Posts Tagged ‘photography’
Jazz Emerges Part 6
Visible Roots of America’s Most Original Cultural Product
The Basses of Our Music
Photographs by William Carter, 1971-1985
Above: listen to bassist Pops Foster with the Luis Russell Orchestra from 1929, “Jersey Lightning.” Also on this record are New Orleans men Henry “Red” Allen, Albert Nicholas and Paul Barbarin. Virtually all of the New Orleans bass players depicted in this post played in an energetic, percussive style very similar to Foster’s.
FUNDAMENTAL: Historians and scholars have long believed the world’s first jazz band to have been that of Buddy Bolden, whose powerful cornet was heard from the bandstands of city parks and dance halls across New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century. The only member of the Bolden band known to have survived into the 1960s was bassist Papa John Joseph, shown above in an upstairs room at Associated Artists gallery, which morphed into Preservation Hall. Joseph played concert sets downstairs until 1965, when, at 87, he collapsed and died seconds after performing When the Saints Go Marching In. Photograph by Bobby Coke, early 1960s
IN PERPETUAL DEMAND around New Orleans, and on numerous road trips across the U.S. and Europe, muscular bassist Chester Zardis (1900-1990) employed a powerful style that belied his physical shortness of stature and earned him the nickname “Little Bear.” In the post-World War II years, younger proteges flocked to hear and meet early New Orleans masters like Zardis. Thus was a once-obscure, pre-electronic bass plucking technique revived and carried forward across generations and over continents.
Photograph by William Carter, 1984
NEW ORLEANS BASS STYLIST Wellman Braud (1891-1966) reached the top of his profession as a
mainstay with Duke Ellington, plus many other engagements. Like a number of the classic jazzmen, Braud descended from a Creole musical family — several of whom, such as his cousin, bassist McNeil
Breaux, used an alternate spelling of the French-derived last name. Like many another jazz pioneer,
Wellman eventually settled in California, accepting gigs such as with blues singer Barbara Dane. Photograph by William Carter, c. 1960
FAMOUS BASSIST Pops Foster (lower right), 1892-1969, was already playing professionally in New Orleans by 1907. Amid a busy career of touring and gigging with top jazz names, he lived mainly in New York and (eventually) San Francisco. He is shown here (bottom right) in a photo from his own collection with an all-star band that included New Orleans natives Alvin Alcorn (trumpet, center) and Cie Frazier (drums, top right). Photograph: San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation Collection, Archive of Recorded Sound, Stanford University (date unknown)
Listen to bassist Pops Foster on “Ostrich Walk” with Mutt Carey’s band
TALENTED SON of bandleader Henry Allen, trumpeter Henry Red Allen (1906-1967) played extensively in New Orleans, on the Mississippi riverboats and in Chicago before settling in New York, where he was featured as soloist and sideman with top jazz orchestras of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s including those of Luis Russell, Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson and Eddie Condon — besides leading several of his own bands. Photograph by William Carter, 1964
UNDISPUTED EMPEROR OF TRADITIONAL JAZZ, Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) enjoyed a career too spectacular to summarize. While occupying center stage in America’s mainstream musical culture for virtually half a century, in his music and in his words Satchmo never ceased to recall, with great affection, his formative New Orleans years as a streetwise orphan and fledgling brass band cornetist. Photographs by William Carter, 1962
Jazz Emerges Part 5
Visible Roots of America’s Most Original Cultural Product
Preservation Hall Won Hearts Across U.S.
Photographs by William Carter, 1971-1985
New Orleans
New Orleans
San Francisco
San Francisco
Middle West
Napa, California
Napa, California
Jim Robinson and fan, California
San Francisco
Santa Rosa, California
Jim Robinson at Stanford
Frank Demond in Santa Rosa, California
Sing Miller en route
Allan Jaffe, California
New York City
Chicago
Minneapolis
Jazz Emerges Part 3
Spirit Matters
Visible Roots of America’s Most Original Cultural Product
CLICK THE ARROW ABOVE to listen to The old Eureka Band, led from the 1930s by Percy Humphrey., Tops in the city, as late as the 1950s its joyous processions were marked by a dignity and decorum since overtaken by the wild and garish. Photos by Tom Sharpsteen, compiled with sound by Clint Baker and Katie Cavera, used here with permission.
Years ago, the French Quarter streets were amazingly quiet. Especially in the mornings, before the few tourists were out and about, this historic section – located near the river, yet built on high ground for good reason – retained its residential feel. New Orleans’ slow-going, personal style, out of the national mainstream, had much to do with how it cradled classic jazz for most of a century.
But other than a couple of sleazy joints on Bourbon Street, it was hard for a musician to feed his family, or for a visitor to hear the real deal. Still, the city’s close-knit neighborhoods proclaimed their musical birthright at pop-up parties, funky dance halls, street events, church memorials. “Let the good times roll,” translated from the French, was always there, highlighted by everyone’s anticipation of the Mardi Gras Carnival, which they prepare for all year long.
The past has always loomed large in this survival culture where one never knew what tragedies the future might hold. Generations of musicians have long been linked by family ties, spiritual traditions, personal musical tutelage, people caring for neighbors. By the 1970s I had met and played with musicians in several cities of the world, but only in New Orleans did you learn so quickly where they lived — on which block of which street, in which ward, near which landmark. And no other city has ever spawned so many tunes named for beloved streets, from Basin to Canal to Bourbon to Burgundy to…
Within weeks of arriving, I knew I had arrived when I was invited to jam on the sidewalk to celebrate the birthday of an old lady named Miss Carrie. Then on ten minutes notice I donned a parade hat to go play a gig at Antoine’s fancy restaurant. Then I joined a procession of Japanese visitors marching to the graveside of clarinet great George Lewis. There were plenty of weeks of no action at all. But one thing was sure: in New Orleans nobody ever needs to be asked to “play with feeling.”
Preservation Hall, St. Peter Street, French Quarter, New Orleans, early morning, after the streets have been freshly washed and workers are filtering back to their jobs in the tourist industry.
Photograph by William Carter, 1984
Serenading a friend of the musicians, Miss Carrie, at her home typified the informality of French Quarter musical culture. Left to right: Miss Carrie; bass drummer Booker T. Glass; student Jennifer Hamilton wearing band hat; washboard player Allan Jaffe. Photograph by William Carter, 1974
Left to right: trumpeter De De Pierce; tubaist Allan Jaffe; clarinetist Willie Humphrey with Preservation Hall Jazz Band on tour in California. Under Jaffe’s marketing expertise the warm sincerity of the players was welcomed as part and parcel of their music by adoring fans in major concert venues worldwide.
Photograph by William Carter, c. 1970
Pianist-vocalist Sing Miller at concert; “You gotta have soul to do this work,” he told a photographer. Photograph by William Carter, 1975
Trombonist Louis Nelson at a private party in the French Quarter. For many years Nelson was
featured in the bands of Barry Martyn and others on countless European tours, as well as with trumpeter Kid Thomas and others across the U.S. under the Preservation Hall banner. The watchword of such brass players was a simple, honest sound derived from decades of experience processioning through the streets of the city by day and working down-home dance halls by night. Photograph by William Carter, 1984
Drummer Paul Barbarin’s manuscript of his song, “The Second Line” © circa 1960: the term “second line” refers to the enthusiasts who walk and dance and exult beside the brass bands along the routes of the street parades. Collection of William Carter
Clarinetist Paul “Polo” Barnes’ manuscript of his tune “My Josephine,” New Orleans, prior to 1960. Polo was remembered by jazz buffs for his tours and recordings with Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver around 1930. He was remembered by his neighbors for playing sweet songs by himself on summer evenings in his back yard. Collection of William Carter
Entertainers in a Bourbon Street nightclub: some clowning is traditional among New Orleans musicians, but in the commercial joints they often faced degrading conditions. Bassist at right is jazzman James Prevost. Prior to 1960. Courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
Sister Gertrude Morgan at Associated Artists gallery, New Orleans. Photograph by Dan Leyrer, before 1960.
Revival service, Church of God in Christ, New Orleans. Photograph by Ralston Crawford, 1950s. Courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University
Clarinetist George Lewis with his mother, Alice Zeno, New Orleans. An internationally influential jazz stylist, Lewis loved playing simple hymns. He said, “I consider myself as a beginner from the time I started till now.” Photograph by Stanley Kubrick (?), c. 1950.
Reedmen Tom Sharpsteen & Ryoichi Kawai; banjoist Junichi Kawai and others pay homage at clarinetist George Lewis’ grave, New Orleans. Photograph by William Carter, 1984
Tubaist/entrepreneur Allan Jaffe paying his respects at a New Orleans memorial service for trombone star Jim Robinson. Photograph by Grauman Marks, 1976
Carters in SF MOMA Show
Photograph by Chuck Frankel. Viewing Carter prints at SFMOMA: this museum was among the first in the world to collect photographs as a fine art.
From November 29, 2012 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is showing the following 4 William Carter prints. Part of Carter’s “Humanity” series, as represented in his book Causes and Spirits, these photographs are in SF MOMA’s permanent collection and can be seen in the rooms displaying the Museum’s ongoing series, “Picturing Modernity.”
San Francisco 1969
Central City, Colorado 1970
Geneseo, Illinois 1973
Fuengirola, Spain 1968
The World’s Century
American Exceptionalism is Dead
Longterm thinking: Chinese laborer in Yemen, 1964. Photograph © William Carter
By 1945 the U.S. had emerged indisputably as the world’s strongest nation, physically and financially. War spending had helped end the Depression. The country had been spared the devastation of once-dominant Europe and its far-flung colonial system. The booming 1950s reinforced America’s underlying faith in its own moral and political underpinnings. Goaded by the worldwide challenge of communism, this “first new nation” set out to teach the “third” or “underdeveloped” world, by soft and hard power alike, the benefits of the American way. Behind this effort was a longstanding set of internal attitudes and assumptions that historians would dub “American exceptionalism.”
During the second half of this “American Century” the U.S. became involved in proxy wars in places such as Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and Latin America. The results of these conflicts were often, at best, indeterminate. Far more successful, below the radar, were America’s exports of knowledge-based, open-lifestyle aspects of its consumer-based civilization: science and education, manufacturing and retail, mass communications and entertainment. Enlightened self-interest assumed that a rising tide of living standards worldwide (across oceans policed by the U.S. Navy) would lift all boats. Public and private agencies poured massive resources into helping the world imbibe Progress.
But by the year 2000 the success of this “soft power” transfer had produced unforeseen consequences. Populous and increasingly prosperous non-western civilizations, having acquired industrial and economic modernization, were now reconfiguring their societies in ways not necessarily predicted or understood by their western mentors.
Worldwide economic relationships were increasingly interconnected and interrelated. Low-cost Asian labor was as much a fact of life in Berlin or Los Angeles or Mexico as were the inventions of Apple or Caterpillar or Boeing in Mumbai or Sydney or Cairo. No one anywhere could any longer claim a monopoly on righteousness, pornography, or nuclear fusion. Provincial U.S. politicians might still try to pander to the hustings with sentimental yearnings; but the greater world knew that the idea of ”American exceptionalism” was now as last-century as “the American Century” itself.
Hands Are Us (Part 1)
Touching the Heart
Ruth and Olivia, 2012, Archival Inkjet Print, ©William Carter 2012
On September 11, 2012, I visited my beloved 97-year old Aunt Ruth. Her body systems were shutting down. Two of her children, Maureen and Susan, and one granddaughter, Olivia, were there. I took a few pictures, including the one above. Two nights later, Aunt Ruth passed away.
In the 1980s and ’90s I spend fifteen years photographing nudes and the body. For much of that I carefully avoided hands: they felt personal and unique, whereas the project was about universal forms. Eventually, though, hands started creeping in. I’m not sure if that was my decision or theirs. Several appeared in my 1996 book, Illuminations.
“Hands” is a project without a beginning or an end. Some were used with Indian poetry quotations and readings by Sramana Mitra. I used a shot of my own palm as the endsheets for my 2011 book, Causes and Spirits.
Here are some others:
Sramana’s Hands, vintage silver print, ©William Carter 2002
Appearance, 9/25 ©William Carter 1983
Char, 3/25 vintage silver print, ©William Carter 1992
Remember, 3/25 vintage silver print, ©William Carter 1990
Mystery (detail), Vintage Silver Print, ©William Carter 1990
Whisper, Vintage Silver Print, ©William Carter 1992
Intimation, 3/25 Vintage Silver Print, ©William Carter 1991
Needed: World-Class Vision
The Current Candidates Can’t Cut It
John F. Kennedy in Berkeley, CA: Cuba, Berlin, segregation, strikes, and our man on the moon photograph © William Carter circa 1960
In view of the gravity of the job he wants us to give him, Romney is a cardboard cutout, a talking puppet. He panders to a sentimental view of a 1950s USA, replete with a triumphalist foreign policy, go-it-alone economics, and class warfare. He shows zero sensitivity to the broad heart and soul of America at home. He displays zero understanding of the global realities of today’s business and politics. No major entrepreneur of the 21st century could survive if he followed Romney’s reductionist view of capitalism, or his isolationist outlook on a complex world.
Both candidates, in fact, project a sentimental ’50s vision of an America in isolation. Obama’s knee-jerk reversion to the populist rhetoric of class warfare is worse than Romney’s. Rather than floating nice emotional balloons about a mythologized middle class, as they did in their conventions, both candidates should be showing us world maps with trading routes and population numbers. One of the best articles I’ve read recently is the front page of one of the sections of today’s Wall Street Journal by Robert Kaplan. Simple geography goes a long way toward casting things like the Iran question way beyond the narrow focus of Israel and Hormuz. Both candidates could start by pointing out the geostrategic fact that, for better or worse, the US recently took out both of Iran’s worst long-term enemies — Iraq and Afghanistan — both of which are (of course) already reverting to their eternal tribalism.
As we are to ours.
By default, Romney appears not to disagree with Secretary Clinton’s foreign policy activities, for example in respect to the South China Sea. If he does disagree, let’s hear his alternative plan, relationship by relationship across that vast archipelago of islands, moderate religious affiliations, tight trade corridors and natural resources, starting with the differing views and interests of places like Pakistan and China and Australia.
Sorry, but I don’t give a damn about what either candidate’s mother fed them for breakfast. We need big-souled, broad-gauged, wide-view leadership. If the world’s most powerful man is going to have an opinion on appropriate capitols for Israel and Palestine (as he should), he needs to demonstrate a balanced understanding of the millennial conflicts over these eternally contested areas.
I agree with Romney when he attacks over-regulation of US business. But we need far more fact and detail on this: exactly which regulations he would change or keep, and why. Instead of treating us to cartoonish mom-and-pop mythologies, please posit a long-term reliable playing field on which managers and investors can plan their domestic and international strategies and risks. Take Wall Street: I happen to think the big banks brought regulation on themselves by the excesses that caused the 2008 collapse — requiring rescue with your and my taxpayer money. Obama lacks the sense, feel, experience of running a business, and business is the foundation of the economy; but Romney lacks the sense and feel of the globalized community his decisions would affect. Nobody wants to mention Fiat’s key role in rescuing Chrysler: okay, Obama’s boys worked hard on the auto debacle, but for all that only a foreign company was willing to step up and do it. Are we Americans, in the 21st century, too poorly educated to grasp such plain facts? Or to be told it is beyond any nation’s power to just call up jobs?
Any candidate who slashed the slogans and started with a simplified world map, overlaid with trade and population data, and interwoven with a modicum of historical perspective, and could abbreviate all this to under an hour — he or she would attract my vote. I’m less interested in specific policy predictions than in the demonstration of world class thinking. Such a speech could be given in, say, Long Beach, California, against the backdrop of all the container ships arriving from every point on earth. It should include a graph of trade dollars and deficits flowing in all directions, and what all this means for the future of humanity and the planet.
No candidate is worth his salt if he is afraid to stand up and say, “This is no longer the world of your fathers. There is no sentimental return to the 1950s. We are living in a world as highly integrated as its trade, as its broader economies, as its micro and macro political relationships, as its climate zones and as its languages and peoples. How many hot wars have you won since 1945? Get used to it, my friends, and live appropriately.”
Mother Theresa in Bombay, India: seeing God in the hearts of the least of these photograph © William Carter circa 1984
Contested Stones redux
Too late — again?
As a sad update to my recent “Contested Stones” blog, events continue to unfold in the Middle East. Under the headline “Saving Syria,” the Wall Street Journal notes that, amid that nation’s current civil war, poorly guarded monuments of immense historical importance, including the medieval Crac des Chevaliers and the Roman ruins of Palmyra, are starting to be degraded by looters and damaged by modern weaponry. Below the link to the WSJ story is one of my photographs of Palmyra, in the eastern Syrian desert. (Recall that Iraq suffered other important archaeological losses which occurred during the American invasion.)
Please read “Saving Syria,” by Christian Sahner in the Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2012.
Palmyra, Syria vintage silver print ©William Carter 1993
East Jerusalem, 1964
“Watch any mother kneeling beside her toddler, pointing and explaining what they are looking at. Our urge to see, to comprehend and connect, starts there.”
That’s how I put it in the opening text of my Causes and Spirits.
Received culture profoundly affects how we see the world. Including how we view it through our cameras.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Holy Land” fought over for thousands of years by followers of the three Abrahamic religions, plus such secular claimants as the Romans, the Turks, and the British.
When I was living in Beirut 1964-1966, much of Jerusalem and the territory around Bethlehem were controlled by a classic buffer state — the Kingdom of Jordan. On two successive Decembers I was sent by an American magazine to photograph Christmas in Bethlehem. None of those pictures survive, because the magazine was buying full rights, including the films themselves. But I retain strong memories of the tumult swirling within and without the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Monks of various traditions were physically fighting for jurisdiction over this and that section of holy stones at this and that hour. The surrounding city bubbled with the sorts of strife to which the region has always been heir, and to which the Israelis would soon contribute. Seasoned observers would continue to watch these underlying tensions weave threads of irony into all the heartfelt salaams and shaloms of the private greetings, public blessings and international agreements.
But I did my gig: I sent the Midwestern magazine what I was sure they wanted: warm, candlelit faces of Protestant pilgrims processioning past the ancient, contested stones.
Where and when to cut slices of space and time with the bright-line frame of my Leica was never obvious. I reflected, sometimes, on earlier generations of foreign photographers of the Middle East: of the dreamy harem scenes, for instance, always included in the sets of stereopticon slides sent back to reinforce colonial stereotypes in London drawing rooms — some of those same drawing rooms where ruler lines were then being traced across the maps of Arab sands creating nation-states where none had existed before – thus helping set up the kinds of tribal quarrels the world still struggles to contain.
Working far from home, journalists can face ethical dilemmas that are personal and immediate, as well as professional. Covering the Korean War in the 1950s, a journalist I knew watched an American TV crew stop a farm family from putting out the fire engulfing their shelled house until the cameraman got great footage of the licking flames.
Iraqi Kurdish guerrillas, June 1965
At one point I faced a dilemma while traveling for Life Magazine with the Kurdish guerrilla fighters across northern Iraq (see also previous blog post Plight of Syria’s Kurds Breaks into the News). My main contact was an intelligent, helpful, English-speaking former Iraqi army officer named Colonel Akrawi. Huddled by a lantern one night, noticing I hadn’t gotten any combat shots, he moved closer, tapped on a map and whispered, “At the bottom of these hills, in the flat desert north of Suleimaniya, there’s a small Iraqi police post. Half a dozen of them sleep there every night. Next Tuesday is full moon. So if you want, we can raid the place and kill all the policemen – and you’ll can get great pictures! Okay?”
He was leaving it up to me. His offer was laden with the warmth and generosity of traditional guest-honoring, plus a dose of macho that included me as co-conspirator in their revolution. How to reply? The pictures sounded tempting. But to get them, I would, in effect, be sponsoring a few murders. And, I would be creating some news in order to report it – not exactly what photojournalists are supposed to do. As the lantern light flickered over our faces, I thanked the colonel, but explained that for that job I would have needed a flash, and mine was broken. The gentlemanly Kurd nodded and accepted this. I photographed Akrawi and his aides, conferring in the orange lantern light well into the night. Days later I photographed him shaving. Then we marched west for several nights to the mountain passes above the oilfields of Kirkuk. Under shellfire the colonel handed me his binoculars, pointed, and declared, “That oil is ours!” Today, sixty years later, the Kurds are negotiating to sell that oil direct to major American producers without bothering to ask permission from Baghdad.
A year or two after my visit, word reached me Colonel Akrawi had been badly wounded in battle. Eventually, I was told he had died. An amateur botanist, he had showed me a scrapbook he toted around, into which he pressed samples of plants peculiar to the Kurdish region of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Whatever happened to that lovely notebook, with its unique specimens? In Paris, much later, I visited the Kurdish Institute and asked about Akrawi: they remembered him well — but not his collection.
In the late 1970s I was sitting on the cool tiles of a crowded courtyard near Bombay, listening to a talk by spiritual master Swami Muktananda when he remarked, as if casually, “One sees the world as one is.”
Colonel Akrawi shaving, Iraqi Kurdistan, June 1965
Signs of the Times
America’s Corn Belt Speaks for Itself
Digging deep in my files as part of an ongoing effort to gather a legacy of vintage prints, I stumbled on some unpublished treasures. Forty years ago I photographed these signs along the back roads of Indiana, Illinois and neighboring states while working on my second book, Middle West Country (Houghton Mifflin, 1975).
Now the signs are mostly gone — but not the inherent modesty, chuckling humor, and serious spirit of America’s heartland.
Photographs © William Carter 1972, 2010
Jazz + Photography (Part 3)
A Spontaneous Collaboration
Strange bedfellows, you might say? In 1963 Lu Watters, Bob Mielke and Barbara Dane were each into separate scenes in the San Francisco trad jazz world. As was I: playing occasional gigs, while becoming professionally committed as a photographer and writer. You can read more on this here.
What brought us together in one of those spontaneously rich, fleeting jazz moments was the decision by Watters (then retired) and Dane (who had been running her own San Francisco blues club called Sugar Hill) to make an album together as part of a protest movement aimed at stopping the California utilities agency from building a nuclear power plant at pristine Bodega Bay, north of San Francisco. For many reasons, the plant was never built. The recording session happened on December 1, 1963. My equipment was not yet the best, but the negatives have been in my files ever since (48 years and counting). We herewith present a few of those images.
The Lu Watters Band recording “Blues Over Bodega” in 1963. Personnel: Back row Bob Mielke, trombone, Lu Watters, trumpet, Bob Helm, clarinet, Barbara Dane, vocals. Front row: Thad Vandan, drums, Bob Short, tuba, Monty Ballou, banjo, Wally Rose, piano
Bob Mielke, Lu Watters, and Bob Helm at the 1963 recording session. Photo By William Carter
Lu Watters, Bob Helm, and Barbara Dane at the 1963 recording session. Photo By William Carter
Barbara Dane at the 1963 recording session. Photo By William Carter
Lu Watters on trumpet at the 1963 recording session. Photo By William Carter
Wally Rose at the piano during the 1963 recording session. Photo By William Carter
Bob Helm on clarinet at the 1963 recording session. Photo By William Carter
Moments in Mirrors
Washington Square, New York City, 1963
My wanderings through the canyons and parks of New York often began or ended in Washington Square, at the foot of Fifth Avenue. I never tired of joining the onlookers at the serious chess games going on there day and night. Occasionally one could spot someone like this guy who appeared to have privately cracked the code on the game of chess (or life for that matter). New Yorkers seem to have evolved ways of being at once entirely public and intensely private.
Later, I shook hands briefly with a famous photographer of an earlier era, Andre Kertesz, who was living on an upper floor of a tall apartment house on Washington Square, right above my head. Some of his pictures were taken in fun zone mirrors, others from his window looking down on the Square. I fantasized that at the moment I was taking the picture above, Andre could have been taking a picture of me taking pictures of the “chessmen.” Remembering that thought makes me laugh like the man in my picture.
Inverness, California 2002
Please click on image for full-size version. To view more panoramic images, please visit this page on my website.
My wife Ulla and I were staying overnight with friends in Inverness, near the Pacific Coast in northern California. We were in their lovely new guesthouse in a lush garden and forest setting of coast redwoods. Waking early, I glanced out the window at a remarkable scene, like a fantasy, the way the rain had just stopped and light was filtering through the not-yet dissipated mist. Still in my pajamas, I grabbed my large Linhof panoramic camera, tripod, film, light meter and ran outside. I knew those conditions would not last, and I knew what the camera settings should be for that light. It was chilly but I was warm with sweat. I found the spot to set up but the ground was wet, so the tripod and I were both tending to sink in the mud. I had to stabilize the tripod, or wait for in between moments when it was not sinking, because to get infinite depth of field even with Tri-X film required exposures of 1/15 of a second or slower, which would blur the image if the camera moved. Meanwhile the light was changing, in and out, up and down, involving me in an intricate dance; just when it all came together and I pushed the cable release (gently to avoid causing movement), I heard Ulla open a window and in a bleary early voice asked what I thought I was doing out there in the cold and wet in my pajamas with mud all over me. I shouted something terse and dismissive. Finally I finished several exposures and the light was fading and I trudged back dripping mud and thinking of coffee and a shower and wondering what I or Ulla would do about my soaked pajamas.
One of the frames turned out great. I scanned it and printed it 30 inches wide on an Epson printer, have sold a couple of prints, and 9 years later used it on page 293 of my retrospective book, Causes and Spirits. Including it there was a late breaking decision because the book was mainly about people; altering the last chapter in order to include that and some other non-people images interrupted the printing cycle and caused the great publisher, Gerhard Steidl, to remain angry at me for about a year.
But the Linhof is still okay. Also the pajamas. Also Ulla.
Portrait Of…?
Content is in the eye of the beholder
by William Carter
The Holy Karmapa, age seven, at Tsurphu Monastery, Tibet, October, 1992. Eight years later, in 2000, he fled Chinese occupation to join the Dalai Lama in India. Photograph © William Carter 1992
Every picture carries meanings behind the surface — beyond the literal. Our yearning for such meanings makes us human. This enduring, endearing need for meaning appears in many guises.
Photographs carry values. Across much of Europe and the U.S., many of the old churches are empty. But the museums are full. People hunger for something beyond the commercial — even as some monuments of high culture seem to have become palaces of mass entertainment.
Every photograph is a slice through space, and a slice of time. Different slices mean differently to different persons.
The Karmapa, above, is looking at you, even as you are looking at him. What part of you is he looking at? How do you see him? If you are looking at him while he is looking at you, are you in effect looking at yourself?
And what about the shot below, of the Duchess and Duke of Windsor (the abdicated British king), and their driver: what do you — and the onlookers beyond the window — bring to this picture?
© William Carter 1967
And what, then of pictures of your relatives, or your children? I took the photo below of Jobi, my wife’s grandson, on his 17th birthday. Different people see it differently. I don’t notice the hair, for example; I just see the eyes as spiritual; reminds me of an Italian Renaissance painting.
Jobim Morris Gavrielli, June 30, 2012; photograph by William Carter
In the same way, my published photographs elicit a wide variety of responses. In my recent book, Causes and Spirits, my shot of an older woman carrying a watering can up the steps of her Minnesota bungalow in 1973 elicited an e-mail from a man who speculated on the market value of the house, then and now, 39 years later.
Northern Minnesota, 1973
For decades (actually, centuries) artists in various media have preoccupied themselves with issues of their own identity. Contemporary educators and tastemakers have supported this kind of questioning, often as a critique of modern society. Since the 1970s some have even called it the “culture of complaint.” Sculptures such as this were evidently meant to shock visitors to the Jerusalem’s Israel Museum in 1993:
© William Carter 1993
My response was to look elsewhere for things closer to my own heart. I found them in a nearby orphanage, and in a refugee camp:
© William Carter 1993
© William Carter 1993
In the Middle East, as I mentioned in earlier blogs, perception of identity and reality hinges crucially on tribal affiliation. My self-assignment as a photographer has long been to try to see past such tags, to the underlying humanity. Does this slot me with 19th century romanticism and impressionism, as opposed to modernism or postmodernism or what else is currently hip? Who cares? This image from Hungary in 1964 belies the fact that Russian tanks were parked just over the hill:
©William Carter 1964
Or this one, in Yemen, at a time when the Egyptians and the Saudis were fighting a proxy war there, with the subtle involvement of the Americans and the Soviets (sound familiar?):
©William Carter 1964
As a kind of summing up, here’s one from my book, Preservation Hall. It’s of Emanuel Sales singing in New Orleans. One of his fellow jazzmen told me, “You got to have soul, man, to do this work.”
©William Carter 1991
Them vs. Us, and Beyond, Part 4
HORIZON OF HOPE
By William Carter
Stellshagen, Gernany, 1999. Click on image for full-size version.
So often, these days, we feel caught in a clash of forces. When passions collide, resolution appears impossible.
Interminable wars, tribal struggles, sagging economies, rancorous politics, divorce courts, teenage gangs sometimes mirror our own internal struggles.
“Kill! Kill!” the drill sergeants taught my platoon to scream in basic training, running down a hill with fixed bayonets.
Violent mainstream movie content suggests such urges are never far from the surface.
Science has brought huge material gains, zero moral progress.
We are as we are.
End of story? Or can the situation change?
Research on human brain activity is famously hard to do. But progress is under way, and a spate of recent books describes the gradual unveiling of this final frontier. Careful, long-term studies are shedding light on the deep wellsprings of our thoughts and actions.
In The Moral Molecule (2012) neurologist Paul J. Zak summarizes decades of research into the ways the brain-and-blood chemicals oxytocin and testosterone powerfully affect human thought and behavior.
How culturally and tribally based languages, including music, express and determine our attitudes and actions via specific brain centers and pathways is the focus of the work of Daniel J. Levitin as outlined in books such as This Is Your Brain on Music (2007) and The World in Six Songs (2009).
Oliver Sacks is a well-known writer on these crossover areas between brain, behavior, and art.
Here are a few other recent titles, in alphabetical order:
Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame (2012)
Richard J. Davidson with Sharon Begley, The Emotional Life of Your Brain (2012)
Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct (2009)
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)
Marc Lewis, Memoires of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs (2011)
Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (2012)
Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (2012)
We are as we are. Not necessarily as we thought we were — or could be.
The research nudges us past our deeply rooted tendencies to separate mind and brain, spirit and matter, them and us. The physical and spiritual are shown as one substrate. We are encouraged to seek resolution beyond the opposites, within that unified field. At least we can witness ourselves from a wider perspective, hopefully adding some humility.
While the wars rage on.
Fleeting Treasures
By William Carter
I arrived in New York City in the summer of 1962. Toting two Leicas, I hunted for a job and an apartment. I gravitated to a part of the Lower East Side which was later re-christened the East Village.
Since I had begun my career in California doing informal photographs of children, my first self-assignment was to extend that practice to these fresh surroundings. I spent a day with a couple of kids at Coney Island. I traversed dim wells behind tenements that served as de facto playgrounds. I dropped in on friends of friends living with their daughter in an artistic shack on Staten Island.
Half a century later, those freshly seen scenes keyed off my retrospective book, Causes and Spirits. Below are examples, plus a couple of images omitted from the book. I only met the Staten Island girl for a few minutes, but she graces the book’s front cover, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has requested the vintage original print. But what happened to that girl? By now she would be around 60.
The subsequent lives of the other kids remain just as mysterious. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, photography resembles jazz in that both art forms – like modern life in general – often express moments that are the most pungent when they are the most fleeting.
Staten Island, New York, 1962, Causes & Spirits, jacket & pg. 29
Coney Island, New York, 1962, Causes and Spirits, page 39
Lower East Side, New York, 1963, Causes and Spirits, page 31
Lower East Side, New York, 1963, Causes and Spirits, page 33
Lower East Side, New York, 1963. This photograph and the one below were made within moments of the one above.
Lower East Side, New York, 1963
Plight of Syria’s Kurds Breaks into the News
In the Western press, the story of Syria’s beleaguered Kurdish population has been overshadowed by coverage of their immediate cousins, the U.S.-friendly Kurds of northern Iraq and those of Turkey. Michael Kennedy’s story on page A6 in the New York Times of April 18 changes that. In a deeply sourced and widely researched report, Kennedy quotes longtime Washington Post correspondent and author Jonathan C. Randal and other experts on the Syrian Kurds’ long and heartrending struggle for independence against the long-running hereditary regimes of strongman Syrian Presidents Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad.
An old personal friend of my wife and myself, Randal always had a reputation among his colleagues of daring to go where no one else would asking the provocative questions no one else dared ask. Following on the pioneering 1960s book on the Kurds by another friend, New York Times’ Dana Adams Schmidt, Randal’s updated and highly detailed book on the Kurds’ struggle landed him with a subpoena from a Turkish court which he, characteristically, flew from France to Istanbul to answer in order to assert freedom of the press in some of the more dangerous corridors within a strife-torn nation wishing to qualify for membership in the European Union.
Kennedy’s fine piece in this week’s New York Times alerts modern readers to the seemingly eternal reality of tribalism as a stumbling block to national identity everywhere in the Middle East and south Asia — the fundamental resistance to political “modernization” as earnestly attempted under the evolving value systems and political motivations, in the course of their histories, by Britain, Russia, and now the U.S. Good luck. Or maybe Godspeed would be the more appropriate term, given the religious undercurrents always involved.
Another fine photographer who covered the Kurds extensively is Susan Meiselas. Visit her website www.akakurdistan.com, “a safe and anonymous space on the web to share some of the complexities of Kurdish history.”
Kurds with Rocket Launcher, Northern Iraq, 1965, photo by William Carter
Them vs. Us, and Beyond, Part 3
THE KURDS AND I
By William Carter
When I boarded the plane with a hand grenade in my coat pocket, I never thought that much about it. I just laid the fuzzy garment in the overhead rack. I was far more concerned with the camera bag containing a couple dozen canisters of undeveloped film, which I slid under the seat in front of me. If anything could still go wrong, I reasoned, those films would somehow or other make their way to Beirut – God knows what would happen to them then.
Sure enough, before the engines started, a polite announcement: “Would Mr. William Carter kindly step off the aircraft?” My limbs began to quiver. But I had already thought this through: leaving the films where they were, and the wool coat where it was, and with my passport and boarding pass in my shirt pocket, feigning calm, I unbuckled my seat belt, walked to the door, down the gangway in the spring sunshine, and stopped. What next? There was no one in sight to direct me. I stood there in the sun for a few seconds — minutes? — my toes nervous in their hiking boots already warming on the hot tarmac.
If I were arrested, I wondered, could I call the U.S. Embassy and could they get someone in Beirut to pick up my stuff (my film) off the plane? A door in the terminal opened a crack. A hand emerged and seemed to be waving me to get back on the plane. I couldn’t be sure. I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted. Half a person emerged, faceless but connected to the hand, which kept waving. I went back up the steps. At the top the stewardess in her high heels and perky hat was smiling professionally. “Customs wanted to be sure it was you,” she said, preventing any questions. “Customs,” I knew, meant the Shah’s secret police, the savak, which, I was to pretend I didn’t know, was tracking my movements in and out of Iran.
As I buckled my seat belt, the door closed and the engines started.
The hand grenade – it was disarmed — had been given to me days earlier just across the border in Iraq as a parting gesture of hospitality by the pesh mergas, the Kurdish guerrillas fighting for independence from the Baghdad government. This was June 1965. To this day, some friends think I was working for the CIA in that era. Far from it. I was a freelance photojournalist, on assignment in this case for LIFE Magazine. Authentic except for the explosives, the grenade had been proudly presented to me by the Kurds after I visited a nondescript village house which my hosts had transformed into an impromptu arms factory.
Weapons factory, northeastern Iraq, 1965
This was the pesh mergas’ way of showing how self-sustaining they were while at the same time begging me to tell America how much they needed modern weaponry. That was not the first time, those past glorious weeks, when I had to improvise a semblance of diplomacy. “America is a big ocean,” I replied, “And I have only a small spoon.” Hearing the translation, they laughed and slapped my back with that ready good cheer that has charmed many another visitor to these Swiss-like mountains of Mesopotamia, origins of those twin rivers of life—the Tigris and Euphrates – which, millennia earlier, had enabled the blossoming of man’s earliest civilizations in the vast deserts below.
But what was so obvious among the mountain-based Kurds were the profound differences between their character and those of the Arabs, Iranians and Turks under whose authority they were forced to live. After World War I, following the collapse of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire and the century-old British Empire, the international boundaries of the Middle East had been drawn in the drawing rooms of Europe, with scant regard to tribal realities on the ground. For a century, and counting, those artificial lines on the map have remained a recipe for instability — magnified now by the ever-increasing importance of energy resources in a globalizing economy.
P.S. I made it okay back to Beirut, developed my black and white film in my impromptu bathroom darkroom, scribbled the story and some captions, and airfreighted all that — plus the undeveloped color films – to Manhattan. LIFE ran the story only in black and white. Few of the color slides have ever been published, but you can view them now by hitting the button below.
That was 47 years ago, when I was 30. Our thanks to old Kodak for creating Kodachrome, a wonderful, permanent film whose worldwide success has outlived that of the company. And to Leica for the cameras, an M3 and an M2 (later ripped off my neck covering a flood in Jordan, but that’s another story).
Oh, the hand grenade? I lost it at the Beirut airport, if you can believe that. Perhaps it got reloaded with explosives for use in one of Lebanon’s own fierce tribal wars soon to come in the later ’60s and ’70s. Which I was not around for. Except that my (now) wife (of 27 years) did live through those bleak Beirut years. Which is another story.
I recount the story of the hand grenade and the coat in this video segment.
Here is a video segment in which I recall my travels in Northern Iraq with the Kurds in 1965.
With Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Iraq, 1965
With Kurdish pesh mergas, Iraq, 1965
Them vs. Us, and Beyond Part 2
Here’s another photo to illustrate tribalism — a portrait of the famous Kurdish tribal chief, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, taken when I was traveling illegally in northern Iraq in 1965. This black and white version appeared with my six page article in LIFE Magazine the same year, and it reappears in my recent book, Causes and Spirits, on pages 264-265. Mullah Mustafa died in 1979. The original is in brilliant color (Kodachrome slide taken with Leica M2), which I could probably find and scan into my website if anyone is interested (ie, if enough readers write and ask). Another picture of Barzani taken by me at the same time illustrates the current Wikipedia entry on Mustafa Barzani.
The deep tribal affinity of the Kurds in their generations-long struggle for independence from the Iraqi central government is a textbook-perfect case of the enduring power of in-group tenacity throughout the Middle East and south Asia. Mullah Mustafa’s son, Massoud Barzani, has played a leading role in Iraqi politics since before and after his alliance with the US-Coalition invasion. He is the current leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iraq, and was re-elected President of Iraqi Kurdistan with 66% of the vote in July 2009.
The deeper reality is that the Barzani clan commands the fundamental loyalty of only part of the Kurds. The others traditionally adhere to a faction called the Talabani (unrelated to the Afgans by a similar name); Jalal Talabani serves as the sixth President of Iraq. He met with Barack Obama in Iraq on April 7, 2009. Past relationships between the two Kurdish clans were frosty at best, but (perhaps as a sign of changing political realities) the Barzani and Talibani appear to have evolved a cooperative relationship. The stories of the Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Syria are politically different, yet ethnically similar in that, for instance, nearly all speak Kurdish and some have blue eyes; quite a number have also emigrated to Europe.
My step-daughter’s husband, Kushi Gavrieli, is a Kurdish Jew born in the Negev region of Israel whose family migrated there from a village in western Iran where the ancient Aramaic language is still spoken. The Middle East is speckled with such anomalies; I visited a band of Chaldean Christians living in a cave among the Iraqi Kurds.
Sure, all of above complexity will be beautifully sorted out and settled by whomever wins the U.S. election in November. Send over a few more bombs, and we can “get it behind us.”
Mullah Mustafa Barzani, Northern Iraq, spring, 1965
Them vs. Us, and Beyond
The upper photograph of mine, below, is featured on the cover of the March 2012 issue of The Sun magazine, which, according to its website, “is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than thirty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human.” You can sample over 50 of my photographs which have appeared on Sun covers and inside the magazine on my website here. Below the magazine cover is another photograph I took of two Yemeni children.
In 1964, when I first arrived in Beirut (where I would be based for two years as a photojournalist), I met Dana Schmidt, the New York Times Middle East bureau chief, who asked me to accompany him on a journey to Cairo, Yemen, and Aden. From Sana’a, Yemen, we traveled north toward a tribal civil war then raging between the Royalists (backed by the Saudis) and the Republicans (backed by the Egyptians). The country was extremely undeveloped in those days. We met this man on the road north. He wore his curved dagger as a traditional emblem of manly power. Stuck in his headband was a sprig of khat, a mild narcotic plant chewed by most Yemeni men in the afternoons to induce a state of semi-stupor. The photo is reproduced in my recent book, Causes and Spirits. The full un-cropped print, made in my darkroom, includes the long-abandoned ruins of a castle on the hill behind the man.
In the 48 years since taking these pictures, along hundreds of others across the region, I have often reflected how long it is taking the Americans (and the British before them) to begin to comprehend the intricacies and staying power of tribal relationships throughout the Middle East and Asia — and to understand the near-futility of trying to transform these insular societies, in our lifetimes, into Western-style democracies.
Tribalism is an innate human survival mechanism. The impulse to cluster together in small bands must have embedded itself in the human brain over thousands of years of evolution. Straying beyond boundaries meant getting eaten by animals or killed by competing tribes. So, those with strong in-group affinities were selected to survive. That is my view and that of the neo-Darwinian “evolutionary psychology” movement.
Equally crucial, among these societies, I experienced traditional patterns of human relationship and economic cooperation. Mate selection, child rearing, home management, land management, animal husbandry, trading networks and handed-down occupations are elaborately codified in language, ritual, and religion to form a tightly woven fabric deeply resistant to change from within or without. Since the dawn of recorded civilization, the peoples across this vast stretch of territory, stretching from the Nile Valley across the Fertile Crescent and over to the Indus Valley, have developed complex strategies of thriving internally while resisting external threats. Layers of cohesiveness bind in-groups together in a quilt-like diversity of languages, faiths, pride and identity. Like many another outsider, I was greeted with extraordinary warmth, underwritten by strong customs of sharing and hospitality. The poorest among my hosts were often the most generous. However, ostracism — or worse — faced one of their own whose attitude or behavior might undermine in-group cohesion.
We westerners have all experienced schoolyard cliques, ethnic slights, religious and social superiorities/inferiorities, countless other in-group/out-group expressions, overt and subtle, right down to the class warfare sometimes implicit in the Presidential debates. Nationalism is a way of belonging, as is the nuclear family. But now there are strong forces, worldwide, working working to dissolve all forms of group affinity. These include major trends such as the spreading demands for personal equality and religious liberty, the toppling of dictators, and the globalization of commerce and travel. Digital transmission may enable tribal chatter, but it also seeds the rapid dissolution of all sorts of boundaries worldwide. Deeply rooted instincts are now confronted by commercial facts on the ground, and seamless communications in the air. The pictures of conflict I took in the Middle East, armed with Leicas and press credentials, are now being supplanted by gritty videos shot by ordinary citizens wielding their i-Phones.
Like it or not, appropriate or inappropriate, this is how the world is going. I welcome your comments.
Above: children in Yemen, 1964
Bella Italia
"Il Photografo: Mestiere d’Arte" by Giuliana Scimé
Our visits to my wife, Ulla’s house in northern Italy over a twenty-year period had some lovely benefits beyond the friends, the wine, the jazz gigs, and basking in the landscape.
The Italian photo community responded with shows of my work at a citywide Biennale in Torino, and at a one-person gallery show in Milano. Private dealers in Milano sold my prints, particularly the nudes, as did galleries in Switzerland and Germany. A renowned teacher, Professor Giuliana Scimé, included my work in her 2003 history of photography, Il Photografo: Mestiere d’Arte. At left is the book cover. Below are her pages with examples of my work (please click on the photos for larger readable versions).
A chapter on my Italian photos and experiences appears in my 2011 book, Causes and Spirits, autographed copies of which I continue to sell direct until they run out (see this page on my website to order); they can also be ordered from Amazon.
Scimé Chapter Part 1
Scimé chapter part 2
Above and below: Farm Family, Pizzasco (Lake Orta) Italy 1989
Below: Retired Actress, Ameno (Lake Orta) Italy c. 1990. Click on images for larger sizes.
Happy Accidents Part 2
When I was fooling around with my first digital camera several years ago, I tried auto focusing on my hand, then snapped the picture. The photo somehow refused to go away, and kept popping up in my files. Unlike others in the book I was preparing in 2009, it would not fit in that sequence, but like an unruly child still demanded attention, until I hit on using as a soft pattern across both “end papers” – the sheets just inside the hard covers. What could be more implicit in ones destiny?
“The Palm of My Hand,” photograph © William Carter 2001-2010, as used in Causes and Spirits, 2011
Click here to see other examples of photographs in Causes and Spirits.
Connective Tissue
Rabindranath Tagore
Ever since the days of cave paintings, humans have found ways to communicate that bypass the limits of tongue, tribe, and time. “Globalization” is a recent term often applied to economics; more broadly, it has actually been under way for thousands of years. Accelerated by the industrial revolution, globalization was supercharged by the invention, in 1838, of a universal language — photography.
Every day, pictures connect us in fresh ways. Around this fast-shrinking planet, images often outpace words in the race for hearts and minds.
Century-old poems by Tagore, their meaning derived from the Upanishads — spiritual texts dating back thousands of years to before the dawn of writing and civilizations — were recently recorded in Menlo Park, CA, in the Bengali language. Implemented by the noted young Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author, Sramana Mitra, and spoken by her beloved father, these most rare readings were accompanied on the internet by photographs, several by myself.
Nothing has ever given me a warmer of feeling of humility than the opportunity thus to be woven into the living tissue connecting us all across the eternity of time and space.
You can see and hear a collection of these recordings here. A sample:
Sramana Mitra, photograph by William Carter
Slowly, my friend, slowly
Slowly
Lead me to your private retreat.
I do not know the way
There is no light
The inside and the out are both mired in darkness
I have taken your footsteps as my guide
amidst this deep forest maze.
Slowly, my friend, slowly
Slowly
Let us travel on the edges of this darkness
I will follow your course through the night
I will track the smell of your breath
Tonight, as the spring breeze blows
Slowly
Slowly
Slowly
Happy Accidents Part 1
Above: Bunnie Meade, subtitled “The Eminent Lady Clarinet Soloist,” turned up in the bin of a junk store in New Orleans. I could never learn any more about the winsome Madame Meade, so she never made it into my book on New Orleans jazz: “Preservation Hall” (W.W. Norton, 1991).
“If you break eggs – make an omelet.”
That old saying is good advice in life — being able to turn a negative into a positive is a creative response.
Similarly, a famous book by the cultural writer, Joseph Chilton Pearce, was called The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. Essences seep from seismic shifts.
The same can be true in the arts. “Accidental” has a particular, narrow meaning in music. Beyond that are wider applications — especially in jazz. An improvising jazzman is bound to stumble now and then. Hitting a “clunker” means playing a wrong note outside the chord progression. Sometimes a quick-minded response can save the day: re-framing the phrase, or making the bad note part of a longer statement, or an accompanist quick-fixing the chord to suit, or recovering with good humor the way we sometimes do if we accidentally use the wrong word in everyday conversation.
Accidents can become a creative force in photography. One feature of my first three books (on Ghost Towns, the Middle West, and New Orleans Jazz) was to blend my own photos with historical ones. I loved researching old pictures in public archives. In the early 1970s I drove a camper across ten states, scouring the land looking for remnants of the early mining booms which had helped blast open the West. Here and there I would pause to comb local historical files. It was a kind of mining in itself. Spend a day, see maybe a thousand prints, feel great to find one that may make it into the book. There is a “happy accident” quality in this kind of research: staying open to the unexpected: the oddball treasure may not quite fit, but may inspire you to bend the narrative to make room for it. Reproduced here are a couple of fun obscurities that I always wanted to print but had never found space for.
Fashionable employment in a town in rural America, 1920’s: I struggled to find a place for this shot in my book, “Middle West Country” (Houghton Mifflin, 1975), but never did.
Happy accidents are a breath of fresh air. But when you break eggs, how do you respond? That’s the key.
America’s Funniest Home Videos would be nothing if people didn’t spot and send in those homespun howlers. With only seconds to spare in the fading light, and only one exposure left in his camera, that ultimate plan-ahead craftsman, Ansel Adams, jammed on his car brakes, jumped out and grabbed his most famous photo, “Moonrise Over Hernandez.”
Fresh realms of re-interpretation have been opened by the transition from film to digital. My print, “Persepolis,” started life as a black-and-white negative. Following a trip through Iran in 1998, I had made a set of quick 4×6 proofs but neglected to properly “fix” them in the darkroom. Eleven years later, I was chagrined to find many had faded and/or acquired brownish streaks. One proof caught my eye. It had inadvertently become streaked with a haunting, 19th-century sort of patina. To preserve it, I scanned the little print. Then I blew it up. This “omelet” ended up in two states, in two sizes, now in limited editions, and the “state 1” image occupies a two-page spread in my new book, Causes and Spirits (Steidl, 2011). One of the larger sized State 1’s — 48 inches wide — now graces the wall of our dining room (see below).
Persepolis, Iran (State 1) Inkjet print 1998-2009
Persepolis, Iran (State 2), Inkjet print, 1998-2009
Gone Tomorrow?
Bank, Rhyolite, Nevada, 1970. From Causes and Spirits, text and photograph © William Carter
Musings on Permanence/Impermanence
In a nation often characterized by its frontier past, the zest for the Now has always contended with its opposite: the urge to constellate older, permanent values. Centuries of the wide open West brought us the enduring myth of cowboy who roamed freely across open spaces but whose assignment was often to save a threatened town. Trappers, miners and farmers kept moving on to the next big thing. Less romanticized, other farmers and their town-dwelling cousins put down roots, planting for permanence.
Today the theme lives on in other forms, such as in the struggle between development and preservation. Or between the risks of global thinking and the reassurances of old-time religion. Universally, man struggles for immortality against his evident mortality.
My first two books – Ghost Towns of the West and Middle West Country – probed America’s frontier tensions in detail. My newest one, Causes and Spirits, is a photographic art book of worldwide scope; yet it, too, explores the contest between “dust to dust” on the one hand, and surpassing vision on the other. Threaded through the book in varying dimensions, the underlying polarity can be summed up here in two images involving the widespread deployment of Greek classical architecture. References to a shared European ancestry and taste, such structures served as emblems of a hoped-for permanence as America unfurled its banner westward.
Some dreams were broken. Some dreams survived.
Town Square, Northern Minnesota, 1973. From Causes and Spirits, text and photograph © William Carter
Still Walking
In September, 2011 William Carter joined the Photography Accessions Committee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Carter’s ongoing contributions to the field include his founding, 8-year membership in the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
This is part of a process for me — coming out of the darkroom, if you will — into the light of public exposure. Like the Getty, SFMOMA owns some of my prints. You can see them here. Just one sample (click here for the story behind this picture):
Corconio, Lake Orta, Italy, 1989, © William Carter.
Cool Appraisal vs. Hopeless Infatuation
It must have been in the mid-1960s that my father remarked, “More people now attend museums in this country than attend baseball games.” Around the same time an edgier friend exclaimed sardonically, “America can package anything.”
The two statements are related.
Dad’s announcement centered partly in his belief in the gradually rising tastes of the American consumer, as reflected in his long, successful experience in the department store business. His enthusiasm also derived, in no small part, from his giving large chunks of his time, over many years, to cultural and educational institutions. These included his deep involvement as a founder of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he served as the first President of its Board of Directors.
I suppose some of these values must have rubbed off on me. But in truth, by the late 50s I was long out of the nest, into my own thing. While poking around in what would later be termed the counter culture, I launched myself as a photographer and began accepting commercial assignments; but in my heart of hearts my esthetic values were aligned with those historic photo purists — Stieglitz, Cunningham, Weston, Strand, Frank, and others — who, for the past century, had struggled to prove the new medium could be, in the hands of a master, a high art.
Fast forward forty-five years. Today, no one doubts the legitimacy of photography as art. Although no one can claim, “As many Americans now visit museums for their photography shows as for their painting shows,” it’s getting to be thinkable at some institutions. I’ve served on the Photographs Council of a major museum for a number of years, and just joined a similar committee at a second important museum. From such vantage points one sees how the fine art photography world has really exploded: the auctions are packed, collectors proliferating, students exfoliating, galleries booming.
All this is glorious. Yet there is another question: is there ever a straight-line progress in the arts, comparable to that, say, in the sciences? Which is where I recall my friend’s sage observation of half a century ago, about America’s special genius — packaging.
A high degree of professionalism has evolved in the ways photographs are catalogued, evaluated, presented, historically researched, bought and sold, discussed. Going back, one remembers the suddenly addictive passion, a borderline craziness that infected and united (or sometimes bitterly divided) the band of crazies who believed in this stuff in, say, 1958, when I first caught the bug. To admit to nostalgia for that era of hopeless, senseless infatuation risks sounding an awful lot like your too typical geezer sharing some park bench with the pigeons and wheezing to the world about “these kids now, they don’t know…” Which in fact it may very well be. Except I’ll take the darkroom over the park bench, anytime.
Hey, blogging is cheap, so I’ll say it anyway: it’s all about love. When photography was that single print that took your breath away, filled your life for a minute or a week or longer. Later you learned how to spell the name of the photographer, where to see more of his or her work… on and on to the steel flat file cabinets, intelligent researchers and conservators putting each artist in context, discerning movements and influences and historical technical and social factors, walking the learned walk, and proving the proof of why that picture by that artist has, after all, some importance… hoping to let your mind find ways to justify what your heart, unfiltered, had tried to tell you in the first place.
The history of the medium, no less than the history of each print, is a giant and important history, as we have certainly learned by broadening out scholarship, sharpening our sensitivities, honing our awarenesses. Indispensable.
Still, I suspect that many artists and appreciators, in their hearts of hearts, would agree that it is that first sheer thrill, with zero references, that sometimes inner burst of private joy when you unexpectedly encounter a person face to face: that knowing naiveté — your obsession — knowing what’s in the package under all the packing but wishing to remain out of the box — that primal heartbreak — which is all that finally matters. Those of us who feel this kind of thing about certain prints can sometimes exchange a wave from our park bench, or privately wink in passing, been there and done that, war’s over but still with that mad essential glint exchanged between us — the walking wounded.
I’ll go farther. The two prints below are statements, consciously or not, about the artists and their times. Imogen’s style of discourse is as unguarded as it could possibly be. In the case of hot contemporaries like Struth, their work arrives packed under thickets of docent-like explanation, laced and layered with ironies about repressed semi-feelings and implied disconnects, slyly staged, magazine-level exposés of the offbeat, deadpan decadence asking to be decoded. Struth’s oversized optical spectaculars are sold by giant commercial selling systems specializing in corporate clients and people like Russian oligarchs. At a steep discount you can probably buy a duplicate of your Struth to keep in cold storage against the day, scientifically predicted, when his fugitive color dyes will fade and evaporate — a value metaphor in itself. More than doing abstractions, Struth told the New Yorker of September of 2011 that he has a desire “to be an antenna for a part of our contemporary life and to give this energy…a sort of symbolic visual expression.” (The old ideal of art was to go beyond the Now.)
I first saw Imogen’s work in modest thumb-through bins at the Focus Gallery, a hole in the wall for nuts like me on Union Street in San Francisco. If you couldn’t find a certain one and showed up on her doorstep, or in her kitchen, the diminutive little lady probably would have scrounged around to look for one or promised to make you another real soon, meanwhile sizing you up personally, from under her beanie, with that shrewd twinkle she also used on occasion to skewer the pompous. Being based on silver or platinum, the print would have continued to demonstrate its permanency in more ways than one.
Which of the two photographs below would you rather live with…hold close?
Thomas Struth, “String Handling," SolarWorld, Frieberg 2011
Imogen Cunningham, “The Unmade Bed,” 1957
Tone in Art — and in Life
Essential Dimensions
"Sight," by William Carter, 1995
Women are natural masters of tone. Their voices are extensions of their bodies and feelings – from cooing and whispering to babies, to the murmurs and cries of love making, to the exactingly regulated interview or phone voice of a business professional, to the bark of a drill sergeant or the yell of a basketball coach, to the whining shared grievances and inebriated hilarity of girls night out, to the plaintive pain of a close-miked blues singer, to the glass-shattering beltings of an old Broadway pro, to the moans of mourners the world over… Men have no equivalent for such emotional precision. (We do have other advantages.)
"Violante", by Titian, circa 1514 (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum
Tone is as fundamental to art as it is to life. It is about relationships. It is about attitudes. It has a billion nuances. Tone subverts speech. It is pre-literate: dogs, like newborn infants, get the message. Like breathing and heartbeat, tone springs from sources preceding the analytical brain.
Each scrap of civilization is permeated by tonalities. And each separate civilization has its own dominant tone. Choosing a tone, we can actually choose what sort of civilization we wish to live in — what sort of civilization we are creating, second by second, from the ground up (actually, from the underground up).
Tone is interwoven with the materials and techniques peculiar to each craft, each art. The sounds of musical instruments are analogous to those of the human voice — bestowing limitless expressive possibilities. Musical fundamentals – harmony, melody and rhythm — open into endless variations of emotion, attitude, relationship: carriers of thought and feeling, from sudden joy to the wisp of a half-forgotten memory. Essential to this conversation is the artist’s sensitivity to the ears of his listeners. Refined artistry implies respect for people’s receptive capacities.
And tone is interactive. New Orleans jazz derived from street processions before it moved indoors to dance halls. The early jazzmen and their listeners were conditioned by both. At certain events one early bandleader is said to have occasionally surprised everyone by shouting “Feet!” – an instruction to his players to suddenly cut the volume so far they could actually hear the shuffling feet of the dancers.
"Flora," by Titian, 1515-1520 (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi)
Tone is crucial in writing. The element hardest to teach, it remains after everything else has been fixed. After each essay has been structured, each meaning parsed, each meaning clarified, the voice of the author, and his fictional characters, is what finally counts. It is what we hear below the surface of language — what we ultimately care about in a person or a book. The off-putting snarl, the simmering poetic glow, the endearing humor: tone is the attitude of the speaker toward his listeners and himself.
Tone is the light in the eye: the energy radiating from a person – what we really take away from an encounter.
Representations of the human face or body, in all the visual media, include great examples of tonal artistry — translating the invisible into the visible. Titian painted many scenes from classical myths involving nudes; many sacred scenes in the Christian tradition, involving more discreet clothing; and many portraits. His women often present a thoroughly mixed message: their neutral stare, the amount and distribution of skin revealed, and the sumptuous coloration and warm compositions, combine to make his subjects appear, at once, as holy as the Virgin and as sensual and shapely as a Venetian courtesan. Rather than presenting these as opposites, he presents, at least in some cases, a mixed message. As important as what they do or do not reveal of their breasts is the care the artist gives to the sumptuous fabrics and delicate lacework around or over the chests, arms and bodies.
"The Penitent Magdalen," by Titian, circa 1533 (Florence, Galleria Palatina)
For me, Titian is using all his matchless talent and vast technical means to express the multi-layered, multi-valent wonder that is Woman. Hiding while revealing, Titian enrolls us in the mystery, leaving it to us to make what we will of his women’s inscrutable faces. This great Renaissance painter stood astride two intersecting epochs — the religious and the classical. He was trained in the old, tightly restrained, exacting tempura technique; yet he pioneered the new, freer, emotionally expressive medium of oil and impasto on canvas. Such dualities fused to inform his work, but did not determine his vision. Whoever happened to be sitting for him, in whatever moods, and whatever myths and fashions might have shaped the story telling, what counts for us, five centuries hence, is the look of the work – an aura of person-hood that confounds interpretation: a nobility of tone emanating to us from the canvas, delivered to us out of the artist’s own being.
In photography, especially of people, whether clothed or unclothed, the word “tone” also applies to technical choices involving lighting, contrast, paper color, etc. Such choices are necessary but not sufficient means en route to the work’s larger tone and overtones. The attitude and intent of the photographer affect his choices of dramatic stage lighting vs. soft shadowless light – deep shadows for striking layouts in the magazine era, for instance, vs. subtle grey-scale values for intimate personal portraiture. Layers of over-civilized European irony permeate the tough commercial nudes of glitterati like Helmut Newton or Karl Lagerfeld. Whereas the nudes of gentle humanists, alive in a gentler age, such as Imogene Cunningham or Paul Strand, are all about tenderness.
How we see is who we are. Inevitably, our tone, our voice, is a projection of our inner state — our inner self.
"Megan," by William Carter, 2006
Meaning Together
The Art of the Opener
Chapter openers in pictorial books lasso the reader and set the stage for the gallery-type display pages to come. If well done, these two-page spreads can also subtly convey layers of context and mood — qualities many readers may sense, without being fully aware of.
A simple design is usually best. Unlike flashy magazine spreads, which must fight hard to grab the reader immediately, the best pictorial books should invite you to savor and probe over an extended period. Depth earns them a permanent place on the shelf. “Coffee table” or “gift book” attractions are fine, but transitory: many of us hold those things or people closest to ourselves when we feel they have permanent value.
For such reasons I give special consideration to chapter and section openers. The classic graphic elements are a single vertical picture and a short title: and they need to talk to each other. I select the picture and word(s) with an ear to this visual-verbal dialog. The goal is a kind fusion reaction that creates energy. That energy can ignite the text-and-picture narrations to come. As in any conversation, its tones and textures can weave layered meanings, overt and subtle, explicit and intricate — laced, for example, with irony and humor. This overlapping/interweaving of word(s) and picture can become a force multiplier.
My newest book, Causes and Spirits, is a kind of compendium of my images of people, worldwide. Superbly printed by Steidl, a noted German publisher, its 296 pages sum up half a century of black-and-white photographs from around the globe. The challenge of such a far-flung subject was to give it coherence. I needed to find ways, through careful selection and sequencing, for the pictures to relate to one other across short stretches — plus, as with a few gentle nudes, placed early and late, to bracket the book with long range continuity. My aim was thus to make a book that was more like a film than a catalog.
Causes and Spirits is divided into eight galleries. Each is preceded by a chapter opener, plus one or more pages of text. The eight openers are: “To See is to Connect,” “Genesis,” “Gigs & Inspirations,” “Pioneers,” “Eyes in the Street,” “Gift of Place,” “The Uncharted,” and “Re-Union.” These track my life (and career) from childhood to the present. The text takes the form of a physical and spiritual journey across fifty years and around the world — an eastward odyssey that climaxes with my return to my birthplace, California, in the last chapter.
In some ways Chapter 4, “Pioneers,” can be called the heart of the project. Its overt subjects are the mainly rural Americans whose ancestors opened vast interior tracts of the nation, and who thereby gave us much of an enduring national character, strands of which may live on, below the surfaces of our urbanized lives. This “past-presence,” — our unconscious arc of identity — is implied in the small-town grit and grain of the photographs, many in a slightly 1930s or 1940s style, including offbeat sightings of buildings and objects that had long since seen better days.
The fuzziness of my underlying theme of national or regional character made it hard to settle on one photo for the opening spread. As I struggled with this problem, at one point I even considered breaking my self-imposed rule that the chapter opener should be a single vertical shot. Months passed. I mumbled and grumbled, shuffled through stacks of prints, flung open yet more file cabinets and boxes, scoured scores of contact sheets, made yet more prints in the dark darkroom and on the bright computer screen. Eventually, I noticed that one fairly simple image kept pushing its way to the top.
I’d made the picture of the old ladder on one of my far-flung trips across dozens of western states, when I was carving out publications on our gritty mining towns and sod-busting farm communities. Later, the same ladder had been chosen by Alfred Knopf, the book publisher, as the cover image for a William Faulkner novel. Now the same picture was again tapping me on the shoulder.
Plain form, stark tonalities, rough-hewn texture, and a slightly humorous narrative of dauntless striving and stumbling: for me, these reflect the respect due our forefathers: for their elemental energy as they infused this first new nation with their unpretentious get-up-and-go.
Jazz + Photography = Now (Part 1)
Surprising similarities between two young art forms.
William Carter, clarinet, at Preservation Hall, September 1973 with Kid Thomas, trumpet; Emanuel Paul, tenor saxophone; Emanuel Sayles, banjo; Charlie Hamilton, piano; Alonzo Stewart, drums; and Louis Nelson trombone. Photograph by Mona Mac Murray
In your lifetime, as in mine, both jazz and photography have gradually won acceptance as fine arts. Having been intimately involved with both, I see underlying similarities between these two “modern” forms.
The special energy of the fleeting moment is as crucial to photography as it is to jazz. Perhaps Zen painting or action painting should be included. But any jazzman, photographer, or Zen master would add that preparing for that moment is crucial. Any advocate of the “cutting edge” wanting to tear down old establishment walls can proclaim the supremacy of the Now. Expressing that moment meaningfully — artistically — is something else.
The two upstart arts share another similarity: technology has been key to their histories.
Willie Humphrey album cover: photograph © William Carter 1974
After the invention of the camera in 1839, photography evolved rapidly. It continues to do so. From plates to films to sensors, its myriad processes and techniques have influenced, and been influenced by, history itself. From colonial times and the U.S. Civil War to today’s cell phone revolutions and satellite imagery, photography has been as intertwined with the history of science as with the historical events it was picturing.
Jazz first appeared in the 1890’s — roughly the same time as sound recording. It was invented in New Orleans as a medium of locally styled dancing, parading, and other social functions. Not until it migrated to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles — where the recording studios were — did “America’s classical music,” as it has since been called, take off. The first jazz recordings were made in 1917, and the first by black musicians in 1922. These sparked the Jazz Age, positioning musicians and listeners for the worldwide boom, with its myriad stylistic developments, that continue to unfold.
Absent sound recordings, jazz could never have developed as an art form. The highly personal sounds of Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke or Benny Goodman or Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker or Bill Evans or George Lewis or Miles Davis, or hundreds of others, would have been lost, other than in the fading memories of the relative few who would remember hearing them live. Unlike music whose essence is preserved in written manuscripts, this music of the moment required recording to filter into that cumulative memory we call civilization. Absent recordings, jazz’ own inner development would have been stunted: generations of younger players, having had far less access to the sounds that preceded them, would not have been able to power the medium forward down the many new tracks it has taken.
Guitar Slim album cover: photograph © William Carter 1959
An interesting, if comparatively minor, factor in the development of both photography and jazz has been the direct dialog between them. From the earliest days, jazz bands have needed publicity photos of themselves and their prominent individual members. Creative photographers have often responded to the special, sometimes romantic-seeming conditions and atmosphere of the jazz scene. For me, having my feet in both worlds has often been rewarding, both personally and professionally.
Among my earliest paid photo assignments, around 1960, were shooting album covers for an obscure blues label (see above, right and below). In the following decade I began accumulating the pictures and interviews that would come together in my book on early-style New Orleans jazzmen, Preservation Hall (W.W. Norton, 1991). But my first real job of any kind had been in 1955, at age 20, when I toured the U.S. as a clarinetist, performing nightly nationwide and recording with Turk Murphy’s Jazz Band out of San Francisco. I would play professionally and semi-professionally ever since, and would come to know countless wonderful musicians.
Here’s a track featuring me on clarinet playing Sidney Bechet’s “Blue Horizon.”
Magnolia Jazz 5 album cover, 1985. Author in lower left.
Numero uno, however, was the night I met and photographed the great Satchmo (below).
As I said, happy accidents happen everywhere, all the time. But creating them, recognizing and treasuring them, preserving and framing them — that’s a special preoccupation shared by photographers and jazzmen. And creating those moments? That’s the most arcane, edgy aspect — and the mysterious heart of both activities. In practical terms, you can only create the conditions and hope something great happens — and you don’t miss it. Trying too hard—too consciously setting up the picture, or over-arranging the music—is opposite of the process I’m talking about.
The night I met Louis, he just happened to be positioned that hundredth of a second on that gym stage at Cornell University, under those stage lights, in a way that would work on film as later processed (with some difficulty) in my darkroom, and much later translated onto my computer. I just happened to be there holding that camera with that lens and film, ready to celebrate that moment, partly because I so loved the expansive human with whom I had just chatted backstage in his dressing room. I just happened to cut a slice out of infinite time with that particular shutter speed, and just happened to cut a slice out of infinite space with the bright line viewfinder in that particular Leica.
And Louis?
Louis Armstrong at Cornell.
Click here for a larger version.
Louis just happened to be doing one-night stands across the U.S. at an age, and in a degree of uncertain health, when many others would have long since hung up that horn. Nearly half a century earlier, he had just happened to walk into a studio to record a few sides including “West End Blues” (click below),
and happened to improvise a solo intro lasting less than half a minute which happened to change the course of American music. That intro has since been imitated, repeated, re-interpreted, re-arranged thousands of times — but never with that same elemental, accidental-sounding force of its first moment.
Another of my early idols, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, called his most influential book The Decisive Moment.
Which says it all.
Fresh Light
Are traditional & modern / old & new media, really at war?
For fifty years I shot worldwide on film, printed in darkrooms on four continents, published in a wide variety of traditional media. I would not trade those experiences. To quote from my forthcoming book, “I count myself fortunate to have been seeded in the warm loam of classic photographic practice.”
But then I add, “Equally, I’m glad to make use of whatever new developments prove useful.” Most useful, indeed, are digital photography and the digital media, in their countless flowerings. Literally and metaphorically, I find myself emerging from the meditative close focus of the darkroom into the fresh broad brilliance of the “blogosphere.”
The frontier-minded U.S. has always been spellbound by the “new all new,” whereas traditional cultures located their main value clusters in the past. But the greatest artists often seem to surpass such timely strictures.
Near the end of his life the painter Paul Cezanne said, “Even though I am already old, I am only a beginner. However, I am beginning to understand…” Photographer Paul Strand said, “We are all students.”
In that sense, we are all, always, “emerging.” Every morning, the light on our doorstep is as fresh as Genesis. We only have to see it. A great teacher said, “One sees the world as one is.” The sculptor Constantine Brancusi said, “It is not difficult to make things. What is difficult is to reach the state in which we can make them.”
Some such quotes were printed in my 1996 book on the nude, Illuminations. Others appear in my Causes and Spirits, due out this summer, which opens with the lines of the Star Spangled Banner — “Oh, say, can you see?” — and riffs on the realization that the camera, besides being a profession, was a way for me to discover, at once, the world and myself.
A sampling of the results are on view at www.wcarter.us.
Photographing people of many backgrounds, in many places, one becomes acutely aware of their sharply differing tribal, social, and other identities – the source of seemingly endless conflicts. There are no easy answers, and indeed the future seems ominous on that level. In later postings here, I hope to say something more about tribalism, its possible origins and future. Blogging and the web seem to have raised the stakes.
For now, suffice it to say that in my work as a photographer, writer, and sometime jazz musician, my (unfashionable?) mode has always been not to dwell on the surfaces that seem to separate us, but to try to look behind and below those surfaces, to that which unites us.
Stay tuned.
