Amnesia Vivace

Back in the early days of B one of the first posts I wrote was an open inquiry about a photo I'd seen somewhere. I couldn't remember the source, so I asked for help. This was back when I would write short posts every day no matter how inane, like this lost photo alert:

It only took eight years but someone finally dug up the source. Federico Rubio in Uruguay sent me a note last week telling me to look in Sally Eauclaire's New Color / New Work (Abbeville, 1984). I pulled out the book and sure enough there it was, the photo I'd been wondering about all these years. To tell the truth I'd forgotten all about it. But Bingo anyway.

New Color / New Work (photo by Federico Rubio)

As the original post suggests, this photo lives a hermetic existence. As far as I can tell it only exists in this one place, tucked away in an old book. It's not in any other monographs by Meyerowitz, including Cape Light and Redheads which he was compiling contemporaneously. I don't think it belongs to any print collections. It doesn't exist online. If it weren't for Euaclaire, all public evidence of the photo might vanish. And I'm guessing that would be fine with Meyerowitz, because the subject matter is sensitive. It shows his daughter Ariel naked, wearing knee-high disco boots, and standing happily on a shore wall. She looks about 12. 

Ariel Meyerowitz is now an art dealer. I have no idea what she thinks of the photo now, but I'm guessing she is just as happy to have it remain out of circulation. So I won't post here. But if you want to see it, look in your copy of Euaclaire, page 166. If you don't have that book, please buy it already. Heck, buy the trilogy. It's an essential reference.

People say things live online forever, and it's often true. But in this case it's the opposite. This photo has no online presence. It's been preserved only in physical form. It's an ironic twist and a reminder of the long tail of history. Only 10 to 15 percent of published books are still in print. Recorded music has a similar legacy, as do human beings. Only 6.5 percent humanity's history is alive today. The past contains most of what's been created. Sometimes it clings to material quite tightly, offering it to the present in unpredictable chunks. 

That's a potential problem for children posing nude. Maybe Ariel Meyerowitz was fine with her photo as a kid. Maybe she no longer likes it. Or perhaps the opposite of both presumptions is true. Either way it's not going to disappear so long as copies of that book are out there. In the Internet age most people are aware that potentially compromising images can linger and are generally circumspect about what goes online. But back in 1984 the photo world was more naive. It could be compartmentalized and nerdified, and not many outsiders were tuned in. A nude photo of a kid might be exhibited one month, or tucked in a book, then pass into history unnoticed or unremarked. Or so people imagined.

Few people are more aware of these issues than Sally Mann, whose children are the main subject of Immediate Family. If you don't have that book, please buy it already. A new edition is about to be released and copies should be easy to find. "It is to photography what William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor are to Southern fiction," writes Mike Johnston, and I'm with him. I consider it a landmark, and, as with many such books, it wasn't published without controversy. Only a small portion of the photos showed nude children by they were enough to get folks excited. No, I'm not talking about those folks. Forget the sickos. I'm talking about general prudish society. Immediate Family's initial publication in 1992 created an uproar and sent Mann's life through the public ringer, along with her children. Perhaps seeking to head off attention raised by the new edition, her extraordinary essay a few weeks ago in the New York Times Magazine (presumably excerpted from her memoir Hold Still due out May 12th) discussed the book at length and put the photo world on alert. Not only was she a world class photographer. She was a damned good writer and very thoughtful parent. And, like some of her best photos, she was invigorated by her flaws. 

I read the Times article with great interest because I too shoot my kids, sometimes in potentially embarrassing or disturbing situations, and sometimes nude. Childhood includes a healthy dose of all three, at least in my home. It's not a kid smiling with a puppy. To me it looks more like two boys throwing rocks at their helpless younger brother. I find that interesting, so I've documented my family along with most other things around me. And like Mann I've wrestled with what to do with these photographs. I don't mean to put myself in her class as a photographer —although one of my sons is named Emmett— but I think all parent/photographers face similar questions of consent, publicity, our sometimes conflicting roles as parent and photographer, and how all of these factors might change over the course of all our lifetimes. And good parenting is sort of like good photography. Neither one usually offers clear answers.

Woodward Cover Story, 9/27/92

Mann might say her troubles started with Richard Woodward's essay on Immediate Family. That was the review that galvanized national attention, some positive and some negative. But what about her decision to create the book in the first place? All parents photographs their kids. Very few put them in books. She could've stored the photos in a box or album, but with the step to public authorship Mann consciously thrust her children into the spotlight. 

It was a big step and I think that decision weighed on her. Maybe it still does. She expressed ambivalence at the time, initially choosing not to publish the photos. According to the Woodward article it was the kids who changed her mind, demanding that she reconsider. And so she did. But even as she proceeded to publication it was with the expectation — false hope?—  that the book would have minimal distribution. This was 1992, before the Internet, and it was still possible for photographs to vanish without a trace. Many photo books were market flops. Her previous book had taken a decade to sell through its run. With luck maybe this one would fade quickly into the out-of-print bins. She even hoped to keep it out of Lexington bookstores and confined to the rare-book room of the local library. 

Basically I think Mann suspected she was about to unleash Pandora's box and was torn about the way forward. She fantasized about having it both ways. By shoving the book aside after publication she could gain the accomplishment of a major monograph while sheltering her vulnerable subjects. Or so she imagined. But that dream was more cognitive dissonance than reality. The book did not disappear quickly. It became a breakout hit and made Mann's reputation. In some ways that was the best and the worst possible outcome.

In her recent essay, Mann seems to deflect partial responsibility for publication onto her children. Her kids were "visually sophisticated, involved in setting the scene..., and in editing them...I gave each child the pictures of themselves and asked them to remove those they didn't want published." I agree they share some of the burden for what followed. But it's an open question if young children can understand the dynamics of that situation or give informed consent. Most kids want to see their faces on TV. A book? Sure. Great. It might exciting at the time but they may not be thinking about how those images are perceived in 30 years, or how they might come to define their identity. 

For me it's similar to the issues faced by parents of Hollywood child-stars. At what point does a child gain decision making power over their life, image, and identity? I'm sure Mann has thought long and hard about these questions, as have the parents of Shirley Temple, Harry Shearer, Fred Savage, Macaulay Culkin, etc, not to mention Richard Woodward. Sometimes it works out fine for child actors. Sometimes it doesn't. What's the best answer? Damned if I know. 

Jessie's Cut, 1985, Sally Mann

Mann's internal logic was to separate her roles as mother and photographer. "Taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering," she writes, and several images in Immediate Family support her. To shoot a bloody nose, a wet bed, or your daughter being stitched in the hospital requires a remove from maternal instinct, or at least an objectification of it. "The fact is that these [pictures] are not my children," she wrote recently. "They are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind, and shade." 

It's the old photographic credo: A photograph does not equal reality. I get it. But untangling the roles of mother and photographer is not as simple as she lets on. If it were, then it would be no trouble to splash a photo of your youngest on the cover of Aperture. After all it's just an image, not a child, right? And if the Wall Street journal later came along and drew crude bars across its bare flesh, they'd be doing to it a photo not a person. But Mann's infuriated reaction suggests she knows the line is not so clean. People in photographs feel the weight of being represented. And when it's a kid that weight can be unpredictable. 

How might that weight might change over time? For me that's the $64,000 question. "What [will] Emmett, Jessie and Virginia think about these photographs and about their mother, if not this fall, then in 5, 10, or 15 years?" asked Woodward in 1992. It's now 23 years later and by most accounts the photographs have had little negative impact on them. The Mann kids are well adjusted young adults. They like the book. But how could Mann know that at the time? An interesting comparison is to Larry Rivers, whose nude photographs of his young children became a torment to them later, causing real emotional damage and endless legal headaches. The photo of Ariel Meyerowitz mentioned earlier is another example. Or the case of Michael Northrup, whose wife consented to his photographs of her as they were made, but later opposed their publication. 

The future is uncertain for everyone, but with kids even more so. All directions are open. They go through incredible changes on the way to adulthood. Who knows how they'll think of the photos later? Shooting children is fraught with moral hazards. Mann has negotiated them probably as well as anyone could hope, but that doesn't negate the fact they're there.

I'm glad Immediate Family came out when it did. I don't think a book like that could be published today as original material. It came during the only cultural window available to ti. As Mike Johnston notes, the book seems more like a capstone to the 1970s than an influence on what would follow. I think that nostalgic feel, which keyed on Mann's own childhood —"The land was still wild where I grew up, a feral child running naked with the pack"— was responsible for some of its success. I can relate. My childhood in 1970s felt pretty similar. On hot summer days, a mass of local hippies would gather at the pond or river. Everyone stripped their clothes and swam naked, adults and kids together. No one thought twice. It was idyllic but that world is gone. When Mann asks, "How bizarre would it have been to insist on bathing suits for river play, which began after breakfast and often continued long after dark?" it roots her work firmly in the past. Not only would kids be wearing suits now, they'd likely eschew riverplay for screentime. 

Napalm Girl, April 30th, 1975, Nick Ut

By 1992 the spark of the seventies had been snuffed and the culture wars were heating up.  Nudity was politicized, and Immediate Family became a touchstone for broader preconceptions. But as prudish as society was in 1992, it's become even more vigilant now with regard to the privacy of children. A casual photo-op of unknown kids nowadays is enough to spark World War III. Could Nick Ut get a candid nude of a crying girl published today? I'm not many papers would be brave or foolish enough.

That's a good thing in some ways, since images can sometimes proliferate in unwanted directions. But the flip side is that helicopter parenting has eliminated an entire category of images from our visual culture. We see virtually no nude photographs of children in books, magazines, or newspapers today. They're certainly not on TV or film or social media. The one outlet in which they might be shown and rationally interpreted, fine art photography, has largely eliminated them as subject matter. Alain Laboille is an exception, along with a few others. But looking back now, 1992 seems like the glory days. An alien observing earth now through satellite signals might wonder, do children here posses skin or bodies? But forget aliens. The more pressing problem is future humans. They're sure to wonder too, and also about what other categories might be missing.

The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude, 1987, Sally Mann

I'll leave that for future generations to decide. Personally I'm mostly done shooting nude kids. My children are older now and they no longer roam naked as they once did. They're usually clothed, and they'd generally rather not be photographed at all. I often get a hand in front of my lens or a back turned toward me or an "Oh, dad" sigh. Whatever. I was a preteen kid once. I know parents can be irritating. So that project's window has probably closed. I'm guessing Sally Mann faced a similar situation as her kids grew older. The title of her photograph "The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude," suggests an ending point, capped by his defiant gaze.

Not the last time Emmett modeled nude, 2008

I'm done making those photos. But now what? In one way I'm just like all parents. I'm sitting on a large stash of unseen kid pictures. But it's with the extra caveat and possibly deluded notion that others might find them interesting. Forget the subject for a moment. I feel strongly about some as unique photographs, just as I'm sure Sally Mann felt strongly about hers. But I'm less confident than her about the decision to release them into the world. There are a few —maybe my favorites?— I'm certain I'll never show anyone beyond immediate family. Some are nudes. Others might be embarrassing in other ways. I think photographs which pry a subject open lay it bare are often the best, and by that logic some of these are quite good. But to pry open and expose my kids? Hmmm. 

In the end I'm left I'm hemming and hawing, and admiring Mann's fortitude. To release her photos into the world couldn't have been easy. But she did, and I've been enjoying them very much since.

City Of Tiny Lites

Only a few more days until Photolucida portfolio reviews begin Thursday in Portland. It's usually a fun weekend. I've seen this event from all sides over the years, as reviewee, reviewer, volunteer helper, and detached observer. That's my role this time attending some of the events. If you're visiting from out of town, please say hi. Here's a recent portrait to help you find me. 

Of course I won't be dressed in overalls. I'll have the yellow silk suit on just like all the other locals. My "big city" suit. 

There are many photo shows up around Portland during Photolucida. It's a true visual smorgasbord. I wish it were like this every month, but alas, in another week the city will return to normal. So take advantage now.

If you don't want to chase down shows, the portfolio walk at PAM Thursday evening brings hundreds to one location. The buzzline is: "See more photography in one evening than most people see in a lifetime." I'm not sure if that's true but I will verify it's a ton of photos. I can usually absorb photographs until my eyes bleed but by the end of portfolio walk I'm pretty fried. And ready for a beer. If you are too, please get in touch.

Drafted Again

I've been thinking lately about music covers, and how they might or might not relate to photography. In music the idea of covering someone else's song isn't just acceptable. It's expected. Young musicians cut their teeth on covers, as many begin in cover bands trying out the songs of predecessors. It's a learning tool, but it doesn't end there. Musicians typically play covers throughout their career. Established artists will often throw an old cover into a live setlist or album as homage, and many in late career release albums of standards or favorites. And it works vice versa. Every famous musician gets covered. You expect to get covered. In fact if you're writing songs that don't get covered by others you're probably doing something wrong.

This isn't by accident. The structure of musical culture is based on reinterpreting the songs of others. The Great American Songbook, for example, is basically a collection of cover songs. Every serious jazz musician knows the fake book and every pop musician knows The Beatles' catalog. These past works serve as the raw Ur-material which connects musicians going forward, because music culture is cover culture.

Songwriting tradition is passed down through various cultures and and shuffled and edited and remixed long after the author is forgotten. Until the middle of the last century, this was de rigueur in all forms of music. The idea of writing your own songs was relatively uncommon. Maybe it was even considered borderline cocky. In the post-Beatle era the idea of pop performers writing their own songs is much more accepted. Yet covers live on, like this unforgettable Sam Chalpin version of Satisfaction. I'm sorry but you are now sentenced to spend the rest of today with this rattling around in your head.

The same bias applies to music as intellectual property. Copyright generally belongs to the writer of a song, not the performer. The Electric Ladyland version of All Along The Watchtower may be the one which gets airtime. But it's Dylan who receives royalties, not Hendrix.

The same logic might apply to writing. If I repeat the exact same paragraph it could be seen as an act of reinvention, not theft. The same bias applies to music as intellectual property. Copyright generally belongs to the writer of a song, not the performer. The Electric Ladyland version of All Along The Watchtower may be the one which gets airtime. But it's Dylan who receives royalties, not Hendrix.

Great. But what about photography? Why aren't photographers more like musicians? Why don't they cover each other more frequently? Why isn't there a tradition of people rephotographing Talbot or Daguerre all the way back to 1839? Look at all the ways to play Mozart, all the ways to play Summertime. Where is the photographic equivalent? Where's our Ur-material?

To be fair, it does happen sometimes. The most basic method is probably through rephotography, where a photographer revisits the site of an older photo to see how it looks later in time. Longtime B readers know I have an infatuation with rephotography which I have a hard time explaining. I just know I'm just intrigued by it. I've written about it several times, and when I visit new cities (e.g., L.A. recently) I'm often drawn to rephotograph the sites of well-known photos. For me, rephotographing a scene helps me stand in the original photographer's shoes for a moment, to try to see what they saw and wonder why they framed it a certain way. 

I'm no musician but I think the same thing might happen to musicians when they cover a song. They might gain new insight into the melody or words. It puts them for a moment in the author's shoes. I like all sorts of covers but I'm drawn especially to the more adventurous ones. The less recognizable the better. The peculiar mix of influences that results when Pat Boone covers Ozzy Osbourne, for example, or Bongwater covering the Beatles is really quite beautiful. But I have to draw the line at reggae bands covering The Police. Please, for the love of god, no more of those.

Brittany Marcoux

There are all sorts of rephotographic projects out there, from Camilo José Vergara to Mark Klett to Christopher Rauschenberg to Brittany Marcoux to Bruce F. Molnia to Gary Shrimpling to PDX Then and Now to Dear Photograph to Frank's View and more. Some are more arty than others, but I think almost all are rooted in basic homage or curiosity, or some mixture of both. In any case they aren't generally viewed as copying/stealing but more like musical covers, a gentle revisiting.

Carl Weese for TOP

One subcategory of the rephotographers is people who cover themselves. Nick Nixon's Brown Sisters project is among the best known, and Milton Rigovin made similar projects, not to mention innumerable amateur efforts. TOP featured a recent such photo by Carl Weese, which is probably typical of many. For me it's more interesting as a rephotographic study than as a photo. But even a simple pairing like this will cause me to look closely for a few minutes just to check out the recoverage. I just can't help it. Noah Kalina and Karl Baden have used their own faces as rephotographic subjects, creating selfie typologies. I don't know if I'd have the stomach to do something similar. Watching wrinkles and gray hair develop every day doesn't seem very uplifting. 

In musical terms I think these projects might be comparable to an old touring band which plays the same song every night, but each time in a slightly new way. Sugar Magnolia, for example, was initially recorded as a 3 minute pop song, after which the morphing began almost immediately. None of the 500+ live versions which followed were quite the same, but they all pointed back to the root melody. Maybe some are still playing.

Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother (1936)

Alec Soth, Eueth, Migrant Workers Camp, 
Owatonna, Minn., 2011

Another form of photographic covering is to make a photo in the spirit of an older photo. Alec Soth's experiments in 2011 closely modeled on Lange's Migrant Mother and Orkin's American Girl In Italy fit here, as does Rauschenberg's project Atget's Shoes. Karen Keister made a series of these in the 1980s modeled after images in Szarkowski's Looking At Photographs. The example below is from the book Photographs Updated: Similar images/Dissimilar Motives edited by Beth Goldberg, which exhibited at Sonoma St. University in 1990. In musical terms this might be comparable to Wright and Forrest writing Strangers In Paradise based on Borodin's Polovtsian Dances. There's a direct lineage but it's not exactly a straight cover.

from Photographs Updated: Similar images/Dissimilar Motives, edited by Beth Goldberg

1990 is a long time ago and there hasn't been much other scholarship on this since. Maybe photographic covers ran their course in the 1980s? In any case there is at least one other book out there which focuses on photographic covers and that's Richard Whelan's Double Take from 1981, available used online for not much money. If you're into this stuff that is the one to get. Some of the spreads from the book are here and here including the dual shot below comparing Berenice Abbott (left) and Andre Kertesz (right). They were attracted unwittingly to the same New York clock, both circa 1950. In musical terms this might be comparable to Procol Harum's A White Shader of Pale emulating Bach's Air On a G String.

from Double Take, edited by Richard Whelan

Fette and David Simonton have explored this theme through Tumblrs, often bringing together clusters of photographs which share common traits. In musical terms this might be like comparing two acts which resemble one another unconsciously. Horse With No Name will always be mistaken for a Neil Young song, just as King Tuff mimics T. Rex. That's just how it is. 

Then there are the artists who use covers to gently parody, the photographic equivalent of Weird Al Yankovic. Photographs Rendered In Playdough has gotten a lot of traction recently recreating famous photos. Before that it was Legos. The example below mocks Sander's Young Farmers. Sandro Miller's recent Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich hits some of the same humorous notes. No one would ever mistake these for the originals, or Eat It for Beat It. Parody provides safe territory for exploration, or at least it should. 

 Ulrich Tillmann/ Wolfgang Vollmer: Köln 1984. 

No harm, no foul. That's how it should work. But covering another photograph often leads to trouble. It can happen unwittingly to amateurs. It can happen, perhaps wittingly, to pros. Either way the reaction is usually negative. In these cases, re-interpreting someone else's photo isn't considered covering. It's viewed as copyright infringement. In musical terms it might be comparable to The Doors stealing a Kinks riff for Hello, I Love You. If they'd just covered All Day And All Of The Night there'd be no problem. But by recrafting it slightly there's a supposition that they've disguised it as their own, and that's too far. 

Maybe the same logic applies to Burdeny covering Leong. One photo of the Seine from an identical perspective might be considered as an homage. But blindly copy an entire project and recraft it as your own? That's a stretch.

River Seine, 2006, Sze Tsung Leong

River Seine, 2009, David Burdeny

A similar logic might apply to photographic reappropriationists like Sherry Levine or Richard Prince. I guess in their own minds they're creating something new, and the courts have agreed. Maybe they envision their coverage as artistic tribute, but to me it's more likely tied up in some toxic brew of collectibility, art theory, and money. In musical terms I equate these these folks with MC Hammer quoting Rick James. Homage? For me, it's closer to rip off. 

Eric Doerginger's cover projects may seem similar at face value, but I view them differently. To me they come off as earnest and loving, referential to the point of being deferential. In musical terms he's like a Pink Floyd or Grateful Dead tribute band, sacrificing self identity to replay complete sets note for note. Yeah, it's hokey but what's not to love? Plus he's a Brown guy, so there's that. But who copied who?

Photographers are very territorial it seems, much more so than musicians. Maybe it's that pictures are much easier to create than songs. With hundreds of millions of cameras circulating on a finite planet the odds are good that some scenes will get copied multiple times. How many photographers have shot Peter Lik's Antelope Canyon from an identical perspective both before and after him? It's the Star Spangled Banner of photography, redone over and over  to the point where originality has been drained. 

Few would bother copying Peter Lik on purpose, but similar scenarios happen sometimes by chance. When two photographers covered each other shooting the same iceberg by chance recently it almost resulted in a lawsuit.

With the increased accessibility of cameras and online photography we can probably expect more such incidents in the future. I'm actually surprised it doesn't happen more often. Relax, everyone, there's enough world to go around. Some of it is gonna get photographed harder than other parts. And Burt Bacharach is gonna get covered more than Oingo Boingo, and that's OK. No one gets hurt.

But instead of photographing random icebergs, maybe photographers should direct their attention sometimes to historic predecessors. Not only is it OK to cover them, it's healthy for the medium. It keeps the good stuff circulating and makes us rethink the pioneers. It's a form of homage, like naming your blog posts after miscellaneous Zappa titles. We all know photographers are trapped in the past anyway. Why not go all in and relive it?

I Come From Nowhere

I've made three photo trips to LA in recent years. With each visit my circle of exploration has expanded slightly. During the first visit with Bruce Hall in 2012, we stayed in a small motel on 7th between downtown and McCarthur Park. We had no car and we explored only the places we could reach on foot or by subway. That turned out to be Broadway, Hollywood, Alvarado, and Watts Towers. We had a great time, and Bruce found downtown to be mostly unchanged from the early 1990s.

7th and Hill, Los Angeles, Bruce Hall, circa early 1980s

7th and Hill, Los Angeles, Google Street View, 2015

The second visit was in the summer of 2013. I stayed with Bruce downtown on the edge of skid row and my mental map of LA expanded to include the toy and fashion district, Chinatown, and the river. We saw where Bukowski had pissed and Robert Frank's St. Francis statue. We also had access to Richard Bram's car for one day and visited Santa Monica and Venice. It was a fun trip but left me hungry for more. 

My recent visit in January was the longest of the three, 10 days total, shuffling between two AirBnBs, one old hotel, and a rotating mix of 8 roommates. The last 5 days there we had a car, and that opened the city up. I played Neal Cassady to Matt Stuart's Kesey. We rolled the windows down, cranked 93.5 KDAY, and acted as if we'd lived in LA for years. I drove. Matt shot everything that moved out the passenger side. If we saw a good place to walk around we parked and explored. 

One of the more interesting places to explore on foot was Rodeo Drive. That's pronounced Ro-Day-O and don't you forget it. It's Prada, not cowboys. But I don't own any Prada so I dressed there the same way I do every day. I wore an old t-shirt, shorts, sandals, and uncombed bedhead hair. This is a standard outfit most places, but on Rodeo it's comparable to wearing a magic invisible suit. The rich people there have their heads so far up their asses they can't see anything! Within a few minutes walking around I realized that included me with my camera. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I could walk right up to people and shoot them point blank, and with beard and dirty T-shirt I didn't exist. Matt and I had a lot of fun there, although I have to say Matt was dressed slightly better. He's European after all, and the Rodeo folk are trained to pick up on that. 

Olvera Park, Los Angeles, 2012

Together we were able to see the main boulevards and neighborhoods of West LA in some detail. Sunset, Melrose, Beverly, 3rd, Wilshire, Fairfax, Olympic, Pico, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice, Glendale, Echo Park, Silver Lake, Farmer's Market. Every day we found new things and my mental map of LA expanded slightly. But after 10 days I'd still only seen about 1% of the metro area, and they were mostly the white hip parts. I still have no idea what Compton or Pasadena or Inglewood or Long Beach or Burbank looks like. In my mind they remain full of potential, and LA itself is an untapped land of possibility. The more I see of it the more mysterious it becomes. I guess that's why people move there. They're helpless to resist the dream impulse.

The irony is that I grew up hating LA. Where I lived as a kid on the far north coast of California everyone did. LA was Babylon. Cars, traffic, smog, plastic, crime, and everything bad. Worse than that, it had the population base and could thus control the state's political world. The rural hills of the north coast felt like another state entirely. In fact there was a movement to secede from Southern California and create a new state, where everyone would grow their hair out and live on nuts and carrots and pot. It never worked out but that was the context for me to judge LA. It was the distant overlord. We had nothing in common, or so I thought.

Top: Robert Frank, 1955; Bottom: Garry Winogrand, 1955

Three decades later the place has begun to grow on me. Not that I could ever live there, but as a photographic destination it has enormous potential. Just look at downtown, for example. Within six blocks it transitions from financial skyscrapers to the grungiest skid row imaginable. The mix of people in between is beautiful. Why hasn't someone made that a project? Who is shooting good photos there? If downtown has been relatively ignored it's probably because LA is a driving city. You need a car to see it, and once you have one you realize that downtown is only one of about 300 promising destinations. 

LA is the kind of place you stumble on random famous shit occasionally (except for downtown which is mostly unknown to the outer world). Oh yeah, there's that restaurant from that show. There's so-and-so from that movie. There's Jeff Garlin with his Leica. 

Photographers aren't immune. Last week I hit three photo landmarks by accident. The first was Gursky's 99 Cent Store on Sunset Boulevard. I guess I should've known where it was because I'd written about the thing several weeks ago. But but the time I arrived in LA I'd forgotten all about that. We were shooting Hollywood Boulevard and needed some film. So George, Faulkner, and I decided to walk to Freestyle Photo on Sunset, another photo landmark of sorts but definitely second rank. 

We'd gone just a few blocks from the Hollywood/Western subway stop when there it was: Gursky's 99 Cent Store, 5270 Sunset. Turns out there are many 99 Cent stores in LA but this one was immediately recognizable. It had palm trees in the right place between the clerestory windows, and amazing lines of fluorescents. Gursky's Photoshopping notwithstanding, the place felt real. I went inside but it proved impossible to get an upper view of the aisles. So I settled for an exterior shot.

The second photo landmark was La Brea and Beverly. This is another corner I've written about so I know it well from various photographs. But finding it in LA came by accident. We were driving down Wilshire to LACMA, we passed La Brea, and I realized the corner must be close. A little ways up the road and there it was. We all piled out of the car to get a good look.

This photo is shot from the same vantage as Shore's and shows Bruce, Missy, Steve, and George in the foreground near the iconic sign. This was right before Bruce managed to get scolded for hip shooting a passing woman on a bike. She called him on it but instead of saying anything about the Shore photo —which may have soothed her but doubtful— Bruce went into denial mode. Who, me? What photo? Poor decision. So are the coffee stains above.

Before visiting this corner I'd always wondered about Shore's choice of location. On a map this seems like no-man's-land. There are no big buildings, no famous shops, nothing noteworthy. It's just two gas stations. Why that spot? But when you visit this corner you realize it's sort of the perfect center of LA, or at least White-Upper-Class LA. Beverly and La Brea are main corridors. Where they intersect, nothing much happens, but that's the story of LA. It's all about the void, and cars, and space. Symbolically, this corner could be city hall. In fact we passed La Brea/Beverly by chance several times later in the week driving here or there. There's some sort of magnet there and you wind up circling the spot involuntarily. Maybe Shore had a similar experience there and that's why he shot it. Or not. Who knows. Either way I can check that photo landmark from the list.

The last landmark I found by accident was on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. This was during our street shooting workshop on the last weekend in January. We picked a Starbucks on Hollywood as a meeting point, and everyone went off to find photos. 

I knew this would be my last time in Hollywood for a while and I was determined to find the location of  Winogrand's photo of three women with wheelchair guy and shadows. Unfortunately I was going from memory and I didn't know the photo by heart. The only helpful detail I could remember in the photo was a sidewalk star which pinned it on Hollywood, but I had no idea which cross street. 

This is where the magic of smart phones (maybe I'll have to get me one) kicked in. No image is ever out of reach. One of my students looked up the photo on his phone and it was a simple matter to see the Vine St. sign in the upper right of the frame. Voila! The corner turned out to be just across the street from our Starbucks meeting point. 

By afternoon in late January this corner is completely shaded. Winogrand must've shot it during summer months in the evening, shooting due west into the sun. The buildings in the photo are still there, and maybe the tree, although it's hard to say because the entire sidewalk is now lined with large palm trees obscuring the sky. The sidewalk and lamppost remain unchanged. I scoped out the location from several angles but by this time my Instax had broken down, so I can't show any instant photos. Here is it in Street View:

All in all it was a good trip. I'm gradually going through the film now. Whatever turns up will be only part of the LA story. I'll need to return at some point...

Status Back Baby

One of the hazards of commenting on evolving stories is that the ground can shift underneath you. That's what happened with yesterday's post. I spent a few days over the weekend compiling notes, and checking in occasionally on MPD to confirm it was still down. As I posted yesterday I thought I was in the clear. MPD was offline and looked as if it might stay that way a while.

About three minutes after my post went up, so did MPD. I'm glad it's back but now much of yesterday's post has become outdated. All of the comments referring to MPD's demise were obviously premature. Jumped the gun there. A simple verb flip might help correct the rest. What if the past tense uses of "was" now change to "is"? And my copyright thoughts still apply, although maybe MPD wasn't the perfect test case after all. Oh well. It's good to see him back online anyhow.

The oddest part of MPD's reinstatement is how it came about. MPD was initially expelled from Tumblr due to their three strike policy. If Tumblr receives three DMCA complaints about a site within a certain time period, down it goes. Mark had posted two songs without permission several months back. The third strike was apparently an unauthorized photo by the Swiss photographer Massimiliano Rossetto.

Now it turns out Rossetto didn't file the DMCA request after all. Instead it was filed by an identity thief posing illegally as Rosetto in an effort to gain control of his images. Say Wha? 

A brief explanation appeared yesterday on Rosetto's website:

Dear visitors, 

For the last four years I've been a victim of a serious identity theft from an unknown person living in France that used my photography work without my consent and published it on several websites. 

After reporting this person, things have been on the quiet side for almost a year, but I was recently contacted by several magazines and editors (see mpdrolet, C-HEADS and others), asking for explanations on why did I ask them to remove my pictures. And I didn't know anything about what they were talking about. As I later found out, this impostor from France had been trying to eliminate all my photography work and my identity from the internet, by using my own name "Massimiliano Rossetto" to send fake emails to the various publications/ blogs/ magazines in which my photography work was published and submitting fake DMCA requests, which were clamorously accepted for some reason. 

With this statement, would like to apologise for all the problems this has created. In case you'd like to provide me with legal help or if you were contacted by this impostor, please ignore the fake request and contact me by forwarding a copy of the email to: legal@massimilianorossetto.com

So not only was this guy stealing Rossetto's images, he was filing DMCA requests in an effort to squeeze him out of his own photo business, one of which brought down MPD as collateral damage. Wow. Talk about an Major Asshole Move. Who pulls a stunt like that? 

At the time his site went down, Mark didn't realize any of this. When he approached Tumblr yesterday about reinstatement, Tumblr said its hands were tied. The only alternative was to get the DMCA request removed by the filer. A tough chore...unless the filer was in impostor. 

Once Mark got in touch with the real Rossetto they both realized what had happened and Rossetto removed the takedown request filed in his name. This allowed MPD to go back online yesterday with complete archive intact, and he's been pumping out photos like a racehorse in the 21 hours since. It's as if last weekend never happened. And the real Rossetto? He's fine with MPD:

Problem solved, sort of. Most takedowns aren't this odd but the possibility still lurks. Mark has two strikes. Another one could bring it all Tumblring down again. They aren't hard to file. All it takes is one bad apple, and whoever stole Rossetto's identity is still out there. All of this could change in five minutes just like I could get run over by a bus in five minutes. Fuck it, I'm going to press now.