Fifty Years

[Bob Michaels]

The first time I looked at The Americans, I came across the photo of the black man polishing shoes inside a public washroom, I simply froze.

I did not believe such an occupation existed. The whole job description was nothing but purely sadistic. Not only a man is humiliated by polishing shoes, but doing it inside a public washroom with the smell and people reliving themselves...

There is no honor in what that man was doing and there was no honor when black people sat in the back of the bus and Frank in his genius captured it in one single frame.

Maybe it is a question of semantics, but I certainly believe Frank captured his subjects with honor.

As to the question of honor in what the subjects were doing, we must remember this was 50 years ago. Times have changed and we can no more now assign the label of what is and what is not "honorable"back then than someone in 2059 could of today. There was no perpetual threshold sometime between 1959 and today when Americans moved from dishonorable to honorable.

As a 65 year old product of the deep south, I have seen black men shining shoes in the men's room. I have been on buses where the blacks rode in the back. I have good friends now that were subjected to such back then. But neither they nor I see it as any more than what was. Things have changed and will continue to do so.

Let us be careful not to evaluate 1959 by 2008/09 standards. And let us hope that people in 2059 do not evaluate what we do today by those later day standards.

And, which of our current photographers will be considered in 2059 to be the 2008/09 equivalent of Robert Frank?

 

[Nando]

Thanks Al. This is a great thread. I haven't picked up my camera a lot since my father passed away about a month ago but now I want to get out and shoot!

 

[Merkin]

Why, thank you, Nh3. 😉

Harry, I talk more about gear because photos speak for themselves (or should).

I used to feel the exact same way until I had a photo professor that forced us to write a lot about our work, and discuss our work as a class. He would sometimes ask us to write a page or two about every print we made, sometimes just a page or two about our particular project that week. Even when a photo does speak for itself, talking and/or writing about your work, and the work of others, helps (me, at least, if not all of us) become better photographers, IMHO.

 

[Al Kaplan]

Black men shining shoes in the mens' room was a common sight in Boston and New York back then, and probably a lot of other places as well. Black kids, and some white too, who should have been in school roamed the downtown streets with a shoeshine box slung over their shoulder from a leather strap. In 1950 we still had a few Civil War veterans in the parades, and many black people of that era had listened to their grandparents and great-grandparents talk about what it had been like to BE a slave.

But the point of starting this thread was to get some serious discussions going on about our photography and I think that's pretty much what we've been doing. What would you like to photograph over the next year or so that might carry some significance to a viewer half a century hence? Think about it. Do something about it.

 

[Bob Michaels]

Black men shining shoes in the mens' room was a common sight in Boston and New York back then, and probably a lot of other places as well. Black kids, and some white too, who should have been in school roamed the downtown streets with a shoeshine box slung over their shoulder from a leather strap..

Last year I was visiting an elderly friend (who is black and once shined shoes) when a Rolls Royce pulled up in front of his house. The man (also black) in the Rolls was delivering a pair of custom orthopedic shoes. We were introduced and chatted briefly until he left.

I asked my elderly friend to tell me about the man driving the Rolls Royce. My friend said "well, he started off shining shoes..........., hired a few people to work at his shoe shine stand............., got the shoe shine franchise at the airport..........., got into the custom shoe business.............." Now I figure that was sometime in the late 50's - early 60's. In fact, I think I remember him from my youth.

Now I have never shined shoes for a living. But I am not driving a Rolls Royce now either.

 

[gb hill]

Pretty Booger is a shoe shine man who lives in Graham N.C. He is not ashamed of his work. Here is a photo of him with reporter Caron Meyers of TV Fox 8. This is the camera guys flickr page.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33066968@N00/14437062/

 

[wlewisiii]

But the point of starting this thread was to get some serious discussions going on about our photography and I think that's pretty much what we've been doing. What would you like to photograph over the next year or so that might carry some significance to a viewer half a century hence? Think about it. Do something about it.

I think this finally lets me put my finger on what has been bugging me about this thread. Why the presumption that just because some of us use this place to talk a bit about some gear (& other toys we enjoy) that means we are unable to be serious about our photography?

I have several projects I'm working on that I feel are significant but get the feeling I shouldn't bother mentioning them because they won't measure up to Mr. Franks mythos. That they won't, in your eyes, be the right kind or right subject or right technique or right something or other.

Ah, well, may all of us have a better new year.

William

 

[Merkin]

Pretty Booger is a shoe shine man who lives in Graham N.C. He is not ashamed of his work. Here is a photo of him with reporter Caron Meyers of TV Fox 8. This is the camera guys flickr page.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33066968@N00/14437062/

In Wilson, NC, there is a guy with a metalworking shop downtown that used to be an auto mechanic's shop. The bathrooms are outside, in the area where customers brought in their cars. The men's room door is not original, but if you look very closely at the women's room door, you can see where, under several layers of paint, the door originally said "White Ladies." Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a good photograph of it. I guess the point of mentioning this is to say that even though great strides have been made in recent years, we are still not terribly far (in a literal sense of years) from those days that we see in "The Americans," and a lot of the things we see in those shots, as well as other shots from the time, aren't necessarily gone, they just have a couple layers of fresh paint over them. You could go to any migrant worker camp in the southeast (i can think of a few examples just in Eastern NC where I grew up) and take shots that would have as much capacity to wrench the heart as any number of the FSA shots from the thirties. The "old days" aren't gone, they are just hidden away in dark corners where the middle class don't tend to venture. They are out there to be found and photographed today, though.

 

[Al Kaplan]

Why is it when we finally get a good thread going about about shooting pictures, and the impact our pictures might have on social change, some folks take it as a put down on those who want to talk gear? We all use gear, but gear is just gear. At the beginning of the thread I mentioned the grainy contrasty photos from pushing the emulsions of yore, and the slight unsharpness that many of the photos exhibit from using the lenses of the period. That was gear talk. Not talk about the latest high tech gear available to us today, but gear talk. He was using the latest high tech gear available fifty years ago. Perhaps none of us are in Frank's league. Perhaps Frank was really a second rate photographer compared to others of his generation whose photographs we'll never get to see. He might just have been the one who had the right social connections to get introduced to the editors and reviewers. We'll never know. But the book was published and it had a profound effect on the direction of documentry photography.

 

[Merkin]

I have several projects I'm working on that I feel are significant but get the feeling I shouldn't bother mentioning them because they won't measure up to Mr. Franks mythos. That they won't, in your eyes, be the right kind or right subject or right technique or right something or other.


William

Something tells me that if there is anyone here on RFF that is as good as some of "the greats," they probably lurk 😉 To that end, I don't think that any reasonable person (yes, I know this IS the internet...) expects every single shot posted around here to "live up to someone's mythos," or to be great, or to even be good. I don't think that "my work isn't as good as X, Y, or Z, therefore I am not going to show it" is a particularly valid reason to not show off some work that you would like to show off.

Even if you shoot in a style that isn't everyone's cup of tea, it doesn't mean that no one will like what you do. If anything, you might broaden someone's horizons, and someone might give you a piece of constructive criticism that you can take to heart and learn from.

 

[sjones]

If one is already predisposed to hating America, then many of the images will certainly appear "sinister," but passing such harsh judgment on absolute strangers simply because of the way they were depicted for one second of their life is arguably a sinister act itself, certainly a tendentious one.

Photography needs to be careful; I can approach a group of people who are all laughing, having a genuinely wonderful time. Someone stops laughing for a half a second, I take the picture, and proclaim the true "isolation" that permeates throughout the populace.

Even if accepting that the "The Americans" deliberately portrays the country's horrors, and assuming that all of the characters included (well, the white ones) are indeed evil, it would be foolish to use the book as a visual testament to America's only reality, as society, let alone individuals, in any country, are generally a little more complex than that.

 

[MikeL]

He might just have been the one who had the right social connections to get introduced to the editors and reviewers. We'll never know.

When I first looked through The Americans, one of the first things that came to mind was that I would like to see the photos he didn't include.

 

[Jamie Pillers]

What I love about Frank's book is that it gets me re-excited about photography at just those moments when I think "Why bother... every picture has been made."

Frank's book represents one very small moment in time here in the US. Time has moved on. Many new issues need to be 'discussed' photographically. There will never be a lack of important subject matter.

So, thank you to all the photographers that have come before us, who have worked their hearts out capturing moments in time. Now its our turn. Keep it up, boys and girls. 🙂

 

[Beniliam]

Rarely I read words about the influence of Louis Faurer in the work of Robert Frank, one of the most interesting points in my opinion about the photography of Robert Frank. When Robert Frank arrived with 23 years to America, he had the great chance of find a photographer like Louis Faurer, eight years older than Frank. I feel that the Robert Frank sensibility about the city and America shares a very similar vision that Louis Faurer had. In some ways, Louis Faurer is a ´proto-Frank´, a ´first-Frank´, and was one of the first photographers that had that detachment glance for photograph the urbe in the 40´s.

Robert Frank published part of his work, but Louis Faurer didnt do the same, at least as soon as Frank did. Part of the success in the photographers life can be a publication, an exhibition, a grant... Sometimes, succes dont have a clear explanation, but its quite evident.


-David

 

[Bob Michaels]

But the point of starting this thread was to get some serious discussions going on about our photography and I think that's pretty much what we've been doing. What would you like to photograph over the next year or so that might carry some significance to a viewer half a century hence? Think about it. Do something about it.

Al: right on! As a rare central Florida native, I have real interest in documenting our local people, history and culture. Our population is now about 30X what it was when I was born here, so there have been many changes. I am trying to figure out now what is going to be historically significant in the future.

I am finishing shooting / beginning final edit of 3 month long documentary of Florida Highway 50. That is a 110 mile road that runs E/W across the state from Titusville on the east coast to BayPort on the Gulf of Mexico. It runs through downtown Orlando, many differing rural communities, the St. Johns river flood plain, huge state forest. Just about everything in FL, including some 60 year old tourist attractions, is represented somewhere along that road. This is a collective effort of four of us, each with a very distinct photo style. I am anxious to see how the final body of work turns out as I have never worked with others before.

I spent most of 2006 & 2007 doing a photo story of the people of South Apopka, the historic black section of where I live. I was happy with the way it turned out. That was exhibited 3 times in local non profit galleries in 2008. It will be on exhibit at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, a part of the University of Mississippi mid-January through March of '09.

I spent six months in 2005 photographing the people who come to the Daytona Beach Boardwalk. I photographed there just about every weekend. That was timely as the City seized about half the arcades & rides there by eminent domain and tore them down to build something better. Now it is vacant.

I spent most of '03 & '04 documenting the disappearing rural lifestyle surrounding here. That body of work is sometimes exhibited along with the South Apopka work.

And I am already thinking about what I want to do next. I do know that it will have something to do with the local population.

 

[Jamie Pillers]

Beniliam,
Thanks for the Louis Faurer reference. I hadn't heard of him... I'll search around to see what I can find about him and his work.
Jamie