Tim Hetherington II

From Sebastian Junger's meditation on his colleague and friend, who was killed this week in Misrata, Libya, photographing the war there:

Maybe Misrata wasn’t worth dying for—surely that thought must have crossed your mind in those last moments—but what about all the Misratas of the world? What about Liberia and Darfur and Sri Lanka and all those terrible, ugly stories that you brought such humanity to? That you helped bring the world’s attention to?

After the war in Liberia you rented a house in the capital and lived there for years. Years. Who does that? No one I know except you, my dear friend. That’s part of Misrata, too. That’s also part of what you died for: the decision to live a life that was thrown open to all the beauty and misery and ugliness and joy in the world.

And the rest:

 http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2011/04/sebastian-junger-remembers-tim-hetherington-201104?printable=true#ixzz1KIQWNiQ8

In Memoriam: Tim Hetherington

I woke this morning to the sad news that documentary filmmaker and photographer Tim Hetherington lost his life yesterday in Misrata, Libya, covering the fighting between the army of Muammar Gadaffi and opposition rebels. The British-born Hetherington and an American colleague, photojournalist Chris Hondros, were both killed by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by Gadaffi forces.

Hetherington will long be remembered as a consummate war photographer and humanitarian. He trained his lens less on the drama of battle than on the terror and psychological assault that defines the war zone.  Among the work on his website are portfolios of the civil war in Liberia, of war graffiti, and perhaps most subtle and affecting, a portrait series of US soldiers asleep in their outpost camp on the front lines of the Afghan war. In their faces and postures, Hetherington recorded the trauma many of these men are sure to carry long after their wartime service ends.

In Darfur Bleeds, a brief film made by Hetherington for Human Rights Watch, the humanitarian concerns that motivated his work are fully on display. The film documents the destruction of a village in Chad, ostensibly demonstrating how the war had spilled over the border from Darfur. But Hetherington refuses to turn the event into an abstraction, and pays moving tribute to the individuals who perished in the attack.



I had the good fortune to meet Hetherington this past July, when he was at the New York State Museum screening Restrepo, the documentary he made with author Sebastian Junger about American soldiers in the Korengal Valley of East Afghanistan. I had more than a general interest in the film. At the time, I was preparing the photo exhibition Battlesight , and knew the work of one of the photographers in the show, Balazs Gardi, depicted the same part of Afghanistan where the film was made. Indeed, as I discovered, Balazs's photographs were of the identical Army unit and villages in Korengal, even of the same four-day battle seen in the movie. It was remarkable; more than one combat scene in Restrepo was also documented in Balazs's powerful stills, and Balazs is among those acknowledged by Junger and Hetherington in the end credits.

Hetherington and I arranged to do a telephone interview a few days later, when he was back home in New York. He was called away before the interview was completed, so it went unpublished. I looked at it again today, and feel now as I did then, that I was speaking to an exceptional and courageous artist and man. In Hetherington's memory, I offer excerpts of that conversation now. It begins with my question about a scene from the film.

There’s a moment in Restrepo, just after one of the soldiers has taken fire. He’s almost giddy from the experience, and says, “Once you’ve been shot at, you can’t come down.” Somebody off-camera asks, “How are you going to go back to the civilian world?” “I have no idea,” he answers. Talk about that moment, that experience. Do you feel the same sense of a high in a war zone?

Tim Hetherington: When you hear what that man is saying in that clip, he’s specifically talking about the adrenalin of a battle. But I think for many of the soldiers there, the group experience of what they went through, that bombing, was very meaningful to them. I mean, if you take an 18-year-old and he’s part of that group, and the job he’s tasked with is defending the group, his life takes on a purpose and a significance, a meaning, that must be extremely gratifying. Then when that 18-year-old comes back to America, to society, suddenly he loses all that sense of purpose and meaning. I know many of the guys miss that meaning and significance.

I think it’s the same way with journalists­—I know, for myself, that sure, adrenalin is a part of the experience. When I came out of Afghanistan in August 2008, it was like someone had pulled the rug from under my feet because I had been drip-fed adrenalin. So chemically that does something to you. But on the other hand, covering world events, covering these situations, gives your life a kind of meaning as well. It’s very gratifying to be at the center of world events as they unfold. You feel that you have some kind of significance. That is part of the reason you keep going back. It’s not purely a combat adrenaline thing; it’s more than that. And for Sebastian and I, we got close to these guys. That’s why, when I came out of Afghanistan, I missed them. I missed being up at Restrepo.

So there’s a sense that what you’re doing has a purpose, that it’s useful?

You’ve totally hit the cornerstone of my work. I always wanted to be useful and add utility. That’s why, as I’ve said before, I’m really not interested in photography, the art. I recognize that it is an aesthetic medium, so I pay attention to that. But the craft of it isn’t my primary concern. I’m not interested in the craft and art of photography per se; I’m interested in visual communication, and that ranges from the still to the moving image.

You have that perspective of working in these two related, but very different mediums. What are your thoughts about that?

The still image offers the audience a greater imaginative engagement with the subject. You look at a picture, you have to enter into a conversation with the image. That conversation is predicated on a lot of different things—your own personal experience, what you see in the picture, but also your own visual library, what you have stored in your head about the subject matter you’re seeing. When you see a moving image, especially video contextualized with sound, you’re literally being dragged through the experience. You’re not imaginatively as engaged in that. You’ve being shown something that’s more concrete. 

I’m from the photographic trade; that’s part what I do, and I understand the strengths and weaknesses of it. I think [the photojournalistic] community is caught up with the aesthetic craft of image making more than what it says. We don’t unravel enough what images say; we’re too held up on the surface level. The problem with photographs is that they can be an unreliable form of witnessing. I understand we all want to believe in the veracity of a photograph. I have a photograph of my mother on my mantelpiece. I want to believe that that image is true. We need to believe images are true. I get that. But as the actual makers of images, if we are engaged professionally in the business, we have to understand that that is also a fallacy.

What did making Restrepo teach you about warfare, about yourself, and, more broadly, about humanity?

We sought to really mine the embedded process, deeper than anyone had mined it before, in terms of the amount of time we spent with the guys, the way we embraced the unit, for all intents and purposes became part of the unit. That was a very profound experience. I had never done that before. I had been embedded with a rebel army in Liberia for six weeks, but never reached that kind of connectedness with the individuals. As a documentarian, either still or moving images, you seek to have this very, very close connection with your subjects, and I really had that with the soldiers out there. Following on from the subject of young men and war, which is a subject I’ve been preoccupied with for some time now, I really came to understand how this bonding, this sense of brotherhood that soldiers attain, that that is really the heart of the war machine. You take a small group of guys, you get them to train together, live together, bond together, they form this brotherhood. This isn’t friendship. This is brotherhood. Guys in the unit admitted they hated each other, but they would die for each other. It’s this sense of brotherhood that’s the cornerstone of the war machine. It’s not Apache helicopters or aircraft carriers or missile defense systems; that is all icing on the cake. This sense of a small group of young men who will kill and be killed for each other is at the heart of it. That goes back to time immemorial. The siege of Troy would be the same thing. It’s an obvious thing but also quite a profound thing when you start to understand that.

Tim Hetherington at the New York
State Museum, July 2010

Love and Justice

Hugo Perez

For the past week I have been ruminating on what was in every way a fine and moving evening last Tuesday, when we screened Hugo Perez's Neither Memory Nor Magic, a film portrait of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti. I had moist eyes more than once as I watched this beautiful and poignant work, which, though it depicts the life of a man who died miserably in the Holocaust, is ultimately about life, not death; courage, not fear; beauty, not brutality. Radnóti's poems, the few I know from the film and from Carolyn Forché's anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, have burrowed deep into me. He bore witness to the barbarity of the Nazi labor camps where he was imprisoned, with a voice at once elegiac and indomitable, and though he never flinched from the horror of his circumstance, his poems ultimately are expressions of profound love. Love for his wife Fanni, for the music of language, for the world:

. . . tonight the moon is so round!
Don't go past me, my friend— shout! and I'll come around! 
                                                                              
I was just admiring, up there, your eyes' blue sheen,
when it clouded over, and up in that machine
the bombs are aching to dive. Despite them, I am alive

My definition of the "documentary arts" is broadly inclusive, as evidenced in the mission state on this page; it's meant to embrace all art that bears witness to the struggle, striving, and triumph of the human spirit. Bearing witness in this sense is no passive, legalistic stance. It demands an active engagement with the world and, perhaps more deeply, a committed relationship to soul. As Forché writes in the introduction to her book, witnessing art "will have to be judged . . . by its consequences." Among the consequences must include art's ability to advocate for life, to stand on the side of compassion, generosity, care; in short, to love. As a position, this is not at all simple or easy. The instinct of a great many artists who fall loosely under the heading "documentary" is, I observe, not toward love as much as justice. I once asked the poet Hayden Carruth which of those two imperatives was "more important"; he declared in favor of justice, since justice implied love. I'm not entirely sure I agree with his choice, but the logical equation is not at all straight-forward: all love may encompass justice, but too few things that pose as "justice" can be said to espouse love. Indeed, the concept of justice is commonly defined according to the duality of good and evil, a useful dichotomy if one is in need of enemies or dominion, but not one that accommodates grace. Grace, simply put, is treating others not necessarily as they "deserve," but as love requires — as fellow travelers on a divine journey. This is a radical notion, one that runs counter to logic and experience, yet it seems to me just where we can situate Radnóti, and where the artists I most admire reside. This does not mean I take no interest in art that seeks to expose injustice or address suffering. Far from it. That is also an act of witness. Yet I have long believed, and maintain more strongly now than ever, that art's greatest power is not as a mirror, but as a torch, beacon, guide, path — whatever metaphor works for you — to higher consciousness. Art elevates humanity not so much via the enlightenment of argument and evidence as through the illumination of the soul's mysteries and wisdoms.

This is what Hugo's film accomplishes. There are passages in it as moving as any I've seen in a documentary film; in one, the screen painfully dissolves to black, a darkness broken by one of Radnóti's poems like a herald from heaven. I want to express my gratitude to Hugo for his work and for being my guest in Albany, and thank all those who attended and stayed for the lively Q&A afterward. More screenings are planned for the future; the Opalka Gallery, my partner in last week's event, will be co-host and venue for a series of four films beginning in October. I am currently programming that series and will have more information to share on it shortly.

The audience during the Q&A

Poetry excerpts from "Forced March" and "Letter to My Wife," translated by Emery George, from Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited by Carolyn Forché. 

Neither Memory Nor Magic: Part II

I fell beside him; his body turned over,
already taut as a string about to snap.
Shot in the back of the neck. That's how you too will end,

I whispered to myself; just lie quietly.

Patience now flowers into death.

Der springt noch auf, a voice said above me.

On my ear, blood dried, mixed with filth.*

When Miklós Radnóti's body was discovered in a mass grave in 1946, he had been dead a year and a half, one more of the staggering millions who perished in the shadow of Hitler between 1939 and 1944. Unlike most of the victims, however, Radnóti did not vanish after death nor remain silent. Already celebrated in his native Hungary as an important poet before his internment in German labor camps, Radnóti rose like a phoenix to bear witness to all he endured as an enslaved prisoner. When his body was exhumed, his wife found a small notebook in his pocket that contained his last poems, and many of his greatest. The so-called Bor Notebook, named for the Serbian copper mine where it was begun, is one of the twentieth century's abiding testaments of artistic courage amid barbarity and suffering. The poems Radnóti composed in Bor and on the forced march before his execution possess a strength, pathos, and compassion that take them even beyond literature, into the highest precincts of the human spirit.

On April 12, the Center for Documentary Arts will premiere an expanded and re-edited version of Hugo Perez's Neither Memory Nor Magic, a film portrait of Radnóti. The screening, presented in collaboration with the Opalka Gallery, will be shown at 6:30 in the gallery's theater, Sage College of Albany, 140 New Scotland Avenue, Albany. (If you haven't read my previous post about the event, there is additional information and a trailer there about Radnóti and the screening.) This is a proud moment for the Center for Documentary Arts; Hugo Perez is a gifted young filmmaker whose work is insightful and visually beautiful, and the opportunity to see this film in the intimate setting of the Opalka theater, with the director in audience, is a rare privilege. Perez and Radnóti each embodies the Center's humanitarian mission with work that speaks to individual conscience and calls us to empathy. Radnóti's poems are creative acts so potent they leave you changed. The same can be said of Perez's film, which was awarded the prestigious Chairman's Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities.


. . .  Lonely the vigil I'm keeping;
in my mouth I taste that half-smoked cigarette, not your
kisses, and dreams won't come, no sleep will come to relieve me,
since I can face neither death nor a life any longer without you


Neither Memory Nor Magic—the title comes from a Radnóti poem—has been eight years in the making.   Perez traveled to Hungary and Serbia to visit the places where the poet experienced his greatest triumphs and most desperate hours. He interviewed more than fifty people, including friends who knew Radnóti in Budapest before the war and a fellow inmate who shared the horrors of Bor. A poignant image early in the film shows an exhibit in a Hungarian school in which Radnóti's poems are displayed impaled on barbed wire. Later, Perez is welcomed by Radnóti's widow Fanni into the apartment where the couple lived together. And flowing like a strong current through the film are the poems themselves, which voice their author's hopes, joys, fears, anguish, and finally surrender in language both humble and haunting.


For its art, for its humanity, and for its portrait of grace in the face of brutality, this is a film not to be missed.

Hugo Perez, right, interviews Ferenc Andai in Serbia,
where he was interned in a forced labor camp with Radnoti

Perez graduated from Yale University in 1993 with a degree in English. His training as an artist began in Little Havana, Miami, amid relatives who fled Cuba after the revolution. He grew up suffused with a sense of exile, yet entirely at home among the movies and stories of his native country, America. His Hispanic heritage is the occasion for some light irony in the name of his film company, M30A. The appelation derives from the Latin American custom of naming a revolution after the day and month it was started. In Perez's case, the revolution was the launching of M30A itself, which took place the next to the last day of August 2003. 

I spoke to the filmmaker earlier this month as he was putting the finishing touches on NMNM.

TC:  What is the genesis of your film?


Hugo Perez: You could say that it started in Saratoga Springs, New York in the summer of 1996, when I had the pleasure of meeting Carolyn Forché and was introduced to her anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. The whole idea of that book is that poetry can be almost documentary in nature, a poem can be like a mini-documentary. The book covers the twentieth century from Armenia to Rawada through the eyes of poets. This idea of poetry as witness was one I was quite taken with. Right in the middle of the twentieth century—right in the middle of the book—is the Holocaust, and one of the poets featured in that section is Miklós Radnóti. In fact, the story of the Bor notebook is the story she starts out her introduction to the entire volume with. The first couple pages are about Radnóti, and the notebook coming out of the grave. I read it and was really moved by it. Then eight years went by. I met this guy named Gregory Carr, who had a foundation called the Carr Foundation and at that time was interested in supporting documentary film. He asked if I had any ideas for a documentary that would celebrate the power of poetry. That’s perhaps the only time I’ve ever been asked that question, and will likely be the only time for the rest of my life. He asked with the intention that he was looking for a film to support. I thought back to Against Forgetting, I sent him a copy of the book, we talked about it some more, and we decide that Radnóti’s story captured the essence of poetry of witness. Ultimately, the foundation wound up supporting my film. Sometimes you choose films, and sometimes films choose you.


Why Radnóti, of all the poets in the anthology?


A couple of things. There isn’t anything else like the story of the Bor notebook. Literally, his final poems were in a grave for a year and a half before anybody saw them. His notebook with his final poems were soaked in his blood, blood of a poet. It adds a special drama and quality to his particular story. And also the fact that it was the Holocaust, this monumental moment of evil—it captures everything we were trying to say about poetry in the twentieth century.


What was it you wished to say?


In the case of Radnóti, in the last weeks of his life he must have known he was going to be killed. He must have known that perhaps nobody would ever see these poems he was writing. And yet he continued to write. He wrote four poems while he was on a two-month death march, before he was shot into a mass grave. To me that’s very powerful— even when you’re a week away from your death and can barely walk, you care enough about what you do, and believe in it enough, that you write a poem. As a poet, as a writer, you can’t focus on the outcome of your work, who’s going to read it. There’s something about the act of setting things down, putting pen to paper, that is meaningful in and of itself.


And the documentary was a way not just for us, but for you yourself to come to know this man?


I went in not as a scholar but as a filmmaker and storyteller. I wasn’t looking to make the definitive statement on Radnóti. I was trying to find connections that would help me understand him and the story of his world in a way I could present to audiences. Over the course of a couple years, I was back and forth to Hungary six or seven times, we interviewed more than fifty people, including a handful of people who had known him; I literally walked in the same places he walked. I went to Serbia to see the Bor copper mine, where he was a slave laborer. We followed the course of the last hundred kilometers of the death march, the different places where he stopped and he camped. There’s not much left of that time, but you get a connection of the geography, the place he was in, the sky that he saw. The film is episodic in nature, especially the last forty minutes, it’s a string of little stories that take you from the labor camp to the death march to his death and after his death. There’s a voice in each of those little segments that takes you through.


The film is a portrait of artistic courage and a love story between the poet and his wife Fanni.


Oh, definitely. One of the great privileges and pleasures of this trip was getting to meet and spend time with Fanni Radnóti, who is still alive today and still lives in the apartment they shared together. She had never done an interview. She has really been the keeper of the flame for Radnóti, she has assured that his legacy lives on. Every significant project on him that has happened as happened with her blessing or some conversation with her. I tried to get her to give me an interview and she wouldn’t. I finally persuaded her to let me film her, which I use as the ending of the film.


How did the experience enhance your understanding of Radnóti's poems?


When I read his work, it felt very personal, like he was speaking to me. Making the film helped me understand his world better. The thing I came to understand more was how he developed into who he was. He was Jewish by birth but not by culture. He was a very secular guy who as a teenager got introduced to the great Hungarian poets, and decided he wanted to be one of them. He went and he made himself into a great poet.

* Excerpts translated by Emery George, from Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forché.

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.