Paolo Pellegrin - Transformer or Transcriber?

Photo by Paolo Pellegrin, from Ben Taub's "In Search of the Sublime"

Ben Taub, in his absorbing “In Search of the Sublime" (The New Yorker, May 23, 2022), a profile of photographer Paolo Pellegrin, mentions that, in 2019, Pellegrin joined him “in documenting an expedition to send a manned submersible to the deepest point in each ocean.” I vividly recall that piece. Titled “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” it appeared in the May 18, 2020 New Yorker. It was my choice for best reporting piece of 2020 (see here). It contained several striking black-and-white photos by Pellegrin, including this one:

Pellegrin’s photos for Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” are notable for their matter-of-factness. They don’t transform their subjects; they transcribe them – clearly, precisely, concretely. They show them exactly as they are (albeit in black and white). That’s why I like them so much. And that’s why I’m surprised by some of the things that Pellegrin says about his art in Taub’s profile of him. For example, Taub quotes him as saying about his photography project in Namibia: “Yes, of course it’s about landscapes and nature, but I have to transform it,” he said. “It has to become something else, or else it doesn’t really work for what I’m trying to do or say. You have to, in a sense, go beyond—especially when it’s very beautiful.”

Really? Looking at Pellegrin’s wonderful “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” photos, I would never have pegged him as a “transformer.” Perhaps different projects call for different approaches. I prefer Pellegrin’s “transcriber” mode, when he regards his subjects as they are. 

Best of 2020: Photos

Photo by Joseph Michael Lopez, for "April 15, 2020"

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2020:

1. Joseph Michael Lopez’s photo for “April 15, 2020,” May 4, 2020 (see above).

2. Naila Ruechel’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: EMP To Go” (November 23, 2020).

3. Dina Litovsky’s photo for Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (March 18, 2020).

4. Paolo Pellegrin’s photo for Ben Taub’s “Five Oceans, Five Deeps” (May 18, 2020).

5. Collier Schorr’s photo for Amanda Petrusich’s “Opened Up” (October 19, 2020).

6. Andre D. Wagner’s photo for “April 15, 2020” (May 4, 2020).

7. Caroline Tompkins’ photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Table for Two: Aquavit” (January 27, 2020).

8. Christaan Felber’s photo for “This Week” (April 27, 2020).

9. Christopher Payne’s photo for his “Vital Vessels” (December 7, 2020).

10. Heami Lee’s photo for Hannah Goldfield’s “Tables For Two: Edy’s Grocer” (December 7, 2020).

May 18, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week (and maybe Pick of the Year) is Ben Taub’s masterly “Five Oceans, Five Deeps.” What a piece of writing! It’s an exhilarating account of an exploration team that builds an amazing one-of-a-kind submersible, named the Limiting Factor, and pilots it to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trenches.

Of its many pleasures – superb description (“Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves”), vivid figuration (“At the bottom of the deepest trench, every square inch would have to hold back sixteen thousand pounds of water – an elephant standing on a stiletto heel”), arresting details (“They are ancient, insect-like scavengers, whose bodies accommodate the water – floating organs in a waxy exoskeleton”) – the most piquant for me is the contrast between the “misfit” characterization of the team (“ ‘a proper band of thieves,’ as the expedition’s chief scientist put it—with backgrounds in logistics, engineering, academia, and petty crime”) and its amazing ingenuity. For example, when the Limiting Factor’s manipulator arm fell off during a test dive, and the mission was in danger of being called off, Tom Blades, the team’s chief electrical officer, noted

that the loss of the manipulator arm had freed up an electrical junction box, creating an opportunity to fix nearly everything else that was wrong with the electronics. “Basically, Tom Blades hot-wired the sub,” Lahey explained. “There was literally a jumper cable running through the pressure hull, tucked behind Victor’s seat.”

And when the team lost two of its landers (“large, unmanned contraptions with baited traps and cameras, dropped over the side of a ship”), Alan Jamieson, the team’s chief scientist, “cobbled together a new lander out of aluminum scraps, spare electronics, and some ropes and buoys.”

Those are just two examples of the team’s creative responses to the mission’s numerous setbacks.

Reading “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” I was in awe of the way Taub put me right there with Vescovo inside the Limiting Factor as he explores the bottom of, first, the Puerto Rico Trench, then the South Sandwich Trench, then the Java Trench, then the Mariana Trench, and, finally, Molloy Hole, in the Arctic. It’s an epic journey. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: I want to compliment The New Yorker on the wonderful job it did illustrating “Five Oceans, Five Deeps.” The online version is a lavish photo text, with pictures by Paolo Pellegrin and illustrations by Anuj Shrestha. Pellegrin’s photo of the Limiting Factor in its custom-built cradle on board the Pressure Drop allows me to appreciate the aptness of Taub’s “bulging briefcase” description of it.

Paolo Pellegrin, "Limiting Factor"

December 4, 2017 Issue

This week’s New Yorker brims with piquant details: “seagulls, nominally and stickily rendered, as if piped on with black icing” (“Goings On About Town: Art: Whitney Museum: ‘Laura Owens’ ”); “Yvette, a raw industrial duo whose jagged tracks should come with cautionary signage” (“Goings On About Town: Night Life: Eaters”); “black-garlic jam (if mahogany had a flavor it would be this)” (Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Ferris”); the white bones of a dead raccoon’s hand that “seemed to reach / out toward the sun as it hit the water, / showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers / still clinging” (Ada Limón, “Overpass”); the mud-encrusted riding goggles in Thomas Prior’s striking color portrait of Puerto Rican jockeys Irad and Jose Ortiz, illustrating John Seabrook’s excellent “Top Jocks”; Paolo Pellegrin’s arresting black-and-white photos of reed huts for Ben Taub’s absorbing “The Emergency”; the roll of adding-machine tape on which A. R. Ammons composed his great “Tape for the Turn of the Year” (“The poem’s margins were set by the tape’s width, about two inches; it began where the tape started and ended when it ran out, with no chance for revisions as Ammons’s words slalomed down its length”: Dan Chiasson, “One Man’s Trash”); Alexander Calder’s “kinetic, wire-and-collage miniature circus, complete with a full cast of characters, from ringmaster to strongman,” made “creature by creature, out of wire bent with pliers, and powered by everything from springs to balloons” (Adam Gopnik, “Wired”).