About the Sixties

An alternative reality, in which Swinging London was devised and documented not by Mary Quant and David Bailey and the Beatles, but by Samuel Beckett.

(Photo of Twiggy and Wilfrid Brambell by Burt Glinn.)

About Greta Thunberg

Two thoughts. First (prompted by a Facebook exchange), what would Roland Barthes have made of this photograph? And then, Paul Morley’s analysis of a famously ill-tempered edition of Juke Box Jury: “How Johnny Rotten looks at Noel Edmonds is eventually how an entire nation would look at Noel Edmonds.”

About blackface

A man in Arizona is objecting to an old photograph of coal miners in a bar because it reminds him of blackface. He accepts that the picture isn’t intended to represent blackface, but “a business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me “Whites Only.” It says people like me are not welcome.” Ultimately, whatever the reality of what the image depicts (and we’re almost getting into Magritte territory here), “the context of the photograph is not the issue.” It’s a starting line, a springboard for a bigger, nastier conversation. Which is probably one we ought to have, but it makes people uncomfortable, so. nah, let’s just take down the photo.

A few days later, a piece in the New York Times traces a fairly convoluted line between blackface traditions and the soot-smeared chimney sweeps of Mary Poppins, rather ignoring the fact that, whatever the original intent of PL Travers, or Walt Disney, or long-forgotten vaudevillians, or even the blessed St Dick of Van Dyke, sweeps’ faces are black because of the nature of their work, not as part of a secret plot to ensure white superiority. Like the miners, they work with dirt.

And just now, I read that Gucci is withdrawing a (frankly hideous but what do I know?) piece of clothing because it reminded somebody of blackface.

The argument is no longer about whether blackface was “just a harmless bit of fun” (it clearly wasn’t) but whether it was something so heinous that any cultural product that might accidentally remind someone that blackface even existed should be cast onto the scrapheap. Clearly this sets precedents. Should we ban the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ because the refrain could prompt flashbacks to Kristallnacht? Or possibly consign the routines of Les Dawson to the margins, not because of his rather unenlightened attitude to his mother-in-law, but because his forename is still occasionally deployed as a homophobic slur?

Beyond the inevitable PC GORN MAD headlines, we need to remember that everything is offensive and hurtful to someone. Coalminers and chimney sweeps and designers of truly horrible jumpers may take offence at the brouhaha that’s arisen from these stories. But as Rashaad Thomas, the author of the article about the miners argues, the context is not the issue. How we respond is the issue.

And increasingly, my response is to search out the nearest coal mine and wonder what it’s like down there.

PS: Katy Perry adds to the fun.

About AI

We should no longer be surprised that Artificial Intelligence is generating much of what we are encouraged to call “content”, whether it’s words or pictures (ceci n’est pas your mum). The tipping point comes when it’s not just the product, it’s the consumers who exist beyond meatspace. As Max Read reports in New York magazine:

Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

Which raises all sorts of questions: can there be a valid Turing test if neither party is human (but each assumes the other to be)? And does Baudrillard’s hyperreality become hyper fraudulent? (“Wasn’t it always?” chuckle the cynics.) And if we’re not brains in vats, could we just be phones in racks?

About comments

I was wondering whether to write about the Anni Albers show at Tate Modern but, as is so often the case, it’s more fun to write about what other people have written. For example this, left on the comments board (in the gift shop, naturally).

Some thoughts:

1. What exactly is the objection to taking photographs in an exhibition? I can see there may be copyright issues, and it might have an impact on, say, postcard sales, but surely that’s a problem for the gallery, not a visitor. It’s not as if people are lugging around tripods and flash guns; someone taking a photo of a picture with a phone is no more intrusive than someone simply looking. It is pretty much impossible these days to market any kind of arts event without using social media (there was a notice up asking us to use the hashtag #AnniAlbers) so exhibitors should be seeking to embrace the form; last year’s Selfie to Self-Expression show at the Saatchi being a case in point.

2. If, for some reason, you object to being in proximity to people taking photos, I can’t imagine that counting them does much to soothe your troubled soul. It’s almost as if you want to be offended, and somehow need to quantify your degree of offence.

3. Oh dear. Those exclamation marks. Really.

PS: Vaguely related: A cheerful update to the Monkey Christ fiasco.

About Tumblr

I was alerted by my venerable friend Barnaby Edwards to the fact that the image-sharing site Tumblr is attempting rid itself of “adult content”. And, unsurprisingly, nobody seems to know what that means. Tumblr reassures us that “artistic, educational, newsworthy, or political content featuring nudity are fine” but the results don’t seem to bear that out.

So, I tested it out, with a pop-up Tumblr of my own. And apparently these images are “adult”:

Whereas these are... well, whatever the opposite of adult may be. Childish? In any case, Tumblr appears to see no ill in them, not even the one of a severed head. Which is surely worse than bosoms and willies, isn’t it?

PS: There were rumours that a lot of the censorship betrayed an element of anti-gay bias, so I posted this as well, but nobody complained, so that’s OK then.

PPS: But then they blocked this:

PPPS: And because you’re all desperate to know, they’ve passed everything except the Courbet and the Michelangelo.

About Hurricane Michael

OK, call it the pathetic fallacy, but maybe Hurricane Michael is really trying to tell us something about consumer capitalism. In any case, it’s given Naomi Klein her next book cover...

About the Crocus Valley

I am, and always have been, a profoundly rubbish photographer. But I’ve finally come to realise that this hasn’t stopped a whole load of other buggers from taking lots of photos and showing them to people, so I’ve put a few snaps of my hood, as the young persons have it, here on Tumblr. Enjoy. Or don’t, because they’re rubbish.

About Ophelia etc

Storm/Hurricane Ophelia has battered Ireland, but in its slipstream yesterday came a shower of meteorological weirdness over parts of England. The morning was strangely warm for October; and in the afternoon Saharan sand in the wind turned the sun and sky various shades of red and yellow.

It was one of those moments when you had to be there. From inside at about 3pm, it looked as if storm clouds were gathering; stepping outside, everything was suffused with a weird, tawny light; the closest thing I can compare it to was when I was in Stockholm at the height of summer and it was still light past 10pm, but the city was starting to fall asleep anyway. Inevitably, many people took photographs but this was one phenomenon to which mere smartphones could not do justice. For some reason (sorry, ask someone more tech-savvy than me), the odd ambience wouldn’t translate to ones and zeroes and pixels. So, rather than commit the ultimate 21st-century solecism and leave an event unrecorded, many people tweaked their images with various filters so as to give the pictures the appropriate hue. Despite the fact that many of the people who saw those images were looking at the real thing themselves. The simulacrum was momentarily imperfect and had to be nudged back to perfection, especially because the original was still there for comparison.

And then, because it was so difficult to communicate in words or images exactly what was happening, even to people who were experiencing exactly the same thing, we all started talking about Ragnarok and the Book of Revelation, which is much easier.

(John Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-53)

And you thought funeral selfies were bad?

The latest eruption of moral why-oh-whyery to transfix the interwebs has been prompted by the Tumblr Selfies at Funerals, which does pretty much what it says in the title; young people trying to make a solemn occasion all about them. Could there be a more apt symbol of the corruption of modern society?

Once again, plucky Thailand rises to the challenge. On Monday three bomb disposal officers were killed in the restive south of the country and when the bodies were brought into the hospital, a couple of nurses decided to mark the occasion thus:

PS: The nurses have apologised. So that’s OK then.

Photographing food: eating with your mouth closed

I don’t actually have a principled objection to people taking pictures of their food: that said, it can be annoying when they insist on taking pictures of my food as well and won’t let me start eating it until they’ve snapped it from five different angles.

What worries me, however, is what such ad hoc snapping replaces. Instagram and Tumblr are quintessential media for our post-literate age, in that they do away with the need for all that pesky writing and spelling and syntax stuff that seemed so vital in the days when blogging looked like the future (see the second quote here). But they also ensure that people can document their various realities without engaging in any kind of critical thinking. Clearly one’s choice of subject implies a certain level of discrimination, but ultimately the burden of analysis is placed on the person viewing the photo, and that’s often based on something other than the quality of the picture or even the specific content. We respond differently to someone photographing a meal at The Fat Duck than to someone doing the same thing at Nando’s. I’ve seen people photographing their frappucinos; am I entitled to have a critical response towards such a phenomenon? If photographers don’t explicitly review the food, we fill the gap by reviewing the photographers. Ultimately it’s all about them; see the tumblr Pictures of Hipsters Taking Pictures of Food.

I’m in the middle of Steven Poole’s You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up With Gastroculture, in which he excoriates the drooling excesses of chefs, critics and foodies. It’s an entertaining read and he makes many good points about the daft ways in which food has been raised to the level of art or sex. But ultimately, if we worry too much about the risk of hyperbole when writing about food – or about anything – we may as well just put down “And then I had gazpacho and then I had lamb chops and then I had baked Alaska and it was all nice.” Or we might as well just take photos and not say or write or think anything at all.

Walk away René Magritte

I very rarely find myself in an “I-wish-I’d-had-a-camera” moment because I’m hopeless at taking pictures and in any case deep within my DNA I think there’s a little bit of that superstition (Amish? Inca? Nepalese? Can never remember...) that capturing someone’s image is a way of grabbing their soul. And I’m really rather shy, so I could never do that thing of stopping perfect strangers on the street and asking to photograph their groovy clothes; and I’m also very wary of confrontation, so I could never risk taking pictures surreptitiously, in case the subject objected. No, words is what I do, which is why I was massively tempted to turn the end of that last sentence into a pun about word order, by inserting the word “verb” but I didn’t, so hurrah for me.

But anyway, on Saturday night, in the gift shop of a posh hotel in Bangkok, I wished I’d had a camera. A youngish couple walked in; from what I could hear of their conversation I think they were Korean. He was wearing a blue-and-white striped polo shirt and on the right breast was Magritte’s pipe. Oh, you know the one:

That’s the chap. Except he just had the pipe – not the words. The words that seem to be a lie and then you suddenly realise they’re telling the truth, because it’s not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. The words that encapsulate Magritte’s dry, self-deprecating, deliciously Belgian wit; the words that brought metafiction to visual art; the words that make you look at all art before or since through different eyes; the words without which it would still be a pipe, because nobody’s telling you otherwise. But I didn’t take a photo, for all the reasons I mentioned.

And because I don’t know the Korean for “Do you mind if I take your photo for my new website youvecompletelymissedthebloodypoint.tumblr.com?”

That’s not me

I’m going to Vietnam in a few days’ time, so I had to get a visa, so I had to get some photos done. Thailand doesn’t have photo booths; instead, you go into a camera or print shop where someone takes your photo to the precise specification of the task to which it will be put, because the pics for passports and ID cards and work permits and visas to various countries all need to be different sizes and shapes.

Except that when I went to pick up the prints, they’d clearly gone PhotoShop crazy on my picture, zapping the pimples and eye bags, doing a digital botox job on my forehead and I think they even toned down the grey in my beard. What’s left is a cleaned-up, hyperreal simulacrum of the hideous mess I see in the mirror every morning, which would be understandable if I were starring in an advertising campaign for some overpriced moisturiser, but this is meant to be for an official document that lets me get into a country. The photograph is the proof that I’m the person to whom the details on the document apply. If the photograph doesn’t look like me, doesn’t that make the whole thing a bit pointless? It may as well be a picture of George Clooney or Winnie Mandela or a patch of moss.

One could delve into the realms of social anthropology and deduce that the buffing and sheening done to my sort-of-likeness is part of the Asian desire for harmony in all aspects of life. Thai people tend to tell you what you want to hear, but to them this isn’t a lie; they genuinely believe that keeping you happy is more important than keeping you in touch with reality. (If you want to see how disturbed they get when reality intrudes, read the comments on this article.) Maybe I was meant to think I really do look like that. In fact, the picture won’t even make me look better, because it will only ever be used in conjunction with my real face, and its weird, glossy smoothness will just throw my own saggy, pockmarked decrepitude into brutal relief.

The funny thing is, I bet the Vietnamese immigration guys won’t give a damn that the picture looks nothing like me; but if it turns out to be the wrong size, I’ve got no chance.

Everyone will become famous for 15 tweets

In The Guardian, Chris Floyd presents photographs of his favourite Twitter users. Forget Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher, though: one or two of them, refreshingly, are those mythical beasts, “ordinary people”, not actors or musicians or even, um, Guardian writers (three of whom are on Floyd’s list). Although now that the temp and the civil servant have achieved this random jolt of mainstream media attention, they will of course cease to be ordinary people, and at same time, cease to inhabit a nice little secret corner of social media; perversely, when they stop being ordinary, they also stop being special. Everybody knows them, and they are ruined. “Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit,” said Lady Bracknell, accidentally inventing quantum theory while she was at it. “Touch it and the bloom is gone.”

Wretched refuse

The US Postal Service has inadvertently issued a stamp depicting the fibre-glass simulacrum of the Statue of Liberty in Las Vegas, rather than the original. But this hasn’t provoked the outrage one might have expected, according to the New York Times.

“Wouldn’t anything be a replica anyway?” asks firefighter Doug Jessup, demonstrating a pretty good grasp of the Baudrillardian fundamentals. “It’s still only a picture, a representation in any case.” But it’s the response of 21-year-old Alex Henes that will most depress anyone who has pored through a Stanley Gibbons catalogue. “It’s a stamp to me,” he says. “We’re not the snail-mail generation; we’re the ‘e-mail, get it out as quick as you can’ generation. If it was 50 years ago, I would take issue with it.”

PS: Mrs Peel directs to some incisive comments from Times readers.

I agree with... um...

(From the Torygraph)

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Dreams of children

Oddly moving and evocative photos by George Plemper, from his time as a teacher in Thamesmead, SE London, in the late 70s. Background story here.