Bill Cunningham New York

Navasky on Zelizer's About to Die

From The Nation: "[Zelizer] rightly emphasizes that most journalists and academics have generally assumed that words are more important than pictures or images; that the main function of news pictures is to document or illustrate words; and that most editors regard pictures as “softer” than words. Of the bureau chief who remarked, “Words can go deeper than pictures,” she writes, “This disregard for the image has buttressed a default understanding of news as primarily rational information relay that uses words as its main vehicle and implicitly frames images as contaminating, blurring, or at the very least offsetting journalism’s reliance on straight reason.” Of academics like Jürgen Habermas and Karl Popper, who have acknowledged the power of images, she argues that they seem “irritated” because they believe that “affect, the emotions, and passion,” which may be aroused by images, “undermine the development of the reasoned public that journalism is expected to bolster.” About to Die is a refutation of this “words matter and images don’t” perspective. As Zelizer sees it, words may be rightfully valued for reasons related to logic and evidence, but rationality, facts and information offer an incomplete picture, so to speak, of an event. Images can “bypass the intellect to engage the emotions,” offering instead what she calls “implicative relays, suggestive slices of action that people need to complete by interpreting and imagining.”

Stan Douglas - Midcentury Studio @ David Zwirner

From the Zwirner website: "Stan Douglas...chronicles the burgeoning discipline of press photography in North America during the postwar period. Douglas has assumed the role of a fictional, anonymous photographer to create a series of images hypothetically produced between 1945-1951. To do so, he constructed a veritable “midcentury studio” using authentic equipment as well as actors to produce carefully staged, black-and-white photographs that painstakingly emulate the period’s obsession with drama, “caught-in-the-moment” crime-scenes, curious and exotic artifacts, magicians, fashion, dance, gambling, and technology."

About Looting?

Rebecca Solnit in the Nation:

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I'm talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I'm talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word "looting." One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: "A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk." The man's sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: "Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince." It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: "A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store." Yet another: "The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter."

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who'd survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn't arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual "objective" roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of cliches and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The "looter" in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn't the most urgent problem. The "looter" stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don't convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I've seen I'm not convinced.

Matteo Ricci's Big Map

The New York Times has graciously cropped Ricci's c.1600 world map to suit its readers' presumed provincial world view?


Edward Rothstein in the Times:

When a map of overwhelming dimensions and detail is presented to the ruler of a land, the homage, surely, is a kind of deference. The map is partly meant to be an illustration of the ruler’s powers, the extent of his realm, the range of learning he commands.

And yes, one of the remarkable aspects of the world map on display at the Library of Congress through April 10, is that along with its imposing scale (it is 12.5 feet long and 5.5 feet high) and grand ambitions (it encompasses the known world of the early 17th century), at its very center stands the “Middle Kingdom,” as China called itself, its mountains and rivers commanding attention with dense annotation, all of which is in Chinese.

Created by a visiting Italian-born Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, and apparently commissioned by the court of Emperor Wanli in 1602 — the year after Ricci became the first Westerner admitted to Peking and then the Forbidden City— this map is indeed partly a tribute to the land in which Ricci had lived since 1582, and in which he would die in 1610.

One of his commentaries on the map (placed just south of the Tropic of Capricorn), declares that he is “filled with admiration for the great Chinese Empire,” where he has been treated “with friendly hospitality far above my deserts.” Over the landmass of China, he comments: “The Middle Kingdom is renowned for the greatness of its civilization.”

That greatness can be sensed in the delicate cartographic detail that had to be meticulously carved onto six wood blocks before being printed on rice paper. Ricci’s explanatory Chinese commentary is so extensive in some regions that it seems to cover the terrain. The map was meant to stand on six folding screens and can be imagined engulfing its observer.

Snowflake Bentley

From the Guardian:

Bentley took his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal at the age of 19 and went on to capture more than 5,000 more images. Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor who grows ice crystals in his laboratory at California Institute of Technology, said Bentley's photographs were so good "hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years."

Stacy Hollander, senior curator of the American Folk Art Museum, which is hosting the fair, said: "Everyone's fascinated by snow. It's just magical, and he captured that magic in these beautiful photomicrographs."

In his local town of Jericho, Bentely's fascination with snowflakes earned him the nickname Snowflake Bentley. A museum there is dedicated to his life's work, housing 2,000 of his vintage prints. A book of his photographs, Snow Crystals, was published in 1931. The same year he died walking home in a blizzard.

Liz Glynn's California Surrogates for the Getty

Nuit Banai on Liz Glynn in Artforum:

Following The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, her contribution to the New Museum’s first triennial in 2009, Liz Glynn continues to explore the fraught relationship between institutions and art objects. For her latest venture, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2009, she trawled the Dumpsters of the venerable Los Angeles institute to dig up common materials (the exhibition checklist cites “California yard waste, trash, plaster, and Victory wax”) that she repurposed to make copies of the disputed antiquities returned by the museum to Italy in 2007.