the thing itself

Monday, July 13, 2009

Taken Today

Rest, wherever you find it, San Francisco, July 2009.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

At the end of the day

Group Center, San Francisco, April 2008.

I'm an end-of-the-day photographer. On my way home I take pictures of people on their way home. Five o'clock light is a harsh and blinding spotlight that makes huddled pedestrians look like bas relief. Backlit, the same light portrays them as the urban warriors they truly are, the shadows as long as the day that is about to end. An hour later, the light softens to cast a golden glow on everything -- magic hour it is called -- magic to the photographer and magic to everyone else because it conjures the promise of rest.

But before rest comes the commute; I photograph that too. Light pierces the descent underground and transforms a man's head into a ghostly apparition. The same head is multiplied three times in reflections and shadow, a hydra retreating to its cave.

The train ride home brings close encounters in closed quarters. If the morning commute is lively with chatter and the rustle of newspapers, the late afternoon commute is marked by pensiveness and hunched shoulders. For those who are seated, it is a time to recharge. For those who stand body-to-body on the aisle, the commute is long and the temper is short; let no man be a jackass and let this train keep running or else. Taking pictures inside the train is a stealth operation (I will not be that jackass). I am careful even though everyone is too exhausted to care. Most of the time I don't even bother to take out my Leica. I just want to get home, say hello to my wife in the garden, make coffee, have my second cigarette of the day, and read The Huffington Post online.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Lunch hour

Grey Gardens, San Francisco, March 2007.

I'm a lunch hour photographer. I skip the sandwich and the midday office gossip. If I'm lucky I get to take a bite out of something else: an elegant lady against an elegant frame, young love, stillness amid the hubbub of the city.

In his poem "Stay Away from Here," Frank O'Hara writes about his own lunch hour experience in New York City. It is akin to mine in many ways; San Francisco, after all, is New York's more graceful sister:

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.

My lunch hour is never taken at high noon because the light has no shadows; it's flat and uninteresting. Two o'clock is good; three o'clock is even better. A harried worker rushes to her gym to decompress. The gymnasium is aptly Athenian with its imposing white columns. A man goes through vertigo-inducing heights to find privacy or a signal from his telephone. The first warm day in April unexpectedly arrives and the city becomes a tanning bed for its urban warriors, to be alone with their thoughts or the afternoon paper.

The geometry of the city is inescapable. Mondrian lines bisect and crisscross the frame with angles that are relentless in their sharpness. To find softness, I must flee the city.

Frank O'Hara ends his lunch hour this way:

A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

I end mine with a cup of strawberry yogurt. My heart is in my pocket, it is a Leica.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Taken Today: Dancing

After Ballet Class, Berkeley, July 2009.

My daughter is on her sixth or seventh year of taking ballet classes. She's getting stronger, more limber, and beginning to distinguish her Fosses from her Balanchines. But her real idols are the modern dance choreographers of her generation: Mia Michaels, Wade Robson, Sonya Tayeh, Shane Sparks, Tice DiOrio, Adam Shankman, Mandy Moore; in short, the choreographers of the inspiring reality TV show, So You Think You Can Dance. Better known to its fans as SYTYCD, the show has taken dance out of its elitist and airless space and into the living rooms of the public-at-large, alive, kicking, and a joy to behold. SYTYCD has shown everyone what dance enthusiasts have known all along -- that dance is hard work and, when done well, is an exuberant celebration of what the human body can do.

Here's a sample of the boundless ingenuity of its choreographers, a Latin-hiphop hybrid set in a Cuban bordello, danced to the music of Cuban-American rapper Pitbull, choreographed by Tabitha & Napoleon and Dmitry Chaplin. (For Jorge, who missed this number when it was first braodcast.)

So You Think You Can Dance - Calle Ocho

Friday, July 3, 2009

(Don't) strike a pose

Untitled, San Francisco, July 2007.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, shown here in a 1992 photograph by his wife Martine Franck, didn't like posed portraiture; he detested them. He said he would infinitely prefer to look at ID pictures displayed outside passport photo studios than look at a contrived portrait. "At least there is on these faces something that raises a question, a simple factual testimony."

Cartier-Bresson retired from doing reportage in 1970, but continued to take portraits of people he admired. He shot his portraits the same way he shot pictures on the street: quickly, discreetly, unobserved, without artifice. He avoided posing his subjects as much as possible, even the ones that he shot for magazine assignments. When asked to photograph Frederic and Irène Joliot-Curie in 1944, he shot their picture as soon as they opened the door. "It wasn't very polite," Cartier-Bresson said, but the piercing gazes of the Curies with their hands clasped naturally against their bodies could not have been captured any other way.

Cartier-Bresson described his shooting style as a "quick bite of a mosquito." But for Truman Capote, whom he photographed in 1947, he was a dragonfly, "a frantic dragonfly ... Leica glued to his eye ... doing his clickety-clicks with a joyous intensity and religious fervor that filled his whole being."

His frenetic approach usually meant getting the business of shooting done as quickly as possible: "A portrait is like a courtesy visit of fifteen or twenty minutes. You can't disturb people longer than that..." He preferred to spend the rest of the time enjoying the company of his subjects. Or their silences. Of his visit to Matisse in 1944, he said: "I sat in a corner and didn't move; we didn't speak to each other. It was as if we didn't exist." His 1971 meeting with Ezra Pound in Venice was equally wordless, a long silence "that seemed to last for hours."

Cartier-Bresson had an aversion to photographing actors because their professional instinct is to pose for the camera. These portraits of Marilyn Monroe (1960) and French actress Isabelle Huppert (1994) are notable exceptions. Monroe was photographed on the set of the 1961 film The Misfits. Huppert, on the other hand, was a favorite of Cartier-Bresson's: "I was aware that he saw something in me that I didn't reconize," she said. "He seizes a moment that is captured by a movement; that's why he's right to do things quickly."

In the age of elaborately manufactured image-making, Cartier-Bresson's portraits may appear unremarkable for their lack of high-concept artistry. His portraits of Jean-Paul Sartre (1946) and Simone de Beauvoir (1947), lovers and twin pillars of French existential philosophy, are mere snapshots; Albert Camus' 1945 portrait is slightly out of focus.

Cartier-Bresson will not dispute this; he does not care for image-making or deliberateness. "Above all, I look for inner silence," he said. "I seek to translate the personality and not the expression."

Drawing, not photography, was the first love of Cartier-Bresson. In the course of his career, he photographed the greatest painters and sculptors of his time, artists whom he admired. Comparing photography and drawing, he said that "If in making a portrait, you hope to capture the inner silence of a willing victim ... with a pencil portrait, it is the draughtsman who must possess an inner silence."

Francis Bacon (1971)