Travelogue(s)

Telling a story is both easier and more difficult than it has ever been before. Easier because there are any number of ways to get your story out in front of a large audience. More difficult because the number of stories out there is so great that it’s easy for yours to get lost. So whether you’re telling a tale of illegally crossing the border into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan or taking a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate your 40th birthday it has to be well told.

In 1986 the photographer Didier Lefèvre went into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan for the first time while covering a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) mission. Of the four thousand frames he exposed only six images were initially published. Thirteen years later his friend Emmanuel Guibert suggested they collaborate on publishing the story of Lefèvre’s journey and, with the help of Frédéric Lemercier, Le Photographe was published in France in three volumes between 2003 and 2006. In 2009 the English version, The Photographer, was published in one large volume by First Second.

The Photographer, p. 74

Being based on actual events I don’t know if you would call it a graphic novel, but the illustration drives the bulk of the narrative with Lefèvre’s photographs working as accents. It’s similar to, though not quite as powerful as, the film Waltz with Bashir and its shift from animation to photographic images. In the film’s case, the change takes place at the end to maximize impact while in The Photographer Lefèvre’s images are sprinkled throughout allowing the viewer places to rest and contemplate. I also enjoyed how, in many places, we’re given the equivalent of a contact sheet where we can see a sequence of shots and the one that has been selected (or discarded). Seeing the contact sheets sometimes gives you a better idea of what the photographer is looking for. Another example that comes to mind is the Diane Arbus shot of the boy with the toy hand grenade in Central Park. Looking at the contact sheet the boy looks fairly normal in most of the shots, but the in the image she chose the boy looks mentally unbalanced. I don’t pretend to know why Arbus chose that particular shot, but, for me, seeing the shots she didn’t choose make that image all the more interesting.

Diane Arbus contact sheet

To be perfectly honest, I doubt I’d like The Photographer as much if it were just Lefèvre’s photographs. There is something about the combination of photos and illustration, and even the size and heft of the book (11.7 by 9.4 in., an inch thick, and over 2 lbs.), that makes it appealing. Though the line work is heavier and looser, the drawing style strikes me as Tintinesque. There’s a similar use of color and sense of adventure. Add to this Afghanistan being in the news a lot lately and I found myself devouring it in large chunks.

Finally, the use of the black and white reportage reminded me of something from Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury. He (or his character) found it curious that black and white photography, “the most unreal of processes,” now stood for “realism, integrity and art”. That may have been true when Rushdie originally wrote those words, or when Lefèvre shot the photos, but I wonder if today the ubiquity of color photography hasn’t left black and white photography seeming dated or, at the very least, self-consciously arty.

On a lighter note, Alec Soth’s slideshow of a trip to Las Vegas for his 40th birthday is another example of the flexibility of story telling media. People are more willing to experiment with ways of telling a story. In this case Soth, normally a still photographer, is experimenting with an A/V presentation.

One of the great things about Soth’s slideshow (other than the actual images) is how self-contained and almost circular the narrative is. It begins with him wanting to buy a limited edition of Bukowski poetry. He can’t afford the book, so being in Vegas, he tries gambling to raise the money. You can probably guess how that turns out. But don’t despair, he turns the experience into a piece of art that references both Vegas and a bit of poetry from the unattainable volume which he then sells for the price of said volume. Genius.

The Age of Stupid

Pete Postlethwaite in The Age of Stupid

I just saw a brilliant combination of documentary and fiction at the San Francisco International Film Festival called The Age of Stupid. The topic of the film is climate change looked at from the vantage point of the year 2055.

It’s not often that you see a film successfully combine serious subject matter with a futuristic element, but this film does so amazingly well. It would be unfortunate if this combination allows people to write the film off as either not serious or as overblown scare mongering because I think it needs to be seen by a wide audience.

Learn more about it here.

Sebald and Sabra

Waltz with Bashir film still

The connection between photography and memory is a facile one. Who doesn’t have a photograph of a time or place that they would like to remember? The school photo, the vacation snapshot, the wedding photograph all verify, more concretely than memory, that a certain moment occurred. Or do they? Even before digital manipulation, photography has had, at best, a loose relationship with reality. On the one hand, we are taught to consider photographs as representations of the real when they appear in newspapers, court rooms, scientific publications, etc. But even these images are produced by way of any number of subjective decisions which determine the “reality” of what is portrayed.

So what put me on this line of thought? First, I’m currently reading The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald which is a combination of reminiscence by the narrator and his chronicling of the lives and travels of the four emigrants of the title. Though the narrator is never identified, I can’t help thinking it’s Sebald himself. It’s a thought that’s at odds with the book being a work of fiction. This tension between document and fiction is strengthened by photographs placed throughout the text as if they have been collected from various shoe boxes and albums of the characters. The images, though they appear to relate to the text, could very well be a collection of unrelated images around which the author created his story. The book has me wondering, as if I were watching a movie “based on a true story,” how much is remembrance and how much is pure fabrication.

In contrast to Sebald construction of fiction from “real” representations of the world (i.e. photographs), Ari Folman’s film Waltz with Bashir uses a stylized form of representation (animation) to portray real events. It’s an animated documentary. Here the animation enhances the subjectiveness of memory as Folman, a former Israeli soldier, tries to recall the events of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The film moves back and forth between past and present as Folman interviews various people involved trying to uncover the memories he himself has blocked out. Slowly things come to light as his memory returns culminating in a final denouement which I will leave a surprise. The film is a powerful contemplation on war and memory.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

” A fucking masterpiece”

That’s what Sean Penn called Julian Schnabel’s new film tonight at a screening in San Francisco and I would have to agree. Without giving too much away I’ll say that the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby is amazing, the performances (particularly Max von Sydow) are heartfelt and pitch perfect, and the team of Schnabel and Janusz Kaminski create a truly beautiful film.

In a Q&A session after the screening (which was more rambling anecdotes than interview) Schnabel said that he felt film making was more about finding something out about the world than telling something that you know. His discoveries become our discoveries and they make for the palpable freshness of this film.