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Thursday 29 July 2010

Windhover


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File:Common-Kestrel-2.jpg

Common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus): photo by Andreas Trepte, 2010

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, pride, plume, here...-- G. M. Hopkins


The poet who reveled in the stooping of the raptor among reaches and crags
upon the wing of the wind

embraced the will in the scream of the plummeting Peregrine, the Greater Will,
the whim
of a beloved brutal and violent predator God --

praised out of silence lord dauphin chevalier and master,
sang flight terror
in the Merlin's glide, saw Christ in the dip of the Kestrel, knew love
ecstatic

in the Gyrfalcon's Sturzkampfflugzeug swoop and
Lanner's

wild updraft soaring out of stony nested shade
over tarn and lake -- sensed startled cry of prey, felt hearts
race, heard
sharp fear music from faroff in the instant of speechless prayer

before the inevitable Kill -- and then the fade

back to mere word language my heart in hiding
stirred --
from bird augury and violence in the realm
of the parahuman
the gods have always been made.



File:Gyrfalcon (falco rusticolus) in flight.jpg

Gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus) in flight, west of Hastings, Minnesota: photo by Derek Bakken, 2006

File:Falco columbarius pair Auburn NY 2.jpg

Merlin (Falco columbarius) pair fighting over prey, Auburn, New York
: photo by Bear Golden Retriever, 2010


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Merlin (Falco columbarius) pair fighting over prey, Auburn, New York: photo by Bear Golden Retriever, 2010

File:MerlinchasingBlueJay08.jpg
Merlin (Falco columbrius columbarius) hunting a Northern Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata bromia), Mount Auburn Cemetery,
Massachusetts
: photo by John Harrison, 2008

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Lanner Falcon (Falco biarmicus) in a dive: photo by Steve-B, 2006


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Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus anatum) in flight, Morro Bay, California: photo by Kevin Cole, 2008

The Emperor's Attendant


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The Persian emperor who had once been defeated in battle by Athens now required an attendant to accompany him at all times, to help him combat fatigue and discouragement and restore his taste for battle by murmuring night and day, "Lord, remember the Athenians." The mere words were enough to awaken the old feeling. This custom of the emperor persisted long after his reasons for going to war with the Athenians had faded from his mind. But his distaste for conflict remained a secret known only to his loyal attendant, who was forever whispering into his ear the prescribed urgings. The emperor seldom slept, the attendant even more rarely.

A new campaign began but the emperor barely noticed, for him things continued as they had been. Even when the fever of battle was sweeping over everyone around him, he felt himself strangely detached, as if standing, fully dressed in his battle armour, his bright war pennants unfurled brilliantly before him, well apart.

Then one night when a ground fog had crept over the camp, the tents were enveloped in silence, and the distant fires of the Athenians could hardly be made out through the mists that cloaked everything -- or, perhaps, it may have been on a night at sea in the Straits that this happened, and it was the distant lights of the enemy ships that were dimmed -- a peaceful moment befell the contending armies -- or fleets.

And the emperor's attendant drifted off to sleep.

It was as if something within the world had shifted, in that moment. There then prevailed a period of peace between the Persians and the Athenians.




File:Attack on Pearl Harbor Japanese planes view.jpg


US Navy sailors in motor launch rescue a survivor alongside the sunken battleship USS West Virginia during the Japanese raid at Pearl Harbor, 7 December, 1941: photo by US Navy
Torpedo exploding on USS Wast Virginia at Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941, seen from attacking Japanese plane: photo by Japanese Navy Ministry

Wednesday 28 July 2010

A Trip on the Santa Fe


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Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Passing a section house along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Encino vicinity, New Mexico, March 1943



The heavy industries that built and shaped our lives are dying
The sights and sounds now but memories of their once throbbing rituals
That echo and reflect their death throes
In retrospect
A pall of absence hangs over things
Yet time continues to move forward
Along the rusted tracks and corroded rails
Around blind corners
Through a labyrinth of empty corridors

We've perhaps been here
We will never be back
The tracks go on unscrolling
And we go on following the tracks
These endless parallels endlessly unravelling

A flagman
A pale glimmering signal light
Against the deep blue of the sky
Space drifts
We move forward as a scroll is unscrolled
There is no turning back
The pale glimmering of a signal
A level crossing
The stark figure of a man
He holds up one arm
As if beckoning
We pass another level crossing
Time floats
We follow the tracks
Distance
Iron rusting under snow
Absence
Smoke
The tracks continue on toward infinity
And a vanishing point
Debris of a past cluttered with activity and use

Oblique lines do bend and may greet but parallels though infinite may never meet
Rust covers everything an iron blight of time oxidizing
The past
We won't be back this way again soon
We were never really here so how can it be we're leaving
The blight of time an irony corroding what we've left behind

Time that is the ghostly material medium in which we think and act
Compelled onward yet never knowing where we're going
Turned aside, derailed, misled, diverted, confused, disoriented, finally lost
Time continues to grind on as long as we keep breathing

The world of time through which we travel which we have made and which has made us
Has only one direction
Forward
And one speed
This speed
And one destination



Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Santa Fe Railroad freight train about to leave for the West Coast, Corwith yard, Chicago, Illinois, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Re-tiring a locomotive drive wheel, Santa Fe Railroad shops, Shopton, Iowa: the tire is heated by means of gas until it can be slipped over the wheel; contraction will hold it firmly in shape, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Servicing engines at coal and sand chutes at Argentine Yard, Santa Fe Railroad, Kansas City, Kansas, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops, Topeka, Kansas, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Yardmaster in Santa Fe Railroad yards, Amarillo, Texas, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Grain elevators along the route of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, Amarillo, Texas, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

A completely overhauled engine on the transfer table at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad locomotive shops, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Santa Fe Railroad train near Melrose, New Mexico, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Santa Fe Railroad near Melrose, New Mexico, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Flagman standing at a distance behind a Santa Fe westbound freight train during a stop, Bagdad, California, March 1943

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Mojave Desert country, crossed by the Santa Fe Railroad, Cadiz, California

Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Activity in Santa Fe Railroad yard, Los Angeles, California: all switch lights, head lights and lamps have been shaded from above in accordance with blackout regulations; the heavy light streaks are caused by paths of locomotive headlights and the thin lines by lamps of switchmen working in the yards, March 1943


Folks around these parts get the time of day
From the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe
-- Johnny Mercer, 1944

Photos by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Scale: John Vachon


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Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Seed and feed store, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942


Middle America in the time just before and on into the early years of the War: this is the world into which I was born, in which I spent my childhood. In memory, it remains familiar to me, and has a scale I am able to recognize.

I say that world remains familiar to me in memory. But memory is a notoriously fleeting faculty, requiring, latterly, a bit of prompting. The photos here work for me as prompts. They take me back to that gone world, and perhaps even help to create the memories.

The photographer John Vachon (1914-1975) left his native Minnesota in 1936 to attend college in Washington, D.C., but within a year had dropped out of school and gone to work for the Farm Security Administration. At the time FSA director Roy Stryker was assembling a crew of the finest photographers in the country, their mission to document the lives of common working people and rural poor around a Depression-stricken America. Vachon, with no prior training in photography, began at FSA as a messenger, later became a filing clerk and fell into taking pictures out of a curiosity bred of proximity.

"John came [to Washington] to go to Catholic University," Stryker recalled in a 1963 Smithsonian oral history interview. "Got into some trouble down there because he was curious about the world about him and didn't attend classes. Finally wound up as a messenger in our place. I needed a librarian -- John was out doing filing and messenger work, and I asked him if he'd like to take it. And he took it over and became very successful at it."

Encouraged by one of most famous of the FSA photographers, Ben Shahn, Vachon borrowed a Leica and on weekends began snapping shots around the Potomac River valley. "I came back from vacation once -- I'[d] never had an assistant down there, but I came back and John had taken to loading one of our cameras," Stryker remembered. "He'd gone off on a walking tour and came back with some surprisingly good pictures. Later on it became apparent that John should quit the filing and become a photographer, and he turned [out] to be a superbly good one. He's what I have said many times is the only 'congenital photographer' that I ever realized we had."


With the loan of equipment from Stryker and under the tutelage of FSA photographers Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans, Vachon took on his first solo traveling assignments for the agency in the fall of 1937 in Nebraska.

In a 1973 interview Vachon looked back on this period as the time of his true birth in the art he would practice for the FSA until its dissolution in 1943 and later as a photojournalist at Life and Look (where he would work for for 25 years, until its demise in 1971). He had been sent to work in Omaha, but given no list of specific subjects. He was on his own.


I spent a cold November week in Omaha and walked a hundred miles. Was it Kearney Street where unemployed men sat all day on the steps of cheap hotels? A tattoo parlor, and the city mission with its soup kitchen. Men hanging around the stockyards. One morning I photographed a grain elevator: pure sun-brushed silo columns of cement rising from behind CB&Q freight car. The genius of Walker Evans and Charles Sheeler welded into one supreme photographic statement, I told myself. Then it occurred to me that it was I who was looking at the grain elevator. For the past year I had been sedulously aping the masters. And in Omaha I realized that I had developed my own style with the camera. I knew that I would photograph only what pleased me or astonished my eye, and only in the way I saw it.


He quickly developed that style of his own. And over the next several years ranged afield across the interior of the country, working out of various FSA regional offices at the standard $5-a-day salary also drawn by his more experienced colleagues Shahn, Evans, Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Carl Mydans, et al.

Samples of the photos that resulted from Vachon's odyssey can be seen here and in the two preceding posts. They capture the image of an America that is, for all intents and purposes, lost.

I say lost; yet then again some essence of what John Vachon saw in his travels, in those years of austerity, perhaps remains. His photographs seem to identify a trace in the American grain, a vein of lonely spaces, material emptinesses and great spiritual distances. But his eye can be hard and gentle in the same moment. He sees darknesses that go deep within the interiors of the common places, yet explores these depths dispassionately: as though they were merely surfaces, without judgment. The evident absence of judgment has made it difficult to classify Vachon as a social historian with a direct political intent. There is in his work a surprising affection for this vacant heartland.

And that element perhaps accounts for the paradoxical intimacy of scale, which brilliantly solicits the historical imagination.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Grand Grocery Co., Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942


Photos by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Something Occurring by the Side of a Road


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Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Children playing by road near school house, Kansas (?), c. 1942


I Hide and Seek

Along the roadside it appeared the children might have been playing a game of hide and seek. Passing cars slowed down as the people strained to see what these children were doing, kneeling with their heads hidden beneath folded arms, or lying motionless as if playing dead by the shoulder of the road. At a quick glance it looked as though they might have been hit by cars. But the bodies were scattered at a certain distance apart. The impression that they were playing a game was in the mind of the beholder, it was possible this was a misinterpretation. A theory of games is not the same thing as a game; in order to understand the progression of a game it is not necessary to have a game theory. If it is possible to make a false move in some game, then it might be possible for someone to make nothing but false moves in every game. The person passing along on the road would have no idea.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Road out of Romney, West Virginia,1942/3


II History Lesson

The Sunray man wearing the spectral white face of carbon black may not after all be a visitor from a scorched and vacant dead world beyond our solar system. You whistled soundlessly in the sleepless dark and he came, as in a dimly remembered children's game.

When you played hide and seek there was a secret excitement hidden within the game, the private knowledge that, should you be lost, it was he who lay in waiting, he who would find you.



Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Worker at carbon black plant, Sunray, Texas, 1942


III But Then

in the hard white northern distance of the clouded morning the school bell tolled.

The child who was found in the game of hide and seek discovered he did not know the language that was being spoken by the other children. He may well have known some other language or languages, but the babbling going on around him in the here and now, that to him seemed a mystery, a bafflement.

Behind every tree in the immediate vicinity of the confused child was concealed another bewildering uncertainty. Branching off in several directions from the point where he stood a labyrinth of conflicting paths beckoned equivocally. And so it seemed to the child he had no choice but to hold perfectly still and remain completely silent. It is at this point that from behind the nearest tree emerges the waiting figure.



Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Landscape, Northeast Utah, April 1942


Photos by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Sunday 25 July 2010

Wisdom


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Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Wisdom, Montana, April 1942



Triumph of the Will
over the contingent
and the incidental
Wisdom, Montana
April 1942
everything we could view
looked large
and nearly empty
John Vachon's vision
of an arid
America




Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Cemetery at edge of Romney, West Virginia, 1942



Lincoln, Nebraska
March-April
1942
forty days
without a
traffic
fatality



Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Lincoln, Nebraska, 1942


Photos by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Saturday 24 July 2010

At the Fair (I): Pie Town


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Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Saying grace before the barbecue at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair: photo by Russell Lee, October 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)



Those who hunger shall be fed, and drink shall come to the thirsty, he said. Here no woman or man stands above another woman or man. The head of the lowest child here brushes against the sky.

From the crest the spine of the land runs out from peak to peak as, unflagging, through the passes, under the huge stars, a grey wolf moves, in pursuit of an exhausted isolated sheep.

Past and present run down and away on both sides. Just before sunrise the world seems to wobble slightly on its axis. The declining clauses in the personal stories -- lost trust and belief, home, job, farm -- mercifully escape under cover of darkness, as fugitive parts from a collapsing sentence. Scrambling down the western slope through scrub juniper and pine, dislodged rocks clattering ahead, while behind to the East, over the top of the ridge, there returns the light.

A timepiece on a chain in a city lawyer's coat pocket. The days go by. Things were lost, we were broken apart and separated. The names of the places where we had once lived stopped bringing back memories. Then again it seemed our own names too were past recollection. Still we found one another, or were found. With nothing left to speak of as our own we were welcomed and accepted. There was something to eat and drink for everyone at the fair.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Serving pinto beans at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair barbecue: photo by Russell Lee, October 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)



There are men of a valley who are that valley
, he said. Down there below the children shall be taken.

But we did not wish to hark back. Our original homes were not so pleasant as to make us wish to remember them. The names of the places are but vacant sounds to us now. There is not time for remembering, we can but attend to this day.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Homesteader and his children eating barbecue at the Pie Town, New Mexico Fair: photo by Russell Lee, October 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)


Grey wolves move in the hills above our homesteads at night. We hear their songs. The New World is already old.

The piñon, sage and juniper. The scrub stands of ponderosa pine, the sharp aromatic air of the Divide, so high above the world.

The hours before dawn when time is a sprung clock, stuck on the instant of concluding the execution of an unremitting contract.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Jack Whinery, homesteader, and his family, Pie Town, New Mexico : photo by Russell Lee, October 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)


There are men whose words are as natural sounds without location, lost,



Image, Source: digital file from original transparency

Garden adjacent to the dugout home of Jack Whinery, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico : photo by Russell Lee, September 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)


but the natural sounds of the women and their children



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

School is held at Farm Bureau Building, Pie Town, New Mexico: photo by Russell Lee, October 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)



are the sounds of the places they have found.

So you found one another, or were found, with nothing left to speak of as your own you were welcomed and accepted, he says. There was something to eat and drink for everyone at the fair.

Those who have been here a while, though, lingering, seem to wear expressions of concern. Perhaps it's that they fear nothing has actually been promised us. We might not be able to stay on here after all.

Still they walk the roads in the evening, bare headed, hands now and then touching, saying little to one another, as the clouds gather, with the sun going down.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Main Street, Pie Town, New Mexico: photo by Russell Lee, October 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

At the Fair (II): Reality


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Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Gas pump, with clothesline, barn and horse-drawn wagon: photographer unknown, c. 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)



Reality, he said on the way to the fair, is composed of the external world.




Image, Source: digital file from original slide

At the Vermont State Fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)



The road rutted and bumpy, a tire, a mattress, a bed frame and a dresser tied to the running board, a towheaded child perched like a small ragged pasha on top: steam belching from the radiator, by the roadside, stalled: we passed them along the way, and did not stop.




Image, Source: digital file from original slide

At the Vermont State Fair, Rutland
: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)




There are men of the small towns and villages, he said, who carry in them what remains of those small towns and villages. There is not that world any more. This is a wider world. There are novelties to be experienced. There are bizarre enormities. This may come as a shock. There is sudden laughter; a tingling of sensation, confused, curiously mixed: desire, wonder, fear; an inexplicable sadness; a feeling of some concealed danger encroaching; perhaps the danger is nonexistent; perhaps it is real, perhaps very near. Freaks, deformities, horrors previously unknown: all to be experienced by anyone, by everyone, at these ordinary common gatherings, these fairs.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Barker on the grounds of the Vermont State Fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)



There are men of a province who are that province, he said. This is not that province any more.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Abandoned shacks, Beaufort, Mississippi: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, June 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

At the Fair (III): Jockey Street/Juke Joint

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Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Mountaineers and farmers trading horses and mules on "Jockey Street", Campton, Wolfe County, Kentucky
: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Mountaineers and farmers trading horses and mules on "Jockey Street", Campton, Wolfe County, Kentucky: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Mountaineers and farmers trading horses and mules on "Jockey Street", Campton, Wolfe County, Kentucky: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)




A fair exchange ought to happen under the plain light of day. When the transaction has been done, not all will have received due recompense. Some will have been made less whole than others, some will have been less satisfied. Some, too, will have come to the fair and been turned away.



Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Living quarters and "juke joint" for migratory workers, slack season, Belle Glade, Florida: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, February 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Migratory workers by "juke joint", Belle Glade, Florida: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, February 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress)

Image, Source: digital file from original slide

Cross roads store, "juke joint" and gas station, Melrose, Louisiana: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, June 1940 (Farm Security Administration Library of Congress)

Thursday 22 July 2010

Double Feature


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File:Wwii woman worker-edit.jpg




After the moon goes down, the nearness of the night, fair
And dark in its standing against the remaining trees,
Comes off as not an embellishment
But a facsimile. Where have I seen this evening before.
Past is past. It is no longer the small town nineteen forties.
But living in the moment is postponed by
This uncanny sense of repetition.
For example, at the filling station
On the corner outside the theatre,
Beneath violet neon, near green garbage cans
And racks of bright red cans of motor oil, and rows of whitewalls
Stacked for sale, a young man in blue overalls pumps
Gas, over and over, in my mental reproduction of this scene,
Remembered from a foggy night on Pico, Santa Monica,
1951. Sometimes images will never leave your mind.
It's as though you were merely the carrier pigeon
For messages of unknown origin, to be delivered over and over.
As when, after a long day of construction
And assembly, the factory worker and the apprentice escort,
Having put workaday cares aside for a rare night out
At the movies, sitting rapt through the double feature,
Shyly holding hands, turn to one another at last
And sigh, and one whispers to the other,
In a tone of concession gentler than the soft summer night wind,
This is where we came in.




File:Geisha-kyoto-2004-11-21.jpg


Woman aircraft worker checking electrical assemblies, Vega Aircraft Corporation, Burbank, California: photo by David Bransby, 1942 (Library of Congress)
Two Maiko (apprentice Geisha) conversing near Golden Temple, Kyoto, Japan: photo by Daniel Bachler, 2004