My First Memory of Color
Short documentary by Anatoli Ulyanov
As an immigrant from a raceless country, I’m troubled by the American obsession with the color of one’s skin.
In 2018 I’ve asked my friends to recall the very first time they became aware of having a race.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Being born in the Soviet Union, I was never introduced to the concept of “Race”. Not until I moved to the United States and realized that everything in this country is about Color, and defined by Color. To me, it’s something that is hard to comprehend. As an immigrant who’s going through the process of re-socialization, I feel that Race is being forced on me – as if in order to become an American citizen I must include the color of my skin into my identity. I resist the racial cautiousness as a fertile soil for racism. But in the US a notion of Race seems to be bigger than a person. I use my art as a tool to investigate this problem and to provoke a discussion.
Los Angeles, 2018
VIDEO: Anatoli Ulyanov
DESIGN: by Natasha Masharova
MUSIC: The Bowls
PRODUCTION: VVHY
ОТ АВТОРА
Меня беспокоит американская одержимость цветом кожи. Я родился в советской Украине. Идея “расы” не была частью моего социалистического образования. Никто не учил меня ни тому, что я “белый”, ни тому, что “чёрные” чем-то “хуже” меня. Оказавшись в США, я попал в общество, где цвет кожи решает всё. Проходя через неизбежный для всякого иммигранта процесс ре-социализации, я чувствую как американская культура буквально принуждает меня к расе – складывается впечатление, что для того, чтобы стать американским гражданином я должен включить цвет кожи в свою идентичность. Я усматриваю в этом требовании расизм, и пытаюсь понять бытовую механику расового сознания. Поэтому и попросил своих американских друзей вспомнить первый раз, когда они осознали, что у них есть раса. Результатом этого опроса стало данное видео.
SO MUCH LOVE, IT'S A SHAME
by Ana Vallejo
by Ana Vallejo
For the first time, I am looking at myself in silence for prolonged periods of time. Through research of neuroscientific and psychological journals, therapy, interviews, and anonymous inquiries I am exhaustively scrutinizing my fears, desires, obsessions, and defenses.
I am photographing, collecting, and recapturing traces in all the mediums that become available to me, transcribing my unprocessed and obsolete inner workings into another version of myself.
Our eyes meet and a chemical reaction takes place.
A rush of dopamine increases my focus as we simultaneously scan each other’s presence.
Unconscious attraction drives me to know this person and the experience proves to be exhilarating, an intense print of pleasure has been formed in my memory again.
Quickly, my source of gratification shifts and becomes a bit more elusive, a red flag of what is ahead.
Intermittent reinforcement is always the most irresistible and reckless, my reptilian brain is in charge from now on.
I can’t control my surroundings, and stupidly cling tightly. At every hint that the source of my energy, focus, and pleasure might vanish, I fall into despair.
In this hypervigilant state, every disturbance in my surrounding is sensed with suspicion.
My anxious nature knows this road a little too well. The thrill has been asphyxiated.
At this point he is miles away from my reach. Prolonging the situation will only lead to increasing degradation.
Then again, if I had been given any control in this process I would have most likely also fled.
I find myself in isolation fearing a void within myself. “How can you not provide yourself with your own sense of worth?” The weight of this judgement inundates all my mental spaces.
My thoughts lose continuity and the blob of fragments overwhelm me, I can only process that I am not fit for this world.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
I want to know what the experience of falling in and out of love feels like to you. Fill out this anonymous form to be a part of this project.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ana Vallejo is a Colombian photographer who is viscerally attracted to color and emotions. She is fascinated with human perception and with how art and social bonding expand our sentience and concept of self.
Ig: @anacvallejo
anacvallejo.com
MONTAGE AND ART DIRECTION BY FOTODEMIC
LOOKING THROUGH THE WINDOW
by Kenji Chiga
by Kenji Chiga
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KAGEROU
by Yusuke Takagi
by Yusuke Takagi
Kagerou is the heat haze on a desert lake. Invisible, pervasive decay powered by the nuclear radiation. It was 12 March 2011. The day after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, I woke up in a shrouded Tokyo. The cityscape looked blurred and twisted. Nobody else seemed to notice. For 37 million people it was business as usual. Compared to the visible devastation of the tsunami, the invisible hazard of contamination seemed to belong to another world.
The ghostly exclusion zone surrounding Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant felt more real. The danger was showing its consequences. The nature was starting to reclaim the town. It felt like walking in a floating world painting, everything was silent.
Two years later my beautiful son was born. His mother and I are still wondering what the effects of the radiation are while he was in her womb.
In the wake of Fukushima Daiichi meltdown, I face the fears of the nuclear era, pondering pregnancy and fatherhood in a transfigured Tokyo with the landscapes of the Zone and the portraits of people who decided not to leave.
Is the image of Kagerou just an illusion, or was the nuclear heat haze showing the true nature of things? Life goes on, no matter whether you are in Tokyo, Yokohama or Fukushima, we are at the mercy of politics and fate.
「陽炎」、それは砂漠の中の泉、放射性物質の崩壊熱、目に見えず、そして拡散する。福島第1原発が津波の被害を受けた翌日の20011年3月12日、静寂が支配する東京で目覚めた私は視界がぼやけ、歪んでいることに気づいた。原発から250キロ離れている東京では何事もなかったかのように日常が営まれていた。津波による目に見える被害とは異なり、目に見えない放射能汚染の危険は別世界のように感じられた。
福島第1原発を中心とした無人の避難区域の存在が、私にはよりリアリティを増して感じられた。やがて自然は再生を始め、町をも飲み込んだ。静寂が町を支配し、まるで絵の中の浮遊した世界を歩いているかのようだった。
2年後、玉のような息子が誕生した。彼がまだ母親の胎内にいた頃から、私たち夫婦は胎内被爆の影響を未だに案じていた。
この物語は、福島第一原発のメルトダウンをきっかけに放射能の恐怖に否応なく飲み込まれた私が、息子を授かって父親となり、変貌した東京の風景と同時に避難区域となった土地の風景とそこに残ることを決意した人々のポートレートを撮影した写真が織りなす物語である。
「陽炎」とは単なる幻影だったのだろうか。はたまた核分裂による熱によって物事の本質が炙り出されたのだろうか。東京であろうが福島であろうが、政治と運命に翻弄されながら、それでも我々の人生は続く。
I majored in Sociology at Meiji Gakuin University and since graduating, I’ve been a photographer based in Japan. I always try to put my conscience on neutral and see society as it is. For me, to tell a story is to understand society and myself. In addition to making my own photographs, I also use archives and other kinds of materials if it works for telling the story.
Kagerou consists of two different stories, Fukushima and Tokyo. About a month after the Fukushima disaster, I went to Minamisōma, which is about 30 km from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, and documented the landscape and the people who decided to stay. I visited there often. Apart from Fukushima project, I shot the landscape in Tokyo and my son, who was born two years after the disaster.
I was trying to think of how to publish the Fukushima project with multiple layers. There have been many stories published about Fukushima. I finally decided to combine the Fukushima story and the Tokyo story so that I could show Fukushima from a unique point of view - a father’s point of view. I tried to avoid the typical narrative that is often told about radiation. Instead, I used many metaphors, in hopes of drawing attention to the invisible fears and anxiety around it for the future.
Radiation and viruses are invisible, and many news stories about them, including true and fake stories, appear on TV and SNS. Because of this, fears spread dramatically like a virus and people become fearful. Poor people are always affected most by these disasters. After the Fukushima disaster, people were forced to be separated from nature, but this time people are isolated and realize how important nature is. Whatever happens, life goes on.
Human beings are fragile. We realize we are helpless in the face of nature. There seems to be no choice but to accept everything that happens and to try our best to live. It’s time to understand that we should give up the idea of destroying and conquering the virus. Instead, we should coexist with it in this pandemic situation. I believe we can adapt ourselves to our new circumstances.
www.yusuketakagi.net
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THE HERMIT
Short documentary by Lena Friedrich
synopsis
When the news broke that a man had been hiding in the woods of Maine for 27 years, it turned into a media sensation. Overnight, the identity of the legendary “North Pond Hermit” was disclosed and he became the talk of the town.
The Hermit is a documentary about the extensive impact made by someone who spent a lifetime trying to erase any hint of his own existence.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Lena Friedrich is a French-American filmmaker and writer.
CREDIT LIST
Directed and Produced by Lena Friedrich
Co Producers: Laura Snow And Aitor Mendilibar
Director Of Photography: Laura Snow
Sound Recordist: Aitor Mendilibar
Edited By: Lena Friedrich
Consulting Editor: Bob Eisenhardt
Story Consultants: Immy Humes & James Lecesne
Still Photographer: Aitor Mendilibar
Original Score: Fatrin Krajka & Gary Lucas (The Legenary Guitar Player Who Composed Jeff Buckley’s Grace)
Songs: Minnehonk Blues By Stan Keach And Dan Simons
Banjo In Hallowellfor By Stan Keach And Dan Simons
The North Pond Hermit By Troy R. Bennet
Music Supervisor: Benoit Muno
Interview by Zoe Potkin
I was randomly checking the news when I saw an alert about Christopher Knight’s arrest. It said something like “Man arrested after spending 27 years in the woods of Maine.” 27 years! That was approximately my age at the time. I had lived in different countries, worked different jobs, fallen in and out of love, and during all that time this man had not had a single human interaction. He had simply been living in the same campsite, lost in the woods.
The article I had stumbled upon included interviews with residents of the town into which Knight snuck in at night to steal what he needed to survive.
Two things raised my curiosity:
1. Every interviewee had a very strong opinion about Knight.
2. None of them had the same opinion.
But what truly prompted me to go to Maine with a small crew and shoot the film was a line from one of the victims of Knight’s robberies: “He doesn’t like tuna fish too much.” I thought that was just so funny!
I had contacted the president of the North Pond Association in advance and he generously introduced us to his community. It was pure luck that we ran into Carrol, the mustached man who guided us through the dense woods to Knight’s secret campsite. He found his way by looking for a particularly sharp stone or recognizing some broken branch in the middle of the forest. It was uncanny! Every media outlet, including the New York Times, had been trying to access the encampment and couldn’t find it. We were the only ones who filmed it before the location was disclosed.
In the comments section of the local newspapers, I noticed that people were reacting to the story very intensely, sometimes with great hostility. The town became polarized between those who saw “the hermit” as a villain and those who saw him as a folk hero of sorts. I realized that as with every legend, the true legend of “The North Pond Hermit” had many versions and interpretations. I tried to find characters who would provide personal layers of understanding to the enigma.
What makes Knight’s story so extraordinary is that it happened in the 21st century. Had the story happened in 1914 instead of 2014, it wouldn’t have been so remarkable and it wouldn’t have been sensationalized by social media or the international press.
It is only in contrast with today’s urban, hyper-connected normative lifestyle that living a solitary life in the woods becomes so puzzling. In the age of selfies, this man had not even seen his own reflection in a mirror! He did not care for productivity hacks or social media following, and he certainly didn’t suffer from fomo.
I think people react strongly to Knight because he radically rejected everything that is supposed to make us happy – meaningful relationships, a fulfilling career, material comfort – yet, he was content in the woods.
Also, dropping out of society is the ultimate, most radical act of freedom. It is inspiring for someone like me who feels slightly rebellious when putting my phone on airplane mode for a couple of hours.
While the epidemic has shown how connected and interdependent we are on a global level, confinement has revealed how resourceful we can be individually.
Suddenly, we discover all the things we are capable of making, fixing, cooking. We also realize all the things we can live without and that can be very liberating.
Knight’s story expands the limits of what we considered possible for a human. Perhaps this can give us the perspective to examine our own lifestyles and reflect on modern society as we enter the post-Covid world.
I feel very comfortable with solitude. It is a restorative state for me, but I get energized and inspired by people. It’s a fine balance.
The way in which I relate the most to Knight is not so much his love for solitude, but his struggle to fulfill social expectations. I find it pretty hard and boring to do what you are supposed to do. My way of dealing with that is not to escape expectations, but to play with them.
FLOWERS
by Federico Pestilli
by Federico Pestilli
In our desire to control Nature, we invented a tool to separate us from it. Plastic’s primary function is separation. Its ability to isolate, contain, and protect inner from outer matter provides solutions to many human needs. Its durability and resistance to degradation, on the other hand, represent a threat to living organisms. While seemingly protecting flowers, the synthetic “shroud” eventually destroys their organic beauty.
Only light, it seems, has a chance to play on both sides of the translucent barrier.
Federico Pestilli is an Italian artist who combines photography and painting to create large-scale studies.
PANDEMIC, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTANCE
Interview with Fred Ritchin
Interview with Fred Ritchin
by Amanda Darrach, CJR
Image by Alexey Yurenev
Decisions made by photojournalists and their editors define traumatic events in the cultural consciousness. Throughout coverage of COVID-19, many news outlets have published photographs that reiterate racist tropes, suggest a false gap between “East” and “West,” and fail to engage a fuller range of human efforts to respond to a pandemic.
CJR spoke with Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography (ICP) School and a former professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University specializing in visual media and human rights, who shared his opinions about early photographic coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and the way journalism illustrates trauma. Ritchin’s comments have been edited for length and clarity.
PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE PRESS tends to be reactive rather than proactive—graphically depicting catastrophes rather than illuminating strategies that may diminish or even prevent the worst from happening. Photojournalism has also often been used to highlight the “other” as victimized, less well off than we are.
With the coronavirus, it was at first the Chinese wearing masks, who became emblematic of the idea that bad things happen to other people. That was very short-sighted. There’s an understandable but problematic impulse to try and show that others have it worse than we do, that we are somehow in a protected space. It’s a psychological defense, but it’s not what’s called for in journalism.
Much of the photography that we see is not actually “coverage” but facile “signifiers.” Part of the problem is a shortsightedness in the utilization of photography: rather than use it to explore what is going on, just pick a signifier, a white mask, and stick it everywhere. Rather than ask questions of events, the images often just show a fragment of what’s there without putting it in context. If you’re reading a major news organization on your cell phone, you have this postage stamp-sized image. It looks like a photograph, but basically it’s only a button that is there to be pushed to get the potential reader to the article. For that, the easiest thing is a simple signifier—an alarming image of a white mask that gets the reader to click to the next screen rather than reflect.
When I think of the white masks, I think of orange jumpsuits issued to detainees at Guantanamo. Once you saw the orange jumpsuits, the people wearing them are dehumanized, thought of as guilty, although most were later released. The orange jumpsuit signified that They’re different from us, there is an enemy out there. I think the white masks at first constituted a shorthand that said it’s about the “other,” not us. It was a visceral defense against the threat of contagion that crumbled as the pandemic took hold. Now it’s no longer just the other, it’s us, but very little of the imagery we have seen told us how those first affected were able to cope with it, to contain it.
“When I worked in print journalism, one would think, Oh, I can show a picture of someone far away in a difficult situation without revictimizing them because they would never see the newspaper. With the Web, that stopped. You understood that there is no seal between you and the rest of the world.”
I was a curator of a show on Iraqi civilian photography made a year after the US invasion. The most important image for me was the one of somebody in Iraq going to the dentist, because it’s not about bombs exploding. The visual take-away from the Iraq war, like so many other conflicts elsewhere, was that there were all these crazy people just killing each other all the time. Once you see people go to the dentist, they’re more like us. And then it’s terrifying because it could happen to us as well. It’s not only them anymore.
When I worked in print journalism, one would think, Oh, I can show a picture of someone far away in a difficult situation without revictimizing them because they would never see the newspaper. With the Web, that stopped. You understood that there is no seal between you and the rest of the world. The world may see what you publish. Being a war photographer is different when the combatants are checking out your pictures the next day and you’re embedded with them. You may photograph differently. You may take their feelings into account in different ways.
At PixelPress, an online publication that I directed, we put a photograph of somebody jumping from the World Trade Center on our home page right after the September 11 attacks. And I immediately got reactions from people I knew who basically said they would never talk to me again if I didn’t take it down.
In this photograph, you could not identify the person. So it wasn’t that we were revictimizing that specific individual’s family or friends. But I took the photo down because people were really upset. You couldn’t publish those pictures, because that was us, not someone else.
With COVID-19, initial photos depicted the danger as being far away, as opposed to raising questions of what’s going on among us. It’s been, understandably, somewhat of a stunned reaction worldwide—not knowing what’s going on, not knowing what questions to ask, and not wanting to add to the panic.
One of the most interesting coronavirus-related images I saw is one of China since the people stopped going to work. The pollution has decreased enormously, because they’re not doing what they normally do. I learned something about what’s going on, and even felt a small bit of hope that we might use some of these images to motivate ourselves to respond more effectively to climate change.
Photographs rarely become icons now, as they did with “Earthrise,” and during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. It’s not top-down anymore; with social media, it’s much more horizontal. Its fuel is constant replenishment of stuff that could become viral. And what often works best are things that cause immediate visceral reactions, such as hate, fear, anger.
You could argue that social media as it functions now, and online media in general, is very well-made for the panicky side of an outbreak, and less well-made for the compassionate side. The image of the neighbor helping someone get to the hospital or bringing food to someone in quarantine isn’t the first to go viral. I think online media is often better at propagating the malignancies as opposed to the underlying issues at play, the strategies for healing and understanding.
It is difficult to have nuanced discussions in the newsroom when people are under so much pressure to produce on a never-ending news cycle. Often, people picking the pictures don’t have time to reflect on these complexities, or they must plug imagery into a predetermined template that limits their choices.
Editors are really undervalued; they’re the people who should be asking these questions. Didn’t we run another mask picture yesterday and the day before and the day before that? Can we do something different? In some publications there are very few photo editors now, a result in part of the financial squeeze in journalism, and very little money to make long-term assignments.
What are the alternatives? What else can you do? Should you do portraits of 28 people who survived the coronavirus? Couldn’t that be reassuring to people, and isn’t it reflective of the actual situation in which the large majority of people do survive their illness? It takes effort to do that. It’s a lot simpler to pick up the white mask picture than to find 28 people and do 28 portraits and interviews.
I would love to see photographs showing the faces of the nurses, the technicians, the people working long shifts, the cleaners, the people who are putting their lives at risk for the rest of us. It can be upsetting to think of being taken care of by a space-suited person—certainly for kids, as well as for many adults. I would like to see who these people are, why they do what they do, in part so that we can feel empathy for them, and gratitude. One photograph I saw online in the New Yorker did just that: a doctor, the only one in Clay County, Georgia, where forty percent of the population is under the poverty line, is depicted sitting on a metal folding chair as she talks with the nurse in their small clinic. It speaks of concern, and responsibility.
A friend of mine just got out of quarantine the other morning. I’d love for someone to do a portrait of her to say, Look, she’s fine, she’s happy to be out and about again. It’s actually so reflexive, this Let’s find the worst and publicize it. Somehow, showing the best in people nowadays is frequently viewed as naïve.
Published in Columbia Journalism Review on March 20, 2020. Reprinted with permission.
POEM
by Larry Fink
by Larry Fink
it’s that moment in — between
daffodils and tulips
bright yellow finches
are passing through
the bird feeder glows
next week the tender red
will color the landscape
the tulips will dance in the north breezes
waiting for the southern sun
we as people will rejoice in our
necessary discipline
we as a people can out last
and analyze this period
this terror. this bright illuminator.
this dark moment in human history
we as a world and it is the whole of us
will begin to rethink thinking
without blinking we all of us will sustain
the tender hopes of children and doing so
will be born again anew....
Larry Fink has worked as a photographer for over sixty years. He has had one-man shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, among other venues.