The Corpse of Content – Pictures & Words #4

hey there this is alex soth and i'm back in my studio in st paul minnesota it's been like half a year since i've done this and i'm feeling pretty rusty um earlier this week i gave a online lecture and so i set up my whole light table video camera thing here and um and thought i would try to see if i could do one of these videos again this isn't wildly planned out or anything i just picked a couple of recent books that have shown up at the studio here that um that speak to my ongoing interest in the relationship between words and pictures so um i thought i would start by talking about this book by tim davis it's really a beautifully produced small hardcover book by aputure and let's see if i can remember all my little shortcuts here so here it is and um i'm really not going to talk about the whole book um but i just i just wanted to point out that there is plenty of writing in it um it's it starts with an essay by tim davis himself and there are additional essays by him as as you go along um and tim is a uh is a very flamboyant and and colorful writer as colorful as his photographs what i wanted to talk about is one sequence of pictures and its relationship to the to the text in the book so this small little sequence starts here these two men wrestling some sort of uh dancer or actress rehearsing it looks like someone reading a script i should mention these are all la-based photographs here's this interesting transition which kind of speaks to um this this kind of stuttering time sequence that i talked talked about in another video okay and then the sequence ends with this picture of a body in the trunk of a car i'll just zoom in for you on that and it looks like that okay and so then there's a whole bunch of pictures and we eventually get to this essay called bar fight as artist statement and and in this essay [Music] first of all tim davis talks about just walking around in the la landscape and and just seeing things witnessing things um and he says this there's there's one line here let me find it um a mixed martial arts gym empty except for two straight i asked them salesmen writhing on the mats in the mating ritual of bush pythons so that line um goes back to that first photograph in the sequence we saw the two men wrestling and so he gives us this little information this little glimpse into it and you imagine tim davis encountering them and asking them if they were straight or not and then so the book carries on more pictures more pictures more pictures and we get to the the final essay which is called the corpse of content and and this essay um if if it wouldn't uh be so awkward i would read the entire thing but it's um hysterically funny and it says so much about photography i will just read the beginning here i'm old enough to admit that i'm pretty good at photography i'm like good at it i know how to wrestle or squeeze significance out of almost any situation it is one of my few consistent beliefs that there is an infinite amount of significance in the universe an almost bottomless well of telltale to draw from i know how to pull back into a wide embrace and allow the camera which doesn't care where it is positioned to pitch up its admiration for the world surfaces by stretching the tension between described and describe her i know how to lie down on the floor and look under a chair i don't mind asking someone to move over a little or to pretend they've swallowed a cherry pit so uh you know he's he's humorously talking about his process and uh and his kind of confidence as a photographer but then he goes on to say but there are bad days days where it's hard to know whether to pull the car over here or to keep driving there are days when nothing pops when the world feels drained of contrast or saturation or certainty there are days when i'm unsure what i'm looking for and he talks about how he wishes he had a style like friedlander where he could just photograph anything sort of twist the subject in in into something but he he needs something else and he says uh unlike friedlander the rest of us have to have something to say we need content and it's not always forthcoming on these days i fantasize about dead bodies i've had long reveries walking down a highway in tennessee or next to some unsparing spillway in northern new jersey about what would happen if i found a human corpse would i call the police would i photograph it first what if the light was wrong would i wait to call the police would i try to make a dramatic image or simply stand back and let the dead body emanate in its own unacceptability it's happened enough times that i gave the phenomenon a name the corpse of content it stands for the photographer's yearning for content so potent it's taboo and uh and then he tells a a couple sort of related stories so one of um going to an opera and and witnessing a uh a singer die on stage and and then another example of of collaborating with an artist in bulgaria and encountering a dead body and and actually moving the body for a better picture which is a story that i want to hear more about someday [Music] and then we go back to l.a the making of this book and he talks about having one of those days uh where it's just beautiful out and he's so excited to go on this aimless walk uh and and he says this uh everything looks good but are there pictures here you keep seeing things interesting things a man washing a phalanx of yellow handles shopping carts the spray jetting off them scattering rainbows around the sugar rush fills you with boldness and you scamper down an embankment to the supermarket parking lot you nod at the workmen and they nod back you're in right here right now in front of something beautiful and resonant you finally managed to cross the dance floor to talk to the high school crush and he's all ears you have something to say but do you know how to say it you can't seem to find an obvious place to put the frame you raise the camera up but the buildings and cars in the background feel illegible you don't get the connection between the radiant ritual you're observing and the stucco tetris just beyond you get down on your knees to frame out the city but then you're oversimplifying and it feels cheap over complicated or oversimplified too much sky or too much street these dualisms are warning signs that you're not seeing the picture you're seeing a thing and trying to build a picture around it that's when you give up so this experience that that he describes is one that i've had a million times which is you see something amazing you approach it you you try to take the picture and you can't find the picture and you're you're getting down on your knees and you're moving in the back side and it's not appearing um and so he he talks about just giving up aft after half an hour and then he gets a call from his wife who has a uh an art studio in a church and she's like you got to get over here right away and uh and he says i raced up flights of stairs to find my wife eyes wild pointing out the window from its heavy stone sills you could see down into what is usually an abandoned alley but no place in los angeles remains no place for long below a bloodied young man lay motionless in the trunk of the car a woman stood over him holding the hatch door open even amid a thicket of film equipment all i could see was the impossibility of death to this day when people look at this picture they often don't notice the camera and sandbags and production assistant a corpse rings bell and it takes a minute for its sound waves to decay but once i realized that i was looking at a film production i saw the entire picture immediately its frame and focus were inevitable and and what i love about this is that this incredible picture um which you know really stays with you as you look through the book [Music] we get to experience it in a different way in the back of the in the back of the book through text and and for me um that story behind the picture does not ruin the picture i had my first encounter with it if that text had been here for example uh that probably would have ruined the picture it would have been competing with the text but since that text is embedded in a longer essay it's it's almost like we discover it again and get to revisit this this photograph in a new way and for me that's that's a really successful example of using text and image so tim davis book is it's small and compact it has a lot of pictures and and a good amount of text but there's a breeziness to it it it feels like a casual walk through los angeles a very different experience is a book that i recently received it's actually three books in one and it's called whatever you say say nothing [Music] it's gigantic the box looks like this the two of the individual volumes look look like this and then there's a third book of text that's like this and and it's actually in this third book which is called annals of the north where it says whatever you say say nothing contains a thousand pages and seventy words it speaks in a purely visual language in an invented grammar the many many words in the annals are meant to open up that language and to provide the reader with a set of tools for exploring it so i thought i would just give you a little glimpse into how that functions so let me turn to the book here and so again this is just volume one and i'm just going to show you uh the introduction to the book and and and how it works so it starts with this this kind of um poetic passage that that's almost like um the title sequence in a film and just sort of setting the stage setting the mood for what's about to happen uh this book is all about the troubles in in northern ireland but we start with uh us you know just landscapes not much people just this feeling for the the country that we're going into mostly deserted a couple figures here and there and then we have the actual title whatever you say say nothing and importantly uh perez calls this a documentary fiction which is uh very much like jill perez he never wants you to think this is the truth despite the fact that it's a thousand pages and and there's i don't know how many pages of text um what he's aiming for is not truth but maybe um something more like what werner herzog called ecstatic truth anyway uh the book then starts with the first day and and as you go through the book um it's broken up into chapters and they're all called days uh of different sorts and so the first day takes you in and and i'm just going to show you this sequence and and i guess what i want to emphasize is just how damn good the pictures are um when when i looked at this book for the first time i thought there's no way these are all going to be good pictures it's impossible uh and there's no way it's gonna hold up for a thousand pages but uh it does and and then there are different movements and different feelings um but there's just consistently unbelievable photographs don't know how well you can see here but this bride viewed out a car window dog and man on a snowy day between two walls angel perez does something always with the spreads sometimes the pictures are are merged together in a panoramic using a panoramic camera or i think he sometimes stitches them together but other times they're they're two separate images but they almost can be read as one image this first sequence has lots of children this is just such a thrilling pair and and they're enhanced by each other the the um the shifts in mood inside to outside dark to light a feeling of violence everywhere and then explicit violence okay so that's just the first day of many incredible um so and that's in that's in volume one i want to show you a sequence that that confused me a little bit in volume 2 and how it's affected by the text in volume 3. so this day this is called days of shoot to kill and you know at this point i had looked at you know uh 600 photographs and was it was still on the edge of my seat and i got here okay still an incredible pair of photographs unbelievable picture and sometimes when there's a photograph so powerful uh it's best to have it paired with something static and this is what threw me a little bit uh also just an incredible picture a strange kind of blurriness to it um and then this photograph and i was like huh that is not up to par with the other pictures it's uh it's kind of soft it's not clear [Music] okay there's a feeling of the casket being moved but why is this here it actually stood out for me going through and then i carried through the rest of the the chapter with great pictures and great pictures uh occasionally there are these uh sort of motion sequences so it's this feeling of this moving of the casket from one place to the next and of a funeral etc here's an example of one of those panoramas that's amazing unbelievable photograph so we're back to great pictures but uh i mean i i'm pointing this out just to say that out of all these photographs one of them threw me out of whack and so then i finished the book devastated by its greatness and i i started reading annals of the north and so um far back here uh so annals of the north is broken up into different chapters as well and uh and and some of them have denser text and some of them are looser and this particular section has a story which is about that photograph that i pointed out in the in the previous section and it's uh much like the tim davis essay it talks about the process of the making of the picture and kind of changes the way we look at the picture uh so i'm gonna just read this 1985 was a gruesome year a shoot to kill year a year when the state's forces abandoned the exhaustingly blunt instruments of the law for the short sharp crack of bullets one day during that brutal summer word arrived in derry about three volunteers who had been executed the night before in a field outside strabane they'd been moving a cache of arms when the army surprised them the they immediately surrendered and then they were killed the photographer got in his car by the time he arrived serbane the most bombed bombed-out town in europe with its highest unemployment rate glowered in the late afternoon merc he stopped on a tri-colored street and asked for the volunteer's address a boy pointed to him to an estate just outside the town he passed by the field on his way three white crosses already stood there marking the spot where the men had died a small crowd bunched around them silent waiting arriving at the house of one of the volunteers they've been they've been a pair of brothers and a friend the photographer found martin mcginnis on the curb they didn't know each other well maybe because mcginnis was a dairy man and the photographer spent more time in belfast maybe because each had other things to focus on but mcginnis greeted him politely and when the photographer asked if he could enter the house he was led inside with no words wasted night was falling children sat packed on a sofa in the good room watching television the photographer stood in the kitchen and smoked a wood vine before heading upstairs where the dead man lay in his coffin covered in mass cards a living volunteer in a balaclava on either side of him standing guard neighbors bustled through and touched the corpse's hands leading down to whisper farewells in his cold bandaged ears when the photographer returned to the kitchen the air had changed mcginnis had become agitated and was pacing the room he had realized from the helicopters whirling overhead that the army was closing in determined to prevent a republican funeral with its traditional volley over the casket suddenly he bounded upstairs and then just as quickly came flying back down now accompanied by three men and the casket somehow they navigated the stairway even though it was so narrow a man on his own could barely fit and before anyone realized what was happening they had the coffin out the door and into the garden the photographer only had time to shoot one picture out the kitchen window as they left so there's that picture and the explanation of why it's imperfect he just had this one opportunity but it was such an important moment it was such an important moment in his story that he felt the need to include it in the book and the story goes on in the dark garden mcginnis reigned amidst the chaos organizing people around the coffin a paper bag appeared and he pulled out four guns which he handed to four masked volunteers two on either side of the casket shoot he yelled and they shot while this was happening the photographer had to wrestle with his own chaos the chaos of representation the sky had grown black and his flash was refusing to sink to his camera or to trigger as mcginnis improvised the funeral the photographer decided to improvise as well he put the camera on bulb opening the shutter and then when mcginnis yelled shoot he popped his flash the moment the report ceased he closed the shutter he had made his leica shoot the picture in reverse so that explains this this ghostly effect in this photograph so what i think is um is amazing about that is is the way again the text separated from the photographs changes uh the way we look at the photographs and gives them a kind of new sort of intensity without ruining the pictures again it's a matter of placement about by putting it in this separate book one has to find it and discover it and and somehow that leaves space for me as the viewer um to not feel like like meaning like the uh tim davis is the corpse of content like that corpse being shoved at me um i'm allowed to to find it essentially much like the photographer found their subject and i i just think these are two striking examples of text and image they're also really great books um so different uh and you know whatever you say say nothing again it's just uh it defies all expectations i often say that um i joke that a photographer a photo book should have as many pictures as one's age and uh you know and jill perez uh he's getting older now maybe he's uh 70 and and he's not a thousand so i was you know wow a thousand pictures um but um it's it it's the exception that proves the rule it's uh it's something really profoundly special and uh i hugely recommend it it's expensive um but it's worth it and tim davis book is a delight and the essays are um for photographers especially just a treat so two books some words and pictures and i figured out how to make a video again so thanks so much

Channel: Alec Soth

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Id: zNLmOXfDonE

Length: 30min 17sec (1817 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021

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Love his Videos on Books.