blog.thoughtwax.com

Some photos on Flickr. Also, bonus sets of pilgrimages to Industrial Light & Magic and the Long Now Foundation.

I kept the last few posts from documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’ New York Times blog starred but unread in Google Reader for a couple of weeks. The summaries sounded intriguing, but I was busy finishing up Masters stuff, and each post is a couple of thousand words long. Tonight I finally got around to reading them, and, of course, here I am to rave about how fantastic they are.

I’m a fan of his films already (I wrote about a scene from Gates of Heaven last year) and am looking forward to his forthcoming one about the photographs of prisoner abuse that came out of Abu Ghraib prison, Standard Operating Procedure. In the run up to that, he has been writing on his blog about the nature of photography and the truths that we expect photos to represent, particularly in relation to war photography.

According to these notes (and the excellent accompanying doodle) from a talk that Morris gave last year, the project came from his fascination with an 1855 photograph by Roger Fenton that was mentioned in passing in Susan Sontag’s book Regarding the Pain of Others. Here’s what Sontag, herself no slouch when it comes to photography criticism, had to say about Fenton’s famous image:

Not surprisingly many of the canonical images of early war photography turn out to have been staged, or to have had their subjects tampered with. After reaching the much shelled valley approaching Sebastopol in his horse-drawn darkroom, Fenton made two exposures from the same tripod position: in the first version of the celebrated photo he was to call “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (despite the title, it was not across this landscape, that the Light Brigade made its doomed charge), the cannonballs are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before taking the second picture – the one that is always reproduced – he oversaw the scattering of the cannonballs on the road itself.

Here are the two photos, with the cannonballs off the road and on the road (the second is the famous one):

The question is, why the disparity between the two photos? Mustn’t Fenton have planted the cannonballs on the road before the second shot to make the photo more dramatic?

I’m at risk of simply paraphrasing Morris’ entire entry here, so I’ll stop now. Suffice to say that he’s not happy to just accept the conventional wisdom that Fenton planted the cannonballs for dramatic effect, and sets about doing some detective work. What follows is a modest but absolutely compelling investigation. Seriously, go read it.

What I really love about this is that he has taken what might be a mildly interesting topic — I wonder if this photo was staged or not? — and delved so deeply into it that it becomes infectiously fascinating. After reading the first entry I spent half an hour following up some of the various ideas that had occurred to me while reading the post that I thought could crack the case (for the record, I’m an anti-staged guy; check out this comparison of the high-resolution images that I did to see why). After a little over three weeks, the first entry alone is pushing nine hundred comments, so it looks like I wasn’t alone.

To finish, some video links: A Brief History of Errol Morris, a documentary about the filmmaker himself; Morris and Robert McNamara on the Charlie Rose show, most notable for how strongly Morris disagrees with McNamara, something that didn’t come across in The Fog of War. The Florence Rasmussen bit from Gates of Heaven used to be on YouTube, but it appears to be gone again. I’m kind of glad; some things just need to be seen in their original context.

Last year I tried writing about that intangible sense of warm satisfaction that comes from using a mechanical camera. I didn’t think I was too successful in expressing myself even at the time, but I figured that was mainly because those types of sensual experiences are very much a visceral thing, and can’t be adequately expressed through writing.

How wrong was I? Dig this:

The Leica is lumpless, with a flat top built from a single piece of brass. It has no prism, because it focusses with a range finder—situated above the lens. And it has no mirror inside, and therefore no clunk as the mirror swings. When you take a picture with an S.L.R., there is a distinctive sound, somewhere between a clatter and a thump; I worship my beat-up Nikon FE, but there is no denying that every snap reminds me of a cow kicking over a milk pail. With a Leica, all you hear is the shutter, which is the quietest on the market. The result—and this may be the most seductive reason for the Leica cult—is that a photograph sounds like a kiss.

Candid Camera: The cult of Leica, by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker).

I created a new Flickr group called Guess Where Dublin.

The idea is totally ripped off from many other similar groups, but I think it’s a great concept. Members are encouraged to post a photo taken somewhere in Dublin and everyone else has to guess exactly where it was taken. What could be more fun?

Not entirely unrelated, I just read a beautiful little book that interested types might enjoy: Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places by John R. Stilgoe. It’s a “guidebook to exploring” everyday places by walking or cycling, and it really is accessible and enjoyable. From the intro:

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted — all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in.

Join the group and start exploring.

Paula and I arrived back yesterday afternoon from our week in Morocco. It was my first time visiting a non-Western country. Get ready for some superlatives.

We rented a car and drove north from Agadir airport to the small hippie/surfer village of Taghazout, then to the walled city of Essaouira, east to Marrakesh, and back to Agadir through the Atlas Mountains.

Life moves slow in Taghazout. Most of the fishermen come ashore after a couple of hours in the morning, by which time the day has eased into its usual mix of visiting surfers and local loiterers. Beach soccer is pretty popular.

The roads in Morocco are just as interesting as the cities they lead to. The coastal views are spectacular. Indigenous Berber people line the roads, walking, standing or just squatting, watching the traffic go by. Some work in rocky fields or guide donkeys along the roadside, but mostly they sit in the shade alone, apparently for lack of anything else to do. Some wave frantically at the passing cars, smiling and holding up bottles of olive oil for sale.

Closer to the city we passed road painters and small crowds of men putting up giant red national flags, and things generally got busier. It was obvious that there was a frantic cleanup job going on, and when we got into the city we heard that the King of Morocco was arriving the following day. The whole town was buzzing in anticipation, and getting their streets and shop fronts ready.

Inside the walls of Essaouira is a maze of twisty passages (all alike), lined with markets, tea houses, workshops and restaurants, and opening out into squares and ports.

The city is soaked in bright blue.

Each night we stood on the roof terrace of our riad and listened to the final call to prayer of the day echoing out across the city from the mosques as the sun set, and each morning we looked down into the tightly packed living areas.

On to Marrakesh.

Coming from Essaouira, Marrakesh is a hard place to arrive into. After being flagged down by an aggressive motorcycle guide while entering the city and falling for the oldest trick in the Moroccan book (allowing him to guide us through insanely busy streets to his friends guardian de voiture parking area and haggling over price), we found our way to our riad.

Outside of the main tourist areas of Marrakesh you see very few Westerners, the poverty is conspicuous, and the density is overwhelming. The streets are a ballet of people on foot, bicycle and moped avoiding and interacting with each other. The culture of repair and reuse is everywhere. Any of the guys in the food markets and craft souks could teach you a hard lesson in business. It’s a real city, warts and all.

Final leg of the journey. We too took the scenic route back, up and over the snow-capped Atlas Mountains (2100m) and down the small winding road into the desert on the other side. Children on their way home from school thronged around our car if we stopped nearby and wrangled whatever sweets we had out of us, then chased us down the road. Some held up paper signs with “STOP” scrawled on them and shouted “bonjour!” as we passed.

This is a rough edit of the five hundred or so shots we took during the week, far more than I’ve ever taken before, and that was without even trying. We couldn’t help ourselves, it’s certainly the most photogenic place I have ever been to, and the visual offering is only a part of the story. Again more than any place I’ve been to, Morocco is a full sensory experience, and the sounds and smells really are something else. For every photo I took, I wished that I had a microphone with me to record the sounds.

What have I not mentioned? The incredible hospitality and openness of the people there, the amazing food, the beautiful weather… I warned you about the superlatives. The running joke of the week was a gameshow-style ding that would sound every time Paula said “so gorgeous” or I said “amazing”. Ding!

If you can take any more, there are still more photos on my Flickr and on Paula’s.