The Epic of Everest

Leni Riefenstahl by Martin Munkacsi.

It's funny how everything somehow ties together. Earlier this week, I was looking through a book of images by Martin Munkacsi and came across this picture of Leni Riefenstahl which caught my eye. 

The picture was taken in 1930 or 1931, when Riefenstahl was making mountaineering movies. Munkacsi was a Hungarian photographer who might just be one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century.

Munkacsi's picture of kids playing in the water in Lake Tanganyika capture Henri Cartier-Bresson's imagination. this is what HCB said about it:

"For me this photograph was the spark that ignited my enthusiasm. I suddenly realized that, by capturing the moment, photography was able to achieve eternity. It is the only photograph to have influenced me. This picture has such intensity, such joie de vivre, such a sense of wonder that it continues to fascinate me to this day." 

Munkacsi was also at the forefront of the modernisation of fashion photography. He worked for Alexey Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar and used his beautifully relaxed style to create images like the one below. And that work inspired Avedon and so many others. 

Munkacsi died in poverty in 1963 and nobody wanted his archive. So it goes...

Riefenstahl worked for a time as the star of Alpine pictures (and here is a  link to Susan Sontag's Fascinating Fascism article on her - thanks Joerg), pictures that Sontag claimed were part of a Teutonic claim to mastery of the heights above this earth. 

Then yesterday on BBC4 they showed the history of climbing Mountain Everest. Mountaineering was never a neutral subject, it was always invested with politics (hence the Riefenstahl connection). 

The other film they showed was The Epic of Everest, which was shot in 1924 and details the expedition where the British Mountaineers Mallory and Irvine died. But it's a beautiful film and says something about the Himalaya that contemporary movies just fail to capture. 

Perhaps that's something to do with the primitive equipment and the simplicity of choices that make for a very still, considered take of the landscape and the mountaineers moving through it, with lots of long shots (the film makers are very proud of their long lenses).

And then there is the journey to the mountain and the images of the people they meet. And the baby donkey.

Here's the baby donkey. 

Watch The Epic of Everest here if you're in the UK. 

Stacy Kranitz: Sex and Drugs and The Frankfurt School

It's conference season in the UK and the lookalike leaders of the lookalike parties are all standing up and presenting their best faces to the world; they're faces that have been focus-grouped to the point where all personality, individuality and vestiges of what it means to be an eating, spitting, shitting human being have been blurred out. Everything they do or say is because someone, somewhere has told them that this is what someone, somewhere wants to hear.

Focus-grouping for politicians is a bit like photo-shopping for slebs, retouching people until they all look the same, so the freckles and spots and wrinkles (the bits that make people look interesting and beautiful) all go away.

I sometimes get the feeling that a similar thing happens in photography, that people make work that they only pretend to engage with, work that they really don't have a passion for and that doesn't connect with the world outside the photo bubble. It might hit the spot in parts of that little bubble world, but essentially its work that is a bit dull and boring, work that's no fun; no fun to make, no fun to view, no fun to talk about.

Which can't be said about Stacy Kranitz. She has a new book out published by Straylight Press called From The Study on Post-Pubescent Manhood. It's a modest book published in modest numbers, and should be seen as a stepping stone to future publications. But buy it all the same because the work is so full-on

What is great about the work though, is how it was made and how Kranitz talks about it. One of the pleasures I have in writing for the BJP is that I get to interview consistently fascinating and committed photographers who are stretching photography in so many ways, people who are happy to give their time to talk about work that I would so love to be able to make.

Kranitz is one of those people. I interviewed her last week for the BJP's November youth culture edition and was bowled over by the combination of energy and erudition that she has when she talks about her work;  with some heavy drinking, a bunch of disaffected boys without shirts and a whole bunch of drugs thrown in for good measure it's Sex and Drugs and the Frankfurt School.

Kranitz describes herself as an experiential, performative photographer; seeking  a new methodology in photo-making - one that at the moment involves all the sex and drugs and the Frankfurt School. But she ties this in with some the anthropological/photographic writings of people like Katherine Stewart, Michael Taussig and James Agee, all of whom share the idea that to make serious work you have to be part of what you are photographing, and (in Stewart's case) that a closely analytical way of working may be counter-productive in understanding the chaos and ephemera of another culture.

So Kranitz goes into a scenario in full method style (and it might not always be that healthy mentally or physically. Do not try this at home and if you do, don't tell your parents unless they're as understanding as Kranitz's). The pictures at the top are from her Nazi re-enactor series, a series where she takes the role of her hero/anti-hero Leni Riefenstahl. It's Nikki S.Lee with Nazi nobs on, but strangely the pictures with Kranitz/Riefenstahl are mixed with straight portraits and action shots, very good portraits and action shots but not on the same level as the Riefenstahl role pictures.

For the Post-Pubescent pictures, she basically became part of the Skatopia community (a libertarian skateboarding farm)  with its ritualised violence and bedlam of skating, music and drugs. Anyway, I still have to try and write all this up into a more coherent form so that's about all I will say for now.

Because at the end of the day, as Kranitz says, "I struggle to know what the fuck I'm doing."

Buy the book here at Straylight Press.

Propagandists

Saatchi and Saatchi were the great British propagandists of recent years, using their marketing skills to sell Margaret Thatcher to the UK public.

In the US, I suppose Shepard Fairey springs to mind, even if it's just for the one picture - and I feel kind of bad about having him up there - so I'll put Jill Greenberg's John McCain up as well - a blast from the not-very-distant-past.

The best propaganda is inspired by despotic, all-powerful regimes - Nazis and Communists in other words (but there could be others). They produced  John Heartfield who made his wonderfully savage anti-Nazi collages, while people like  Leni Riefenstahl and Alexander Rodchenko made work that supported the Nazis and Soviet regimes. Rodchenko was perhaps the greatest artist/photographer/propagandist of them all, and the most compromised , as  Peter Schjeldahl so eloquently states.


"How does one assess Rodchenko? By what measure? According to whom? He was among the most zealous of the Russian avant-gardists who identified totally with the policies of triumphant Communism. The policies were horrible from the start. The artists were perhaps understandably blinded to the truth by naïveté and initial privilege.

But Rodchenko, as the nightmare unfolded, proved himself sincere. He capitulated abjectly to each mad turn of Party ideology and willingly abetted epic criminality. He took thousands of propaganda photographs at the White Sea Canal project, gazing through his camera at a slow-motion massacre of 200,000 persons and praising Stalin with every frame. By the mid 1930s, his photographic work was hardly distinguishable from that of his German contemporary Leni Riefenstahl. Both celebrated the totalitarian sublime."

But despite the Rodchenkos and Riefenstahls, relatively few photographers are renowned for propaganda - they remain nameless servants of their political, military and economic patrons -despite every picture of a politician, a businessman or a soldier, every advertisement or fashion picture, every shiny car, environmentally friendly oil company, every luscious burger and thin-hipped model being propaganda in a direct shape or form. 

Nowadays, photographers don't need to celebrate the "totalitarian sublime" because we have the "consumerist sublime" to hold up high - look in any magazine and you will find photographic celebrations of consumption, consumption that photographers fall over themselves to serve at every turn - we celebrate the destruction of the biosphere, the contamination of body image and sexual identity, the commercial and architectural debasement of community and public space and a worship of oil and the automobile that is destructive at personal, local, national, global and universal levels. 

So, just for a little bit of mischief and not saying there is any kind of moral equivalence (though one day there might be, nay perhaps there already is), how do we assess photographers that engage in these "celebrations"? How do we assess people who capitulate abjectly to each mad turn of capitalist society, who identify so thoroughly and cheaply to the bottom line policies of  fin-de-siecle consumerism.


"How does one assess commercial photographers? By what measure? According to whom? They are among the most zealous of photographers who identify totally with the policies of triumphant Capitalism. The policies are horrible from the start. The artists are perhaps understandably blinded to the truth by wilful naïveté, initial privilege and residual greed.

But these photographers, as the nightmare unfolds, prove themselves sincere. They capitulate abjectly to each mad turn of consumerism and willingly abetted epic environmental, social and community destruction. They take thousands of propaganda photographs for Apple, for Mercedes, for Shell, Gucci, British Airways or KFC, gazing through their cameras at a slow-motion degradation of the planet and her inhabitants, praising her destroyers with every frame. By the mid 2000, their photographic work was hardly distinguishable from that of their German and Russian ancestors, Leni Riefenstahl and Alexander Rodchenko. They celebrate the consumerist sublime."


From the Big Freeze UK, over and out.. 

We are all Prostitutes

Five Kinds of Bad, but for what I can't recall

The previous post gathered lots of responses for which there are no easy answers. One poster asked about any academic papers/research into some of the issues posted.

So does anyone know of any research into how we view pictures (either analogue or digital). I know Modern Painters touched on Semir Zeki's research on responses to beauty 'in the medial orbito-frontal cortex' to beauty in the February 2009 issue but I think there must be academic research into how we look at different kinds of pictures, both on paper/canvas and on the screen.

I would also imagine there is extensive research done on the way words, text and image interact with each other. Certainly, great attention is paid to the exact wording that accompanies particular images both on screen and in newspapers. I love the way stock images are used repeatedly on television (over a period of years) and how they make us remember/forget, the lag/dissonance between word and image leaving some half-baked recollection in our brain (as in the pictures above). At various times, the BBC (just to take one example) lays down specific guidelines for its journalists on what language to use in particular circumstances and so to accompany particular images. This has a huge effect on how we view people from particular places. But this should come as no surprise - photography has served capitalism, communism, fascism and consumerism well over the years, playing a major part in making us vainer, greedier, dumber, fatter, thinner and altogether more lustful, selfish and short-sighted. We always talk about the concerned photographer, and mock him or her, but what about the bastard photographers who do help neuroticise women, who do help distort the way we see and experience the world. It's not just Leni and anyway, she had a mortgage to pay as well. I vas only obeying orders, don't ve all? Is it all just propaganda, as Martin Parr would have us believe?

Oh dear, I'm away with the fairies on this one...

So if anyone can point us into any research, aesthetic, pychological or neurological, it would be most welcome.