2012 in Review: January

This has been a most challenging and difficult year for me in many ways, and I approached the end of it not feeling particularly on top of my game and more wary than hopeful or excited about a new year. So when photographers on Google+ started posting their "best of 2012" photos and thoughts, my first thought was, "I just can't do that this year. No heart for it."

But, in fact, photography has been the best thing about this year. It has kept me sane and trudging along through some real crap, and indeed has provided not only creative relief but inspiration when my images have been well-received by so many of that same international network of photographer friends.

I encountered photography when I went back to the University of Iowa in my late 20s to get a degree in Journalism. I did lots of photography and achieved some recognition for it, but then went off to graduate school. Years later, after many years of graduate school, struggling to achieve tenure and being an academic department head, I found my way back to photography (long story for another time).

From 2005 through 2011, I shot some but not enough to do a "best of the year" review. In 2012, I shot 4,387 images with my digital 35mm camera!

So I decided to give "best of 2012" a shot after all, one month at a time. I completed that task today on Google+, and decided I'd share the results with a larger audience. And because the words that go with these images are just as important as the images, I'm going to use this blog to do it. The story is, after all, partly about coming to terms.

Joy

Here's my favorite from January. As whale shots go, this little tail slap is not that spectacular. But it means the world to me as one who has studied and loved whales form afar for decades but has only twice managed to get close enough to make a decent photograph! It is from my January trip to Hawaii to an academic conference.
                         
                               

Who are we in relationship to each other?

                                              

Left: This photograph of Indian women praying from The Family of Man exhibit is mounted on the stone wall skirting Clervaux Castle.                              

At the end of World War II, photographer Edward Steichen had a vision. He wanted to respond to the horrors of war and its emphasis on human conflict with a positive statement about “those universal constants of being that all humanity shares.” And so he set out to collect photographs from around the world, and out of them create an exhibit that would make the point, clearly and resoundingly, that the human family in all its diversity had even more in common.

The result of his work, an exhibit called The Family of Man, consists of 503 photographs collected from 68 countries. On January 26, 1955, The Family of Man opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and closed 103 days later having broken a 15-year attendance record. MoMA toured the exhibit to major cities in the United States and the U.S. Information Agency took it abroad. By 1968, it had been seen by more than nine million people in 69 countries. Several book versions of the exhibit have been produced and millions of copies sold.

By most measures, The Family of Man is the most successful photography exhibition of all time. Steichen chose images that show humans behaving in ways we readily see as “universal,” then grouped the photographs to emphasize these universals. Thus, the exhibit begins with photographs of couples hugging, kissing, rubbing noses or otherwise showing affection. These images are followed by a cluster of pictures of weddings; then comes childbirth and so forth, each group of images drawn from many countries. The overwhelming effect is exactly as Steichen desired: Love, joy, hope, anger, fear, pride in family, the protectiveness of parents, the exuberance of children—all come through as universals that unite the human family.

Clervaux Castle overlooks the city of Clervaux, Luxembourg, and is the permanent home of Edward Steichen's The Family of Man exhibit.

                                                                  
But the success of the exhibit is also its greatest weakness. The Family of Man is often criticized for glossing over stark differences among peoples. The exhibit has found a permanent home in Steichen’s native Luxembourg, where people from around the world (including me last summer) continue to visit and write responses in a guest book. One scholar who has studied the exhibit provides two direct quotes from the guest book that illustrate precisely the poles of disagreement. In June 1996, a Luxembourgian wrote:

How lucky we are to be part of this vast “Family of Man”! I believe that despite all the differences we really form a big family. If only we would stop destroying one another!

Just 10 days earlier, a British visitor had written:

The exhibition wants us to believe that we are all the same fundamentally. But we are not. We all are born, have children, and die. But there the similarity between me and an African, a Chinaman, or a Muslim living in Saudi Arabia ends. We all have very different morals and attitudes—we are not a “family.”

The exhibit itself and these two comments from viewers draw our attention inexorably to what I believe is one of the most—perhaps the most—challenging, perplexing, emotionally charged concerns of humankind today: Who are we humans—individually and as members of the social, cultural, political, economic and religious groups we inevitably and naturally form—in relationship to each other? What are the common grounds among us? When are the differences among us significant and worthy and consequential? Can we use our commonalities to overcome our hostilities? What differences are worth preserving, even with violence?

These questions are especially vexing for those whose faith teaches welcoming the stranger and loving the neighbor. I have no easy answers, only a hope and a prayer. My hope is that someday we will move beyond tolerating difference to celebrating the exuberance of human diversity. My prayer is for wisdom to know the difference between valuing diversity and a valueless, “anything goes” relativity, and for the courage to see and to stand against those human practices—including our own—that diminish other humans.

Top photo: This photograph of Indian women praying from The Family of Man exhibit is mounted on the stone wall skirting Clervaux Castle.

iPhone Diary

iPhone Diary: 27 March 2009

In late March of 2009, I began to explore the capabilities of my new iPhone camera. Like most of my projects, this one did not spring full-blown from my mind. Rather, I tend to start doing something, then figure out what it is and why it is interesting.

What it is, in this case, is a series of photographs called "iPhone Diary." Each image is subtitled with the date it was made. iPhone Diary photographs must be composed at the moment of taking on the screen of the phone-camera. Although I upload them to my computer and sometimes adjust the contrast or color to represent the scene as near to how I saw it as possible, I do not crop the images.

My purpose in not cropping iPhone Diary pictures and in seeking to re-present a scene as I saw it is distinctly NOT to reinforce the popular notion that the camera produces a mechanical, therefore somehow "objective," record of reality. Photographers are in the business of framing the world. They impose the physical frame of their camera's viewfinder/screen on continuous reality. What ends up within the frame and how it is organized in relationship to the frame is one of the photographer's primary communicative tools. Deciding to not crop the iPhone Diary images thus requires discipline. I must be very clear and deliberate at the moment of making the photograph about what I see and how to frame it so that others will be able to see it as well.

Is it interesting, and if so, how? To me it is, but the photographs are fragments from my life--like a diary of images. I have a story to go with each one. At the same time, perhaps the pictures also somehow transcend the particular. Maybe they evoke your stories, too?