Neither Memory Nor Magic

On April 12, the Center for Documentary Arts is pleased to present, in collaboration with the Opalka Gallery at The Sage Colleges, Hugo Perez's Neither Memory Nor Magic, a stirring film profile of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti. The film, presented as part of Holocaust Remembrance Month, will be screened at 6:30 in the theater of the Opakla Gallery at Sage College of Albany, 140 New Scotland Avenue in Albany.

Radnóti is one of Hungary's foremost poets and a national hero. He was a fervent nationalist and anti-fascist; this activity and being born a Jew condemned him during World War II to internment in a series of forced labor camps, where he died.


Hugo Perez travelled throughout Hungary and Serbia to film NMNM, which is built upon the poignant, courageous poems found in the notebook Radnóti had when his body was discovered. This is the synopsis from the filmmaker's website:

In the spring of 1946, a mass grave was unearthed in the Hungarian village of Abda. Twenty-two decayed bodies were found sprawled in the pit. One of the bodies found in the grave was that of the poet Miklos Radnoti, shot into the grave by Hungarian fascists eighteen months earlier. Found in the front pocket of his coat was a small notebook soaked in his bodily fluids. It was laid out to dry in the sunlight and when examined later revealed the poets last poems carefully handwritten onto the ruled lines of the notebook. In the so-called Bor Notebook, Radnoti, through poetry, told the story of the last six months of his life, months spent first as slave labor in a Nazi labor camp in Bor, Serbia, and then on a three-month forced march from Serbia to the small village of Abda where he was killed when he was too weak to continue.   

Radnoti’s final poems serve as the backbone of the narrative of NEITHER MEMORY NOR MAGIC to reveal the story of a poet who continued to write poetry even as he faced almost certain death. Through the use of evocative and lyrical Super8 footage, readings of the poems to represent Radnoti’s account of his life, and interviews with some of those who knew him best and who got to know him in his last days, NEITHER MEMORY NOR MAGIC tells the story of one poet’s triumph over the inhumanity of his age –a story previously untold outside of Hungary.

I urge everyone in the area who can attend to see this haunting and beautiful documentary. Hugo Perez will be present to discuss the work following the screening. More about Radnóti, Perez, and the film in a future post.

Air

Dorothea Lange, Kern County, California, 1939

I was in Ireland for a couple weeks, which included time participating in N. Michael Murphy's Love, Loss, and Forgiveness workshop, a profound crucible of compassion and healing. Still wholly infused with the lessons of that experience, on the flight home I happened to watch Inside Job, Charles Ferguson's documentary about the 2008 financial crisis. The film won this year's Academy Award for Best Documentary, an honor richly deserved for the clear, courageous way Ferguson navigates us through the how and why of the world banking meltdown that cost millions of people their savings, their homes, their jobs, their security.  How?  Through manipulation of the US political process, eliminating regulations and safeguards that protected our economy and, by enmeshed extension, the rest of the industrialized world. Why? Why else? That particularly malignant greed of wealthy, powerful men for ever more power and wealth.

By the time I got to the film's credits, I was seething and emotionally spent, as anyone must be in the face of such monstrous avarice. The bankers, economists, politicians, and policy-makers indicted in the film, most of whom still have their fortunes and their jobs (including one or two running the US Treasury), devised and promulgated financial schemes designed entirely to enrich themselves and a relatively small number of shareholders, schemes they knew must inevitably implode and impoverish the rest of us.  For a time, it seems, the whole monied world was enchanted by these men, or at least believed that those we wanted to trust had everything under control. You leave Ferguson's film knowing two things beyond a doubt, that the individuals and structures that caused the destruction remain firmly in power, and that nothing meaningful has been done to reform the system. The global banking and finance system is a vast humbug that must eventually fail under the weight of its own corruption.



A few days after I got home, I went to hear Dr. Lisa Dodson speak about her book,  The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert An Unfair Economy. Dodson is a self-described "public sociologist," a kind of academic investigative journalist who spent several years interviewing the so-called working poor, people who often cannot meet their basic living expenses despite having one or more jobs. As an academic, she is in control of a raft of statistics, which together paint a horrifying picture of the American underclass. Here's one such number: In America today, fifty percent of all children will rely on food stamps at some point before they turn eighteen. This is unnerving. In the richest nation in the world, one in two children will require public assistance to keep from going hungry.

A friend of mine who worked in a large public hospital is fond of declaring that the United States is becoming a third-world nation. This was the picture in my head as I listened to Dodson describe the impossible compromises a brutal economy forces on the working poor in healthcare, childcare, housing, and anything resembling a family life. These compromises threaten children's health, their education, their happiness, and impact the social fabric in everything from drop-out rates to crime to psychological well-being and civic bonds. In other words, Dickens' shivering waifs Ignorance and Want are our own.

Dodson's book is not simply about the economic underclass, however, but about the middle-class men and women who work beside them, typically as managers and supervisors. Working-class jobs today are often service jobs, in retail, health care, food service and other areas that pay minimum wage and often provide few or no benefits. Those in mid-management positions know that the people they oversee often cannot support themselves on what they earn; they are all too familiar with the burdens their workers bring with them from home. Dodson's book is about those supervisors who go against company policy to help these workers, by allowing them to leave early for a doctor appointment, by not docking their pay for a school conference, by giving them food or other resources off store shelves.

Dodson calls these gestures "acts of economic disobedience," and they are not done without the potential risk of losing one's own job. The people Dodson interviewed said they took action despite the risks because they could not turn away from suffering, and because to not act would make them complicit in a morally corrupt system. (How corrupt? Consider this: The four hundred richest individuals in the US possess more wealth that the bottom fifty percent of Americans. Four hundred have more than one hundred fifty-five million. No wonder we need all those food stamps.)

Heroic acts of empathy like those Dodson describes are becoming more common as they become more necessary. Such empathy is essentially an act of imagination. One must conceptually experience a reality not one's own, and respond to it with compassion and creativity. I was discussing with a friend the other day her idea that service is essentially a creative act. This is an intriguing notion, that service, which we think of as a response to another's need, can in fact be rightly conceived as exploratory, imaginative, original on the part of the giver. And if from creativity one extrapolates creation, then service becomes in essence an artistic response to the world.

As one who has known a number of people deeply embedded in acts of service, this makes perfect sense. Many of the individuals I know who minister to the needs of others, whether as nurses, case workers, educators, or others, are deeply creative people. It is no easy thing to respond year after year to the plights and sufferings of those less fortunate, and to do so effectively takes passion, commitment, spontaneity, resourcefulness, and ingenuity, all qualities of the artist at work. It also takes high levels of detachment, of savvy, of penetrating intelligence, also provinces of the artist, and the results are often equally as enlightening and inspiring. Indeed, the main difference between an artist and a creative service provider may be intention; one strives to create an aesthetic effect, the other a practical one, although I'm not all that sure of this distinction.

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
photographing for the FSA in 1936.

This all brings me around to the photograph at the top of this post. Dorothea Lange, like poet Elizabeth Bishop I wrote about in an earlier essay, is an artist I responded to at a very young age, well before I could articulate exactly why. I don't remember where or when I found the postcard of this image, but I remember I was moved not only by the defiance of its message but by the passion and compassion of Lange in taking it. She was working for the Farm Security Administration when she made it, a US government agency that employed photographers to document the conditions of poverty to support legislation to alleviate it. This was in the years following the Great Depression, when it seemed, as it does today, that the "big men" had taken America for their own. (In Inside Job, there's a similar image, of graffiti on an urban wall demanding, "Where's my fucking bailout?")

The Depression was a turning point in American politics. I believe we are at the fault line of a similar paradigm shift now, on a far larger scale in which old orders of dominion and false ego, be they economic, political, social, or personal, will be replaced by new modes and methods of action. Dorothea Lange left a comfortable career as a studio photographer to go into the streets and express the suffering of men in bread lines. Her art was her service. I know artists today who are leaving the studio to engage the changing times in direct, sometimes unglamorous, ways. I believe that those who remain in their practice are being called to service of their own. Lisa Dodson told me that many of the people who come up to her after her talks are artists seeking to make a contribution with their work.

This, I believe, is where the muse wants us now, in the world, bearing witness to the needs of humanity and serving the higher consciousness of love and compassion. Really, it must be so. Otherwise, the big men who care nothing for these things will continue to control everything, even the air.

Compassionate Acts

As a partner in the Charter for Compassion, Odyssey Networks is collecting stories of compassion wherever we travel. While in Seattle for that city's landmark signing of the Charter, ON asked James O'Dea for a memory of compassion in his life. He is co-director of The Social Healing Project funded by the Kalliopeia Foundation, immediate past president and member of the extended faculty of The Institute of Noetic Sciences, former executive director of The Seva Foundation, and was, for ten years, director of the Washington office of Amnesty International

Human Condition

When I came up with the term "documentary art," I was looking for a phrase that was inclusive and fluid, one that would capture the narrative, "real life" essence of traditional non-fiction forms (photography, oral history, documentary film) while preserving the appeal to mind and soul that accompanies the fine arts of painting, drama, poetry, song -- as well as uniquely powerful creations like the AIDS quilt or Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I devised the term, and quickly discovered, of course, that on Google it was already in use more than seventy-two thousand times, usually meaning something far more restrictive than I intended. My conception remains unchanged.

The Center for Documentary Arts is committed to artists whose work captures the human condition -- artists who cut deeper than fact and draw out our understanding and compassion. From Art & Document friend Gayle Sulik comes this inspirational video by French filmmaker Philippe Joubert, a humane short that magnificently fulfills the meaning of what the Center is about.

embark on a journey

put yourself into the music

play the sport

feel your self-confidence

so that your resolutions 

become revolutions

Elizabeth

But I felt: You are an I,
you are an Elizabeth

Today is the hundredth birthday of poet Elizabeth Bishop, as fine a poet as America produced in the twentieth century. I have a sense that, for the most part, Bishop is a poet's poet, one of those brilliant souls known by everyone in the tribe and not much remembered by those outside it. That may not be true, judging by the number of books by and about her on Amazon, but whatever her popularity, she has been by my side all my adult life. She is one of my oldest companions and most enduring spirit guides. The connection we make with the poets closest to us, alive or dead, is a powerful and intimate one. They exist perpetually in the present tense, speaking in our ears or whispering to our hearts; singing, casting light, or simply standing beside us with the assurance we are not spiritually alone.

   

I have turned to Elizabeth Bishop time and again for a certain deft insight that is at once bracing and consoling. Her poems have the lonesome, soulful music of the muted trumpet, a sound tinged with pain but detached from nostalgia. They grow from incidental scenes and small moments, finding immense dignity in the simple act of being wholly present come what may. This is "simple" the way the Tao is simple: a state unburdened by fear, illuminated by humility, opened to life. Few of us dwell in such grace; Bishop's poems embody it.

--Suddenly the bus driver

stops with a jolt,

turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of

the impenetrable wood

and stands there, looms, rather

in the middle of the road.

It approaches; it sniffs at

the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,

high as a church,

homely as a house

(or, safe as houses).

A man's voice assures us

"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers

exclaim in whispers,

childishly, softly,

"Sure are big creatures."

"It's awful plain."

"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time

she looks the bus over,

grand, otherworldly.

Why, why do we feel

(we all feel) this sweet

sensation of joy?

Pansies,  by EB, watercolor and gouache, 1960

Bishop possessed an enduring empathy for life's frailties, perhaps as a result of her own suffering. When she was a small girl her father died and her mother was institutionalized for mental illness, never to return. She spent the rest of her childhood living among relatives or in boarding school, one of those experiences, I have been told, that can be at once achingly lonely and liberating. A note of loss pervades her poems, but whatever torment she carried she bore with a sort of tender stoicism, if such a thing makes sense. Grief is always present in her work, but she treats it matter-of-factly, neither nursing it nor turning it away. Vulnerability was Bishop's path to comprehension; she held to it without possessing it. Her candor is not confessional but, to quote W. B. Yeats, "as cold and passionate as the dawn." 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

. . .

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing isn't hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

This is the first time I've been moved to articulate what it is about EB's influence that remains potent to me. I think that influence has everything to do with the recent recurring motif of this blog, love, that matter I have fathomed so incompletely.  Through loneliness, failed relationships, alchoholism, and a pervasive sense of displacement, Bishop's spirit remained courageous--courage, with its French root coeur--heart--being love's essential element. True courage allows for passion, for commitment, for empathy, for vulnerability--the components of love, be it for another person, for one's art, for life. Sometimes the teacher appears before the student is ready, and remains patiently in waiting.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.

Excepts from In the Waiting Room, The Moose, One Art, and The Sandpiper, from Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems 1927-1979.  Watercolor as seen in Exchanging Hats: Elizabeth Bishop Paintings

Beyond mortal need

I ruminated all month about next steps for the Center for Documentary Arts, in the quiet that followed the close of Battlesight and the six months of daily effort behind it. By every measure the exhibit was a success, for which I'll thank again all who helped make that possible, and just as much an education. I've been learning how to direct this organization as I've gone along, and embarked on the exhibition a year ago with little more than a notion in my head and a date on the calendar. I'd never managed the logistics of printing, framing, designing, hanging, promoting, and representing an exhibit of that scale, nor had I ever raised a nickel's worth of donations for myself or any cause. I'm hardly seasoned at either of those things after one rodeo, but at least I now know something about what goes on in the arena and am eager to do it again.

Jack Delano, Vermont State Fair, 1941.
Library of Congress / Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI collection

The lesson that struck deepest had nothing to do with me or my skills, though, and everything to do with how deeply people reacted to the photographs by Cheryl, Balazs, and Teru. Much of that response was expressed in the notebook available in the gallery, a cathartic vehicle into which viewers expressed pain, frustration, pride, admiration, hope. What most heartened me and confirmed my judgment was the way the exhibit equally touched people with anti-war convictions and those with military connections. One man, a combat veteran and peace activist, told me the show captured the ambiguities of valor and horror he experienced in the war zone. I can't think of a more gratifying affirmation than that.

Page from Battlesight gallery book

When the Center launched in 2009, my emphasis was most firmly on the art aspect of the endeavor, on the production and presentation of aesthetically interesting work that addressed social themes. My thinking has become more complex, though I'm not sure where it's taking me. The powerful response to Battlesight among people from all walks of life hints at a hunger for art that speaks with immediacy and accessibility to the human condition, art that serves something bigger than itself. There have been times in the past month when I have wondered if what I am building is fundamentally an arts organization at all. Maybe the Center is closer to a humanitarian mission, in which art serves the cause much the same way public-service announcements do other initiatives.

I've even thought of changing the name of the Center, to something that more plainly states the social goals of raising awareness and fostering compassion. Among the names I've considered were, "The Center for Art and Humanity," "Empatheia: The Project for Art and Humanity," and "Eleos: Culture of Compassion" (somehow, Greek seems to fit the need in ways English alone doesn't). No sooner do I come up with a name, though, then I feel the weight of it dragging its chains. They all seem, for their high nobility, limiting. Humane, humanitarian, humanity--these words speak to that part of us that goes beyond mortal need to capacities of the heart and soul, to equality, fairness, justice, mercy, all the products of an intrinsic empathy that is as much in our nature as aggression and competition. In other words, to be fully human is to possess loving kindness, and the purpose of culture is to cultivate those creative aspects that forge human(e) connections.



If that's true, though, then can't all art be considered essentially humanitarian, since it all feeds the culture? Once upon a time I might have argued yes, but as I look around the contemporary art world, I cannot escape the fact that much of it is driven by conceptual, market, and personality concerns that no more serve humanity than social Darwinism feeds the poor. As I interrogate my thinking--and present it here, still raw and provisional--I find myself slouching steadily away from art that doesn't in some way--through protest, praise, prayer, witness, or wonder--aid the well-being of the personal soul or spiritus mundi. I'm not equipped to be the arbiter in all this, except to the extent that I have a small NPO with a mission and a world-view. As things are progressing, though, it seems that part of the mission is to engage in this discussion.   

"Love in Action"

Other work prevented me from commenting on the observance of Martin Luther King's birthday earlier this week, one of those rare American holidays that, like Thanksgiving and, I don't know, maybe Arbor Day, hasn't been utterly co-opted by commerce. Once a year, then, we are each reminded of Dr. King's power as a leader of the Civil Rights movement, power to both change policy and stir the soul, all within a framework of non-violence. Before his assassination in 1968, King  had begun to speak out forcefully not just against racial inequity per se, but also the evils of the Vietnam War and economic inequality. As he told his supporters at the time, he'd reached the only logical ethical conclusion that injustice in one arena is lack of justice in all.

The foundation of King's philosophy was described with swift clarity by sociologist Gayle Sulik earlier this week in her website blog. I am just getting to know Dr. Sulik via email, and she has become a stimulating and inspiring new ally. Her new book Pink Ribbon Blues examines how activities of breast cancer awareness groups, while well-intentioned, often undermine efforts to improve cancer treatment. Her work has given her stark insights into questions of suffering, compassion, and hope, common ground we have begun to explore. Her recent posting, "The Heart of Social Reform: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." begins with a brief explanation of how King came to his ethic of non-violence through the work of Gandhi and Hindu philosophy:

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a reverend and scholar committed to social justice and nonviolent action that, above all, emphasized the power of love as a potent social force. King wrote six books and numerous articles on the subject, stressing the rational and moral necessity of “Love in Action.” How often do we hear those words in public debate these days? Yet, the most influential leader of civil rights in this country lived by, and led with, an ethic of love that went beyond his religious upbringing or his pastoral career. In fact, King’s philosophy of love and nonviolent resistance reflect a long contemplative journey.


In his book Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King wrote:


“The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contracts theory of Hobbes, the “back to nature” optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi.”

As I think about the direction I'd like to take the Center for Documentary Arts, I am increasingly drawn to the power of "love in action." The idea, as Gayle explains, is grounded in the Hindu concept of satyagraha, which designates a force "that originates in truth and love and is an instrument for social and collective transformation." The ways this applies to art become more and more obvious to me, but in fully embracing them I find I come up against decades of inculcation in modernist theories and notions of "art for art's sake." These ideas insist on the artist's essential autonomy and rail against expectations that art might, can, or even should serve a cause higher than itself. I am not at all prepared to reject these ideas, nor am I sure I even need to. My aim is to more completely articulate the intellectual foundation of the Documentary Center. I am aware, however, of how much the theories still define the mainstream of artistic thought. 


Certain strains of post-modernism incorporate aspects of protest, activism, and critical commentary, though often at conceptual heights that elude the attention and comprehension of most of the population. So another part of my inquiry involves the familiar question of accessibility. I was moved by the quote Gayle chose from Stride Toward Freedom, in which King explains that the "moral and intellectual satisfaction" he sought to ground his instincts did not come from the western intellectual tradition, but from a love-based philosophy from India (which combined, of course, with his Christianity). My conclusions are far from complete on this issue, but more and more I suspect the truth I'm working toward does not so much resemble that of modernist thinkers or post-modern theorists, but rather is closer to King and others influenced by love in action.           

Golden Rule

Karen Armstrong is a scholar of comparative religion whose study of the world's sacred traditions has led her to identify the Golden Rule--do unto others as you would have them do to you--as the essential message of all scripture. This philosophy, first articulated by Confucius centuries before Jesus, is at the heart of what Armstrong calls the ideal of compassion, and as such, humanity's search for the divine. In 2008, Armstrong established the Charter for Compassion, a declaration of "absolute justice, equality, and respect" prepared by a council of multi-faith religious thinkers and leaders. (A Charter for Compassion button is in the sidebar of this page.)  She was interviewed by Bill Moyers, on the much-missed "Bill Moyer's Journal," on March 13, 2009.

Bill Moyers:  What is it that evokes the empathy--and the commitment, which you’re calling for--[in] people to put themselves in other’s shoes. What is it that evokes that in people?

Karen Armstrong: Basically, a sense of urgent need. If we don’t manage to do better than this, both in our own communities, our own nations, and as regards other nations far away, then I think we are in for a very troublesome ride. We’re not doing well at the moment.

Click here to view

Let us remember the primal duty of compassion.

Which is?

The words com-passio mean "to feel with the other," "to experience with the other"— do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. . . .  As Confucius said, who was the first to propound the Golden Rule five hundred years before Christ,  "You seek to establish yourself? Then seek to establish others"  . . .  seek to practice the Golden Rule "all day and every day." You constantly have to dethrone your ideas from the center of your world and put another there, and realize that even in the most unlikely person there is a trace of the divine.”

*

The human race has never embraced compassion. Why did we create this compassionate ideal, when all the world’s great religions were created? Because societies had reached a point of violence and the religious people said – people like the Buddha, Confucius, the sages of the Upanishads, the prophets of Israel, Socrates – they all said, this aggression, even in a good cause, is not the way to go. And people found that when they did it, all day and every day, it worked, because when you get rid of ego, it does bring you a sense of enlightenment. But it’s not just a question of holding hands in church, or embracing when you make the peace . . . it is a discipline you have to practice all day and every day. 

     I used, you know, to be a really spiteful human being. I learned a vicious form of rhetoric from my religious superiors and also from my teachers at Oxford. People used to say to me, "I’d really hate to be your enemy," because I had a really sharp tongue and I knew how to use it. I’d get in there first before someone put me down, that sort of thing. I found that in my studies, I had to practice what I found called in a footnote "the science of compassion." It was a phrase coined by a great Islamist Louis Massignon. Science not in the sense of physics or chemistry, but science in the sense of knowledge, sceintia, the Latin word for knowledge. The knowledge acquired by compassion. Feeling with the other; putting yourself in the position of the other. 

    This footnote said that a religious historian, like myself, must not approach the spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of post-Enlightenment rationalism. You mustn’t look on this in a superior way, and look at the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th-century text, as "poor soul." You had to recreate in a scholarly way all the circumstances that had resulted in this spirituality or this teaching, and not leave it, or certainly not write about it, until you can imagine yourself . . . feeling the same. So when I wrote about Mohammed, for example, I had to put myself in the position of a man living in the hell of 7th-century Arabia who sincerely believed he had been touched by God. Unless I did that I would miss Mohammed. I had to put clever Karen, edgy Oxford-educated Karen, on the back burner, and go out of myself and enter into the mind of the other. And I found, much to my astonishment, it started changing me. I couldn’t any longer be quite as vicious as I was, or dismissive as I was, in clever conversation. 

"What makes us vulnerable makes us beautiful"

Here's a brilliant TED talk by Brene Brown, research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame, and is now using that work to explore wholeheartedness.  





Dr. Brown's findings go to the heart of compassion. I was sent her talk in preparation for a two-day workshop on Love, Loss, and Forgiveness, founded and facilitated by Michael Murphy. The workshop was an exhilarating and occasionally harrowing excursion into vulnerability and bearing witness, which Dr. Murphy, an early leader in the hospice movement in America, identifies as an act of love. "We need witnesses to heal," he observed. "Our secrets are what kill us." To wholeheartedly bear witness to another's distress is difficult but intimately life-affirming and has implications far beyond the individual. As Brown and Murphy reveal, we cannot feel true compassion for others if we do not have it for ourselves. 

Pietas

Saratoga poet Marilyn McCabe has sent, via a friend, her poem inspired by Balazs Gardi's 2007 image of a man holding a wounded boy in the Korengal Valley in East Afghanistan. Nearly everyone who commented on this image compared it to some masterpiece of painting or sculpture, by Michelangelo, by Caravaggio, by Rembrandt, by El Greco, or just generally from the grand tradition of western art. Photojournalists and documentary photographers have long winced at the suggestion their work "looks like a painting," because the essence of documentary photography is that it decidedly is not a painting, meaning it is not manufactured, arranged, distilled, or otherwise interpreted to create or enhance dramatic effect. Traditionally, the first authority of a documentary photograph is precisely its literal truth, the spontaneous representation of reality it certifies and thereby honors.

El Greco, Pieta, 1587-97

More than once, I was asked if Balazs had "set up" his image; if, like a film director or one of the cadre of postmodern artists who create photographs from fictional tableaux, he had somehow staged the scene to heighten its impact. Though I have never spoken to Balazs about this, I am certain the answer is an unequivocal no. The verity of Balazs's work is its most obvious strength and virtue. (One does not endure, as Balazs Gardi does, the difficulty and sometime danger of documentary photography to create false images and present them as real.) Balazs does not call his photograph Pieta. He did not set out to create a pieta. Yet life, in its horror and beauty, offered him one and he accepted. And thus did he join a long tradition of images of suffering and pity.

Eos Lifting the Body of Her Son Memnon, Attic red-figure cup, 490-480 BCE

And yet, if a documentary photographer does not create like the masters of old, this does not mean his eye and soul are not moved to similar depths of recognition and compassion. This, I think, is a more agreeable and profound sense in which a great photograph can resemble a painting -- or symphony or any other sublime human creation. In her poem, Marilyn captures this affinity with eloquence, and mirrors it by concluding with a quotation from a master of her own medium, W. H. Auden, writing on Brueghel. The result is a richly-faceted meditation on how art reflects and magnifies our common humanity.

Afghan Pieta  
  Eyes of the one holding the limp body,
  the grainy surface as of stone,
  or pigment made of rough powder.
 
  The triolet: help sought
  from the less of it, bonds

  broken, things cut down.

  There’s a body.

  There’s a body

  and there’s life

  left, it’s seeping,

  wounds we must look for

  in tell-tale places.

  There’s the cradle:

  the holder’s arms,

  chest to body.

  The ache the eyes

  are always turned toward:

  the third figure obscure.

  The matter is always

  man. The suffering

  old masters always knew.

                                             --Marilyn McCabe

Balazs Gardi, Afghan man and wounded boy, 

Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, East Afghanistan,  2007

Best of 2010

It is with pleasure I can report that Battlesight is on two end-of-year "Best-of" lists.

David Brickman, in his blog Get Visual, named our exhibit in his Best Shows of 2010:

Battlesight: Dispatches from Iraq and Afghanistan by International Photographers stood out as a hard-hitting, carefully planned combination of three photojournalists’ personal visions of war (oddly enough, it’s the only show of photographs that made this list). 


And via Nippertown!, The Daily Gazette's Karen Bjornland included Battlesight in her recap, What We Loved This Year: Visual Arts.


Thank you, David and Karen (and friends at Nippertown!).


And thank you to all who helped me and the Center for Documentary Arts during our first year of operation. I am grateful to you one and all. And so we look toward 2011. . .