“Infrared Color Photography of Cannikin Test Site, Amchitka Island, Alaska, September 1971.”

I’m not quite clear on the attribution for this photo. It’s from this site, where it has this caption:

Infrared Color Photography of Cannikin Test Site, Amchitka Island, Alaska, September 1971. Red to pink color tones indicate healthy, live tundra vegitation. Dark tracks in tundra were caused by vehicles traveling across the tundra. Light gray to dark gray indicates exposed ground or gravel-covered areas (such as roads). Photograph was taken from an altitude of 1,500 feet on a heavily covercast day at f/5 and 1/250 sec with a K-17 Fairchild aerial camera fastened to the outside of an Alloutte III helicopter. (Photo in Joe Stevens collection from Baine Cater.)

I came across the image at the Arms Control Wonk blog. A quick bit of googling didn’t turn up anything else on the image, and searches for “Joe Stevens” and “Baine Cater” were both unproductive. If anybody happens to know anything about it, I’d love to hear.

I’m posting this mostly because it’s something of a novelty for me, because it’s a color infrared photograph, and I kind of like it.

For the most part, I don’t care for color IR photography, despite my love of black and white infrared. The reasons I dislike color IR are probably a lot like other folks’ reasons for hating black and white IR — it usually looks to me like strange for the sake of strange, deliberately outré. (Doubtless this is just a prejudice of mine — pay it no heed.)

That may be the key to why this photograph appeals to me while most color IR that I’ve seen has not. It’s utilitarian, it’s straightforward — and the greatest strangeness in it comes from the purpose of the site it documents, rather than the colors of the photograph. And unlike many aerial photographs, when viewed by a lay audience, it does not become a picture-puzzle.

“Aerial View: Looking Southeast Over Windy Ridge and Visitors Parking Lot, Four and One-Half Miles Northeast of Mount St. Helens, Washington, 1983” by Frank Gohlke. In Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, p. 85.

I wanted to be able to use those things which connect to whatever runs deepest in me without giving in to them, to call attention to them without distorting their relationship to the contexts in which they occur…My aim is to make photographs that are at the same time lyrical and intellectual, intensely personal yet rich in information, neither reticent nor effusive.

(From Gohlke’s autobiographical statement in “Camera” 55, no. 5 (1976), reprinted in Thoughts on Landscape)

If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that a sizable portion of my photography-related enthusiasm has been directed lately to Frank Gohlke. I recently read Thoughts On Landscape, which collects some of Gohlke’s writings and some interviews, etc., and was enthralled. Gohlke is one of the few photographers who can write well about photography, and he puts his eloquence in service to a way of viewing the world which is full of wonder, penetrating insight, and integrity — qualities which are not usually found in close association.

At the time I read Thoughts on Landscape, I was not very familiar with Gohlke’s photography, and what I had seen (mostly the New Topographics stuff) had not really captured my attention. (Gohlke also mentioned in one of the interviews in Thoughts on Landscape that he wasn’t especially pleased with his photographs in the New Topographics show “as a body of work,” and it definitely seems clear from what I read there that those photographs aren’t strongly representative of Gohlke’s overall career.)

This made reading Thoughts on Landscape a bit strange, as I was gaining what felt like a strong, sympathetic understanding of everything about Gohlke’s photography except for the actual photography. So getting my copy of Accommodating Nature and seeing the photographs in it gave me an odd feeling, probably akin to meeting a pen pal in person for the first time.

The photographs are diverse, including some of Gohlke’s grain elevators, some of his photographs of Mt. Saint Helens and the aftermath of the tornado that struck his home town, some photographs related to his family, some from the Sudbury River, and various other subjects and projects.

The disaster photographs are (of course) the most immediately attention-grabbing. It’s hard not to be gripped by the often staggering scope of both the destruction and the recovery. But what is most notable is Gohlke’s ability to perceive and to photographically depict the underlying order of the processes of destruction — the way they restructure as much as destroy. He integrates that order and that structure into his photographs such that they become inextricable from his composition, as though he were collaborating with the eruption and the tornado to make his photographs rather than merely documenting them by means of a camera.

Gohlke’s photographs of more homely scenes are as impressive, even when their content is undramatic and pedestrian. They are distinguished by Gohlke’s understanding of the places where he has worked, an understanding that is to some degree communicated to the viewer, and which thoroughly informs Gohlke’s composition and his choice of where to place his camera. In this regard he has some of the aspect of Atget — “vivid, precise, intimate, local,” as Gohlke says of Atget in one of the essays in Thoughts on Landscape.

I could go on like this for quite a while, but I’d probably just get more annoyingly laudatory. To cut things short: Go buy these books. Thoughts on Landscape in particular contains some words which I think every photographer ought to read (not just the landscape crowd, either). Seriously. Do it.

“Autumn sits between a relative’s legs,” by Maisie Crow. Via Conscientious.

Maisie Crow’s “Love Me” is a series depicting a teenager living in Southeast Ohio. It is undeniably intimate and gripping, but there is something about it that makes me uneasy. (Something other than the baseline unease that can be expected whenever one is viewing depictions of people who experience poverty-induced despair.)

I think partly it’s to do with the way the photographs are captioned; there is a mix of matter-of-fact description, trite socio-economic commentary (“As she comes of age in this environment, Autumn struggles to find her way,”), and terse, sinister fragments, such as, “What? I didn’t hurt him,” below a photograph of the girl pulling a small dog off the ground by the leash, or “Autumn sits between a relative’s legs.” These comments seem to be leading the viewer in different directions, to different judgments. Together, do they suggest a complex understanding of the subject, or just a confused one?

I’m also not sure what to make of the photographic style Crow employs. The presence of the photographer in the scenes seems always half-acknowledged; it feels like the subjects were told not to look at the camera the moment before each release of the shutter. The camera often appears to be in the corner of Autumn’s eye.

As a result, the “documentary” feeling — of having an interloper’s perspective — is very strong. I’m not sure whether the result is more honest or more dishonest because of that.

I should make clear that I’m not sure that these things which make me uneasy about “Love Me” add up to criticism of the work or not. I wish I knew more about the work, and more about the people involved — because I have the feeling that I’m missing the piece that would enable me to know where I stand relative to these photographs.

“Glouster Ohio, 2009,” by Andrew Spear. Via Verve Photo.

This is from a series of photographs of the people of Glouster, Ohio, a town in economic decline. In the post at Verve Photo, Spear describes the situation it depicts:

I was photographing a family outside their home last spring when the girl in the red dress ran by with a ferret. One of the children asked her to stop so they could look at it and I asked what was happening because she was in such a hurry. All she told me was that her Aunt had just been arrested and asked her to take care of the pet for her. She was unsure of what charges her aunt was facing.

The photograph and its explanation are marked by the acute absurdity and specificity which sometimes distinguish real events — part of what is meant by the old phrase about truth being stranger than fiction. That absurdity gives the photograph — of people who are in terrible circumstances — an aspect of quasi-comedy; when I look at it, I keep wondering if I am missing a joke. So I keep looking at the photograph, with its dreamily-saturated reds and greens, with its three unreadable gazes, and with its strong, cryptic gestures, trying to puzzle it out.

The other photographs in the series are well worth looking at. I was startled by and impressed with Spear’s use of stopped motion in the photograph of a boy jumping over a mailbox and that of a woman vomiting on the side of a road.

Normally I wouldn’t comment on something as mechanical as shutter speeds in a post at 1/125 — but then, normally I also wouldn’t bother to mention photographs of children playing or people puking, both of which are among the more coarsely manipulative types of documentary content. Spear does unusually well with both — creating in both cases scenes which are simultaneously grotesque, awkward, and beautiful.

From the series “Untitled (2009)” by Will Govus.

I came across Will Govus’s site by way of Silver & Silver. I really like the simple and straightforward design of the site. I also really like some of the photography, particularly the series “Untitled (2009),” which is a short but diverse sequence held together by a lovely melancholy.

I had trouble picking one image to represent the series, because it’s a well-edited series, in which the whole is greater than you might expect based on looking at any one of the parts. For that reason, I suggest you click through and see the whole thing. “Going out West” is also worth a look.

“Grassland” is a series of photographs by Phil Underdown made in the Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge, which was once the Galeville Military Airport. Superficially, it appears to be a deserted area which has gone into disrepair and grown wild; in fact, it is continuously engineered to create a specific kind of wildness in the interest of preserving certain migratory bird species who require a specifically grassland habitat.

Underdown describes his images as “a type of fiction; a story of a place told through the traces of its inhabitants…Signs of its past, present, and future mark its rationalized topography like small-scale reenactments of the dramas playing out in the world around it.”

The photographs are presented on his site in a very long horizontal page containing many same-sized photographs, somewhat like a film strip. This creates a rather disorientating effect when moving from image to image, because the horizon is constantly jumping around. I don’t know if this an intended effect or simply a matter of convenience, although the included “installation view” looks roughly similar except that some of the prints are of a larger size.

I think I would have preferred a presentation which equalized the horizon, because the way they are presented now detracts from the strong sense of place the photographs create.

There is also something about the editing of the sequence presented on Underdown’s site which I find dissatisfying. Some photographs do not seem to belong, like #024, #027, and #360, where aggressive low perspective, close focus, and shallow depth of field are the dominating characteristics, unlike the main body of the photography, which is characterized by rigorously upright perspective and an austere distance.

This is not to say that these photographs should be excluded simply because they are “not landscape enough,” but it seems to me that the contrast between near seeing and far seeing they create is not being put to much use, and that the sense of dissonance they induce is not forcing the viewer to see the subject more deeply or clearly, but simply disrupting his concentration.

I could, of course, be missing something. But the inclusion of #360, which appears to be a photograph of bird crap, seems particularly questionable; not that bird crap can’t be a good photographic subject (I believe Minor White did extraordinary things with bird crap on occasion, for example), but such an uninteresting depiction of it seems like a peculiarly halfhearted joke in this context.

However, the main body of the series is very good — particularly photographs like #466, #160, and #45353, in which the artificial traces are seamlessly merged into the “natural” landscape — in which a metal pole seems to grow as a plant among the weeds and trees, and vehicle traces take on the aspect of the spoor of great mysterious fauna.

This is exactly the sort of landscape photography which most appeals to me, because it does not pretend to represent an unspoiled wilderness or nature in itself. It shows nature as it must always exist in the modern world — in constant contact with the world of civilization. Beyond this, though, “Grassland” appeals to me because it is subtly but significantly different both from the sort of photography which merely illustrates the corrosive effect which the human civilization tends to have on nature, and from the sort of ever-more-familiar genre of urban decay porn.

I would also love to see — not necessarily as part of this project, which has a particular tempo and perspective that would likely not be compatible — more documentary photography related to the active efforts of the Fish & Wildlife Service to maintain and transform the landscape to the particular needs they wish it to serve.

Note: I’m only looking at the selection on Underdown’s site — so my thoughts about the editing of this series may be totally inapplicable to the work as it exists in book form or other larger sequences.

“Office Door, Pulaski, Tennessee, 2006,” by Jessica Ingram.

Ingram’s caption for this image:

The Ku Klux Klan was originally founded in this law office on Christmas Eve, 1865. The original historical marker, which has since been bolted to the wall backwards, reads:

“Ku Klux Klan organized in this law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones December 24, 1865. Names of original organizers: Calvin E. Jones, John B. Kennedy, Frank O. McCord, John C. Lester, Richard R. Reed, James R. Crowe.”

I came across Ingram’s series, “A Civil Rights Memorial,” in No Caption Needed. Ingram’s photographs record the scenes of certain critical events in the history of the civil rights movement and document the absence or inadequacy of memorials or markers which might tell a passer-by or tourist what it was that happened there.

I always have difficulty with photography like this, which can only be correctly seen and understood in light of specific information which must either be had in advance or obtained at the same time as one sees the photograph. I can’t help feeling that the work is not really in the photograph but in the caption, as though this were a series of very short written works with photographic illustrations incidentally attached. Because of this, I cannot feel moved by the photographs, but only by the words, and a caption is not generally an adequate venue for profound communication. So I find myself curiously unmoved by Ingram’s work, and a bit embarrassed and frustrated about that fact.

To say that I am unmoved is not a criticism. This work — which is clearly valuable — could hardly have been conducted in any other way, because what it is documenting is of course the absence of evidence of the subject matter. Indeed, one could say that my own limited ability to react to these scenes is part of what Ingram is showing me: her photographs depict unremarkable scenes, but what they show is that in response to those scenes, I have an abstract itch where anger or sadness ought to be.

“Early Blossoms, Wooded Island, Jackson Pk.,” by Charles Cushman. Via the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection at Indiana University.

Make 14,000 images from any photographer available and your perspective on their work will change drastically. If Cushman’s work would have been tightly edited and only distributed as a book, he’d probably be praised as a pioneer of color photography.

— La Pura Vida

I think that’s a fairly accurate comment about Cushman, and I think it applies as well to quite a lot of lay photographers’ flickr streams, and for much the same reason.

Part of what leads to the consternation some folks feel regarding flickr as opposed to other venues for photography is that most flickr users do not treat flickr as a form of publishing in the same sense as a photobook or a gallery show — it’s a lot more like someone hanging up their all work prints and contact sheets to dry in their front yard. Those prints and contact sheets have not yet become part of a finished sequence of photographs that could be fairly compared to the published body of work of a well-known photographer. For this reason, comparisons of this kind are inapt.

However, while it’s true that a very good edit could create a pioneering Cushman, it’s also true that a different edit would create a lousy Cushman, or a clumsy Cushman, or a merely lecherous Cushman. One could easily make five or six different edits (maybe more) and persuade a viewer that they were the work of five or six different photographers. One could create whole false histories out of an archive like this.

I wonder what the world would have made of the archive of someone like Winogrand if he had never published work during his life time…

Photo by Eddie Adams/AP via “Vietnam, 35 years later” at The Big Picture

The Big Picture’s Vietnam, 35 years later is a collection of 47 Vietnam War photos. As would be expected there are a few iconic photos in there and in particular two. The first is Eddie Adams’ photo of the summary execution of a National Liberation Front guerilla. The other is Nick Ut’s photo of naked and napalm-struck nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc running down a road.

What is particularly interesting, though, is that The Big Picture also has photos taken, by the same photographers, before and after the moment shown in the two world famous photos. Seeing a three photo sequence (starting at #13) makes the event photographed by Adams seem more drawn out and therefore even harder to look upon. The three photos tell little more story than the one, though, and I doubt Adams himself would argue with that.

I wonder how the third photo, or “after”, of Nick Ut’s sequence (starting at #30) would stand on its own but it’s pretty much futile. Knowing the back story to the picture of naked and running Kim Phúc focuses my attention on her horrible wounds in the thirds photo. Otherwise the surreal scene in the photo might weigh heavier. As it is the third photo is like a second chapter of horridness.

“Mobile Homes, Jefferson County, Colorado, 1973,” by Robert Adams. Via Art Knowledge News.

Fundamentally I think we need to rediscover a non-ironic world.

— Robert Adams. In New Topographics, ed. Britt Salvesen, p. 27.