The Road

These are roads to take when you think of your country
and interested bring down the maps again,
phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend,

reading the papers with morning inquiry.
Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light
chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights

indicate future or road, your wish pursuing
past the junction, the fork, the suburban station,
well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.

Past your tall central city’s influence,
outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds,
are centers removed and strong, fighting for good
                     reason.

These roads will take you into your own country.
Select the mountains, follow rivers back,
travel the passes. Touch West Virginia where

the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace,
iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down
into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel.

Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs.
Airport. Gay blank rich faces wishing to add
history to ballrooms, tradition to the first tee.

The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded with pine
in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,
crosscut by snow, wind at the hill’s shoulder.

The land is fierce here, steep, braced against snow,
rivers and spring. KING COAL HOTEL, Lookout,
and swinging the vicious bend, New River Gorge.

Now the photographer unpacks camera and case,
surveying the deep country, follows discovery
viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

John Marshall named the rock (steep pines, a drop
he reckoned in 1812, called) Marshall Pillar,
but later, Hawk’s Nest. Here is your road, tying

you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.
Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river
cutting fast and direct into the town.

Photograph © Mark Ruwedel, from Westward the Course of Empire (2008), courtesy of Yossi Milo.

LH “Jug” Lowell, Buffalo Bills Birthday Party, Lookout Mountain, Colorado by Alec Soth, from the forthcoming Colorado, part of the Little Brown Mushroom Dispatches project.

From Brutal, the recently published third book by Michal Luczak. More to follow.

“The function of portrait painting was to underwrite and idealise a chosen social role of the sitter. It was not to present him as ‘an individual’ but, rather, as an individual monarch, bishop, landowner, merchant and so on. Each role had its accepted qualities and its acceptable limit of discrepancy. (A monarch or a pope could be far more idiosyncratic than a mere gentleman or courtier.) The role was emphasised by pose, gesture, clothes and background. (…)

The satisfaction of having one’s portrait painted was the satisfaction of being personally recognised and confirmed in one’s position: it had nothing to do with the modern lonely desire to be recognised ‘for what one really is’. (…)

It seems that the demands of a modern vision are incompatible with the singularity of viewpoint which is the prerequisite for a static-painted ‘likeness’. The incompatibility is connected with a more general crisis concerning the meaning of individuality. Individuality can no longer be contained within the terms of manifest personality traits. In a world of transition and revolution individuality has become a problem of historical and social relations, such as cannot be revealed by the mere characterizations of an already established social stereotype. Every mode of individuality now relates to the whole world.”

— John Berger, “The Changing View of Man in the Portrait” in Selected Essays.

Images in order: August Sander, Young Farmers, Westerwald, 1914; Alex Dellow, Teddy Boys, Tottenham 1954; Robert Frank, Newburgh, New York, 1955; Alec Soth, Josh Joelton, Tennessee; Bryan Schutmaat, Perry, Cascade, Montana

The ground-breaking Waffenruhe, by Michael Schmidt. See his latest, Lebensmittel, also up at Have A Nice Book.

From “South Philadelphia” by Justin James Reed, (2005 - 2007).

“The problem is the medium’s literalness, so the photographer is not only trying to go beyond subject matter and find subject, she has to take her audience with her. Most people, and this can include people quite sophisticated and well versed in other arts, assume that if the photograph is of a white horse, the photographer is talking about white horses rather than loneliness or loss, or any number of apparently unlikely subjects, as well as the more obvious metaphors like strength or grace. Of course, the ultimate task for any photographer is to talk about the most unlikely things and the white horse, in short, to tell the subject’s tale as well as her own.”

— Gerry Badger, writing in his essay “Far from New York City: The Grapevine Work of Susan Lipper”, in The Pleasures of Good Photographs

Photograph from This Russia, (2008) by Irina Rozovsky.

“Pliny the Elder’s Natural History tells the story (also echoed by Turner) of the Maid of Corinth, who “was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by the lamp.” This scene, which has been represented often in Western art, expresses both pictures of desire in a single scene; it has its cake and eats it too. The shadow is not itself a living thing, but its likeness and projection of the young man are both metaphoric and metonymic, icon and index. It is thus a ghostly effigy that is “fixed” (as in a photographic process) by the tracing of the outline and (in Pliny’s further elaboration) eventually realized by the maiden’s father in a sculptural relief, presumably after the death of the departed lover.

So the image is born of desire, is (we might say) a symptom of desire, a phantasmatic, spectral trace of the desire to hold on to the loved one, to keep some trace of his life during his absence. The “want” or lack in the natural image (the shadow) is its impermanence: when the young man leaves — in fact, when he moves a few feet — his shadow will disappear. Drawing, like photography, is seen to originate in the “art of fixing the shadow.” The silhouette drawing, then, expresses the wish to deny death or departure, to hold on to the loved one, to keep him present and permanently “alive.” (…)

God makes man in his own image, according to Milton, out of a desire not to be alone. Man, as image of God, has desires of his own, and asks for a mate to love him in turn. Narcissus finds his own reflected image in the water, and drowns in the act of taking possession of what he mistakenly supposes to be a beautiful young man who is returning his passionate gaze. Pygmalion makes an ivory statue of a beautiful woman, and falls so passionately in love with it that it comes alive and becomes his loving wife, bearing him a son.

It seems, then, that the question of desire is inseparable from the problem of the image, as if the two concepts were caught in a mutually generative circuit, desire generating images and images generating desire.”

— W.J.T. Mitchell “Drawing Desire” in What Do Pictures Want?

Images in order: Joseph-Benoît Suvée, Dibutades Or The Origin of Drawing,1791; Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, The Burial Of Atala, 1808; Henry Peach Robinson, Lady Of Shalott, 1860 (albumen print); Glen Luchford, Prada campaign, Spring 1997; Justine Kurland, Wild Palms, 2006