Ugly America

Updike, after scrutinizing "Katrina art," decides who disaster photography is for:

...After the Flood is an opulent volume, brilliantly sharp in its large, ten-by-fourteen-inch reproductions, bound in lavender cloth, and difficult to manipulate anywhere but on a coffee table. It weighs nearly ten pounds and costs $90; a consumeristic paradox hovers over the existence of so costly a volume portraying the reduction of a mostly poor urban area—"the funky urban environment that gave birth to jazz," a wall legend has it—to a state of desertion and deeper destitution. Who is this book for? Not the flood's victims, who could not afford it. Nor, one suspects, very many well-heeled connoisseurs of fine photography, though there is an abstract beauty in Polidori's close-focus studies of patterns of mold and paint distress, and an occasional Pop humor in the tinselly shoes and glitzy wall decorations the victims left behind them as the floodwaters rose, and a macabre Art Brut in shadowy rooms crowded with cheap furniture as tightly as passengers in a sinking ship.

As it happens, another enigmatically magnificent album of photographs is also on the market these days—Aftermath, by Joel Meyerowitz, an extensive, big-format pictorial record of the cleanup of the World Trade Center site...On September 23, 2001, Meyerowitz, wearing his worker's badge, began to photograph the gigantic tangle left behind by the attack on September 11 and the myriad workers who carried out the daunting and dangerous task of clearing the site. Adrian Benepe, the Manhattan Borough commissioner for parks and recreation and the son of a friend of Meyerowitz's, cleared the bureaucratic hurdles balking the photographer's desire to document progress with a large-format wooden view camera. The engineers, policemen, civil servants, and construction men on the site were already, in an age when photographs verify reality, taking surreptitious snapshots. When Meyer-owitz, his status still uncertain despite his badge, explained his presence to a group of NYPD Arson and Explosion Squad detectives, one immediately said, "Yeah, we need this history, for our children and our grandchildren."

The formulation is about as a good as any we will get. It is for our children and our grandchildren—for the historical record—that Meyerowitz and Polidori zealously labored over many months to capture on film (a phrase the digital camera may soon render archaic) the aftermaths of the two most spectacular disasters on American soil in this young century. This is what it looked like; this is what we don't want to happen again. Since the Brady studio photographed the aftermath of Civil War battles, war has worn a new, less acceptable face. Photography, Sontag pointed out, is naturally drawn to misfortune and the unfortunate; in some cases, such as Jacob Riis's photos of New York slums and Lewis Hine's of child laborers, a public reaction effected some reform. The bourgeoisie must be continually discomfited. If the discomfort that After the Flood and Aftermath arouse contains an increment of discomfort at the poshness of the volumes and the aura of glamorous selflessness bestowed upon the photographers and their photographic appropriations, the record is indeed enhanced, for posterity to consult, and to use in ways we cannot imagine.

Comments

[mark c]

"portraying the reduction of a mostly poor urban area"

80% of new orleans is mostly poor and urban. hmmmmm...

"crowded with cheap furniture as tightly as passengers in a sinking ship".

I wonder how he can tell the furniture is cheap. Also when 4 to 12 feet of water lift your cheap furniture for close to a month, it will not put it down in the same spot. So, i think crowded is the wrong word. maybe he thinks because the furniture is cheaper, we buy more of it.

[Rake]

Here's the passage that leads me to believe that Johnny U. has been hanging out in austere, pricey surroundings for far too long:

For many of us gallery-goers, this is as close as we will ever get to the insides of ordinary African-American homes —their touches of sometimes garish comfort gone, as Mark Twain wrote of the wreck of a raft, "all to smash and scatteration."

First of all, that might be as close as HE gets to ordinary blah blah blah. Second, if he thinks that black folk from N'awlins have the market cornered on "garish comfort," he needs to descend the stairs of the ivory tower occasionally and see how some of the people where I came from choose to live and decorate. Yikes.

[mark c]

wow! i guess i should read the whole thing. maybe it will draw me away from my alan richman gq article obsession.

If you are ever looking for some hoity toity food writer bashing, start here.
http://www.appetites.us/archives/000467.html

[Renaissance]

Perhaps there's merit in the "for our grandchildren" gambit but still, you have to have a taste for this kind of book and it strikes me as a bit much and a bit too soon.

[meika]

disaster porn