Minor Characters. Johnson writes about herself and other women who tried to ride along with the men of the Beat Generation, only to find themselves relegated to the sidelines. Johnson was Kerouac’s lover, on and off, for two years preceding and following the publication of On The Road. The story of their affair is the story of Kerouac’s multiple abandonments of her, punctuated by moments of joyous intensity that keep her hooked. But try as she might, Johnson is never admitted into the exclusive boys’ club. At one point, her older self reflects sadly that she was attracted to men who offered her “some pursuit of the heightened moment, intensity for its own sake, something they apparently find only when they’re with each other.”

Johnson’s memoir contains many other “minor characters.” There’s Joan Vollmer, the brilliant and drug-addled wife of William S. Burroughs, who was fatally shot by her husband during a drunken game of William Tell. There are the young women in Johnson’s English class at Barnard College who are told by “grey-haired, craggy-faced” Professor X that “if you were going to be writers, you wouldn’t be enrolled in this class… you’d be hopping freight trains, riding through America.” But the most tragic story belongs to Elise Cowen, Johnson’s brilliant and doomed best friend, a voracious reader and generous soul who “couldn’t reconcile her intellectual passions with the need to get by through fulfilling requirements.” Hopelessly in love with Allen Ginsberg (they’re lovers before he opts only for men), Elise spirals downward after he leaves. She’s Johnson’s dark shadow, the embodiment of the danger lurking in a woman’s desire to be free.

Johnson (who recently published a biography of Kerouac) was one of my first and best writing teachers in the Columbia MFA program. It’s been a while, but I remember her as a perceptive critic and a great booster of anyone she thought talented. In another irony, Minor Characters—her depiction of her minor status in the Beat Generation—ended up catapulting her to literary fame, while her novels have been largely overlooked. Minor Characters won the National Book Critics Circle award and has been widely celebrated as a lovely, eloquent evocation of that period in America’s cultural history.

To get another bead on Kerouac and On the Road, I watched the recent film adaptation of the novel. Helmed by Brazilian director Walter Salles, it’s a reasonably faithful adaptation that’s beautifully shot, giving rose-and-gold tones to everything from a Rocky Mountain sunset to a San Francisco jazz dive. Physically, the period detail is impeccable and makes for enjoyable watching, but something doesn’t gel about the movie. Possibly it’s the miscasting of the two male leads, whose performances are overshadowed by the charisma of Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst as the “minor characters.” Or, as critic David Haglund writes in a perceptive review on Slate.com, “Maybe it’s just that the transgressions of the Beats don’t feel that transgressive anymore. Kerouac may have thrilled to ‘the enormous presence of whole great Mexico’ with its ‘billion tortillas frying and smoking in the night,’ but when, in the movie, Sal and Dean visit a brothel in Mexico City, the term sex tourism is hard to keep from your mind.”

Watching the movie of On the Road makes it abundantly clear that Kerouac’s romanticism and sexual politics have dated as badly as the novel’s occasional whiffs of racism. But let’s give Kerouac his due. At its best, his work has a moody lyricism and ecstatic energy. He wrote a wonderful introduction to The Americans, Robert Frank’s seminal 1958 book about American dysphoria. Here, Kerouac’s musical, hypnotic prose is a perfect match for Frank’s intimate, elegiac images. In Kerouac’s words, Frank perfectly captured “that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral.” He “sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”

Seeing Adie Russell speaking Kerouac’s words, I couldn’t help thinking that part of his tragedy, and that of the Beats in general, was that their vision of creative freedom didn’t extend to women. Instead, it was a curiously half-formed vision of liberation in which men’s self-actualization crashed up against a 1950s view of women as “sweet little girl”s and housewives. Something had to give, and it did: some of the men, and most of the women, died young and/or violently. Miraculously, Joyce Johnson survived to tell the tale.

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FURTHER READING AND WATCHING:

Jack Kerouac being interviewed on the Steve Allen Show, including him reading the passage that Adie Russell lip-synched.

Adie Russell’s web site, where her videos of Nixon, Bergman and others can be viewed.

An essay in which Vince Passaro contrasts Kerouac’s romanticism with Joyce Johnson’s hard-edged realism.

An essay about women of the Beat Generation, on the site of a literary journal dedicated to the study of Beatdom.

I wrote about the 50th anniversary reissue of Frank’s The Americans here and here.

Paolo Ventura’s work lies at the intersection of fantasy and nostalgia. The Italian-born photographer creates scenes that evoke the past in a way that’s rich, dream-like and occasionally surreal. Ventura does this by painstakingly creating miniature sets—dioramas into which he places realistic dolls and props—then photographing them. The result is a delicious hybrid that veers between reality’s sharpness and the strange logic of dreams.

What makes Ventura’s work sing, though, is its narrative quality. Brought up on stories (his father was a well-known children’s book author), Ventura seems to have a natural gift for narrative. Each of his pictures is its own little mystery, a bombardment of character and atmosphere and detail that begs for closer examination. Tiny details—a torn poster on a wall, a musician’s mud-soaked trousers, scattered photographs on the ground—invite the viewer to construct a story around them.

This quality gives his art a distinctive flavor that carries across various series of work. Some series—like War Souvenir and The Automaton—are rooted in the realities of World War Two. Others—Winter Stories and Behind the Walls—create fantasy worlds. Ventura says he likes working in both veins.

A self-confessed school truant and voracious reader, Ventura worked as a fashion photographer for a decade before quitting to pursue art photography. His work is on view at the Italian Academy on the Columbia University campus until March 8th (see below for times). He spoke to the Literate Lens from his home in Tuscany.

Literate Lens: Your father was a children’s book author. Were you influenced by him?

Paolo Ventura: A little, but I think my grandmother influenced me more, even though my father was about stories and illustrations. Maybe inspiration is better when it’s more indirect! My grandmother lived with us for more than thirty years. After World War Two, her husband died and she moved from the countryside to Milan. She was very simple, a free spirit, poetic in her own way. She’d befriend people from her village—visiting them in hospital, and dressing them for burial. My brother and I went with her when she did that. We were supposed to stay in an outer room, but we always tried to sneak a look at the corpses.

LL: What else sparked your imagination as a child?

PV: The best thing was not going to school. When I realized that morning was a great time to do my own things, I started skipping school. I’d walk around, watching scenes on the street. If there was a robbery in a bank and the police came, that was wonderful. I’d draw, think, go into bookstores. It made me happy. I didn’t have money to buy my own books, and there’s not much tradition of public libraries in Italy, so I picked up anything I could find. My father had a passion for the authors George Simenon and Joseph Roth. I read a lot of Italian literature from the 1950s and 60s: Primo Levi, Pasolini. When you’re young, you’re free to explore.

LL: You started as a fashion photographer. How did that happen?

PV: When I was in art school, I got a job as a photographer’s assistant. The work was boring, he shot catalog photos of objects, but I wanted to work and didn’t have any other ideas. After six months, the photographer had a car accident and went into a coma, and his brothers asked me to keep the studio going. I was alone there for six months with cameras and lights, so I started shooting my own pictures of things lying around in the studio. When the guy recovered and came back, I no longer saw myself as an assistant. I left and went into fashion photography. I wasn’t really interested in fashion, but all my images were of shoes, bags, etc. I was clueless at that time; I didn’t know you could be a photojournalist or an art photographer.

LL: When did you realize you wanted to do more personal work?

PV: After ten years I asked myself, am I really interested in this stuff? The answer was no. Working in fashion was fun, it had been a good life. But I had the feeling there was no life, no story in anything I was making. If you want to make a great picture, you’ve got to be interested in it! I had contracts with Elle and with Marie Claire magazines, and I just quit. In 2004 I used my savings to move to New York because I thought changing continents would help me create something new. New York seemed the best place to invent a new life. I think everyone thinks that!

LL: Where did the idea of constructing sets come from?

PV: I was living in Brooklyn and I had a small closet. That’s where I did my first work. I had an idea in my mind and I thought I should draw or paint it, but I wanted to take photographs. I knew I wasn’t going to find exactly the right location in real life, so I thought I’d try to make a set. The results were good from the start. What I was seeing in the diorama was exactly what I had in my mind, and that made me very happy.

LL: The sets and props are incredibly detailed. How do you make and find everything?

PV: It’s a combination. I make some clothes and props, I find others on eBay. I make things in cardboard because it’s easy to work with. I was never interested in making models, but this is the only way I could represent what I wanted to show. I try to make it look as real as possible, but I also want it to look a bit like a dream. Reality is too boring; we’re already living in it.

LL: Your first series, War Souvenir, was based on stories your grandmother told you about World War Two. The Automaton was based on a story your father told you. So you were a little influenced by him!

PV: Yes. My father was a great storyteller. We’d sit at the kitchen table after dinner and he’d tell stories. Sometimes he’d invent new ones, sometimes we’d ask for old ones. One of my favorites was this story of the automaton. I decided to give him a vision of that story.

LL: The story is about an old man who’s one of the remaining Jews in the ghetto of Venice during World War Two…

PV: It’s completely invented, but it’s based on one real fact. During the war, almost all Jews who lived in the Venice ghetto left. The remaining ones were poor people who couldn’t afford to leave. On the evening of December 8th, 1943, the ghetto was evacuated, all Jews were taken away by Italian fascists. My character is an old Jewish watchmaker. Because he’s lonely, he creates an automaton to keep him company.

LL: You wrote this story as well as photographing it. How did those two experiences compare?

PV: Writing a story is the same kind of process as photographing or painting. It comes from the same place; it’s the same process with different tools. Writing and photography give me the same pleasure and desperation, the same happiness and sadness and anger.

LL: Your other series, Winter Stories and Behind the Walls, have a different feeling. They’re not connected to any specific time.

PV: I tried to make them timeless. There are no vehicles, no objects that can date the photograph exactly. It’s a vague past, or perhaps the future, why not?

LL: I see echoes in your work of Edward Hopper (for the feeling of isolation) and Magritte (for the surreal elements that creep in). Do you like those artists?

PV: I never thought about this until you said it. I like both of those artists very much. I’m also very indebted to an Italian painter of the 1920s, Antonio Donghi.

LL: In Behind the Walls you used digital manipulation to put yourself in the pictures. Every figure in those images is you. How does it feel to enter your own fantasy worlds?

PV: It’s very natural. I have an identical twin brother, so I’m used to seeing myself from the outside. Every twin has a mirror in front of them. I had a desire to be anchored in my created worlds and not have to put someone else—a doll—there. It was easy to take photographs of myself and digitally insert them. When I look at those images, I don’t see myself. I always try to change my face a bit, find a new character. This was something I did as a child. Because being different from my twin meant being myself.

LL: You could create almost anything these days, with digital technology…

PV: Yes. Before Behind the Walls, I never used Photoshop. I wish I had, because it would have made my life much easier! But post-production costs a lot, and I didn’t have the skills to do it myself. It took me time to get there, but I’m happy I did. The possibilities with the new technology are fantastic. It’s like being a painter and someone gives you a bag, and inside there’s a completely new color. I think photography is much more interesting now than it was before, digital technology has opened the door of fantasy and imagination.

LL: It’s changed the mission of photography.

PV: Right. Photography has always been the witness of our history, but now it’s lost that mission a bit and is growing into something else. I know it’s a big tragedy for some people, but for me I think it’s more freeing. It can be art or not, or be a witness or not. There’s the same feeling now that there was in the 1840s, when photography was invented and there was a surge of creativity.

LL: Where is your creativity going to take you next?

PV: I’d like to make a real movie. Also an opera, but without music. Just the stage, the costumes, the characters. With movies, I think you can go deeper, or with music or literature. Even with cuisine. If I see a photo show, it’s fun. But when I hear music, read a great book, or even eat a great plate of pasta e fagioli, my emotions are really stirred. Don’t you think?

LL: I think that’s a very interesting thing for a photographer to say!

PV: Well, I’m objective. But I’m just in the beginning; there are many more stories I want to tell. And I’m a very lucky person. I give thanks to God, if there’s a God, because I love my work. I’m living the life I always wanted.

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Paolo Ventura is represented by Hasted Kraeutler Gallery NYC. His work is on show at the Italian Academy, Columbia University through March 8, 2013, 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Italian Academy is at 1161 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027.

Click here to see a video of Ventura talking about Winter Stories and how he makes his sets.

Click here to see Ventura talking about and reading The Automaton.

Click here for a panel discussion with Paolo Ventura, curator Renato Miracco and editor Denise Wolff.

I was thrilled, then, when I was asked to guest-moderate the inaugural meeting of the International Center for Photography’s book club. Obviously, the concept is right up my street. For each exhibition cycle, the ICP chooses a book that underscores or amplifies the themes of the exhibit. Participants read the book, then attend an evening gallery tour and book club discussion.

The first book under the microscope was J.M. Coetzee’s powerful, unflinching post-apartheid novel Disgrace. It accompanied the exhibition Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life, which closed last weekend so unfortunately is no longer viewable. Of course, as in any conflict, photography played an important role in the struggle against apartheid, and the exhibition drew on a rich and exciting vein of material.

Anyone who lived through the 1980s will certainly remember the cruelty, violence and repression of the apartheid era. They’ll also remember the joy that erupted when Nelson Mandela was freed in 1990, and as the path to majority rule began. And then there was the inevitable reality-check: years of disappointment and conflict, punctuated by moments of genuine progress and uplift. To quote Donald Rumsfeld (not my usual go-to source), “democracy is messy.”

What you don’t always get as a distant observer of this struggle, though, is a sense of grey tones, the nuances that get lost in a time of raging conflict. Rise and Fall of Apartheid did a wonderful job of painting a full-tone picture of South Africa. There were the expected images of struggle—Ian Berry’s shocking documentation of the 1960 Sharpville Massacre, Joao Silva’s images from Soweto—but there were also photographs that illuminated quieter moments of everyday life.

Take the lovely image above by Peter Magubane, of a nanny and child in 1956 Johannesburg, which shows that love can’t be segregated. Or this one, by Jurgen Schadeberg, of a protest by The Black Sash, an anti-apartheid group made up of respectable women from the suburbs. Another image by Schadeberg shows a terrifically sexy young Miriam Makeba in 1955, and was later adapted into a cover for Drum, a groundbreaking South African magazine.

The exhibition ended with some more contemporary work, like Sue Williamson‘s coruscating 1994 artist’s book A Tale of Two Cradocks. In this effective piece, the artist interposed pages from a bland guidebook of the Eastern Cape town Cradock with the story of Matthew Goniwe, a local resident who was pulled out of his car and shot to death by the police. Cleverly, the book was displayed like a concertina, so that viewers saw different stories depending on which side they stood—a potent metaphor for the effects of apartheid.

A novel could spend many pages painting a visual picture as strong and nuanced as some of these. But a novel can go places a photograph (or even a group of photographs) can’t: into a subject’s private reflections. For as much as we rely on documentary photography and photojournalism to bear witness to history, they’re mostly occurring in the public sphere. Some incidents, some transformations are beyond their reach—even, sometimes, beyond the reach of nonfiction. It takes a novelist to breathe life into them.

Coetzee’s Disgrace is a hugely ambitious novel, spare and precise in its language, but emotionally devastating. Set in the 1990s in Cape Town, it tells the story of David Lurie, a humanities professor who’s forced to resign when a student complains of sexual harrassment. Disgraced, David flees to the Eastern Cape, where his daughter Lucy owns a small farm. Thanks to changing land laws, Lucy’s former black employee Petrus has been able to buy land from her and their power relationship has shifted. When Lucy and David are brutally attacked by three black men on the farm, each character comes up with surprising and distressing responses.

Disgrace has an interesting history. When it came out in 1999 it was widely hailed as a masterpiece outside South Africa. Inside the country, reactions were more mixed. Thabo Mbeki’s ANC government was particularly angry about the depiction of blacks in the novel, which it felt were stereotypical and one-sided, making blacks out to be largely violent and amoral. “South Africa is not only a country of rape,” Mbeki said.

In fact, when the Human Rights Commission convened in 2000 for hearings on racism, a government group denounced Coetzee as a purveyor of racist stereotypes–which presented an embarrassing dilemma for Mbeki three years later, when Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize. (In what one writer described as “an ANC egg dance,” congratulations were given and deemed not inconsistent with the censure.) Even fellow South African author and Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer—usually a Coetzee admirer—weighed in, saying, “In the novel Disgrace there is not one black person who is a real human being.”

(At the book club, someone asked if Nelson Mandela had congratulated Coetzee on his Nobel Prize. I didn’t know the answer, but later found this story, which reports that Mandela not only congratulated Coetzee but called him “an intellectual hero.”)

Gordimer’s comment brings up an interesting question, namely: is the student David has his affair with black or white? Coetzee leaves this ambiguous. Her name is Melanie Isaacs, which could be black but could also be Jewish. She’s attending college in Cape Town, which indicates that her family isn’t dirt-poor, but isn’t a marker for race: by the mid-1990s, there was open admission to college. David Lurie’s fictional Cape Technical University has black faculty members too.

Why does this matter? To my mind, Coetzee—an incredibly precise and purposeful writer—does this for a reason. He makes Melanie a blank screen to which readers bring their own preconceptions. In terms of the novel’s structure, it makes more sense if Melanie is black, and I think that’s the reason most critics have taken her race as a given. But Coetzee is a writer who doesn’t want anything to be easy (just read his later novels if you doubt that). The absence of a clear race markers for Melanie means we have to think carefully about how we perceive identities, make judgments and label people.

And this, too, is something a photograph can’t do. It can’t strip away obvious visual information. Miriam Makeba is in front of us, gloriously vibrant, in a way Melanie Isaacs isn’t. Conversely, the characters in a novel have what might be described as a breathing presence, which is to say that we observe them over time, not in one static moment (or a series of static moments). We’re privy to their thoughts; we walk in their skin in a way that isn’t so possible with photographs.

So it seemed somehow reductive, to me, when I watched the film adaptation of Disgrace. The film was stark, well-acted, difficult to watch—I can’t imagine it being a better adaptation, but it seemed flat to me after the novel. The ambiguities and doubts were mostly ironed out, the directors of course being obliged to translate Coetzee’s ellipses into tangible imagery. (In case you’re wondering, Melanie Isaacs is portrayed as a very light-skinned black woman.)

Calling Coetzee a purveyor of racist stereotypes is clearly beside the point. Though the novel exists on one plane as a piece of dramatic realism, it’s also rife with symbolism, becoming something of a racial political fable. Coetzee’s questions go much more than skin-deep (and skin-color-deep), into areas that affect us all: moral responsibility, accountability, humanism. Maybe the failure of the South African government to grasp this is what made the author emigrate to Australia in 2002.

I’m now reading a magnificent book on South Africa by Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart. It’s a nonfiction book by a white South African whose relatives played key roles in the apartheid era. Malan, who grew up instinctively liberal—alienated from his white family but not completely accepted by his black friends—does a wonderful job of describing his journey against a backdrop of turmoil. Like Disgrace, My Traitor’s Heart is full of moral conundrums and descriptions of brutal violence. But it also resonates with warmth, a quality that stands in counterpoint to Coetzee’s sometimes bleak vision.

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The next ICP Book Club pick is George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, to accompany the exhibition We Went Back: Photographs from Europe 1933-1956 by Chim. Watch this space for details on the date.

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P.S. The Literate Lens turned a year old last Saturday! In its year online, the blog has garnered 188 subscribers, 39,400 page views, 140 comments and 198 Facebook fans. Thanks for your interest and support, and please keep your comments coming!

Bonanos traces Polaroid’s history from its non-photography beginnings (its polarizing filter was first applied to sunglasses) to its recent, humiliating rounds of bankruptcies and reinventions. Most of the story swirls around founder Edwin H. Land, a visionary who was pretty much the Steve Jobs of his time. In fact, Jobs acknowledged Land as his hero, traveling several times to meet the camera inventor in Boston. “The man is a national treasure,” Jobs told an interviewer in 1985.

Land was certainly an impressive person. A college dropout (like Jobs), he was clearly brilliant and extremely driven. His wife complained that he was always late; that’s because he was constantly working, not hesitating to call employees at 4 a.m. to discuss an idea. His mind was fast, dynamic and incredibly fertile. In 1970 he foresaw the smartphone, talking about “a camera that you would use as often as your pencil or your eyeglasses.”

There have been quite a few articles about how Jobs was inspired by Land. It may seem a stretch, but consider this: in the 1970s, photographers were shooting over a billion Polaroids a year. In its heyday, Polaroid specialized in creating products that were sleek, exciting, and, as Bonanos writes, “what people viscerally wanted.” And when Polaroids hit the market in the 1940s, there was usually a one-week wait between shooting photographs and seeing them, so that “the leap to Polaroid was like replacing a messenger on horseback with your first telephone.”

Consider, too, that Land was a genius at presentation. He might have believed that “marketing is what you do if your product is no good,” but he also intuitively understood the public’s need for image and theatrics. At Polaroid’s annual shareholders’ meetings, he often gave flashy presentations with slideshows and music. “A generation later, Jobs did the same thing, in a black turtleneck and jeans,” Bonanos writes.

As for the product itself—Bonanos does a great job of explaining the mystique of the Polaroid image. “Seeing your own face emerge out of the misty goop has the quality of a sleight-of-hand or a striptease,” he writes, “a slow reveal, one that keeps you guessing, then delivers… It’s hard not to watch.” Anyone over thirty probably remembers the thrill of holding one of those white plastic squares, waiting for an image to swim up out of the green murk–which Polaroid’s advertising smartly likened to “opening a present.” Long before consumers expected instant gratification, Polaroid was dishing it out in giant spoonfuls.

Speaking of thrill, it didn’t take long for the public to realize another benefit of Polaroid: no lab technicians ever saw the image. “Instant photography’s success was at least in part built on adult fun,” Bonanos writes. Despite Polaroid’s carefully-honed image as an instrument of clean family entertainment, the company was well aware of its other uses. In 1965, Polaroid brought out a camera slyly called The Swinger. Small, pretty and fun, the camera practically winked at consumers. (In the 1980s, a series of successful Polaroid TV ads for the OneStep also featured James Garner and actress Mariette Hartley bantering sexily, as in the one below.)

Instant: The Story of Polaroid has other fascinating bits of Polaroid history. One of Land’s odder ideas was Polasound, a technology that would have allowed users to record photo captions with images (it failed). He employed an impressive number of women in senior positions, many of them Smith College graduates who brought an artistic sensibility to the company. And he prioritized research to an incredible degree, once giving an employee two years to simply observe and think about a problem.

It’s also fun to revisit, in these pages, the work of artists who embraced Polaroid technology. Ansel Adams had a close, remunerative relationship with the company that lasted many decades. Walker Evans and André Kertesz both had late-career bursts of creativity thanks to Polaroid. Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hockney all did distinctive work with Polaroids.

At the center of all this was Land, charismatic and handsome (in photographs here, he looks like Gregory Peck’s slightly less good-looking brother). Land was capable of soaringly persuasive rhetoric. Take this 1974 passage he wrote, extolling the virtues of the iconic Polaroid SX-70, which reminded me of Don Draper’s inspired pitch for the slide carousel in season one of Mad Men:

“It turns out that buried within us–God knows beneath how many pregenital and Freudian and Calvinistic strata–there is a latent interest in each other; there is tenderness, curiosity, excitement, affection, companionability and humor; it turns out, in this cold world where man grows distant from man, and even lovers can reach each other only briefly, that we have a yen for and a primordial competence for a quiet good-humored delight in each other; we have a prehistoric tribal competence for a non-physical, non-emotional, non-sexual satisfaction in being partners in the lonely exploration of a once-empty planet.”

Where did all this brilliance go? Well of course, Polaroid’s days as a market leader were numbered once digital photography gained hold, but that wasn’t the only factor in the company’s demise. Other elements included Land’s fallibility (he invested heavily in Polavision, a video recorder that was beaten out by Sony’s Betamax) and his failure to anoint a successor. After he was forced out, the company stumbled under different CEOs, each worse than the last. In 2008, CEO Tom Petters was arrested in an FBI sting and sent to prison for fifty years for stealing $3.65 billion from the company.

It could have been different. Under a better CEO, Polaroid could have married its PoGo portable digital printer with a camera to produce a digital Polaroid (Bonanos spends several pages wondering why this didn’t happen). And if the CEO of the current, much depleted Polaroid, Bobby Sager–himself a photographer–had been in charge during the Petters years, Polaroid film would probably still be with us. Sager says here that he “wouldn’t have had the heart” to close it down.

Instead, Polaroid film is now a collector’s item, despite a huge outcry by fans. The energetic, failed attempt to save it shows the existence of a vibrant niche market: this market is now being partially served by The Impossible Project, a boutique company of ex-Polaroid people. Another group, the New55project, is working on a replication of Type 55, and of course there are Hipstamatic, Instagram and all the other “retro” filter technologies that digitally replicate the look of Polaroids (I wondered why these weren’t mentioned in Bonanos’s book).

“Why can’t I see the picture right away?” Posed by his three-year-old daughter, this question inspired Land to create the Polaroid. It was a vital link between roll film and digital photography, a great creative breakthrough. But the rise and fall of Polaroid is a cautionary tale. It shows that technical genius and vision aren’t always enough to ensure longevity. You also need to predict the future and align your vision with it–not just once, but time and time again.

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A Literate Lens event! Join Sarah at the ICP Book Club, January 3rd 2013, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Want to meet art and photography lovers who share your passion for novels? If so, please join me on January 3rd for the launch of the International Center for Photography’s Book Club! Each exhibition cycle, ICP will select a novel related to exhibition topics and host a meet-up for readers at the museum.

The current exhibition is Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life. On January 3rd at 6:00 p.m., ICP will host a walkthrough of the exhibition, following which I’ll be moderating a discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s powerful post-apartheid novel Disgrace.

Disgrace tells the story of David Lurie, a professor of Communications at Cape Technical University who loses his position after a ill-advised affair with a student. Disgraced, Lurie flees to the rural Eastern Cape community where his daughter Lucy has a small farm. When a shocking act of violence happens there, Lurie must grapple with his own sense of morality in a country caught in the chaotic aftermath of centuries of racial oppression.

The ICP is located at 1133 6th Avenue at 43rd Street. For more details, click here.

The latest novel to take on this challenge is the extremely ambitious Eight Girls Taking Pictures by Whitney Otto. (Thanks, Julie Brown, for bringing this book to my attention!) As its title implies, Eight Girls tells the stories of eight different female photographers, spanning roughly a hundred years from the 1890s to the 1990s.

If you’ve ever wanted to get a feel for how women have contributed to photography without grappling with Naomi Rosenblum’s weighty A History of Women Photographers, this novel is definitely for you. Otto calls it “my love letter, my mash note, my valentine” to women photographers she’s loved throughout her life. They include Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller and Ruth Orkin. Names have been changed (I’ll have more to say about that later), so Cunningham becomes Cymbeline Kelley, Miller is Lenny Van Pelt, Modotti is Clara Argento—and so on. In some cases, Otto tweaks their biographies too.

Of all the arts, women have arguably been allowed to contribute the most to photography. Reasons for this are many: they include photography’s emergence at a time when women were gaining independence, its hobbyist aspects (which allowed some women to begin at home as ‘dabblers’) and its initial status as a technical craft (which made it less threatening for women to be involved). Whatever the reasons, though, photography has long attracted the kind of strong, charismatic women who make for good fictional characters.

And sure enough, the women depicted in Eight Girls are all vibrant, unconventional characters. Each is a pioneer in her own way—whether she discovers a new technique or shows that children can be photographed unsentimentally. Each struggles to find her vision, but eventually manages to express herself transcendently through photography, with various personal costs.

The book unfolds chronologically, with each “girl” getting her own chapter. Otto focuses on how each woman struggles to maintain a balance between her art and her personal life. There are many challenges, which range from the inevitable -isms (sexism, conservatism, alcoholism, anti-semitism) to demanding husbands and children, wars, money problems and varying levels of self-doubt.

Over time, some of these conflicts repeat themselves across generations and some ebb, only to have new ones seep in. Cymbeline Kelley marries a bohemian painter who urges her, “Let’s not be like anyone else,” only to find herself tethered to her children and the domestic sphere while her husband blithely leaves for months on end to pursue his art. Forty years later, Miri Marx (based on Ruth Orkin) is also expected to stay at home with her children, and thirty years after that, Jesse Berlin is struggling to define herself against an artist husband. Progress can be elusive. As the elderly Cymbeline says to the young Jesse (who’s photographing her for something called the BelleFemme project), “I sometimes think things are harder for young women now then they were in my time.”

For me, one of the great pleasures of this novel was finding out about some amazing women photographers I didn’t already know about. For example, Madame Amadora, the subject of the second chapter, is based on the early twentieth-century British photographer Madame Yevonde. A literally colorful character, Yevonde pioneered the use of color photography in the 1930s, using the short-lived Vivex system. In her most famous series, The Goddesses, she photographed society women to look like goddesses from Greek and Roman mythology. The image at left shows how shockingly modern some of these images were.

Charlotte Blum, who gets one of the best chapters, is another fascinating character. She’s based on Grete Stern, a German photographer who, along with her partner Ellen Auerbach, won prizes in the 1930s for striking avant-garde advertising images. Jewish in Weimar Germany, Stern and Auerbach worked together as Ringl + Pit, their childhood nicknames (thinking ‘Stern and Auerbach’ sounded too much like a department store) until the rise of Nazism forced them out. Stern later emigrated to Argentina, where she made a wonderfully surreal series of photomontages called Sueños (Dreams) to illustrate a women’s magazine column on psychoanalysis. (The image below is from the series.)

Otto writes about these characters with verve and lyricism, tracing the threads of influence and coincidence that connect them. I haven’t read fiction by her before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I saw the movie adaptation of her bestseller How to Make an American Quilt, and I remember thinking it was ok, if a bit sentimental. But I was impressed by her research, descriptions and characterizations here. For an author who straddles the divide between literary and popular fiction, she’s a pretty decent writer.

It’s all a lot to manage, though, and I have to confess that the eight stories and all their plots and minor characters got a bit overwhelming. Details got lost, and because all the chapters were written with the same blend of omniscience and close third person voice–not to mention the fact that many of the women had similar personalities–they often merged together. It didn’t help that I was reading this on a first-generation e-book reader that didn’t allow me to flip back and forth easily to refer to earlier sections. I would have liked it if Otto had worked a bit more to distinguish her eight protagonists from each other.

Compounding this difficulty was the fact that I was constantly in the process of comparing fact and fiction. Perhaps Otto thought that changing her heroines’ names would make it easier for readers to get caught up in their stories, but for me it was the opposite. Each chapter felt like a mystery: so who’s who here? I gave myself brownie points for every character I correctly identified: Morris Elliot is Edward Weston, Angel Andrs is Ansel Adams (not hard!), Tin Type is Man Ray, and so on. Confusingly, Otto isn’t consistent about her name-changing policy: Ansel Adams never appears directly but gets a name change, whereas Diego Rivera makes a cameo appearance as himself. And Lee Miller is mentioned in a late chapter, which is strange given that the earlier Lee Miller chapter casts her as Lenny Van Pelt.

Admittedly, this might not be such an issue for readers who don’t know about these characters’ real-life analogs. I only knew about some of them, but even so, I found it a little distracting.

I could go on for a long time about the issue of changing names in historical fiction, because it’s something I’ve thought about a lot with my own novel. It’s a fraught issue. Historical novelists who don’t change real names open themselves up to easy criticism–but when novels keep the biography of a famous person intact and change the name, it can be annoying too. In the recent novel Waiting for Robert Capa (which I wrote about in a previous post), Spanish novelist Suzanna Fortes kept real names, and took some heat for sentimentalizing Capa and Gerda Taro’s relationship. But first-time novelist Gaynor Arnold faltered in her 2009 novel Girl in a Blue Dress, where she changed Charles Dickens into Alfred Gibson. I understand why she didn’t want to take on the mighty Dickens’ legacy, but the reinvention suffered by comparison–after all, who could hope to make up better names and characters than Uriah Heep, Abel Magwitch and Ebenezer Scrooge?

There are times when a novelist is only loosely inspired by a famous person. In that case, I think a name change makes sense. A case in point is one of my favorite photography-themed novels, Helen Humphreys’ luminous Afterimage. Humphreys was inspired by Julia Margaret Cameron, but changed Cameron’s life story significantly enough that the change of name to Isabelle Dashell seemed appropriate.

It’s a fraught issue, but in general, I’m for keeping real names wherever possible, because I think readers are sophisticated enough to know they’re reading fiction. The reason for fictionalizing a known person’s life is because you want to get inside that person’s head and present the inner life that accompanied their famous acts. Done well, that can be amazingly satisfying. It gives you a visceral sense of what it might have been like to be walking around in the skin of the character. If that’s not what you want, go read a biography.

In Eight Girls Taking Pictures, Otto is caught in the middle. In the case of the two contemporary women characters (based loosely on Judy Dater and Sally Mann), I can see why she wouldn’t want to use real names. These women are alive, and it could seem indelicate to write about their intimate thoughts. Mann’s is probably the story Otto changes most: Jenny Lux’s images (and the controversy they cause) are clearly based on Mann, but the story takes place in California’s Napa Valley, a very different landscape from Mann’s native Virginia.

With the earlier women, though, Otto seems to have stuck very closely to the known biographies. Since her novel will be an introduction to the work of these women for many readers, I kind of wish she’d been able to use their real names. As I said above, with this volume of characters, working out who everyone was in the context of the novel was hard enough without playing the guessing game of who was whom in real life.

I don’t say this to discourage anyone from reading Eight Girls. The novel is based on eight fascinating women, and Otto has largely done them justice. Each chapter is absorbing and evocative. But be warned: take your time with the book, and make sure to read it in a format where it’s easy to flip back and forth. Then when you’re done—or while reading—go check out these women photographers’ wonderful images, starting with the resources below. That’s something you definitely won’t regret.

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RESOURCES

The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Madame Yevonde: An official site about Yevonde Cumbers Middleton (aka Madame Yevonde) with galleries of her images.

Lee Miller Archives: Official Lee Miller site.

This page shows many of Grete Stern’s surrealist Sueños (Dream) series.

Ringl + Pit is a documentary movie that tells the story of photographers Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach.

Tina Modotti: A web site devoted to all things Tina Modotti.

Portraits of Women, 1964-2004, by Judy Dater (on whom the Jesse Berlin character is partly based)

Sally Mann’s web site.

I live on high ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and from there we watched helplessly as friends in other areas suffered power cuts, flooding and worse. You’ve seen the footage so I won’t elaborate, except to say that as with 9/11, there was a spirit of cooperation and kindness that was heartening. Uptowners made space in small apartments to host downtown refugees; neighbors checked on the elderly and infirm. In the Harlem branch of Fairway, where I did my pre-storm shopping, lines were long but smiles were wide. It was a marked change from the cart-bumping, glaring behavior you often see there.

All of this reminded me of an interview I did four years ago with photographer Jim Reed, for a story in PDNedu. Based in Kansas, Jim is one of the country’s top documenters of extreme weather. Over the last twenty years, he has become known for capturing images that show both the destructive power of the elements and their astonishing beauty.

Jim is also a talented writer, having started his current career after selling a screenplay to Hollywood—a move that enabled him to buy the expensive gear he needed to document storms. He has written two books: Storm Chaser: A Photographer’s Journey and Hurricane Katrina Through the Eyes of Storm Chasers (with Mike Theiss). These days, in addition to photographing and writing, he spends time lecturing to different audiences about extreme weather.

In the wake of Sandy, I was curious to hear what Jim thought about our current and future climate, the media’s handling of the superstorm and the emotional and political fallout. I caught up with him over the weekend and we talked about all of this, in a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation that lasted over an hour.

Literate Lens: How has your work changed since we spoke four years ago?

Jim Reed: Since we talked last, the extreme weather events have become so frequent that it’s impossible for me to cover each one. Choosing where to go and pacing myself has become very important. When I don’t chase a storm, I always follow the coverage and try and learn what I can from it. With Hurricane Sandy, I made a decision to document it from afar. Instead of being out there photographing I was documenting it through television, radio, internet and social media, which provided me with a very different perspective.

LL: Were you surprised by Sandy’s ferocity?

JR: Not really. If you look at my notes, journals and photographs over the last two decades, you’ll see a very specific, factual pattern. There are now more storms and bigger storms that challenge our infrastructure. The consequences are more dire. So I thought something like this was coming, but I predicted it would come by next fall. It came a bit earlier than I expected.

LL: If you, an educated observer, were able to predict this, why do you think officials on the east coast haven’t taken more precautions to protect their communities?

JR: I’m not a climatologist, but from what I’ve seen, first of all we’re dealing with a truly unpredictable, ever-changing subject, so the fact that we can predict it at all with any degree of accuracy is amazing to me. With weather patterns, the computers base their models on past systems, then average those with other information. But so much is changing so quickly in the weather that sometimes the computers get challenged. For example, hurricanes used to immediately weaken when they made landfall, but Irene didn’t do that and neither did Sandy. The computers are making the best guesses they can, but these are extraordinary times and if we’ve never seen something before, that might throw them off. And when you have the Jetstream moving and hurricanes going over warmer waters, there are going to be changes.

LL: What did you learn from monitoring the media on Sandy?

JR: First of all I was impressed by the forecasters at places like Accuweather and the Weather Channel. The computer models are getting better all the time, and they did an excellent job with this system. I was impressed that the national media started talking about the storm as soon as they did. And when it started, the New York Times had a blog with constant live updates, and they did a marvelous job. It was fascinating to watch bloggers in other countries write about it; this was truly a global story.

LL: I noticed that media channels were doing a lot of crowd-sourcing; asking viewers, listeners and readers to send in photos of how the storm affected their neighborhoods. How do you feel about citizens reporting on extreme weather?

JR: It’s a great question. Back in 1990s, when I went out storm chasing I’d pop in a tape to record the Weather Channel, and they would emphatically tell people not to go out and take pictures. Now they say just the opposite. Perhaps they’ll say, only take pictures if you can do it safely, but is the public qualified to know what’s safe? During Sandy, one woman came out to take a picture and stepped on a puddle of water that was on a live line, and not only was she electrocuted but her body caught fire. I mean, you’re not going to keep some people inside, the curiosity is too primal. But I wish we could have a campaign to help people become more weather literate, so they’d know when they were pushing it. You wouldn’t go to Africa and stand in front of a herd of stampeding elephants—but people will stand out in a hurricane, which is pretty analogous. And all they’re thinking is, how cool are those elephants?

LL: I read on your web site that you went to the White House in 2009 to talk to Chief White House Photographer Pete Souza about extreme weather photography. How did that come about and what did you discuss?

JR: Pete Souza heard I was giving a lecture at the Corcoran Gallery, and wanted to come but couldn’t. So he invited me to come to the White House and talk. He went to school in Kansas, so he knows what severe weather can be, and he has been with the President on storm aftermath tours. We talked about everything from cameras and methods of printing to climate change. I hope we’ll be talking more after the election! He’s got that weather bug, and with luck the Obama administration will have another four years to address this.

LL: Right, but at the same time, attention spans are so short and it seems hard for people to plan for more than their own generation’s future.

JR: It’s true. I’m perplexed by how quickly people seem to forget. But when you have major cities changed, when communities lose an entire zip code of houses and decades of memories are wiped out, it certainly leaves a visual impression. However, I’d like to come at this with an inspirational tone rather than by creating fear. We have a golden opportunity to address these issues now and make a historic difference.

LL: Visual documentation is clearly crucial. You’re known for taking breathtakingly beautiful images of weather systems, but you’ve also documented the devastation they bring. How does it feel to work with that dichotomy, and particularly to go into communities that have been wiped out?

JR: It’s very, very tough. That’s the one dark side of this adventure that I seldom talk about. Right after Katrina hit, we were there: we heard buildings collapse and people screaming for help for hours. I’ve experienced some post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time it feels good to be there and help. Sometimes we’re the first responders: we’ve helped locate people, or get them out of harm’s way. I also go in to places two or three weeks after a storm: I have a project called 19 Days Later. At that point, the media has left, people are no longer in shock, and they have a different take on what’s happened. You can’t help but absorb part of their grief. It’s not a natural thing. Once you see it and feel it, it’s with you for life.

LL: What do you tell people in your lectures?

JR: One of the first things I try to teach is that we are in a new age of weather challenges. I talk to people about becoming more weather literate, learning what to do to minimize hazards and disruption. With a storm like Sandy, we need to ask, Can we make the subways watertight? Do the galleries in Chelsea want to be storing their artwork in basements? Is diesel, which throws off a lot of noxious fumes, the most reliable form of backup power in the future? I’m concerned too about outdoor concerts and stadium events. In the last year or two, several stages have collapsed during high wind events and have crushed people to death. There needs to be a movement to change how we do this, to put in more braces and safety systems. Regardless of what’s causing this increase in severe weather, we can begin adapting immediately.

LL: What are you working on now?

JR: I’ve been documenting what will go down as a billion dollar drought. It’s not the sexiest subject, but it’s going to be hugely important. I was inspired to do this because last Christmas, I went to Minnesota to spend the holidays with my girlfriend, and on Christmas day there the grass was still green. I thought that was pretty odd. Sure enough, 2012 began and the weather started heating up, and suddenly farmland was completely drying up in the Midwest. This is a big story: the land is so arid that crops have failed and farmers have even been selling off cattle because the cattle have nowhere to graze. It’s going to have a huge impact on the food prices in 2013.

LL: All of this seems so depressing. Do you have hope for the future?

JR: I do actually, and I have a lot more as a result of Hurricane Sandy. The reaction from officials and leaders has been inspiring. I was very pleased to hear [New York] Governor Cuomo come out and say he was convinced there was an increase in the frequency of storms. We have an opportunity now to increase momentum. If I can play a part, that’s great. I’d like my images to inspire people to talk about the weather. Because we have to be thinking: If the weather’s going to throw me a challenge every few months, what do I need to do?

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See more of Jim’s images at his web site.