Some Thoughts on the Role of Photography in the Anthropocene

"What does it mean to be a photographer today and is it still relevant to make a picture when an infinite number already exist?"
-- Ignacio Guevara

I would say that we live in unprecedented times – with the biology of the planet, including humans, under existential threat. The old stories we have told ourselves, based on the myths of eternal "progress" and the idea that humans are somehow "separate" from the planet on which they exist, have proven to be destructive fictions. Accordingly, photography that seeks to tell new (or old and resurrected) founding cultural stories is photography that is highly relevant, crucial, essential.

My other thought is that -- whether or not we realize it, -- we exist in a battlefield of images warring for influence upon our consciousness. On one side, there are the ubiquitous images generated by the corporate advertising machine. These images seek to transform humans into consumers with empty materialist values and yearnings that can only be satiated – temporarily and incompletely – through the purchase of products. On the other side, there are people creating images and capturing images which seek to challenge and deepen human consciousness. These are images which seek to draw the human moth away from the flame of empty consumption. And so, again, photography is deeply relevant today.

The Shell Ring of Hilton Head Island and the Destiny of Humans

I had Derek Jensen’s 2011 book Dreams -- a work which explores the relationship between human consciousness and our treatment of the planet -- with me on a trip to an island off of South Carolina last summer. My partner had a work conference on Hilton Head, and so I did a little background reading on the history of the region and learned that the island has been inhabited by humans for approximately 12,000 years. I read of a “shell ring” at least 10,500 years old created by the island’s original human inhabitants (of whom little is known presently) and that remains in a nature preserve on the island.

The beach in front of the hotel where Christine’s work put us up was beautiful, but in a wide and empty and somehow eerie way. The landscapes internal, external and eternal that Jensen explores in Dreams were very much part of my experience of it and of the whole island. I saw the several million-year-old design traces in the saxophone-shaped bills of the large seabirds gliding the air currents outside our third-floor window and over the beach. I felt the warm water tides arriving and receding as part of something deep in me – but a me is older than anything of which I had previously conceived -- and as part of a self that is not only me, but exists in relationship with all of creation.

Becoming evermore aware of the heightening Earth crisis in which we find ourselves, one question pounded incessantly through my head during the trip: How did the original people of the island live for 12,000 years here without fucking it up? Practicing a version of the sacred insight Jensen writes about frequently – learn to see the world as subjects to be listened to and not objects to be exploited - I asked the flora and fauna and waves and sands and rocks of the island this question. But I also asked the question to the spirits of the original humans of the island. And I knew I must pose this question at the site of the accumulated pieces of shell and pottery placed in a ring on the island over the centuries for reasons we no longer know, but for reasons that were vitally important to the people and suggest a gesture of the sacred.

The day we went to the nature preserve, a tropical storm was predicted. It never arrived, but there were dark clouds rolling above, mixed in with the sunshine. We made it to a large, open pond where two seabirds - one long-legged and one round and plump – stood motionless in the soft rain that had begun to fall. From the little gazebo where we sought shelter to the shell ring was not far. Walking to it, the forest surrounded me with a presence that felt at once unsettling and old/known/familial.

Being a sound-oriented person, I experienced our approach to the sacred site as a rising dull tone in my body. And all the while, the question surged within me: How did you live here so long without destroying this place? I saw the ring out of the corner of my right eye and at this moment I heard a loud clattering. I looked up to see an enormous branch falling down directly toward Christine. I yelled for her to move and physically jerked her back to avoid the branch that really could have hurt her, falling from such a height. My question had been answered.

The answer was clearer and resonated on levels that a message formed in words cannot: You must stop this terrible destruction or so much more will be lost. This, the violent gesture of the forest and of the spirits of the original inhabitants told me. I experienced the message in the very ancient part of my brain that goes back to the dawn of the evolution of creatures – in the “fight or flight” spot of the brain. I will be living the consequences of that message for the rest of my life.

Tucker F. Katonah! circa 1990

I was speaking to Dino Andersen - whom I used to see on Sundays at the café on Prospect Avenue where he would drink endless cups of coffee until a white sheen gathered around the corners of his mouth - of the Milwaukee poet John Koethe. I had recently read that with his lucrative position as a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Koethe would occasionally take a flight to Paris just to have dinner and then return home. I told Dino, who had been writing art limericks for many years and had amassed several thousand of them, that it seemed as if John Koethe had realized his dreams and that it was for this reason that his poetry was ethereal, a trail of words that led far into realms of consciousness that felt like visions of mist. Dano responded that he did not believe that Koethe had realized his dreams, but that he rather had “solved” them. Koethe had solved his dreams.

Koethe wrote:

“There seems to be, about certain lives,

A vague, violent frame, an imperceptible

Halo of uncertainty, diffidence and taste

Worn like a private name that only God knows,

Echoing what it hides, that floats above a bottomless

Anxiety that underlies their aura of remote calm.”

---

I observed Tucker Katonah! for some time before I decided to introduce myself and talk to him. He cut a strange figure: knickers, a burgundy knit cap encircled with flowers, a teal cardigan sweater and toting a carpet bag suitcase, also teal with an old-fashioned floral design. He would show up at the Moulton Union, though he was not a student, ensconce himself at a table and write. He would later pen the phrase, “He died writing.”

I came upon him writing his thoughts into a Star Wars-themed notebook and told him my name, shaking his hand. He acted as if he knew that we knew we would eventually meet, that there was some wavering beam of light emanating from each of us which sought the other. This I felt, also.

The writing he did was his distillation of the reading he had done for years, including time “starving in the mountains in Colorado,” with his girlfriend Wendy. He no longer read and told me he was “digesting” all of those books: James Joyce and Richard Ellman’s biography of him, Kerouac, though he declared resolutely to Bill the bass player that he had tried and failed to read The Subterraneans multiple times, as Bill asserted the book’s wonders. Tucker’s distillations took the form of crystalline aphorisms which formed the basis for his songs and also his poetry hand stamps with which we peppered Portland, Maine.

"Living in these hard times

Learning to play the guitar

Living in these hard times

Wanna be a wannabe

Living in these hard times"

…

Liking the same woman was inevitable. This happens regularly among close friends: we like the same music, the same poems, the same women. Calendar Finch worked the breakfast shift at the downtown Portland Holiday Inn. Tucker chose to like her from a distance. I went to her breakfast shift where the playful waiter named Elvis tried unsuccessfully to hit on her. She was happy to see me at my table. We went to her house later and kissed listening to the Ciccone Youth album by Sonic Youth.

Tucker showed a vague jealousy – it wasn’t expressed directly to me, but was rather communicated via silences and wry comments: How was it over at Calendar’s last night? It was a woman that brought Tucker from New York City to Brunswick, Maine (population 45,000).  Four years after high school graduation, at age 22, the memory of Pamela Perry’s dark hair, Mediterranean features, and cool playful bearing surged into his mind, compelling him to purchase the Greyhound bus ticket. He appeared at the door of her room in the Grateful Dead co-ed frat house and announced himself and his intentions. Pamela said, I’m sorry, Tucker, I don’t feel that way about you.  And Tucker, O.K. and he decided, I may as well stay on this town: a college, pretty women, 19^th century buildings with New England gothic spires and a fine bookstore...

The Way Forward in a Poem by Muhammed Ali

An earlier version of this essay appeared at pilsenportal.com.

As we conclude the first month of 2014 and we contemplate the myriad issues that weigh and pressure upon us as a nation, I recall a comment made by George Plimpton. When asked to reflect upon the character and genius of Muhammad Ali, the legendary writer and editor of The Paris Review recalled a two-word poem by heavyweight champion and improvisatory poet from Louisville, Kentucky. Plimpton heard the champ recite the poem to a large crowd sometime in the 1970’s. Ali proclaimed simply: “Me: We.” Plimpton and those in attendance were moved; Plimpton never forgot the distillation of wisdom.

Me: We. It is that movement in thought and action that can act upon and transform every issue confronting our country and our world. Carbon emissions causing an increase in global temperature?Me: We. Brutalizing inequality between the rich and the poor? Me: We. Tensions rising over questions of immigration? Me: We. Ethnic and religious tensions rising and manifesting in acts within society? Me: We.
We is not a radical concept to Homo sapiens:  95% of human history was spent in hunter-gatherer groups of 75 to 150 people who, in order to survive and flourish across those many millennia, had to have an attitude of sharing. Those tribe members who attempted to hoard resources individually could be exiled from the tribe, a state which would likely lead to their death. In reality, a Herculean effort has been required to convince humans to act against their deepest nature and to seek fulfillment in a purely individualistic way -- most often through the amassing of consumer goods and in the quest for the social status that wealth accumulation affords.

As is detailed brilliantly, humorously, and at times terrifyingly in BBC documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’ work, The Century of the Self, Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays - known as the creator of modern marketing - used the manipulation of the deepest irrational impulses of the human psyche to create desires where once there were none. As Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930’s declared, "We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. ... Man's desires must overshadow his needs."

Our true needs are met through the leap in consciousness suggested by the poem, Me: We. As for our desires, let us indulge them and celebrate them when they do not deprive others of their needs and when we are sure they are, in fact, our desires. Our true desires are realized through human connection, connection to nature, and a connection to something greater than us. Me: We. If, upon our deathbed, we recall a diamond broach, it will be because the broach arrived to us from our mother or grandmother or acquired meaning through our sharing it with a sister who longed to wear it one moonlit night in April. Me: We.

The Spanish Teacher and the Radical, 2013

This essay originally appeared on counterpunch.org

The bracing moment when you realize the university where you work is the training ground for Empire. Students write of their goals of working for Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman – the goliath defense contractors who are bankrupting the nation and manufacturing technologies of terror – and the NSA – the Ever-expanding Eye on the global 99%. These entities send reps to the campus to vet (interview) students.

If you are the instructor, earning a non-living wage, what does that make you? Are you a patsy? The butt of a joke?

You try to escape the tentacles of the corporate state and find its grip virtually omnipresent. The trail of slime emitting from its suction cups reeks in remote and unsuspected corners of existence: grocery store food, the asphalt streets you bike upon, the fetid river struggling to flow beneath the turnpike, the classroom where you engage students in simple Spanish exchanges (Dónde está el perro?/ Where is the dog? A qué horas es la reunión?/What time is the meeting?). These diverse realms, all forged by the influential glances and handshakes exchanged between the state and the obsequious & cloying corporate lobbyists- more often than not with the actors playing roles on both sides, at different times. (In 1999, Mr. Smith works for the SEC. In 2001, Mr. Smith works for Goldman Sachs. Or vice-versa).

Rather than making me into the patsy (stammering goggle-eyed at the unknowable machinations) or the fool (red-faced with a bowl of noodles plopped onto his his head), this knowledge is making me into a Radical, in the true, original sense of the word. Radical: “… relating to, or proceeding from a root: as a (1) :  of or growing from the root of a plant…”  Radical: from the root. The Radical of 2013 therefore values above all the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. She values the perfection of the relationships of interdependence that she observes in the biosphere: Tree needs soil needs worm needs water needs sun needs bacteria needs fallen leaves need fruit needs seed needs bird needs twigs needs wind and on into the infinite it goes.

It is to this understanding of existence, of the human, of life that the bracing moment ultimately leads. And it is to a wolf-fierce dedication to right the unbalance and vanquish the nightmare toxic beast seeking to destroy all that the bracing moment ultimately leads.

Rumsfeld Refracted through Milton, Melville and Eliot

Of whom Melville might say, “… he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.”

Or, “… he… lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs.”

Of whom Milton might say, “The seat of desolation, voyd of light.”

The blood mercenary of the oak table and the flat, dead nickel eyes.

Of whom Eliot might say, 
“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.”

The figure who approaches on the backcountry road at the wrong time of night who tells you,

“And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

He is the half-man who says that there are unknown knowns. The thought bursts into a thousand fine particles of light - this he can pursue, as Ahab would, across “wild and distant seas … through the undeliverable nameless perils.”