#gracesong

[this is a belated blog post since I realized I missed this when we watched the film]

The Salt of the Earth striked from the opening scene, which zooms in to the gold miners in Sierra Pelada, Brazil. Much of the film felt like it wasn't about photography so much as it was an exploration of the world and of the history that Salgado has uniquely witnessed. It brought to my attention lives that I didn't even know existed (like those of the firefighters in the Great Burhan Oil Field) and created a greater realization of the problems that I had merely heard of in a textbook (like the exodus of Rwandan refugees).

My red-dominant collage is called "Ancestry" and is inspired by the altar cloths used in Chinese shrines, often to honor an ancestor.

My blue-dominant collage is inspired by the concept of "The Blue of Distance."

"On Seeing Red" and "A Field Guide for Getting Lost" were some of my favorite readings from this semester. I enjoyed the chronology of the references to how red and blue have respectively permeated history, religion, and art, and the fragmented style of "On Seeing Red" especially reminded me of David Foster Wallace's writing.

One of the most compelling visuals for me are when Jarmon describes the red of his mother's dressing table and the pigmentation of the makeup used. On a person, red communicates anger, but at the same time it communicates passion and/or desire. In the passage about vermillion, I immediately remember the color pencil of the same name that I had used in middle school and how vibrant it was as I drew a streak across my paper.

Rebecca Solnit's essay immediately reminded me of the intensity, the sadness, the ultimate pervasiveness of blue in the introduction to Joan Didion's Blue Nights:

T.S. Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" provides a provoking image of what seems to be a barren post-war contemporary landscape. The first section (The Burial of the Dead) immediately piqued my interest with its description of the four seasons in a way that I found unintuitive: one wouldn't typically think of April as the "cruelest month" and isn't initially sure how "Winter kept us warm."

From that, the reader is taken through a journey of different voices and landscapes. Many of the passages evoked memories of Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall," which describes a person's journey through a similarly bleak and neglected world, with descriptions reminiscent of Rimbaud. There is a persistent sickness and dryness in Eliot's poem -- the stones with no running water, the brown fog in London, the room in The Game of Chess. I felt a sense of urgency reading the poem, like everyone in Eliot's world was running out of time, yet also at the same time unsure about what to do with the time they have. Perhaps that is what happens in a wasteland.

As for my collage, I created an overlay of a woman crossing the street on a desert road and replaced the sky with a dots pattern inspired by Roy Lichtenstein. I wanted to make the road seem oversized and endless since the perspective it was taken from was interesting. I used the move, blur, resize, magnetic lasso, magic eraser, and eyedropper tool to create the layers and also adjusted the color channels and texture so that it had a canvas feel to it.

I was surprised, yet appreciative, that the Life Magazine exhibition was as critical as it was celebratory of the magazine and of the photography in its era. While it certainly displayed details of the history of the magazine's conception as well as its highlights (such as its rights to the photos from the first Moon Landing), it also featured artists that examined the kind of work that was missing from the public gaze. One example is the work of Margaret Bourke-White, which brought female workers to the forefront:

and also artfully contrasted the messaging in American ads with the state of the populations who were left out from the benefits of economic growth:

Faces, Places was whimsical and touching. To me, it was as much about the relationship between Agnes and JD as it was about the art that they created. It was clear that they each had different visions of what each project was meant to communicate, but the two always communicated and learned from each other's styles and preferences.

The English translation of the original title (Visages, Villages) seemed to miss one piece of the film -- that it was centered on rural towns in France. There is something special about going through a small and/or abandoned village, elevating the space and the people that occupy it, and leaving behind their art just as quickly as they came. In some cases, the art impacts the area it occupies for months to come (like in the case of the woman with the umbrella who was pasted on the side of a building), or it disappears within hours without a trace (as in the case of the fallen bunker in Normandy). Both have a place in their works.

Personal and critical, "Notes of a Native Son" was oftentimes heartbreaking to read. Baldwin paints a picture of his relationship with his father before and after his passing and draws connections to his outlook on racial relations in the United States.

A central theme of the essay is how easily hatred can be passed on and slowly take over one's sentiments and viewpoint from within. For Baldwin, we saw this in his inability to clarify his feelings about his father until after he had passed, how easy it was to despise him and find him unforgivable when he was still alive. Baldwin's descriptions of his feelings and relationship to this father are incredibly visceral, and the reader is able to see their development over the course of the story:

"There was something in him, therefore, groping and tentative, which was never expressed and which was buried with him."

"How powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness was now mine."

"I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart."

"I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain."

"This was not the man they had known, but they had scarcely expected to be confronted with him; this was, in a sense deeper than questions of fact, the man they had not know, and the man they had not known may have been the real one."

The third quote reflects one of the climaxes of the narrative, where Baldwin enters the bar and throws a cup at a young waitress in a segregated diner. One can also argue that this was one of the turning points where he is able to see clearly the effects of his anger for the first time and become more critical of the way his community in Harlem has been responding in the height of racial tensions. However, Baldwin's ending notes still seem to indicate that he doesn't feel that pure pacifism can make progress in racial justice.

I checked out New York, New York: Fifty Years of Art, Architecture, Cinema, Performance, Photography, and Video. The length of the title is pretty representative of the book -- it's huge! But it truly felt like a walk down memory lane of some of the most innovative works in the latter 20th century.

The photos that caught my attention the most were that of Duane Michals. Featured in this collection are The Poet Decorates His Muse with Verse (2003-2005):

as well as Christ in New York (1981):

The concept of an album and accompanying pictures with text feels very familiar to us now, but Michals combined these elements in innovative ways in the 60s to create a new kind of narrative and cinema. For Michals, adding text adds intimacy to a work, and he argues that when the subject is close enough to a reader, one does not need the image to be large or framed in a museum to induce wonder.