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© Kenneth Jarecke
Ken Jarecke (blogs at Mostly True) is a world-renowned photojournalist and founding member of Contact Press Images, an illustrious photo agency based in New York.
On Friday he poured his heart out at Tiffin Box:
No, I’m sad and ashamed to report that my lack of desire stemmed from nothing more than a lack of money. More specifically, the constant worry, and the ongoing struggle to pay the bills had taken its toll.
It’s sad, because I didn’t become a photojournalist to get rich (I was never that crazy or misguided). I’m ashamed because much of my money problems were the direct result of poor or stubborn decisions that are completely my fault.
He doesn’t hold back:
Pride and arrogance, a nasty couple of vices. As you can imagine, the only people to suffer from the choices I made was my family. Over the past few years, we’ve cut expenses, and eliminated most of the extras that come with family life, in my vain attempt to reinvent the editorial market and make things right (vanity, there’s another one).
Although I never stopped loving being a dad or a husband, the only thing I accomplished was to give my family a grouchy dad who hated making pictures.
Also recently, one of his daughters got serious ill, it gave him new perspective, Jarecke’s’s not proud anymore, he’s not too worried about bills, he’s taking portrait jobs, having a print sale and moving forward. He just wants more than ever to be a better dad and husband.
It seems to me that Jarecke has said what many are feeling. Bravo Kenneth for your honestly and vulnerability!
This is funny, and could launch a thousand visual studies crit papers.
Remember Hugh Hefner and co. just sank $900,000 into saving and preserving this sign.
Found via i heart photograph
CONVERGENCE?
Stock vs. Fine Art; Standard view vs. Privileged view etc …
Worth contrasting Getty’s butchering with Emily Shur’s Hollywood Sign, Los Angeles, California. Featured on Shur’s blog.
Photo: Andy Duback / AP. An inmate shows off the nutraloaf prepared by the cafeteria of the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, Vt. To prison officials, it’s a complete meal. To inmates, it’s a food so awful, they’d rather go hungry than eat it.
Prison food is notoriously bad, but is it unconstitutional? Prisoners have sued saying the forced menu of Nutraloaf, served to inmates accused of alleged infractions, is cruel and unusual punishment.
This from Slate:
Nutraloaf (sometimes called Nutri-loaf, sometimes just “the loaf”) is served in state prisons around the country. It’s not part of the regular menu but is prescribed for inmates who have misbehaved in various ways—usually by proving untrustworthy with their utensils. The loaf provides a full day’s nutrients, and it’s finger food—no fork necessary.
Nutraloaf is cubed whole wheat bread, nondairy cheese, raw carrots, spinach, seedless raisins, beans, vegetable oil, tomato paste, powdered milk and dehydrated potato flakes.
The larger issue here is one of economics. State prisons look to cost-saving in every part of its operations (that’s what happens when an unsustainable prison-system is created by voters and punitive laws). Nutritional considerations were abandoned long ago across the US prison industrial complex. Ideally, the “better food” discussion should be eclipsed by the “better non-custodial alternatives in US criminal justice” discussion.
Kyodo/Reuters
The Japanese government opened up its execution chambers to the public for the first time on Friday, taking journalists on a tour of Tokyo’s main gallows. The insides were stark: a trapdoor, a Buddha statue and a ring for the noose.
[…]
“Apart from Japan and the United States, the other countries in the world that carry out capital punishment are those accused of other grave human rights violations,” said Kanae Doi, a lawyer who heads Human Rights Watch Japan. “Japan should be ashamed to be on that list.”
The US should be ashamed too.
This recent release piques my interest:
Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration prints 130 tri-toned black-and-white images scanned from negatives in the collection of the Library of Congress. Wiliam E. Jones’s book is the first to deal exclusively with the 35mm negatives that FSA director Roy Stryker killed with a hole punch during the early years of the project (1935-39). The book brings to light destroyed or defaced photographs by Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, and others; it also includes two essays by Jones discussing the images and possible reasons for their suppression.
You can search through the 175,000 Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives and pick out the punched prints yourself. Here’s some off just the first page.
In July, Foto8 reviewed the Punctured, a 5 minute film by the book’s author William E. Jones:
It was not so long ago that photographers and editors editing film would use a hole punch to indicate a selected frame, clipping a small half circle out of the edge of the frame by the sprocket holes where the frame number and film info had been burned into the emulsion during manufacturing. Stryker was more ruthless with his hole punch, “killing” the work of his photographers by punching a hole directly through the negative image. Unsurprisingly, the photographers objected to this practice, which Stryker ended in 1939. Many of the punched negatives survive in the US Library of Congress FSA archives.
Punctured, Jones explained, is about the “Interface between image making and power… what images authority gives us and what we do with them.” Jones’ effort is to unsettle those relationships and to this end Punctured is articulate in its explorations of the way that archives are constructed, of the FSA archive specifically as the product of Stryker’s judgments …
OTHER PUNCHY CONTRIBUTIONS
This all leaves me thinking of Lisa Oppenheim‘s Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans.
Lisa Oppenheim, from the project Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans
Carefully Aimed Darts points out the Etienne Chambaud also made use of the defaced FSA negs for the show A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
Installation shot, Etienne Chambaud: Personne, 2008
If only for the similarity between precision-cut and precision-painted holes I am left thinking of John Baldessari:
John Baldessari. Hitch-hiker (Splattered Blue) 1995. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York © John Baldessari. Colour photograph, acrylic, maquette
Photograph: Benjamin Sklar for the Guardian
It’s just a brief account of his time in solitary and his time since the overturning of his conviction. 29 years in 24/7 lock-down is a long time for anyone, is it worse for someones who’s innocent?
“I didn’t realise how permanently the experience of solitary would mark me. Even now my sight is impaired. I find it very difficult to judge long distances – a result of living in such a small space.”
Photo: Chip Litherland
I spent all day looking at photography and this was the last thing through my RSS. Exhausted but pissed off, I have to post.
Chip Litherland (@chiplitherland) was on assignment for this story in the New York Times, and shared a few images on his blog. I simply copy & paste the comment I left with Chip here:
The red hues, the spot light (recalling war photography), the drama in general but most of all the solemnity of Jones who poses between the ultimate Hollywood myth and a shooting target – it reeks of a man who’s more obsessed with theatrics & violence than he ever will be with reality.
I expect this was one time you wanted to put down your objective journalist persona and tell him straight he’s a liar, a nutter and a danger to those fooled by his hate.
More of Chip’s images here.
Fair Warning: This will probably be the only post I do about the Islamophobia gripping the vocal minority in America. There’s no point talking about it; it’s hate and those spewing it are dangerous simpletons. My only worry is that TV will continue to bombard people with heady graphics, drastic statement and “passive wonderment” (as Jon Stewart has best described it). At this point, Fox News conjures the wildest conspiracy theories in America.
Ernest Morgan, an inmate since 1987, holds his prison-approved CD player. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
My friend and colleague Matt Shechmeister at Wired’s Raw File just published Life on Lockdown: See-Through Gadgets, DIY Media, No Internet, an article and gallery on idiosyncratic prison technologies.
Matt went to San Quentin Prison with photographer Jon Snyder (@jonsnyder) to tour cells and music studios to report on the see-through typewriters, prison-sanctioned music selections and contracted companies all shaping the security-minded tech-culture at San Quentin.
Not an angle seen or read very often. Well worth checking out.
Prison Photography 