Posts from the “Photography” Category

JR: Women Are Heroes

Posted on December 12, 2012

Since its inception in the late 60s, graffiti has been the most public of public arts, the ultimate statement of self, a mark of existence that enlivens the streets. Since it began with tags, it has since expanded in all manners including beyond its original letterform. As it shifted into an image-based lexicon, it took on new forms, and was dubbed Street Art as a way to differentiate itself. And while many have succeeded in any number of mediums, there is only one photograffeur: JR.

JR has taken photography to new heights. By employing the ideals of graffiti—scale, placement, and proliferation—JR’s work creates its own expectations. The 2011 winner of the TED Prize, he works on a global scale using art to effect a change in the world. Women Are Heroes: A Global Project by JR (Abrams) showcases one his most noble efforts, a tribute to women on a massive scale, with public art works produced in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Kenya, Brazil, India, and Cambodia. Mural size photographs of everyday women were created on monumental scale from simple black and white portraits that are at once intimate and outlandish, evocative and emotional, provocative and profound. The cumulative effect of JR’s work allows for a new understanding in the representation of women, as well as in the discourse of public art.

Public art, such as it exists, has been a tool for the establishment to reinforce itself. Whether it is the monumental sponsored work of the church and state, or more recently, the art world’s ever-present self-veneration masquerading as a “profitable investment” most public works have been imposed by external forces upon the community it claims to serve. Graffiti and street art also impose, but they do so by way of the anonymous insider making his or her presence known. Here, JR takes the insider to the furthest possible reach, making heroes out of the people themselves, effectively saying, “In you, beauty exists.”

JR’s installations serve the people by becoming part of the whole, by transforming the landscape by fusing the internal and external at the same time. The placement of the works are as telling as the choice of subjects themselves, for the art of Women Are Heroes exists only in lands of extreme poverty throughout the world, in lands where people are marginalized in ways we of the first world all too often forget.

But JR won’t let us forget, and he takes us deeper into the abyss by granting access to the personal side of his subjects in “As Told To” narratives throughout the book. As Chantha Dol of Cambodia reveals, “I agreed to have my photograph put up so that the men in power in Cambodia would open their eyes and take a look at our condition. The reason my eyes are so wide open is to show my anger. Words are no longer enough. I want people to ask themselves why these photograph of women were put on the walls of their houses.”

But Ms. Dol might not know that when she agreed to be photographed, the question she wanted people to ask themselves would be a question to travel around the world. JR’s continued success allows the work he is doing to reach new audiences that go far beyond the traditional realms of photography and street art. As his audiences expand in both size and prominence, the questions his work raises gain power and strength, inspiring us as individuals and as societies to look at ourselves with fresh eyes.

Women Are Heroes is a sumptuously produced tome that pleasingly combines the grand scale of the public works with the directness of the photographs and stories being told. It provides context at every turn, allowing for a more complete experience of the installations themselves. This book is equally provocative and pleasurable, as each turn of the page reveals an unexpected angle on the power of photography to tell stories and touch hearts. Imagine eyes softly shut, black eyelashes lain thick, now imagine this image pasted to the side of a garbage truck at a dump in Cambodia. JR reminds us women are worthy of a veneration that goes deeper than the flesh, that celebrates an inner beauty in every being that only art can truly make manifest.

Categories: Africa, Art, Books, Graffiti, Photography, Women

Bobby Seale: All Power to the People

Posted on December 7, 2012

Everyone has a level by which they’re going to deal for self. But in dealing for self you can or cannot be considerate of your fellow human being next to you or near you or around you or in your neighborhood. It was the 60s protest movement that captured the imagination of a lot of young people, including myself. For me to go and hear Martin Luther King speak in 1962 when I was first introduced to, beginning to understand, what that 60s protest movement was about, I was a young college man, I was an engineering/design major, and at night I worked a full time job in an engineering department. I was working on the Gemini Missile project, a government-financed framework putting the satellites up around the earth. I placed myself in the high tech world I loved. So that’s where I was; but I became sensitive, was made sensitive by people like Martin Luther King, by the plight of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. They made me understand, made me take the time to research and know the history—not only the colonization of Africa but the history of African Americans in this country. And I had already identified with the history of peoples—when I was 16, before I knew any African American history, I knew Native American history and their plight. It was easy, I guess, that the civil rights protest movement should get to me and cause me to be concerned a young man—not married, to get involved in the protest movement, to the point of literally quitting my engineering job to go to work in the grassroots community and not even make the kind of money I was making.

Now the Constitution of the United States of America and the First Amendment that Huey Newton had pointed out before we started the Black Panther Party gave the people the right to peacefully assemble and peacefully address their grievances. That’s important to understand—morally, correctly so—but more importantly from a legal standpoint. The people had a right to peacefully redress their grievances and peacefully protest. Before the Black Panther Party came along, peaceful protesters were getting murdered shot, killed, brutalized. Peaceful protesters who declared that they were holding peaceful protests. It happened to a lot of protest efforts around the country because they gained momentum, because they were saying, “Let’s make a change.” Violence was getting heaped upon peaceful protesters.

It’s important to understand what we said in our Ten Point Program, when we called for full employment, decent housing, an end to exploitation and robbery of our communities, free preventative medial care for our communities—these were basic civil rights issues that peaceful protesters were about across the board. But politicians would order their police, order their National Guard, order their state police to literally beat the heads of and brutalize the peaceful protesters. So by the time we came along, Huey and I, creating the Black Panther Party, we took the position that if anyone attacks the people of the United States, if any racist or others attack the people of the United States, it’s wrong. Because we would take arrest, that was always our policy: if the police say we’re under arrest, we take the arrest. We were never afraid of the courtroom, but if they come in shooting and not recognizing our human right to live, as a means to try to terrorize us, we will defend ourselves—and that’s what we did. By 1969 every Black Panther Party office across the United States of America was attacked and half of those attacks resulted in shootouts—because the police came in shooting. They didn’t come in saying you were under arrest, they just came in shooting and we defended ourselves. And in that heavy period of 1969, twenty-eight of my Black Panther Party members ended up dead, a couple of them killed by provocateur agents working for the FBI inside our organization. And then they attempted to blame party members for doing it. Now this is why I was heating up, but we defended ourselves. And we had many a rally that was basically peaceful; we had many a gathering that was basically peaceful; we had many a free breakfast for children in churches or in other halls that were basically peaceful efforts. The point is they heaped the violence upon the United States and we defended ourselves from it.

Now people forget how and why all those attacks and all those shootouts—shootouts with the police were largely the police attacking the United States—now why did those police and those attacks stop? People have to remember that by 1970, going into 1971, the United States Senate, Senator Ted Kennedy and Senator Church headed up an investigation hearing on the FBI because they found out the FBI was going to police departments and setting up and laying plans months in advance to attack the Black Panther Party offices. Now with this hearing the FBI was in the hot seat and the United States Senate asked—it was right on live television—“Why are you running around here attacking these Black Panther Party members?” Now if you take note of history, those investigations were caused by the last two attacks in December 1969. December 4 in Chicago, a predawn raid where the police busted into a house and came in shooting, shot up everybody, and killed and murdered Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. We later proved and showed, and as the Freedom of Information Act documents, that in fact the FBI had an infiltrator who got the plans for the layout of the house. Those plans were given to the State Attorney’s Special Police Force. Six to eight years later, a suit was filed and the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark eventually won millions from the FBI and the State Attorney.

Two days after that shootout they attacked the Los Angeles office, and a month or two after that they laid out plans to attack the national headquarters, the central headquarters of the Black Panther Party here in Berkeley California. I was in jail at the time, but a young white policeman in the Berkeley Police Department had overheard the plans. This young white police officer, hearing them laugh and carry on about how “We’ll kill 10 or 20 of these Black Panther Party when we come in shooting from the downstairs up to the second story through the ceilings,” all this kind of crap—this young white policeman stole the plans and gave them to our lawyer and we called a press conference and put them in the press.

I am trying to show you that there’s smoking gun evidence of how the politicians and others had agreed that they needed to wipe out and terrorize the Black Panther Party. Further, the mayor of Seattle, Washington, a young white liberal mayor, got on television after he discovered the FBI had planned attacks on the Seattle chapters. He said, “We want the FBI out of our department. We will not have the FBI try to spearhead and cause an attack on the Black Panther Party here in Seattle.” Now notice something: after the investigations there were never any more shootouts between the Black Panther Party members and the police in the United States again—ever. That’s the evidence.

This is what people forget or don’t know or don’t understand about our position. The difference is between taking the right of self-defense and at the same time having all kinds of programs around the country. Party members went to do breakfast programs without guns. It’s what we did when we started that Free Breakfast for Children program—it’s one thing to say the racist pig power structure is brutal, it’s murderous; it’s another thing to articulate and specify all the hysterical particulars of how racist discrimination has affected the United States; but it’s another thing to say we’re not only observing the police, we’re going to organize political, electoral campaigns and we’re going to run for political office and we’re going to try to win some of these localized seats where we have these large African American groups.

We were ready to write legislation that deleted the racist discrimination, policies, and institutionalized racism. Because the city council is nothing but a local legislative body—just as a county seat is a local legislative body, as states are local legislative bodies, as the federal government is a local legislative body—it can make laws and policies that make human sense. This is what our revolution was about. Not only had the Black Panther Party spread out in 49 chapters with branches in cities across the United States of America but we had working coalitions with all ethnic groups, including our white, left radical friends, so we had another ten thousand working in our framework called the United Front Against Fascism: The National Committee to Combat Fascism. So to the power structure we were on the proper move to make a change.

What people have to take time to understand was that we, as young college students, injected something into the movement that was relevant, and that legacy is about uniting people and creating greater political electoral empowerment. You have to remember we ran for political office with our names on the ballot: a critique of and opposition to institutionalized racism in the United States. Trying to unite people with electoral and community empowerment and to change legislative bodies as a means to fight against institutionalized racism here in the United States of America: that is what we were about, that is what I stood for, that is what I organized.

—Bobby Seale
As told to Miss Rosen
Oakland 2006

America Was Built on Revolution

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, Art, Photography

African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album

Posted on November 21, 2012

1st Sgt. Octavious McFarland, Company D, Sixty-second U.S. Colored Infantry. Carte de visite by unidentified photographer, about 1864-1866. © Collection of the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum.

In February 1865, Martin Delany was received by Abraham Lincoln at the White House. There, Delany told the President, “I propose, sir, an army of blacks, commanded entirely of black officers.” Shortly thereafter, Delany received a commission as major of infantry—the first African American appointed an army officer. As Frederick Douglass reportedly stated, “I thank God for making me a man simply, but Delany always thanks Him for making him a black man.”

The story of Major Martin Robison Delany, Fifty-second U.S. Colored Infantry, is titled “Most Defiant Blackness” and leads with his portrait, dressed in Union blues. This photograph is a cartes de visite, taken with a specially designed camera that produced eight images on a single glass plate, from which the resulting paper print. It was then glued to card stock and measured 2.5 x 4 inches in size, the perfect keepsake that was economically possible at this time. From 1851–67, “cartonamia” was unleashed, with some three million cartes de visite sold. This was the first time almost anyone could record his or her own image for posterity, and they immediately became decorative objects that made picture giving a cultural phenomenon. Not to mention a resource for an author as industrious as Ronald S. Coddington.

Coddington has just released his third book, African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album (Johns Hopkins University Press), a beautiful and meticulous presentation of the likenesses and lives of seventy-seven men whose stories are part of the complex and compelling tapestry that is America. These stories offer but a glimpse into the vast ocean of men, some 200,000 African Americans, who served the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War. Some of them were born free, others escaped from slavery or set free by owners sympathetic to the war effort. And, if only for a moment, imagine what it must have been like, two hundred thousand African American men armed and dressed for combat on American soil, ready to fight the white man for freedom, the right to self sovereign.

And, if only for a moment, imagine what it must have been like, two hundred thousand African American men army and dressed for combat on American soil, ready to fight the white man for freedom, the right to self sovereign. “I am for war—war upon the whites,” Delany wrote during the 1950s in a novel that stood in marked contrast to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Delany’s words are seen in the stories of men who served not only their country but something greater than this. As soldiers in the Civil War, they stood for what the United States was founded upon: Independence.

The stories provide a reverent context for the images we witness here. They lend a gravitas to the images, which charming in their dated stylistic iconography, the way in which the photograph easily replaces the painted portrait while assuming all of its conventions. Consider the portrait of Corp. Jeremiah Saunders, Company K, 124U.S. Colored Infantry, and his wife Emily. His master died in Kentucky in February 1965, he was not free for the Emancipation Proclamation only liberated those in the seceded states. Nevertheless, Saunders left the tobacco fields and headed straight to Camp Nelson, a Union establishment. There he signed his enlistment papers with an “X” and joined the 124 U.S. Colored Infantry, a regiment composed of men between 3545, considered too old for active duty. And though he was not on the front lines, still he served. For this book proves that for all the darkness of humanity that does occur, the wheel of fortune will always turn. And though one might be born a slave, degraded in countless ways, there might just be another destiny that is meant to be. African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album serves us well to remind us of those who came before and honor them for these are the heroes we need today, the lives and lessons of humble greatness.

First published in Le Journal de la Photographie
21 November 2012

med_01-coddingtonafricanamer04newton_p16-3-jpg

Q.M. Sgt. Alexander Herritage Newton (left) and Q.M. Sgt. Daniel S. Lathrop, both Twenty-ninth Connecticut Infantry. Carte de visite by James Horace Wells (b. ca. 1828) & David C. Collins (b. ca. 1805) of New Haven, Connecticut, about 1865. © Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Seaman George William Commodore, U.S. Navy. Tintype by unidentified photographer, about 1865-1867. © Collection of National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

There Is One Mark You Cannot Beat

Posted on August 14, 2012

Photo: Volker Hinz, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Kansas, 1987

This is a story about the machine.

When you ain’t got nothinn, you got somethinn. You got you exactly as you are. You got love and fire, passion and desire, untainted, untouched, virgin, unspoiled by what comes after.

When you a virgin you got that. You got that thanng no one else has had. You got that thanng you can give once. And you know this. So it builds. It becomes everything. It becomes all you have in this world because you are all there is.

And you give it, you give it with everything you got because all you have is you, and your dreams. You got dreams, right. Dreams of what is and what could be, born of pure and innocent heart, of never knowing anything other than the depths of your soul plumbed for this moment riighh here. This moment to give, to share, to become, to be in this world, on this earth, in this life, this time around.

And you give it. You give it with everything you got. Cause you know, you know you got this, this is your shot. So you give it, and then you give it some more, and you keep on givinn until you can give no more.

Who is to say who gets lucky? Cause luck isn’t what happens, it is how you maintain.

But let’s just say you get IT. That dream you dreamed has finally come true. And it surprises you in that way you always knew you were somebody—you just didn’t know other people knew too. So you’re kinda humbled and shocked but also kinda happy and rocked cause you know You, you know what you put in to get to the here and now of it all.

Thas what no one knows, thas what no one could ever know. Not the blood tears and sweat, not the sleepless nights, fears and regrets. Not what it cost and what you lost and the sacrifices it took. Not the passion and the pride and the power manifest when you claim whas yours.

But.

Ahh. See now. It ain’t eva yours so long as there is anyone else involved. If you lucky, it will be ours, but it might become theirs sho nuff. Cause virgins are, well, naïve. There’s a lot of trust in your heart cause trust is believing other people feel the same.

But.

You don’t know. You have no idea. No one eva does. No one eva knows what kindsa people run the machine, why they run the machine rather than live out their dreams like you and me. You know no child has ever answered the question, What do you want to be when you grow up? with the words, I wanna be a cog.

But they do. Become cogs, jockeying for position while causing, well, clogs. Clogs, drains, alla that. The machine is a machine which means, it is gonna break. Break down, break you, break me, break apart, break your dreams, break your sweet succulent innocent heart. The smart ones are dancinn on the break, you know, them b-boys and b-girls with the headspins and backspins to keep themselves in check.

But maybe if you lucky, you will learn to maintain. You will learn it is a machine and you’ll look to preserve your (integrity) (sanity) (innocence) (name). Maybe you got that, maybe you are that one, the golden virgin with brains and restraint. Or maybe you like me, thinkinn, now you experienced. You somebody. You got that. What? What! WHUT!

It goes on like this. It goes on and on until you’ve had enough. But when does it get to be enough is enough? Do you gotta get on your Donna Summer and be reborn?

Sho nuff. Everyone got they thang. And it makes you wonder, yea, it makes me wonder. We know this is a machine. A machine designed to turn us into a dairy cow (heated vegan alert). Take us out of our natural rhythm, in a constant state of mass productivity, draining our life’s essence to make dollars for just who now?

But even if you get it. Even if you get tha cash. Is that what this is about. Is that why we are here. To be whored out.

I’m sayinn. What kinda writer hires a writer to write for them? Dig, we know Warhol wasn’t paintinn nothinn for most of his career, which is why no one ever calls him a, umm, painter. He was a conceptual artist. What he produced was ideas, not artifacts, though undoubtedly, he had that OCD need to hoard crap.

But most of us ain’t gonn reach the stage of conceptual artist, meaning we aren’t gonna be able to have other people produce our work for us. Or. Perhaps we are, we just won’t tell you. We’ll take the praise and the hate and run smoke and mirrors thinking we beat the machine because we lost our soul.

But wait. Wait! Can you beat the machine? To beat it, wouldn’t you have you blow it up. Why does that sentence set my heart aflame. Bougie fuckinn revolutionary, c’est moi.

Categories: Art, Photography, Poetry

Self-Preservation Society

Posted on July 28, 2012

Guy Bourdin

Commitment is a crazy thang,
take you by the hand and be like, “Step right this way.”
And you go, down the rabbit hole
but you know it’s not a hole, it’s just The Way.
Like a supernova thas gonna explode I guess,
time is here and now and also past and future
spiraling over again and again…
til
it gets to the point that there is no point
except
to know.
well,
good luck with that.

Yesterday I was up then right back down,
flat on my back, could not sleep;
it was gruesome in the strangest possible way.
It was like, drained, every last drop, and all that was left
was me swimming in thought.
Treading water,
to keep from sinking…
into what?

Go, where would I go? What’s left?
Nothing is my everything, yes ~

So this is me looking at the phone ringing,
smiling wanly like, No fuhhckinn way. I’m paper thin.
But I notice there’s also this feeling in my heart,
this low beat like,
Wow what would it feel like if I were alive?
And then I think this is one of two and
what’s up on the other side.

But I can’t feel anything,
I’m barely alive.

I miss the point.
This happens all the time.
I’m thinking one thing because I’m stuck in my mind.
And I’m thinking wait, what
and I actually ask.

And then I get it.
And then I Get IT.

And then everything shifts and I finally understand.
I mean, I have no idea what I understand.
This post isn’t meant to be read at all.

How do you hope to help your fellow writers—now or in the future?

I just want to read your words.

~Miss Rosen

Categories: Art, Brooklyn, Photography, Poetry

(It Chooses You)

Posted on July 19, 2012

Photographer unknown

April 4, 2010

Dear Sara:

I’m glad you took the time to sit down and analyze your situation. You have had a hectic ten years but at the same time you have had a wonderful experience and will profit from it. It’s time to make a career change and I for one would like to see you take on the role of author.

With your talents, the most lucrative, productive and satisfying career would be to write novels. Start with one where you have a lot of experience. “He is a young free-lance photographer, affiliated with Magnum. He has obtained an assignment from your firm to do a photo shoot of Afghanistan by following the path of the previous Russian involvement there and why they failed. He has just returned from there on September 10, 2001. He makes a date with you to give you a heads-up on some of the details and photos of the difficult terrain and hardships involved. You make a date to have lunch at Windows on the World at noon on Sept. 11, 2001.”

Take it from there and develop a traumatic, compelling love story of these two young people.

As for myself I’m still hanging in there. I’m satisfied with my sons’ achievements and with my grandchildren. Each is special to me in their own way. It’s been a productive life. I feel fulfilled and ready for the final journey. I’m at peace with my journey through life.

And I Love You

Grandpa

Categories: Art, Books, Photography

Rest in Peace Rodney King (1965–2012)

Posted on June 17, 2012

They got him in the end. It just took twenty-one years to die. And that might be worse. Last month, Rodney King gave an interview with The Guardian. In it he said, “It was like being raped, stripped of everything, being beaten near to death there on the concrete, on the asphalt. I just knew how it felt to be a slave. I felt like I was in another world.”

Does that ever go away? Is it possible to heal from the mark the devil left? I’m talking about the agony of the soul here. King told The Guardian when he heard Trayvon Martin scream, it was the scream he gave on March 3, 1991. “It is the scream of death.” But King didn’t die. He only came so damn close that when he assailants were freed of charges, this miscarriage of justice set off riots that took new lives in its carnage.

Rory Carroll wrote the story for The Guardian on May 1. It was timed with both the twentieth anniversary of the riots as well as the release of King’s memoirs, The Riot Within. And in the story Carroll observes what is more prescient than any of us would wish to understand, ”King himself remains a forlorn figure seemingly trapped by his past, his name and his addiction to alcohol, all, in his mind, inextricably bound.”

There is no way for us to feel his pain, except to feel our own. My heart breaks with feeling for the private hell he has endured for over two decades all because he was Black in America.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

Categories: Photography

Silence Moves Faster When It’s Going Backward

Posted on June 5, 2012

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods.
We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Poets don’t draw.
They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

The eyes of the dead are closed gently;
we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.

Photographs by Tomoaki Hata
Quotes by Jean Cocteau

Categories: Art, Japan, Photography, Poetry

Martha Cooper: Tattoo Tokyo 1970

Posted on May 18, 2012

In 1970, photographer Martha Cooper spotted a man in a crowd. On his back was a Japanese tattoo, figures drawn in the style of a woodblock print. Entranced by this vision, Cooper followed him until he disappeared, and soon thereafter began questioning her friends about the subject. It was a touchy topic—it had been outlawed in 1872 and legalized again in 1948 and as the decades intervened, tattoos became symbols of the yakuza, the gangsters and the underworld of Japan. This is because the images of tattoos were seen in films, and is all too common, what is constructed for entertainment is taken as truth.

Fortunately, Cooper delved deeper, and discovered an ancient art, the art of the ornamental flesh that has traditionally defined members of the working class. As Cooper explains, “Tattooing properly is a difficult skill and therefore to get tattooed has always been expensive. A bad tattoo artist could kill you by pricking your skin to deeply with poisonous inks. A laborer who as a full upper body tattoo has to earn a lot of money to pay for it. Thus the most beautiful and extensive tattoos are symbols of wealth and prestige.” And it was with this basis for understanding that Cooper visited tattoo master Horibun I in Tokyo and documented his world.

Tattoo Tokyo 1970 (Dokument Press) is a beautifully produced volume of this work. Tall, slim, and elegant, the book is as much an objet d’art as the work itself. This volume features two brief essays by Cooper describing her study, the writing as rare as the images themselves for Cooper usually allows her photographs to speak for her. Cooper’s essays add insight and context to the work, providing us with a stage and a setting for the scenes about to unfold.

As Cooper describes, “In the corner of the room say a young girl of about 18, who I assumed was Mr. Horibun’s daughter or assistant. She greeted me and we chatted, avoiding the subject of tattooing. Mrs. Horibun brought us tea and as we were sipping it, began making preparations. She moved aside the little table, rolled out a narrow mat and adjusted the overhead light. Mr. Horibun then walked into the room without ceremony and began to prepare the inks. To my surprise, I saw that the inks were nothing more than the usual ones used for calligraphy. As Mr. Horibun rubbed the ink stick in water on a stone, the young girl who had been sitting demurely beside me began to unbutton her blouse. I realized for the first time that she was the one to be tattooed but did my best to hide my amazement.”

And it is this young girl who receives a striking piece outlined upon her back, a girl kneeling while contemplating a branch in her hands. Cooper carefully documents the work of Horibun I, and we see how the master uses flesh as canvas for a drawing that has as many layers of work as it does symbolic importance. In Cooper’s photographs we also see the human as canvas themselves, and can consider the dialectic between ideas which are usually quite distinct. Through the process of creation artist and the artwork are forever fused with the owner themselves—for the act of wearing a tattoo is as much about adornment as it is about expressing the inner self.

This particular form of art is unlike any other, for it is permanent in the most temporal state, and just as the body does, it ages and changes over time. Tattoos last as long as life, and after this moment all that remains are the images themselves. The individually decorated body telling a story that is all their own, the style of design as distinctive as the face that wears it proudly. Cooper’s work for Tattoo Tokyo 1970 is a stunning document of a place and a time that brings together history and ritual, tradition and spectacle, expression and artifact in an eloquent volume.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Fashion, Japan, Photography

Eric Johnson: A Tribute to My Grandmother

Posted on April 16, 2012

Photograph by Eric Johnson

This is an American family. It is a story we do not hear. A story of five generations brought together in honor of the life of its matriarch. Idell Marshall, born on April 14, 1915, died on July 16, 2011. She was 96. For all intents and purposes, she died of old age. When she began to get weak, her daughters reached out to all members of the family and they came to her bedside to say goodbye. One of her grandsons is Eric Johnson, a photographer whose works are ingrained in popular consciousness. But in the presence of his family, he is just Eric, one of the 91 members of Mrs. Marshall’s family.

Johnson had been on a job in Miami when he received the call from his mother. And he began shooting as he came up on the train. He documented his journey as part of a larger story, the story of a family brought together by a woman whose success few can claim: 14 children (8 alive today), 28 grand children, 38 great grandchildren, 11 great-great grandchildren—a veritable clan is Mrs. Marshall’s legacy.

But this is not just the story of a family, it is the story of a place. Charlotte County, Virginia. The South. The American South. Charlotte County was formed in 1764, and was the second governing body in the 13 colonies to declare its independence from England. During the Civil War, a ragtag group of Confederate old men and young boys beat the odds and held off an assault by 5,000 Union cavalry soldiers on Stauton River Bridge, which was of strategic importance to General Robert E. Lee.

Today the population numbers over twelve thousand, with Caucasians accounting for 65% and African Americans accounting for 33%. And of that 33%, Mrs. Marshall and members of her extended have lived here their entire lives. Mrs. Marshall and her now-deceased husband had purchased a large tract of land in 1968 that now is home to five families of the clan. And in keeping the family closely connected, Mrs. Marshall and her descendants have accomplished something very rare.

Our idea of family has become plastic. Time begets progress and progress begets change, and where families were traditionally tied to each other and the land for countless generations, it is now common for families to be in so many ways estranged, most notably from each other, but also far from the town that was once known as home. And it appears to be normal, if not acceptable and encouraged, if we are out of regular contact with the world in which we are from.

But with the ownership of land comes the opportunity for a greater investment, not just in the self but in the long-term viability of the family. And so it is that when Mrs. Marshall passed, her family of 91 was easily united, and so it came to pass that the funeral was to be held three days later, bringing together not just her descendants but all the people whose life she had touched.

Johnson’s pictures tell the story of a family, of a people united by blood and shared experience. It is a story of stories within stories, so many layers that in each of these photographs there are histories untold. We see individuals, people whose lives are interrelated in ways that we may never know. But with each frame Johnson gives us access into the heart of a family united around the woman who made it so.

One of the most striking images is Mrs. Marshall before her death, gripping Johnson’s hand. The image is evocative in revealing the strength that life holds, even as it is slipping away. In complement is the photograph of Mrs. Marshall lying peacefully in her coffin in perfect repose. In looking at her face we feel assured that one can pass peacefully into the next world. We can look at Mrs. Marshall as a woman who not only lived a life like no other but we can aspire to have the peace in her heart, the faith that has guided her through life and made her death an expression of grace and dignity.

What is also striking is a small backstory to this image. Growing up Johnson recalls seeing photographs of deceased family members in the photo album, and being uncomfortable in the presence of these images. He remembers turning the pages quickly past these pctures, as a way to avoid the feelings they raised. It is then that this story is all the more fitting, that he should take this photograph of his grandmother and be able to observe death, both in person and through his lens, as something that is serene and natural.

But this is not a story about death; it is a story about the eternal continuum. For the circle has no beginning and no end, and so in these images we return time and again to the lives of all Mrs. Marshall has left on earth. And each of these lives tells a story, and each of these photographs offers a glimpse. And the greater story has yet to be told because this is just the beginning, my friend.

Originally Published April 16, 2012
La Lettre de la Photographie

Categories: Art, Photography

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