"civilized" ku # 170 ~ the best B-47 in the world

Pride of the Adirondacks • click to embiggenJust outside of the NE corner of the Adirondack Park on the shore of Lake Champlain (20 miles south of the Canadian border) is the city of Plattsburgh. This small rather unassuming city was, until its closing in 1995, the home of Plattsburgh Air Force Base - the oldest military base in the US and one of its most deadliest in terms of destructive power.

During its last 40 years, Plattsburgh AFB was a major Strategic Air Command base - which meant that it was bristling with nukes all of kinds which were "aimed" in one form or another at the old USSR. The first atomic "aiming device" employed by the USAF/SAC at PAFB was the B-47 long-range bomber - made long-range capable only with the advent of air-to-air refueling. It's also worth noting the B-47 shared its aiming duties along with a number of Atlas ICBM missile silos - the only ICBMs ever deployed East of the Mississippi River - that were placed within a 50 radius of the base - one of which was in my little Adirondack village of Au Sable Forks.

The size of the installation at the base is evidenced by the still existing and in-use runway - it is literally so large that it disappears over the horizon and is one of only 3 runways on the planet that is rated for space shuttle landings.

In any event, the B-47 pictured here, The Pride of the Adirondacks, was named The World's Best B-47 in 1965 as a result of its performance at SAC's 14th Bombing and Navigation competition. The crew of the plane won top honors as Best B-47 Crew, Bombing and Best B-47 Crew, Combined and Best B-47 Unit. Shortly thereafter - 3 weeks - the PAFB B-47s began their final flights into mothball status. The B-47s were being replaced by B-52s.

The B-52, of course, had a starring role in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - an absolute must-see film.

Update on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 11:11AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: bulldog wrote: "It sure would be nice if the USA could figure out a way to spend money to stimulate the economy without investing in ways to destroy 2/3 of mankind. I think the Europeans have it down. Maybe we could send some spies over there to Europe-land and steal the secret formula that enables them to provide healthcare; public transportation; better, affordable elementary, secondary and higher education; lower murder rates; lower poverty rates; longer life-spans, better quality of life in general .... The hell with it. Really, they are sooooo smug in their enjoyment of all those things……let’s just nuke’em.

my response: Good idea - that way we can stimulate our economy (not that of those smug SOBs) just like we did post-WWII after we bombed/reduced a big chunk of Europe into a big pile of rumble. Yeh, that's the ticket.

red pepper # 1

Red Pepper # 1 • click to embiggen

by the light of the moon

Barbeque and moon shadow • click to embiggenJeff Wall has opined that there are 2 prominent myths about photography: the myth that it tells the truth and the myth that it doesn't. Another photographer, Allan Sekula, has taken that idea a step further and stated that, in our present ideological climate, these myths do not hold the same weight for intellectuals and media professionals: "... the old myth that photographs tell the truth has succumbed to the new myth that they don't."

Me? I like it both ways and have no trouble whatsoever embracing and seeing both "myths" evidenced in a single picture.

decay # 31 ~ wherein I double down, po-mo wise

An imaginary/imagining/imaging porthole • click to embiggenAs we all know the web can be a domain of anonymity. Anyone can write anything and do so anonymously. For all any of you know, there is no actual Mark Hobson - at least not as perceived and presented here on The Landscapist. You have only my word(s) for it.

I mention this because of 2 recently posted comments - one from Vinegar Tom (the name of a feminist play), the other from (reputedly) none other than Terry Eagleton. Eagleton, you may recall, was snagged off by me in a recent entry.

Now the only thing I can say for certain about the 2 entries is that they both originate from the same place - the University of Southhampton in England. Other than that, I really can't say if Terry Eagleton actually left this comment attributed to him:

Oh, come on. Don't be such bullies, you people. Anyone who can write "photography that pricks the unthought known" in their banner heading clearly has language issues. Give him a break.

The pictures are nice, aren't they? Although perhaps faking the Holga corners is a little too knowing, dare I say even a touch too po-mo, for some tastes. Perhaps Mark is saying "Look, I know and you know the frame is a convention, and to emphasize this I'm going to pretend, in a purely rhetorical trope, that these pictures were made with a completely different sort of camera, something which both you and I know not to be true, yet at the same time can accept as an aesthetic foregrounding device, if you will. The images are seen as if through an imaginary/imagining/imaging porthole, allowing the play of differance in the arbitrarily placed frame." Or maybe not.

Maybe. Maybe not. But, in any event, it's a bit flattering to think that my nice pictures may have been given a look and a mini review by someone who is regarded by some as Britain's most influential living literary critic. Not an Art Critic (Photography Division) perhaps but, nevertheless, whoever he/she is, he/she is on to my artful stratagem / artifice, re: my aesthetic foregrounding device, aka - my emphasis on the convention of the frame.

That said, because Terry - that's Terry with a "y", not an "i" (as I misspelled it, although the comment was attributed to Terri Eagleton [why do I feel like I'm going down the rabbit hole?]) - asked that I be granted a break, I'll extend one to him/her - their is no reason to assume that a literary / cultural theorist might be acquainted in any great detail with the history of the medium of photography. He/she may be more familiar with it than most (and I suspect he/she is) but it is certainly not the object of his/her life's work.

That may explain why he/she referenced my "Holga corners", rather than my black filmic border, as my "aesthetic foregrounding device". Although, that said, the vignetted corners are intended as a somewhat rhetorical trope to create the feeling of "an imaginary/imagining/imaging porthole". But, that trope derives from my intention to mimic the manner in which the human eye sees - sharp at the center of the field of vision, less so at the periphery. BTW, you can imagine my surprise when, investigating the history of the medium, I discovered that I had re-invented P. H. Emerson's idea of Naturalistic Photography.

That said, I realize that the comment attributed to Eagleton may have been nothing more than a thinly-veiled ruse (maybe, maybe not) to get me to explain my meaning as opposed to the meaning derived by him/her/whomever thereby illustrating and illuminating the concept that "nothing is ever fully present" in my pictures. That any meaning therein is "always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one" with themselves. That my pictures exhibit, in fact, all pictures intrinsically must bow to différance - they can never fully summon forth what they mean, but can only be defined through appeal to additional pictures (or words), from which they differ and therefore, meaning is forever deferred or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers.

OK, fine. Point taken. But, not conceded if for no other reason than the real Eagleton has issued an "indictment" centered on relativism - theorist's and postmodernity's rejection of absolutes. When referencing cultural theory, he opines that it -

....fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on.

IMO, that's one statement that I do not find to be dispersed, divided or not at one with itself. It's a statement about which I can say, "What he said!" as opposed to, "Say what?"

man & nature # 135 ~ the daily show

A sign of things to come • Red True Temper wheelbarrowStruan Gray wrote:

I like your blog, and your photos, and - I think - you.

But your writing about the academic lunatic fringe is just so much willy waving at strawmen. You are using exactly the tactics you say you despise in them: name calling, empty rhetoric, and a firmly closed mind. It's Limbaugh lite, and it leaves a nasty taste.

Eagleton isn't the lunatic fringe by a long chalk. Even the bleeding chunk you've posted here makes sense. You don't have to buy into the whole post-modernist programme to see the utility of thinking about how your available tools and habitual mental habits might limit your ability to be creative.

Struan - I'm just having a spot of fun at the expense of the academic lunatic fringe but, that said, I don't think that that fringe is merely a harmless and/or irrelevant phenomenon.

Case in point, Milton Friedman and his gang of free-market zealots - it was Friedman and his gang that advanced and propagated the ruinous concept that laissez-faire government policy is more desirable than government intervention in the economy. It was academic economic theories from the U of C gang - markets always work and that only markets work / markets can't go wrong and government intervention can't serve a useful purpose - that were adopted by the free-market zealots / absolutists. The entire world is now living in a reality that has flowed from that academic genius.

But, this a photo blog, so I write about the academic lunatic fringe and what I see as its effects upon the photo world and the Art world, Photography Division, in particular. I don't like what I see - the fetish of concept over what is actually pictured. So (admittedly) I engage in a bit of verbal theatrics to make my point although ....

I prefer to think of my verbal theatrics as being more from the Jon Stewart/Daily Show School of Social Criticism as opposed the Limbaugh School. That is why I post under the nom de blog of gravitas et nugalis, aka - seriousness and lack of appropriate seriousness. Get it? You know, the ying-yang thing. A bit of self-deprecation, if you will.

That said, I'm thinking of changing that to gravitas et levitas in order to make the distinction a bit more clear. On the other hand, either way I do it, my nom de blog may be a bit too subtle for the room.

man & nature # 134 ~ rickety & ramshackle

Rickety ramshackle • click to embiggenSeinberg (about or relating to Seinfeld and Spielberg, that is, Sein[feld][Spiel]berg .... the name spawned whilst day-dreaming in an undergraduate Philosophy class entitled Thanatopsis: Death and Dying) wrote: Your photography is great, but your repetitive sarcastic and biting remarks about academia are very revealing personally. What is all that anger really about -- surely academia isn't all that bad.

In fact, in general I am not angry with academia at all - as I always state it is the academic lunatic fringe that most often gets me a bit cranked. Not actually angry, but rather a bit annoyed. The ones that spin a zillion words that produce nothing of value. And even then it is the humanities and social sciences departments that are the primary instigators of that agita. The "sciences" that produce lunacy like:

Nothing is ever fully present in signs: it is an illusion for me to believe that I can ever be fully present to you in what I say or write, because to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself. Not only my meaning, indeed, but me: since language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable unified entity must also be a fiction ... It is not that I can have a pure , unblemished meaning, intention or experience which then gets distorted and refracted by the flawed medium of language: because language is the very air I breathe. I can never have a pure, unblemished meaning or experience at all. ~ Terry Eagleton summarizing Jacques Derrida

Say what? (# 3) What the hell does that mean? Is this guy for real is he just a theoretical fiction?

And, a word of warning to Eagleton's significant other, if he has one, re: wedding vows - remember that he was never fully present to you in what he said because his meaning is always somehow dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself. Although, what could one expect from someone who, after all, is not a stable unified entity.

In a recent NY Times Op-Ed, End the University as We Know It, author Mark C. Taylor wrote:

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues) .... [U]nfortunately this ... has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization .... [A]nd as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

In a comment on another Op-Ed piece, one person referred to the above situation as a "silo culture" - the idea that a silo culture is "where few collaborate with parallel disciplines". The commenter went on to opine that:

We’ve more recently seen this same silo culture in the bankruptcies of our banking and finance. Too many in the biz school world learned not only to withdraw into it primarily, but also to lobby against regulations that might expose fantasy schemes to public accountability .... but please note that it is a syndrome – one that stretches from its roots in our genteel academe to equally genteel institutions across America ...

IMO, a silo culture has infected the medium of photography as found the incestuous, self-serving, self-referential, ivory-tower proclamations of the academic lunatic fringe which are so far from the real world regarding the real world and meaning and truth re: pictures that ... well ... that they are just so spectacularly unreal.

I have writing about this photographic silo culture for quite a while and, at times, I have even found a bit of light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel self-examination in the pinhead-ed curatorial ranks (credit where credit is due) wherein it has been suggested that:

... the nuances of the photographic process are poorly understood in the art critical community—the present author included—and this shortfall radically limits the discourse. ~ Christopher Bedford, an art historian, art critic and the Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

What a novel idea - actually talk with actual picture makers, study and learn about what they actually do, and integrate that into the discourse that emanates from the art critical community.

However, as fond as I am of real life, aka - "living", I'm not holding my breath ...

decay # 30 ~ on liking real life

Rotten crab apples • click to embiggenIt has been opined, somewhere by someone (I forget), that one of the problems with criticism (to critique) is that critics often appropriate that which they are critiquing. As far as I can determine, what that means is that the critique of whatever becomes more important that the whatever that is being critiqued. In essence, the critics steal the show.

IMO, that is exactly was has happened to the medium of photography, Art Division. The academic lunatic fringe has appropriated the medium of photography by decreeing that concept - the idea behind the image, not the image itself - reigns supreme. In simplest terms, it doesn't matter what you picture as long as the concept / theory behind it interesting (aka, obtuse, arcane, self-referential art theory). Or, in other words, the words that can be written about a picture (better yet, a body of work) are much more important than the picture(s) itself.

This state of affairs is way whacked.

If all of this tenure-tract, publish-or-die, closed-loop-self-stimulation, theoretical-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin bloviation were confined to the "hollow-ed" halls of academia, wherein they all talked to themselves, the world would be a better place. But nooooo - as these pinheads have swarmed over the curatorial class, they have slowly but surely appropriated the museum/gallery world and shaped it into their own ego-centric version of what matters.

In stark contrast to this academic mania, the former MOMA photography department curator, John Szarkowski, was an accomplished picture maker in his own right. Without a doubt, for him, pictures, not picture theory, mattered most. That is not to say that he was a picture-is-just-a-picture guy - his visionary promotion and elevation of Eggleston, Shore, Winogrand, Arbus, Friedlander, and many other "postmodern" picture makers belies than notion. But, nevertheless, he demonstrated time and time again that he really liked pictures.

In fact, Szarkowski's tenure at MOMA was viewed as flawed by some precisely because he deliberately avoided exhibiting the work of most, if not all, of the emerging darlings of the academic photo-theorist world. Case in point, while he could hardly have been unaware of the one-million-dollars-a-picture darling of that world, Jeff Wall, Wall's work never graced the walls of MOMA until after Szarkowski's departure. One could legitimately think that part of Szarkowski's decision not to display Wall's work was based on Wall's statement that one should, at all costs, avoid picturing anything that one actually cared about - you don't want any of those pesky personal feeling about a subject to get in the way of photo theory.

In any event, as far back as 1967, writing in his introduction to the New Documents exhibition, Szarkowski stated:

Most of those who were called documentary photographers a generation ago ... made their pictures in the service of a social cause ... to show what was wrong with the world, and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right ... A new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy - almost an affection - for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors,as a source of all wonder and fascination and value - no less precious for being irrational ... What they hold in common is the belief that the commonplace is really worth looking at, and the courage to look at it without theorizing. - all italic and underline emphasis is mine

It almost seems that Szarkowski's "without theorizing" was a prescient / pre-emptive strike / warning against academic lunatic fringe photo-theorist tsunami that was incubating - one might even say, "festering" (like a boil) - just below the surface of the times. Did he understand that an infectious pandemic of photo-theory criticism would soon begin its relentless spread of appropriation in order to gain mastery over a medium of which none were actual practitioners?

Quite frankly, this situation reminds me of our current economic crisis - a crisis fermented and driven by economic theorists from the halls of academia - pinheads who never actually practiced any "economics" themselves and, much to our dismay, upheld the theoretical concept of economics over its everyday all too human practice.

A pox on all of them.

BTW - how many of you consider yourself to be "new documentarians"? That is, picture makers directed toward the idea that you "like the real world", that "the commonplace is really worth looking at" and that it is "a source of all wonder and fascination and value".

And, most critically, that if you have "the courage to look at it without theorizing" you might even have the ability to "know it".