Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #2 "Life Is Rescues"

Benjamin Lowy's photo illustration for Nick Paumgarten's "Life Is Rescues"

Nick Paumgarten has a taste for danger. It’s an ingredient in several of his best pieces, e.g., “The Descent of Man” (downhill racing), “Dangerous Game" (extreme skiing), and “The Manic Mountain” (mountain-climbing). In his great “Life Is Rescues” (November 9, 2015), he rides with a search-and-rescue team on patrol in Iceland’s southern plain. The team is part of Iceland’s renowned Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg – an extensive system of emergency-response volunteers. 

The piece brims with gripping search-and-rescue stories. The opening section is a riveting account of Landsbjörg’s attempt to recover the body of a woman who’d apparently fallen into a “completely unsearchable” pool at the bottom of thirty-metre high waterfall  
(“ ‘Divers went in but couldn’t get close enough. Three or four metres from the waterfall, it was a total washing machine’ ”).

But, for me, the most enjoyable parts of “Life Is Rescues” aren’t the rescues. What I like are the seemingly mundane in-between scenes showing the Landsbjörg crew in non-rescue mode, traveling, camping, kibitzing.

For example,

Rebekka called shotgun. The convoy hit the highway, passing big-box stores and meadows of purple lupine. Within minutes, it pulled into a gas station, where members of another Landsbjörg team were loitering on the grass, and warning approaching motorists against the country’s dangers. The Garðabær crew got out and mingled. Elva went inside for gum, and when it was time to go, Einar, unable to find her, drove the van in circles around the station lot. The week’s first search: they found her after a few laps.

And this:

A while later, as the road cut through foothills of steaming fumaroles, the team came upon a three-car fender bender. They all got out, but no drivers or passengers were hurt, and the police were supposedly on their way. Onward. The next stop, not much farther east, was a KFC in the town of Selfoss, home to the team handballer Þórir Ólafsson and the grave of Bobby Fischer. Afterward, having forgotten to get gas, they had to backtrack a few miles, to a station that provides Landsbjörg vehicles with discount fuel. Now they got caught in traffic heading back through Selfoss. One began to get a sense that this wasn’t SEAL Team 6.

And this:

In the morning, Rebekka summoned everyone to the kitchen tent: “Beikon! Beikon!” The rescue team huddled around a propane wok, chattering and laughing in Icelandic. Palli was the worst snorer, they all agreed. On a pair of folding picnic tables they’d set out cans of Heinz beans and juice boxes, and they drank coffee out of clear plastic cups, on which each team member wrote his name with an indelible marker. The team passed around a box of kleinur—Icelandic doughnuts—and spread butter on slices of white bread. There were scrambled eggs and beikon, donated by Nýherji, the I.T. company Elva worked for. Day One of highland watch is the high life.

Paumgarten is a superb noticer. He notices the “strange salty licorice candies called Dracula Mega” that one of the crew members hands around. He notices the card game called skitakall, “which they said meant ‘shitty man’ ” that some of the members play. And, in my favourite passage in the piece, he notices … bananas:

I wandered out into the rain and then into the kitchen tent. On a row of plastic hangers someone had hung the team’s bananas. Each hanger held two bunches. I stood looking at this, in admiration and wonder. Iceland.

That bit about the bananas in the kitchen tent is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of Paumgarten’s very best. 

"New Yorker" Portrait Photos and the Problem of the Pose

Zora J. Murff, "Clarissa Glenn and Ben Baker"

I like portraits that look me straight in the eye. They seem more natural. They confront the problem of the pose (what Michael Fried, in his Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, calls its “inherent theatricality”) head-on. Lately, New Yorker photography has favored averted eyes. Portrait subjects look down; they look away; they don’t look at the camera. For example: 

Krista Schlueter’s “David Hockney” (from Françoise Mouly’s “Cover Story: David Hockney’s ‘The Road,’ ” newyorker.com, April 16, 2018)

 

Anne Golaz’s “Poul Andrias Ziska” (from the newyorker.com version of Rebecca Mead’s “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018)

Gillian Laub’s “Alex Katz” (from Calvin Tomkins’s “Painterly Virtues,” August 27, 2018)

Pari Dukovic’s “Martin Amis” (from Thomas Mallon’s “House Style,” February 5, 2018)

Jamie Campbell’s “Sheila Heti” (from Alexandra Schwartz’s “To Have and to Do,” May 7, 2018)

Ilona Szwarc’s “Bo Burnham” (from Michael Schulman’s “The Awkward Age,” July 2, 2018)

Irina Rozovsky’s “Courtney Barnett,” (from Amanda Petrusich’s “Wry Wonder,” May 21, 2018)

These are all gorgeous portraits. But, to me, there’s an element of fiction in them: the subject knows he or she is being photographed, yet pretends otherwise. I prefer the classic pose in which the subject looks directly at the camera. Here are five of my all-time favorites:

1. Davide Monteleone’s "Su Xiaolan" (from “Portfolio: A New Silk Road,” January 8, 2018)

2. Benjamin Lowy’s “Latham Smith” (from Burkhard Bilger’s “Towheads,” April 19, 2010)

3. Nadine Ijewere’s "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye" (from Zadie Smith’s “A Bird of Few Words,” June 19, 2017)

4. Dan Winters’ "Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire" (from Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars,” October 27, 2014)

5. Thomas Prior’s "Irad and Jose Ortiz” (from John Seabrook’s “Top Jocks,” December 4, 2017)

Credit: The above photo by Zora J. Murff is from Jennifer Gonnerman's "Framed" (The New Yorker, May 28, 2018).

Is Photography Transformative?

Benjamin Lowy, "Latham Smith" (2010)

John Berger, in his “Understanding a Photograph” (included in his 2012 essay collection of the same name), wrote, “There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus.” In contrast, Janet Malcolm, in her “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008), says, “Taking a picture is a transformative act.” Here are two major photography critics disagreeing on a fundamental photographic issue. Who’s right?

I’m drawn to Berger’s view. I relish photographs that show people, places, and things exactly as they are – unaltered, unfiltered, undistorted. My idea of a great photograph is Benjamin Lowy’s portrait of tugboat captain Latham Smith (see above), which appeared in the April 19, 2010, New Yorker, as an illustration for Burkhard Bilger’s superb “Towheads.” Lowy’s photo brims with raw reality – rope, cables, water, rust, a nearly sunken barge, and Smith himself, leaning forward against a yellow railing, wearing a dark green shirt and navy watch cap, giving the camera a hard-eyed stare.  

In his essay “Appearances,” Berger said, “Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them.” I agree. Photography is an art of quotation, taking images directly from reality. Lowy’s Latham Smith photo exemplifies the art brilliantly.

In her essay “Burdock,” Malcolm describes the way she photographs burdock leaves. She doesn’t photograph them in situ. She snips them off the plants, takes them to her studio, props them in small glass bottles, and photographs them head on, “as if they were people facing me.” The process, she says, is a form of decontextualization:

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontists’ waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables – these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

Janet Malcolm, "Burdock No. 1" (2005-07)

Malcolm’s method is sourced in Irving Penn’s decontextualized photography: see, for example, his photos of artificially posed Peruvian Indians, Spanish gypsies, and San Francisco Hell’s Angels in his 1974 collection, Worlds in a Small Room. Interestingly, thirty years before she started taking her burdock pictures, Malcolm wrote a piece, titled “Certainties and Possibilities” (The New Yorker, August 4, 1975), criticizing Penn’s approach. She quotes a passage from Penn’s Worlds in a Small Room, in which he says, “Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them.” Malcolm comments,

Penn removes people from their own context and treats them like botanical or zoological specimens. He lures them into his studio, sits them on cloth-draped structures, subjects them to a north light that shadows half of each face, and sometimes literally pushes them into a corner that his brutal direction has put them emotionally.

She says of Penn’s enormously enlarged photographs of cigarette and cigar butts,

Penn’s pictures of butts exhibit all the rough oddity of the found art object that emerges from the enlargement of a murky detail in a torn, unregarded snapshot or of a quaintly drab illustration in an old textbook; they partake of the transformation that quilts and ship propellers and industrial tools undergo when they are wrested from their functional context and put on show for their aesthetic qualities. And they suffer from the same paradoxical devitalization that comes over useful objects when they are no longer in use. The tacky machine-made synthetic comforter on the bed has more connection with life – is more genuine, in its way – than the handsome antique quilt that hangs on the wall as if it were a painting, and in this respect Penn’s sleek pictures of clothes and caviar in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, far from paling before the rough vigor of his pictures in the museum show, present a kind of rebuke to the latter’s false vernacularism.

Irving Penn, "Cigarette No. 86" (1972)

In a line I’ve never forgotten, she says, “Unlike Weston’s peppers and cabbages, which celebrate Weston’s religion of 'the thing itself' and permanently alters one’s vision of these vegetables, Penn’s butts efface reality.”

Is photography transformative? Yes, it can be, in the decontextualizing sense that Malcolm describes. Does photography have to be transformative in order to be artful? No, it doesn’t. Lowy’s striking “Latham Smith” portrait is proof of that. It doesn’t transform reality; rather, it precisely and vividly quotes from it. For me, the art of photography is, in Berger’s words, “the art of quotation.”

Best of 2016: Photos

Photo by Pari Dukovic

Here are my favorite New Yorker photos of 2016:

1. Pari Dukovic’s “Yuja Wang,” for Janet Malcolm’s “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016 (see above). I knew from the moment I first saw this photo that it would be my #1. The arresting keyboard-level angle, the piano’s sleek black curve, the greenish-blue tint, Yang’s spread, tense hand, her tight, glitzy dress, her closed eyes, open mouth, messed hair – wow! It magnetizes my eyes, makes me smile. Interestingly, Malcolm’s superb piece ends with a description of Dukovic taking this very photo.

2. Simon Norfolk’s “Camp on the Chhota Shigri Glacier,” for Dexter Filkins’s “The End of Ice,” April 4, 2016. Green sky, streaked with pink tracer-like star trails; harsh, sharp-edged, black-and-white rock; and in the lower left corner a blue-roofed tent softly illuminated from within – this is a memorable shot, evoking the cold, star-lit, rock-strewn, Himalayan terrain that Filkins traverses in his excellent piece.

Photo by Simon Norfolk

3. Edward Burtynsky’s “Saw Mills #1, Lagos, Nigeria 2016,” for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Long View,” December 19 & 26, 2016. Rafts of floating logs seen from high overhead are like textured fans of bone or bamboo stitched on a ragged, shredded brown, black, and tan patchwork textile that is actually boats, sheds, bark, sawdust, among other interesting elements, that constitute the sawmills of Lagos, Nigeria. In his absorbing piece, Khatchadourian says Burtynsky explores “the tension between realism and abstraction in manufactured environments.” “Saw Mills #1” exemplifies this tension perfectly.

Photo by Edward Burtynsky

4. Isabel Magowan’s “Emma Kline,” for James Wood’s “Making the Cut,” June 6 & 13, 2016. Cool, ravishing, painterly colors of white, lime and aquamarine. Cline seems frozen in place like a mannequin, her pensive blue-green eyes fixed on something beyond the photo’s realm. She has the look of a seer. In his piece, one of the year’s best reviews, Wood writes about Cline’s “ability to look again, like a painter, and see (or sense) things better than most of us do.” These are the words The New Yorker uses as a caption for Magowan’s portrait. They match magnificently.

Photo by Isabel Magowan

5. Katie Orlinsky’s “Chasing Winter,” for Tom Kizzia’s “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016. Reader, I have lived this photo. Caribou skins drying on a wooden rack, snow littered with bones, weather-beaten bungalow on piles (boat and motor parked out front, waiting for spring thaw), snow streets and snow roads, wind-polished ivory skies, on and on – I know (and love) these things. For almost ten years, they were part of my life. Orlinsky’s wonderful photo, a piece of Inuit reality, brings it all back to me.

Photo by Katie Orlinsky

6. William Mebane, “Babu Ji,” for Silvia Killingsworth’s “Tables For Two: Babu Ji,” January 11, 2016. I’m a Mebane fan. His “School of Rock” was on my “Best of 2015” list. He could’ve had two or three shots on this year’s list. I’ve chosen “Babu Ji” for its delicious colors and riveting composition.

Photo by William Mebane

7. Meredith Jenks’s “”MIMI,” for Shauna Lyon’s “Tables ForTwo: MIMI,” September 5, 2016. This is an inspired image. It has the look of a found composition. But someone had to be there to recognize the pictorial potential of that jazzy multi-hued stairway and wait for (or arrange for) a server carrying a delectable dish to ascend. That person was Jenks, a photographer with a Matisse-ian eye for texture, pattern, and color.

Photo by Meredith Jenks

8. Jeremy Liebman’s “Yemen Café,” for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Yemen Café,” November 21, 2016. I devour this image: still life with pots, skillets, flame burners, and magenta stove knobs. It exudes a keen awareness of life and art – kitchen reality and the beauty of kitchen reality – simultaneously.

Photo by Jeremy Liebman

9.  Benjamin Lowy’s “Gustu,” for Carolyn Kormann’s “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” April 4, 2016. The focal point of this great kitchen shot is Kamilla Seidler, chef of Gustu, “the most ambitious restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia.” Seidler figures centrally in Kormann’s wonderful piece. Lowy shows her working in the restaurant’s glassed-in service kitchen. The dining room is visible through the windows in the background. The dominant colors are brown and tan with accents of white (jackets worn by Seidler and two helpers), orange and red (lantern hanging in the dining room), and silver (stainless steel cookware). It’s a stunning shot containing several details mentioned by Kormann.

Photo by Benjamin Lowy

10. Philip Montgomery’s “Michel Martelly,” for Jon Lee Anderson’s “Aftershocks,” February 1, 2016. I admire clear, well-lit, sharp-focus photos immensely. This one, a portrait of Haiti’s President, Michel Martelly, is extraordinary.

Photo by Philip Montgomery

Honorable Mention: Cait Oppermann’s “El Sabroso,” for Becky Cooper’s “Tables For Two: Lunch à la Mode,” September 19, 2016.

Photo by Cait Oppermann