Che Guevara

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You don't have to go out looking for Dr Ernesto Guevara when in Cuba -- his picture will find you. Guerrillero Heroico Che has become, as it was described to me more than once, the logo of Cuba. I've read that it's the most famous photograph in the world.

In his Message to the Tricontinental published the year of his capture by the Bolivian army and the CIA, Che opens with a quote from José Marti, and ends in this declaration:

"Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons and other men be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine-guns and new battle cries of war and victory."

It is easy to see a great personal vanity in this. One sees this vanity often in revolutionaries and terrorists. It was a bit easier to spot in the language those days, with various manifestos and communiqués that revealed a self-conscious bourgeois-education sense of entitlement.

"Of course," one imagines the groovy revolutionaries declaring to themselves: "of course we should be the ones remaking the world to suit our ideals." The peasants would just mess it up.

Yet it really could be more than fashionable vanity that drove them on. Guevara took pains against this sort of revolutionary superiority complex. No one chooses their childhoods, or the style of language they're drilled in (Guevara's parents allegedly had over 3,000 books in their Argentinean home).

The advent of global communications for (nearly) everyone -- radio, newspaper, and photograph, information about the world -- changed the world. Before the advent of worldwide communications it was difficult for anyone, except a few of the privileged, to be able to see the full scope of global exploitation. Che lived during that crossover. Before those media, people would see that bananas are on sale, but not see the machine guns firing in the village square that managed those prices. In the era of globalized information, it is possible to see the slave ships still crouched on the horizon.

Guevara, in a manner not unlike some modern violent jihadis, seemed to see his mission as ranging not only to his immediate neighborhood or to a single country but across the entire globe ("There are no borders in this struggle to the death").

Enabled by global view and fueled by outrage against globalized exploitation, violence continues today but of a very different nature. Unlike the tribalist, racist mission of modern jihad to destroy those lesser beings who befoul the world, Guevara's was the opposite -- to see a world without Kings or Caliphs, without the superstitious justifications of "nobility" and privilege that would place the greed of one group or corporation above the interests of every other person. Of any other person. A world that does not justify inequality.

Guevara was the Real Deal in many ways. I'm not so presumptuous to make a comprehensive list of his bravery or idealism, nor of his many faults and failures, some truly frightening. We're supposedly just talking about pictures here on PhotoRant.

Guevara had many international admirers, friends, and detractors, from Hemingway to Sartre to JFK. Photos of him were well-known in the 1960s, and so when he was finally executed by the Bolivians they realized that they needed a photo -- perhaps many photos -- to ensure that the world truly believed they had trapped him once and for all.

"The myth of the holy Che must finally be destroyed," wrote Bolivian General Gary Prado Salmon.

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Oops.

Other authors have noted the similarity of Freddy Alberto's Bolivian photos of the dead Guevara to Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, and some to Catholic images of Christ's body, lowered from the cross. The result was not what the Bolivians and the CIA had planned. It was meant to put terror into the hearts of leftists worldwide, but instead it emboldened them as the world tumbled into massive demonstrations against American involvement in Vietnam (on which Che had written a great deal) and the tumultuous Paris events of 1968.

Guevara's eyes in these photos are open and watching, even at his expected end. And unlike the figures surrounding Rembrandt's Dr. Tulp, none of the media & executioners seem to dare look straight back at the viewer, at the eyes of the world.

It was only after Che's death that the Heroico photo appeared publicly. It had been snapped by Castro's photographer Alexander Korda back in 1960, when barbudo Guevara was a Christlike 31 years old. The photo was taken at an event that commemorated a harbor disaster where Guevara and others had braved death to rescue the injured. The photo spread worldwide: first on book jackets, then moving to the posters and the tee-shirts and the Plaza de la Revolución.

Today it is a commercialized fashion icon as much as a political one. Buyers and sellers imagine it expresses a vague notion of one's independance and freethinking. Or maybe being like Brad Pitt. Christopher Hitchens has called Che's modern, somewhat manufactured persona as more heroic Byron than Marx. The legacy is dissolving but the photo, disconnected from its slogans and meaning, remains.

I've yet to see it happen, but can imagine, the double irony of seeing Che merchandise for sale at Banana Republic. Somehow the image most associated with Guevara has become one that cements the values opposed to his ideals. It's the real demonstration of his end.

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Hasta la Victoria Siempre!

Che Guevara: posted March 17, 2017 | 0 Comments

Havana: Caged Bouquet

(Jump to slideshow)

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Trocadero y Paseo de Marti

The Old Man was dead.

"We should go to Cuba before it changes too much," See See told me that evening.

"Definitely," I agreed with her, "before they finish putting in a Bubba Gump and TGIFriday's on the Malecón."

So I set aside my winter holidays and started looking at options, logistically and legally. Try to find something we could do together. Maybe an art workshop? Almost immediately, I found: Santa Fe Workshops, Open Door Havana with David Alan Harvey. Holy cow!

"That’s a great trip for you," See See said when I told her about it and tried to explain who DAH was, his relationship to Cuba, his books and Burn Magazine, and... without missing a beat she simply said "Go, and if you like it we’ll go together later." I am constantly in awe of her calm sweetness. Her timely sweetness, because the final day for registration was: tomorrow. So I registered. And I went.

I’ve never gone to a photo workshop before. I learned all my craft aspects of still photography by shooting yearbook and school newspaper photos, by working at ciné and darkroom rental houses, and after that my formal training was all cinematography. Harvey’s workshops are (deservedly) legendary for their intensity and his insight into the processes of many different kinds of photographers.

"Who Should Attend: Advanced Amateurs, Professionals." In other words, people with accomplished records and five times my chops when it comes to still photography. But frankly that’s what I enjoy most: being the class dunce gives me the most opportunity to learn something from everyone else. I started studying.

First, bust out all the Harvey books: not just Cuba and Divided Soul but everything else I could find, or that could be tracked down from a statewide library search. I picked through my old Geographics. I started scouring the web for more insight into his work, for tales of his workshops, and youtube for samples of his talks and working methods -- not to attempt at being a junior copy of DAH, but to save time, to guess at where he’s coming from via close reading of the pictures. A goal for me was to find some way to move beyond the kinds of work I’d been making in recent months, without abandoning it.

I read José Marti’s Cultivo Una Rosa Blanca. Binge-watched The Cuba Libre Story and the spectacular (and infrared) Yo Soy Cuba; scrubbed Google Maps for stories about things I imagined making projects about: internet censorship avoidance via la paquete semenal and how to find bicycle parts in the alleys around Cristina train station. I loaded my backpack with school supplies and bug repellent as gifts to people who might help me find pictures or just to make their lives better.

I started drumming my fingers over gear -- should I bring an audio recorder? Will the new Fuji 50mmWR come out, can I get an X100F in time (answer: they came out during the trip, so it was a moot concern)? In the end I opted for just two lenses, the 23 and 35 (35 & 50 equivalents), mounted on the X-Pro2 and X-T1 respectively so that I needn’t swap lenses on the fly. I did bring the little Instax SP-2 printer and lots of film; it was an excellent door-opener in some situations. Some days I just took the X-Pro with the 23. No tripod, no crazy Russian ultra-wide lens or infrared film. The 18-55 kit lens I left in my case as emergency backup, it was never used save for one shot of my American companions during lunch. I brought a tiny strobe that was nearly unused until the last day, and only for one shot.

Since I figured I was likely to be the most-junior, least-published photographer on the trip, I spent an evening just blasting out 8x10 prints, figuring everyone would probably have an image portfolio to use as introduction.

But… Esta complicado.

Complication #1: In the papers sent from the workshop after I’d registered, this description of what to expect: "people-to-people cultural exchanges that use the photographic experience… these are not photography workshops and there are few formal lectures, group critiques, or assignments during the week." Their bold-facing. Uh, que? Because of legal restrictions on the nature of our visas and tour permits, the workshop would be largely scheduled group visits to specific presentations and locations and walks through picture-rich locations & set-up situations. Which would be terrific, as I was really coming to love Cuba as a result of my research -- but not what I’d initially expected, and I was concerned that the experience might be a little too "on rails."

Complication #2: Just a day after completing my registration I decided to be a responsible adult and clean the rain gutters at the front of the house. An object lesson about correctly counting ladder rungs ensued, leaving me on crutches with multiple soft-tissue injuries and a fracture (and: fully cleaned rain gutters). The doctors weren’t entirely sure I could get around at home, much less overseas, and the workshop-participant papers warned repeatedly that Havana’s streets and sidewalks were full of dangerous holes, and that I’d be walking for hours each day on hazardous and slippery terrain. But when I worked through the chain of medical specialists up to the surgeon, he was resolute: delay your surgery, we will get you to Havana. Oh, and he knew Antonio Castro personally. I doubled-down on my physical therapy, on my gym visits, and also on babying my leg for six weeks. I bought some better waterproof boots and hid a cane in my luggage, just in case. While I dreaded the possibility of getting hurt at every step (those amazing holes in the streets are real!), I got through (until after the trip - another story). Never used the cane, just stayed slow and prudent.

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You can't make a bad picture in a situation like this. But is it the right picture? Maybe.

Complications… to heck with them. If anything they just solidified my resolve, and clarified my thinking about what I wanted to experience and learn. I tweaked my sleep schedule to match Havana time. I changed my diet from salads and vegan protein shakes to ropa vieja. The doc cleared me. I got on the airplane. Missed my connection. Made the second one (last-minute standby!), got to the hotel with twenty minutes to spare, met everyone briefly, and it was a go.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the least accomplished photographer in the group, just somewhere in the middle. I learned a tremendous amount just from watching the other students in the workshop while they were shooting, especially practiced hands like Maria Daniel Balcazar and Chris Michel, who were both inspiring while very different in their temperaments and approaches. And also learned from students more like myself, just trying to figure it out as someone who loves photography.

I’ll write later posts in more detail, but it was just a day or so into our week when I started to feel more confident about just doing what I normally do and not worrying about the specific requirements of the trip, or the workshop’s format, or even the location; and that if I wanted photos that were mine, I needed to have my own plan (just like... CalArts! Amazing instructor, lots of cheap rum, and it's up to you to sink or swim to your own island). There was some revolution in the air, a few people (ahem) talking about going off on unscheduled tangents, but it wasn’t that. Someone asked me, after a walk, if I’d gotten some good pictures that day, and I said that I couldn’t know, since I had no opinions about what I was seeing yet. It felt odd to say that, but also felt true.

The next day or two gave me a chance to show DAH some of my previous photos (I had those prints! To my surprise, no one else brought any, heh). Besides sagely telling me which prints to immediately eject from the set, he warmed to some portraits from the Liquidity series and even told other students about it: at a class lecture he reminded me to "get weird, Kevin!" a phrase most everyone in workshop repeated to me during the rest of the week.

By day four I was feeling that something like an opinion was forming: that Havana was like a derelict bouquet, still beautiful but collapsing and very, very fragile. Time passes, and winds from the north are inevitable.

Early that morning, just at dawn, I was ruminating on this when I looked down and at my feet in the rubble-strewn street was a crushed lost rose. I carried it to the hotel, snapping shots along the way (I brought it home too, though it’s dust now).

By 4AM the next morning I awoke from having done a dreaming edit of pictures (editing in your head is better than a laptop: the laptop's too slow) and realized that I might be able to use the idea of a caged bouquet as a way to rationalize some of my photos as a group, to make some sort of narrative out of them rather than a travelogue. I scribbled a list of pictures I already thought I had, a list of pictures I wanted, and went back to sleep. From that point forward I had a completely different way of thinking about the pictures yet to be made: I knew I wanted certain colors and feelings, but didn’t actually care about the specifics of location. Once I had that set of unifying ideas, the pictures almost took themselves. It also meant that when I sat down at at the light box that I could avoid confusing myself by just grabbing pictures that were "good" or "likeable" -- first, they had a job to do.

The Santa Fe Workshop goal was an eight-picture slideshow of favorites. I gave them that, and also made a twenty-picture slideshow of my own as a personal exercise. After the first draft I showed it to Harvey, and (after he counseled me to discard some of the shots) we chatted about how a similar process of getting at themes can drive a project, as they did for his long-term work on Divided Soul. He pointed out that once there’s a connecting idea, in a sequence a picture can be more than a picture, just as in a poem a word is not just a word. It has a broader function.

The revised version of that slideshow is here, you can play it small or use the fullscreen (button on the lower right when playing). The music is a fragment from an Isaac Albéniz piece, beautifully played by Rosa Antonelli. The titles were in the first draft too. They might feel a bit overwrought but they did me right at 4AM at the end of a very inspiring and satisfying week.

An hour back to Miami, and within another hour I was parked across from the Trump International Resort, having an almond-milk latté and listening to the chatter around me: a mix of English, Spanish, and Russian. But that's another post entirely.

We will go, See See. Before the Bubba Gump.

Havana: Caged Bouquet: posted March 12, 2017 | 0 Comments

Clarifications

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Clarifications: posted March 29, 2016 | 0 Comments

Nine Statements

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Here are nine statements that I hope clarify to readers (and myself) what I'm on about here at PhotoRant.

It's also a useful prep for me as I try to write up more about the nature of my actual working methods. I don't expect them to apply for everyone, but here they are:

  1. I attempt to involve myself in work and ideas which constantly challenge that which I previously understood or thought I understood.
  2. I am interested in the relationships and play between an unfamiliar picture/object content and the familiar photographic image.
  3. As aspect of the work has to do with altering the literal/cultural meaning of existing public images and additions. Using superimposition, juxtaposition, and other contextual changes, I am functioning as a visual guerrilla.
  4. I am interested in the various ways that photographic images transcend their relationship to actuality.
  5. The pictures and objects are not related to direct experiential camera vision, but represent formalized symbolic equivalents of experience.
  6. The figure, because of its human, erotic, sensual and psychological connections, remains my primary subject interest and is the vehicle for the formal content of this work.
  7. Often the work relates to my ongoing interest in random and aleatory occurrences and associations. The images are the result of situational rather than visualized stimuli. Synthesis rather than selection is significant.
  8. Through my work, I am involved in extending the photographic medium into new processes, concepts, and areas of concern and utilization of new light sensitive materials.
  9. My basic aim is to be able to relate the concept and the content of the last piece into the next, so as to be involved in the constant development of individual subjective work. I value the open-ended evolution of ideas as opposed to a particular aesthetic resolution.

In fact, this list was actually created by Robert Heinecken in 1963, two years after starting to lead the UCLA Photography Department. I recently encountered it and was surprised how well it resonated 40+ years later.

"Students seem to want to know where they should stop," he wrote, "rather than where they might go."

Nine Statements: posted March 27, 2016 | 0 Comments

April Art in Palo Alto

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Hidden Layers 3, 2016

I will have some pieces in the April exhibition at Palo Alto's Pacific Art League. As usual the opening will be on the first Friday. As you might expect for anything containing my work, that's April First.

Please feel free to come by during the opening reception that evening between 6 and 8PM, where you can critique in person over a glass of wine; or visit any time during the first three weeks of April. The gallery is at the corner of Forest and Ramona Streets, across from Palo Alto City Hall.

April Art in Palo Alto: posted March 25, 2016 | 0 Comments

Recent Finds

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KawauchiRinko Kawauchi: Illuminace, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow

Instant CityInstant City

Recent Finds: posted March 13, 2015 | 0 Comments

Folsom at Third

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"Photography books often have titles like The Photographer’s Eye or The Vision of So and So or Seeing Photographs — as if photographers didn’t have minds, only eyes." — Duane Michaels

Folsom at Third: posted February 07, 2015 | 0 Comments

SJC

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"Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies’ playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar." — Walker Evans

SJC: posted January 23, 2015 | 0 Comments

Fourth at Market

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"Although we know that the buildings, sidewalks, and sky continue beyond the edges of this urban landscape, the world of the photograph is contained within the frame. It’s not a fragment of a larger world." — Stephen Shore

Fourth at Market: posted January 20, 2015 | 0 Comments

Townsend at Fourth

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"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)"Susan Sontag

Townsend at Fourth: posted January 18, 2015 | 0 Comments

Approaching Sansome on Market

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"Most of what we know and learn, what we buy and believe, what we recognize and desire is determined by the domination of the human psyche by the photograph." — Donis A. Dondis

Approaching Sansome on Market: posted January 06, 2015 | 0 Comments

Fremont onto Market

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"I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them." — Paul Strand

Fremont onto Market: posted January 03, 2015 | 0 Comments

Market at Taylor

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Mono version.

Market at Taylor: posted January 02, 2015 | 0 Comments

Mono

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I've received two handsome books of current black and white photography, just before the holidays.

The first was MONO Volume One, edited by Luca Desienna (of Gomma magazine) and released in 2012 as the first part of a proposed trilogy (A Kickstarter project for Volume Two also shows a video that includes paging through the first volume).

The second, smaller book was BLACK FOREST, edited by Russell Joslin (of SHOTS magazine) and just now available. BLACK FOREST is not entirely in black and white, though the color fraction is desaturated and small.

MONO is organized as short portfolios by an individual photographer -- BLACK FOREST is organized into four “visible poems” of Joslin’s devising, with contributions by many photographers. Thus the smaller book includes the works of more artists. At least one (Roger Ballen) can be found in both books.

For each portfolio or visual poem, there is a brief and self-consciously cryptic poem-sized intro text. I am generally mistrustful of such props. They can be safely ignored here.

Both books exhibit a considerable love of blackness. This might be a by-product of modern book-printing practice, but both contain not only photos with tones that sink down below the page but the images are often presented against black, and many pages that bear no photos are also inked over.

The blackness suits both volumes’ interest in nostalgic, dreamlike states: dreams, like photographs, can seem vividly real, yet in nearly all these photos, as in dreaming, the realistic depiction is thwarted by defiances of physics, surrealist-like dissonant combinations of scale, of objects, animals, masks, realigned gravity, uncharted woods, skulls, paint-spattered walls, naked flesh and drapery. There’s a baroque quality to the extremity of detail.

Nearly all the work is made in the studio, or in controlled locations, really with only a single exception, Trent Parke’s portfolio in MONO. The notion of the camera as a window onto the world, or of the world as a supplier of image elements, is absent here.


The internet is first and foremost for shopping. So which of these books is most worthy of your cash? While I like MONO’s affordance of a deeper look at one artist’s imagery at a time, BLACK FOREST (which is also actually available!) suits me better. That said, I’ll still pony-up the speculative 29 quid for a copy of the upcoming MONO Volume Two.

Mono: posted December 31, 2014 | 0 Comments

Third Off Brannan

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"There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography." — Araki Nobuyoshi

No matter how tiny, the human figure will dominate any photograph it's found in. What are the limits of this phenomenon?

Third Off Brannan: posted December 30, 2014 | 0 Comments

 

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