Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 318

June 26, 2015: Gordon Parks and America: Portrait Photos and the Past

[Earlier this year, I had the chance to visit an amazing photography exhibition at Boston’s Musuem of Fine Arts: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott . In this series, I’ll use that exhibition as a starting point for highlighting some of the many ways Parks’s career and life illuminate late 20thcentury American history and culture. Add your thoughts, whether you’ve seen the exhibition or not, in comments!]On what the cultural form can’t quite reveal to us, and what it can.First, I can’t end a series AmericanStudying a photographer without highlighting the ground-breaking work done by my friend, mentor, and former dissertation advisor Miles Orvell. From his seminal American Photography (2003), the definite scholarly overview and analysis of the subject, to his edited John’s Vachon’s America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War 2 (2003), Orvell has consistently been at the forefront of studying American photography and photographers. Vachon worked for Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) alongside Gordon Parks, and I imagine the two must have had some interesting encounters or conversations that could shed light on the history of American photography and culture in the 20thcentury. But if we can’t get back to those conversations, Orvell’s work is certainly a good proxy.Much of the time, we seem to assume that photographic portraits offer us preciselysuch glimpses into the past. But while of course they literally capture a piece of the past (“This is what Abraham Lincoln looked like,” and so on), I would argue that it has tended to be at best a distorted lens. After all, portrait photos are staged, artificially posed and constructed images of people that reflect some combination of the photographer’s instructions and the subject’s self-conscious self-image far more than whatever complex identity and personality might have existed there. That was even more true for the most historical of the photographs we have, where the posing and staging often took an extended period of time and no doubt resulted in drastically different images of the subjects than whatever they would have looked like in instantaneous shots. Which is to say, historical portrait photos seem to tell us far more about the process of photography and what it meant to those experiencing it than it does about those subjects themselves.And yet. If I come back to the Gordon Parks Fort Scott photos in the MFA exhibition with which I began this week’s series, I have to admit that: a) they do seem most definitely constructed, driven by both Parks’s own artistic vision and the self-images and goals of his subjects; and yet b) both of those elements are incredibly interesting and compelling, and reveal a great deal about both Parks and his subjects. Perhaps we can’t learn about what these people or their world might have been like in their most casual or unguarded moments, necessarily; of course we can’t even assume that we know such details about most of those around us in our own moment, other than perhaps our closest friends or loved ones. So in learning about the self-conscious, performed identities of these portrait subjects, just like in seeing products of the artistic vision of their photographer, what we are able to engage with is images of their social selves, their relationships to other people and to their communities (small and big, specific and broad). That’s a pretty valuable part of history to have access to after all, I’d say.      June Recap this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

June 25, 2015: Gordon Parks and America: Shaft

[Earlier this year, I had the chance to visit an amazing photography exhibition at Boston’s Musuem of Fine Arts: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott . In this series, I’ll use that exhibition as a starting point for highlighting some of the many ways Parks’s career and life illuminate late 20thcentury American history and culture. Add your thoughts, whether you’ve seen the exhibition or not, in comments!]On how Parks helps us analyze the problems and the possibilities of Blaxsploitation.Only two years after he directed the deeply personal film TheLearning Tree (1969), Gordon Parks was back behind the camera for a very, very different kind of ground-breaking film: Shaft (1971). With this hugely successful film and its sequel, Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), which he also directed, Parks helped usher in one of the 1970s most prolific and profitable film genres, Blaxploitation. Richard Roundtree’s badass private detective John Shaft was quite literally one of the principal archetypes for most of the decade’s Blaxploitation heroes and heroines, as well as inspiring iconic action hero types and images that have endured long beyond the waning of Blaxploitation as a genre—all of which means that his work directing the first two Shaft films could be seen as among the most influential and enduring cultural efforts of Parks’s long and impressive career.Which, I can’t lie, is a really frustrating sentence to write. How on earth could a photographer who spent more than half a century documenting identities and lives, communities and histories, from FSA portraits to Pittsburgh steel workers, New York City fashion to the Jim Crow South, be best known as the director of a film featuring lines like “Where the hell are you going, Shaft?” “To get laid, where the hell are you going?” or (from Isaac Hayes’s mega-hit theme song) “Who’s the black private dick/That’s a sex machine to all the chicks?” Following on the potent effects and meanings of the Civil Rights Movement and its era, a period that Parks’s photographic works could be said to have helped usher in and in which he participated significantly in any case, 1970s Blaxploitation films can feel at best extremely silly, and at worst exactly as exploitative of serious issues of race and community (among many others) as the name suggests. And Gordon Parks helped create them.I’m not going to pretend that I’ve got a clear pro-Blaxploitation perspective to reveal here, but I will say this: that last sentence, the fact that Parks did contribute so fully to the development of Blaxploitation as a genre, does in and of itself comprise an argument for taking the genre more seriously. This was an artist, after all, who consistently and crucially innovated, not only in his photographic career but also and just as fully in his film contributions (among other efforts). And here is another innovation, another cultural form that Parks helped create and popularize, another representation of African American and American lives and communities that he brought to wide and enduring audiences. That this representation has its flaws and limitations, that it needs response and analysis, that it leaves out certain stories and exaggerates or misrepresents others, only means that it’s a cultural form like any other, as complex and human as all the people on whom Parks’s portraits focused. And like those portraits, the Shaft films comprise another successful, vital stage in the very American career and life of Gordon Parks.Last Parks connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 24, 2015: Gordon Parks and America: The Learning Tree

[Earlier this year, I had the chance to visit an amazing photography exhibition at Boston’s Musuem of Fine Arts: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott . In this series, I’ll use that exhibition as a starting point for highlighting some of the many ways Parks’s career and life illuminate late 20thcentury American history and culture. Add your thoughts, whether you’ve seen the exhibition or not, in comments!]On Parks’s autobiographical novel and its even more ground-breaking film version.If Gordon Parks were just the hugely talented and influential photographer on whose career and works I’ve focused in the last two posts, that would be more than enough to merit this weeklong series and perhaps even a coveted spot in the under-construction American Hall of Inspiration. But in truth Parks was far more multi-talented than that, producing substantial and meaningful work in a number of artistic forms and genres, and as a result he left a cultural legacy that extends well beyond the worlds of photography and art. Over the next two posts I’ll highlight a few examples and products of those manifold talents, beginning here with his work telling the story of his own childhood as first a writer and then a filmmaker.Parks told that story first in his one published work of fiction (he published numerous autographiesand poetry collections as well as photography collections and textbooks), the autobiographical novel The Learning Tree (1963). I would locate Parks’s readable, compelling, and thought-provoking young adult novel alongside a work like William H. Armstrong’s Sounder (1969) in its ability to turn African American history into the kind of story that can engage and entertain as well as educate young readers. Parks’s book might not be quite as successful as Armstrong’s (which remains one of the greatest American young adult novels), but on the other hand it is both drawn from the author’s own life far more closely (which has its own interest and appeal) and represents, in its portrayal of 1910s and 20s Kansas, a period of African American and American history more consistently overlooked than the post-war sharecropping era of Armstrong’s book. Not bad at all for the man’s one published work of fiction!A few years after publishing his novel, Parks took an even more radical and significant artistic step: directing a feature film version of The Learning Tree (1969), and in the process becoming the first African American director of a Hollywood studio film (it was made for Warner Bros./Seven Arts). That Parks also wrote the screenplay, produced the film, and, just for good measure, composed the musical score to boot makes this truly one of the most virtuoso artistic performances in American film or cultural history. But all that behind the scenes history shouldn’t overshadow a simpler but even more crucial way in which the film made history: representing an African American childhood as the central story of a Hollywood movie. That is, there had been plenty of other novels like The Learning Tree; I don’t think there had ever been a film remotely like it, just one more way that Gordon Parks profoundly influenced and altered American culture and history.Next Parks connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 23, 2015: Gordon Parks and America: A Photographer’s Life

[Earlier this year, I had the chance to visit an amazing photography exhibition at Boston’s Musuem of Fine Arts: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott . In this series, I’ll use that exhibition as a starting point for highlighting some of the many ways Parks’s career and life illuminate late 20thcentury American history and culture. Add your thoughts, whether you’ve seen the exhibition or not, in comments!]Three projects that represent three American stages in Parks’s iconic career.1)      The Farm Security Administration (FSA): In the early 1940s, Parks secured his first steady photography gig, working for the influential Roy Emerson Stryker in the Information Division of the New Deal’s FSA. It was during this time that Parks created the photograph that remains one of his most famous and powerful works, American Gothic, Washington, D.C. (1942). In its connections of work and class to race and America, the photo reflects how fully Parks wedded his own social and cultural interests to the FSA’s mission; in its fundamental, unmistakable humanity, it reflects Parks’s lifelong talents as a portrait photographer.2)      The Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) Photography Project: After brief stints at the Office of War Information (OWI) and freelancing for Vogue magazine, Parks once again went to work for Stryker, this time for a series dedicated to capturing industrial settings and communities. Produced for the oil company’s Public Relations department, this project was at least as propagandistic in aim as anything done by the OWI. But as reflected in a photograph like Workmen in Powerhouse, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1944), in his work for the project Parks couldn’t and didn’t elide either his social and cultural interests or his talents for capturing complex human identities and lives. The result is a snapshot of mid-century industrialism that complements the more rural focus of the FSA work very potently.3)      The Restraints: Open and Hidden: Life magazine didn’t publish the Fort Scott series about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, but they did employ Parks as a photojournalist for twenty years; and while much of that work comprised portraits of celebrities and other iconic images, it also allowed Parks to continue investigating and portraying the issues and themes of most interest to him. That was especially apparent in his 1956 photo essay The Restraints, which followed three Mobile, Alabama African American families through their daily lives within the Jim Crow South. Not as personal to Parks as the Fort Scott series, perhaps, but just as historically and humanly revealing and powerful, as was every stage of his impressive career.Next Parks connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 22, 2015: Gordon Parks and America: A Stunning Exhibition

[Earlier this year, I had the chance to visit an amazing photography exhibition at Boston’s Musuem of Fine Arts: Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott . In this series, I’ll use that exhibition as a starting point for highlighting some of the many ways Parks’s career and life illuminate late 20thcentury American history and culture. Add your thoughts, whether you’ve seen the exhibition or not, in comments!]On three reasons why the Parks exhibition (which runs through September!) is a must-see.1)      These photos have been unseen for more than 60 years: I can’t sum up the amazing story of Parks’s photojournalism assignment for Life magazine, a series that the magazine subsequently never aired (for unclear reasons—perhaps because historical events got in the way, perhaps because of racism, perhaps just because of the exigencies of publishing), better than this New York Times story on the exhibition. So I’ll just add that the chance to see amazing unreleased photos from one of our most talented and significant photographers, more than six decades after they were taken, is an opportunity no AmericanStudier should pass up.2)      The photos reflect our history in subtle but vital ways: When Parks returned in 1950 to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, to try to catch up with and photograph a group of his high school classmates, the town remained as segregated as it had been in his 1910s and 20s childhood. Other than one picture of a young African American couple standing outside the town’s segregated movie theater (the second picture in the preview slideshow at the exhibition’s website), Parks’s photos don’t overtly portray that Jim Crow world. But on the other hand, of course they do—these individuals and families, lives and communities, were all part of that world, affected by and engaging with it on so many levels, and the photos provide a glimpse into that world far beyond the perhaps more familiar headlines and images.3)      The photos capture humanity: As a photographer primarily interested in human subjects, Parks (on whose life and career more in tomorrow’s post) was obviously very talented at portraits—not only at the literal art of taking people’s pictures, but at the more complex and compelling skill of capturing their identities and worlds through such portraits. And in the Fort Scott series, that skill served him very well for two distinct but related reasons. For one thing, segregation and racism depend on seeing people as types and stereotypes, not three-dimensional human beings; even in two-dimensional photos, Parks consistently pierced that prejudicial perspective. And for another thing, our 21st century narratives of histories like Jim Crow still too often portray people as simply small dots within the big picture; but the people in Parks’s photos are life-size, and give us amazingly powerful glimpses into those lives as a result.If you’re in the Boston area, get to the exhibition ASAP! If you’re not, feel free to come visit me and we’ll go together! Next Parks connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

June 20-21, 2015: Crowd-sourced Responses to the Charleston Terrorist Attack

[I’ve said it before and will say it again: one of the only positives to come out of all the American horrors of the last few years has been the volume of amazing public scholarly writing produced in response to them. That’s never been more evident than this week, in the aftermath of the terrorist shooting at Charleston’s historicMother Emanuel AME church. Here, then, a handful of the many such important pieces. Please add more, and your own thoughts, in comments!]Raw Story on the historic anniversary that almost certainly prompted this act of racial terrorism.Benjamin Park on the history of black churches in America.Charles Pierce on what we can and should think and speak out.Heather Cox Richardsonon the history and presence of domestic terrorism.And Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Confederate flag still flying over the South Carolina capitol.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Other Charleston thoughts or links you’d share?

PPS. Two more great pieces posted after I scheduled this post: Rob Greene on the church's history; and Josh Marshall of TPM on the dark history of race and terror.

June 19, 2015: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: A Tragic, Compelling Life

[Each of the last few years, I’ve helped kick off summer with a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition! Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll put its toes in the sand!]On why it’s important to get serious on the beach, and a book that helps us do that.As part of my BlockbusterStudying series last month, I addressed the argument that “It’s not Shakespeare”—the perspective, that is, that some popular art isn’t meant to be deep or thought-provoking, and shouldn’t be analyzed as such. The same argument could be made for beach reads as for blockbuster films, of course—that we can’t analyze or study a John Grisham legal thriller the same way we would To Kill a Mockingbird, not without acknowledging their overtly different intended audiences and effects at least. While I agree that we can and must consider the individual circumstances, goals, and genre of each particular work, however, I don’t at all agree that we can’t also analyze any and every work of art, including if not indeed especially the most popular. After all, every work both tells us something about its world and contributes something to ours—and that’s just as true if we’re engaging with them on a beach as when we encounter them in a classroom.Moreover, closing that perceived gap between the beach and the classroom has another important effect: it can help us think about the benefit of bringing to the beach books that we might not consider beach reads, works that feel more “serious” than the category generally implies. For one thing, many of those so-called serious books are just as readable, engaging, page-turning as the kinds of thrillers I’ve addressed earlier in this series (a goal for which all writers, including the most scholarly or academic, should strive). And for another, even more important thing, neither the world nor our place and role in it go away when we’re on vacation, in more relaxed spaces and situations—and so it seems to me that finding ways to continue engaging with complex social, cultural, historical, and identity questions as part of our beach reading is a great metaphor for bringing a piece of that world with us. It was for that reason that I featured my third book in last year’s Beach Reads series, and it’s for that reason that I’m ending this year’s series with Jeff Hobbs’s The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (2014).Hobbs’ book tells the story of one compelling American life, that of Hobbs’s college roommate Robert Peace. Peace, an African American young man, made his way from the inner city of Newark to Yale University, only to end up drawn back into the violence of that hometown neighborhood and killed by it at far too young an age. Peace’s story is thus profoundly illuminating of many of the social and cultural issues that remain so vexing and vital into 2015: race and community, the state of America’s cities, violence and guns, education and its opportunities and limitations, and many more. But it’s also and just as importantly a compelling story, compellingly told, capturing first and foremost the identity and perspective of this individual young man. Hobbs’s book reminds us on every page that great storytelling and analysis aren’t necessarily opposed, that indeed they can work hand in hand to impact both our emotions and our thoughts, our reading and our reflecting. That’s a pretty potent combination, for the beach and beyond.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: Responses to the week’s posts? Other Beach Reads you’d share? You know what to do!

June 18, 2015: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Big Man

[Each of the last few years, I’ve helped kick off summer with a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition! Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll put its toes in the sand!]On the autobiography as big and messy and entertaining and pitch-perfect as its author.Almost exactly four years ago, Clarence Clemons passed away. Among a few different posts in which I wrote about Clarence, I featured Bruce Springsteen’s amazing eulogy for his lifelong friend and colleague and partner in musical perfection. There’s a lot to love about that eulogy, but I think what it does best is highlight three seemingly distinct but ultimately inseparable qualities of Clarence’s: his larger-than-life, mythologized identity; his undeniable flaws and mistakes (ones felt with particular potency, Bruce notes, by family members such as Clarence’s sons); and his inspiring greatness, not only as a musician and performer but as a man. Taken together, that trio of elements doesn’t quite sum up Clarence—what details can sum up a life?—but it does, perhaps, capture his essence.Fortunately for Clarence fans and the reading public, not long before his death Clarence published an autobiographical book that likewise captured that unique and vital essence: Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales (2009), co-written with longtime writer and TV producer Don Reo. As its subtitle suggests, Big Man is as messy with the facts as was Clarence’s mythology (such as the many different stories about their first meeting that Bruce told in concerts over the years): featured throughout the book are stories that may or may not be true, legends that can’t help but call into question the more ostensibly factual stories from Clarence’s life with which they’re interspersed. All autobiographical writing should be approached more as narrative and story than as history, of course—but by foregrounding its playfulness with the facts, Clarence’s autobiography begs the question of what we can expect to learn or find about the man and his life even with such reasonable doubt in mind.I don’t have any answers to that question, and can’t say that I finished the book knowing any more, definitively, about Clarence than I did when I began. But at the same time, I felt that I knew Clarence himself, his voice and perspective, his jokes and his passions, his relationships and his world, who the Big Man was, much better. If that seems like a contradiction, well, all I can say is this: like Clarence, and like that other great American artist Walt Whitman, Big Man is large and it contains multitudes. Am I arguing that Big Manis a work of American art on par with Whitman’s “Song of Myself”? C’mon, that’d be crazy—a final act of Big Man mythologizing that goes way too far, that can’t possibly stand up to the facts. Which is to say, hell yeah I’m arguing that—now get yourself a beach read copy and, as my boy Walt put it, filter it from your self.Last Beach Read tomorrow,BenPS. Other Beach Reads you’d share?

June 17, 2015: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Alexie’s Diary

[Each of the last few years, I’ve helped kick off summer with a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition! Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll put its toes in the sand!]On three salient facts about Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007).1)      It’s Alexie’s best book: And that’s high praise indeed. I can’t quite believe I’ve never written about Alexie in this space before, but a quick search of the blog reveals that indeed I have not. Which is an outrage, as he’s one of our most talented and compelling contemporary voices—equally adept at fictionand poetry, as well as a prolific Tweeter and a pretty great interviewto boot. So I’m sure this won’t be the last time I’ll write about Alexie—but as of this moment in mid-2015, Diarystands out as the best book in this great author’s impressive career.2)      It’s a Young Adult novel: To some, those who dismiss Young Adult books as something less than Literature-with-a-capital-L, this fact might seem contradictory to my first one. But indeed, Alexie’s Diaryprovides a compelling case for exactly the opposite position, as it is both a Young Adult book and one of the great American novels of the last decade (and beyond). Which is an important and good thing on two interconnected counts: it reminds us that great art defies categorization or limitation, demanding that we engage with rather than circumscribe it; and it likewise highlights the ability of great art to reach many different audiences, including if not especially younger ones.3)      It’s one of our most “challenged” books: Perhaps because they recognize and are frightened by that last point, the ability of great art to reach and impact young audiences, many parents and other community members have “challenged” the place of Alexie’s book on educational syllabi and curricula, seeking to keep it out of the hands of our young readers. As I’ve written before, challenging a book’s place in school isn’t exactly the same as banning or censoring it; not all books should be read by all age groups or in classroom settings, after all. But to my mind Alexie’s book is precisely one that should be read by young readers, in educational settings where they can discuss and respond to it communally. So first things first: read it on a beach this summer, and then share it with your local middle school if you agree with me!Next Beach Read tomorrow,BenPS. Other Beach Reads you’d share?

June 16, 2015: AmericanStudies Beach Reads: Pleasantville

[Each of the last few years, I’ve helped kick off summer with a series on AmericanStudies Beach Reads. If it ain’t broke and all, so here’s this year’s edition! Please share your responses and beach read nominees for a weekend post that’ll put its toes in the sand!]On a great new mystery that literally forced its way into this series.I wanted the second post in this year’s Beach Reads series to focus on a relatively new novel, and was all set to write a post on David Gilbert’s funny and moving & Sons (2013), which I certainly recommend. But at the same time I had my hands on Attica Locke’s new third mystery novel, Pleasantville (2015), and, well, I couldn’t put it down long enough to write the post. Indeed, I’m writing these words having just finished Locke’s novel, which I was compelled to do before I did anything else. So even though I’ve already paid ample tribute to Locke’s considerable talents in this space, I’m not sure there’s a better definition of a great beach read than a book that requires your sustained attention, work or other obligations be damned, until you’ve finished it. Pleasantville fits that bill and then some, and might well be the best of Locke’s three great novels. Enough said!Next Beach Read tomorrow,BenPS. Other Beach Reads you’d share?