I got a call recently from the VV to request images of Pablo, no mention of why, but they really liked what I sent and said that it was a possible cover.

It’s not the cover that is remarkable, it is Pablo’s story. We didn’t discuss much that day except the story, do some cool pics of Pablo on the streets of New York in different cycling garb, a style piece, and I suggested we just cycle and find locations that worked, which he was all for. Pablo was riding a fixie, and I loved watching him descend the Brooklyn Bridge locking up the rear wheel every once and a while. I lumbered along after him on my mountain bike. (I’m old enough to remember when it was necessary variously to have: a Banana Seat Bike, a 10 Speed, a Mountain Bike….I skipped the BMX phase…)

Anyway you should read the VV story, it is very current, it is an individual story about an immigrant, which we should recognize as very common.

I am sensitive to the whole notion of “immigration” – Neither of my parents are in the country that they were born in, and now, neither am I. By “law” I have rights to three passports but carry two- on from jus soli and the other by jus sanguinis to get fancy- born in Canada to an American mother. I have a third option available to claim British Citizenship through my father and his father, although my father was born in New York to British parents…what a bounty of passports simply being thrown at me! I have to wonder- what are we all so sensitive about when it comes to people born south of the border? East-West doesn’t seem to get everyone so worked up.

I am oversimplifying-Pablo was convicted of a felony- had I been convicted of a felony while in Canada I do not know how the immigration authorities would have handled my case-as far as they were concerned, I was an American from birth, so I suppose you cannot deny something from someone that they already possess.

Everyone accepts that this is the country you come to to get a new start-certainly things were good enough for me in Canada that I didn’t need to come here, I wanted to. I have never been to Uruguay. I am told it has a high standard of living relatively in South America, and is progressive and democratic.

What the story boils down to, as so many stories do, is that if you have money and can hire better than a public defender, your troubles will likely go away. No one will talk about rewarding bad behaviour, consequences, etc. “Used to be” that this country was a place for people with no money to come and work and create a new life. Now that we are the “haves,” we are insensitive to the have-nots. And unless we all get down to making babies real soon, we need immigration simply to prop up social security and medicare for all those boomers who used to be on the side of immigration but now seem to be against it.

Update: so I wrote all that last night and was going to post it and checked the VV story again for the link and evidently he is out!-

This all ties in to running and the marathon last year, to Team for Kids, and an iPhone app that Jamie Oliver created with recipes and tips.

This is a screen cap from the app, 20 Minute Meals. It’s really a great little app, lots of pictures and videos, plus updates with new recipes come too. I got the app when I was training for the marathon and decided to forego takeout as much as possible, in addition to it being cheaper. It was so fun making all the recipes that I found myself dining in nearly all the time.

If you watch the video Jamie makes the case that we have not passed to our children the knowledge they need to cook, select foods, and make healthy choices. Even adults, and I count myself in there, do not know their way around a kitchen. David Letterman can joke about “Know Your Cuts of Meat” but in truth that is about all I do know! I could not tell you the difference between a shoulder and a rib roast, chuck, round, whatever, the nomenclature is greek to me. And I come from a family where we had very (too!) regular family meals around the kitchen table, cooked by my mom and by my dad. Fast food was limited to once a week, we’d call it fend for yourself, or ersatz, usually friday.

That’s a cookbook I wrote out as a kid. I liked grilled chees with pickals and a glass of milk. Still do.

The whole Team for Kids mantra is get children moving early and often, because we have an epidemic of obesity going on. Oliver makes the same point in the video above, and he says we are not doing enough in schools to teach kids about food, not doing enough to supply healthy meals in schools, which are often the bulk of the meals kids get, and we are not doing enough to pressure fast food and the  food-industrial-complex to get the crap out of our food that they put there to increase profit.

For you out of town readers, living in Brooklyn I have always observed that the poorer neighbourhoods got the worst food, the worst vegetables, the worst meats. The closest grocery to me has great staff, but un-appealing veggies. I see them trying. It might be me single-handedly buying more veggies than anyone else!? And with more and more people turning to food stamps in this recession, it is only going to get tougher- what WIC will purchase is often nothing I would touch. So it is no surprise that when real food is unappealing, and when you don’t know how to prepare it properly, a family will turn to crap because the kids will eat it.

This is nothing that is sustainable or desirable. Oliver points out that the biggest killers in society today are not violent crime, or ‘terrerism, but the diseases of obesity and bad diet. By a huge margin.

Jamie’s mantra is pass it on, which is what I am doing.

I feel like we have gone back to the time of Matthew Brady, not in the least because men seem to dress like they are late for a nearby civil war battlefield, short stovepipe pants, felt coat and millitary cadet hat covering unwashed hair mingling with steamboat captain beard and mustache, a fleck of loose pipe tobacco at the corner of the mouth, but I digress. Considering the snapshot above, I should not offer opinions on fashion.

The decisive moment is now a good half minute. I believe it would be sufficient for Brady and his eight-ten on a sunny day.

…people are waiting everywhere…I see them. Like in that movie, I see dead people.

Bidden by the outstretched Franken-Camera they are immovable, locked in a death mask, waiting, waiting. If it was a subway they would not be so patient. I think the idea is, if I can just out-wait this camera, it will do what I want it to do. It will make that perfect picture of Me.

I watched a woman use her cell phone to make a self portrait on the B37 bus recently. Obviously the light was good or she was bored, her boyfriend was not proving to be an arresting subject. It was a curious case of mirror-mirror on the wall, except for the maddening fact that the mirror was turned the other way. With each picture she had to turn the phone around to see if she got what she wanted. I desperately wanted to intervene-hey this is my job didn’t you know?- I could see the image on the LCD that she was about to make. Higher, left, ok, don’t tilt the head, less smile. This will be the FB status update for when you dump this brohunk and move on…. I really don’t understand why some enterprising cell phone manufacturer has not simply made a camera exactly like a make-up compact, they are already small, shiny and colourful. Bury the lens in the mirror!  Then you could see yourself as you made the picture. Fait accompli.

The camera has now become an accomplice in our efforts to attain stardom and we are the lead character of our own lives! Born of two worlds and with a compelling personal narrative! We deserve a picture that confirms this. Head tilt, fish lips, squint. There. We need to control the media, even our own. Balloon Boy. Creepy White House Party Crashers.  I really don’t know why we worry so much about media censorship, when we edit our own stories much more heavily. Gone are all the random moments. Delete that. And definitely delete that off your friends phone or facebook page. Please do not tag me in someone else’s photograph. That is not an “official” photograph of Me™.

I miss the snapshot. I realize that what I am calling the snapshot and “snapshots” are very different things. Winogrand liked to point out when asked about his “snapshot aesthetic” that the garden variety snapshot was not very haphazard or uncontrolled, what his frames seemed to be suggesting, but actually a very staged and formalized genre of picture making, a subject in front of some object, owned or mastered by the person depicted. Like the photograph above. What I mean by snapshots refers to the vernacular use of snapshots and the lack of control and  innocence that film allowed. When you can’t see what you are doing instantly, you can’t be that self conscious. Or styled or controlling. The snapshot was a memento, like found beach glass, and it is made with the speed of our reaction to life, instantaneously. And permanent. I think this is why digital compact cameras have never really done it for me, they can’t focus and shoot fast enough to matter in this way.

If a camera cannot keep up to wit, can it say anything meaningful? And if you could take back what you say, as if it never happened, what does that do to our sense of selves?

A Camera, a Real Camera, is a subversive object. Robert Frank (I think) described carrying the Leica felt like having a gun in your pocket. Photographs threaten politics and vanity equally. I find this surprising since everyone has cameras and everyone takes pictures. Surely if everyone is doing it it means nothing? Yet still. I brought this contradiction up at a recent shoot and the sitter reminded me of the camera phone video of Neda’s Agha-Soltan’s death, the female Iranian protester, and how that video has gone on to be a symbol of the Iranian Resistance. The Youtube Revolution as it is called. Another Nick Ut moment. I am not so sure about this, I am not sure that the world can be galvanized for very long by such imagery, still or motion. Both moving. But are we moved? I am not old enough to know if the same questions were asked of the photographs produced during the Vietnam War, yet we tend to acknowledge that the images coming back from that War did much to change the course of our involvement there.

Photography is subversive, but it is subversive everywhere, which means nowhere. It is no longer the tool of one government, on ideology, but of all governments, and all people really. And I think this means that we assume all photographs are staged fakes since we are busy now staging our own lives for social media. The snapshot is dead, and we are all waiting for face detection to locate our true selves.

TO: ALL FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHERS

This is a reminder of The Times’s policies on digital manipulation or other alteration of photos.

As you know, under the contract you signed for The Times, you warrant that any photo submitted for publication “will be original and unaltered (unless it is a photo illustration, pre-approved by your editor and fully disclosed in caption information materials).”

The Times takes this obligation very seriously; the integrity of photographs and other material we publish goes to the heart of our credibility as a news organization. The prohibition on unauthorized alteration of photos applies to all sections of the paper, the Magazine and the Web site.

This passage from the newsroom’s “Guidelines on Our Integrity” explains our rules in more detail:

Photography and Images. Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions). Adjustments of color or gray scale should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction, analogous to the “burning” and “dodging” that formerly took place in darkroom processing of images. Pictures of news situations must not be posed.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

If you have any questions about what is permissible under the rules, please consult the assigning editor.

Sincerely,

William E. Schmidt
Deputy Managing Editor
The New York Times Newspaper
Division of The New York Times Company

The gloves will have to wait. But they have come off. Obviously some battening down of hatches is going on after the Edgar Martins débâcle. It is to be expected. It is also the first time I have ever gotten any official direction in writing with respect to “a policy” on alteration…well corporate communication is always an oxymoron. I did know what was permissible out of common sense. You wonder who doesn’t? As for that bit about consulting your editor if you have a question, well, in my experience Photoshop is most useful to them as a box to make the monitor higher. Raw converters, high radius sharpening, LAB colour, moire, curves vs. levels, shadow-highlight, none of this is going to get you more than a wha? Honestly, it is not their job to understand digital capture technology or be digital referees. Their job is to understand pictures and make intelligent assignments. They do this very well.

Part of the reason I was approached by the Times to do work for them was that I was outside of the newspaper world. I had not cut my teeth on newspapers, I did not go to J-school, I had never shot a grin and grab nor a high school soccer game. I don’t have that memory bank of solutions to photo problems that go through a 24mm lens close to the subject if you know what I mean. Which is not to disparage what journalists have to do. There are necessary limits implied by the mandate, I will get back to that.

My development in photography had come totally through editorial magazine work, and the editors that were calling were also veterans of that world. Their learning curve was steep also. While some may have had experience on newsmagazines or financial reporting, none had significant newspaper backgrounds. But the sections I was being assigned to were not “news” sections, it was feature fare like Dining, Arts, Style. I was not being asked to “report” on anything. I still got chastised early and often however for my scant captions. I figured the less I said the better. I did not want the responsibility of reporting, since I am not trained. My mandate is to take the intelligent handoff from an editor and make good pictures in my style. That’s what they wanted me for. Which is not reporting, probably not journalism, and may or may not be reality either. By the standards above, almost everything I was assigned was a photo-illustration, in that I directed people, moved furniture and generally futzed around until I got the photograph that I wanted, whether it was a portrait, a still life or interior. This is standard editorial practice.

In some sections, and in magazines, where a photograph is used to serve the same purposes as a commissioned drawing or painting – as an illustration of an idea or situation or as a demonstration of how a device works, etc. – it must always be clearly labeled as a photo illustration. This does not apply to portraits or still-lifes (photos of food, shoes, etc.), but it does apply to other kinds of shots in which we have artificially arranged people or things, as well as to collages, montages, and photographs that have been digitally altered.

“Illustrations of ideas or situations” might encompass any situation where I was present and made choices about photographing a person or group. But portraits and still life gets a pass evidently, unless the “people or thing” is “artificially arranged”, which takes me back in a circle to almost all portraits and all still life. I am no clearer after this clarification. (secret answer: there may be no answer to this for newspapers, read on…)

Tangential to that, (going somewhere, I promise) my cable provider has seen fit to scramble the location of the channels, I now have C-Span and NY-1 in the low digits. I am enjoying the Wendy Williams show for the first time. How You Doing? Fine, thank you, and getting up early on Sunday mornings for my long runs means that I get back around 10am, just in time for Richard D. Heffner’s excellent program “An Open Mind” broadcast from SUNY somewhere upstate, NY. For the last two weeks he has been interviewing Alex S. Jones, an authority on media issues, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times staffer through much of the eighties. He has a new book out called “Losing the News” “The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy.” Here is an excerpt from chapter one, “The Iron Core”:

Imagine a sphere of pitted iron, grey and imperfect like a large cannonball. Think of this dense, heavy ball as the total mass of each day’s serious reported news, the iron core of information that is at the center of a functioning democracy. This iron core is big and unwieldy, reflecting each day’s combined output of all the professional journalism done by news organizations — newspapers, radio and television news, news services such as the Associated Press and Reuters, and a few magazines. Some of its content is now created by new media, nonprofits, and even, occasionally, the supermarket tabloids, but the overwhelming majority still comes from the traditional news media.

This iron core does not include Paris Hilton’s latest escapade or an account of the Yankees game or the U.S. Open. It has no comics or crossword puzzle. No ads. It has no stories of puppies or weekend getaways or recipes for cooking great chili. Nor does it include advice on buying real estate, investing in an IRA, movie reviews, or diet advice. There is nothing wrong with any of these things. Indeed, pleasant and diverting stories are far more appealing to most people than the contents of the core, which some find grim, boring, or riddled with bias.

It has no editorials and does not include the opinions of columnists or op-ed writers or political bloggers. These things are derived from the core. They are made possible because there is a core. Their point of departure is almost always information gleaned from the reporting that gives the core its weight, and they serve to spread awareness of the information that is in the core, to analyze it and interpret it and challenge it. Opinion writers pick and choose among what the core provides to find facts that will further an argument or advance a policy agenda. But they are outside the core, because they almost always offer commentary and personal observation, not original reporting.

Inside the core is news from abroad, from coverage of the war in Iraq to articles describing the effort to save national parks in Mozambique. There is news of politics, from the White House to the mayor’s office. There is an account of a public hearing on a proposal to build new ball fields and an explanation of a regional zoning concept that might affect property values. There is policy news about Medicare reform and science news about global warming. There is news of business, both innovation and scandal, and even sporting news of such things as the abuse of steroids. An account of the battle within the local school board about dress codes is there, along with the debate in the state legislature over whether intelligent design should be taught as science. The iron sphere is given extra weight by investigative reports ranging from revelations that prisoners at the county jail are being used to paint the sheriff’s house to the disclosure that the government is tapping phones without warrants as part of the war on terror.

Alex feels we are eroding this Core, and are at risk of losing it altogether. The core cannot be maintained in any type of “free” way. Basic reporting is like digging ditches, rarely any glamour involved, you are not going to get an intern to go to Afghanistan for free to do this. It requires resources and commitment over the long haul. Notice also the distinction he makes between original reporting and opinion and analysis. Without the core, you cannot have the rest.

…So I get this email this morning reminding us all about the standards and practices involved and it makes me think-how do you square this circle? In other words, in trying to create a product more interesting to more people newspapers have enlarged the scope of their coverage well beyond the confines of the iron core that Alex talks about. Tthey have done this for a long time, except with staff photographers. Lately they have seen fit to hire outside the choir you could say. Which gets you Edgar Martins, an art star who has no connection to print and obviously no concern. Or it gets you Nadav Kander, (who I love) and a set of completely manipulated portraits that passes muster because as I read above, portraits and still life can be called photographs, except when they are photo illustrations. So is it not a photo illustration to completely change and insert a background? The Magazine, the website and the Newspaper all have to adhere to the same standard according to the letter above. If I am confused, imagine the lay reader.

Newspapers seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it too. The mandate to create compelling (which you can also read as trendy, fashionable, provocative) content may not always coincide with the mandate to report facts. When you start to mix up this iron core with sections from Agronomy to Zymurgy, (just leave my astrology thank you!) when you start to look outside the J-schools and newspaper ranks for editors and creatives, and when the pressure of the bottom line starts to pinch, then you get mission “creep”.  Profit and ambition can compromise integrity, and the reader loses faith in the core itself. News becomes confused with info-tainment.  Reporting start to look less like truth and more like the opinion of the newspaper owner.

We now are awash in opinion, mine included. I have no solution here but wanted to draw attention to Jones’ writing and his “core” idea. I believe that accountability reporting as he calls it is essential to our democracy. You are not watching your city council, but you know someone is. Dutifully, so that one day there is a paper trail, and a story can emerge of corruption or improvement. Technologists like to posit that the camera phone, the citizen journalist and the very transparency of information on the internet can provide what newspapers currently provide. But you cannot expect bloggers to be able to withstand the lawsuits that even a simple investigative piece could generate. Certainly that lone blogger could “tweet” for help but this is a naive fantasy. I heard Eric Schmidt of Google gush that the simplicity of fact checking on the internet means that politicians will have a harder time lying in public. Guess he has not tuned into C-Span lately. Maybe he needs to rescan his converter box to make sure he is getting all the channels…

A whole post and I only mentioned running once.

Some real gems:

Every year art schools across the country spit out thousands of groomed-for-success graduates, whose job it is to supply galleries and auction houses with desirable retail. They are backed up by cadres of public relations specialists — otherwise known as critics, curators, editors, publishers and career theorists — who provide timely updates on what desirable means.

Many of those specialists are, directly or indirectly, on the industry payroll, which is controlled by another set of personnel: the dealers, brokers, advisers, financiers, lawyers and — crucial in the era of art fairs — event planners who represent the industry’s marketing and sales division. They are the people who scan school rosters, pick off fresh talent, direct careers and, by some inscrutable calculus, determine what will sell for what.

…

And where is art in all of this? Proliferating but languishing. “Quality,” primarily defined as formal skill, is back in vogue, part and parcel of a conservative, some would say retrogressive, painting and drawing revival. And it has given us a flood of well-schooled pictures, ingenious sculptures, fastidious photographs and carefully staged spectacles, each based on the same basic elements: a single idea, embedded in the work and expounded in an artist’s statement, and a look or style geared to be as catchy as the hook in a rock song.

Just read the whole thing.

I have always enjoyed looking at Nadav’s work. I guess it has been a while since I last tuned in but my reaction to this is pretty negative. It feels to me the most “unphotographic” that I have seen of his work, the most manipulated. Of course I understand it is all manipulated, but many of his portraits have some tone in the background which sort of softens the blend between the shadow, the person and the backdrop. What I am feeling here is bad drop-shadow 101. Photography reduced to graphic design.

Which sort of brings me to another peeve, the way that graphic design has become so intertwined with the Obama administration, for example the silly podium sign “Office of the President Elect of the United States” with the faux POTUS shield, not to mention that the office is not an “Office” at all. 

Consider also Shepard Fairey’s photo-cum-illustration of TPEOTUS:

The Obama O::

Stays Crunchy in Milk!

I’m feeling hit over the head with branding. Are there that many out of work graphic designers?

Perhaps it is commentary by Nadav to turn the administration into cut-out-dolls? If we can paper over our financial troubles by printing money perhaps we can also design our way out of crisis?

And I voted for the guy.