Invisible Photographers

Over break, some people pointed me towards some interesting photography online. First, some images rescued from the past:




These were taken by Vivian Maier -- who, as far as anyone can tell, kept them to herself. She died in 2009, leaving behind hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film; her work has been brought to light by John Maloof, an "eBay entrepreneur and real estate agent," who bought a box of negatives being auctioned off from a storage-locker whose owner had stopped payment. There's more on the story here:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photography-60-years-old/?hp

And Maloof's blog, featuring more examples of Maier's work, is here:

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

Her talent is clear; and of course you begin to wonder why, after recording these moments -- many of them intimate, many with a sort of an aura of corner-of-the-eye privacy -- she chose to keep them private. Recorded but private. She must have been a quite circumspect voyeur. Towards the end of her life, what did she remember of her captured moments -- and did she suspect that some day, they would belong improbably to the world?

Photography had always had a stain (or an electric charge) of voyeurism. John Rafman's collection of photos from Google street view embrace voyeurism with the icy rapture of a predator drone lens. Some of the pictures arrest you with the helpless enthrallment of disaster just passed, or disaster immanent (and yet also passed, just passed invisibly). You'll have to click on the second one here to get a better view of it, to see why it's so terrible:




Although I shouldn't oversell the more dramatic images -- they amount to only a portion of the total work. Some of the views are simply beautifully (if accidentally) composed. And of course the accidental nature of their composition is part of their allure. I'm particularly drawn to the images of animals that show up. The animal is incapable of realizing its image is being recorded, and that image is being shot by a camera that is taking a picture outside of any pictorial intentionality (the picture is being taken to record a space on a map, not to really frame and take a "picture"). There's a mutual blankness of subject and perpetrator that amounts to a an almost perfect clarity -- something so clear it seems to dispense with the neccessity of a human eye to see it.

(The effect also has something to do with Victoria's post below, with the animals in the hotel rooms)





This work is quintessential postmodernism -- creating art by curating other peoples' images. Except in this case the images weren't really taken by another person -- they were taken by a machine, an automated camera attached to the top of a car. Postmodernism is partly a reaction to the endless proliferation of images in current culture; that profusion has long ago reached a point of metastasis. No one has to take the images, the images take themselves. This collection of Google street views holds forth the ideal of a disembodied photographer -- one who is everywhere and nowhere. A photographer whose physical safety is never at risk -- but whose punishment is that he's never there to see the outcome of any of his collected moments.

The idea of an artist's artist is familiar; Rafman is perhaps the voyeur's voyeur. And maybe he's simply a conduit for the camera's camera.

An interesting essay by Rafman on his work can be found here:
http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/

Tamarin Monkeys chillin out to Metallica

A recurring point of interest, in the scattershot reading I've been doing on animal consciousness, is the area of non-human animal aesthetics. Humans are notoriously jealous of their capacities, but the more animal researchers dig into those categories which are supposedly "uniquely human" -- the use of tools, the capacity for language, and now perhaps what could be called the possession of an "aesthetic sense" -- the less "uniquely human" those categories appear to be. Temple Grandin, in her book Animals in Translation, even suggests a religious sense, or a sense of "God," may be innate in some non-human animals. She hasn't done any studies on this -- she uses a combination of intuition and analogy to get there -- but I find the notion as suggestive as the description I came upon, in the book When Elephants Weep, of bears climbing out onto hillsides at the end of the day to sit down and watch the sunset.

For me, that image of sunset-admiring bears is at once surprising and consoling. There would be something horrible about a vast and verdant world, a world that humans find self-evidently beautiful in both its enormous vistas and its detailed filigrees, populated with an army of creatures completely insensible to that beauty. If beauty is just a freak of the human mind, it amounts to little more than a pretty mirage laid over the landscape.


I caught an interesting interview on Talk of the Nation today, dealing with monkeys and music. Ira Flatow interviewed both biomusic researcher Patricia Gray, who jams with Bonobo apes on synthesizer, and David Teie, a cellist who has composed music for tamarin monkeys. Both interviewees end up relating music more to behaviors and emotions than to aesthetics (you'd probably get closer to musical animal aesthetics with songbirds or whales), but there are a lot of fascinating details that shake out. The second-funniest bit is when Flatow asks Gray: "Does it matter when you play with them that they hit the right notes?" I'd really like to know what he thinks the "right note" would be for a monkey.

The funniest bit is when Teie reveals that, of the human music played to tamarins, Metallica and Tool made the most impact -- and the impact it had was that it calmed the monkeys down.

And then there was this bit:

Mr. TEIE: According to my hypothesis, the reason we have rhythm and the sense of - and the foundations of all music are of the womb sounds that we have heard, that the fetus can hear for five months and the sounds of the heartbeat, the female voice of the - the voice of the mother and the respiration, they account for all of the universal traits music found in all cultures.

That's an evocative notion: that music has as much to do with the womb as it does the brain. The capacity for musicality, for musical art, is impressed upon us in the dark, before we're even born. And in this case "us" is a noun that encompasses more than humankind.


And with that, I'll leave you with a video of a Walrus playing a Swiss horn: