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Uncle Tungsten
p133-134, 140 By chance I happen to own a copy of a 1939 National Geographic magazine issue from just before the outbreak of the war in Europe, June 1939 to be precise. Sacks writes about how photographs can preserve a lost past, and there could be no better example than this issue of the National Geographic. The table of contents -- on the cover, there's no cover photo -- includes: "Kaleidoscopic Land of Europe's Youngest King; [15 year old Peter II of Yugoslavia] Yugoslavia: Where Oriental Hues Splash Europe [most of the photos show locals in colorful traditional costume]; Pedaling Through Poland; and Looking Down on Europe Again."
The subtitle of the Poland article is, "American Girl Free-wheels Alone from Krakow, and It's Medieval Byways, Toward Ukraine's Restive Borderland." Dorothy Hosmer only appears in one photo, as she is leaving Poland and entering Romania, but she is (I've since learned) 26 and her story sounds similar to many young women of today on foreign adventures. But nearly all the people she photographs as she travels around the south of Poland are still in native dress. And she takes many photos and writes a great deal about the Jews, especially in the Krakow ghetto. She doesn't give any dates, and something I noticed while skimming the issue this time suggests that she was actually in Poland in 1938 or even earlier, but still, she rode her sturdy bike (in her split skirt) through a world that had existed for centuries and was about to be violently and permanently changed beyond recognition. It's actually, for such a puff piece, pretty distressing to read.
The final article of interest is subtitled: "Crisscrossing Air Tracks Reveal Nature's Scenic Masterpieces and Man's Swift-changing Boundaries and Structures." This is about seeing Europe from the air and the current state of aviation in Europe. Besides the classic aerial shots of the European countryside and cities in the late 1930s, there are nice shots of Paris's Le Bourget, and Berlin's Templehof airports (the latter featuring a nice shot of 13 Lufthansa 2 and 3 engine airliners with swastikas on their tails. Most of these "airliners" would soon be known as Junkers Ju 52s in Luftwaffe service but also what looks like one civilian version of the Junkers Ju 86). The airport in Helsinki is interesting in that it lacks runways. It has a large flat area out behind the little terminal where planes can land from various directions -- perhaps the winds are very irregular there.
Again, the impression is of a wonderful world that is about to end.
(The National Geographic Society was the client for a fun software project I coded for Lucas Arts at Skywalker Ranch around 1990. Navigating the two very different corporate cultures was probably the most difficult thing about the project.)
p135 Sacks’s reflection on how photography preserves the past and shapes our recollections, reminds me of a favorite book by Fenton Johnson, Scissors, Paper, Rock. (At least I think this is the novel I'm thinking about) The central conceit of this novel is that a professional photographer ran off with all the photographic memories of this small, poor, rural, Kentucky town. In the absence of photographic evidence, the townspeople were free to remember the past as it suited them. It’s only at the end of the book when a character discovers the missing photographs that we learn to what extend people have been embellishing their stories. So photography can be a preserver of the past but it also limits our freedom to remember things as we wish they had been.
p137 Sacks has a first cousin who introduces him to photography and the use of a darkroom. I didn’t get around to developing and printing until I was in college, though I had been an “avid” photographer for some time. I had not a clue about the chemistry, but I worked in a very nice lab that was open to the public -- for a fee -- near ASU before I assembled the equipment to turn my bathroom at my parent’s house into a darkroom. (I borrowed an enlarger from my logic professor.) I still have scores if not hundreds of prints from those years. Mostly I learned through this hobby -- I never took any classes -- that I was a night-owl, content to work steadily through the night until there were prints drying on nearly every flat-ish surface in my parents house. I would not really take advantage of this characteristic until I was working as a computer programmer against unreasonable deadlines and had to stay up through the night, sometimes for days on end.
My first serious camera was a 35mm Zeiss Contax rangefinder with a wicked fast lens. I purchased this camera at the end of high school with the proceeds I believe, from the sale of my Walther P-38 handgun. This was the heyday of the SLR, so my camera was unfashionable and limited to a single 50mm lens. Eventually I moved up to a Minolta SLR which I paired with a Zeiss Contessa rangefinder (that I still own). These two cameras were perfect for the wedding photography I did for money toward the end of my university days.
I’ve used (very briefly) both view cameras and twin-lens reflex cameras and, as lovely as those larger negatives are when you are enlarging, the difficulty of using the cameras didn’t make me eager to change formats. My experience did, however, give me a great deal of respect for people who photograph with a view camera.
I never even tried to develop or print color. I think this had more to do with being lazy and being more interested in the image than the process, though it is also true that I’m very fond of things monochrome and gray-scale in general.
p143 The other side to all of this [creating depth and motion with photography], I came to realize -- a sort of deconstruction or decomposition -- could occur when I had migraines, in which there were often strange visual alterations. My sense of color might be briefly lost or altered; objects might look flat, like cutouts; or instead of seeing movement normally, I might see a series of flickering stills, as when [his cousin] Walter ran his film projector too slow. I might lose half my visual field, with objects missing to one side, or faces bisected. I was terrified when I first got attacks like this -- they started when I was four or five, before the war -- but when I told my mother about them, she said she had similar attacks, and that they did no harm and lasted only a few minutes. With this, I started to look forward to my occasional attacks, wondering what might happen in the next one (no two were quite the same), what the brain, in its ingenuity, might be up to. Migraines and photography, between them, may have helped to tilt me in the direction in which, years later, I would go.
I guess! This is almost cheating.
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