Take a Picture

This morning I spent several hours at the coffee shop with lots of espresso and the new issue of Vanity Fair. 

I look forward every month to sitting down with a cup of coffee and a glossy, slippery, pristine copy of VF, which I usually read cover to cover, because, aside from Esquire I feel that its one of the only magazines in decent circulation anymore that cares about being...well, literary.

This month's cover/feature story is Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Sarah Silverman - a response to the provocative piece that Christopher Hitchens did last year called "Why Women Aren't Funny". However you might respond to it, it's an interesting subject, and it evoked an unprecedented amount of response emails from readers. Most of them were predictaby angry. 

In any event, this issue features a rather breathtaking piece about the American photographer-artist, Robert Frank.

When I was 22, I moved to Chicago and started to try and drink in everything I could about living in such an imperial city.

I remember going to the art institute in Chicago and by happenstance, pure- dumbluck, seeing a Robert Frank exhibit. It was his photographic manifesto,  The Americans. 

I remember that as I walk-stopped through the exhibit, I had in each eye, tears that kept in obedient, shallow puddles and remained but never dropped, much like the small bowling ball apparently caught in my throat. But I didn't know why, becuase the pictures themselves were very plain and didn't necessarily demand an emotional response.

83 photographs.

Very pedestrian.

But they do envelope a perfectness that language could never articulate, really.

I have never understood exactly what makes some people magicians with cameras, and some not. Two people could essentially take pictures of the same object or person, and one of them will invariably have some kind of unexplainable honesty to it. A beauty that is unduplicated except for in that precise moment the ravenous lens eats it up and cements it in 35-mm.

There's no answer to that, and even if there were, I wouldn't want to know it.

Frank also directed the movie "Cocksucker Blues", about the Rolling Stones. He told Mick Jaggar that Keith Richards was simply, more interesting than he was. 

His work, like how he speaks, is very plain and to the point. 

In any event, I feel that the articles author, Charlie LeDuff, sums up The Americans perfectly in the following paragraph:

If you see the photographs today, nothing about them looks scandalous. Rather, everything appears normal. It's as though Frank predicted the future. A car, a jukebox - they became the symbols of our lives.  We were ruled by our machines, Frank seemed to say. A covered car neatly arranged between two trees looks like a coffin, and then you turn the page and there is a grainy photo of a dead body covered by a blanket lying beside a highway, and the corpse and the car look the same.  The tuba player has no head, and the television personality has no body.  Frank took 28,000 shots from 1955 to 1956 over the course of three road trips. The genius lay in editing them down into 83 daggars which he plunged directly into the heart of the Myth. The critics...were saying "The Americans" was a movie slowed to a stop. A novel without a plot, a symphony of no sound. Frank had gotten our souls on film.

Photoabove guide:

1. Gas Station-Albequrque, New Mexico

2. Trolley - New Orleans, LA

3.  Jukebox-LasVegas, NV

4.  Parade - Hoboken, NJ

5.  Charleston, SC

6. Public Park- Ann Arbor, MI