what makes a postmodern photographer?

On Mapplethorpe specifically . . .

 

I recognize validity in your perspective about his treatment of subjects and in contrasting his

portrayed values to the other values flowering in 80s San Francisco. And I tend to agree.

 

At the same time, there has always been recognition by many of us in the gay community

itself of (among many wonderful qualities) a cold, dehumanizing and treating-people-as-

meat mentality. As disappointing as they may on some levels, there is also truth to

Mapplethorpe's images.

should be: As disappointing as they may BE on some levels, there is also truth to

Mapplethorpe's images.

Fred, I don't recall anybody who claimed to appreciate fine photography, before you and I, commenting on the shallow values Mapplethorpe displays. I think most bought what the press told them to buy.

 

Dehumanization is the norm in sexual imagery, irrespective the orientation. I wonder if Mappelthorpe often rises to porn. That we recognize its failing doesn't elevate Mappelthorpe's work, and it tells us something about his collectors and Szarkowski.

I gotta think. I think there may be a new topic here. And I'd like to hear others' responses.

I take back what I said about Hilter and Stalin , they were simple totalitarians who worked the shtick that always works; hatred of the other so extreme it becomes paranoia, meglomania, charismatic to others in their unshakable belief in themselves. They, like Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Roy Cohn, were simply evil.

http://www.oprah.com/presents/oathome/200711/homelist/homelist_110.jhtml

 

Ellis, see, even Oprah loves it!

Just for the record:

 

Stalin was much more complex than these common cold war caricatures. See the recent book, The Young Stalin and Montefiore's earlier book on Stalin:Court of the Red Tsar. He was in fact a respected Georgian poet before his turn to Marxism, and that was very much his philosophy, one based on an absolute faith in objective reality as revealed in the Dialectic, to be sure.

 

The recent two volume set on Hitler reveals a shallower individual than Stalin, but one who was not only a romantic, but absolutely believed that truth could be bent by WILL (as in Triumph of...). He most certainly was not a modernist, as any of the Bauhaus refugees and concentration camp inmates could have told you.

 

I am not defending either of them, to do so is in the league with the question "Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?" To make them into simpletons overlooks the key reason they are horrors--

Wow ... it's early and I'm lost, and to think I used to lose sleep over this one. One thing for

sure, even to think on this level you are artists.

 

I just answered an innocent question about photojournalism vs documentary in Casual

Conversations, with my first cup of coffeee running out long before I finished what can be

read in a minute, and now I fear I may have opened Pandora's Box. Please be kind, it's

almost a new year.

Stalin was a well-established Marxist by the time he was 16 years old. He was probably better-educated by then than Hitler was, for what that's worth.

 

I don't think there's any evidence that either Hitler or Stalin was "deeper" than the other, not that it matters. Stalin appears to have plotted more and he certainly did more bank robberies and betrayals. I doubt there's evidence that before he was a Marxist, before 16, Stalin had any recognition as a poet.

 

The two characters would be good subjects for photo essays...using historic photos. If I were doing such an essay I'd frame it using Alan Furst's historic novels.

Enough already. Believe what you like, but Montefiore's new book (The Young Stalin) has information never available before (at least to the public). One can argue about exactly when Stalin became a "Marxist" as opposed to being a schoolboy rebel. His early poetry was,insofar as I can tell, published when he was in his teens, certainly still a schoolboy, and anthologized thereafter.

MARIA: There are some excellent fairly recent books on the whole field of fine art

photography ... and the major and minor movements within it. I WISH I could find the last

one I was reading ... it was so fascinating that I carried it around with me for a week or so

and managed to misplace it, so I can't give you the title. It is the one I would give to a

photography student. It is about 5x8 inches and soft cover. If you email me, I will send you

the title now that I have remembered to look for it again.

and ... Happy New Year!

JDM, our respective beliefs aren't relevant to evaluation of the visual merits of Hitler's artistic efforts (paintings) Vs our reads of Stalin's schoolboy poetry.

 

We can see what Hitler painted, but unless we read Russian well (mine's touristic) one can't evaluate Stalin's poetry...only interpretations.

 

We do know Stalin engaged in two decades of terrorism and common money-raising crime on his path to central power. He was as much an organizer and betrayer of Russia's fascists (there were and are plenty), as its labor organizations and its multiple versions of socialists and communists...

 

Hitler's path to power was simpler, not depending much on marks made by earlier leaders (such as Lenin and Trotsky made before Stalin). Hitler was favored by compact geography, few different cultural groups, a national tendency to click heels, efficient police and bureaucratic systems, and simple political factors (collapsed economy, need to blame Jews). And he only confronted mutually understandable German dialects.

 

By contrast Stalin struggled with infinite geography, many more political issues, wildly different cultural and language groups, and a bureaucracy that was so far-flung that it couldn't function coherently. Unlike Hitler, I don't think Stalin played his anti-Semitic card until he was in power: his purges.

Stalin, like Hitler , but on a far grander scale, attacked and attempted to wipe out many other ethnic and cultural and political groups far beyond Jews.

 

It's a commonplace among military historians that one of the reasons Hitler was able to strike so deeply so quickly into the Russian heartland (through the Ukraine ,Lithuania, etc.) was that Stalin had purged the Russian army of many competent generals, etc. who he had felt threatened by.

Yeah, yeah. These attitudes are based on the lies about Stalin and his role made up by 1) Bourgeois cold-war historians, 2) Trotsky, and 3) Stalin. Just read Montefiore's two books on him, as well as Werth's history of the Soviet-Nazi War, and you will find a different Stalin than the traditional biographies. Dare I say it? The Stalin with a poem in his heart. ;)

 

("Aside from that Mr. Trotsky, how was your vacation in Mexico?")

 

More seriously, of course, Stalin's by-no-means-childish poems were written in Georgian, not Russian. English translations are in the biography mentioned.

I would apologize for hi-jacking this thread, and do, except that the OP was clearly needing help with her paper which she had blown off until the last moment. Many of us were once students ourselves, some even in seminaries in Georgia.

"Aside from that Mr. Trotsky, how was your vacation in Mexico?"

 

Isn't the sub-title for that poem : "Is that an ice pick in your hand or are you just glad to see me?"

JDM, thanks, I'll look for those books.

 

Here's my own main Stalin resource. Free to download, huge. Yes, I've read it all...would make an incredible movie.

 

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/souvar/works/stalin/

 

Evidently you enjoyed Joseph Djugashvili's ("Stalin") adolescent poetry in the original Georgian, rather than dumbing it down with mere English translation.

 

Please forgive this: I find Stalin easily comparable to Hitler, though far more interesting...maybe its the Slavs in the Hungarian side of my family woodpile.

 

Factoid: Sadaam Hussein modeled himself after Stalin, built a library that consisted exclusively of Stalin material.

 

Watch me bring this back closer to the OT while tipping my hat to Ellis's Trotsky joke :-)

 

A onetime photo client, Emmy Lou Packard, then head of the San Francisco Arts Commission, was an assistant to Diego Rivera and jealous possible rival of Frida Kahlo.

 

Emmy Lou had been a Stalinist CP member, as had Diego and Frida. A painter, she was a photographer as well, making some fine casual portraits of Diego and Frida (Diego was most famously photographed by Edward Weston).

 

http://sonic.net/~goblin/pack.html

 

Punch line: Emmy Lou told me Frida canceled her dinner invitation to Trotsky at her home, the day he was assassinated at his own place.

 

Frida was a Stalinist at the time, as was Emmy Lou (Diego claimed to have withdrawn from the Communist Party).

 

I wonder what Frida expected might happen that day to her incipiently-former-friend, ice-axed in Mexico at the order of Joseph Djugashvili ?

Yeah, well, I have transliterated stuff that is posted ON the Stalin archive, so there! Did you note that when the Trotskyists got control of the Marxist archive both Stalin and Mao were banished to the 'reference' library as non-Marxists?

 

I confess I used a pseudonym so as to not completely compromise my enviably high security rating,but now it's shot anyway after all this ;)

 

 

Actually, to bring this back to photography, Montefiore has some explanations of the context of some of the better known photos. I also would draw everyone's attention to a chilling and fascinating book called "The Missing Commissar" by David King that details the "photoshopping", in effect. of Soviet era photographs.

 

 

Hmmm.., it occurs to me that maybe YOU are a Trotskyist (so it begins....)

 

 

Trust me John, you will enjoy the two books, they are quite startling works and are well-reviewed by people who are worthy.

 

Young Stalin and Stalin-the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore (yes, really).

Ellis, I've had my first good LOL of the new year. In fact, I will steal it in a moment when a

good friend calls me back.

 

And where is little Maria in all of this? No calls, no letters ...

Here is some of Stalin's poetry. AS you read it, note the symmetry of phrasing, the euphonious wording. Here truly is poetry worthy of the Stalin Prize.<div></div>

Many post-modernist were Artist who used photography as a tool for their Art, in comparison to photographers who emulated Art with their photographs.

JDM, You've not established that, as a post-adolescent, "Stalin" showed signs of the "depth" you attribute.

 

I don't know anything about the politics of the Marxist historian I linked, but you've not yet bothered to refute anything he said (re:"Stalin" as thug).

 

Something you might enjoy: "Secrets and Spies" (overheated title) by Mara Moustafine. She was Austrailian Intelligence, her family had moved to Harbin, China and then called back to Gorky to be interrogated and executed...she found the KGB files in Gorky during Glasnost. I explored that aspect of Soviet history in order to understand a collection of photos I bought from gypsies, centering on European families in Harbin.

 

If you'd like to respond off line, please do...we're surely exhausting everybody else. If you were an American (?), which of our candidates would you support? Richardson, in my case.

Hi again all!

 

Well i certainly was not trying to get you to 'complete my homework for me', I just dont have a constant internet connection and so only get the opportunity to check here when i can.

 

thank you all so much for your discussion, I think the second half has gone a little over my head but i will read and re-read and try to get my head around it. you have really helped me understand the thinking around the topic, THANK YOU!

 

maria

 

ps i will keep posting when i have chance!

A post-modern work is one which references its own creation.