Vivian Maier, photographer

Last night we watched a wonderful documentary called Finding Vivian Maier, about a woman who worked her whole life (1926–2009) as a nanny but who on the side made photographs—more than a hundred thousand of them. And they were amazing. Street photography mostly, focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, as well as self-portraits; also films. These materials (and more) were found by a young man, John Maloof, and gradually he started piecing together just who this mysterious, completely unknown photographer was. The result was the documentary, as well as a website and Maier's growing fame. I'm posting some photos here, but if you're interested, the website is a wealth of information and further imagery. Here is the first paragraph of the About page:

Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Vivian could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks. The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief.

And here are some photos, very randomly selected, but again, if you want to see more (and I encourage it: the variety of what her eye caught is astonishing), go to the website. 

Self-portrait

Later, she worked in color as well:

Alex Honnold, climber

I'm going to fan-girl for today's post, because... Alex! 

The other day I came on this video about the making of the movie Free Solo, about Alex's, yes, free solo of El Cap in 2017, featuring filmmakers Jimmy Chin and E. Chai Vasarhelyi:

And here are a few more videos of Alex being his inimitably darling self. First, 10 things he can't live without (from 2019):

And from 2021, Alex breaking down climbing scenes from movies:

From this year, a free-soloing excursion with YouTuber Magnus Midtbø, at Red Rock Canyon outside Las Vegas (MM calls it an **insane experience**):

 Here he is answering fans' questions online:

 "I'm sure it'll be fine," says Cedar Wright, in "How to Solo a Big Wall":

And finally, Alex giving a TED talk, in 2018, kind of about fear (which he knows zero about, so there's that):

I know. You may have clicked on one of these videos and then, immediately, said, "Nah." But I'm sticking these here because, fan-girl that I am, I benefit from his wisdom. Or his cuteness, anyway. His wisdom would, perhaps, benefit climber-girl me, if I were putting on rock shoes anymore. But that said, maybe? The Pinnacles, once it cools down a bit? Dust off those old cams and chocks, go for an easy 5.8? Why not?

Book Report: Ill Will

14. Dan Chaon, Ill Will (2017) (7/23/22)

My sister-in-law recommended this book—which actually surprises me, because it doesn't seem like her type of writing. But she likes to listen to books when she's doing chores, and a thriller is as good as anything, I suppose. Anyway, that's why I picked it up. It took me a long time to finish: the structure, which jumps back and forth in time and from narrator to narrator (sometimes on a single, multi-column page), was disorienting, and I didn't much care about the characters. But after recently starting and then (metaphorically) throwing against the wall an unreliable-narrator novel (Lisa Lutz's The Passenger: those characters I really didn't care about), I figured I should keep going and finish a book, for a change. 

This one begins ca. 2012 in northern Ohio with a psychologist and a former cop—a patient, sort of—discussing some recent deaths of college students: was there a serial killer in the area? It is soon revealed that the psychologist, Dustin, lost his parents in a multiple murder when he was a teenager, and his testimony helped send his adoptive brother, Rusty, to prison for thirty years. Also, Rusty has recently been released. We then go back in time to the fall of 1978 and watch Dusty and the six-years-older Rusty interact. Rusty has had a hard childhood, and he's not very nice. The narration switches to 2013 and from Dustin to his younger son, Aaron—a sort of Rashomon effect, only each of the characters is wrapped up in their own world: they aren't really telling the same story, but parallel, somewhat overlapping ones. Then back to June 1983, just before the multiple murder. Then 2012 and Dustin, narrating his and the cop's "investigation" into the college students' deaths. Then fall of 1983, after the murders—exploring another character, Dustin's cousin Kate (who also lost her parents in the murders). Then January 2014 and Aaron again. The next few sections remain in January 2014 (blessedly), and are told from various points of view. The book ends in April. 

Nothing is actually resolved, although one has a pretty good sense of what happened or may have happened—both back in 1983 and in the present day. Part of the point of the story, if there is one, seems to be that "truth" is always illusory, incomplete. The saying of Lao-Tzu comes up a couple of times, "The Tao that we speak of isn't the true Tao." At one point, another cousin, Wave, has a thought:

Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall through a keyhole. . . . Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives?

Or as the book's epigraph by Jean de La Fontaine puts it, "We often meet our destiny on the road we take to avoid it." 

If nothing else, these ideas could be considered the "story" of this book, perhaps. In the end, I think I'm just not a fan of Dan Chaon. This is the second book of his that I've read, the first being Await Your Reply—about which I remember not a thing, except that it was clever. Too clever. This one, similarly. I do enjoy a smart book, but when the author is too distracting with his cleverness and experimentation, he's got to make me care more about the characters or the story. It's a matter of taste, in the end.

 

Mementos #2

These aren't all exactly mementos from my house, because no, I lost sight of that particular project immediately. But they're 7 photos (I know: I owe 14, but 7 is what you get) for installment #2. Because I do want to keep this project going. So, here:

A netsuke that my friend Mary gave me,
together with a scented candle.

The erasable pens that I use for proofreading Getty Museum catalogs.

A beautiful afternoon on the Big Sur River
with my niece Erica and her daughter, Kimberley—
and of course David and the Milo.

An afternoon walk with Tesi at Fort Ord Dunes SP.

Our neighbor's cactuses are blooming AGAIN!

Bee in ice plant.

Ravi flexing his stuff.

Saul Leiter, photographer

Today's discovery thanks to Teju Cole: Saul Leiter (1923–2013), whose photographic work in the 1940s and 1950s especially, with color film especially, earned him a name within the New York School of photography. He later went on to work as a fashion photographer for the top fashion magazines. Here are a few of his shots, so many of which feature umbrellas and weather, and NYC urbanscapes. Gritty and beautiful at once. (I didn't record all the titles and dates, sorry...)

Red Umbrella, 1958

Lanesville, 1958

Straw Hat, 1955

Walking with Soames, 1958

Through Boards, 1957

Canopy, 1958

Snow, 1960

Pink Umbrella, c. 1950

Here's what Teju Cole says about Leiter: 

The content of Saul Leiter's photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a  moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don't so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter's works is a mystery, even to their creater. As he said in In No Great Hurry, laughing, "If I'd only known which ones would be very good and liked, I wouldn't have had to do all the thousands of others."

Mementos #1

I think I'm going to try a new daily project—only this one will be posted weekly. It'll be of things: things that decorate my house, things with sentimental meaning, things that I find amusing, things that I use regularly, things that I never use and should really get rid of. The stuff I've gathered, or that's come down to me. I've just scanned quickly through the zillions of photos on my phone (I do not like the fact that Apple has me so beholden to my phone, and to the Cloud, for the sorting and storage of my photos, but I don't have enough time or energy right now—or perhaps ever—to become unbeholden...) and singled out a few that count in this new project. So here they are. The first one, taken this evening.

A water glass, Arcoroc, made in France;
I found it in the middle of Carlson Blvd., El Cerrito,
right around the corner from where we were living,
back in 1985 or so. Today it is my wine glass of choice.

Some of my mother's many spectacles. Now that I am
becoming a connoiseur of spectacles myself (distance, reading—
and I'm getting close to a third pair, for computer/piano),
I appreciate the gift of vision that these gave my mother,
who suffered from macular degeneration toward the end
of her life of 93 years. Today I visited the eye doctor,
and he assured me that my own, growing collection
of spectacles is perfectly normal. In a few years,
a cataract operation will be in order, but until then,
I should enjoy all those stylish frames!

Dessert plates, painted by my grandmother,
Annie Hooten Skinner

My father's slide rules; he died in 1978,
at age 70, so never got to gain expertise
in computers, but I know he would
have loved them

There will be books in this project...

A bellydance scarf that adorns the floor lamp by my bed;
I bought it in a fit of optimism after a lesson
with my friend Carolee, thinking: yes!
I will be a bellydancer! if I have the scarf,
it will make it so! (it did not; but I like the scarf)

Okay. There's a sampling of what I envision. Let's see if I remember to keep this up. I'm thinking a Friday post, every week for... gulp... 52? Do I have that many things to showcase? We'll see!

Penelope Umbrico, appropriation artist

I am reading a wonderful book of essays by Teju Cole called Known and Strange Things. He's smart and his interests are wide ranging. Currently I'm in a section titled "Seeing Things," about film, photography, and more. He's mentioning so many artists I have never heard of, and his descriptions send me immediately to Google so I can see the works in question.

One of those artists, Penelope Umbrico, is featured in a color illustration insert, and I really enjoyed the representative image, an excerpt of a larger installation called 541,795 Suns from Flickr, from 2006:

Umbrico's MO is to search the web for a subject—in the case of the above, it was "the most photographed subject," which turned out to be sunsets, and from there she isolated the suns in the sunset photos she found on the photo sharing website Flickr. 

Here are some other collages she's created in a similar manner:

This one is called Range (1850–2012) of Aperture Masters of Photography (2012), which she describes here. It's mountains as shot by "masters of photography," variously manipulated through apps to create and mimic the mistakes of analog film photography.

Sun/Screen/Scan (2018), described here: in a nutshell, disassembled computer monitors, laptops, tablets, and phones.

 

 

Everyone’s Photos Any License (654 of 1,146,034 Full Moons on Flickr, November 2015) (2015), described here.

136 Mini Film Cameras in the Smithsonian Institution History of Photography Collection With Old Style Photoshop Filter (2012), with more information (include a close-up of the various assemblages) here.

 

A collection of "previously owned" ceramic cat figurines advertised on eBay (2015–ongoing), described here. 

 

And finally, circling back to sunsets:

 

 

Titled Sunset Portraits from 33,755,447 Sunset Pictures on Flickr on 08/16/17 (2017).

There are many more subjects and collages, all detailed at length on Umbrico's website. 

I appreciate the obsessiveness of Umbrico's searches and the artistry of her representations. I'm not quite so obsessive myself, but I can imagine getting lost in such a project.