Signs

Buy, BART Station, San Francisco, March 2007.

Back in 2007 when I shot this picture, I thought it was a wry comment about runaway consumerism in our society, where everywhere you turned screamed buy, buy, buy! A culture of excess. What a difference two years make. Nowadays, in our cash poor, stimulus-hungry economy, shopping has become a civic duty.

Those who forget the past... yeah,we know, but we repeat it just the same. Take Dorothea Lange's signs from the Great Depression: substitute "Obama" for "Olson," and you're back in the winter of 2008. Or the gas station sign from 1938. The same sign can be recycled for the angry mob that demands greedy heads to roll at AIG and Merrill Lynch.

Every overleveraged speculator who watched his credit rating go down the tubes last year will get a sobering slap on the wrist from Robert Frank's gambling hall sign from 1955. To risk what you can afford sounds logical enough, but the warning underestimates human nature's capacity for folly, which is the greatest risk of all.

Yet it is also true that time and again, we have seen how man has managed to pull himself up from the rut he has created. Through imagination, innovation, and resourcefulness, man has persisted, even prospered, when the notion of prosperity itself seemed far-fetched. So we turn to yet another sign, from W. Eugene Smith's colossal Pittsburgh Project, at a time when we are bereft of dreams. And if by chance it feels premature to dream that better things will come our way soon, perhaps we can agree to just settle for a good night's sleep.

Dorothea Lange, Newspaper Stand, San Francisco, 1939.
Dorothea Lange, Kern County, CA 1938.
Robert Frank, Untitled, 1955.
W. Eugene Smith, From Dream Street: The Pittsburgh Project, 1955.

Hats

Man on Train, San Francisco, March 2009.




There are many things about my personal appearance I don't like, but what rankles my vanity most of all is that I look silly wearing a hat. More than any other fashion accessory, a hat has the power to summon images from our memory. Most of them, of course, are movie images: gangster shootouts from the 30s, Cary Grant, Preston Sturges screwball comedies, Indiana Jones on horseback losing his Fedora again and again, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown saying "I'm just a snoop." My own memory of hats takes me back to Philippine cockfighting arenas in the 1960s, where hundreds of men wearing straw hats and closed-toe leather slippers screamed and hollered in the bleachers while two fighting cocks decked it out in the center of the sandy ring.

The sight of a man in a hat never fails to put my photographer's instinct at attention. Add a trench coat and I hit the ground running. It's almost impossible to take an uninteresting picture of a man wearing a hat because the drama is right there, sitting on top of his head.

In his book, The Ongoing Moment (a must read for photography lovers), Geoff Dyer said that the story of the Great Depression can be told simply by looking at pictures of men's hats. Poring through Dorothea Lange's portfolio of the depression years, Dyer looked at all the pictures with hats. He discovered that the hats, once signs of affluence, became more and more battered with each passing year until finally, in photographs of Skid Row, men slept on sidewalks using their hats for pillows. Dyer observed that by the 1950s "the great era of hats in photography has passed" and "it was no longer a reliable indicator of the ravages inflicted on men by economic forces..." As in the picture above by Garry Winogrand, "the hat was [now] just a hat."


Garry Winogrand, Untitled, 1950s.
Dorothea Lange, White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1937.
Tina Modotti, Workers Parade, 1926.
Saul Leiter, Harlem, 1960.
Dorothea Lange, Ball Game, Migrant Camp, Shafter, California, 1934.