v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Photographer Raymond Cauchetier Gone

From an online self-portrait that he authored, photographer Raymond Cauchetier, who recently passed away at the ripe age of 101, writes about his work in the 50's:

In 1954, just when I’d been promoted to the rank of capitaine after Dien Bien Phu, I left the army. The war was over. I stayed in Indochina and tried to embark on a career as a photographer. I knew a little about photography itself, but nothing about the world of photography. At the beginning, though, things went well. My first album, Ciel de Guerre en Indochine, was very successful. The 10,000 copies printed were all sold on subscription, and all the royalties went to Air Force charities. Also, to my great surprise, the Japanese, who had just discovered my photos of Saigon, hailed me as one of the greatest photographers of the time. The magazine Asahi Camera gave me sixteen pages. One of the top American museums, the Smithsonian Institution, organized an exhibition of my photos of Vietnam, Faces of Viet Nam, which travelled around the States for several years.
came back to Paris full of hope. I dreamed of working for Paris-Match and of learning my new profession at last. I managed to get an interview and arrived with my published albums and a selection of my best photos. The editor rejected them disdainfully. “Nowadays, Monsieur, everyone takes good photos. The only thing that matters is who recommended you!” I wasn’t recommendable, so I left.
And yet I wasn’t forgotten in Japan. When he came to Paris, the most famous Japanese photographer, Ihei Kimura, mentioned me to Henri Cartier-Bresson, who suggested I work for Magnum. I was just about to leave for Indochina again, and gladly agreed.
I arrived in Saigon during the elections. The Americans were plotting to make sure their favourite, Ngo Dinh Diem, would replace Emperor Bao Dai, who was too favourable to France. My photos show the various phases of the campaign, which was violent and pitiless. I sent them to Magnum straight away, but received no answer. A little disappointed, I left Saigon and went to Cambodia, where the Angkor temples still awaited me.
It was only much later that I found out why my photos did not find favour with Magnum. It wasn’t because they weren’t good enough, but because they had been taken with my old 6X6 cm Rollei, whereas the Magnum lab, sponsored by Leica, was only equipped to process 24×36 mm photos. They were eventually published, but I was kindly but firmly urged to get a new camera. I refused, and that’s why I only really worked for Magnum for a day.
So I went back to work in Angkor. That’s where, in 1956, I got a telegram from the producer Jean-Paul Guibert, who asked me to take photos for the film Mort en Fraude, which Marcel Camus was about to make in Indochina based on a book by my friend Jean Hougron. It wasn’t because I was (possibly) talented, but because it was cheaper than bringing over a photographer from Paris.

That’s how I started working in film, little knowing that I would later, in my own way, illustrate the revolution of New Wave cinema.
At the time, set photographers were technicians with ill-defined jobs. They were mostly asked to take a photo from the spot where the movie camera was standing at the end of a scene, and then to make themselves scarce. They got in everyone’s way and cost the producers money as every minute had to be used profitably. Their role as button-pushers brought them a meagre salary that was aligned with that of junior machine operators. Besides, nobody really knew what to do with the photos, which only really interested the script girl trying to get the continuity right.

But that was when Jean-Luc Godard appeared, beginning to film Breathless. The wind of change was starting to blow in the world of cinema. The producer was indignant when he saw Godard writing dialogues in a café and sending the film crew home because he didn’t have any ideas that morning. The sacrosanct rules of traditional cinema had been thrown out of the window.
I covered this upheaval from day to day, but I was careful not to talk about how successful my work had been in Indochina. I still had everything to learn about the world of film, where I was still unknown. Besides which, I bothered people. I was severely criticized for my initiatives and my ‘reporter’ style that was so far removed from standard set photography. One day, in 1961, they stopped using me to please a cameraman who was eager to give the job to one of his friends. Nobody’s perfect.

As for my pictures, which belonged to the production company, they stayed in boxes for fifty years. When they’d finished filming Breathless, Jean Seberg introduced me to Romain Gary. We got on really well and talked a little about film and books, but a lot about aviation. He had been in the Air Force in the Middle East, as I had in the Far East. We would often compare the attractions and dangers of our respective air missions.
But I had to get another job. I offered my services to François Truffaut, who welcomed me with open arms. I took part in the filming of some unforgettable films. But the set photographer’s salary was set by the trade unions and remained as low as ever, and I became tired of this and ended up leaving the cinema world altogether.
The publisher Dargaud gave me what seemed like a golden handshake after the paltry salaries in film: they asked me to edit a series of photonovels – a format that was very popular at the time. I learned the technique from Hubert Serra, one of the people who created the genre in France. I was thrilled: I could write the storyboards, select and direct the actors, and do the lighting for the shots myself. I adapted Balzac, Maupassant, Zola and Chekhov. It was like film, except that there were no movie cameras or sound engineers. Instead of spotlights, we had flashes bouncing off walls. This lighting method was used faithfully in the New Wave films, and the critics, who had never opened a photonovel in their lives, proclaimed it as a stroke of genius.
Within a few years I was back on an even keel financially, until Dargaud sold the thriving magazine to a greedy Belgian publishing house, which ruined its distribution and killed it off within a few months.

There was nothing to keep me in France any more. In 1967 I was able to go back to Indochina, where Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, who loved the photos in my Saigon album, asked me to take photographs of his country as part of a tourist promotion. I was given everything I needed: cars, planes, helicopters. It was like a dream! For two months I travelled the length and breadth of Cambodia, without a single day’s rest. I was a little worried, because I had never taken on such responsibilities before. But when the King saw my work he loved it, decorated me with one of the highest Khmer honours, and asked me to set up a National School of Photography in Cambodia.

From our Visit to Dehli's Red Fort

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- At Red Fort, Dehli, India 2011

Comrade Trump

 

Tom Nichol's writes in the Atlantic:

We are living in a time of bad metaphors. Everything is fascism, or socialism; Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Republicans, especially, want their followers to believe that America is on the verge of a dramatic time, a moment of great conflict such as 1968—or perhaps, even worse, 1860. (The drama is the point, of course. No one ever says, “We’re living through 1955.”)

Ironically, the GOP is indeed replicating another political party in another time, but not as the heroes they imagine themselves to be. The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s.

I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes.

No one thinks much about the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, and no one really should. This was a time referred to by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as the vremya zastoi—“the era of stagnation.” By that point, the Soviet Communist Party was a spent force, and ideological conviction was mostly for chumps and fanatics. A handful of party ideologues and the senior officers of the Soviet military might still have believed in “Marxism-Leninism”—the melding of aspirational communism to one-party dictatorship—but by and large, Soviet citizens knew that the party’s formulations about the rights of all people were just window dressing for rule by a small circle of old men in the Kremlin.

“The party” itself was not a party in any Western sense, but a vehicle for a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was an utterly mediocre man, but by the late 1970s he had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of “Marshal of the Soviet Union.” He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to have been caused by Brezhnev’s medal-festooned military overcoat falling off its hanger.

The elite leaders of this supposedly classless society were corrupt plutocrats, a mafia dressed in Marxism. The party was infested by careerists, and its grip on power was defended by propagandists who used rote phrases such as “real socialism” and “Western imperialism” so often that almost anyone could write an editorial in Pravda or Red Star merely by playing a kind of Soviet version of Mad Libs. News was tightly controlled. Soviet radio, television, and newspaper figures plowed on through stories that were utterly detached from reality, regularly extolling the successes of Soviet agriculture even as the country was forced to buy food from the capitalists (including the hated Americans).

Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply fired. They would not be executed—this was not Stalinism, after all—but some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually retiring as a forgotten “Comrade Pensioner.” The deal was clear: Pump the party’s nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage a library in Kazakhstan.

This should all sound familiar.

The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comrade—excuse me, President—Donald Trump said it was.

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Ryley Walker & Kikagaku Moyo Live in 2018

This is the live set of Ryley Walker and Kikagaku Moyo that is just been released on Riley's label-it's a solid pairing of the type of improvised rock that I still enjoy for its surprises. Enjoy everyone.

Who Belongs in America

Novelist Laila Lalami interviewed in LARB:

ABBIE REESE: I saw the story of your mother-in-law as sort of parable about consent and memory and acquiescing to authority.

LAILA LALAMI: I think in some ways my relationship with my mother-in-law mirrors my relationship with America. She’s somebody that I cared about very much. I got along very well with her and cared a great deal about her. And it was very painful to watch her go through Alzheimer’s and to watch her lose her memory. The difference is that the loss of memory in the United States is willful, while in the case of my mother-in-law it was obviously not willful. But an erasure of memory is part of how the United States constructs its national identity. It’s by erasing these little portions of its history that are shameful or distasteful or disturbing that American mythology is created. Think about the myth of “a nation of immigrants,” made up of many different races, and how that erases indigenous dispossession, slavery, or segregation. It’s through erasure that you can have situations where new citizens are being sworn in at the site of previous internment of Japanese Americans, as I was in Pomona in 2000. America is where we can erect a parking lot over the site of Japanese relocation and forget about the episode and use the space to swear in new immigrants. I think that erasure is very much a part of how America constructs its national identity.

The dichotomies or the pairings that you present — of allegiance and silence, of consent and memory — are really important and thoughtful.

The connection between allegiance and silence is a long-standing feature of American national mythmaking, and you can see it at play almost constantly. The one that’s on my mind this morning, because of the situation in Washington, DC, is how Ilhan Omar, the representative for Minnesota’s 5th district, gets treated whenever she criticizes the United States: out come the racist cartoons, with her being portrayed as a terrorist sympathizer, if not an outright terrorist. Or accusations that she wants to turn the US into Somalia, which is where she was born. Her criticism of US government policy is perceived as a criticism of America itself, despite the fact that she is actually quite careful when she talks about the US to signal her gratitude for having been welcomed here as a refugee and growing up in Minneapolis and, in a wonderful arc, becoming her district’s congressional representative. Her gratitude doesn’t protect her from these accusations. I think that’s because, for people like her, and I think you can see this very clearly with Muslims, there’s this idea that you show — you demonstrate — your allegiance by being either silent or by being vocal about your gratitude. But any other kind of position — any position in which you are critical — is perceived as a sign of a betrayal, as a sign of ingratitude. Silence is the price that you have to pay to show your allegiance. That has always struck me as strange.

Now, the other thing I will say — the flip side of what I was talking about with Ilhan Omar — is what happened this week, where a crowd of “pro-Trump extremists,” as NPR calls them, who are basically insurrectionists, stormed the Capitol. That’s the opposite of allegiance. They’ve stormed the Capitol and carried Confederate flags and caused all this mayhem. Several people have died. But look at how they’re being defended, to this day, by people like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley. All of these senators are basically saying that the onus is on us who are sitting in our homes minding our business to listen to them — the insurrectionists — and to listen to their concerns. These senators denounced the violence, but they’re also saying that the election was fraudulent and that we have to listen to the concerns of these insurrectionists.

When you compare these two behaviors — you have a representative from Minnesota who is being critical of policies that she wants to change, and you have citizens who are taking action by storming the Capitol and acting like a mob and threatening to kill the vice president — it’s clear that the range of discourse that’s allowed, the margins of what’s allowed, are not the same. The margin of discourse that Ilhan Omar is permitted is far narrower than what those people were permitted to do. Some citizens are allowed to be critical to the point of violence toward their government, and others are not. And there is absolutely a connection between political affiliation, race, gender, and this right to speak critically.

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Luigi Ghirri

 

From Blind:

It all began in Cesena. Wedged between national route E45 and the fertile plains along the Adriatic shore, this city is just one hour by train from Bologna. In the morning, it is swaddled in thick fog which makes it look like Irish countryside. Once the fog lifts, the city bares its many faces and shapes. Amid sprawling urban architecture, there is an elegant fifteenth-century library, a working-class canteen, a sports center, and even a family farm… At the end of an apple-tree-lined alley, we find a modest low cottage—Guido Guidi’s home.

This is where, for nearly forty years, he has been collecting his photographs, meticulously filing them into boxes organized according to date and place. The boxes are casually stacked next to a book on the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, a first edition of the American photographer Walker Evans, and a family album. The walls are bare, except for innumerable notes in pencil, which are both discreet and enigmatic: a veritable codex spread out in plain sight. In the corner of the room, wrapped in warm fleece, glisten the keen, lively eyes of Guido Guidi. And this is where the journey begins.

This vast photographic enterprise on Veneto was launched in 1984 as part of scientific research into the character of the new Italian landscape. In the early 1970s, this formerly poor, rural region experienced unparalleled economic growth. While many companies decided to build new plants in the region, seaside towns staked their livelihood on budding tourism. These rapid changes led to unchecked, senseless urban sprawl: endless housing developments, resorts, a road network, and Kafkaesque infrastructure. The once-rural, agricultural Veneto gave way to a new kind of urban planning.

While his contemporary, the photographer Luigi Ghirri, sought to capture the traces of a bygone era, Guido Guidi deployed his observation skills to portray a world that was rapidly transforming right before his eyes. Trying to record the imperceptible changes taking place in every corner of a region he knew intimately meant accepting the impossible challenge of portraying himself in the process of aging: skin that begins to sag ever so slightly; wrinkles that grow deeper; and eyes that grow dimmer. This is what he soberly calls “the in-between.”

 

Jungjin Lee's Photography

 

By accident I ran into Lee's sophisticated photography earlier today-she has been doing this for many years and this article in Medium does a good job of describing her artistry:

Ms. Lee’s process is unique, one she began in the 1990s with her American Desert series. Using Korean ​Hanji p​aper, a handmade mulberry paper with irregular edges, her prints are made first in the darkroom, the paper coated with the photo emulsion Liquid Light. In recent years, her final prints are a combination of analog and digital processes. She scans the darkroom print, makes adjustments digitally, and finally prints large-scale pigment prints on large sheets of mulberry paper from the digital file. In a 2014 interview with Charlotte Cotton, she describes her process:

I try to make a perfect print, but that is a contradictory and impossible aspiration. There is no ‘perfect,’ there is only what I think is perfect at that moment. Sometimes I make a mistake, by chance, and what comes of that is very unique and thus perfect.

The prints on view at the Denver Museum of Art are from the ​Opening ​body of work, with frustratingly vague titles, ​Opening #02, Opening #04​. Likewise, on her website there are no titles, no artist or project statements, no information of any kind. There are only the images. Bodies of work are named for the most part with a single word, ​Desert, Ocean, Wind, Wall, Thing, ​and only a few refer to a specific place, ​Unnamed Road, Everglades. ​This is the only prompting the artist gives, and in our current world of exhaustive explanations it is disconcerting at first, but when viewing the images, the where and the what quickly lose their importance.

Certain motifs pop up across the projects: roads curve between land masses or barriers, folds in the earth repeat, horizons rise and fall, a single hill becomes a monolith, sand and stone formations sprout fantastic wild hair pieces of weeds and brush. Darkness and light are often transposed — the foreground is a black void while shapes and light emerge from the distance. Most noticeably, the printing process Lee uses creates a distinctive textural element in the images. There is noise, static, like fuzzy video footage, and there is depth — it feels like you are looking through space, or layers of time.

 

How Republicans Destroyed the Senate

From an Ezra Klein interview with Adam Jentleson who has recently written “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” :

Ezra: Senator Mitt Romney’s child allowance plan is the kind of proposal where you could really imagine Democrats and Republicans working together. But, to my knowledge, not one Republican senator has some out and supported it.

I think this is a way the 60-vote threshold impedes bipartisanship. It seems plausible to me that there are bills out there that could get, say, 43 Democrats and nine Republicans and pass with a simple majority. But you can’t pass a bill like that under a 60-vote threshold.

Adam: This is one of the biggest misconceptions about the filibuster: the idea that it promotes bipartisanship. In fact, it does the opposite because it gives the party that’s out of power the means, motive and opportunity to block the party that’s in power from getting anything done. And when the party that’s in power doesn’t get anything done — when voters see nothing but gridlock from Washington — they turn to the party that’s out of power and try to put them back in office.

Republicans are well poised to take back majorities in both the House and Senate — all they need is a handful of seats to do so. So they have every rational, political incentive to block Biden from achieving any victories. A program that would cut child poverty massively would be a huge victory for Biden. And the ability for Biden to pass it on a bipartisan basis would be a huge victory for his campaign promise to restore bipartisanship and unity.

Republicans collectively don’t want to see President Biden standing at a signing ceremony with Mitt Romney, signing a bill that is going to massively slash child poverty. That’s not good for their political interests and their desire to take back their majority in the 2022 midterms. So you have [Marco] Rubio and [Mike] Lee and all these others who supposedly care about this issue coming out and shooting it down right away.

The irony here is that the framers saw this coming and they identified this misperception about supermajority thresholds in 1789. The reason they saw it was that they had just finished having direct firsthand experience with the Articles of Confederation, which did require a supermajority threshold for most major categories of legislation.

In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton addresses this misperception head-on. He says, “What at first sight might seem a remedy,” referring to a supermajority threshold, “is in reality a poison.” You might think it would cause compromise, but really what it does is it provides an irresistible temptation for the party that’s out of power to make the party in power look bad.

So you think, oh, 60 votes. Well, there’s 50 Democrats; that means they have to get 10 Republicans, so that’s going to force bipartisanship. But really what it does is give Republicans the ability to make Democrats look bad at all times. And in a polarized environment, that’s the rational political choice.

Ezra: I think this is a very important and very subtle point. When I came to Washington, the dominant view was bipartisanship is something the minority wants and the majority has to be incentivized to offer them. And in reality, it is the precise reverse. Bipartisanship is something the majority wants and the minority does not have an incentive to give them.

This is something, I think, that Mitch McConnell understood, frankly, better than any Senate leader before him. He understood that he could win the majority back by sabotaging the majority’s ability to govern. And that was an important strategic insight.

Adam: Yes. And he had the high-risk tolerance necessary to run the experiment. When Obama came into office, he was riding a 67 percent approval rating — the highest since J.F.K. Democrats had made massive gains in the House and Senate for two straight cycles, and the general wisdom was that if Republicans wanted to avoid extinction as a party they should cooperate with this massively popular president and his giant majorities.

So it took a real bold insight on McConnell’s part to defy all of the conventional wisdom and say no, we are going to oppose him at every turn. And what McConnell did was prove that blame for gridlock ends up being directed toward the party in power. I remember being there and trying to mount communications campaigns to lay the blame at Republicans’ feet. But people just don’t want to hear it. It sounds like excuses.

And then they have this massive success in the 2010 midterms, gaining upward of 50 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate. So there’s just really no question that his experiment worked and proved that obstruction in our current polarized environment is a successful political strategy for the party that’s out of power.

Ezra: This is something I always want liberals to understand better about Mitch McConnell: He is not a unique evil genius. He is simply somebody who correctly understands the incentives of the system that we have set up

Imagine you work in an office and you don’t like your boss or what your boss is working on. And, importantly, for your boss to finish his project, he needs your help. If you don’t help him, he won’t finish his project and you may become the boss. And if you do help him, he will finish his project and you may lose your job. And even if you don’t lose your job, all your friends are going to be mad at you. So what do you do? I think the answer is pretty obvious: You wouldn’t help your boss.

But with Congress we expect minority players to overwhelm their own self-interest because of tradition or something.

Adam: I think that’s an extremely accurate way of looking at it. And then you add on to it that you have basically a massive cheering section cheering you on to oppose your boss and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at you and providing you with unlimited resources to run ads against your boss and do everything you can to obstruct them.

You have structural factors encouraging you to do it. You have donors demanding that you do it. You have your base demanding that you do it. So it’s not taking the initiative to act this way. In many ways, it’s just going with the flow that is already carrying you in that direction of obstruction and legislative sabotage.

US Botanic Garden

Vallejo Nocturno 2021- Impeachment Fever

A Disregard for Democracy

From Talkingpoints.com:

No matter how the final Senate conviction vote shakes out, the case that the House impeachment managers presented this week made the Jan. 6 mob a defining episode of his presidency.

Four years of Trump flirtations with white supremacists, of his leaning into political violence, of his utter disinterest in the obligations of leadership— those four years collapsed onto themselves as the House managers recounted the days and hours that preceded  the riot against Congress’ certification of the election results.

Trump’s willingness to throw democracy under the bus in order to keep himself in power is in character with all the other ways he put himself above the country he was elected to serve.

Republican senators can squirm and twist around the question of whether Trump was intent on having those rallygoers violently disrupt Congress’ certification of his defeat. But the House clearly established that, in neglecting to call off the mob — in encouraging their false beliefs that the election was stolen from them — Trump fell well short of the duties of his office, just as he had fallen short time and time again, throughout the entirety of his administration.

Under his watch and with his encouragement, the American tradition of a peaceful transfer of power was interrupted. 

“This wasn’t just an attack on the Capitol Building and the dedicated people inside. It was an attack on what we were elected to preserve, our democracy,” Rep. David Cicciline (D-RI) told the senators. “This attack on our election, on the peaceful transfer of power, from one president to the next, didn’t even happen during the Civil War. But it did just happen because of the cold, calculated and conspiratorial acts of our former president Donald J. Trump.”