AIFF 2021: Picking Films By Image And Description

In previous years, by this time (a few days before the Anchorage International Film Festival begins) I would have made lists of films in competition for various categories with descriptions of the films and trailers.  I would have had email communication with some of the film makers, and possibly even done a Skype interview or two.  

But beginning last year all films are in competition.  They haven't preselected 'the best' five or seven in a category.  That's good for most film makers, but more work for film festival bloggers.  That leaves getting tips from people who have screened the films or doing a lot more work than I've had time to do while I'm still deep in redistricting details.  

But the Festival starts Friday and I had to do something.  Since I've bought my online pass, I can peruse what's there.  (You think you can do that without a pass, I'm not sure. Try from their FB page. You should be able to.)  So I've picked a few films from different categories that caught my eye.  Film should have beautiful visuals, so I picked some that I thought were visually striking.  Where someone picked  a beautiful image as the still shot to represent the film.  Or at least an interesting shot.  

But the first one was just different. Made me stop and imagine, how would I try to do this?  

This is a perspective I would have least expected.

The light and dark of this image made it the most striking of the films I perused.  

Another striking image.  

Not a mummy story.  

This seemed like an unlikely story, but then I realized that making me think that was the point of the blurb.  But why shouldn't an Alaska Native play on the USA Rugby Team?  Is the real story that she made it to the rugby team or the close ties of family?  We'll see at the festival.

This was just such an odd combination of people, clothing, and stuff.  

Another striking and curious image.

And not the story line I would have imagined for the picture.  

Again, the image caught my attention here. 

There are lots and lots of interesting looking films from different parts of the world.  There will be very limited seats at the Bear Tooth opening night (to keep people distanced) and tickets go on sail December 1, 2021.  

Working On A Truncation Post, But In The Meantime A Visual Break

 When I sat in at the Redistricting Board meeting when they were doing truncation and then assigning Senate seats to the required staggered terms, I kept scratching my head and wondering, what is happening?  Lots of things didn't make sense.  So I've been listening to the video of the meeting and trying to write down exactly what was said so I'm certain about what I'm writing about it.  It's taking forever.  Especially with an eight year old granddaughter who hasn't seen her grandparents in almost two yers.  So here are some pictures - mostly ones she took yesterday.  I won't say which are which.  Today we baked a bread, played war, and were very silly, and I didn't get much done on the Board.  But priorities.

Downtown Seattle off in the distance

This one we played with together in Photoshop

Trying Out My Wife's New Phone's Camera In The Yard

 

My wife just upgraded her iPhone at High Fidelity (a phone repair store) because ATT has told her that her old phone isn't going to work much longer.  My interest was in how much better her camera might be than mine.  

Much.  

Here are some pics I took in the yard today.  

Something took a chunk out of this amanita.  Hope it had a good trip.

These are astrantia.

A small broccoli.

High Bush Cranberries

Lysimachia, or loose leaf.

Snapdragon

Snap pea.

These are sub-arctic tomatoes.  Tomatoes require a lot of work in Alaska - the nights drop down below 50˚ F (10˚C) and the fruit doesn't set.  But these are supposed to set down to 40˚F.   

I've got some inside the house, these in the old greenhouse in the backyard, and one plant out on the deck. There are some tomatoes in all three locations.  The earliest were in the house.  But these in the backyard greenhouse are doing ok.  There are lots and lots of flowers, but not that many tomatoes.  Will the redden before it gets too cool?  This is an experiment.  I ended up with lots of plants because every seed I planted seemed to sprout two or three plants.  That part was successful. I don't think I'll be gathering that many tomatoes in the end though.

These are still very small cherry tomato size.

Without a doubt, J's new camera is significantly better than my old one.

A June 4 Repost: What's An Iconic Photograph? Thinking About Tank Man

 I posted this five years ago.  Since then, the most iconic 'photo' was actually the video of George Floyd,  And probably some photos of the January 6 insurrection.  (Yes, that's the term that I think best describes what happened even if the majority of Republicans think (or say, even if they don't believe it) it was just a boisterous demonstration.)

 A lone student protestor blocks Chinese army tanks near Tiananmen Square. 

In 1989, when this photo was taken, most people still believed in the power of a photograph to tell the truth.  With digital photography and Photoshop people are still taken in by the apparent 'truth' of a photograph, but many people are also much more skeptical.

PetaPixel writes about this photo:

"AP photographer Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man” photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century."

 Though Business Insider says that Stuart Franklin's image is the iconic image,

". . . Franklin's image is arguably the most iconic, having appeared in Time and Life magazines, and winning him a World Press Award."

There were actually four photographers who managed to smuggle their film out of Beijing that day, all shooting from balconies or rooms at the Beijing Hotel about half a mile away:  Widener, Charlie Cole, Franklin, and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah. A fifth photographer, Terril Jones, got shots from ground level, but did not publish them until the 20th anniversary in 2009.  He wasn't aware of what he had until the film was developed several weeks after the events.  There were also two videos made of the event that got out.

My questions today, 27 years later, are about what makes a picture 'iconic,' what story does it tell, and  how close is the story to what really happened (assuming anyone can even know that)?   I'm afraid I'm only going to make some quick stabs at answers, and perhaps raise more questions about how we interpret what we see.   

1.  What makes a picture iconic? 

Wikipedia's definition is similar to many others I found:

An icon (from Greek εἰκών eikōn "image") is typically a painting depicting Christ, Mary, saints and/or angels, which is venerated among Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and in certain Catholic Churches. Icons may also be cast in metal, carved in stone, embroidered on cloth, painted on wood, done in mosaic or fresco work, printed on paper or metal, etc. Icons are often illuminated with a candle or jar of oil with a wick.

The term has evolved to have a more generic meaning which is appropriate to the idea of an 'iconic photo'  (from Oxford online):

"A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something: 'this iron-jawed icon of American manhood.'"

So, what exactly is the tank man photo a symbol of? 

2.  What does the picture tell us? 

Here's how the New York Times interpreted the photo in 2009:

"The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses."

Charlie Cole, one of the photographers on a balcony at the Beijing Hotel, says it this way (from the same NY Times article, in which  he also gives a detailed account of what happened and how he got his film past the Chinese Public Security Bureau):

"I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers." 

For people outside of China, this is probably the story we give to and take from this photo. [Yes, 'give to' because all interpretation is based on how our brains relate the meaning based on what we already know and expect.] 

For Chinese officials, I suspect it represents the restraint of the Chinese government which patiently bore months of demonstrations.  It also showed the compassion of the tank drivers who didn't run over this man.  We get a hint of this in a 1990 interview Barbara Walters conducted with then Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin.

"Walters : Yes. Do you have any idea what happened to him ?
Jiang : I think the picture you mentioned just now shows exactly that the
person stood in front of a tank and the tank stopped. Why did the
tank stopped ? Did the child stop the tank ? It's because the tanks--
the people in the tanks -- didn't want to run over the people
standing in the way. But I think this picture just proved that."  (Emphasis added)
(Transcript of the interview are from a Google Group forum.)

I'd add one more interpretation.  I arrived in Hong Kong for my Fulbright at Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 1989, barely a month after Tiananmen.  I met a number of people who had been in Beijing during those times, and ended up taking a group of students to Beijing the following May.  It was a trip we had to schedule well before the first anniversary of Tiananmen, because the parents of my students didn't want them in Beijing during the anniversary.  One student wasn't allowed to come at all because his father thought it was potentially too dangerous.

But I'd like to highlight here just one story.  I had a student who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).  He'd spent time in a mental hospital and had either thought about or actually tried to commit suicide (I don't recall exactly.)  He told me his interpretation of this picture, which went something like this:

"I wanted to be Tank Man.  I could end my life as a hero."

I'd say this was a version of what in the US is called suicide by cop.  When he told me this, he had a wistful smile on his face.  He considered this the perfect way to go.  This was his reaction to this photo.  [As I write this, 27 years later, I realize that I don't know if he had a wistful smile.  I've seen him with a wistful smile, but did he really have it when he told me that?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'm just writing this to remind folks not to trust people's old memories.]

We could spend days studying what this image means to different people and whether it has any meaning to people in China at all?  The photo was suppressed in China.  Given the scope of the internet today, I'm not sure how many people have since had access to this picture.  But as I was working on this post, I came across a  Japan Times story on a photoshopped version of this picture from 2013 with Tank Man standing in front of a line of giant, yellow rubber duckies.  The article said

"Internet searches for 'big yellow duck' were blocked by Chinese censors, but the image went viral on social media overseas."

But let's move on to the more concrete aspects of the picture.  What does it factually tell us?

3.   How close is our understanding of the content of the picture to what actually happened?

Here's how Wikipedia describes the photo:

"Tank Man (also Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide."

Did you catch that?  June 5.  June 4 is the date of the so called Tiananmen Massacre.  The photo was taken the day after.  I didn't realize that until I was working on this post.  If you google Tank Man Tiananmen, you'll see a number of pictures.  This one is very closely cropped.  Others show a long line of tanks.  And here's one from the shots taken by Stuart Franklin (you can see it and more of the original slides and about Franklin's story here.)

Image from Business Insider

This is an image of one of the original slides that Stuart Franklin took that day from a balcony of the Beijing Hotel. 
The green arrow was on the image I copied.  It points to Tank Man walking into the road.  I've added the yellow circle.  It shows Tiananmen Square, which continues to the left of the circle beyond the photo.  The tanks are headed away from Tiananmen Square.  In the bigger scheme of things, I don't think that means all that much, except for the way we in the West, most of whom have never been to Tiananmen Square, associate this with atrocities in Tiananmen Square itself.  Knowledge gained since June 3, 4, and 5, 1989, seems to show that most of the people who died did not die at Tiananmen Square, but at other locations in Beijing.  And most of the deaths were workers, not students.  Again, I think those are details that don't change the meaning of all this, but I am simply trying to discuss the difference between people's perception of the facts and the facts of the photo.  And how cropping
a photo can take away the context of the image. 

Again, the images (since multiple images of this event  shot from the same location were published and now we can see many more that weren't originally published) have a meaning that goes beyond what happened that day. 

And now that we've discussed the photo and questions about what it means, here's some video footage of the event that also gives more context (though it doesn't show the people walking Tank Man away.)



 


And, here's another take on the image.  Stuart Franklin talks about another image he took during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in spring 1989, that he would prefer symbolized Tiananmen demonstrations. 

From Business Insider

"This is an image that changed everything because, for me, it crystallized the spirit of revolt. The uprising in Tiananmen Square was one of the most moving events I’ve witnessed. It was a tragedy to see unarmed young people shot down in cold blood. It was a movement for freedom of expression, for basic rights, and against the outrage of official corruption. It ended badly, a stain on the reputation of a great country. The facts should not be denied, but discussed, so that people can move on. A lot of things were misreported on both sides. A lot of outside actors were involved that may have worsened the situation for the students and their protest. I want this photograph to be available to people for whom this is an important memory. It symbolizes the courage of the time. What it doesn’t show is the bloodshed. I am best known for the image of the tank man. That is called an ‘iconic’ image, but what such images sometimes obscure, with the passing of time, is all the other pictures that lend explanatory power to the story. I’m interested in history, and this landmark event changed my life.” — Stuart Franklin

An ironic twist I can't help but mention, TechDirt reports that a Chinese firm now owns the rights to the Tank Man photo.

And finally, I'd note that Tiananmen 天 (tian) , 安 (an) , 门 (men)  means, literally, Heaven+Peaceful+Gate (Door)

Kent State, Photo Ethics, How Subject And Photographer Were Affected

[Note to readers:  This post started with one article about a photograph.  But then it seemed like a good place to slip in some book notes on books about photographers.  The ideas are stacking up on my desk faster than I can post.  Sorry if this one rambles.]

When I first started blogging I spent a lot more time pondering the ethics of this medium, including using of images - of others' photos,  of people without their knowing, let alone permission.  I decided that for kids it was taboo.  For adults, if they were part of a crowd in public and relatively innocuous, it was ok.  But it's better if I get at least their oral permission.   (See some links to some of those posts below.)

I thought about that reading this Stars and Stripes article  [Thanks Brock, I think it was you] about the girl immortalized by photographer John Filo at Kent State in May 1970.  Turns out she was a 14 year old who had run away from a bad situation in Florida and just happened to be on the Kent State campus when the National Guard started shooting students.  And the photographer was too.  Below is a snipped from the article, but I recommend going to the link.  

From Stars and Stripes:

"Last May, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd's dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space — to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier. On that afternoon in 1970, the world was just as riveted by an image that showed the life draining out of a young man on the ground, this one a black-and-white still photo. Mary Ann was at the center of that photo, her arms raised in anguish, begging for help."

Photo from Cincinnati.com  John Filo/Getty Images

It focuses mainly on how that photo affected both the subject and the photographer over their life times, but it also reminds us about another time in recent (for us that were alive and aware back then) US history when the country was deeply divided.  And it shows that law enforcement shoots at white folks too, if they've categorized them as 'the enemy.'

I've also just finished three books about photographers (two were book club books) in which very task oriented photographers took pictures without regard to others.  The Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan examined the life of photographer Edward S. Curtis, who, in the early 20th Century, set out to capture American Indian culture before, as he saw it, it died out.  His was a manic effort to document the 'real' Indians and their culture.  

In Arctic Solitaire, Paul Sauders chronicles his own quest to take the best ever photograph of a polar bear.  He goes to extremes chasing bears for several summers in a small boat in Hudson Bay.  

You Don't Belong Here is Elizabeth Becker's documentation of and tribute to three women journalists who broke barriers in Vietnam by getting out to report from the battle field.  One of the three was the French photographer, Catherine Leroy.  This work focused more on the battles women faced as journalists at that time.  An excerpt:

Chapter One begins with Leory in a C-130 cargo plane.

"Leroy was the only journalist on the plane, the only photographer - she had two cameras draped around her neck - the only civilian and the only woman.  Her US Army-issued parachute nearly swallowed her.  At five feet tall and weighing eighty-seven pounds, she was less than half the size of the dozens of US Army parachutists sitting alongside her."

The shots she took of the parachute assault were printed in newspapers and magazines around the world.  

"With so much riding on the operation other reporters had demanded to be on the ground with the paratroopers.  Many were upset, some even disdainful, when they found out Leroy would be the only accredited journalist to jump.  For over year, Leroy would be the only woman combat photographer in Vietnam and had given up trying to change attitudes.  Eve the great photographer Don McCullin, who admired Leroy's work, was taken aback seeing her on the battlefield.  'She did not want to be a woman amongst men but a man among men.  Why would a woman want to be among the blood and carnage? . . . I did have that issue with Cathy.'"

"There was a horror of assigning women to sports much less war," said Hal Buell, the New York photo editor of the Associated Press who worked with the Vietnam War photographs sent from Saigon.  "Look at the history of photography.  It was male oriented for so long:  the equipment, the printmaking.  We didn't think women could handle it.  Women just weren't part of that pool."

But the readers know she got on that plane because she was the best qualified.

"She had lobbied to jump with the troops ever since she arrive in Vietnam from Paris.  Few other press photographers were remotely qualified.  Leroy had earned first- and second-degree parachute licenses in France while still in secondary school, egged on by a boyfriend who had dared her to try it, where she jumped eighty-four times over the vineyards and meadows of Burgundy." 

The book is very much worth reading.  I'd started to write, particularly for those who were watching the war at the time.  But, of course, it's an important history lesson for readers who weren't even born yet - about the war and about the obstacles for women covering it.  

Here are some of my earlier posts on photo ethics as I was confronting issues as a blogger.

Do You Put Your Kids Pictures On Facebook?  Should You?

Photography Is Not A Crime:  Blogging, The First Amendment, And Your Camera

Our Rights To Film Cops In Public

Anchorage Daily News Updated Photo Policy - Icon-Sized Photos Usable

AiFF2020: Toprak and The Woman of the Photographs

 I can't believe there are still five narrative features I haven't seen yet.  Or that I'm writing about two obscure films instead of addressing more significant issues.  But there are plenty of people commenting on US politics and not very many commenting on these two films - one  Turkish and and Japanese.  

Toprak - 

I just looked up Toprak on google.translate.  It means Soil.  You don't have to know that watching the movie (I didn't), but it makes a lot of sense.  

Often times, watching a film based in a culture other than one's own, people need to change their sense of time, their pace.  I suspect, given the success of US films around the world, that speeding things up is easier to adapt to than slowing things down.  

This film slows things down a lot.  It takes place in rural Turkey, where this slower pace is the norm.  It focuses on the remnants of one family - a grandmother, her son, and his nephew - who eke out a living growing and selling pomegranates.  It's a theme we've seen repeatedly in AIFF films - young people leaving rural areas and small towns to pursue a more interesting, if not better, life.  And we know this saga in the US and here in Alaska all too well.  

This movie takes us into how these tensions between carrying on the family traditions and breaking the ties plays out in this (and to a much lesser extent one other) Turkish family.  

Originally, a copy of this film without subtitles was up on the AIFF site.  That was corrected yesterday (Wednesday).  Slow down and take a trip to rural Turkey. Pomegranates would make an appropriate snack for this film.

The Woman of the Photographs

We watched this one after Toprak. The topics of this film are very contemporary and the pace much faster.  It's an odd film - the main character doesn't speak a single word until the last few minutes of the film; a praying mantis has a significant supporting role - that explores the boundaries between the reality of who people are - what their actual faces and bodies look like, the manipulated photographic images on social media, or how other people perceive them.  This is a perfect film festival selection.  

I found The Woman of the Photographs a more watchable film than Toprak, I think because the issues raised in Toprak are well-known.  Toprak merely adds a case study to the stories of people leaving their small town/rural lives to larger cities.  Woman of the Photographs offers interesting material for the current concerns about how social media are changing the nature of reality, how we communicate,  and personal identity.  

Pause For A Prayer

From A Concord Pastor Comments

Sometimes when I pray, Lord,
I imagine sitting next to you
on a park bench, on a warm day,
a grassy carpet at my feet...

Sometimes we just sit there,
you and I, just the two of us,
in a moment made holy
by the silence we share...

Or I pour out my heart to you
and share my cares and worries
while you listen
and gently wipe away my tears...

(It goes on, but that's the relevant part.)

My regular readers are probably scratching their heads by now.

Someone in Mountain View, California got to this old post ( What Do I Know?: Little India, The Arab Quarter, and Peranakan) of mine from a blog called A Concord Pastor Comments.  Nowadays, most of the browsers don't leave behind the search terms people use to get to your website.  When they did, I sometimes did a post looking at what people searched for and what they got.  (For example:  "Where Can I Ride A Trained Polar Bear?")  That's interesting for a blogger because you can see what people were looking for to get to your blog.  Sometimes it's a great match, other times it leaves you wondering.

But I rarely get to see the search terms these days.  Most often from Bing.  But this one had a link so I went to the Pastor's blog to see why my post got linked.

I wandered around the site not finding any links to my blog and then I saw the picture of the two people on the bench in the park.  I took that while I was visiting my son in Singapore where he was studying for his Masters degree and I was on my way home after volunteering three months in Chiengmai, Thailand.

It really is a perfect picture for the poem.  Few people seeing the picture and poem would imagine the two on the bench are Chinese and the park is in Singapore.   And I appreciate the Pastor linking to the source of the picture.  Not everyone who uses someone else's photo acknowledges where they got it.


It turns out there were about 12 other hits on the Singapore post all clustered together around the same time from around the country, but none of the others showed how they got to my blog.

Learning Numbers

 






While waiting for the pre-school to open we walked around the corner and I saw this tile address on a house.  My three year old looked and I pointed out the first number - Three - and she repeated Three.  I pointed out the second number and she repeated four.  I pointed out the third number and she said five.  We talked about it, but she insisted it had to be a five.

So I looked across the street and found 345.  And she agreed with all my numbers.  But when we went back to 346, she continued to insist on 345.  Of course, she knows "1-2-3-4-5" and my changing that five to six had no chance.


















So after dinner I wrote out the numbers one through eleven (with her editing below).  And we went through them.

Then I made white ones and had her find the matching number.  Most she did without hesitation.  Three and five were confusing.  Eight was a B to her.  All good too the point that she played games with me, saying she didn't know while taking the right white paper and turning it over.  Even gluing some to another piece of paper.

But the 346 picture is still 345 to her.



[Background of the pictures.  We first saw the 346 yesterday morning.  I decided to take pictures in the afternoon when we picked her up.  The 345 was made of beautiful metal numbers on the wall across the street.  But in the afternoon, there was a portapotty covering the 345.  It was still there this morning, so I had to make do with the little numbers on the mailbox.]

What's The Difference Between a Memoirs and a Memoir? And an Autobiography? But That's Just The Hook. There's Also Kimani. [Updated]

I follow  Kimani Okearah @theKimansta on Twitter.  He's a photographer for the Sacramento Kings.  Well, that's not exactly right.  He's a photographer for Vox News and he covers the Kings for them.  I follow a number of folks who experience life differently than I do just to keep tabs on worlds I don't know well.  Mostly there's basketball in his Tweets, but also stuff on race, and health, and things I'm not really sure what they are about.  But there's something sweet and decent about him. I've grown to like him.

It turns out one thing we have in common is an interest in film.  He's working on a documentary.  It's called 30 Year Memoirs of a Crack Baby.  He's the crack baby and he has, among other congenital health issues, a seriously problematic large intestine.

But as I read the title I wondered, why is it memoirs instead of memoir?  So I googled.

[UPDATE 8/15/19:  Kathy in KY commented that the boxes for Memoir and Autobiography had the same texts.  (I've corrected that.)  But then that leaves this post without a distinction between memoir and memoirs.  So here's one from the blog Memoir Mind  that seems to make sense:

"Writing about one's whole life is writing one's memoirs, plural. It's more akin to autobiography, in which you tell all about what happened, often with intense detail, the personal version of the kind of research a biographer would do if they were writing a life about you. Memoirs tend to be more informal than autobiography, but still have that life-encompassing feel. Most of the people who write them are well-known - that's how and why others would buy an entire book about their entire life, or multiple books about their entire life.
Memoir, on the other hand, the currently hot trend in writing and the topic of this blog, is focused on a particular time in one's life, or a theme or thread."

And, back to the original post, below is the bigger picture with the corrected illustration.]

The Author Learning Center explains the difference between a memoir, autobiography, and a biography.    And if you look closely in their summary of a memoir, the second bullet offers a brief note on the difference.

Text comes from The Author Learning Center 

Kimani is asking for a lot of money on GoFundMe, but films cost a lot to make.  He's an expert on the topic.  And since it's a memoirs, it will be a "1st person POV" and less "formal and objective" than a memoir. [And since it's a memoirs, it will be about his whole life, not just one time, theme, or thread.]

I'd urge you to go to his GoFundMe page.  Read it.  And if you weren't born to crack addicts and taken from your parents at 6 months and put into foster home and kicked out of that home as soon as you turned 18, you're probably had a lot more 'privileges' than Kimani has had.  So you could share some of your privilege by checking out his site.

And making a donation.  It doesn't have to be a lot.  $5 would do, but if you're going to go to all the trouble, you might consider making a larger contribution.

He hasn't had a contribution for a couple of days.  I think it's because people would rather look away.  But please, overcome that urge, and give him five minutes.  And when the movie is showing (at the Anchorage International Film Festival I hope), you'll know that you helped make it possible.

I'm not putting up his picture.  I want you to imagine what he looks like.  And then go check how well you conjured up his image.  I'm going to check how many people linked from this page to his GoFundMe page.    Yes, I can do that (and so all other websites.)

Iguazu From The Other Side - Never Saw So Much Crashing Water

Yesterday’s visit to the Brazilian side of the Iguazu set of waterfalls, left me wondering how the Argentine side could possibly match it.

Well, today I found out.  As our guide yesterday said, both sides are different.  From the Brazil side you have a better overall panorama of the the 2.7-kilometre-long (1.7 mi) long wall of waterfalls and you see them more or less from below.  But the Argentine side has a lot more trail (we walked about 3 kilometers yesterday, and today on the Argentine side, about 9), and you see a lot of the waterfalls close up, from above and below.  Small waterfalls here, would be big attractions all by themselves elsewhere.  Here they are just one more jaw-drop in an incredible day of far off and close up views of water thundering down vertical walls from great heights. 

The spray at points is strong enough to create a booming business in plastic raincoats and cell phone holders.  

Sorting through all the pictures I took and resizing them for posting is proving too time consuming on my iPad than I can manage.  Maybe I’ll put more up later when I’ve got my Macbook.  I’ll just put up a few picture here today.  

But I’ll also point out that the falling water, well crashing water might be more accurate, is just the most obvious and wondrous sight here.  But then there are the animals - mammals, birds, insects - and the flora.  And the people coming to see all this.  Mostly I heard Spanish and Portuguese.  Relatively little English or other languages.  So here are a few attempts to convey this massive water movement.       

I’d also add that both the Brazilians and Argentines have done a  spectacular job of constructing trails that allow visitors to get up really close from different angles.

Above is looking down from the top of Galante de Diablo - the biggest of the falls, and the one you see closest from below on the Brazilian side.  
 


And here I am on top, right in the middle of things.  This is where people (who had them) wore their raincoats.  As you can see, my camera filter was all wet.  The no ise is constant.

And then getting back a bit so you can see how massive this all is.


And below is part of the miles of metal boardwalk that take you so close to the water.  The cloud is just mist rising up from one of the many falls.

I mentioned above how ‘small’ falls here would be a big deal elsewhere.  I got that notion looking at the two falls on the lower left.  They’re actually pretty big.  But next to the massive fall to their right, they’re nothing.  But they are each stunning.

But let’s pull back a little more and put it into perspective.  (The really big one is San Martin Falto - falls)

And you just kept being hit with views like this all day long.  Enough.  We’re going birding tomorrow morning early.

Luigi Toscano's Holocaust Portraits And Nathan Jurgenson's The Social Photo

The San Francisco Civic Center Plaza had about 80 of the giant portraits.  Each had a little sign (if you look closely, you can see it on the right in the middle.)

I'm afraid the title of the post promises a lot more than I can deliver.  But the title can at least point to what I'm thinking about as I write this post.   I've got too many backed up, unfinished posts.  These portraits made me think about the nature of portraits and how they're displayed (in addition to the content of the portraits.)  Jurgenson's book is also playing with my understanding of photos in general, and how digital photography and social media change human relationships with photographic images.  Here are the  two catalysts:

1.  Lest We Forget by Luigi Toscano - and installation we saw recently in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza.

Click to enlarge and focus better

And 2.  The Social Photo:  On Photography And Social Media,  a very new book by Nathan Jurgenson that investigates the the meaning of photography in the digital age and how we need to rethink our mental frameworks of photography to understand what's happening.


The notion of portraits has changed over the years.  From the Tate Museum:

"Portraiture is a very old art form going back at least to ancient Egypt, where it flourished from about 5,000 years ago. Before the invention of photography, a painted, sculpted, or drawn portrait was the only way to record the appearance of someone. 

But portraits have always been more than just a record. They have been used to show the power, importance, virtue, beauty, wealth, taste, learning or other qualities of the sitter. Portraits have almost always been flattering, and painters who refused to flatter, such as William Hogarth, tended to find their work rejected. A notable exception was Francisco Goya in his apparently bluntly truthful portraits of the Spanish royal family."

Photography changed things dramatically.  And cameras on phones changes things even more.  From Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 139-143). Verso.

"Photography is a technology of instability . It stages a play of the real and the simulated, the apparent and the contrived, the creative and the mechanical. And photography is itself always in flux, from plates to film, paper to pixels, to more people carrying more cameras more of the time. These changes affect who makes images, where, why, how often, and for whom. There has been a recent and massive shift in who sees any photograph, and the audience for images that social media promises alters what a photograph is and what it means."

Basically, Jurgenson is arguing that the age of digital photography along with social media presents us with a world of photos that the academic world of photography has essentially ignored because they still use the 'art model' of photography to consider photos.  Snapshots don't matter in their eye.

"This is a perspective rooted in art history, one that deals with galleries, museums, and professional work and is tangential to all but a tiny fraction of images made today. The vast majority of photos perform functions distinct from those of documentation or art. The quick selfie reaction, the instantly posted snapshot of nice sunlight on your block, the photo of a burger sent to a friend: these kinds of images are of central importance to photography as it occurs today, but they are not as well conceptualized or understood. These everyday images taken to be shared are examples of what I am calling social photography. Other names include “snapshot photography,” “personal photography,” “domestic photography,” “vernacular photography,” “networked images,” “banal imaging,” or, as Fred Ritchin differentiates in Bending the Frame, an “image” as opposed to a photograph.  All these terms are meant to distinguish social images— the overwhelming bulk of photographs being made today— from those weightier images made with that traditional understanding of photography as something more informational, formally artistic, and professional."   Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 147-156). Verso. 

Her plaque identifies her as

Rachel Goldfarb

(Dokszyce/Poland 1930)

Nazi Armys occupied hometown/

moved to ghetto with the family

Jewish population numbered close to 3000/

Were not sent to concentration camps

but murdered by Nazis/

Less than a dozen survivors/

Only Rachel and her mother survived 

from extended family

1942 went into hiding with family

Brother discovered and killed

Survived with her mother with Russia underground

(partisans)

Liberated by Soviets/Experienced widespread and

overt antisemitism in Poland

Left for Italy

1947 migrated to United States

Lest We Forget - Washington 01-21-2018

OLEKSANDR SKLIANSKI

(KIEV/UKRAINE 1937)

"THANKS TO 

YEVGENIA BOBOVIK AND VIKTOR BOBOVIK

AS WELL AS THEIR DAUGHTER YELENA

MY BROTHER AND I WERE SAVED

FROM BEING SHOT DEAD IN BABI YAR.

THEY BECAME OUR COMPANIONS

ON THE ROAD TO PEACE."

LEST WE FORGET - KIEV/UKRAINE 26-02015

SUSAN CERNYAK SPATZ

(VIENNA/AUSTRIA 1922)

MAY 1942 ORDERED TO

THE GHETTO THERESIENSTADT

WITH THE MOTHER

JANUARY 1943 DEPORTATION TO

THE CONCENTRATION 

CAMP AUSCHWITZ-BERKENAU

JANUARY 1045

DEATH MARCH TO THE CONSTRATION 

CAMP RAVENSBRÜCK

SPRING 1945 LIBERATED

BY THE RED ARMY

LEST WE FORGET -  HEIDELBERG 18.09.2014

These descriptions are just the briefest references to a period of their lives lived in  horror and only the present locations and dates of the photos and the visual images themselves hint at the lives since the end of the war.  Though they never escaped the horrors that stayed with them the rest of their lives.

My stepmother could be one of these portraits.  She, like Susan Cernyak Spatz, was born in 1922 in the Austro-Hungarian empire (in Bratislava) and also was sent to Theresianstadt.  She eventually lived her life out in Southern California.  In 2014 she could have posed for one of these photos, but she passed away in 2018.  So maybe these portraits resonate with me more.  Here she is in 2015 on her 93rd birthday.  She didn't have a professional photographer (not sure how he got those little spots in everyone's eyeballs), nor was she allowed to put on some make-up and jewelry.  Not sure she would approve of this photo here.  But it's one more face for the record.    Who knows, she may have known Susan Cernyak Spatz at Theresienstadt.



Luigi Toscano's exhibit seems to recognize that people's relationship with photography is different now.  From LEST WE FORGET statement in San Francisco (the LEST WE FORGET photo above.)

"Instead of exhibiting them in a museum or a gallery, Luigi Toscano always presents the large-scale portraits in public places, such as parks, public squares or on facades, so they are accessible to everyone.  In this way, LEST WE FORGET reaches thousands of people regardless of age, origin, language or education.  Small information panels, a picture book, and a documentary movie complete the installation."

SF City Hall in background.

Nathan Jurgenson wouldn't count these as 'Social Photos":

"My interest here is with a type of photography made ubiquitous by networked, digital sharing, though many of its characteristics can be found in different degrees in pre-social media photography, especially amateur snapshots (Polaroid sharing in particular). For my purposes here, what fundamentally makes a photo a social photo is the degree to which its existence as a stand-alone media object is subordinate."  Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 158-160). Verso. 

These aren't the instant photos taken on someone's phone and then immediately texted to someone as part of a conversation.  Clearly Luigi Toscano thought carefully about each portrait and how to package them and where to display them so that they would be seen and attended to by many people.  Looking at these giant face images in person, faces almost as large as the viewer, has a big impact.  The holocaust survivors are almost gone.  I suspect many, if not most in the installation, have pass away already.

 But there is no shortage of victims today, people being killed and maimed and terrorized by American made weapons as well as those made in Europe and Russia and Israel.  They are not that different from the Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany, just in the manner of their suffering.  But the Jews of Europe were easy to ignore while they were being slaughtered, just as the people of Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and the refugees from terror in Africa and Central America are easy to ignore today.

As I get to the end here, I realize that this mashup of Luigi Toscano's photos and Nathan Jurgenson's book may be a little forced.  And I may post more on Jurgenson's book later.  But here's a bit more:

"Photography theory’s long marginalization of amateur snapshots has left a shortfall of reference points for making sense of social photos today. The dichotomies of “amateur vs. professional” and “digital vs. analog” matter less for the social photo than the relations between power, identity, and reality. The fixation on professional and artistic photos comes with conceptual baggage rooted in other fields, much of which should slide to the margins when discussing social photography. The center of conceptual gravity for describing how people communicate with images today."  Nathan Jurgenson. The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (Kindle Locations 167-171). Verso. 

LEST WE FORGET website.
Jurgenson's book website.