Aperture's Blog, page 181

Documentary Expanded: Interventions in Social Media (Video)

The Spring 2014 issue of Aperture magazine, produced in collaboration with guest editor Susan Meiselas and Magnum Foundation, explores how the ground for socially engaged documentary storytelling has radically shifted over the last decade and how photographers might adapt. On February 25th, 2014, Aperture hosted Susan Meiselas in conversation with Lev Manovich and Teru Kuwayama, two practitioners who extend the language of documentary by harnessing social media in novel ways. The audience was then invited to ask questions.

This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the board and members of Aperture Foundation.Moderated by Susan Meiselas, Manovich and Kuwayama discussed opportunities for rethinking contemporary documentary practice. After, the audience joined in a brief Q&A.

View “Documentary Expanded: Interventions in Social Media” Part 1 and Part 3 on Vimeo.

Aperture 214$19.95

The post Documentary Expanded: Interventions in Social Media (Video) appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Documentary Expanded: Interventions in Social Media

The Spring 2014 issue of Aperture magazine, produced in collaboration with guest editor Susan Meiselas and Magnum Foundation, explores how the ground for socially engaged documentary storytelling has radically shifted over the last decade and how photographers might adapt. On February 25th, 2014, Aperture hosted Susan Meiselas in conversation with Lev Manovich and Teru Kuwayama, two practitioners who extend the language of documentary by harnessing social media in novel ways. The audience was then invited to ask questions.



This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the board and members of Aperture Foundation.Moderated by Susan Meiselas, Manovich and Kuwayama discussed opportunities for rethinking contemporary documentary practice. After, the audience joined in a brief Q&A.



View “Documentary Expanded: Interventions in Social Media” Part 1 and Part 3 on Vimeo.

Aperture 214$19.95

The post Documentary Expanded: Interventions in Social Media appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Elinor Carucci: Mother (Video)

�On Wednesday, March 6 2014, Aperture Foundation in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons the New School for Design presented a talk and book signing with artist Elinor Carucci. A longtime artisan of the personal documentary image, Carucci’s photographs delve into the fissures and camaraderie of family. In an early series, Comfort, Carucci turned the lens on her parents, describing the hereditary aspects of her own identity. Another series, Closer, depicts a marriage fraught with infidelity and addiction. Carucci’s recent publication Mother (2013) documents the lives of her children, in a collection of images wrought using Carucci’s characteristic tactility with delicately personal subjects. After presenting, Carucci answered questions from the audience, and was available for a book signing.

This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the board and members of Aperture Foundation.

View “Elinor Carucci: Mother” Part 2 and Part 3 on Vimeo.

The post Elinor Carucci: Mother (Video) appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Elinor Carucci: Mother

�On Wednesday, March 6 2014, Aperture Foundation in collaboration with the Department of Photography at Parsons the New School for Design presented a talk and book signing with artist Elinor Carucci. A longtime artisan of the personal documentary image, Carucci’s photographs delve into the fissures and camaraderie of family. In an early series, Comfort, Carucci turned the lens on her parents, describing the hereditary aspects of her own identity. Another series, Closer, depicts a marriage fraught with infidelity and addiction. Carucci’s recent publication Mother (2013) documents the lives of her children, in a collection of images wrought using Carucci’s characteristic tactility with delicately personal subjects. After presenting, Carucci answered questions from the audience, and was available for a book signing.



This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the board and members of Aperture Foundation.



View “Elinor Carucci: Mother” Part 2 and Part 3 on Vimeo.

The post Elinor Carucci: Mother appeared first on Aperture Foundation NY.

Basetrack: Conversation with Teru Kuwayama

Balazs Gardi, Afghan detainee at Patrol Base Talibjan, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, November 7, 2010

In 2010, after many years of covering the war in Afghanistan, freelance photojournalist Teru Kuwayama received an invitation to embed with the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment in Helmand Province. Although it was only the start of the counterinsurgency campaign, it was the tenth year of a long and costly war that carried on at a far remove of the daily lives of Americans in the United States. Along with four other photographers, Balazs Gardi, Tivadar Domaniczky, Omar Mullick, and Rita Leistner, Kuwayama decided to approach the embed differently, and started Basetrack, a social-media reporting project conceived to connect Marines and their families and to target the social network—friends, family, and online presence—surrounding the battalion. Most of the pictures were taken with mobile phones or inexpensive consumer-grade cameras and distributed through Basetrack’s WordPress website, Flickr, and Facebook, the main Basetrack channel.

Last November, Kuwayama corresponded with Aperture about the experience of building Basetrack, the advantages of social media, and the misconceptions surrounding the early termination of their embed with the battalion.

—The Editors

Aperture: What was the nature of the partnership among contributing photographers?

Teru Kuwayama: It was a network operation. Photographers who had never worked in Afghanistan or who had never embedded with Marines were partnered up with the experienced operators. Two-person teams rotated in and out, to maintain a constant presence with the battalion.

The forward operators—the photographers on the ground—had extremely limited Internet access, so rear operators were tasked with maintaining the conversation online.

Aperture: Did you have any ideas, prior to the embed, of what you wanted to show or photograph?

TK: I avoid expectations or preconceived notions, but at the time we launched the project, counterinsurgency (or “COIN,” its military abbreviation) had been introduced as the new strategy in Afghanistan. One of the goals of Basetrack was to show the public what that counterinsurgency actually meant and looked like in practice. Ultimately it wasn’t about photography; it was about opening lines of communication. Photographs weren’t the product; they were the tactic.

Aperture: The project’s homepage featured a Google Maps interface. Why was a mapping component important?

TK: Basetrack was designed for a desktop user experience, focused on a mobile team traveling from outpost to outpost in southern Afghanistan. Map-based navigation was an intuitive approach. A core piece of the mission of the project was to tackle the abstraction of “over there” and to speak to the distance and the separation between the Marines and their families. Another piece was to provide some basic training in geography for those who might not have found Afghanistan on a map. Markers on the map were scrambled, so they reflected approximate but imprecise locations so as not to provide geolocation coordinates that could be used for targeting. The locations of the bases weren’t secret in any case.

Faces of vulnerable individuals, like Afghan interpreters working for the military, were blacked out. We did those redactions ourselves, at our own initiative, unlike a lot of major news organizations that don’t always demonstrate much concern for the fate of fixers and translators—but we also created custom software that allowed a designated military officer to black out any imagery or text that concerned them for any reason. The caveat was that the system also required them to articulate a justification for the redaction in a pop-up text window. Any redacted images or text were published, showing the blacked-out areas, making the redaction completely obvious. Unlike the hidden self-censorship typical in the mainstream media, we put the power and responsibility for withholding images or information squarely in the court of the military. Effectively, we facilitated unlimited censorship as long as it was done openly. In principle, it was very similar to the “transparent censorship” system that Twitter rolled out a year or two later.

Tattooed U.S. Marines, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010–11. First row: photographs by Balazs Gardi; second row: photographs by Teru Kuwayama; third row, from left to right: two photographs by Teru Kuwayama, last photograph by Monica Campbell.

Aperture: What were the images, or kinds of images, that engendered the most active conversations?

TK: Portraits of the Marines, but any kind of glimpse into the deployment triggered intense reactions. Our core audience was made up of family members who desperately wanted a glimpse of their Marines—any evidence that they were alive and well, any insight into the world they were living in.

Aperture: Was there any content that was controversial or produced a reaction that was unexpected?

TK: What was interesting was the banality of the controversies. For civilians, it can be hard to fathom that in some quarters of the military there’s a remarkable level of fastidiousness about seemingly trivial rules and regulations, down to the “authorized color” of socks or the length of sideburns or mustaches. The greatest scorn is reserved for “uniform Nazis,” referring to the kind of cultural bureaucracy where troops are punished for infractions such as not shaving properly, rolling their sleeves up, or not “blousing” their trousers according to regulation.

One Marine told me about being punished because a superior officer had found a photograph, posted on Facebook by his sister, where he appeared with minor infractions of the uniform standards. We found ourselves in a curious position when we sometimes had to withhold photographs that had no real “operational security” issues, effectively to protect Marines from their own officers. We approached this with the same transparency as we did with image and text redaction.

When families asked for photographs of their Marines and learned that some were being withheld for such seemingly absurd reasons, it generated a lot of debate on our Facebook page, and on some level, probably undermined the faith that family members might have had in the judgment of “command,” and along with it, the underlying logic of the “operational security” mantra that they were so familiar with.

First row, from left to right: 1st Lt. Robert Rain, age 26, from Dallas, Texas; LCpl. Richard Giligen, age 19, from Bellefonte, Pennsylvania; Sgt. Derek Charles Schwartz, age 28, from Tyler, Texas. Second row: LCpl. Sam Coley, age 21, from Campobello, South Carolina; Sgt. Justin M. Schuh, age 29, from Milford, Ohio; LCpl. Christopher Crowley, age 19, from Henderson, Kentucky. Third row: LCpl. Justin Syvinski, age 19, from Middleton, Connecticut; Cpl. Tristan Rorie, age 28, from Charlotte, North Carolina; LCpl. Chad Hughes, age 19, from West Virginia. Fourth row: Corpsman Zack Penner, age 19, from Sacramento, California; LCpl. Joe Titus, age unknown, from East Windsor, Connecticut; Cpl. Jonathan D. Sappington, age 23, from Blue Mountain, Mississippi. All photographs by Balazs Gardi, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, October 30, 2010.

Balazs Gardi, Cpl. Gretchn, IED detector dog with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment Bravo Company, First Platoon, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, October 30, 2010

Aperture: Why was the website shut down?

TK: It wasn’t shut down. The project was funded [by the Knight Foundation] to chronicle a seven-month deployment, and we kept the website running for more than two years. Like any complex website, it was built on the shifting ground of hosting platforms that are constantly being updated. We didn’t have experienced developers or the resources to maintain the patchwork of code indefinitely, so the site would periodically crash, and eventually we rebuilt it.

At one point, six months into the deployment, I received an email from U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) public affairs noting claims that the Google Maps interface posed an “operational security” risk to the battalion. There was never a request to shut down the website, though, or alter the maps in any way. When I suggested working together to mitigate security issues, there was no response. In face-to-face discussions with Marine officers, it became clear that the Basetrack.org website and Google Maps weren’t the real concern. It was the Basetrack Facebook page—and the unfiltered conversations between family members—that were rattling some nerves. I was given an ultimatum to shut down the Facebook page or have the plug pulled on the embed—but no one was willing or able to articulate a rationale for doing so. The page stayed live, and the last team of embeds had their travel orders canceled. As I predicted to the battalion commanders, turning off the embeds didn’t turn off the community or the conversation. It had quite the opposite effect. There was an explosion of debate within the military community about the ejection of the embeds and a huge spike in media attention to the project.

Aperture: Was the platform used in the way you had originally intended? If not, how did Marines and family members use the site differently than you expected?

TK: The project dovetailed with a stated change in the U.S. Marine Corps that allowed deployed Marines to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but as it turned out, the Marines had very limited Internet access and weren’t encouraged to express themselves online by their commanding officers. The conversation wasn’t driven by twenty-year-old Marines in Afghanistan; it was driven by their wives and mothers in the United States.

Aperture: If you were to do it over, what would you do differently?

TK: To [paraphrase] Donald Rumsfeld: “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” It would have been nice to have more funding, more time, and more experienced coders, but as the Marines say, “Improvise, adapt, overcome.” We maneuvered pretty well out there.

Tivadar Domaniczky, Musa Qala, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010

Tivadar Domaniczky, Musa Qala, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010

Balazs Gardi, Afghan National Army soldier shelters his face with a plastic bag against a dust storm at Combat Outpost 7171, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, October 28, 2010

All photographs of U.S. Marine First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, 2010–11. Photographers, from left to right, first row: Balazs Gardi, Teru Kuwayama, Teru Kuwayama; second row: Teru Kuwayama, Teru Kuwayama, Omar Mullick; third row: Teru Kuwayama, Rita Leistner, Rita Leistner; fourth row: Teru Kuwayama, Balazs Gardi, Monica Campbell. All photographs © and courtesy the photographers.

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Matthew Pillsbury: City Stages

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

Photographer Matthew Pillsbury and guest, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

Photographer Richard Renaldi and Aperture Foundation Executive Director Chris Boot, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

Tom Atwood and Larry Siegal, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

Andrea Fernandez and Martin Adolffson, Image © Katie Booth

Michael Foley of Michael Foley Gallery, Daniel Cooney of Daniel Cooney Fine Art, and Patrick Keefe, Image © Katie Booth

City Stages by Matthew Pillsbury opening reception at Aperture Gallery, February 19, 2014, Image © Katie Booth

Photographer Richard Renaldi and guests, Image © Katie Booth

Aperture Editor Denise Wolff and guest, Image © Katie Booth

On Wednesday, February 19, Aperture Members and friends were the first to view photographer Matthew Pillsbury’s exhibition City Stages at Aperture Gallery. Pillsbury and Aperture books publisher Lesley A. Martin gave Members an exclusive tour. In introducing his work, Pillsbury noted:

What I love most about photography is its ability to show us our world. We know it has a connection to the real, but it is capable of transforming and revealing something surprising to us. For instance, it’s astonishing what has happened in the last decade since I started taking these pictures of screens. It’s no longer just about looking at televisions and computers, which were the dominant objects at the time these photographs were made. Now, the minute we have a few spare moments we pull out our phones and engage with others through e-mail, apps, and social media. Art offers us the means to process the changes that are going on in our lives and to take measure of those changes while they are happening.

View the exhibition through March 27, 2014, presented in collaboration with Bonni Benrubi Gallery. The accompanying publication, City Stages, was published by Aperture in 2013.

Membership at Aperture is about seeing it first. Engage with our talented photographers and publishers at a variety of events like these by becoming an Aperture Member today! For more information, e-mail membership@aperture.org.

—

City StagesMatthew Pillsbury’s first monograph City Stages captures the vibrancy of urban landscapes in large-format, black-and-white photographs.




$65.00



Matthew Pillsbury City Stages Portfolio




$8,000.00

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Dawoud Bey: The Portrait in Context

Bey, Demarco, South Shore High School, 2003

 

 

In Dawoud Bey’s portraits, he depicts both individuals and communities. Through series such as Class Pictures, Character Project, and most recently, The Birmingham Project, Bey explores collective individuality while guiding viewers through social and historical spaces.

Join Bey for a workshop on how to create effective portraits within a community context. The workshop will begin at Aperture, with an introductory review of students’ portfolios. In addition to providing personalized feedback and tasks for improvement, Bey will present his own work and experiences as an artist. The discussion will present conceptual and practical strategies for making new work, followed by a full-day site visit to a church, school, community center, or shelter where students will work directly with subjects to photograph them in the context of their shared environment and community. Students should have a strong working knowledge of their cameras, as well as basic working knowledge of artificial lighting.

Topics for discussion will include:

• What is your interest in the subject(s)?

• What is it you want to say about your subject(s)?

• What is the relationship between the subject(s) and the space you photograph them in?

• How do you establishing narrative in the photographic portrait?

• How to collaborate with and direct your subject(s)?

• Location setup and lighting: what works and how to do it

Dawoud Bey (born in New York, 1953) began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs called Harlem, USA, which was later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago;  Barbican Centre in London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; GA; National Portrait Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, organized a mid-career survey of his work, Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995, which then traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication of the same title was also published in conjunction with that exhibition. Class Pictures was published by Aperture in 2007, and a traveling exhibition of this work toured to museums throughout the country from 2007 to 2011.

Tuition: $500 ($450 for currently enrolled photography students and Aperture members at the Dual/Friend level and above)

Click here to register.

Contact education@aperture.org with any questions.

Image: DeMarco, South Shore High School, Chicago, 2003

“I like when people look at this picture of me and be like, ‘Oh, he looks like he’ll do something bad like this.’ Some people might be like, ‘Oh, he looks like a bad kid,’ or . . . like, ‘I can picture him beatin’ up somebody or taking something from somebody,’ whereas that’s not me at all. I guess there is a certain look, ’cause I’ve experienced it before. Like, teachers in school, they’re like, ‘Oh, I thought you was a bad kid, but you’re all right,’ you know.’Cause I like to prove people wrong so I can make me look better in the end. ’Cause as they get to know me, then they’ll see—like I said, I’m a funny person—and they’ll see I’m a funny person.”

Refund / Cancellation Policy for Aperture Workshop

All fees are non-refundable if you should choose to withdraw from a workshop less than one month prior to its start date unless we are able to fill your seat. In the event of a medical emergency, please provide a physician’s note stating the nature of the emergency, and Aperture will issue you a credit that can be applied to future workshops. Aperture reserves the right to cancel any workshop up to one week prior to the start date if the workshop is under-enrolled, in which case a full refund will be issued. A minimum of eight students is required to run a workshop.

 

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Announcing the finalists for the 2014 Aperture Portfolio Prize!

Matt Eich, Elvis the Zebra, 2007.

We’re pleased to announce the five finalists for the 2014 Aperture Portfolio Prize! This year, Aperture’s editorial and limited-edition print staff reviewed more than seven hundred portfolios. Our challenge was to select one winner and four honorable mentions from this overwhelming response. Out of the following exceptional finalists, one will be selected as the winner of the 2014 Aperture Portfolio Prize, receiving a cash prize and exhibition at Aperture Gallery in New York:

Matt Eich

Amy Elkins

Davide Monteleone

Max Pinckers

Sadie Wechsler

Stay tuned for the announcement of the winner in March! We will then also reveal all of the finalists’ portfolios and statements here on aperture.org. In the meantime, check out past Portfolio Prize winners.

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Mark Oppenheimer on Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible, MACK Books / Archive of Modern Conflict, London, 2013, Designed by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible, MACK Books / Archive of Modern Conflict, London, 2013, Designed by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible, MACK Books / Archive of Modern Conflict, London, 2013, Designed by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

Thank God for human forgetfulness: it makes literature out of cliché (itself the son of literature). In several places, the King James Bible records Jesus as having said that a house divided against itself cannot stand (or some variation thereof). When Abraham Lincoln gave his “House Divided” speech in 1858, upon accepting his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate, most of his listeners would have recognized the biblical allusion. Lincoln’s appropriation of the line marked him as a typically literate man of his time, not as some great stylist. Today, however, ignorant of the biblical referent, the modern reader credits Lincoln not with being derivative, but with being profound. For that matter, how many lovers of Faulkner think that the titular cry “Absalom, Absalom!” is an invention of the Mississippi bard, rather than a reworking of the biblical King David’s lament for his son?

So the question is: can the Bible be a cliché if we don’t really know it? Alas for Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, I think the answer is not really. In their work Holy Bible, they have taken photographs from the Archive of Modern Conflict, the London art repository and publisher, and imposed them on scattered pages of a complete, gilt-edged text of the King James Bible, perfect-bound with a sewn red-ribbon bookmark, just like your Victorian ancestors’ family treasure. The photographs—most of them violent, dissonant, or rancorous, from the lynched men to the naked, hunchbacked woman—correspond to passages underlined in red on the same or the facing page. The red underlining is itself an echo of the practice, in kitschier Bible editions, of printing the words of Jesus in red. But the collagists’ real aim is to make us see with fresh eyes many hackneyed phrases from the Bible. So, for example, the oft-repeated phrase “and it came to pass” is always paired with a photograph of something in the realm of legerdemain or masquerade: a circus act in progress, a close-magic practitioner doing a card trick, children in their Halloween costumes. I suppose that we are meant to think anew about the casual assumption that God can just snap his/her/its fingers and, magically, things will come to pass.

But is the audience for this book not the jaded, secular art world, whose members a) do not believe this stuff anyway, and b) would scarcely recognize “and it came to pass” as biblical, in the King James idiom, as opposed to just Renaissance diction of indeterminate origin? The same audience will not be particularly provoked, either, to see Jesus’s dictum, in a parable in Matthew 22:14, that “many are called, but few are chosen” paired with a picture of a white-jacketed official performing a prostate examination—or is it a prison-entry body-cavity search?—on a bent, naked man. I hardly need tell you that passages from Revelation, the last book of the Bible, are illustrated with a color photograph of the World Trade Center in flames. The cliché here is not the underlined passages, “worship the beast and his image,” but the reliance on the too-familiar, if still horrible, image.

Holy Bible is not particularly curious about religion; the basic message, adumbrated by Adi Ophir’s lucid essay, pasted into the back, is that God is violent. But it is visually sumptuous, at times arresting. “[D]elivered my soul from the lowest hell,” in Psalm 86:13, is illustrated, on the recto page, by a lovely Jewess—it’s the right word; address indignant mail to me—with a broad, Breck-Girl smile, seemingly indifferent to the yellow star she has been forced to wear. When the artists choose erotic snapshots, they choose well, favoring the erotically down-market and amateur. Elsewhere they show us black men at (polyester) leisure, scrawny white boys huffing aerosol, and a contemporary white supremacist exhausted, sleeping by his Nazi flag, as if the march has ended and at last he can take a break from Sieg Heil-ing. Nazis claimed to be Christian, but were of course pagan; this volume is supposed to be about God, but it really is about all of us.

*This title also appears as part of the short list for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

—

Mark Oppenheimer writes the Beliefs column for the New York Times and is author of the e-book Dan Savage: The First Gay Celebrity (2012).

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Danny Lyon on Mike Brodie, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

Mike Brodie, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, NM, 2013, Designed by Jack Woody

Mike Brodie, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, NM, 2013, Designed by Jack Woody

Mike Brodie, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, NM, 2013, Designed by Jack Woody

Mike Brodie, A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, Twin Palms Publishers, Santa Fe, NM, 2013, Designed by Jack Woody

Great photography touches the soul. In 2003, Mike Brodie was a teenager in Pensacola, Florida, living with his mother; his father was far off in Arizona, doing ten years in prison.

Young Mike and his friend Savannah figured out the simple scam of stealing books from Barnes and Noble and reselling them on Amazon. One day Savannah stole some photography books. The Bikeriders, which was reissued that year by Chronicle Books, was kept by Brodie. They gave away one by Mary Ellen Mark; Savannah wanted to keep the book by Sebastião Salgado; and the dog ate the book by Steve McCurry.

That same year Brodie received a Polaroid SX-70 from a friend and made a picture of his BMX. Like so many, Brodie was blown away by the picture that magically appeared. Deciding high school had no more to offer, he told his mother he was leaving home for a life of rail-hopping. There, he took on the tag The Polaroid Kidd. When it was no longer possible to get film for the SX-70, he bought a Nikon F3 for $290 and started to make pictures on negative film. (I once explained to Mike that an F3 was a single-lens reflex and he did not know what that term meant. He did know the term “range finder,” and understood that with the SLR he could perfectly compose his pictures.)

This year, ten years after Brodie hit the rails, Twin Palms, Jack Woody’s small publishing house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, published Brodie’s A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, a collection of sixty-one prints made with the Nikon. The cover, which Jack designed using a detail of one of the train photographs, looks like a cross between Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp and Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. We see two street children upside down and asleep, as if rotating in a heavenly constellation of filth. The image of the sleeping children, one a boy, one a boy/ girl, is held in place by the five steel rivets of a railcar as it rockets across America. Brodie, Nikon in hand, loaded with Kodak Portra color negative film, made the picture by leaning over the edge of the steel car. During four years of shooting with his Nikon, Brodie produced two hundred rolls of film, which were developed at Wal-Mart and Walgreens, “wherever they had twenty-four-hour service.” He carried the negs with him until he had a bundle of rolls, then returned to his mother’s apartment in Pensacola, where he scanned each negative into his computer using a Nikon scanner he purchased on eBay. When I asked him if he ever printed any, he said that he eventually stole a HP printer that could do 13 x 19 in. prints. The negs were terribly scratched, which is fitting for a record of children that proudly wear their wounds and tattoos on their sleeves for all to see, a finger in the eye of all us Americans happily comatose in our materialism. Brodie thinks his train-hopping family were scions of the anarcho/crust punk movement that began in the mid-1980s.

Brodie leapt into the life of picture- making as if he was the first to do it. He was doing what he loved, and he did it compulsively. The book, which he sequenced with Jack Woody in Santa Fe, is the story of rail-hoppers, who after many miles (Brodie has been to forty-eight states by train) settle down in the domestic bliss of a squat. This book is as powerful a record of America in need of a bath and our lust for the road as has ever been done.

When the camera and subject are moving at the same speed, the result is called a pan. In motion pictures it is called a tracking shot. Many of Brodie’s pictures are made in motion. Brodie’s use of color is always subdued. He almost never shoots in sunlight. The endpapers of this wonderful book are a double-page spread from the rear of a train as it speeds around a corner.

In the first picture we see one of Brodie’s train-jumping heroes as he stares down at a train from an overpass. Over his shoulder is slung a sack of veggies, freshly picked from a dumpster. The boy is covered with grime. A late-model black sedan is behind him on the overpass, its fog lights on, because, as if the scene wasn’t gloomy enough, everything is enveloped in fog. Only this car looks like it is about to flip over, because young Brodie has turned his Nikon on a forty-five-degree angle, dividing this two-part vision of travel with a line that crosses the picture diagonally. The picture is perfect. The kid is a natural.

We follow the images in a sort of “how-to” train-jumping sequence. (Don’t try this; you might get killed.) In another pan, a boy/girl clutching a guitar case runs along the blurred gravel roadbed. Far behind, another figure runs along the tracks. Are they getting on or off? And where is Mike? It’s even harder to work a camera than to hold on to a guitar, so let’s assume he is perched on the train. The blurs are thrilling. The only thing approaching focus is somewhere down those tracks, perfectly parallel, stretching to infinity.

There are no captions on these pictures. We never learn anyone’s name, and worse, we do not know if they are in Idaho or Canada, or where they are. There is a beautifully written afterword that Brodie wrote in Santa Fe. In it he briefly lays out his difficult life growing up, the outline of how he made the work, and his early retirement from photography to become a diesel mechanic. He says he is looking for a job, just not in photography.

And he just might have retired the pan on his way out. Shot straight down (again) from what must be the roof of a speeding train, we see the cars coupling, the parallel tracks beneath. This picture is a sort of Lewis Hine for the LGBT crowd. Hanging like a monkey from the car is one of Mike’s little savages—what is he wearing?—a black lace nightgown trailing in the wind. The ground streaks by, giving this solid picture an immense sense of speed and flight, coupled, so to speak, with the bravery and fragility of human existence.

We are left with some mysteries. One young man appears in many pictures wearing a shirt with vertical black stripes. This is his family, Brodie’s family, and a very small group of people. They end up off the rails, in a sort of domesticity of filth. There is a revolting shot of a rat, and, in a picture of someone’s blue jeans soaking in a bathtub, we see that cleanliness, though not next to godliness, is something like sex: most of us seek it, it’s just a matter of how often. The group seems less exciting once they have settled down. Maybe I miss the rails. There is one showstopper, though, as a young woman shaves part of her hair with an electric trimmer, and we see her in the mirror. What, in another group, might have been mascara running from her eye, are long dark tattoos. The phony menu hanging in the squat offers things like “Toast a poot” and “Shit Toes.”

Ah, youth. Thank God America is always able to produce a generation that can offer our self-satisfied selves “Shit Toes” for lunch.

*This title also appears as part of the short list for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

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Danny Lyon’s writing appears regularly on his blog at dektol.wordpress.com. His newest book, The Seventh Dog, will be published by Phaidon in 2014. Aperture will reissue The Bikeriders in spring 2014.

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