The Decline of American Newspapers - An Independent Film Project

Here is a preliminary trailer I have put together for a film I am working on about the changing media landscape and the decline of American newspapers.

A Tribute to Walker Evans

I've been researching the work of Walker Evans who is considered one of the greatest social documentary photographers of the 20th century. Although he abandoned the candid moments in the tradition of Henri Cartier Bresson, Evans would return to a place with a large format camera and capture the essence of our culture through the presentation of artifacts within the landscape.

Lloyd Fonvielle writes about Evan's work that is published by Aperture and describes it as a vision of American poverty that is unlike European poverty which had been romanticized in the work of Atget, but rather a "poverty of culture" whereby our architecture may refer to european style but is cheaply built in an industrial age by a young country that has chosen to litter the landscape with advertising in pursuit of the wealth of the "American Dream."

I have always been drawn to this type of imagery due to my own blue collar roots and family mythology of working, traveling, and working some more. As I look around Spokane I am fascinated by place names that reflect wealth, power, and happiness and yet are far from it. In neighborhoods of every kind we see the all too common white picket fence that illustrates our pursuit of the American dream, although if you look closer you see emblems of alternative beliefs and politics.

These photographs were taken primarily around Sunset Blvd, Government Way, and Inland Empire Way which connects Highway 2 and the Latah neighborhoods. I have included a couple of previous photos from the South Hill and the lower East Side along the Internet just to sparkle some extremities to my portrait of Spokane.

Sunset Blvd is a street filled with old motels and apartments that have been usurped by larger hotels near the airport. These photographs are like a cross between the Brat Pack 60's and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Today these are often used as flop houses for a transient population. I also photographed the Latah neighborhood which runs along Inland Empire Way. This neighborhood is a modern reflection of the 20th century challenges for the working class. And finally to complete my patchwork quilt of Americana, I revisited some rural areas within a few of miles of our downtown core.

The final image is the last remaining film store in Spokane and seemed appropriate for this photographic project.

Creating A Memory

I'm taking a class in visual storytelling. We recently watched the film "After Life" that was about this idea where when you die you go to a place where you get to spend a week deciding what memory you would like to take with you into the after life. The newly departed spend a week thinking about what their most important memory is that they would like to remember and it is recreated for them just like a movie being filmed on a set. I was asked to think of a memory from my life and to recreate it in a similar way.

One of my fondest memories involves my 10th birthday when I received a 22 rifle for a present. As a kid we spent almost every weekend camping, fishing, and hunting. When I received my very own rifle I felt so proud and grown up. When my great aunt and uncle passed away all of our outdoor activities stopped. The last time I handled a rifle was when I was 16. My father and I used to love to go hunting just to go for a hike in the crisp fall air. We never shot anything and I have never killed a deer, but the memories are so special to me.

I asked my parents to come down to my property to recreate this memory. I used my son to stand in for me. My father still had my old 22 rifle so we were able to put together images that feel so real and yet are totally staged. My dad used to wear a wool hunting hat and I used to borrow his filson wool coat. They're both gone now but I did have my dad wear my wool hat and my son wore one of my flannel shirts. You can just make out that the shirt is just a little big on him.

The black and white photographs create a sense of nostalgia and look as though they could have been taken back in 1979. After creating the images of the shooting my family and I sat around the dining table and I decided to photograph my son and parents with the beautiful window light filtering through the late afternoon. I think the image of my son standing proudly against the chair expresses the pride I felt on that special birthday. Afterwards, I printed out some of the images and thought of how I could encapsulate the whole experience by photographing my hand holding the nostalgic photograph.

Photography is not reality, but it is a way of representing our memories with tremendous detail in a way that let's us take only what we want to recall with us.

The Importance of William Henry Fox Talbot’s Experiments

"If it is practiced by a man of taste, the photograph will have the appearance of art (but) the photographer must...intervene as little as possible, so as not to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses."
Henri Matisse



The development of photography can be traced back to the failed attempts by William Henry Fox Talbot to draft the beauty of the landscape at Lake Como by hand in 1833. “How charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durable and remain fixed upon the paper! And why should it not be possible? I asked myself.”

Although photography is often described and evaluated in comparison to the traditional arts, it was at this moment the power of photography as an objective expression was envisioned. “One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature”

William Henry Fox Talbot would draw upon his knowledge of mathematics, botany, physics, chemistry, and optics to develop the photographic process from which modern photography originates and by which the world was transformed into a cult of image.


Talbot would write of his invention, “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist's pencil. They are the sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.” His earliest efforts involved the making of “photogenic drawings” by coating paper with silver nitrate that would turn black when exposed to light and setting upon it a leaf whose outline would be perfectly traced. Unfortunately these early images would darken and fade over time. He determined that treating the silver in iodine rendered it no longer light sensitive, essentially “fixing” a permanent image. Use of salt to enhance sensitivity along with the use of Gallic acid to induce the hidden image to reveal itself would allow for shorter exposures and the development of the latent image, (a concept known since the earliest developments of secret “invisible ink”). The new faster emulsion combined with the use of a camera obscura allowed Talbot to explore his world and reveal it’s photogenic qualities.

One cannot overlook the significance of the timing of this invention. Knowledge of the “natural” elements of photography were previously known generations before, but to pursue controlling and manipulating these elements would be venturing into the “black arts” associated with evil. Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered the effect of light on silver salts in 1775 but it was not published until 1827. Talbot acknowledged this when he described his invention in 1839, he said, “It is a little bit of magic realized: of natural magic. You make the powers of nature work for you, and no wonder that your work is well and quickly done… But after all what is nature, but one great field of wonders past our comprehension.” Photography is thought to have been inconceivable until science was able to break away from religion. There is still magic in photography, and a spirituality within Talbot’s own descriptions of his efforts . Photography, it seems, embodies the natural and supernatural.


While the casual observer may dismiss his early photographs as being banal or limited to scientific inquiry or artistic mimicry, a review of Talbot’s work reveals a sophisticated mind and artistic spirit. Most importantly, we see in Talbot’s images the very essence of the medium that is described by John Szarkowski as “windows and mirrors”. We not only see the fastidious details of the Victorian era, but we see the photographers place within this space and time through the vantage point of the lens. Talbot understood the essence of photographic vision.

The photograms and subsequent photographs by Talbot of the English countryside can be compared to the masterful work of Man Ray and the surrealist movement as well as Laslo Maholy-Nagy whose work is closely tied to the Bauhaus movement.

Maholy-Nagy has articulated Talbort’s accomplishment by delineating the change of perception brought about by photography through the articulation of eight photographic visions:

• Abstract
• Exact
• Rapid (Action is Frozen)
• Slow (Movement is spread over time)
• Intensified
• Microphotography
• Filter photography to bring out hidden details (I.e. UV Haze filter, Red contrast filter for sky)
• Penetrative (Xray, Radiography)
• Simultaneous
• o Transparent superimposition

One cannot imagine our perception of the world without photography. Marshall McLuhan described the impact of any new medium is not so much in its content, but in its impact on society and culture. By 1860’s the world had millions of photographs – only 25 years after the initial invention. When viewed within this context, Talbot’s experiments are as significant as Gutenberg’s.

It seems as if, through his experiments with photography, that Talbot recognized the world was moving faster and was destined to change at a pace approaching the speed of the very light that was the subject of his images. He would write of his work, "The whole cabinet of a Virtuoso and collector of old China might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way."

Talbot’s negative/positive process of reproduction is the basis for photocopying, photogravure (which Karel Klic based upon Talbot’s research), and photo silkscreening which is used to manufacturer the computer chips and circuit boards that modern life is so dependent upon.

To measure the impact of the negative/positive photographic process we need only look at the writings of Paul Valery and Walter Benjamin while comparing the Calotype to the Daguerreotype.

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

Paul Valéry, Pièces sur L’Art, 1931

While Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre simultaneously developed an alternative photographic process whose acuity and subtlety is still unmatched, it is Fox Talbot soft, fibrous prints that set modern culture in motion. When examined with Walter Benjamin’s seminal article, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in mind, you can see that the Daguerreotype retains its aura through its one-of-a-kind originality while the Calotype and its progeny have gone on to define popular mass culture. The cult value of unique art objects such as sculpture and painting is exceeded by the exhibition value of images that are mechanically reproduced in such mass as to actually contribute to the formation of culture. Surely a man so astute as to be able to decipher cuneiform script and who launched a publishing business had some ambition towards cultural authority.

When considering the origins of the medium of photography, there is one name that stands out as having lasting impact, William Henry Fox Talbot. One cannot look at modern culture, nor the beauty of nature, without feeling influenced by his legacy.


Sources:

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“ in Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books 1969)

Burnett-Brown, A., Haworth-Booth, M., @ Roberts, R. “Specimens and Marvels: The Invention of Photography.” Aperture 161 (2000): 4-79.

A Little Bit of Magic Realized: William Fox Talbot’s Discovery. DVD. Fims for the Humanities & Science (2004)

McLuhan, M. “Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man”. (New York: McGraw-Hill 1964)

The Changing Media Landscape

This is a video I produced of a panel discussion held in Spokane Washington about the impact the Internet is having on our local legacy media and journalism in particular.

The panelist included:
Ryan Pitts, Spokesman Review Newspaper
Luke Baumgarten, Pacific Northwest Inlander Weekly
John Orr, KYRS Radio
Cheryl-Anne Milsap, Spokane Metro Magazine
James McPherson, Professor at Whitworth University