J.P. Zorn redividus

J.P. Zorn posted a seemingly banal photo of a suburban hill.

Unlike D.M., I relish this kind of landscape. Helps, maybe, to think of it as an image beamed back by a probe sent here by MASA (Martian Areologists and Science Animals). It's a landscape full of human influence, though you don't see the people involved. A landscaped landscape. The low contrast is matched by low-intensity graphical appeal, if you see what I mean. Nothing about it shouts. The music is barely audible. The poetry doesn't rhyme. Yet we get enough out of it to make us suspect there's something behind the image.

It's often been pointed out that a lightly clad woman is more enticing to men than a naked one. This partakes of the same principle. (2/11/2004)

Philip's Defense

Philip Coggan of Australia came to my defense, sort of. My replies:

"Good taste" is the art of keeping the demons behind a screen, a silk screen charmingly decorated with paintings of Disney monsters like Sulley and Mike. For example, in 1946, when even "prolonged kissing" was banned by film censors, Hitchcock made a movie ("Notorious") featuring a woman forced to copulate with a Nazi in furtherance of a political agenda. Since no sex acts were shown, or even mentioned except in the most oblique terms, the movie passed the "good taste" test. On the other hand, a movie showing a legally married, loving couple actually Doing It would have been, and in puritanical places still is, in bad taste.

Sex and death, the two great levers of evolution, are too strong for some viewers. They can't bear to look at the real things, but they'll pay big bucks to watch their shadows dance on the wall. (2/9/2004)

Philip wondered why Americans protested “Mr Bun,” since they were so fond of grand-guignol movies and TV, and saw so much gore in the daily news.

Ah, Philip, you're on the other side of the world. Photos from Iraq and Palestine are carefully picked over by stateside editors: the blood 'n guts component is elided. What's shown on European TV, much less by Al-Jazeera, would be considered in the worst possible taste. If such images were published here, the word "gratuitous" would certainly bob up on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

This isn't new. War photos from Vietnam, Korea and WW2 were generally quite tame. When I was a boy I was amazed at the snapshots brought home by men who'd fought in the Pacific -- they were so much more, well, explicit than the stuff I'd seen in Life Magazine.

Your point about the Victorians is well taken. During the reign of that dear old queen anti-sodomy laws were passed in England, but they applied only to men (like Oscar Wilde). It's said nobody had the courage to tell Victoria that some ladies were guilty of a congruent sin. (2/9/2004)

Gordon Simpson Speaks

In January, Gordon Simpson of the UK weighed in on “Mr Bun,” suggesting that “no decent person would consider this a worthy image.” Gordon's right, I guess. I don't pretend to be a decent or worthy person -- discovered long ago that I'll never pass for one of the boys. Then again, when I see what decent, worthy persons did to the twentieth century, I don't feel too bad. Looking over these comments again, I notice that all the objections come from the USA and the UK. Wonder why that is? (2/8/2004)

Letters to Neil

I certainly wish I could work with nude models. I'm sure I could do interesting stuff. I don't want the kind of models you do; what I want are elderly and/or fat people, females by preference. For starters I'd photograph them in cheesecake poses. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure there are few women over sixty or seventy who'd be willing to go along with the gag. However, I'm quite serious about it – it's not just something funny to say. If I were really as Boho as I like to think I am, I'd have no trouble talking some people into it. But... As ever, my neuroses get in the way of accomplishing anything. (2/3/2004) Looking over my stuff, I think I have a number of good shots from the last six years, which is how long I've been (back) at it. Odd to see how few pix I was doing at first. Last year, with digital, 476 photos on my personal website, of which probably quite a few are keepers. As for amateur status, I take "amateur" in the 18th-century sense, in light of its derivation from the latin "amator" ("lover"), the amateur being somebody who does something for the love of it rather than for profit. Of course that argues a certain financial independence. The big writers and scientists, though not artists and musicians, of the 18th century were amateurs in this sense, usually guys who had inherited enough money to be able to spend their time collecting old manuscripts or fossils or writing poetry or satires or traveling around discovering new species. Actually earning money this way would've been considered being "in trade," a horrible blot on the old escutcheon. (They all had escutcheons.) (2/4/2004) As I get older (and older and older) I worry less about the correctness of my opinions. Have been reviewing the big new coffee-table book of Henri Cartier-Bresson's photos, probably the biggest collection of them ever printed. And I'm confirmed in the opinion I expressed to you before, that nearly all of HCB's work would, if published under another name, excite no comment and find no market. Certainly a handful of his pix, the thirty or forty most famous, are super-good, almost superhuman. But it would be silly to worship everything he did, since by far most of it is of only passing interest. Even more sadly, circa 1975 he hung up his Leica and went back to his first love, pencil and pen. The book reproduces lots of his drawings. Maybe I'm just a Philistine, but I don't see any talent in them. (2/5/2004)