W. Eugene Smith | The Sinking of the Lusitana | The Dust Bowl | New Zealand and World War One | James Agee | Art in Cuba

The editors have arbitrarily divided Cuban artistic history into five sections, which more or less follow the political fortunes of that benighted island. The first is "Depicting Cuba --- 1868 -1927," 1868 representing Cuba's first spasm of attempted Independence from Spain, the Ten Years' War, and the successful revolt that lasted from 1895 to 1898. The photographs of the Ten Years' War were commissioned by the colonial authorities for the "Album Histórico Fotográfica de la Guerra."
The second part is titled "Arte Nuevo" and "the Re-creation of Identity" (whatever that means), and parallels the ruinous regime of Gerardo Machado y Morales. "Cubanness," roughly parallels that reign of Fulgencio Batista (1938 - 1959). "Within the Revolution" would, naturally, be concurrent with Castro. "The Revolution and Me" concludes it all between 1980 - 2007.
Twenty-one critics take on thirty-four essays in cinema, fine arts, photography, and literature. I am left with the conclusion as I often am in massive books of art like this that the editors have drafted experts to comment on various aspects of art, knowing that words are just words, and the ultimate reward for the consumer are (in this case) the bleak, or gorgeous, or gaudy, or subtle, or flamboyant pictures. Ads for the Tropicana Club (vulgar) are interspliced with wonderful photographs by Raúl Corrales and Ocaño Odio of the poor sleeping on the streets of Havana.
A painting by Carlos Enriquez called "The Happy Peasant" (1938) seems to presage the "Screaming Pope" of Francis Bacon. The thirty photographs by Walker Evans include a haunting shot of eleven dockworkers, faces black from their job of loading coal at the malecón at Havana. The accompanying essay by Jeff Rosenheim, "Walker Evans and The Crime of Cuba" --- referring to a book put out by J. B. Lippencott in 1933 --- is one of the few I could make it through without passing out (or on).
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Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men
James Agee
Walker Evans
(Houghton Mifflin/Mariner)
Agee has set out to bring us into this world, and he does it with a vengeance. It is apparent that he is trying to do with words what companion Walker Evans did with the sixty-four pages of photographs that appear in this volume.
In addition to what some might call the excesses of description --- the exact shape and feel and color and texture of a pair of overalls take the better part of a page --- we have precise word-pictures of three families, their children, their houses, the rooms, the furniture, the walls, the chicken coops, the land, the land under the houses, the roofs of the houses, the feel of the sun, the heat in the kitchen, the dying trees, the dust, the withering crops.
In the hands of a lesser writer, these could be dumb beyond belief; in the hands of this poet --- for he is a poet, and a musician --- they often take surprising turns that pull one in. To those of us who have lived in or at least visited this part of the world, the prose brings back a flood of sensual memories. Here is the single dresser in the Gudger's shack:
The bureau was at some time a definitely middle-class piece of furniture. It is quite wide and very heavy, veneered in gloomy red rich-grained woods, with intricately pierced metal plaques at the handles of the three drawers, and the mirror is at least three feet tall and is framed in machine-carved wood.
So far, so good --- we know that bureau, and we have seen the likes of it. Now Agee will personalize it:
The veneer has now split and leafed loose in many places from the yellow soft-wood base; the handles of the three drawers are nearly all deranged and two are gone; the drawers do not pull in and out at all easily.
Not only has he given our bureau age and substance --- he has plopped in a word that almost sounds out-of-place (drawers that are "deranged") but which, as we continue, turns perfect, the necessary connotations of crazy, undisciplined, askew:
The mirror is so far corrupted that it is rashed with gray, iridescence in parts, and in all its reflections a deeply sad thin zinc-to-platinum, giving to its framings an almost incalculably ancient, sweet, frail, and piteous beauty, such as may be seen in tintypes of family groups among studio furnishings or heard in nearly exhausted jazz records made by very young, insane, devout men who were to destroy themselves, in New Orleans, in the early nineteen twenties.

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New Directions Anthology:
Classical Chinese Poetry
Eliot Weinberger, Editor
(New Directions)
Pound was the poet's poet but to us he came from another planet. Not the least of his bizarre activities was his broadcasting over Italian short-wave during WWII long eulogies for the Mussolini government. Many of us had gone into English Literature because of hope and beauty and the flowers and the sun flooding the wheatfields and the night sky flooding us with the Eternal. Here we were being civilized, studying to be the New Romantics and all the while the thought of one of the preëminent poets of English Literature of the 20th century making apologies for the first fascist regime in Europe struck us as weird indeed. We could be in love with the drunken Dylan Thomas throwing up during his readings and then going out feeling up young ladies who attended his parties, but speeches In Praise of Benito Mussolini? No.
Be that as it may, Donald Halls' anthology Contemporary American Poetry from fifty years ago carried several poems by Pound, and one that touched us was a translation from the 8th Century Chinese poet, Li Po. Not only could we understand it, we could be moved by it. Pound called it "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter." For many of us, it gave us a push to find out more about the verse coming from the Mysterious East.
In this New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry not only does it turn up again, we are given the chance to compare Pound's version to a translation by William Carlos Williams and another by David Hinton.
The River Merchant's Wife:
A Letter
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married my Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
For ever and for ever and for ever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noises overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the west garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-sa.
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The Face of War
New Zealand's Great War Photography
Sandy Callister
(Auckland University Press)

Over sixteen million people died during World War I. Twenty-one million more were wounded. Total deaths for the "British Imperial Forces" numbered 1,114,914.
Over 100,000 men were sent from New Zealand to fight, a full 40% of men of military age. "The toll was particularly high for a small nation," the author reports, "equivalent at the time to 10 million Americans." Final casualties for New Zealand were almost sixty thousand.
Soldiers were allowed to carry cameras into battle and took pictures of much (but not all) that they saw. The newly invented "autographic camera" from Kodak was small and portable and, was, as their ads claimed, "positioned as the visual historian of the household." The Autograph was billed as "The Soldier's Kodak." Film was available in every country.
As small as a note book or diary and will tell a more interesting and convincing story of your share in the Great War story.
Snapshots could be used for "portraiture and landscapes," but Callister thinks that New Zealand soldiers photographed the war itself with gusto. The autographic camera was sturdily democratic. "Cameras required no special skill ... ordinary soldiers avidly photographed and communicated their experiences."
Photographs also provided memento mori. "Families used the photographs of soldiers as symbols of their absent bodies and as artifacts of mourning and memory."
More unsettling, however, was a secret military use, "confined to institutional files ... outside the collective memory." These were medical photographs of the wounded. Such pictures
became part of a militarized way of seeing war, one that relied on an industrial bureaucracy to produce more and more men for battlefield consumption, and given the high casualty rates, a military administrative bureaucracy to deal with the wounded and their rehabilitation.
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A People's History
Of Poverty in America
Stephan Pimpare
(The New Press)

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50 Photographers
You Should Know
Peter Stephan
John Gabriel,
Text Translator
(Prestel)

Rather than give us an exhaustive history of photography early and late Peter Stepan has chosen to give us an overview. He has the advantage of the cut-off number --- only fifty masters --- along with the natural limitation of his working space (13"x13"). He has --- through the publisher --- had access to superb reproduction from the firm Druckerei in Germany.
The layout is perfect, and is perfectly managed. Each of the masters is presented with timeline at the top of the page, one large representative photograph to the left, brief succinct essay to the right, 2"x2" photograph of the photographer (how do you shoot the one who shoots us?) and chronology. Where and when was André Kertész born (Budapest, 1894)? Where did he show (Paris, New York)? What did he publish (From My Window, Hungarian memories)? When did he die (1985)? Are there any other books about him? (Yes, at least two).
All this information is presented in modest agate type because you and I know that the payoff here are the photos: in Kertész' case, three large, two small. Indeed, he sports more than most: Stieglitz only gets three ... one of Georgia O'Keefe (naturally --- one of the 350 of her because Stieglitz and O'Keefe were sweeties).
Surprisingly, the photographer who merits more space than anyone else is one we never heard of, the Italian Felice Beato (d. 1908). He gets a rare two page spread of a shot of a corner of the City Wall of Peking, which we could have done without as it reminds of us of a 19th Century version of Le Corbu at his worst. Still, Beato's 1868 take on two Sumo Wrestlers (from Photographic Views of Japan) is a kick in the pants. There is mention of pictures from a war we never heard of, "Photographs of dead soldiers during the American campaign in Korea," not from the landing at Inchon but from a mysterious martial invasion of 150 years ago.
This is a work of love, and we love it. Those who teach photography, if they were wise, would make their students study each and every one of the 200 or so shots shown here. Our only demurrer would have to do with Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Andreas Gursky and Wolfgang Tillmans, stuffed in there at the very end. In the photographic arts, we're hopelessly stuck in the quicksand of the past, never much cared for color work, never could figure out why others favor it, why whole books are dedicated to it since to our simple taste it gives too damn much and leaves nothing to the imagination
The editor is not only wise in his choices and layout, he's literate. The introduction, "Rendering the visible to make it visible" is spot on: "According to Lewis Mumford, the time clock, and not the steam engine, was 'the most important machine of the industrial age' ...
"To be in command of time is to have power. Photography is the pleasure of making time come to a stop. The perpetuum mobile of our existence pauses for a brief moment."
No face, even in repose, is totally motionless. A face held motionless on silver gelatin paper radically confounds our perception and triumphs over time and ageing ... The portrait --- apparently a simple matter to manage --- is perhaps the most difficult of all photographic genres.
"The charisma of the model reacts to the charisma of the photographer, and in the most favorable cases the effect has been reciprocal."
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review

In the South Bronx
of America
Mel Rosenthal
(Curbstone Press)

Mel Rosenthal grew up in what was once called the East Bronx. His memories of it are of a lively and vital community. He left to study, and do international charity work, but he always returned to take photographs of the area he had lived in. Later, he participated in the South Bronx Portrait Project.

It had originally begun with photographs of Vietnamese refugees and then graduated with pictures of the destruction of what had once been a stable community of apartments, homes, churches, schools, factories and stores. He began to show the citizens living in the midst of this wreckage, and became known in the area as "the picture man." He dedicated himself to showing people surviving in what he now thinks of as another Third World country (in fact, some of the denizens had asked that Russia post a diplomat there, so they could ask for foreign aid).

In the South Bronx of America consists of over a hundred black-and-white photographs of people working to survive in the rubble of what is essentially a dust-bin, with commentary by the author and pertinent quotes from others who lived there, still live there, or are familiar with the area.

Rosenthal is convinced that his community fell apart because of political expediency:

The burning of the South Bronx didn't just happen by accident, but was the result of decisions made by politicians, businessmen, government officials, and urban planners. The factors we have to examine to understand the burning of the South Bronx are the building of the Cross Bronx Expressway (which cut through the homes of tens of thousands of families), the building of Co-op City (a gigantic complex of affordable housing in the East Bronx which led to "white flight")...and the migration of poor people from places where there were no jobs and hopes...

He goes on to suggest that the destruction was promulgated as a policy of "planned shrinkage," by the New York City HUD and specifically, through the offices of one Roger Starr of the New York Times editorial board.

"Planned shrinkage called for the systematic withdrawal of basic services --- including police, fire, health, sanitation, and transportation --- from poor neighborhoods to make them, unlivable and thus drive the poor out of the city."

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The Man-Eaters of Tsavo
Lt. Colonel J. H. Patterson, D.S.O.
(Lyons Press)

You and I have been taught to despise colonialism --- mostly through the writings of the liberal historians and the biographies of those who fought the good fight: Gandhi of India, Nelson Mandela and Patrice Lumumba of Africa. Much of this literature describes the bitter last throes of colonialism as Great Britain, France, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United States were dispossessed of their conquered territories.

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo ostensibly about lion-hunting is, more exactly, a chronicle of the Good Old Days of Colonialism, when Great Britain was at the height of its powers, when it could send in a single ambitious officer to design and build a railroad and keep an army of workers and "natives" under control. Outside of the simple tale of murdering as much wildlife of Uganda as possible in two short years, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is a fascinating document on colonial power --- a power that struck both ways.

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The Worst Hard Time
The Untold Story of Those Who
Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Timothy Egan
(Houghton Mifflin)

It blighted parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and over half of Kansas. In 1933, there were multiple dust storms that lasted seventy days. In 1935, it stripped away an estimated 850,000 tons of good topsoil, the same year that it drove 250,000 people from their homes.

Cows were found dead, bellies loaded with dust. Wheat, corn, fruit trees, grass died during the eight years of drought. It also killed people: there was so much floating particulate matter in the air that children would develop "dust pneumonia" --- a form of silicosis, and die of suffocation.

Visibilty would drop to zero. One could not see far enough to farm, to go to school, or go to town. Sometimes it was impossible to go next door. One could "drive for days without seeing a single green thing."

A judge in Dalhart, Texas, trying to understand why people were going crazy, drove through the dust bowl and

saw farmhouses without a chicken or cow. He saw children in rags, their parents too frightened of dust pneumonia to send them to school, huddling in shacks shaped into wavy formations on the prairie, almost indistinguishable from the dunes.

A woman was brought to his court. "Her children were hungry, dirty, coughing, dressed in torn, soiled clothes. The house was nearly buried." Having lost her husband to the dust, what finally drove her over the brink wasn't the critters (centipedes and black widows). No, the thing that destroyed her and so many of her neighbors was the enervating, hot, rainless wind that never stopped. "One day, the woman simply snapped. 'Dust is killing me!' the woman shouted."

The static electricity would build up so that people "tried not to touch each other," because they could literally blow each other down. It was

the same kind of electrical energy that caused the windmill to spout a flame from a trailing wire and barbed-wire fences to emit blue sparks."

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Michelangelo and the
Pope's Ceiling
Ross King
John Lee, Reader
(Books on Tape)

Michelangelo was a handsome and noble young Florentine who spent many of his happiest hours flat on his back, alone with his paintbrush, doing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel which, when unveiled, got him immense praise and made him rich beyond compare.
That's what I thought until listening to this reading of Ross King's Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. Now I know the truth. That:
Michelangelo was no noble-looking prince. Not only was his family impoverished, he was homely --- jug-ears, flattened nose, ungainly body. And he was a grouch of the first order. Raphael, who didn't care for him at all, said that he reminded him of a "solitary hangman."
Pope Julius II, the one who commissioned the Sistine Chapel fresco, was continually nagging at Michelangelo to get on with it. That is, when he wasn't running off to wage wars against the French, the Papal states, or his one-time allies. He was also unbearably slow on payments to the artist;
When he began work, Michelangelo didn't know squat about the intricate art of frescoing (he saw himself mostly as a sculptor). So he hired on an army of assistants to help him get going, and was so uneasy about his earliest efforts --- Noah and the Flood; the Drunken Noah --- that he tucked them away in a not-too-visible corner of the ceiling;
When he wasn't dickering with the Pope over getting paid, or hiding out because he thought that Pope Julius' mignons might be wanting to poison him, Michelangelo was arguing long distance --- by post --- with his family of loafers and spendthrifts. Sometimes he would have to drop his work to pop over to Florence to get everyone in line;
Rather than encouraging Michelangelo to be an artist from early on, his father and uncles boxed him mercilessly on the ears whenever they found him doodling with pen and paper (his family considered artists to be lower class.)
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The Sinking of
The Lusitana
An Epic Tragedy
Diana Walker
(Walker)
The lowering of the lifeboats constituted as much a disaster as the torpedo. Because the Lusitania quickly listed so heavily to starboard, those lifeboats were too far out for most to jump to; those on the port side were hampered in their descent by protruding rivets.
There had been no lifeboat drills, and many of the mariners who were in charge of lowering the boats were trapped below decks by the explosion of the torpedo and shortly after, one of the boilers.
Germany had been blockaded by the English navy since the beginning of World War I nine months before, and --- in retaliation --- the Kaiser had proclaimed "unrestricted submarine warfare" against all shipping en route to England, military or not. The Lusitania was thought to be shipping arms and ammunition from America --- indeed, there was evidence for the latter --- but the sinking was ill-timed, appalled the world, and was instrumental in bringing the United States into the war ---- especially with the death of 128 Americans and the careful propaganda of the English concerning the plight of the women and children who had succumbed to the disaster.
By May 12, the world knew that the Germans were responsible through their coded cables, intercepted by the British, included one sent from naval high command headquarters in Germany to the U-20:
My highest appreciation of commander and crew for success achieved of which the high seas fleet is proud and my congratulations on their return.
The German press "applauded the attack as an 'extraordinary success,'" but the English newspapers referred to "The Hun's Most Ghastly Crime."
Images of confused, pale-faced orphans, bereaved women, and dead babies stared out from the pages. Survivors' accounts depicted the liner's last moments with grim pathos. They conjured traumatic hours spent clinging to wreckage among a harvest of dead bodies. The Daily Mirror played on readers' emotion with a tale of how a two-year-old boy was tossed into a lifeboat at the last moment. An elderly woman tried to comfort this "Little Unknown," but he "pressed his chubby fists into his eyes and sobbed, 'Mummie, mummie.'"
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No One's Perfect
Hirotada Ototake
(Kodansha)
Ototake's coming-of-age story No One's Perfect has become an instant best-seller in Japan. According to the publisher, it has sold over 4,500,000 copies --- the second largest selling book in that country in fifty years. This is even more amazing, they tell us, in light of the fact that in Japan there is a powerful prejudice against fumanzoku --- lit. "not all there."
Oto has become a celebrity in Japan and many other parts of the world, and it's easy to see why. He is daring, alive, charming and --- apparently --- never sad. He undertakes to work and to play with minimal help, always with a smile, always upbeat. In fact, he reminds us of that old song,
        Where never is heard
        A discouraging word
        And the skies are not cloudy all day.
There is no doubt that he has done a yeoman-like job in breaking the barriers of prejudice in Japan. Still, I am going to suggest, spoilsport me, that many of us in the world of disability are going to have trouble with his unfailingly bright view of the world. I can't help thinking that Oto, like the rest of us, has periods of self-doubt, of anguish. There have to be times when he cannot accomplish something he holds dear --- perhaps some intimate physical act that he chooses not to tell us about.
He tells us, for example, that girls "weren't beating down his door," then says,
No matter how brave a face we may put on it, the hard fact is that people with disabilities do have a handicap in love.
Now, we think, at last, he will tell us something the possible sadness of being different --- most especially for one at that particularly tough age, being puberty, when those tiny differences get magnified out of proportion. But...no:
"I think the important thing is not to turn your disability into an excuse. True, when your heart's just been broken, it may be the first thing you think of... but was that the real reason it didn't work out?"
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Dream
Street
W. Eugene Smith's
Pittsburgh Project
Sam Stephenson, Editor
(Lyndhurst/Norton)
Gene Smith worked at Life Magazine in its halcyon days --- during World War II and immediately afterwards. He was a highly-paid professional, earning the equivalent of $150,000 a year (in present dollars). He covered some of the most brutal wartime battles --- Guam, Okinawa, Saipan, the Philippines, Iwo Jima.
Up until he left in 1954, he was given over fifty assignments, the kinds of projects that Life specialized in --- a country doctor in Colorado, a coal-mining town in Wales, Schweitzer's village hospital in Africa, daily life in a Spanish village, a black nurse-midwife in South Carolina. With Life's astonishing circulation --- the magazine, at its peak, had a weekly printing of 8,500,000 --- Smith's photographs were influential, highly honored, seen by millions.
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