the daily flashkube

Gasparilla Festival of the Arts @ Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park

I watched with amusement as trucks pulled on to the then dirt acreage with pallets and pallets of brown, seemingly dead, sod. I was sure the person in charge would take one look and send the drivers back to the soon to be out of business nursery from whence they came. When workers started actually laying down sheets of  it I was shocked. There was no way they could resurrect the grass in time for the grand opening. However, when the big day came the park was covered with a carpet so green you’d think they were about to shoot a Scott’s television commercial. Only later did I learn the green had been spray-painted on. It sounds crazy, but the practice is not uncommon, especially at golf courses.

This image was shot from my balcony looking down at Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park just the other day. As you can see, the faux greenery has washed away and it once again looks patchy and brown. (To be fair, it looks much worse from above than at ground level.) Sod has always baffled and amazed me. As a child of suburbia, I’ve witnessed countless failed sod jobs. I suppose it’s not so different from transplanting trees, just with a ridiculously poor success rate.

(NOTE: These are best viewed much larger. The first photograph has a lot going on that can’t be viewed at this size. Click through to the larger version.)

I missed a blog post from Roger Ebert last month in which he reviewed the film “Smash His Camera” by the Academy award winning filmmaker Leon Gast. Ebert is insightful and makes me wonder if the movie will cause me to question my existing notions of paparazzi. He did post some interesting related videos, but the Sundance site also has a brief interview with Gast.

I had an idea, as many of us do, about Gallela and the species of paparazzi. It was a hypocritical idea. I disapproved of him and enjoyed his work. Yes, he comes close to violating the rights of public people, and sometimes crosses the line. He certainly crossed the line with Jackie’s children.

But he sold his photographs to publications which we bought, we looked at them with enjoyment and curiosity, and his career was made possible by our human nature. These are conclusions I’ve arrived at after seeing Leon Gast’s “Smash His Camera,” a new documentary shown here at Sundance. It shows Gallela triumphant, installed with his devoted Betty in his Jersey mini-mansion with a large Italian garden for the bunnies. A friend says, “You look at his house, and you think–Sopranos!”

via Smash his camera, but not immediately – Roger Ebert’s Journal.

At one point he calls it a “heavy camera.” This coming from a guy in zero grav just chill’n in his gym shorts. Sheesh. I wonder if he’s ever held a full-frame DSLR and 800mm while standing on Earth?!? This video just warmed my geeky little heart.

In 1962, John Szarkowski was chosen by Edward Steichen to be his successor as Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where he served for almost thirty years. Through his direction and criticism, Szarkowski defined how photography was to be written and spoken about. U.S. News and World Report, in 1990, said, “Szarkowski’s thinking, whether Americans know it or not, has become our thinking about photography.”

In 1974, Szarkowski published Looking at Photographs, 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. The book begins with an introduction by the author who lays out his objectives and makes the case for the need for such a book.

This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide material for simple delectation. Beyond this it hopes to show something of the character and intent of the Museum’s photography Collections, and to suggest some of the ways in which the study of photography touches the broader issues of modern art and modern sensibility.

Also in the introduction, the author gives a short history of the Department and pays homage to his predecessors. Newhall’s History of Photography and Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs continue to be required reading for fine arts majors. (I read Newhall a few years ago and quoted my favorite passage in a 2008 blog post.)

In 1937 the Museum opened the historic survey exhibition Photography 1839-1937, directed by Beaumont Newhall. The exhibition provided the foundation on which Newhall’s seminal History of Photography was based; it also marked the effective beginning of a systematic and coherent commitment to photography by the Museum. The Department of Photography was officially established as an independent curatorial function in 1940. Following Beaumont Newhall, those staff members who have directed the Museum’s photography program have been Nancy Newhall, Willard Morgan, Edward Steichen, and the writer.

The final paragraph of Szarkowski’s introduction, if I may pilfer, shows his acceptance that photography has and will constantly evolve. To have such an openminded director at MoMA for such a long period of time has allowed photography to flourish. I hope that his successors maintain Szarkowski’s progressive legacy.

The future of this beautiful, universally practiced, little-known art will be determined by young and unborn photographers, who will decide how best to build on their rich and ambiguous tradition. A small part of that tradition is reproduced on the following pages.

Some notes about the layout: Each flip of the page shows an image on the right with Szarkowski’s description and criticism on the left. The author decided that no photographer in the book would be represented by more than one work, “regardless of the importance of his contribution, or the richness of the Museum’s holdings of his work.” Shown below are my favorites from the collection with brief reasons and quotes by the author.

NOTE: The copy I have is a second printing from 1974 that I found at the John F. Germany Public Library in Downtown Tampa. Today I also saw a copy at the Tampa Museum of Art book store published in 1999. The photographs below were shot with my Blackberry 8900 and edited with Picnick.

Niagara Suspension Bridge, William England, 1859

On a single plate England has given us a scenic wonder, a group portrait, a triumph of modern engineering, a railroad train, and (if one looks closely) a horse and buggy. He has included everything of the most favored subject matter of the period except an ancient architectural monument–generally unavailable to most photographers working in this country.

Blackfoot Brave with Pony, William McFarlane Notman, 1889

The picture’s design, however, is characteristically photographic. A painter would have included the horse’s front legs, thus locating the animal in space, and making a fine inverted S-curve of its neck and shoulder. In the photograph the horses head, cropped as it is by the picture edge, is oddly two-dimensional, like an element in a collage, attached to the picture structure by the bridle reins and the tepee’s chimney pole.

Agriculture. Mixing Fertilizer., Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1899 or 1900

She was a drill sergeant among photographers. In her photographs no head or hand moves during the long exposures; no undisciplined individualist clowns for the camera; no property, no matter how interesting in itself, is allowed to violate the taut, flat planes of her compositions.

Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris, Jacques Henri Lartigue, 1911

Lartigue was only 15 when he made the image above. Szarkowski writes, “by the time he was ten he was making photographs that anticipate the best small-camera work of a generation later. “

Rayograph, Man Ray, 1922

The final image was never precisely predictable; unexpected gradations in tone created imaginary vistas that were surprising and delightful. For Man Ray, to whom art was a sublime kind of play, the technique was perfect.

American Rural Baroque, Ralph Steiner, 1930

I love the shadow projection on the clapboard wall. The chair itself is insignificant if not entirely invisible. Szarkowski had this to say,

In the forty-three years since this picture was made, its subject matter has acquired a good deal of nostalgia value, and it is perhaps best to point out for younger readers that the chair in 1930 was not a charming antique, but simply a ridiculous and embarrassing middle-aged mistake, dating prerhaps from the administration of William Howard Taft.

[Brooklyn schoolchildren see gambler murdered in street] Weegee (Arther Fellig), 1941

The expression of the shoved girl juxtaposed against the sobbing old lady made me chuckle. It is amusing to study each face and guess at what was being thought in the moment. The author sums up the role of photojournalist thusly, “The function of news photographers is to give us the look and the smell of events that we did no witness.” But he goes on to observe, “the audience was often as terrific as the event.”

Political Rally, Robert Frank, 1924

The photograph reproduced here is a perfect specimen of what was at the time a new genus of picture. The human situation described is not merely faceless, but mindless. From the fine shiny sousaphone rises a comic strip balloon that pronounces once more the virtues of ritual patriotism. On either side of the tuba-player stand his fellows, as anonymous and as dependable as he. It is somehow proper–funnier, sadder, and truer–that the occasion should have been an Adlai Stevenson rally.

Untitled, Garry Winogrand, 1962

There is a Winogrand exhibit at the Tampa Museum of Art right now that contains all the photographs from his Women are Beautiful series. There is a surprising lack of Winogrand books at the libraries in our county compared to those by the dry postcardist Ansel Adams, for example. I had the idea that I would visit TMA’s book store and purchase one for donation to the library cooperative, but alas, they had none. The omission of Winogrand books is sad given his contribution to the medium.

Consider Winogrand’s picture: so rich in fact and suggestion, and so justly resolved; more complex and more beautiful than the movie that Alfred Hitchcock might derive from it.

Untitled, Ray K. Metzker, 1931

Viewing the two frames as one image effects a profound change in the visual character of the two component elements. Viewed singly, each exposure represents a figure on a plane which recedes into deep space; viewed together, the ground no longer recedes. Since the two figures are seen from the same distance, they are read as existing in the same plane, and the beach becomes a backdrop, as ambiguously located as the sky. Visually, the two figures are not resting but falling, or, perhaps more precisely, floating: as weightless and disoriented as two astronauts, or two unlikely angels in a Correggio dome.

New Orleans, Lee Friedlander, 1968

This is my favorite photograph in the book. Szarkowski’s game metaphor is fascinating and one I mostly agree with.

When Lee Friedlander made the photograph reproduced here he was playing a kind of game. The game is of undetermined social utility and might on the surface seem almost frivolous. The rules of the game are so tentative that they are automatically (though subtly) amended each time the game is successfully played. The chief arbiter of the game is Tradition, which records in a haphazard fashion the results of all previous games, in order to make sure that no player that won before will be allowed to win again. The point of the game is to know, love, and serve sight, and the basic strategic problem is to find a new kind of clarity within the prickly thickets of unordered sensation. When one match is successfully completed, the player can move on to a new prickly thicket.

The larger, dark figure reflected in the shop window is (obviously) the photographer. Friedlander has made many such fugitive and elliptial self-portraits, partly no doubt because of the easy accessibility of the subject, and partly because of his fascination with transparency and reflection in relationship to the picture plane, and partly because such pictures remind him later of where he has been and what it felt like to be there. The small figure in the bright square over the photographer’s heart is also the photographer, reflected in a mirror in the rear of the store. The man standing by the Mustang (like the donor in the altarpice) is merely a bystander, wondering what the photographer might be looking at.

His last paragraph is priceless,

It would of course be possible to draw a diagram, with lines and arrows and shaded planes, to explain crudely what the picture itself explains precisely. But what conceivable purpose would this barbarism serve?

Barbarism, indeed.

Above: In a surprising move, the City of Tampa decided to take seriously the fragile, pale skin of redheads this week by beginning construction on a “trellis shade structure” at the newly renovated Curtis Hixon Park in Downtown Tampa’s river arts district. After the park’s grand opening, the biggest complaint from redheads was the lack of shade. The influence of the redhead community on government decision making is apparently quite vast. Some speculate that Tampa’s redhead population has been grossly underestimated. Others say the group is particularly adept at whining. The actual source of their power is yet to be determined.

Above: In a related story, the mouth-breathers were also placated by the City of Tampa when they complained that Curtis Hixon Park had a serious lack of lazy boy chairs. Unlike the pale whining redhead situation, city officials only met the mouth-breathers half way. According to a sign in the window of the park’s offices, chairs will be “scattered” over the grounds. A mouth-breather spokesman told reporters that his people are “happy with the outcome, but hope the chairs are placed reasonably close to each other.” He went on to say there would be political backlash from his group if they are forced to walk too far between chairs. (Also according to the sign, we will soon be served drinks while hanging out inside a Microsoft Windows desktop wallpaper.)

Today I spent the day at the museum, park, and library. While there I stopped by the Skanska trailer on Twiggs to say hello to Meoi Plummer. Plummer and her team built Curtis Hixon Park and the Tampa Museum of Art. They have also been following my blog and photos. They had very kind words for me. Thanks Meoi for all your hard work. The park and museum are a beautiful addition to downtown! It was an honor to meet you and shake your hand.

All joking aside (see satirical news story in italics above), I think the shade trellis is a good move. I’m very happy that nothing will be constructed on the great lawn. Downtown needs a place to stretch out and run around. The chairs and tables will also be a nice addition.

I did walk by the unfinished Glazer Children’s Museum to check on its progress. They are putting up these mosaic pieces (below) on either side of the main entrance. A contractor told me they are going to be spirals when finished. It seems like DeLotto is moving much slower than Skanska, but that may be a funding problem. (And it may just be that I have a bias in favor of my new friends. :P )

Last weekend I was on an art binge (probably because of the new museum opening) and stopped by a gallery tent at a local mall. I fell hard for the original oil painting shown here and surprised my wife with it. She loves it as much as I do. It will probably hang prominently above the television we never watch. (Hmm…maybe I should put it in place of the television we never watch.)

I’m posting this because a funny thing happened when I started taking pictures of it. At first I tried to capture the painting in its entirety. As soon as I nailed that I automatically began making the images below. What the hell was I doing? Making smaller compositions out of this painting as if the wooden frame were a window? It was a surreal moment when I realized what I had done. I’m not sure if this reflects on my instincts as a photographer or on the painters mastery. Maybe both? I can dream…