Thoughts on Blogging

The Compass Rose is a new blog.

I started it to join the burgeoning caravan of online discussion sites which have sprung up over the last decade.

Temperamentally, I am resistant to technology. I swore that I would never use a cell-phone, swore that I would never own a computer, swore that I would never use a digital camera. 

But convenience and efficiency are their own best recommendations: I now carry a cell-phone, but I don't leave it on--I can't receive calls; I just make them. I use a digital camera to make quick pictures of things I want to show other people, or for e.mail communications. It's astonishingly quick and efficient, and, like all such "labor-saving devices" it soon becomes an indispensable part of your daily life. 

The computer, and the internet, however,  open a huge, almost limitless, window on the world, and there is no denying that they have changed the way we think about communication. The appearance and accelerated growth of intellectual and social sites, along with incredible, lightning speed of transmission, has obsoleted snail-mail, telegraphy, and the dissemination of news and information through older traditional media such as radio, television, newspapers, magazines. Soon, direct hook-up for movies and live interpersonal media communication will become generally available. The material text is under assault by a technology so much more powerful than it, that some now speculate about the possible disappearance of the book!

The laws and standards governing behavior and liability with respect to the public internet is now a hotly debated topic. If, as seems ever more likely, the internet replaces newspapers and broadcast media, a whole new body of legislation and regulation regarding conduct and performance will eventually be written to accommodate this new forum of human intercourse.

Blogging would include not only sites underwritten by public entities, private organizations and other official entities, but individual sites generated and maintained by single individuals or small cooperative groups. 

Like many people, I have browsed hundreds of such sites, frequently commenting and engaging other posters and bloggers. 

One issue that seems to crop up over and over on individual (private) sites is the matter of censure or censorship. 

All media have standards of practice, even if they are not openly stated. In America, censorship has generally been defined with respect to standing law(s), and community culture. Aesthetically (and otherwise), an individual blog-owner is the final arbiter of taste and appropriateness on his or her own site. There are also, of course, standards which may be enforced externally, with respect to slander, fraud, copyright, pornography, publicly or privately through legal interventions or challenges.  

From a vantage point of fairness and integrity, any site owner wishing to create the appearance of a site with a free exchange of ideas and viewpoints, probably should give some thought to the limits and standards which should apply, not only to what is expressed in the body of posts, but in the comment boxes which the "administrator" (site owner) moderates. 

Comments which we have made elsewhere have often been censored, even revised (or "bowdlerized") by moderators. Sites which routinely "edit" commentary--in the same way that Letters-to-the-Editor editors do--usually warn contributors (or bloggers) if this is a likely or possible use or mis-use of their contribution(s). 

It has been our experience generally that most blog site administrators generally have an agenda. In other words, they have an ulterior purpose in posting information or opinion on their site, and will routinely utilize the moderation function selectively to censor or "channel" discussion towards or away from a given persuasion or line of argument. 

Is this selective moderation a form of propaganda? 

We would say it is. That is not to say, necessarily, that all such propaganda is bad. Everyone knows that there is really no such thing as unbiased reporting or commentary--everyone has a bias, no matter how subtle, or well-meaning. 

Site moderators who selectively censor commentary risk exposing their biases in a way that defeats open debate.  An open society--a democratic society--is built upon a foundation of tolerance for, even an active defense of, difference of opinion. Probably the most pernicious aspect of private site moderation lies in its invisibility to the public; since no one knows what may have been sent for moderation, a blog-site owner can create the illusion of openness and accommodation, while in reality denying it through concealment.    

Private site moderators may choose to censor and "channel" commentary--that is their right and their privilege. But in doing so, they forfeit their right to be considered relevant. A confidently expressed opinion in clear language has an inherent value apart from the uses to which it might be put: That is the standard upon which Free Speech is based, and which has formed one of the key cornerstones of our way of life. The first duty of citizenship is making oneself informed; the second duty is participation; the third is sacrifice and unselfish devotion (to the principles which these duties embody).

At The Compass Rose, we would find it very difficult to deny the privilege of free expression to any commentator, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, abusive or trivial their contribution might seem. 

As a matter of policy, The Compass Rose believes that Authors of commentary stand on their own with respect to responsible behavior, and to the responsibility for their own opinion. It is not our function to censor and control commentary towards a pre-ordained end. In other words, we would never knowingly or deliberately censor commentary for political or other reasons, because that is un-American, against the spirit of free thought, free speech, of the principle of freedom itself. 

Readers can make up their own mind(s) about what people choose to say about our ramblings and biases. It isn't our duty to protect anyone out there from other people's words. 

The Return of the Grammar Nazi

Never fear, there is always fodder for the delectation!

On NPR, recently, Rene Montagne, a charming and attractive (note the code words, you de-constructionists) morning radio host, has begun repeating the phrase "any time soon".  This is another lazy misuse which has crept into usage, and threatens to become common, with legs. It seems to be a marriage between at any time and soon. It's used when the speaker wants to sound familiar in predictive statements. "There is no expectation of relief in the economy any time soon." The problem is, any time soon doesn't really mean anything more precise or specific than the word soon. Any time soon is redundant and sloppy and should never be used. It's a weed phrase--cull it out of your word garden and don't let it take root. 

Another classic grammar error is the misuse of the superlative. It crops up in various ways, often in sports broadcasts or telecasts (which are both great playing fields of bad language). An announcer will say "so-and-so is the greatest of any player in history". What he is trying to say is that the player is greater than any other player in history, but because he drops the word "other," the speaker unwittingly includes the individual example in the group; in other words, the player is better than any other player (class), of which he is himself a member (nonsense). You hear it all the time these days. This is in effect another misuse of the word any.

Any does not mean all. It really shouldn't be used to designate an entire class of anything. In superlative constructions, it should always be modified adequately to specify its range. 

Escher, Parmigianino, Ashbery & Me

Paradox.

The attempt to self-describe has intrigued artists and writers for centuries. Is it possible to preserve objectivity and speak in an unbiased way--without vanity or caution--of oneself? Autobiography is an exercise in the proposition that one can see one's self clearly enough to report accurately, and meaningfully, to justify the effort. 

The graphic arts permit us to create visual representations of ourselves which may be accurate to a considerable degree. There can be little dispute that a photograph is a "true" version of its subject, though with the new technologies of photo-image manipulation, even that conceit seems suspect. Painters have the luxury of changing any aspect of their subject(s)--painting a self-portrait is the ideal "mirror" of reality, in which the lineaments of character and age are reflected in the will and vagary of the personal. Painting carries the added dimension of creating a literal illusion, in which the apparent "reflection"--as in a mirrored self-portrait--denies reality in the interests of a fake narrative, allowing the image to appear as if the subject was not "painting" (creating) the image being represented, but was posing in the reflection of the moment. This defines the difference between the mechanical "exposure" of the image through photographic process, and the physical building-up of image through the application of light-sensitive matter (paint, lead, etc.) to a surface.    

The first image above was taken by me with a 4x5 camera on a tripod mounted inside the sun room of our old house in late 1980's. It was created using a large polished steel bearing (about 2 1/2 inches in diameter), balanced on a mirror. The reflection thus not only reflects the image of the room in which the spherical bearing resides, but also the mirrored image of everything reflected off the surface of the bearing onto the flat mirror surface below, creating a twin reflected composite. My head and upper body can be clearly seen. Since the camera is focused at a point above the bottom edge of the mirrored plane, there is no "lower" half visible, only that part of the space above the reflecting surface of the mirror. 

The Escher Hand With Reflecting Sphere is a totally constructed image: The artist has created a "picture" of the artist holding a "crystal ball" in his left hand. The image is a lie, inasmuch as we know that the picture is not a real reflection, but a drawing of one. This places us (as well as the artist) at a further remove from the possible reality of the image, since the maker of the image is not present (either as a camera, or as the painter/artist himself drawing the picture we see). But of course we know it's impossible, because it's obviously a drawing, and not a photograph at all. Escher seems--as almost always--to be dazzling us with his ingenuity and cleverness, rather than asking any deep questions about process and truth.

The third image is of the painting Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by the 16th Century Italian painter Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola [1503-1540], commonly known as Parmigianino ("the little one from Parma"). Painted when the artist was only 21, it shows him facing a convex mirror, with its spherical distortion, his left hand resting just below the edge of the reflecting surface. The portrait appears quite accurate, though we have no way, at this distance in time, of verifying its verisimilitude to its subject. But the point of the painting almost certainly does not depend upon the photographic accuracy of its portrayal; after all, photography had not been invented in the 16th Century, and people had no way, aside from plaster masks, shadow tracings, and paintings, of preserving their images in time. Parmigianino seems to want to penetrate through time, to pass through the membrane of that dimension into the viewer's world, to show you his real face, looking calmly, and with curiosity, back at you, cheating death and the fixed coordinates of possibility. He isn't here, with us; he's still in his world, but in some peculiar sense we are looking across the gulf of time. The skin of the painting's surface--a metaphor for the polished glass surface of the mirror itself--is all, it seems to be saying, that separates us from each other. 

John Ashbery's long poem, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror", its title an exact mirror of its subject, is a disquisition, of sorts, on the meaning of this painting. Read it to see what he has to say about time, art, and mortality. It's certainly his best work.                    

Cadenhead's Classic Green Label Rum

As promised, we will devote the occasional blog post to personal discoveries and favorites from the distilleries. Though I'm much more a Scotch man, than a Bourbon or Rum guy, once in a while I get knocked off my soapbox by a spirit that makes drinking ordinary fare seem like scarfing rotgut. Cadenhead's Classic Green Label Rum does that!

Cadenhead is a Scots specialty bottler, export-importer, and retail distributor of Scotch and other selected spirits, centered in Campbeltown, Argyll, Scotland. Before the import regs changed a few years back, a lot of their familiar dark green limited bottlings of small batch Scotch reached our shores. 

As a rule, I don't take much Rum straight, because most of it--the run-of-the-mill stuff you get in taverns or grocery stores--is not very inspiring. Most good Rum is produced in the New World--in the Caribbean, to be precise. Many of the most famous bar-drinks are based on white Rum, and a lot of it is consumed world-wide. 

Caribbean Rums vary in color and density from white (clear) through gold, and dark Rum. Dark Rums are richer, somewhat sweeter--the result of longer aging in wood casks. Long aging is common with Scotches, as well as Bourbon, and certain other fortified liqueurs such as Port or Brandy. It's somewhat less common with Rum. 

I was offered a taste of this new Class Green Label at a local tavern, and was immediately struck by its complexity, seductiveness, and power. High alcohol concentrations aren't always suitable. Higher alcohol content often will make for a very "hot" palate, especially with "thin" flavored spirits such as Grappa. High alcohol content can, however, enhance a beautifully balanced, strong flavored spirit, matching its strength and intensifying its effect. Classic Green Label Rum is a perfect example of this. 

Oddly, Cadenhead hasn't chosen to reveal the exact source of the stuff, but a few people on the internet have speculated it's Jamaican, or possibly even Cuban (which of course would be illegal to market in America). It's listed at 50% or 100 proof, making it an "overproof" Rum. 

The nose is candied (Demerera), with hints of cinnamon, charcoal, and marshmallow. Dark gold in color, clear. It begins with a soft, "crackerjacks" sweetness on the tip of the tongue, and is softly caressing along the sides and under the tongue. It settles out with chocolate notes, caramel, and burnt pineapple, lightly tingling at the back of the tongue. No sense of burning, stinging, no bitter aftertaste, gradually filling the mouth with a pleasant warmth and encouragement. 

I've never tasted another Rum like it--but my range of experience with aged Rums is, as I say, pretty limited. I paid a little under a hundred dollars for this bottle. As recently as two years ago, this same stuff was being marketed for under $70, so it's definitely appreciating. I wouldn't recommend it as a mixer, because it's just too good to adulterate with other flavors, and much too good for cooking use.  

This one is a real winner. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes good quality Scotch or Bourbon. You could drink it before or after a meal, or at any time after Noon. But be careful, the stuff is habit forming.

Cheers!            

Dirty Driving

When I started driving in the 1960's, the speed limit on freeways was between 65 and 75 mph. People got into bad accidents, but it was frequently because they were simply going too fast--often as fast as 90 mph, or more. 

Automobiles manufactured before 1970 were constructed primarily with all-steel frames, and had in addition steel bumpers, and long engine hoods up front. Seat belts were occasionally installed, but few people used them. They were heavy, and their engines cranked out more horse-power. Brakes were less sophisticated than were later, and they were more difficult to steer into sharp turns because of their softer suspension. 

People in those days, as I recall, were not nearly as aggressive on freeways as they seem to be these days. Automobile manufacturers emphasized comfort and luxury, not speed, as the selling points. Teenagers and "car nuts" liked fast cars, especially noisy ones, but they didn't as a rule abuse the laws of the road. 

Two trends occurred during the 1970's and 1980's, and it may be that they were mutually reinforcing. Detroit--and Japanese and German--car manufacturers, began to trim down the size and weight of vehicles, gradually replacing the metal with plastic; reducing engine size, while increasing efficiency. These cars were smaller, faster, and permitted greater control and response on the road. 

While this was taking place, the behavior of the driving public began to change too. There has been a complete change in the culture of driving. The speed limit was briefly brought down to 55 mph during the period 1974-1987, but then was raised again back to 65 mph. States now maintain their own speed limit laws. Despite efforts to control speed on our freeways, there is widespread disregard for posted speed limits. Drivers routinely exceed the posted limit by as much 20 mph on average--and highway patrol enforcement, when not being capriciously applied, generally tolerates violations. 

In addition, the behavior of automobile drivers has changed dramatically since I entered the traffic stream in 1965. Today, drivers routinely "tailgate," or follow too closely the vehicle in front of them. The classic tolerance motto goes: Always allow at least one car length between you and the car ahead of you, for each 10 mph increment of speed. Thus, a car following another in the fast lane at 70 mph should be no closer than 7 car lengths behind the car ahead. If you figure the standard automobile length is something like 12-15 feet, that would mean that at 70 mph you wouldn't want to be any closer than about 85 feet from the car in front of you. 

Why?

Because stopping times for standard automobiles, even in the best of circumstances, go up geometrically for each increment of speed. The "stopping distance" calculated by auto engineers is estimated to be in the neighborhood of 300 feet for a vehicle traveling at 70 mph. That means that, even maintaining the "recommended" distance at higher speeds is not likely to enable you to avoid hitting the car in front of you if that vehicle suddenly, without warning, brakes--because your estimated stopping distance is almost four times greater than the minimum recommended driving distance based on the old-fashioned formula.

Despite this glaring contradiction, commuters and other drivers in the fast lanes of our freeways routinely maintain no more than two car lengths of distance between their vehicle and the one ahead of them, even at speeds exceeding 70 mph! 

Is it any wonder that commuter traffic routinely piles up in multiple vehicle incidents, as several vehicles in a row--all traveling faster than the speed limit, and all following each other too closely--create a chain reaction in which 3, 4 or 5, or more cars smash into each other from behind. 

Despite this habitual "dirty driving" behavior--evident on any freeway at any time of the day or night--the highway patrol does NOTHING to stop it. It may be that "obligatory" citations are harder to prosecute. It may be that attempting to enforce laws in the fast lane is inherently dangerous. Or it may be, as I suspect, that most highway patrol officers would prefer to "wolf the lambs" in the right or center lanes for "speeding" or other relatively minor infractions, because they're easier to enforce, and generate easy revenue. 

With our state and local governments all running deficits, there has already begun to be a new push by patrol departments to increase citation issuance, as a way of defraying declining revenue from taxes and Federal grants. Patrol cars have become very visible since the first of this year--it's a ticket bonanza, and if you're not careful, you'll get nicked for a trivial "no harm" violation that, a year ago, wouldn't have mattered an iota. 

But our highway patrol needs to start enforcing the laws that really matter. Tailgating in the fast lane is a recipe for disaster. It's probably 20 times more likely to result in serious accidents, long delays, and severe injuries than all the other kinds of illegal driving sins combined. 

This isn't the kind of thing you can say to an individual officer on the street; they've usually got a chip on their shoulder a mile high, and are as likely to haul you in for resisting arrest for casually complaining, as if you had pulled a deadly weapon on them. But this is their job. We need to tell our representatives that real enforcement needs to be directed towards greater safety and efficiency, instead of pumping up "revenue" citation totals.      

Harold Pinter's THE SERVANT [1963]

I am not a theatre-goer, so my familiarity with actual live performances is quite limited. Harold Pinter [1930-2008] was for half a century Britain's preeminent playwright, eventually winning the Nobel Prize in 2005. A further admission would be that I have never read the novella, by Robin Maugham, upon which Pinter's screenplay is based. I don't believe that either qualification is an issue in voicing my appreciation for this movie, however.

The Servant came out when I was only 16. I believe I saw it first in the late 1960's, in a showing at an art film revival theatre in Berkeley. The Servant was, even then, regarded as an "auteur" classic, a clear example of a certain kind of gritty, hard-edged British New Wave cinema, associated in my mind with Darling [1965], The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner [1959], Room at the Top [1959], and so on. It was the first dramatic piece I associate with Pinter, who had already, by this date, written eleven major plays, though his screenwriting activity had barely begun when he did The Servant. What an auspicious quasi-debut!

Ostensibly, The Servant is a "vicious" attack upon the British class system, though this initial framework becomes, in Pinter's hands, merely a pretext for a deeper exploration of the nature of the sexual bargain, of the sly, subtle adjustments of interpersonal tension, a theme that is far more universal in its implications than mere social criticism. 

A full analysis of the film easily would take 30 pages of dense ratiocination; all I can reasonably expect to do is point out a few thematic elements which I find intriguing. 

This is, in my mind, one of Dirk Bogarde's three great screen performances, the other two being Darling, and Damn the Defiant [1962] (a little known historical potboiler about a mutiny aboard a British ship of the line during the Napoleonic Wars). Bogarde had begun as a Sunday "matinee idol"--his delicious, boyish good-looks and slick charm conquered the popular movie-going audiences of the 1950's. As his career progressed, he got better roles, and by the end of his life, was regarded as one of the major actors of his era. Physically unimposing, he tended to pout and sulk in his roles, plotting and devising against against power and circumstances to attain his ends. These modes of performance are nowhere more evident than in The Servant, in which he plays a manservant hired by a stuffy, presumptuous, adolescent young architect taking up lodgings in London after a period abroad. 

At its essence, the plot is the story of the seduction, and eventual domination of the young British upper-classman (brilliantly played by James Fox) by his servant Barrett (Bogarde). By "seduction" we must be careful not to place too great a generalization upon the "sexual" implication, since in Pinter's universe, sex is not the end of the bargain--it's just one of the playing fields. There is a highly suggestive dialectic between Fox's relationship to his girlfriend (played by Wendy Craig), and the relationship between Barrett and his girl Vera (Sarah Miles). Pinter seems to be telling us that at its basis, all sexual and/or "contractual" bargains which people make--whether temporary or not--are selfish, provisional, extemporaneous. The difference is in how we pretend: Fox and his girlfriend are no less ruthless and smarmy about what they expect of each other, and how they view their presumed "inferiors"--than are Barrett and Vera; it's just that the "servant" class takes for granted the pragmatic nature of human relationships, which are, as often as not, built upon money and class and "tradition"--and not love and cooperation. 

The movie is in some respects quite theatrical in its technique. I'm thinking of one scene in particular, in which Tony (Fox) and Susan (Craig) go to visit with Susan's parents. The camera view into a "conservatory" or living-room sets the four figures "posed" like marionettes, stilted and formal. The conversation is like a drawing-room comedy, with arch condescensions mounted like stuffed busts in every phrase. It's like suspended animation--these people are ghosts acting out a dead tradition, their belief-systems hollow and echoing.

As the steady deterioration of Tony progresses, their pre-set roles and etiquette are increasingly simplified, until, in the end, the two are like schoolboys, playing ball and hide-and-seek. Barrett hooks Tony on drugs, gets him screwing his girlfriend (prostitution), and eventually totally compromises him. Tony reasserts his class superiority temporarily, but then reneges and re-hires him. Barrett's victory is pyrrhic, of course, since his "control" of the household is limited--it's all ghastly fun and games. The message seems to be that all social relations are a kind of gaming, it's just that the rules for different games are different, though the ultimate outcomes may to some extent be pre-determined. Barrett is ruthless, and appears stronger, more practical--but socially he's still impotent. Every victory is met with capricious resistance from Tony--ultimately it's teasing and coyness that dictate their games.

Pinter is incredibly pessimistic about human relations. People are selfish, and will use anything to advance their interests. Self-pity and disingenuousness and posturing and bullying are the currency of exchange. We barter and sign up for personal gain, but we always are testing and re-testing the limits of our tolerance. Cruelty and vicarious curiosity dictate much of our intercourse.  

How odd that a writer with such a compromised view of the human capacity for evil and mischief should have become such a strident critic of the fake sanctioned American interventions abroad. Did he really believe people are capable of better works?    

The Metaphysical Implications of the de Kooning/Kiesler Portrait [1960]

I have a complex reaction to the above photograph, which is partly derived from my response to Irving Penn's work as a whole, and partly as a result of my meditations about the materials of artistic production. 

The history of photography is largely the record of technical advancement(s), punctuated by many false leads and dead-ends, leading presumably to progressively higher levels of clarity and potency of image. Of course this is only partly true: Innovation in photography has been driven as much, or more, by the lust for convenience and speed, as by quality of image. 

Platinum (or Platinum/Palladium) emulsions were first discovered and utilized well before 1850, but due to the relative cost of these rare metals versus silver, salt or albumen, they were largely abandoned around the turn of the 20th Century. Despite this, the unique qualities inherent in Platinum/Palladium images have long been known. Over the years, a few photographers have continued to explore the range of effects possible with PP printing. During the 1960's and 1970's, Penn, a technically exacting, highly successful commercial photographer, sought to make images with a greater tonal range, without losing any of the densities at the extreme ends (toe and shoulder) of the scale. 

Traditional PP prints tend to be "soft"--Palladium especially also tends towards a brown, "sepia" cast traditionally associated with "old" print-image making. Platinum, more expensive to use, makes a blacker image. This "soft" quality "reports" greater ("feathery") middle-range detail, producing images of great delicacy. Due to the extraordinarily slow "time" associated with PP emulsions, they are impractical for general photography, due to their long, high intensity light exposures. For this reason, they are routinely made as contact prints--sandwiching the naked negative flush against the dried emulsion sheet, transferring the image without the interposition of any expansion (or "enlargement") light projection lens. Emulsion sheets are typically hand-made just before exposure and development. On the other side of the ledger, PP prints are much less subject to the degradations of over exposure to visible spectrum light. 

Penn experimented during the 1950's and 1960's with variations on the PP emulsion formulas, trying additives of various kinds, to enhance and intensify the basic PP look. In addition, he used multiple exposures with layering of emulsions, requiring precise registration of negative overlays--painstaking, and often frustrating work. Only artists with the very highest objectives and standards undertake research of this kind, but Penn had a demanding vision, an obsession the drove him to perfect his materials to exacting levels of precision.  

His resulting success with PP prints permitted the creation of photograph images of greater detail, density and vividness than anyone had thought possible before: The proof was in the eye.

When I first saw Penn's Platinum/Palladium prints at exhibition, I knew immediately that their power lay not only in the choice of subject-matter, or in the innovative nature of his compositions, but in their materiality, the "stuff" itself. When I put this together with the methodology of the vision, I began to see photography in a new way--not simply as an accurate record of something the photographer-artist had discovered or seized from chance or opportunity, but a study of the chromatic/chemical properties of matter, the deeper implications of reflectivity and the deliberate control of the visible spectrum.

Physics and astronomy tell us that the entire universe is in essence simply an explosion: The Big Bang would be the creationist's short-hand if you believed it was "intelligent" in design; for the rest of us, its mere mystery is enough. Everything in the universe is burning, or has burned, or will burn up. Fuel and combustion and ash. Decay. Scientists now believe that life, as we know it, on earth, began at the peripheries of submerged volcanic vent-holes, where heat and the right chemical combinations led fortuitously to the first animate protein structures. Life originated from vulcanism: It's an astounding thought.

Einstein posited that everything in the universe, all matter, is nothing more than elaborations of light. Matter is "arrested" light, or "sluggish" light. Light is the touchstone, the "stuff" from which all substance, all structure, all interaction, all energy, is made and interpreted.  

Photography is the interaction between light and reflective surfaces, recorded/reported/perceived by light sensitive surfaces (including our eyes) as differing wave-lengths along a spectrum of oscillations. Monochromatic densities between absolute black (the absence of visible light) and saturated white (the upper edges of the visible spectrum in which intensity exceeds the scale of value). In metallic salt emulsion surfaces, including silver, or Platinum/Palladium, "development" is the degrees of oxidation (or "slow burn") which occurs between exposed and unexposed areas of the emulsion surface. The glass lens focuses the light image onto the emulsion and delineates the image according to the variable areas of light and dark, making a projected image, once the print is developed.  

In describing print values, photographers will sometimes refer to the contrast extremes of a monochromatic print as "chalk" and "soot". The "soot" is a very ironic descriptive, since the darker/est areas of any developed print are the most "burnt"--using the analogy of combustion/oxidation. Deepest black is, metaphorically, the ashen residue to total, or near total combustion, the "toe" of the log of reflectivity scale. 

I'm not attempting to give a lesson in photographic processes here, but this minimal gloss is necessary to follow the argument I'm making about Penn's image. This photograph is a double portrait, a studio shot, set up and framed precisely--there is nothing superfluous, nothing unnecessary or "accidental" about it. It's not "candid" or opportunistic or "decisive"--it's staged. But despite it deliberateness, its highly controlled aspect, it also frames several fleeting qualities. Typically, the subjects of portraits may be cooperative or impatient, comfortable or ill-at-ease. The dialectic between photographer and model may be a subtle one, subject to all kinds of distractions and influences; but this doesn't look like Kiesler is blinking--he's grown bored or fatigued and is dozing, or waiting for the next exposure to re-pose. De Kooning, on the other hand, is wide awake, and looking with interest into the camera.    

The two men in this portrait are both famous artists. Willem de Kooning (about aged 56 when this portrait was made) was already famous, having achieved an important place in the history of American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950's. Frederick Kiesler was an architect and furnishings designer with a strong underground reputation based partly on his involvement in the production of the important early Modernist work the Ballet mecanique in Vienna in 1924 (music by George Antheil, etc.); he'd been associated the Adolf Loos, the De Stijl group, etc. Kiesler would have been about 70 here.

In the portrait, Kiesler appears to have fallen asleep, or to be dozing. Some people doze compulsively, but in portraiture the subject may often seem to be sleeping, simply because at the moment of the shutter's click, he blinked. De Kooning, on the other hand, is wide awake. His clear-eyed regard is filled with attention, the steady gaze of an artist at the height of his powers. He's smoking--the classic candid "prop".

Both men are dressed rather formally, de Kooning specifically in a broad-cloth white cuff-linked shirt, with suspenders. The two figures lean towards each other, as if linked, though their association is not clear: They were not associated artistically or professionally. Their different ages are emphasized by Kiesler's apparent fatigue--he's clearly older, and closer--perhaps by at least 10 years--to dying. Photographic portraits freeze people at specific ages, capturing them in medias res, at one point in the arc of their existence. The subtle contrast between their ages is a key to the meaning of the picture.   

The cigarette is a potent symbol, perhaps the key to the whole image. The ash at the end of de Kooning's cigarette butt is quite long, perhaps an inch off of the burning point (tip). As anyone knows who has smoked, or watched people smoke, if you don't knock the protruding ash off the end of the cigarette, it will eventually "fall" off by itself. For me, the cigarette is a metaphor for several things:

1) The tension of the moment: Penn is posing the men in session, and as de Kooning leans against one arm, putting the lit cigarette in his right hand against the side of his head, the ash threatens to drop onto his dress shirt, ruining the moment. The length of the white ash creates drama--Penn undoubtedly saw this, and used it to advantage.

2) The symbolic aspect of combustion: Time is eating up the cigarette, just as it is consuming the two men, their clothing, the table, the fabric, the drop-cloth background, everything is fleeting, in the universal disintegration. 

3) The burning of the tobacco is a metaphor for the "burning" processes of the organic chemistry of the emulsions (negative and print). As the focused light strikes, the exact image of all this data is evoked through the transformation of the light-sensitive surface. The development of the silver negative, and then the burning (exposure and development) of the print emulsion, are all controlled burns. 

Penn's print value control is astonishingly strong: The soft melting white of the shirts, of the cigarette paper, contrast with the total black of Kiesler's sweater. Even in the digital reproduction seen here, which is in turn based upon a computer scanned reproduction from Penn's monograph published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, reports incredible detail and intensity. Every whisker, every age-spot, every cross-hatch of weave in the materials, is visible. The imaginative quality of familiar textures becomes so sensual it actually seems to compete with reality!

The tension between the staged, made quality of the studio portrait, and the fleeting, ephemeral content (the cigarette particularly) mirrors the tight balance between disclosure, and concealment: De Kooning's shirt has its two buttons open; Kiesler's eyes are closed (he's obviously "elsewhere"). The portrait is, in a very real sense, an expression of the celebrity status of its subject(s); and the fact of their appearance in Penn's canon of work insures their continued survival as emblems of his penetrating exploration of human nature. 

When you think about the extraordinary lengths to which Penn went to perfect images such as this one, involving multiple registered layering of emulsion application, custom chemical mixtures arrived at through empirical trial and error, there is little doubt that his technique is no less inventive and creative than the greatest painters in history--e.g., Renaissance painters who experimented with different pigment combinations, etc. There was nothing "easy" about the production of this image. Each original print cost untold hours of lab work--unforgiving, delicate, fragile, exhausting. Technique carried to an absolute limit of the artist's vision, and dedication to the medium. 

This portrait of Penn's is among the most impressive of all studio photographs.  It is one of my all-time favorites.