Savannah Schroll Guz

 A Compelling Document

(originally appearing in Pittsburgh City Paper)

In February 1975, the New York Review of Books published critic Susan Sontag’s now iconic essay “Fascinating Fascism”. It discussed, in part, the fact that sexual subculture and popular film had reclaimed official Nazi regalia specifically for its eccentric sexual allure. On one hand, Sontag tells us, this was due to National Socialism’s stringent moral restrictions and contradictory undercurrents. The complicated paradox of Nazi policies and aesthetics becomes patently evident in the era’s “official” German art--which frequently focused on the idealized male nude.   

The traveling exhibition, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945,” organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and [recently] on display at the Jewish Community Center, explores none of these painful ironies. Instead, it focuses on the chronological revelation of documentary evidence, using period photographs and cartoons, original document images, and personal accounts.

Curator Edward J. Phillips begins the story in the Weimar Republic, the liberal fourteen year period between the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the declaration of Hitler as Reichschancellor in 1933. During this time, homosexual culture became more open. Same-sex social clubs and dance halls formed. However, interpretation of the German Criminal Code’s Paragraph 175, which had condemned ‘indecency’ between males since 1871, saw an increasing number of convictions. By 1935, hoping to eradicate activities not contributing to advancement and expansion of the German race, the government encouraged the public to report suspicious male activity. The penalty for engaging in unsanctioned sexual behavior was expanded to include a year of ‘protective custody.’ Many men were sent to concentration camps, where they were tormented by guards and eventually worked to death.

Some sought out Schutzehe (or "Protection Marriages") with willing women. To illustrate this, curator Phillips chose a particularly haunting photograph of Paul Otto and longtime partner Harry, who sit on a bench before a dark woods. Paul and Harry are in sharp focus. Paul’s wife, who stands behind him and has placed her hand protectively on his right shoulder, is nothing more than an apparition. Having moved before the shutter closed, she dissolves into abstraction. The candid portrait makes accidental but symbolic reference to the trio’s necessary affiliation.

Mugshots appear throughout the exhibition and put a startled human face on the statistics of the condemned. In fact, the upper borders of each exhibition storyboard carry the riveting gazes of various arrestees. Where there is sometimes an air of insolence in the police mugshots, in the 32 portraits of camp inmates, terror is unmistakable.

Still, there are images of triumph and defiance, like the piercing gaze of lesbian orchestral conductor Frieda Belinfante, who helped to organize destruction of the Amsterdam-based Nazi Population Registry Office in 1943. Wearing men’s clothing, Belinfante survived and immigrated to America in 1947.

While the exhibition’s circuit-style organization actually concludes with lithographs by Richard Grune, his 1947 work, “Solidarity” serves as the show’s frontispiece. In the print, one concentration camp inmate supports another who has collapsed. Having spent time in both the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg camps, Grune created a collection of these works after his escape to Kiel. Although he studied at the Bauhaus School under Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, Grune creates more in the spirit and style of Kathe Kollwitz, known for her poignant, socially-conscious prints and drawings. His lithographic collection reveals the staggering cruelties of camp life, like his visceral “Four Kapos Beating a Prisoner” and spectral “Prisoners Incapable of Work on the Way to the Crematorium”.

Ultimately, the show does what every effective exhibition should do: it dwells not on the hypothetical and speculative, but truly educates by unraveling the knotted chronology of complicated historical events. It also infuses the colder factual details with the warmth of empathetic humanity. And given the limitations and portability requirements of a two-dimensional traveling exhibition, it does this with amazing ease.

David Graham’s Eccentric America

David Graham’s photography exposes an invisible tension in our culture between the America of commercially nourished mythology and the America that actually is. Yet, Graham continually reveals that the unpolished, authentic America finds a vivifying sustenance in these popular myths and expropriated cultural and historical figures.

A series of Graham’s photographs, on display at Pittsburgh’s Silver Eye Photography Center recently, manifests the persistence of eccentricity in spite of — and, to some extent, because of — America’s relentlessly homogenizing and gentrifying forces. Many of these striking oddities, like the gold-tone statue of Lenin that greets customers like Ronald McDonald in the parking lot a Dallas burger joint, have trickled down from popular consciousness to become pristine examples of local kitsch.

Graham’s human subjects likewise appear passionately consumed by their interests, even if these inclinations tend towards the surreal. There are, for example, Graham’s photographs of Liberace impersonators dressed in suit jackets made of tinsel garland. And there are his many early 1990s portraits, like Randy Allen as Betty Davis, Philadelphia, PA and Bud Burkhart as William Penn, Levittown, PA. These photographs reveal the pop culture reservoir that Americans draw from in their search for personal expression.

In an interview conducted via telephone, David Graham explained his enduring notion of America, his thoughts on icons, his undying interest in photographing Americana, and his conceptual and technical evolution as a photographer. 

What’s your definition of America? Or what is the America you attempt to capture in your photographs?

America is a chunk of land, but it’s also a bunch of people. The land doesn’t know it’s named America. It’s the people, who are very friendly, expressive and, I find, enthusiastic. And the part that I’m interested in is the outward, 3-D manifestation of what they do. I’m interested in what somebody does to their car, if they paint it a funny way or if their front yard is full of things or if they’ve built some odd shed behind their house — anything that goes beyond simply going inside and watching TV. Really, how they express themselves.

The inside worlds that come out.

Yes, that’s right.

So how often are you on the road each year, exploring America?

It all depends. The way I generally get on the road is that I either have a project of my own — something I want to do or a place I want to go — or preferably, I get a free plane ticket from a magazine. And that’s what gets me where I’m going. I go a little early or I stay a little late and shoot whatever is in the area. I’m not like a National Geographic guy who’s out there for months at a time, but I probably do eight to ten small trips every year.

Do you actually take pins and randomly stick them into maps as a method of finding where you’ll go next?

Yes, I have actually done that. For one project in particular, I had a big map and pins all over the place, and when I’d get a bunch of pins in one area, I would go there.

With the exception of Ay, Cuba!, nine of your ten books focus on American subject matter and still lifes. What keeps you photographing America and not another country?

Cuba was amazingly photogenic. It was the most photogenic place I have ever been. But I find that whenever I go somewhere else, I don’t have as much insight into the culture. You can drop some people into, say, a country in Africa, and they see everything that’s unique and new. I get dropped into some place new, and I see what’s superficial. I grew up in this country, and I just know it better.

You often photograph impersonators, from Ben Franklin to Marilyn Monroe. What is your view of icons and what role do they play in your photography?

What I’m always looking for is an iconic photograph. I want every picture to be that, to be straightforward and to have an inevitability. In terms of the impersonators, I would go back to the idea of how Americans express themselves. Those are people who use their own bodies to express an inner passion, interest, or love — whatever it happens to be. And once you start photographing people who do those sorts of things, you hit on powerful icons such as Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley. Actually, the ones I think are more peculiar and funny are the ones that are esoteric, for instance Midge Mattel, Barbie’s best friend. Or there’s a guy around here [Buck’s County, Pennsylvania], who does the Quaker naïve painter Edward Hicks. Nevertheless, going to an Elvis impersonator’s convention is always good fun. I’ve been to a number of these. It’s a way of meeting the people, and it’s just a riot to see ten different flavors of Marilyn Monroe, a Philippino Elvis, or a black leather Elvis.

Do you feel your photographs tap into or dispel an American mystique?

I think they tap into it. A big problem for me is that there is a real ‘blanding’ of the American culture. As everything becomes more homogeneous, it becomes a lot less interesting and a lot harder to find things that are more personal. For instance, when you’re on the road, it’s interesting to see some Mom & Pop restaurant that’s sitting by the road side. Say they’ve had a great idea for a sign, and they got the local sign maker to build it. But increasingly, there’s a Red Robin or a Cracker Barrel in their place. So many of these pre-fab franchises use the spirit of archetypal American restaurants, but they make it into a formula. And I find all that very difficult.

Your newest work deals with Post-Katrina Louisiana and Mississippi. What did you go down there to look for?

Initially, I wasn’t going to go down to Katrina because, although I had photographed a number of floods before, this one was a real disaster. With the others, water came in, people lost their water heaters and their cars, but nobody got hurt. Katrina was completely different. A student of mine went down there and brought back pictures that showed two things: one was the way that emergency workers would put ‘Xs’ on the sides of houses and used numbers to denote different things, like when they were there, how many bodies they found. This had an amazing gestural quality and finality to it. A friend of mine later told me about a particular Wal-Mart, where the entire contents were blown into a forest behind where the building had stood. And I thought, “Wow, that sounds amazing — the juxtaposition of strollers, beach balls, and whatever in the trees.” So, that’s what got me interested in going down there. In addition, I thought, that will be my way to help. If I took a lot of pictures and was able to get them out there — as a means to reinforcing the need for people to be helping — then that would be a great thing.

Then, once you actually have your subject matter in front of you, you forget about the subject itself, and you become interested in the visual forms. You’ve got to construct a rectangle, a square or an oblong shape in an intelligent way.

But for me, the most astonishing image was driving along I-10 at 70 mph at night, knowing that you’re driving through a city, but it’s pitch black and empty. There were just miles and miles of empty houses — even during the day they looked like nothing in particular happened to them when you were going at that speed. It’s when you drove down the streets that you realized that you soak a house in water for months, it’s worthless.

In the end, I went down twice. The second time, I went down with my daughter, who’s 21, and she took pictures and helped people rebuild in a Native American area that’s 45 minutes south of New Orleans. When we came back, she organized a symposium at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where five of us presented what we had seen and experienced and passed along information about where people could volunteer and donate money. So I figured that was better than me, who can hardly pound a nail into a 2 –by-4, trying to rip out drywall for five days.

Critics have characterized you as a humorist because of your photographs’ dry wit and attention to incongruous detail. Has the Katrina experience changed your definition of America at all?

It was kind of weird that there were many of the same elements, but the humor was not there. Part of humor, when it works really well, is its surreal quality — you often jump from one idea to another unexpected idea. With Katrina, the same mechanism was at work, but it just wasn’t funny. My new work is trying to use the Katrina photographs that have a more surreal feel — as opposed to the sense of outright disaster — and weave them in with some of my other pictures. So you’ll see what you would normally think of as The United States, plus a slightly darker side — because, in fact, that was what was revealed.

Are you working on a new book then?

I am. It’s called Almost Paradise.

I like the title.

Thank you. I’m really terrible on titles, but I like Taking Liberties, too. Someone reviewed a book of mine, and they used that as the article title. I thought, “Oh that’s great! I’m stealing that for my next book.” But the editor at Aperture, Michael Smith, came up with the title for Land of the Free.

Speaking of that, you seem to have found a kindred spirit in writer Andrei Codrescu. How did you find each other, and was it your photographs that resonated with him or his writing that resonated with you?

We had one of those six degrees of separation deals. My friend’s college roommate’s wife, knew this guy, who was making a film with him. And he said, “You know, David Graham has photos you’d be interested in.” So, we were hooked up through these mutual acquaintances, and when we were doing Road Scholar back in 1992, we did some traveling around together. It is really fun to travel with him because, if you’re familiar with his NPR commentary, it’s just one--stop commentary after another. That’s what he does. We got along great and had a lot of fun, so he suggested we do the Cuba book [Ay! Cuba] together. Later, he did the introduction to the Land of the Free. We’re actually now republishing Road Scholar in Romania, where he’s from. And we’ve been talking about working on another project, but he’s just so busy. He’s the busiest poet I know.

Let’s turn to technical issues now. Did you begin with black and white film because that was, traditionally speaking, the accepted choice for fine art photography?

Yes. The joke is, Ansel Adams said: “Black and white are the colors of photography.” When I first started shooting in the early to mid-seventies, there was hardly anyone doing color. I learned in school to do color, but everything was black and white until the later seventies.

Did you gravitate towards color because it seemed to happen organically, as a result of your interests or because it seemed to better define the places you visited?

Actually, it was because I started shooting with an 8"x10" view camera, which makes an 8"x10" negative. I was shooting black and white, and I was taking boring, old-fashioned pictures. And really, it was such an ordeal to take a photograph that way instead of walking around with a 35 mm camera, so I figured I wanted to get more bang for my buck, more information. I thought if I shot in color, it would give me another layer of information. I wasn’t enlarging them at the time. They were infinitely sharp. So using color was just a way of putting another set of concerns into the picture. One thing led to another and that’s how it happened.

Do you work with digital formats?

I do. It’s inevitable. When I do freelance work, for a publication or a landscape architect, it’s usually digital. But I still shoot film for myself. I’ve been doing it forever.

Do you develop your own film as well?

I don’t do that. A lab does that for me, but I do make the prints from the negatives. I have a color dark room. It’s very…20^th century.

How do you select your commercial projects? I’ve seen a correlation between the creative and contract works on your web site. Are they often serendipitous matches between what you’ve photographed and what is needed?

A web site is always a little misleading. You don’t put the boring work on there. You just put the ones on that look great. (laughs) Those are the ones where it really worked out, but I get tons of projects where I take pictures of guys in offices. I mean, you gotta pay the rent. A lot of times they are exciting and interesting, even if the pictures themselves aren’t. For example, I just photographed Kelly McGillis recently. They just wound up being simple pictures of her walking her dog, but it was a great way to spend a day. I photographed some banker in East Stroudsburg [Pennsylvania] a couple of weeks ago, and he turned out to be a really fascinating guy.

So really, you’ve lead us right back to your concept of America — you show us what America is by photographing the types of people that comprise it.

Yes. You’ve got it.

REVIEW-->
Hell Is an Awfully Big City

D.L. Russell

Wild Cat Books, December 2009

ISBN: 978-0-9823116-7-7

“Hell is an awfully big city, Mr. Quincy,” the devil informs an octogenarian, whose soul he’s making a play for. It’s a definitive statement, and one that becomes both the story’s title and the title for the entire fiction collection by horror writer and Strangeweirdandwonderful.com editor D.L. Russell. Published by Wild Cat, Hell Is an Awfully Big City is Russell’s second book and incorporates his first novella “Maxwell: The Last Vampire” into the series of nine extended stories. The title for the new collection is apt, since the creatures that populate these engaging tales are as beastly and diverse as anything that might emerge from an urban quarter of Hades.

In the title story, the devil--whose icy blue eyes and straight, unnaturally-white teeth alternately suggests a vain day trader, narcissistic banker, and air brushed media personality--describes hell’s exponential expansion and the advance of bars, clubs, and other business opportunities. The population there is apparently rising. Here, Russell offers a particularly insightful comment on our time: develop hell? You bet. I can imagine some real estate moguls who would give it serious consideration: How hot does it get there? Well, we can tell people they’re just really close to the equator.

Even with the more chilling moments of bloodshed, like the auditory descriptions of consuming tissue and bone in “Waas”, there’s a fable-like quality to many of Russell’s stories. In “That Ain’t No Chicken,” the protagonist is a wily Rhode Island Red named Mr. Mudfoot, who valiantly protects his many hens from unjust humans, fox, and the initially unidentifiable worst. Although Mr. Mudfoot, known to his ladies by the affectionate nickname ‘Wollowo,’ may initially be viewed with suspicion when his first caretaker drops dead while performing the morning feeding, he soon reveals himself to be a wary, heroic little character: a David to the Goliath-like creature that attempts to violate and destroy the chickens and their humans. A plucky little rooster on an Indiana farm actually ends up saving the world. It’s an intriguing page-turner with a moral about physical size, intelligence, and heart.

The story “Raymond Doesn’t Remember” is interwoven with flashbacks involving a significant afternoon in the title character’s youth, when he loses the key to his mother’s house and is confronted by a voluptuous witch who uses it to lure him into her home. The key he’s searching for is a symbolic element: figuratively speaking, its loss opens the door to a future he never planned for and deeply regrets.

Sad but also thought-provoking is “Dreams Still on You,” in which a lonely, curmudgeonly used bookstore owner named Walker Fintz meets the woman of his dreams, Paullina. Yet she is in spirit form, a ghost who can take on mass and volume at will. Russell’s descriptions deftly merge the reality of outside human interactions with the fantasy of an apartment-bound spirit lover. His treatment of poignant human emotion keeps readers engaged and expectant: we hope for Walker’s happiness and know the whole of his being becomes intent on sustaining and building a life with something whose ability to inhabit three-dimensions is ephemeral. The ending is both incredibly sad, but tremendously happy. It is a perfect expression of the human need for reciprocated love, which is solid and real, even when the object and dispenser of that love is not. Often it does not come in the form we anticipate, and many of us will follow it anywhere once we find it. Walker does.

Each of Russell’s nine stories reveals a voice sensitive to the creation of scene and emotion. He deals engagingly with conventional horror characters, offering absorbing twists: there are fickle zombies, unexpectedly noble vampires, treacherous werewolves, a pitiless alien, and a startlingly lascivious witch. His descriptive attention to unconventional figures of dark, and frequently carnivorous, nature allows them to become three-dimensional and confidently enter the horror lexicon. Russell’s “Waas” is just one example. The bewildered humans that gravitate around these central figures are also sharply defined, permitting the reader to immerse themselves in and be carried away a flood of fiction about the natural world communing with (and more often colliding with) the deviant and damned.