Tagged: photography
Service
Platon’s haunting portfolio of portraits of sodliers and their families stood out from the September 29 2008 issue of the New Yorker. High-contrast, grainy, and haunting, they capture the trepidation of soldiers, sailors, and Marines preparing to deploy, and the grief of the families of the fallen. The photograph of Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, is especially heartrending, and out to be on the desk of everyone in Washington who has anything to do with the prosecution of our wars.
one white shirt and a column of tanks
The NYT Lens blog has a fascinating article today about the iconic photograph of the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre of twenty years ago: the man in a white shirt who stopped a column of tanks. Four photographers who captured different versions of that moment of courage and dignity recall the events, and give some behind-the-scenes stories of how they made these images and got them out of Beijing.
My favorite is Stuart Franklin’s, the second image in the article. It captures the scale of the man’s courage with its wide framing, and the lighting is dramatic, with the top half in deep shadows and the man’s stand against the tanks brightly lit.
When the events of June 1989 occurred, I had just finished my junior year in college. I was at my parents’ home in Wisconsin, with my friend Alex, and we sat up late into the night watching the coverage on CNN. A few weeks before, I had finished a term paper for a classical sociological theory course (a critique of Marx and Lenin on the 1871 Paris Commune from an anarcho-syndicalist perspective), so the big issues of the Tiananmen protests were front and center in my young mind. The brutality with which the Chinese Army crushed the protest was shocking; it was what the Versailles government did in Paris 118 years before, but with killing machines Thiers could only have dreamed of owning.
1989 was a year of incredible danger, and incredible promise; a few months after the Tiananmen massacre, the Berlin Wall fell, the Eastern Bloc began its long struggle to rejoin Europe, and democracy seemed possible in Russia. Twenty years on, it’s hard not to feel disappointment and nostalgia for what seemed like a revolution in human freedom, largely squandered: the return of authoritarianism in Russia, imperfect (though still hopeful) reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and the continued thuggery of China’s oligarchy, not to mention the new dangers of religious extremism (with ironic roots in the resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) and economic miscreance on a global scale. A bloody century came to an end in 1989, but the century following it seems little better.
But this image, this man in a white shirt standing in front of a column of tanks, still holds powerful hope. George Orwell may have been right when, in 1984, he wrote: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–for ever.” But that face is attached to a person who gets up again, and again, and again, to challenge that boot.
The Quiet Hours
There’s a danger of nostalgia when looking at these seventy haunting pictures, but we should, as the artist did, beware of falling into it. These are not pictures of the good old days or of some lost Shangri-la of refined taste and quality buildings. These are the practical everyday places, used places, streets where ordinary people lived and grain elevators, railroad yards, and factories where they carried their lunch buckets to work. What these photographs give us is insight into the pulsing real life of cities where we had not previously thought to look for beauty.
Bill Holm, from the introduction to The Quiet Hours: City Photographs
by Mike Melman
After Bill Holm passed away in February, I went to my library to grab up the books of his I hadn’t read yet. Not surprisingly, most of his books were out already, so I added myself to the request list. Hidden away in the local history section, though, was Mike Melman’s The Quiet Hours: City Photographs
The photographs capture city scenes in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth in the quiet hours just before dawn. Some of them are of places I know well: the railyard and grain elevators in my South Minneapolis neighborhood, the streets of Northeast Minneapolis, the bridges of St. Paul. Quite a few are interiors that I have never seen: the abandoned commandant’s quarters at Fort Snelling, the steam plant at the Ford factory, a violin shop with an array of instruments–violins, a cello, a lute–that seem to float in the air. These photographs remind me a little bit of many of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings: there are no people in the pictures, but there’s a very real sense of the people who populate these places. This is what our world looks like when we’re away.
Holm’s essay is well-paired to the images. It includes reflections on Whitman, Sandburg, and Wordsworth, very much in the spirit of similar essays in The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth
For someone who has an equal interest in photography (particularly black and white photography) and literature, “The Quiet Hours” is a wonderful work. And for anyone who is curious about what happens in those hours when “all that mighty heart is lying still,” it offers a glimpse into the stillness.
