Carl Toth: Deconstructing Photography

In the summer of 2015, I wrote an essay for a catalog on the work of former Cranbrook Academy of Art photographer-in-residence Carl Toth. The exhibition was titled "Carl Toth: Pioneering Artist, Photographer, and Educator." It ran in fall 2015 at the Walter J. Mannin Center for the Arts at Endicott College in Massachussetts. The show was organized by Carl's student Mark Towner, now a Dean at Endicott, and curated by Oakland University's Andrea Eis, another Toth student. The exhibition has traveled to Wake Forest University where it will be on view in the Hanes Art Gallery until March 27, 2016. 

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Carl Toth, Untitled, 1978, chromogenic print (All images: courtesy of Endicott College).

In her essay "Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View," Rosalind Krauss states that "photography is an imprint or transfer off the real," fixing, as it were, the photographic image to its referent. (Susan Sontag makes a similar observation in her essay "The Image-World" when she writes that a photograph is "a trace, something stenciled directly off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.") The presumed nature of photography as an indexical sign, that is, as a physical trace of the object to which it refers, underpins prevailing thought about the medium and of what visual culture theorist Tom Gunning terms its "truth claim." For more than four decades, Carl Toth has endeavored to question that claim in an oeuvre that has progressively deconstructed photography's conventions.

Trained in English literature as well as photography, Toth has always understood photography to be, like language, first and foremost a sign system. His early work challenged then-accepted photographic aesthetics regarding subject matter, framing, and technique. Specifically, Toth took up the vernacular practice of the snapshot as inspiration right at the moment when photography's status as a fine art medium was being hotly debated. In a series of untitled works from the early to mid 1970s, Toth presented ensembles of gelatin-silver prints of family members and pets, shot in various locations, which were hand colored to highlight their constructed nature. Some of these works consist of grainy and blurred image sequences that are slight variations on one another, subverting the notion of photography as a device for capturing the "the perfect moment." Other works interrupt or extend the negative's conventional quadrilateral frame, piecing together images to reveal the space that might otherwise have been cut away at the edges and questioning the frame's interior truth claim to be, as Krauss would have it, "an example of nature-as-representation, nature-as-sign."

Carl Toth, Untitled, 1971-1974?, hand-colored gelatin silver print.

The later 1970s brought another body of work that further investigated photography's apparatus of mediation. Central to photography's truth claim is its presumed condition of immediacy, that is, of the medium itself as essentially transparent, characterized by the quality of looking through the image-signifier to the signified content, which is its presumed reality based in nature. This connection to the real is further grounded upon what Gunning terms "iconicity," that is, a visual resemblance to what is being represented. In a series of type C color prints, Toth rephotographed Polaroid SX 70 photographs that in turn re-presented other elements within the composition to create a moebius strip of remediation, drawing attention to the artifice within the frame. In one untitled work, a Polaroid print of a miniature ladder and stair laying side by side on a plywood sheet is shown standing upright on a plywood sheet with the stairway and ladder balancing on top of it; in another, two Polaroids of what appear to be plastic toy parts, one green and one blue, set on table tops are set upon a table top. The frames of these works and others in the series are square, refusing the conventional photographic aspect ratios of horizontal (landscape) and vertical (portrait), the traditional orientations of nature-based observation and its representation in Western visual art.

The terms index and icon so often used in discussing photography are taken from the semiotics of nineteeth-century American Pragmatist polymath Charles Sanders Peirce, who brought the term semiotics into modern usage. In the Peircian system of semiotics (not to be confused with Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's semiology, which influenced another well-known commentator on photography, Roland Barthes), the index is, as has been noted, the trace made by the physical object, such as the impression a car tire leaves in the mud, the relationship of the sign to its referent being one of empirical fact. The icon is a sign whose relationship to the referent is based on semblance; simply put, it looks like what it is supposed to represent: an illuminated figure in traffic signal communicating that it is now safe to walk. There is a third semiotic category of signs delineated by Peirce that does not find its way into the discussion as much, namely, the symbol. The relation of a symbol to its referent is abstract; it is a matter of habit or convention. Photography's symbolic status is based in large part on its truth claim as a transparent medium par excellence and thus a preferred representational conveyor of objective reality. The contingency of photography-as-symbol is a central aspect of what Toth's work ultimately reveals.

Carl Toth, Double/Vision, 1991, xerographic collage.

The heightened awareness of photography's mediating condition finds its definitive expression in Toth's late work, which abandons the camera entirely and instead employs xerographic collage as it primary technique. In these complex works, bits and pieces of recycled images are juxtaposed with a range of textural effects and formed into compositions that do not easily "add up" either as a coherent narrative or a coherent space, creating a situation in which looking-through is exchanged for one of looking-at, a state that can be termed hypermediation. This is especially true of larger-scale works that occupy an entire wall, which as Donald Kuspit notes have very few signs of nature in them outside of the wood-grain pattern elements of some compositions that in their obviously having been subject to manufacturing processes announce their artifice and hence distance from the natural.

Instead of transparently re-presenting the field of vision, Carl Toth's photographic practice has self-consciously evolved to create it in virtual form. And that is his signal achievement.

9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster

I remember the week after September 11, 2001, when the subway from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan was back in limited service, getting off at Broadway-Lafayette and feeling somewhat disoriented when my usual landmark indicating south, the World Trade Center, was missing from the downtown skyline. The specter of the World Trade Center was soon enough evoked by Art Speigelman in his September 24, 2001, New Yorker magazine cover of the Twin Towers as black silhouettes against a black background. The Twin Towers haunted the New York skyline again a few months later in the Tribute in Light installation of 88 search lights configured in the buildings' original footprints and projected upward into the night sky.

The tremulous memory effects of the World Trade Center is the subject of Thomas Stubblefield's 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster. It examines, on the one hand, the cultural industries' attempts to put the World Trade Center disaster down the memory hole by erasing its image in media representations while, on the other hand, galvanizing its persistence as a kind of visual undead with deep ideological significance in the collective consciousness.

Underlying the text is the assumption that our reception of the events of September 11 and its aftermath have been profoundly shaped by the military-entertainment complex and its culture-industry forebears. Hollywood cinema, particularly Cold War dystopias and science fiction; various photographic genres from fine art to journalistic to robotic surveillance; and social psychology constitute the fertile ground from which the cultural meanings of September 11 and its imagery have sprouted and grown.

According to Stubblefield, there have been two main ways of interpreting September 11 from the academic perspective, one primarily European and the other basically American.The former extends the critical analysis of spectacle society, i.e., laying bare the alienating effects of mass media under capitalism; the latter involves the more pragmatic discipline of trauma studies, the therapeutic response to dealing with disasters both natural and man-made. Stubblefield endeavors to steer a path between the two.

First and foremost is the role of the camera in representing September 11. The year 2001 was the first time digital cameras outsold film and September 11 is believed to be the most photographed disaster in history. Ironically, a good portion of the archive was not recorded on digital media but on film, especially from disposable cameras purchased after the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11, crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Another significant database of images was recorded by what in contemporary parlance we might call optical drones—security cameras, webcams, and other imaging devices of the Panopticon. In both cases, the dialectic of morbid fascination, the lure of the spectacle on the one hand, and the bracketing off of horrific experience, the need to hold trauma at bay on the other, produces what Stubblefield calls "non-seeing," a situation in which the apparatus of the camera at the same time enables us to maintain distance in space and time from actual events while ostensibly reaffirming their reality through the captured image.

And yet the reality theoretically being captured is itself up for debate. Stubblefield examines two well-known examples of supposed diffidence (what sociologist Georg Simmel terms the "blase" attitude engendered by modern culture) in the face of the September 11 disaster. The first is Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker's A Group of Young People Watch the Events of 9/11 from a Brooklyn Rooftop (2001), an image of five hipsters apparently basking in the autumn sun as black smoke from the collapsed towers billows across the East River. The photograph was cited by Frank Rich in The New York Times as representative of the American public's failure to learn anything significant from the September 11 attacks, a state of denial held to begin even as the horrific event was taking place. Withheld from publication until the fifth anniversary of September 11, the meaning of the photograph was almost immediately contested, not the least by its subjects who confessed to actually being in "shock and disbelief" about the attack rather than nonchalant as Rich asserted.

The other is Tim Soter's Self Portrait (2001), showing the artist, also on a Brooklyn rooftop, looking straight into the camera as smoke pours out from the Twin Towers in the distance behind him, an image posted for its perceived opportunism on the "wall of shame" as part of the "Here is New York" exhibition mounted in a vacant SoHo storefront not long after the attacks. Professed on one level by the photographer to provide a document of himself within the historic event for the future sake of his grandchildren, Stubblefield reads it as a prime example of photography's mechanically reproduced "euphoric blindness," its penchant for separating the photographer from the photographed.

Stubblefield doesn't cite it, but this distancing in space and time, and the slippery nature of photographic signification, is central to Siegfried Kracauer's under-appreciated 1927 essay "Photography," in which he discusses the difference between the photograph and what he terms the "memory-image." Kracauer writes: "Compared to photography, memory's records are full of gaps." A photograph captures what is within the camera's mechanical view while the memory-image is highly selective based upon an individual's perception.

But a photograph is in essence only a specter of the reality it represents, a trace of a fugitive moment that is gone the instant it is captured. The gap between the photograph and the memory-image increases over time with the signifying value of the physical trace eroding as the years go by. "The truth content of the original [photograph] is left behind in its history," Kracauer notes, opening up the possibility of broader significance through what might be termed the collective memory-image, in this case as a signifier within the visual culture of the disaster of September 11.

Contributing to the social imaginary of September 11 representation is the history of American popular and visual culture, especially as it evolved after the Second World War. Stubblefield organizes each chapter of the book by providing a genealogy, a prequel as it were, of films, photographic images, and other cultural references to frame various representations of September 11, from falling bodies and their subsequent disappearance from the public eye, to abandoned cityscapes in various post-Apocalyptic mise-en-scenes, to the erasure of the Twin Towers in media depictions of the New York City skyline.

As much as the events of day were captured visually, it is the void left behind by the collapse of the Twin Towers that reveals the ever-widening gap between the initial photographic record's truth content and the metamorphosis of the collective memory-image over time. The book's penultimate chapter is the most powerful one, dealing with failure of non-representation as exemplified by Spiegelman's graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) and Michael Arad's 9/11 memorial Reflecting Absence (2011). In both cases, the semiotic dialectic of presence/absence is ostensibly reversed—rather than the presence of the sign marking the absence of that to which it refers, the shadows and voids of the World Trade Center's silhouette and footprint are vestiges of a  wound that refuses to completely heal. This reversal constitutes a space for institutionalizing what Stubblefield terms a "national trauma" (and what we might term a pathological collective memory-image), a psychological state that early on facilitated the march to war and now continues with "counterinsurgency" measures such as NSA warrantless surveillance, CIA drone assassinations, and the militarization of the domestic police force.

Instead of heralding a new political reality or the occasion for national reflection, Stubblefield concludes, September 11 seems to have provided the impetus for continuing business as usual, only now with a vengeance. The American Imperium carries on, most recently through what Naomi Klein terms "disaster capitalism." And in that sense, Frank Rich appears to have been right.

Patti Smith: Photographer In Search of Lost Time

Patti Smith, Arthur Rimbaud's Utensils, Charleville, 2005, gelatin silver print. (Courtesy of the artist and Robert Miller Gallery, New York. Image credit: © Patti Smith.)

During the media preview for the show of her photographs that opened June 1 at the Detroit Institute of Arts, musician, author, and artist Patti Smith responded to a question about her most enduring memory of the 14 or so years she lived in suburban St. Clair Shores, just northeast of Detroit. She told of taking her two children, son Jackson and daughter Jesse, at the time 10 and 5 respectively, for a morning walk on a crisp autumn day. The sun was shining up ahead, the sky was clear, the birds chirping. The two children walked ahead holding hands, perfectly silhouetted by the light. She remembers thinking to herself, "This is a perfect moment and soon it will be gone." That statement is an apt description of the sentiment underlying the relationship of photography to human existence and it's a pretty good guidepost to some of the key ideas in "Patti Smith: Camera Solo."

The show is the first traveling museum exhibition of her photography and it comprises an intimate self-portrait of the artist and her influences and interests in a career that has spanned over 40 years, from her early days as a starving artist in New York City to her emergence as a significant figure in the punk music scene in the mid-1970s to her current position as a doyenne of indy culture. In addition to some 60 black-and-white images, the majority taken with a vintage Polaroid Land 250 camera, the exhibition contains a number of personal artifacts that often appear in the photographs.

The show is installed in groupings that articulate several themes. A large segment of the exhibition is devoted to artists and their creative surroundings. There's a photograph of the chair in which Roberto Bolano sat when he wrote and another of Herman Hesse's typewriter. There's an image of a jar of brushes from the studio of Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant. A large section is devoted to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, including several images shot at the museum dedicated to him in Charleville-Mezieres in northern France. One image that gives pause is a view of the River Ouse taken from the bridge under which Virginia Woolf's body was retrieved three weeks after she had drowned herself in March 1941. In a display case next to the photograph is a rounded rock Smith collected from the river similar to the ones Woolf had filled her pockets with in order to prevent herself from floating, thereby ensuring the success of her second attempt at suicide. There is of course a section devoted to Robert Mapplethorpe, about whose deep relationship with Smith is chronicled in the best-selling awarding-winning memoir Just Kids. In the DIA installation, it constitutes the bridge between the external world of artistic influences and the internal realm of personal emotion, which takes form in pictures of Smith's family and their associations.

In his seminal, if under-appreciated 1927 essay on the subject, "Photography," Siegfried Kracauer compares the medium with what he terms the "memory-image," a comparison that resonates in considering this show. "Compared to photography," Kracauer writes, "memory's records are full of gaps." He further notes: "Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory-images retain what is given only so far as it has significance." Which is to say that a photograph captures and records what is present at the place and time that is within view of the camera's mechanical apparatus while the memory-image is highly selective based on the subjective import accorded the scene by the individual perceiver. The photograph fixes what consciousness sometimes lets slip away. So had a camera been present at the episode Smith recounted at the media conference at the DIA on the morning of Thursday, May 31, 2012, that perfect moment now gone would still be available for us to see.

And yet the photograph is only a specter of the reality it presents, a ghost image of the once seen, a trace of a fugitive moment that, however perfect, is gone in the instant it is captured, a condition that becomes ever more pronounced as the distance from the point of origin increases. An old photograph, Kracauer observes:

has been emptied of the life whose physical presence overlay its merely spatial configuration. In inverse proportion to photographs, memory-images enlarge themselves into monograms of remembered life. The photograph is the sediment that has settled from the monogram, and from year to year its semiotic value decreases. The truth content of the original is left behind in its history; the photograph captures only the residuum that history has discharged.

The chasm between the dead physical gelatin silver print and the living memory-image is something that Smith seems to want to close. This is where the artifacts in the installation, the actual things that inspired some of the images, in a sense come into play. At one point in her guided tour of the gallery, Smith pointed to objects around the room -- her father's cracked teacup, her late husband Fred "Sonic" Smith's cherished 1964 Mosrite "Ventures"-model electric guitar, an unadorned red marble cross left to her by Mapplethorpe -- and pronounced each "priceless" in its turn. And indeed each thing by its continued presence sustains a relationship that loss has threatened to take away; the objects serve as talismans of a reality that is photographically destined to remain unredeemed.

In writing the essay on photography, Kracrauer was influenced by Marcel Proust, who meditated on the vicissitudes of memory for a better part of his illness-plagued abbreviated life. Proust's notion of involuntary memory (that cathartic release triggered unintentionally by a chance encounter, the episode of the madeleine from In Search of Lost Time being the most famous example) at first blush stands in contrast to the apparent superficiality of the photographic image. But upon further consideration, the photograph, through the capturing of certain details, has the potential to open up what Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street terms the "optical unconscious," a more broadly available memory-image, a cultural, i.e., a collective one, that not only conveys meaning for the creator but for others as well. And for both Kracauer and Benjamin (who were contemporaries and friends) this provides photography entry into the realm of art.

One of the details in "Camera Solo" comes from thinking about the juxtaposition of artifacts in the gallery and the images Smith took of artifacts of artists and other figures she admires, many of whom were dead long before she became an artist herself. In particular are the images taken around the Musee Rimbaud, shrine of perhaps the most significant influence on Smith's creative development. Arguably, the most important image in this regard is that of Rimbaud's eating utensils, shot in 2005, more than a century after he last used them. These prosaic items, tools used to sustain life, are transformed in the photograph into sacred objects, fetishized in a way they likely never were when the poet sat down to use them in an evening's repast. The mediated condition of the fork and spoon (which are probably still set at table in a room in a small French town "over there") provides a phenomenological distance that allows them to enter into a cultural discourse that the physical artifacts, as personal mementos, cannot. The distinction is one of intentionality, which separates works of art from mere things.

There's a lot more that could be said about this exhibition. One line of discussion might investigate how the show is a essentially visual memoir of Smith's travels, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically. Another might be how the Romantic notion of authenticity plays throughout. In that regard, the choice of Polaroid serves an essential function. Unlike traditional film, the latent image of the Polaroid develops in daylight before our very eyes. The elusive reality lost at the instant of tripping the shutter is miraculously brought back to life, albeit virtually, almost immediately authenticating the moment one has sought to preserve. (Digital does the same thing of course, but the subsequent image is easily susceptible to alteration in a way Polaroid prints are not.) The fact that the more recent images are being shot on expired film provides another, if unintentional, authentic effect. The dropped-out sections of deteriorated emulsion and other imperfections foreground the mediated aspect of the image, acknowledging the photographs as artifacts in their own right. (The actual prints in the show are images of the original images, printed on gelatin silver paper for archival purposes. But that's another discussion altogether.)

While that perfect moment in St. Clair Shores is gone about 20 years now, "Patti Smith: Camera Solo" is here and now at the DIA. Catch a glimpse of it before it slips away.

Patti Smith: Camera Solo" is on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward Avenue in Detroit until September 2. Go to http://www.dia.org or call 313-833-7900 for information.

Playing catch up, pt. 1

It's been quite a while since I've put up any new content. First it was the end of the school term, then it was the holidays, and then it was the beginning of the new school term. And somewhere in between it all I had to make a blood sacrifice (not to be confused with blood libel) to the sprawling pagan god soon to be formerly known as the Motor City and buy another car. Anyway, following are a few things from the end of last year that I wanted to take note of before they completely faded from memory.

Still & Present: Andrew Doak & Millee Tibbs
Elaine Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University
29 October - 17 December 2010

Andrew Doak, October Lunch, 2009, archival pigment print. (Courtesy of the artist.)

Millee Tibbs, 3-2-87, 2005, archival digital prints. (Courtesy of the artist.)

The age of social networking and the digital imaging technology that has helped propagate its visual culture has provided ample opportunity for narcissistic self-reflection. Artists, of course, have been doing it for centuries in the form of the self portrait. Postmodern iterations, particularly in photography but in other mediums as well, have explored the constructed nature of the self in the highly mediated world in which we live, most notably in the body of work undertaken since the late 1970s by Cindy Sherman. This exhibition explored the issue of self-representation with more reflexivity (as opposed to pure self-indulgence) than one normally encounters in the average Facebook profile.

A recent Cranbrook grad, Andrew Doak revels in his corporeal self, as well as the sumptuous delights that help to sustain it, as if to exorcise the specter of its transient photographic presence. (All photographs are ghost images in that the ephemeral moments captured on film are records of the already-seen, a past present that no longer exists.) Interspersed between multiply-exposed images of the artist engaging in various eating rituals were a number of large-scale photographic tableaux inspired by the vanitas genre. Capturing every morsel of unfinished food and garnish in exacting detail, Doak's renditions upend the moralistic tone of traditional Protestant examples, instead projecting an unrepentant hedonism that at times borders on the obscene. (Which isn't to say that's bad.)

In another series Doak put himself in the place of the artist's model, reenacting academic set pieces of forest nymphs, odalisques, and the like. Doak's more corpulent physique, perfectly normal in the aesthetic historiography that these pictures play on, contrasts with newer conceptions of especially female body image as well as performing a kind of gender transgression. My favorite of this group, in part because I'm a big fan Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is Doak's self portrait as Noble Savage, which has him reposing shirtless on a blanket in a snow-covered field among copse of bare trees, contemplating a half-eaten pomegranate with other food scraps scattered around him. Indeed, Rousseau's Confessions is over the top, not unlike Doak's basic sensibility, and it was Rousseau's unleashing of expressive individualism in the 18th century that touched off the Romantic movement in Europe and whose reverberations have permeated self-reflective art ever since. It's the sometimes more grotesque exemplars of the tradition (Julian Schnabel and Damien Hirst, anyone?) that Doak seems to be deconstructing.

Millee Tibbs, who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design where she got her MFA, investigates space and time as they pertain to the experience of the self. The Jacobs Gallery installation consisted of three separate series, each of which in its own way questioned the traditional trope of the self portrait as an entry into an artist's "authentic" persona.

The series "Self-Portraits" from mid decade are landscapes in which the artist's physical self is not visible. Having titles like "Self Portrait Behind a Rock" and "Self Portrait in the Fog," these black-and-white images toy with Hans Hoffman's famous dictum "I bring the landscape home in me" and also Jackson Pollock's more boastful claim "I am nature," that posit artistic expression and the object that embodies it as a manifest form of natural genius. A more recent series, "Do You Look Like Me," juxtaposes passport-size photos of acquaintances alongside the artist mimicking the poses, hairstyles (and in the case of male subjects facial hair), and dress.

Most intriguing was a series of digitally manipulated images, "This is a Picture of Me," that pair old family snapshots of the artist as a child with contemporary recreations. In each, Tibbs fashions her adult body into the awkward poses of her youthful self, setting it in the identical background and clad in replica attire, including a couple of birthday suits. The verisimilitude is enhanced with PhotoShopped red-eye, bad lighting, faded chroma, and other editing tricks. There are anomalies here and there -- the inexact match of patch pockets on a pair of jeans, the missing pattern and wrong color on a woolen skirt, but for the most part the effect is persuasive enough.

Taken together, the work of Doak and Tibbs exposes the myth of "genuine" authenticity that late-modern commodity culture applies to the individual through the new technologies such as social networking. But at the same time they point to a new authenticity (or might we call it "authenticity-ness"), one that accepts the social construction of self and embraces its symptoms. In these days of life lived on the screen, the fake, it seems, is real.

Portraits of global labor

Jane Duggan, Blacksmiths, Northern Pakistan, 1993.

Frank Hammer, Metal Worker, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2006.

I often feel a twinge of ambivalence when looking at so-called political art in a gallery or museum setting. Perhaps it's a hangover from my formalist studio training as an undergrad (my main influence as a painter in the mid-1970s was James Adley, a student of Clyfford Styll's and now at 80 still a committed flat-surface absolutist), but I also like to think that it has as much if not more to do with a healthy skepticism toward the privilege too many artists of that stripe seem to enjoy in criticizing the contradictions of one social world from the safety of another, arguably no-less-conflicted one called the artworld. Work that investigates identity representation and construction drawn from those in the margins would appear to be on firmer footing, but then there's the whole question of whether one really needs to, as George Clinton says, "dance in my feet" before being able to "walk a mile in my shoes."

The show up at Swords Into Plowshares Peace Gallery doesn't really resolve that question, but it does provide an opportunity to see images of global workers taken by two people who have danced in those feet all of their lives. And although they're billed in gallery handouts and press materials as "artists," a more appropriate term for them might be "cultural producers," agents who in this case use the visual medium not as a form of commodity exchange but as engaged communication.

The exhibition "Portraits of Global Labor" features the work of two longtime labor activists, Jane Duggan, secretary-treasurer of the Detroit chapter of the American Postal Workers Union, and Frank Hammer, retired president of UAW Local 909 in Warren, Mich. The images contained in the exhibition are drawn from their travels around the world. They were sometimes made in an official capacity, sometimes surreptitiously, and sometimes simply out of personal interest.

Most of Duggan's images of Asian workers come from the period when she was living abroad -- years before Eat, Pray, Love -- due to visa restrictions imposed on her then husband, a Pakistani. One set of photos, depicting batik workers in a seaside shanty in Malaysia, documents age-old techniques of craft production before the rise of rationalized factory work in the export processing zones of globalization. Another series documents graduates of a training development class Duggan ran at the Detroit post office to help foster upward mobility. Some of the graduates have since died and the pictures Duggan took are the only visual representations of them in their working life.

Many of Hammer's photos were taken to document trips to several South American countries over the past decade as part of union programs to witness and express solidarity with international labor organizing efforts. Images from Cuba and El Salvador capture workers striving to emerge from under the shadow of American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Photos from Porto Alegre, Brazil, document work and life in the year of the re-election of Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, himself a metal worker and unionist, as president. They should have special resonance for viewers here as Porto Alegre is where the first World Social Forum was held in 2001, the second US national iteration of which met this past June in the D. Photos shot in the US were taken literally from the front lines as Hammer participated in the labor actions they depict.

In her statement, Duggan writes: "Workers of all countries unite...and be seen." And to be sure, this is where these images have force.

In distinguishing between old and new social movements (for example, labor and civil rights vs. green and LGBT), social theorists and researchers, such as Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, typically draw the line between mobilizing for economic well-being and political franchise on the one hand and less materialistic objectives such as acceptance of lifestyle and culture on the other. But, as Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, in their book Civil Society and Political Theory, note, ultimately to effect change requires some level of resource mobilization and in the end material reconstruction of social and political reality. (Their most compelling quote in this regard: "Laws are frozen politics," and certainly the whole issue of gay marriage as it's currently playing out is a case in point.)

What identity politics, especially as it exists in the rarified atmosphere of the artworld, and new social movement theory see as a goal, Cohen and Arato recognize as part of a longer process. First is indeed the recognition of identity, bringing heretofore under-acknowledged publics into view. Second is inclusion, building a sense of solidarity among those who once felt isolated from one another (what second-wave feminists called "consciousness-raising"). But third is influence, a critical mass that demands attention be paid. And finally is enacting reform, which in modern democratic societies is made concrete through legislation, government regulation, and case law.

In bringing the workers of the world back into view, Duggan and Hammer make the case that so-called old social movements still have relevance (and in this age of globalization and in the wake of the recent economic meltdown perhaps now more than ever). Don't go to this show expecting to see perfectly cut mats, archival printing, and museum-quality framing. This isn't the savvy production of artworld posers; it's the real deal, pure and simple.

The exhibition "Portraits of Global Labor," featuring photographs by Jane Duggan and Frank Hammer, is on view until Oct. 9 at Swords Into Plowshares Peace Gallery, 33 East Adams, in Grand Circus Park near downtown Detroit. An evening of readings by workers is scheduled for Sept. 18, from 7 - 9 pm. Call 313 963 7575 for information.

Robert Frank: Detroit Experiences @ the DIA

So I'm playing catch up here. But with the show coming down & the Independence Day weekend upon us, it seems like a good time to reflect on one of the best exhibitions in Detroit so far this year, Detroit Experiences, Robert Frank: 1955,@ the DIA.

Anyone familiar with photographic history or with Beat culture knows Frank's masterpiece The Americans, published in the US in 1959 with a preface by Jack Kerouac. In 2009, the National Gallery of Art mounted a 50th-anniversary exhibition of the photos collected in the book, which traveled, fittingly enough, to San Francisco and New York.

Taking a cue from that, DIA Associate Curator Nancy Barr rifled through the DIA's own substantial photography collection and came up with a trove of images taken as part of the original project, all done during the Detroit leg of Frank's road trip sponsored by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She selected more than 60 drawn from a pool of some 1500 in the collection and, in a curatorial move of pure inspiration, installed them in the galleries behind the south wall of Diego Rivera's magnificent Detroit Industry (1932-33) murals. The exhibition includes the Detroit images contained in The Americans plus many that have never been seen before in public.

I saw the show several times, in part because I took all of my CCS classes there as part of the required coursework. As a result, there are many ways I could riff on this exhibition and I'll touch on a couple.

First, is the art history part. In the catalog, Barr notes that Frank was motivated to take up the project due to the influence of Walker Evans, whose book American Photographs (1938) is a direct predecessor. She also references Charles Sheeler, who in 1927 was commissioned by the NW Ayer ad agency to photograph the Rouge Plant for its client the Ford Motor Company. Then there's Rivera, of course.

Frank's project is almost the mirror image of Evans. For one thing, Evans was working on commission from the Farm Security Administration and other government sponsors to capture a particular view of America, namely, of the impoverished rural communities in need of welfare-state intervention during the Great Depression. Frank had unprecedented free reign to photograph at will in the Rouge Plant and elsewhere, courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation.

The reversal is also reflected in content: where Evans was "praising" the deserving poor, Frank was at pains to register his idea of the underbelly of the American Dream. Evans's pictures were taken with an 8x10 view camera, which required conscientious set up and resulted in razor-sharp images, capturing "reality" in detail. Frank, on the other hand, worked almost surreptitiously, using a lightweight 35mm camera to shoot on the fly. His photographs are often blurry, poorly lit, and gritty in the density of their grain.

Comparing Frank's images with those of Sheeler, we can see another dialectic at play. In Sheeler's photographs, technology is the hero, ruling over the natural landscape with the productive might of a Prometheus unbound but ultimately for the good of humankind. With Frank, technology is also the master but instead of helping us enjoy the fruits of material abundance, it lords over us, alienating us from one another and from our natural selves. (This is essentially what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are getting at when in Dialectic of Enlightenment they state in one of their key passages: "Myth becomes Enlightenment; Enlightment is a myth.")

Second, is the issue of content. As part of the project, Frank endeavored to capture specific iconic images: American flags, automobiles, workers, and cowboys among the most prominent. Frank was essentially on the lookout for key images of American ideology as represented in its visual culture. The flag, of course, is the logo of Team America ("Fuck Yeah!"), and an early image in the series from 1955 presents one in the form of a plastic inflatable pillow perched above a Detroit bar flanked by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Cars are abundant in the photographs and they certainly represent a central aspect of American culture, specifically mobility, at a time when Detroit was ground zero for that idea, both in terms of producing the physical means to freely move from place to place and in providing the economic means for the average worker to do so.

In writing about his subject, Frank, as noted in the catalog, says, "America is an interesting country, but there is a lot here that I do not like and that I would never accept." The workers in the Rouge Plant provide the images to express some of that disaffection. There are many photographs framing workers as literally trapped within the maw of industrial capitalism, lost in the machinery to which they are bound by wage labor. In others, the division of labor between those who work and those watch workers work is represented in the physical barriers erected between management and also consumers who tour the plant for their leisure.

The alienation of the individual in modernity is a trope that goes back to the beginnings of Romanticism, carries through the avant-garde, and remains with us in a highly degraded state in the form of lifestyle consumption. At the time Frank took these photographs there was something called the "other-directed" critique that was being mounted against the perceived ills of mass conformity as embodied in "the lonely crowd," "the organization man," "the status seekers," etc. The Beats and their progeny -- the hippies, the punks, and now vegans, DIYers, etc. -- reacted against this "square" culture with reveries of their own individual hipness. We all know where that -- what sociologist Robert Bellah calls "expressive individualism" -- has gotten us. And these days we might be tempted to look back on those times with fondness.

To be sure, one of things I noticed quite often as I hung around the galleries were viewers who ironically used the images as objects of nostalgia. I think it's good to keep in mind Frank's original intention but to also acknowledge a certain amount of elitism at play. The people captured in those images literally made America and even with all the troubles then it wasn't an entirely bad place to be, especially when you consider what's become of us.