LOL :-)

The Lascivious Centurion, San Francisco, May 2007.

Photographer Elliott Erwitt wrote, "Making people laugh is one of the highest achievements you can make. And when you can make someone laugh and cry, as Chaplin does, now that's the highest of all possible achievements. I don't know that I aim for it, but I recognize it as the supreme goal."



A photographer oftentimes creates humor by juxtaposing incongruous objects through clever composition. When a sphinx appears to carry a car on its back, as it does here, that's funny. Or when a nun from the Vatican appears to shield your eyes from a scandalous movie poster, as in the Bruno Barbey picture here, the horror on her face is funny too. Comedy, intentional or not, comes from unlikely places. This confessional scene in Poland, also by Erwitt, may all be about remorse-ridden piety, but Catholics will not be able to resist smiling at the ridiculousness of this familiar scene.

The boy in this Martine Franck photo is a Tibetan Buddhist reincarnated lama who entered the monastery at the age of five. Franck snapped the picture just as a pigeon landed on the head of the boy's tutor, creating a comic and poignant moment that probably comes as close as a photograph can get to Erwitt's "supreme goal."

An image can be shockingly unexpected that our first impulse upon seeing it is to laugh. Is that a naked man on Brooklyn Bridge? Is that man having lunch on the fire escape? In his underwear? Like they say in chatspeak, omg. What are these ballerinas doing leaping around --- a hot dog stand? Is that really James Dean having his haircut in plain view? Our reaction would be the same as that of the woman passing by: omg.

Garry Winogrand liked to go to the zoo to take pictures. But when you're confronted by a couple wearing identical checkerboard shirts standing next to a man with a box over his head, why bother with the animals?

Ah, human comedy.

Elliott Erwitt, Las Vegas, 1954.
Elliott Erwitt, Pasadena, 1963.
Elliott Erwitt, East Hampton, 1983.
Elliott Erwitt, Hollywood, FL, 1962.
Bruno Barbey, From The Italians.
Elliott Erwitt, Poland, 1964.
Martine Franck, Nepal, 1996.
Richard Kalvar, NYC, 1969.
Chien Chi-Chang, NYC, 1998.
André Kertész, Ballet, 1938.
Dennis Stock, NYC, 1955.
Garry Winogrand, NYC, 1962.

After you, sir

After Meyerowitz, Berkeley, March 2007.

A kind-hearted person would call the picture above a hommage; someone less generous would call it a rip-off. The truth must lie somewhere between the two. Joel Meyerowitz took this b&w picture of the lady in the ticket booth in 1963, a year after he left his job as an ad agency art director to become a full-time street photographer. The grill floating on the woman's face reminded him of Magritte's paintings. So he fell in line and pretended to buy a ticket so he could snap his very own Le fils de l'homme. In the case of my lady in the ticket booth, it was the memory of Meyerowitz' iconic image itself that compelled me to push the shutter.

It's fascinating that the sight of the ticket lady instinctively reminded me of Meyerowitz even though I haven't looked at his pictures for many years. Perhaps he experienced the flashback with Magritte similarly. Consciously or not, memory of images begets other images. For the street photographer, there is a hundred years' worth of photographic tradition and iconography to inform and influence what one chooses to capture. A boy looking out a tram window is not just a boy anymore, but a Robert Frank tableau. Every man on a bike seen from a staircase is also seen from the prism of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Women gossiping on a bench conjure Garry Winogrand.

As for our ticket lady picture, there must be thousands of ladies behind ticket windows at any given time and place, each one waiting to be photographed. But it was Meyerowitz who captured the image first and tattooed it in our minds. So after you, sir.



René Magritte, Le fils de l'homme (The son of man), 1964.
Joel Meyerowitz, Untitled, New York, 1963.
Robert Frank, Trolley, New Orleans.
Garry Winogrand, World's Fair, New York City, 1964.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyeres, 1932.

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.