Eddy van Wessel's Ukraine War Photos

Photo by Eddy van Wessel, from his Ukraine (2025)

I’ve just finished reading Joshua Yaffa’s absorbing “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine” (newyorker.com, August 2, 2025. It’s a review of a new photo book by Eddy van Wessel called Ukraine. Yaffa writes, “Most of the photographs in Ukraine were taken on the edges of violence; they are not gory and never prurient but instead are laced with a sense of what van Wessel called ‘the place where life and death touch each other.’ ” 

Yaffa’s piece is illustrated by fourteen photos from van Wessel’s book. They are compelling documents, records of human tragedy and atrocity. Are they more than that? Are they art? Is that a perverse question? They are superb photos. By that I mean they’re beautifully composed, sharply focused, richly detailed. And yet, I feel guilty responding to them this way. Who looks at war photos and sees beauty? I can’t find any precedents. 

Teju Cole touches on the issue in his “A Photograph Never Stands Still” (The New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2017), in which he analyzes his response to Danny Lyon’s “The Cotton Pickers.” He writes,

I hate “The Cotton Pickers.” It’s unpleasant to be confronted with the abasement of these men in the form of a photograph. But I love the photograph for its compositional harmony, which is like the harmony of a chain gang’s song, or like the paradoxical pleasure Northup took in the sight of a cotton field in bloom.

A photograph can’t help taming what it shows. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But photographs are also pictures — organized forms on a two-dimensional surface — and they are part of the history of pictures. A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of “something terrible,” which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of “a picture,” which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.

Cole supports a binocular response to photos that show “something terrible.” We can be both morally outraged and aesthetically dazzled, he says. I take comfort from his words. They describe my own response to van Wessel’s arresting photos. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #3 Geoff Dyer's "The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg"

This is the eighth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016), retitled “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg,” in Dyer’s superb 2021 essay collection See/Saw: Looking at Photographs.

In this masterful piece, Dyer probes the mysterious heart of a great photograph – Eli Weinberg’s Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956. He first saw it at the photography exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg, in 2014. Dyer unfolds his commentary in seven dazzling analytical moves. First, he describes the photo:

Lines of black people, three or four deep. In the foreground, to the left of the frame, a man whose armband marks him out as some kind of steward, his old and very worn jacket sagging from his shoulders. Women are in the front, holding placards reading, “WE STAND BY OUR LEADERS.” There’s a range of ages, the youngest looking like they might be in their late teens. So almost all of them would now be either dead or in their late seventies.

Dyer notes the way the demonstrators fill the frame:

The demonstrators fill the frame so that - in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras - the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute. Beyond the frame of the picture lies the apparatus of the apartheid state with its immense resources of physical intimidation, bureaucratic control and psychological coercion: the police and soldiers making sure that the opposition stand in — and know — their place. (In a picture taken the following day you can see Peter Magubane - best known for his photographs of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - being arrested, his face pushed up against the wall.) Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.

Then he springs his first surprise:

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy with a pudding-bowl haircut. I’m guessing he’s about thirteen. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left - a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly - and he’s white. He is there, that is the fact of the matter - his watch might even enable us to tell the time he was there, the exact moment the picture was taken. We look at the photograph and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question it insists on our asking: what is he doing there?

Hoping to find out more about the boy in the photo, Dyer contacts the co-curator of the exhibition, Rory Bester. Bester tells him he’s “90 percent sure it’s the photographer’s son. [Mark] often accompanied him while he was working ... both when he was a trade unionist and when he was a photographer.” Dyer digs deeper. He writes,

A 2014 investigation on a South African news website, in which friends of the Weinberg family and fellow activists who were present that day were asked if they could identify the boy in the picture, casts doubts on this score - some were certain it was Mark; some didn’t recognize him. When I checked back with Bester he said that “No more information has come to light about E.W.’s son, except that nobody has contradicted the ‘belief’ that it is indeed his son.”

Then Dyer introduces a new element in his analysis. He says,

Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future. We want to hear his version of what happened. According to Bester, several people in photographs in the show came by to identify themselves and to be re-photographed in front of the old pictures. This has been done in other situations, by other people photographed in the midst of historical events. It’s often illuminating, partly because of the way people’s memories are contradicted, reinforced or even created by the existence of a photograph.

This leads Dyer to another connection:

Consider, for example, a picture that is in some ways the mirror image of this one, taken less than a year later, by Will Counts in Little Rock, Ark. Instead of a solitary white boy surrounded by crowds of peaceful, welcoming black people, there is a solitary black girl surrounded by a baying mob of whites. The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who were supposed to be entering Little Rock Central High School together at the start of desegregation. At the last moment, she found herself walking alone, being abused by the crowd. One snarling white face, that of 15-year-old Hazel Bryan, became the symbol of intransigent racial bigotry.

Commenting on Counts’ picture, Dyer says that Bryan later apologized to Eckford and that Eckford accepted it and “In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women met in person - at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness.”

This is followed by yet another revelation:

Except it wasn’t the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering them. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

That last sentence is inspired! A great line to end on, but Dyer isn’t done. He pivots back to Weinberg’s photo and unfurls yet another surprise:

Let’s go back to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather from almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

We’re near the end of the piece now. One paragraph left, and … two more revelations! Dyer writes,

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he died in 1965 at twenty-four - so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! Who said photographs aren’t narrative? You just have to know how to unpack them. Dyer is a genius at it. He takes us deeper and deeper into meaning.

Credit: The above photo is Eli Weinberg's Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956.

Favorite Photo Reviews 1: Geoff Dyer's "The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs"

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

This is the tenth and final post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016; retitled “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg,” in Dyer’s superb 2021 essay collection See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. 

In this masterful piece, Dyer probes the mysterious heart of a great photograph - Eli Weinberg’s Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956. He first saw it at the photography exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg, in 2014.

Dyer unfolds his commentary in at least seven dazzling analytical moves. First, he describes the photo:

Lines of black people, three or four deep. In the foreground, to the left of the frame, a man whose armband marks him out as some kind of steward, his old and very worn jacket sagging from his shoulders. Women are in the front, holding placards reading, “WE STAND BY OUR LEADERS.” There’s a range of ages, the youngest looking like they might be in their late teens. So almost all of them would now be either dead or in their late seventies.

Dyer notes the way the demonstrators fill the frame:

The demonstrators fill the frame so that - in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras - the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute. Beyond the frame of the picture lies the apparatus of the apartheid state with its immense resources of physical intimidation, bureaucratic control and psychological coercion: the police and soldiers making sure that the opposition stand in — and know — their place. (In a picture taken the following day you can see Peter Magubane - best known for his photographs of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - being arrested, his face pushed up against the wall.) Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.

Then he springs his first surprise:

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy with a pudding-bowl haircut. I’m guessing he’s about thirteen. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left - a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly - and he’s white. He is there, that is the fact of the matter - his watch might even enable us to tell the time he was there, the exact moment the picture was taken. We look at the photograph and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question it insists on our asking: what is he doing there?

Hoping to find out more about the boy in the photo, Dyer contacts the co-curator of the exhibition, Rory Bester. Bester tells him he’s “90 percent sure it’s the photographer’s son. ... [Mark] often accompanied him while he was working ... both when he was a trade unionist and when he was a photographer.” Dyer digs deeper. He writes,

A 2014 investigation on a South African news website, in which friends of the Weinberg family and fellow activists who were present that day were asked if they could identify the boy in the picture, casts doubts on this score - some were certain it was Mark; some didn’t recognize him. When I checked back with Bester he said that “No more information has come to light about E.W.’s son, except that nobody has contradicted the ‘belief’ that it is indeed his son.”

Then Dyer introduces a new element in his analysis. He says,

Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future. We want to hear his version of what happened. According to Bester, several people in photographs in the show came by to identify themselves and to be re-photographed in front of the old pictures. This has been done in other situations, by other people photographed in the midst of historical events. It’s often illuminating, partly because of the way people’s memories are contradicted, reinforced or even created by the existence of a photograph.

This leads Dyer to another connection:

Consider, for example, a picture that is in some ways the mirror image of this one, taken less than a year later, by Will Counts in Little Rock, Ark. Instead of a solitary white boy surrounded by crowds of peaceful, welcoming black people, there is a solitary black girl surrounded by a baying mob of whites. The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who were supposed to be entering Little Rock Central High School together at the start of desegregation. At the last moment, she found herself walking alone, being abused by the crowd. One snarling white face, that of 15-year-old Hazel Bryan, became the symbol of intransigent racial bigotry.

Commenting on Counts’ picture, Dyer says that Bryan later apologized to Eckford and that Eckford accepted it and “In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women met in person - at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness.”

This is followed by yet another revelation:

Except it wasn’t the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering them. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

That last sentence is inspired! A great line to end on, but Dyer isn’t done. He pivots back to Weinberg’s photo and unfurls yet another surprise:

Let’s go back to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather from almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

We’re near the end of the piece now. One paragraph left, and … two more revelations! Dyer writes,

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he died in 1965 at twenty-four - so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! Who said photographs aren’t narrative? You just have to know how to unpack them. Dyer is a genius at it. Under his perceptive gaze, the meaning of Weinberg’s great photo waxes ever richer and more mysterious. 

Rosecrans Baldwin's "Los Angeles Is a Fantastic Walking City. No, Really"

Photo by Adall Schell

I just finished reading Rosecrans Baldwin’s “Los Angeles Is a Fantastic Walking City. No, Really” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. What a great piece! Baldwin’s subject is Rosecrans Avenue. He writes,

At first glance, Rosecrans is not awe-inspiring. Rosecrans Avenue is just over 27 miles long, running east from the beach through South Los Angeles to the Orange County town of Fullerton. As one of the city’s major avenues, it’s among the few manufactured things here big enough to span the region’s disparate parts. I’ll take a walk or drive on Rosecrans — or Vermont, or Pico — and loop in and out of side streets, watching one neighborhood morph into another, not necessarily for the pleasure of it but to absorb all there is to see. Hand-painted business signs change from Spanish to Korean. For a block or two, restaurants suddenly advertise Creole specialties, reflecting Cajun roots, only to revert the next block to ubiquitous fast-food joints. I’ll walk past squashed-together homes, families hosting driveway parties, a BBQ business tucked halfway down a nondescript alley. Amid all this a sense of low-key peace prevails, along with a shared notion of tolerance — minding your business in clear sight of your neighbor’s. Honestly, the only other way I know how to encounter so much of Los Angeles, to see so many of its diverse communities coexisting, is to go to the beach.

Baldwin’s descriptions of Rosecrans evince an avid flâneurial sensibility – exactly the kind I relish. My favorite part of his piece is his account of walking a portion of Rosecrans in Fullerton:

Previously, for thousands of years, this was the homeland of the Indigenous Tongva people. The yellow cliffs of the Coyote Hills were on view in the distance, but my eye was on nearer details. A 90-minute ramble revealed L.A.’s familiar extremes: big houses alongside dingbats, the shock of the unexpected coinciding with numbing dullness. But I also saw small green parks, southern views of the basin and an older-women’s jogging group all wearing sun hats that looked like huge black shells. I finished at Rosecrans’s eastern terminus and got a burrito. There was a feeling I’ve experienced only in Los Angeles: I was in the middle of nowhere and at the center of everything, all at once.

I love that detail of the “older-women’s jogging group all wearing sun hats that looked like huge black shells.” 

Baldwin’s writing is new to me. I see he’s written a book on Los Angeles – Everything Now (2021). I think I’ll check it out.

My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

There's More to Law Than Just Storytelling

Tarpley Hitt, in her “I Read Court Documents for Fun. Hear Me Out” (The New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2020), says, “Trial lawyers are storytellers, and competitive ones at that. Each side accumulates details supporting their arc, explaining away those that don’t, editing along the strict stylization of law.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Janet Malcolm takes the same view. In her great “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010, she says, “If we understand that a trial is a contest between competing narratives, we can see the importance of the first appearance of the narrators.” Well, I don’t understand trials that way. For me, they’re contests of competing arguments. Trial lawyers are arguers. They argue evidence. They argue issues. They argue law. Yes, facts are important in a trial case. And yes, facts are often packaged in a narrative – I’ll concede that much. But the most thrilling cases, for me, at least, are the ones in which facts fall away, and the case becomes a contest between competing interpretations of the law. 

One such case that comes immediately to mind is R. v. Laviolette, [1987] 2 S.C.R. 667, in which a priest was clubbed to death in his parish home. Three men were charged. One of them, Stephen Laviolette, pleaded guilty. The other two were tried for constructive murder. Under the doctrine of constructive murder, a person who doesn’t actually commit murder, but who is involved in a crime (e.g., break-and-enter) that results in murder, can be convicted of it. It’s a highly controversial concept because it means that a person can be found guilty of murder even though he or she didn’t intend it. 

I represented the younger of the two accused, Brian Laviolette, who was only about seventeen at the time, if I remember correctly. Brian hadn’t entered the parish house that night. Stephen was the only one of the three who entered. He broke a window at the back of the property and climbed inside. As soon as he was in, he turned, pointed outside to a length of iron pipe on the ground, and told Brian to pass it to him. Brian did so, not knowing he was handing Stephen the murder weapon.

Brian was convicted at trial under the doctrine of constructive murder. Between his trial and his appeal, Parliament enacted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. At Brian’s appeal, I argued that constructive murder violated Charter section 7, which guarantees an accused’s right not to be deprived of his freedom except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. One of those principles of fundamental justice, I submitted, was that a person should only be convicted of murder if he or she had the intent to do so. The Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal rejected my argument. We appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, and on December 3, 1987, the Court struck down constructive murder. 

I mention all this to show how a case based on the most grisly facts can become a vehicle for an exhilarating argument of pure law. In a sense, transforming the lead of facts into the pure gold of constitutional argument is a form of decontextualization, a process that Malcolm herself writes about in her wonderful essay “Burdock” (The New York Review of Books, August 14, 2008). Someday I’ll write more about the analogous relationship between legal process and the art of decontextualizing. But for now, suffice it to say, there’s more to law than storytelling. That may be the least of its ingredients.  

Gabrielle Hamilton on the Closing of Prune

Gabrielle Hamilton (Photo by Phillip Montgomery)

Even though I’ve never met Gabrielle Hamilton, nor dined at her restaurant Prune, I feel I know her. I know her through her marvelous “The Lamb Roast” – one of my favorite New Yorker “Personal History” pieces. Hamilton is an excellent writer. When her “My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?” appeared in The New York Times Magazine yesterday, I immediately sat down and read it. It’s a moving, frustrated, worried, reflective response to the coronavirus-mandated closing of Prune. The romance of owning and operating a small Manhattan bistro is still there:

Even after seven nights a week for two decades, I am still stopped in my tracks every time my bartenders snap those metal lids onto the cocktail shakers and start rattling the ice like maracas. I still close my eyes for a second, taking a deep inhale, every time the salted pistachios are set afire with raki, sending their anise scent through the dining room. I still thrill when the four-top at Table 9 are talking to one another so contentedly that they don’t notice they are the last diners, lingering in the cocoon of the wine and the few shards of dark chocolate we’ve put down with their check.

But the reality behind that romance is stark:

There used to be enough extra money every year that I could close for 10 days in July to repaint and retile and rewire, but it has become increasingly impossible to leave even a few days of revenue on the table or to justify the expense of hiring a professional cleaning service for this deep clean that I am perfectly capable of doing myself, so I stayed late and did it after service. The sludge of egg yolk seeped through the coverall, through my clothes to my skin, matted my hair and speckled my goggles as my shock registered: It has always been hard, but when did it get this hard?

Will Prune survive? The situation is fragile, the answer unclear. Hamilton says,

For restaurants, coronavirus-mandated closures are like the oral surgery or appendectomy you suddenly face while you are uninsured. These closures will take out the weakest and the most vulnerable. But exactly who among us are the weakest and most vulnerable is not obvious.

Of the many writers’ responses to the pandemic that I’ve read over the past six weeks or so, Hamilton’s piece on the closing of Prune is one of the most memorable.

Thomas Struth's Pergamon Museum Photographs: Fried v. Schjeldahl

Thomas Struth, "Pergamon Museum 4, Berlin" (2001)

I dislike staged photos. This has nothing to do with absorption and theatricality – two issues that preoccupy Michael Fried, in his Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). This has to do with reality – the amount of reality in the photo. Peter Schjeldahl says of the Bechers’ photography, “When their approach works, a picture delivers a sense of reality with the directness of a body blow” (“Reality Clicks,” The New Yorker, May 27, 2002). That powerful “sense of reality” is what I look for in a photo. In his book, Fried takes issue with Schjeldahl’s distaste for Thomas Struth’s staged Pergamon Museum photographs. Schjeldahl, in his “Reality Clicks,” writes,

A current show at the Marian Goodman Gallery, in New York, of new work by Struth—large-scale photographs of people at the Pergamon Museum of ancient Near Eastern art and architecture, in Berlin—suggests hubris. After failing to get satisfactory pictures of ordinary museumgoers, Struth brought in a crowd of his own choosing. The pictures are grand and beautiful, but the subtle self-consciousness of the “viewers” proves deadening. There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera. (I’m confident of this judgment because I felt the off-putting effect of these pictures before learning its cause.)

I agree. Fried criticizes Schjeldahl for failing to appreciate the Pergamon Museum photographs for what they are – “truthful pictures of museumgoers deliberately performing absorption.” But I think it’s Fried who misses the point. He’s so caught up in his absorption theory that he fails to see the obvious. These photos are fiction. For me, fact, not fiction, is what makes great photographs. As Geoff Dyer says, in his wonderful “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016),

“There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.” The fact that versions of this observation have been attributed to two very different street photographers, Garry Winogrand and Lisette Model, underlines its wisdom and its mystery. It helps explain why attempts to stage photographs — to create fictions — only rarely work as powerfully as the kind of quotations from reality that we get in documentary photographs. Larry Sultan once said he “always thought of a great photograph as if some creature walked into my room; it’s like, how did you get here? ... The more you try to control the world, the less magic you get.” Winogrand had no objection to staging things; it was just that he could never come up with anything as interesting as what was out there in the streets.

Sam Anderson's "The Mind of John McPhee"

John McPhee (Photo by Andrea Modica)

Sam Anderson, in his superb “The Mind of John McPhee” (The New York Times Magazine, September 28, 2017), calls McPhee’s writing process “hellacious.” I agree. But you can’t argue with the results – “The Pine Barrens,” “Travels in Georgia,” “The Survival of the Bark Canoe,” “The Encircled River,” “Atchafalaya,” “The Keel of Lake Dickey,” “A Fleet of One,” “LaPlace de la Concorde Suisse,” “Coal Train,” on and on. They're among the glories of New Yorker writing.

Anderson’s piece is part interview with McPhee, part tour of Princeton with McPhee as guide, and part tribute to McPhee. It brims with interesting details, e.g., the faded poster outside McPhee’s office door (“It is a print in the style of Hieronymus Bosch of sinners, in the afterlife, being elaborately tortured in the nude – a woman with a sword in her back, a small crowd sitting in a vat of liquid pouring out of a giant nose, someone riding a platypus”); the 10-CD set of Lolita, read by Jeremy Irons, on the center console of McPhee’s minivan; the twice-a-year fishing trips with three of his New Yorker colleagues: Ian Frazier, Mark Singer and David Remnick.

Singer centrally figures in “The Mind of John McPhee” ’s most moving passage:

When I asked Singer what kind of fisherman McPhee is, he started describing the sight of his friend on the river — “He gets out there in a little canoe and sets up below a rapids, he’s got the fly rod in his left hand, he’ll paddle to sort of maneuver around” — and the description got more and more wistful until, finally, it turned into a pure declaration of love. “You just sort of see him in silhouette,” Singer said, “and it’s just — ” He paused, took a breath and was silent for a moment, and then he actually put his hand over his heart. “You know,” he said, “you just want to tell this guy how much you love him.”

Singer’s “Joe Mitchell’s Secret” (The New Yorker, February 22, 1999) is the best profile of a New Yorker writer I've ever read. Sam Anderson’s “The Mind of John McPhee” is a close second. I enjoyed it immensely.

Gideon Lewis-Krauss's "What We See When We Look at Travel Photography"

Robert Frank, "Santa Fe" (1955)

A special shout-out to Gideon Lewis-Krauss for his terrific “What We See When We Look at Travel Photography,” in this week’s New York Times Magazine, a delicious essay connecting Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” Paul Fussell’s Abroad, Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, Edward Hopper’s Gas, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, Janet Malcolm’s Diana and Nikon (a collection of her New Yorker photography pieces), Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station” (The New Yorker, December 3, 1955) with transfixing “road” photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, and Gary Winogrand. The core of the piece’s combinational delight is Lewis-Krauss’s multilayered interpretation of his friend David’s Instagram image of a nighttime gas station. “ ‘What is it,’ his caption asked, ‘about #gasstationsatdusk?’ ” Lewis-Krauss’s answer is brilliant:

It wasn’t an act of representation at all, and it certainly wasn’t private. It was the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment — something a little smart, and a little sad, and a little funny, and all in all very David. The image, an internet square of labyrinthine self-referentiality — a photograph that recalled a painting that was at home in a poem — recalled for me a different line of Geoff Dyer’s, where he quotes John Berger on Paul Strand’s portraits: They arrested a moment “whose duration is measured not by seconds, but by its relation to a lifetime.”

The “lifetime” Berger is referring to is, I think, the lifetime of Strand's subjects. Berger, in his superb essay, writes, “Strand’s photographs suggest his sitters trust him to see their life story.” Lewis-Krauss, in his piece, seems to be saying that David’s gas station photo is self-referential - “the expression of affect he wanted to communicate in that moment.” I agree with both writers. Photographs have a double aspect, as much that of a mirror as of a lens.