06 11 2009
David Friend. Watching the World Change. (6).
Friend, David. Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind 9/11. I.B. Tauris. 2006. London / New York.
In relation to my ongoing investigations on the use of images derived from TV screens, Friend quotes Vin Alabiso (executive editor of Associated Press) relating its initial extended use in print journalism to the Clinton impeachment hearings in 1999. While photographers were prohibited from the proceedings, film cameras were not: the only images available then, were from frames grabbed from the screen. (p95)
In relation to images from 9/11, Friend quotes Albaiso as follows:
"That immediacy on 9/11 clearly illustrated a paradigm shift in photojournalism. The very first images we transmitted that morning were not from traditional film or digital stills but, in fact, were 'frame-grabs' from video - in virtual 'live time' of the attack precisely as it happened." (p94)
Friend also notes, with reference to the above, that the immediacy afforded by mobile phones with internet access ability did not become available until 2004.
Additionally:
By 2001, digital images had done away with the need for the finished print. The process now is the picture. [...] Today the eye of the photographer is hardly separated by more than a few blinks from the eye of the beholder. (p96)
And:
Quite often many observers cannot separate a news event from its visual representation. (p97)
The Integral Polaroids Of Jones Smith (#9).
The critic Jerry Kirshenbaum has stated, in a written paper published in The Journal of Contemporary Vernacular Photography (Volume three, issue one. June, 2006), that each 600 photograph depicted each door in Smith's house. This however is pure conjecture and no evidence – beyond the fact that there are indeed ten doors in total in Jones Smith’s house – has been presented. On the ground floor there exists the front door (leading into the hallway), door to lounge (off the hallway), door to dining-room (off the hallway) door to kitchen (off the hallway), back door (leading to a small enclosed yard). On the first floor, off the hallway there are doors to bedroom one, bedroom two, bedroom three (converted into a study), and the combined toilet and bathroom (at the end of the hallway).
That two previous photographs, 080541627-02 1711 9276 and 080541627-02 1711 9277, depict his front door does not in itself indicate a wider theme, as Kirshenbaum would have us believe. This, however, has not failed to stop other scholars from agreeing with Kirshenbaum’s' hypothesis.
Lewis P. Bohler, in an essay published in The Jones Smith Journal (Volume one, issue one. Sepember, 2006. p9-12) on the relationship between the two aforementioned integral Polaroid photographs, the 600 type integral Polaroid photographs, Charles Tomlinson's poem The Door (which ends: "For doors / are both frame and monument / to our spent time, / and too little / has been said / of our coming through and leaving them.") and Berlin Uscar’s poem The Door Revealed' (which ends: "and the door / was opened / open / and I saw the face of all) is one such example.
or Nancy Jalet - whom I otherwise hold in high regard – from submitting a paper at conference in Newport, Wales (Reclaiming the feminine: The 600 type Polaroids of Jones Smith. January 2007) with the view that it was in fact other doors within the home: kitchen cupboards, wardrobes, fridge, etc, that were photographed - a hypothesis from which forgeries derive (the forgeries came to light only recently and were published in the second issue of The Jones Smith Journal, March 2007).
The reason for the abandonment of 600 type film – let's not forget after a single evening - is unknown.
Reclaiming the feminine: The 600 type Polaroids of Jones Smith
David Friend. Watching the World Change. (5).
Friend, David. Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind 9/11. I.B. Tauris. 2006. London / New York.
On photographing the remains - after noting who had removed them, and where they had been removed from - Friend writes, quoting from an unidentified NYPD detective and forensic photographer:
The remains would then be rendered in color Polaroid. "Not film, not digital. You couldn't take a chance that the film wouldn't come out or that the digital file would be compromised." (p68)
Manuel Baptista and Dominiek Braet (polarama revisited)
Another selection of work first shown on polarama.com back in 2001. Especially interesting with reference to my recent posts on images derived from TV screens. See the posts: David Friend. Watching the World Change. (2), Zhao Qing. Beijing Olympics on TV (and no comment), and Images of TV screens for instance. Indeed, the title of the work one day, I went to the movies references this very means of production. So it is with great pleasure that I present a small selection of their work here.
Source pictures: photographs by Manuel Baptista taken mainly between 1994 and 1998. These pictures went through a series of non-physical and non-digital transformations (photocopy, color manipulation by light projection, video, etc). The final images are SX-70 Polaroids taken in 1998 from a TV screen. Without any guidelines, Dominiek Braet created the titles for each series. Together, titles and images form the visual concept. The artists believe that by 'separate cooperation', they help each other to understand the meaning of their own personal worlds. Images in search for words. Words looking for images. Fragments of a strange life, moments that never come back.
the night i was denied.
one day, I went to the movies.
past/abyss/present/habit/future/rabbit/CATCH IT!
Manuel Baptista and Dominiek Braet have created some very powerful work here (and that it is a collaboration is another interesting point to note), and not just in relation to my re-occurring interest in Polaroid images derived from the TV screens. The titles function in interesting and disparate ways (abstract and referential); the experimentation with image reproduction - incorporating both digital and non-digital means of manipulation - extends the use of the screen as a (final) source for the resulting Polaroid image; and the relationships between the images in each specific work- incorporating duplication and variation - all makes this re-visit to polarama illuminating.
Conversations: Trouble Every Day.
http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com has an excellent post on the film Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis. 2005) , a conversation between Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard. This is one of the few DVDs I own - most of the others I have I kept because they feature Polaroid use.
For the specific post see: http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2009/10/conversations-trouble-every-day.html (30/10/2009).
As I am unable to leave a comment on the site I thought I would leave a few notes below.
I was watching a lot of Asian horror films at the time i rented this (from the local library in Lancaster) and the tempo of Trouble Every Day reminded me of some of these films Tale of Two Sisters (Ji-woon Kim. 2003) for instance - though I think I saw this afterwards. Hidden (2005) by Michael Haneke also springs to mind (for a veritable feast of information on Haneke see the recent post by Catherine Grant: http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/2009/09/michael-haneke-ribbon-of-links.html. 06/10/2009).
While I recommended the film and relayed my impressions of it, I forgot the title. When I finally came across a copy to buy a few years later (the cover is very distinct), many of the things I had relayed to people as having happened were either merely suggested or never happened at all: I had invented whole scenes and narrative strands.
Additionally, I remembered the film as containing little to no soundtrack, when in actual fact it features prominently (orchestrated by Tinderdticks).
For another interesting post on the film see:
http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/review/2002/03/06/trouble/index.html
So when will Jason and Ed have a conversation about Merci la Vie Bertrand Blier (1991)?
David Friend. Watching the World Change. (4).
Friend, David. Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind 9/11. I.B. Tauris. 2006. London / New York.
Pages 43-44 describe a multitude of uses for the portrait photograph: they way it would be carried and displayed by relatives of the (at this time) missing, and the places in which such photographs were displayed, noting that in many instances the photographs were:
...picked up by TV cameras to spread them amongst wider audiences. (p43)
Friend also notes that some of these photographs were themselves taken (re-appropriated) from the mainstream media itself.
Friend quotes the Magnum photographer Larry Towell comparing the way in which people would carry pictures of the 'missing' round the city of New York with:
...the Mothers of the Disappeared in Guatemala protesting in front of the National Palace on Friday afternoons. (p44)
This reminds me of articulations of the photograph as indexical and the photograph as icon. For more on this see the excellent article Still Moving Images by Catherine Grant, mentioned in the post (amongst others) Catherine Grant. Still Moving Images.
David Friend. Watching the World Change. (3).
Friend, David. Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind 9/11. I.B. Tauris. 2006. London / New York.
Quoting Jerry Spagnoli on his daugerreotype of the South Tower:
"Seen in isolation the event it too awful. But it's inherently empowering to know that we go on. I use a material which visually eludes to previous events. To see it [the photograph] and you think 'Civil War, the San Francisco earthquake.' The manner in which the photograph is made, and then experienced, provides the viewer with a context for the scene. The daguerreotype compresses the precedents." (p24)
Nestled within the quotes above, Friend notes that neither the Civil War nor the San Francisco earthquake were photographed by this method (or, perhaps, that no daugerreotypes of these events are know to exist).
However, the interesting point that Spangoli makes, is that this specific medium - due to its very age, due to what the medium has (or purported to have) witnessed since its inception - somehow locates the event within a continuum of other catastrophic events. Further, that the history (of) the medium has borne witness to is itself contained with subsequent examples of the medium - and therefore within the eyes of the viewer also ('experienced).
While I believe the second point is rather circumspect and too reliant on subjective experience - it assumes that the viewer are aware of the specific medium (and can identify it), its history (invention), and what this medium has recorded (its use through history) - the first, more abstract, point is much more interesting. That a specific medium contains within it not only its own history, but a history of all that the medium has witnessed, has recorded, has set down.
Each Polaroid then, contains within it the trace of all Polaroids: my own, yours - and Edwin H. Land's.