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I cannot forget that Abigail Adams said, “Remember the ladies.”

I recently wrote a blog about several of my “heroes.” I was not oblivious of the fact that my five choices were all of the dangly-bits gender, and I promised in that entry to follow up with one on women who were also my heroes — those who embody character that I admire and would aspire to, if I were a better person than I have managed to be.

Top on my list of women who are my heroes I would place my wife of 35 years, but I will not be writing about her, for deeply personal reasons. Let us simply acknowledge that there is now a constellation that bears her name, made up of the brightest stars, cast up into the nighttime sky.

As with the previous posting, there are some women who most of the world would add to the list. I will never be as brave or as eloquent as Malala Yousafzai. If someone had shot me in the face, I’m sure I would have lain low for the rest of my life, looking back nervously over my shoulder and jumping at Fourth of July fireworks. But Malala continues to speak out forcefully for the education of women. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, when she was 17, which is the age my granddaughters are now. I think of them as mature for their ages, but Malala — wow. They don’t hand out Nobel Peace Prizes for being class president or state legislative page. She is one in a billion.

They do hand out Nobel Peace Prizes for upholding democracy in the face of authoritarian military juntas, though. Aung San Suu Kyi has one. She spent a total of 15 years under house arrest in her native Burma for speaking out against the repressive government, and finally managed to bring democracy back to her nation. (I recognize that all heroes run the risk of clay feet. Malala so far has avoided that fate, but Aung San Suu Kyi nearly blew decades of good will in the world by failing to condemn violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma. One always has to forgive something in one’s heroes. Not one of us is perfect.)

But my personal pantheon comprises five women who have something to give me on a more personal level; they embody traits that I would aspire to and that among them are fervent curiosity; a willingness to include everyone in the circus of humanity; an ability to feel not just sympathy, but empathy; a refusal to accept the conventional wisdom; and a burning aliveness. The each see the multiple layers of existence not as contradictory, but as accumulative.

Toni Morrison — Another Nobel Prize winner, this time for literature, Morrison has the fierce physiognomy of a Tibetan temple’s guardian demon. She suffers not fools gladly. But, as with the Buddhist demons, when you accept her for herself, she turns out to be a guide, not a gatekeeper. I especially appreciate that, although she can walk through walls — indeed, chew the walls up and spit them out — she does not cave in to the conventional definitions laid out for her by society.

When asked about feminism in a 1998 interview in Salon magazine, she said, “In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity.”

She has done a great deal for feminism by being the powerful woman she is. It may be “off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I’m involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don’t subscribe to patriarchy, and I don’t think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it’s a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.”

And geez, can she write.

Agnès Varda — French New Wave cinema broke away from the conventions of studio filmmaking in the 1950s and ’60s, with a fresh approach to storytelling. Varda is often including in their ranks, but really, she isn’t in anyone’s army. She is peculiarly and significantly her own. It is often hard to tell whether she is making documentary or feature film. Her fiction often includes bits of real life, and her documentaries are often so imaginative that the only way you can categorize them is to call them “personal essays” in film language.

She is clearly in love with the things of this world, from her first feature, La Pointe Courte, from 1954, which focuses as much on the physical settings and objects in the small fishing village central to her story, as it does on the two main characters. There are wooden sheds and fishing nets lingered over lovingly by the camera, which moves ever so slowly, giving us all the time we need to pay attention. She dares us to be bored and challenges us to transcend that boredom by paying attention to the wealth she has spread before us.

In The Gleaners and I, she begins by following the poor as they gather bits of food left in the farm fields — a practice written into French law. But, the movie goes on to look at many people who have found value in things forgotten and discarded, including artists who make work from found objects. This includes herself. She said in an interview “I’m not poor, I have enough to eat.” But she points to “another kind of gleaning, which is artistic gleaning. You pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from other people, and then you make it into a film.”

There is no doubting Varda’s feminist bona fides, but her argument is found not in politics, but in human relationships, and in the unembraceable fact that we all die. We wait for the biopsy results with the pop star in Cleo from 5 to 7, we watch the suffering of the poor wraith as she winds down to a cold death in a ditch in Vagabond, and we see Varda’s own love for her husband, Jacques Demy, as he slowly winks out of this life in Jacquot de Nantes. In all of them, death is not a literary device, but a vivifying fact of life we all must face with — if nothing else — creativity.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg — There are many reasons for admiring Ginsburg, not the least of which is her sparkling wit. Even as she becomes older and slower, the words that come out of her mouth always a bit more hesitatingly as age grips her ribcage are often ripping funny. There is always light flashing in those eyes. Whenever she shows up on a C-Span panel discussion, I stop flipping channels and sit through the duration. I love hearing her.

And certainly one admires the legal career which lead her to the senior position on the U.S. Supreme Court (in age, if not in length of service). She is always on the right side, even if not always on the winning side. Her dissents are deeply felt and forcefully written.

One also admires her fashion choice, wearing that lacy jabot across the front of her judicial robe. She was the third woman to administer the oath of office to a president, and the first Supreme Court justice to preside over a same-sex wedding.

And there is her love of opera; she has even appeared several times as a supernumerary in opera productions. And her long marriage to her late husband, Martin Ginsburg. I have a warm regard for anyone forming so close a bond for so long a time.

But the single quality I most admire in the Notorious RBG is the fact she could be friends with the late Antonin Scalia. How, you ask, could this have been possible. Scalia was the most ideologically inflexible of the justices during his term, and the most biting in his writings, whether in the majority or in dissent. Truculent and pugnacious, he had a nasty turn of phrase and seemed to ooze contempt for those who disagreed with him. Yet, Ginsburg and Scalia had a famous friendship in the court. They went to opera together. For years, the Scalias and the Ginsburgs had dinner together every New Year’s Eve. (His friendship with RBG is the one single redeeming feature I can cite in Scalia’s favor).

Nan Goldin — Seeming a universe apart from the high-achieving Supreme Court justice is an artist known for her snapshots of her drug-using friends. Goldin, now 63, made her name with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1985, a slide show with music accompaniment that was presented via a Kodak Carousel transparency projector presented against the walls of a gallery. Along with the hundreds of slides, a recording of music by the Velvet Underground, Charles Aznavour, Nina Simone, James Brown and Richard Strauss played, underlying both the rebellious and romantic nature of the lifestyle portrayed — that of the gay subculture, the heroin chic, the damaging personal life of Goldin herself.

It is painful to look at these lost people, with their bruises, smeared eye-liner, tangled hair and thousand-yard-stares. One critic called them “the beaten down and beaten-up,” with “gritty disheveled miens” photographed in “dark and dank ramshackle interiors.”

An edited-down version of the slide show was published a year later as a book. It would be hard to turn those pages and feel there was anything to admire in them, other than the color and composition of them as photographs. But they are redeemed by two contradictory things: their truth and their romanticism. Goldin was not pointing her camera at this lifestyle to admonish it, but to document it; she was not outside it, but a part of it. It was a harsh self-inspection. But it also, while telling hard truths, explored the deep and abiding search for meaning in life. The need for transcendence, for escaping the banality of bourgeoise existence. Surely we are more important as individuals than as cogs in a societal machine.

For a more in-depth analysis of Goldin’s work, check out: https://richardnilsen.com/2013/08/30/the-goldin-mean/

Anne Iott — There are people who are bilingual, but Anne Iott is so in a very specific way: She is an artist, but she was also the chair of the art department at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, Va., for many, many years and was fluent both in art and in administration. This is — if you haven’t been subject to either or both — extremely rare. To be able to converse meaningfully with artists about art in their own language, but to be able to function efficiently in the bureaucratic atmosphere of academe is more than a talent, it is a genius.

As an artist, she is first a painter, but that is just the start. There is hardly an art form or medium that she hasn’t essayed brilliantly. There are prints, collages, photographs, assemblages and in recent years, artist books, which she seems to spin out of her like a tree grows apples.

Certainly her prolific drive to create would nominate her for this list, but it is rather more than that. Anne has a special genius for seeing in other people that which they do not see in themselves. She has helped uncounted people with their careers and with their lives. I know; I owe my career as a writer to her. When I was teaching as a lowly adjunct faculty member at TCC, she finagled a position for me at Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot newspaper as a freelance art critic. She knew I was a better writer than teacher. I wound up writing one or two reviews each Sunday for the paper, which gave me the confidence and experience to sign on full-time to the Arizona Republic when my wife and I moved to Phoenix, Ariz.

But it is not mere gratitude for her constant support and aid that I put her on this list, but rather for the particular ability to see other people clearly, even when they don’t see themselves, to go out of her way to make life better for other people. Anne has made a good life for herself, but she has also made good lives for all those she has helped. Nothing feels so good as to be seen. Really seen.

All those on these lists, both men (in a previous post) and women embody qualities I love and admire in them, and would wish to be able to emulate. I can try, but even when I don’t succeed, these are the lodestars of my better self.

Capturing souls

June 20, 2015

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Portrait photographs come in basically two varieties: the formal and the candid. These days, with selfies monopolizing the social media, almost all portraits are informal. And when asked, most people say they prefer the candid picture, perhaps because the formal portrait has fossilized into the Olan Mills mall photo, in garish color against phony backgrounds. It would be hard to make an esthetic case for these assembly-line excrescences, with their banal smiles and enforced familial geniality.

Then, there is a prejudice against artifice: Many people prefer the snapshots because they seem more natural, more spontaneous. If you look at one of those highly massaged portraits by Yousef Karsh, there would seem nothing less spontaneous. Every light, every specular reflection in an eye, seems calculated, even marmoreal, like his portrait of composer Jean Sibelius. If we’re a “rock and roll” nation, we are one that values the brash, the riff, the off-the-cuff: Indeed, we trust it to be more “truthful” than the rhetoric of the planned, controlled and considered. As Allen Ginsberg mendaciously preached: “First thought, best thought.” (Despite the fact that his best poems, such as Howl, were thoroughly revised and rewritten; we have the typescript for evidence, with all its emendations.)

Yet, some of our most iconic images — the ones we remember, the ones that fix in our minds some large truth about their subjects, are exactly the careful, posed and arranged portraits, such as Karsh’s take on Winston Churchill — a photo that might have won the war all by itself.

The idea of the formal portrait survives, even in the gaudy, awful Olan Mills photos: The idea that the subject wants to be seen in his Sunday best, with his best teeth put forward for posterity: “This is how I want to be remembered.” Even though the actual life may be more squalid or confused, or complex– certainly infinitely richer. But “this version is the one with the barnacles scraped off.”

The photographer Richard Avedon said, “What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable — and they’re screaming the next minute. I’ve never seen a family album of screaming people.”

But when done well, it isn’t the vanity of the subject that is portrayed, but the insight of the photographer. A good portrait should tell us something about the subject that the subject doesn’t want us to know, or is not aware of, or is somehow larger than the public face intended.

A photographic portrait also tells us something about the artist who makes it. This is something that Avedon always stressed.

“My portraits are always more about me than they are about the people I’ve photographed,” he said. You can spot an Avedon immediately: It’s style is uniquely his. The same can be said for Irving Penn, or for Arnold Newman, or Yousef Karsh — any of those who made a name as portraitists. An Avedon portrait — or a Penn — is a world view, consistent from image to image.

And it is in this sense that the portrait rises from vanity icon to art. The picture tells us not merely, what does this person look like, but rather the larger message: This is what being human is.

It is in the eyes, most often, that the humanity is tethered. You can see the light behind them. Nothing is worse than a picture of someone who is bored with the process of being photographed: The eyes turn into ball bearings, lifeless and extinct. A good portrait is a picture, instead, of being alive, of being in the moment, even if that moment is for posterity, or for eternity.

I bring all this up, because in the age before I became a writer, I thought I would be a photographer. It was in the days of chemicals and dim amber lights, and I became a proficient darkroom worker: My prints, I say with some pride, were as good as anyone’s.

And I took many portraits, working my way through the learning and development that any artist goes through: Imitation, innovation and finally, something personal that emerges.

Most of these portraits were friends or more. I went through cameras, always seeking the right one, never actually finding it: Nikons, Rolleis, Hasselblads. I went through lighting schemes, through backdrops.

And I went through the history of portraiture, from Holbein to Raphael to Rembrandt to Gainsborough to Chuck Close. The model I felt closest to was the Renaissance portrait, such as Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione. Here was a face to look at: Eyes that had seen a good deal of the best and worst of the world: It registers. There is also a sense of moment; this is for posterity. The figure makes a pyramid in the frame, giving it foundation and security. The background is broken into interesting shapes — the so-called negative space, not ignored, but make essential to the impact of the image.

I saw something of the same in the photographs of Avedon: formality, interesting negative space, and the centrality of eyes.

There is one major difference between these great images and the Olan Mills smile-o-thons: So many of them have equivocal expressions on their faces. They aren’t genial and smiling; indeed, it’s hard to quite know what they are expressing. There is a neutrality to their faces; not slack, as if thoughtless, but rather as if thoughts were unresolved.

In other words, the faces were not billboards flashing their message, but rather something denser, meant to be read and fathomed. Not the momentary but the monumental.

This is a portrait of Henry Parrish Lippincott Hackett, I made it in about 1973. It is a model of what I was trying to get in those years.

Of course, they were also shapes in a frame, and the graphic quality of the images counted for a lot, such as the eye of Picasso in Penn’s version, or the indistinct edge of Eisenhower’s head in Avedon’s portrait.

I used the eye in a photo I made of Pam Henry, in the mid-1970s.

Other imitations, conscious or otherwise can be found in other portraits I made from 1970 to about 1986, when I gave up teaching photography and became a writer at The Arizona Republic.

My Degas:

Not a conscious imitation, but clearly a resonance of Ingres in a portrait of artist Mel Steele.

This is Doug Nufer in 1978, when he was officially dubbed “The World’s Most Obscene Man,” against Avedon’s portrait of Willem de Kooning. Nufer has since gone on to become one of the avant-garde literary lights of Seattle.

Or, Botticelli’s Venus in a picture of Kathy Elks.

But it wasn’t all imitation. It was an education, and a slow development of what I was trying to find in portraiture. I wanted it to be formal; I wanted it to be graphic; I wanted it to be more than a snapshot reminder of who my friends were. When I was teaching photography, I ran a course on portraiture and I was not so much concerned with the usual lighting schemes or lens choices, but with engaging with the sitter, finding something human there. And while book after book told us that we should use a long lens for more natural perspective, I found that a normal lens, or even a wide angle lens brought the photographer and the sitter closer together, making interaction unavoidable: The photographer could not be aloof from the sitter, as though the sitter were a mere object, and the sitter could not be indifferent to the photographer invading his private space. The interaction was forced. Always use a short lens, I taught. Get in their faces.

Here is artist and friend, Charles Williams, who returned the favor by making a drawing of my wife and me.

Second lesson: Always have the sitter look into the lens, so that in the photograph, he gazes out of the picture into the eyes of the person looking at the image. This makes the portrait not a neutral event, but it forces the viewer to have a relationship with the subject. In other words, the photographer confronts the sitter; the photograph confronts the viewer. This makes for a more active work of art.

These are three photos I took for The Carolina Peacemaker, when I worked for that weekly black newspaper in Greensboro, N.C. I was looking for that directness, rather than the mere animation that most photo editors want.

Third, no smiles. Unless they are genuine and are more than a tightened muscle at the mouth corner. There is a story about Greta Garbo, when an observer at a studio shoot said afterwards, “I couldn’t see her doing anything,” and the film director said, “But it will show up on film, just wait and see.” And of course, when the dailies were screened, every emotion ran riot across her face — primarily because she didn’t underline each one melodramatically. The film sees things you don’t. Let it do its job.

There were many other points in the course, but these three were most important, even if they ran counter to what is usually taught. After all, I told my students at the beginning of every class that I considered it my job as a teacher in the art department, not to train them for careers, but to make them unemployable. I wanted them to dig deeper than the stereotype. Many of them did. It was a great class.

When I moved to Arizona and started work at the newspaper, I stopped taking as many photographs. I spent my time writing the two-and-a-half million words I pumped out in 25 years. There were photos meant to illustrate stories, but my emphasis had shifted.

Now, I still make the occasional photograph, and I still use the shorter lens, the in-your-face, and the attention to eyes.

And I’ve gotten older, and so have my friends. You saw my Ingres-photo of brother-in-law Mel Steele. Here he is a couple of months ago, more informal — almost a snapshot, but with the lessons I learned from years of looking.

—Richard Nilsen

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Heroes and saints, part 2

Capturing souls