On January 26th,1939, Barcelona fell to Franco’s troops. With the defeat of the Republicans in Catalonia, the Spanish Civil War was in effect over. When the French border opened soon afterward, 350,000 Spanish citizens fled from fascism and reprisals, going into exile through the Pyrenees, especially via the towns of La Jonquera and Portbou. It was a frantic exodus; only a few days later, on February 10th, Franco’s troops controlled the border crossings.

Now, in Spain at that very border with France, in that town of La Jonquera, is the Museu Memorial d’Exili, inaugurated in 2007. This is not a museum of artifacts; there are no dusty shoes or worn suitcases. This is a museum that tells its stories through photographs treated not as documents but rather as carriers and embodiments of time.

ANDALUCES DE JAÉN,
sung by Paco Ibanez, himself one of those who went into exile,
in his setting of a poem by Miguel Hernandez

A museum-goer is asked to begin the visit by taking an elevator to the second floor. Stepping out, directly ahead, one is met by a wall-sized mural, in color, grainy and translucent, of a line of stern-faced people in shabby clothes, This is expected: in context it is clear that they are refugees. But wait — the women are wearing babushkas; and it is in color; surely this can’t be Spain. And it’s not. A wall text informs us that it is Tuzia, Boznia and Herzegovina, 1992. Another step forward, and something very strange happens; a face and then another peer our from behind the column of refugees and, while these faces are also photographic images, they are black and white.

Brilliantly, the exhibit designers have placed a photographic mural of the Spanish Civil War refugees directly behind the Tuzia refugees, both images the same size so that the past bleeds into the present. It is an immediate sign that the idea of exile will not be confined to the period that brought this museum into being: instead one sees the long columns of people who have been straddling the globe in the twentieth and twenty first centuries of exile, migration and diasporas. The effect does not remove the Spanish Civil War refugees from their context; instead, through a simple and profound use of photography, it enlarges the idea of context.

Then one walks into rooms of fire. Giant photographs — fragmented, blurred, colorized — are encased in a dense forest of violently yellow rods serving as partitions through which to glimpse more images.The floors of these rooms within rooms smolder with what look to be red coals, both an evocation of the inferno of bombardment, and also a suggestion of embers not yet banked.

BALADA DEL QUE NUNCA FUE A GRANADA
sung by Paco Ibanez in his setting of a poem by Rafael Alberti

The Civil War was supposedly laid to rest by the Pact of Forgetting, an agreement  brokered by both the left and the right after Franco’s death in 1975. At that time all sides believed that a mutual decision to forget was essential to Spain’s transition to democracy. Through a blanket amnesty, no one would be tried or called to account for atrocities committed in the Franco years. For the past ten or so years, there has been a movement to dismantle the Pact, most literally expressed by proposals to find mass graves and disinter the thousands of persons killed by Franco’s death squads. Now, the argument goes, a society cannot move forward by forgetting — an argument that ironically appeals both to Franco’s victims and to his followers who want to resurrect his legacy. However one weighs the havoc that an excavation of the graves would bring, versus the peace of laying loved ones to rest,  there is a further question: If a citizenry has decided to live with a pact of forgetting and then with a resurrection of the past, how does a society hold both decisions together?

Catalonia, that semi-autonomous state from Barcelona to the Pyrenees whose fierce contribution to the Republican effort was honored by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, has made a move toward responding by creating a framework through which such questions can be asked and explored. By creating a network of sites — an itinerary of interpretation centers, markers, viewpoints — in seventeen villages at the Pyrenean border identified by the collective name Espacios de Memoria, the Catalan government has mandated a living organism for recuperation and investigation. At the heart of the itineraries that make up these Espacios de Memoria is The Museum of Exile. It is through the lens of its commitment to critical reflection that one walks downstairs to the space dedicated to temporary exhibits.

When I visited, I was fortunate to encounter “Distancias,” a show of the work of photographer Gustavo Germano whose life project has been to chronicle the passage of time in lives disrupted by repression and dictatorship. Germano finds photographs that had been taken when people were more or less untouched by history; then he photographs those same people in the same pose, as here six decades later. “Distancias” is the second of a trilogy; the first was “Ausencias” (Absences) photographed in Germano’s native Argentina where he found photographs of families when they were whole and then ‘retook’ the image as the group is now, no longer intact, with the absence of a person who has since ‘disappeared’ throbbing like a phantom limb.

What the images of “Distancias” create is not only a recognition of the passage of time but also a space for imagination. What has happened in these lives between their youth and later years?

We know that this couple left Spain and lived in exile. We can infer that the husband has died and the wife has gone on to a dignified old age. But what of the years in between?

How were these particular lives shaped by exile? By what intangibles? The effort of imagination that we are asked to invest in this exhibition does not tilt toward any known direction; neither to the fictional nor the documentary but rather to an act of encompassing empathy.

NO TE PUDE VER
sung by Paco Ibanez in his setting of a poem by Lorca

Hovering above the central space of The Museum of Exile hangs a huge  panel with a single line of text. In Catalan, a language suppressed by Franco and now gloriously resurgent, is a line from King Lear: La llibertat viu lluny d’aqui, i aixo es l’exili, or Freedom lives hence;  and banishment is here. The line is spoken by Kent when Lear banishes him; in essence he is saying where there is tyranny, there can be no freedom.

La llibertat viu lluny d’aqui, i aixo es l’exili. I think that this line is Janus-faced. It is spoken looking back, with recognition and sorrow that this moment, this situation,  has come to pass. And it is spoken looking ahead, the future of ‘hence’ that takes Kent away from the tyrant into uncharted territory. That the museum chooses to suspend this line of text so that it broods over its main room is a sign of a deep and complex understanding of the fates of the people it remembers, placing them at the border in an eternal moment where looking back and looking forward are only a half-turn away, and then in the stride and stumble of going forward.

TUS OJOS ME RECUERDAN
sung by Paco Ibanez in his setting of a poem by Antonio Machado

The Specious Present, The Photography of Alison Rossiter, by Lorraine Davis

Time is deceptive. It is always hiding something. The present is so fleeting that only the past and future may be comprehended. The nano-second of immediate event perception, the “specious present” is understood only in reflection. Every moment of consciousness is spent processing what has just past while constantly anticipating the future. The brain must contextualize each thought to make sense of the world, time-traveling relentlessly in an information-saturated world that threatens to overwhelm  the ceaseless internal dialogue that defines us to ourselves. More

Barnet Bar-Gas, exact expiration date unknown,  c. 1920’s, processed 2007

Inside the Artists Studio – Brian Forrest, A Radical Arcadia, By Constance Mallinson

“There have always been two kinds of arcadia: shaggy and smooth; dark and light; a place of bucolic leisure and a place of primitive panic”, Simon Schama tells us in Landscape and Memory, one arcadia being “a dark grove of desire, but also a labyrinth of madness and death”. He further describes certain arcadias as purposefully and importantly untamed: “turf, gorse, heather, and timber, trees, shrubs and brushwood” of the heaths outside of 19^th century London were a cherished gift to the city dwellers—landscapes of urban imagination that answered certain needs for wildness, even unruliness. In much the same way, one might perceive the unkempt oak filled, scrubby canyons in the vicinity of Los Angeles as critical counterpoint to overdevelopment, neat watered lawns, and perfect patches of park. More

Decker Canyon #5, 2010

Bibliotecture, Seattle Central Library, USA, OMA / LMN – A Joint Venture
Commissioned:1999 Completed: 2004, Photographic Essay by Nancy Cantwell

From the Original Project Proposal 1999
At a moment when libraries are perceived to be under threat from a shrinking public realm on one side and digitization on the other, the Seattle Central Library creates a civic space for the circulation of knowledge in all media, and an innovative organizing system for an ever-growing physical collection – the Books Spiral. The library’s various programs are intuitively arranged across five platforms and four flowing “in between” planes, which together dictate the building’s distinctive faceted shape, offering the city an inspiring building that is robust in both its elegance and its logic. More

This is the third  installment of a three part series on the Nests of Lindsay Wildlife Museum.
Part 1, “First Encounter” tells how the author-photographer first became a part of the museum’s conservation efforts. Part 2, “Behind the Scenes” takes a look at how the nests are collected, categorized, conserved and studied before display.

This final photographic essay is accompanied by the text “Outreach”, an interview with the museum’s Natural History Curator, Marty Buxton.

*****

Naomi Pitcairn: Can you walk me through the creative process of preparing an exhibit?

Marty Buxton: The process can be quite variable, but essentially it involves choosing a theme and tweaking it enough to fit the space available ( little information for very small spaces and more information and specimens for larger spaces) and the audience. Here we usually assume an audience of elementary age students, but sometimes we will assume younger or older. Then we look for available specimens and any special ideas we particularly want to develop. The next step is to research the topic including the specimens and refining it down to labels. Once the labels are written, they need to be edited several times, finally going to others for their input also. The specimens need to be examined to see if any special prep needs to be done. To install the exhibit, we need to assemble background materials such as fabrics, plants, rocks, cases, shelving, etc and fastening materials as well as labels and specimens.

NP: You are the person that calls with questions about insects, spiders, snakes and bats. Tell us about why you love these creatures that some think of as “bad.”

MB: I don’t think I love these creatures any more than many others; I just think they get a bad rap. Often my answer will include education on the role of that animal in the environment and why it should be allowed to live, but I will also include any information on dangers from the animals. I often also include ways to mitigate annoyance from the animals, such as properly sealing cracks to keep wildlife outside.

NP: How do you manage a collection of items that are so fragile and prone to attack from moths, beetles, mold, all kinds of destructive pests?

MB: Sometimes I think the insects are winning. To protect a collection requires careful housekeeping, monitoring, treatment as needed, repairs and vigilance. When we can afford money and space for individual cases that helps a lot. We also need to protect specimens from light and moisture.

NP: Nests are only a small part of the collection you manage. Can you describe to me what kinds of items the museum has and what they are used for?

MB: The collection is used for educational purposes including use in classes, docent presentations, rentals to teachers, students and artists, and for display. It covers all of local natural history. It is also used to assist in identification of found items the public brings in. Often they want to know what they found, if it might be a risk to their family or pets, and what animals actually might be found in their neighborhood.

NP: What’s it like teaching taxidermy? It must take a special kind of person to do it and a unique combination of skills.

MB: I am not sure I am a special kind of person, but taxidermy takes a special set of abilities. The very best taxidermists combine the knowledge of a scientist, the observation of a bird watcher and the skill of an artist. Since the goal in taxidermy is to take a carcass, remove all parts that might rot or decay, replace them with new fake parts and make the resulting object look alive again, this is a huge challenge that takes all the skills mentioned and quite a bit of patience. My volunteers have varying levels of success, but even specimens that are far from perfect make good teachers since we also need items that can be touched.

A lot of the mounts in the museum are exhibited in some really interesting interactions with their environments, the acorn woodpeckers with their section of acorn-riddled tree trunk, the dusky footed wood rat in it’s little bower, the sea otter floating on his back. You and your fellow-creators seem dedicated to more than just educating people on what these animals look like but immersing them in the animals life-styles. That must add to the creative challenges and call for an even wider range of artistic skills.

Of course this presents challenges. Since our specimens are used by many people, they must be quite stable and as easy to carry as possible while showing information about the animal. That means that that “tree” the acorn woodpeckers is on in not solid, but carefully crafted to be as light and durable as possible (no real tree trunk). There are many tricks used to reduce “baggage” to a minimum while showing maximum information about the specimens in these situations. We have learned that sometimes what is wanted is a simple clean animal only and sometimes habitat information is desired. Various poses can assist educators in getting their message across, so we try to have no duplicates of the species in the same pose.

NP: The purpose of the collection, of the exhibits and other educational outreach, how does that tie in to the museum’s efforts to “connect people with wildlife to inspire respect for the world we share?”

MB: All of our classes, school programs, exhibits, animal displays, hospital activities are designed to help the public understand the wildlife around us all and understand that wildlife needs human assistance. While many people don’t realize it, we all benefit from knowing more about wild animals around us also. There is a clear educational mission in the classes, programs, exhibits and live animal exhibits. The hospital cares for such a small proportion of the wildlife around us that they have little direct effect on local wild animal populations, although they certainly impact individual animals. But giving the public a place to bring injured and orphaned animals and learn more about them allows people to care and not get frustrated because there is now something they can do.

NP: The entire natural world. That’s a large subject for one person to be an expert on. How does a naturalist manage inform themselves on such a broad topic. It’s one of the most generalized fields I can think of and yet it deals with detailed specifics. How did you get interested? This was not your first career. Are you self educated? Where and how would you suggest a person new to the interest get started? What is the best way for someone to educate themselves about these fascinating topics?

MB: Who is an expert? I am convinced that an expert is someone who knows more than you do and that no one is really an expert. We’re all just at different points of learning about whatever the subject is. I learned what I do know from various sources – classes, books, TV, internet, other people, outdoor experiences, etc.

NP: What are some of the ways you would recommend to people who love nature to enjoy it while learning more about it?

MB: Each person should start with their own interests. If a person likes hiking, fishing, museums, books, TV shows or any other active or passive way of enjoying nature, that is a good place to start. Then start trying to find information whenever they have questions. Self taught is not a bad idea. Then one is learning what is interesting. As one learns more, one often wants to know more and more. If taking a class seems like fun, then do so. If reading books is fun, then do that.

Please click to enlarge to observe the arresting intricacies of these nests.

[View with PicLens]

Left: Spotted Towhee —Taxonomists have decided that the Rufous-sided Towhee is actually two species: the Spotted Towhee and the Eastern Towhee. The Eastern Towhee, indeed, does not have the white spots on its otherwise black wings, although they both have gorgeous rust colored sides, that contrasted with their red eyes, black backs and white breasts make them the flashiest of earth toned birds. Like their duller relative, the California Towhee, they also spend a lot of time on the ground foraging for insects. Unlike the California Towhees, Spotted Towhees nest on the ground, or near to it and their nests are more likely to include either shreds or strips of bark.

Right: Chickadees — Are cavity nesters, which explains this nest’s apparent lack of form. They like to start with pine chips on the bottom of their holes and then create a springy cushion of something soft and fluffy like hair, cedar bark, or lint on top. These tiny birds with their big personalities, have always been one of my personal favorites, from their funny calls “Chick-a-dee-dee-dee” that give them their name, to their cheeky willingness to take mixed seeds from a patient hand and then peck it when their favorites are gone.

Last spring we were lucky enough to have a pair of Chestnut-backed Chickadees accept the nest-cam box that we had hooked into our CCTV system. First the male staked the cavity out, sleeping there at night while during the day he would go out in search of a girlfriend. When Mr. Chickadee got lucky, the pair busied themselves bringing materials to the nest, wiggling their round around bodies to form a cup for the eggs. There was the un-enviable process of laying, and then, 2 weeks later, the first hatchling. We watched them, eight in all, eat, sleep and also raise their little butts up for a parent to remove their feces, thus finally explaining to me why nests I found weren’t full of poop. All of them fledged, after lots of practice flying and fluttering inside of the cavity to strengthen their wings. As soon as they are strong enough, the parents then chase them away, thus keeping the species strong by promoting genetic diversity.

[View with PicLens]

Left: Goldfinch — City dwellers can enjoy birds like Goldfinches without attracting a hoard of pigeons or sparrows by putting out thistle instead of sunflower or other seeds. Gold finches have complex and interesting vocalizations and the males  are a brilliant yellow during breeding season. They travel in flocks, and one of the most gorgeous things I have ever seen was a large flock of these tiny, bright yellow and black birds rising up from a green field, dotted with purple thistles. Being seed-eaters, they do not migrate. The males feathers will turn a drab, ochre though, similar to that of the female for half of the year. Unlike the more widespread and predominantly yellow American Goldfinch, the Lawrence’s Goldfinch has a pale gray body, highlighted by black on the face and yellow wings and breast. You can see that this particular female (the male contributes materials but does not build the nest) used oak flowers as well as leaves and grass to construct her nest.

Right: Mockingbird — From the family Mimidae, Latin for mimic, Mockingbirds get their names from their habit of repeating the sounds of other birds, insects and amphibians. One of the ways that a birder can decide that it is not a Cardinal he is hearing, but actually a Mockingbird, is the Mockingbird’s habit of repeating his calls in groups of three. Say, cheer, cheer, cheer, when imitating a Cardinal, peep, peep, peep if a frog. They are a medium sized grey bird but will show  white tail feathers when flying away. Their nests are described as untidy which might imply that this particular mockingbird nest, with its delicate lining of pine needles, is something of an aberration.

[View with PicLens]

Left: Purple Finches —Looking a lot like the, red House Finches, that are partially displacing them, the Purple Finch is a little bit larger and the male’s head is more raspberry red than the orangey red of the male House Finch’s. Like all finches they are seed eaters and so, have strong, stocky beaks, capable of breaking into seeds. The females are a plain speckled brown. Both House and Purple Finches also resemble the House Sparrow, (really an introduced European finch) which has displaced both of the native finches to some extent. Purple Finches prefer to nest in trees in coniferous forests, while House Sparrows nest in small cavities and seem to thrive on junk food, which makes them particularly adaptable to city dwelling.

Right: Hummingbirds — Not only eat nectar but need to consume protein, frequently in the form of spiders. Spider webs are an important material in their nest construction as well, which relies on the sticky elastic fibers to hold together a flexible but strong cup of embedded lichen and moss and plant down. As fierce as they are tiny, hummingbirds defend their territories to the death, males often stabbing each other with their lance-like beaks. The flashy bits of color, or gorgets, that all hummingbirds display (a deep, iridescent pink in the case of the Anna’s Hummingbird) are semaphores of love, as the photos of Douglas Morgan clearly illustrate.

Hummingbirds legs are small and weak. They cannot walk or hop, only kind of shuffle sideways along branches, and they court in the air, with impressive flying dances. They are one of the only birds that can fly backwards, as well as forwards and I have been entertained, more than once by a hummingbird flying circles around an increasingly annoyed hawk zapping at him from all directions.

[View with PicLens]

Above Left: Stellar Jay, Right: Scrub Jay— As I have already mentioned in my earlier nest articles, Jays are intelligent birds who form close family bonds, evident in the distress they expressed when my cat, Bubba, caught and killed one the other day. I try to keep Bubba inside for this reason. As charming as Bubba is, and as much as he likes to kill birds, I love the native California birds as much as I love him, and house cats are one of the most serious threats to many species survival, especially ground nesting birds like road runners, quail and warblers. Several organizations including American Bird Conservancy have endorsed programs that aim to encourage cat lovers to keep their pets inside. Not only this better for the birds, but ironically, cats can actually fall prey to hawks and owls as well as hit by cars or contract diseases and parasites. Bubba clearly does not agree with me, but I do my best to thwart the murderous and occasionally foolhardy expeditions that he clearly enjoys so much.

Maya Zack, W.G. Sebald, Walter Benjamin and Chris Marker, A Further Inquiry on Image and Text
by Janet Sternburg

With Living Room, an installation I sought out at The Jewish Museum in New York, Israeli artist Maya Zack is salvaging the past of a particular man, Manfred Nomburg, and through his memories of the pre-Holocaust past, the Jewish experience in Germany. Zack is honoring what once was, what was lost and now remembered. But something else is at work, subtly undermining that formulation. Living Room combines the immemorial impulse to salvage with a more contemporary impulse to sabotage, and suggests ways that artists and writers are bringing these impulses together, not as separate and opposite, but rather in generative conjunction.

On each wall of Living Room’s black cube, big enough to hold five or six viewers, was a large image, 4 feet high by 10 feet wide, depicting a cross-section of the living room, dining room and kitchen of a Berlin apartment before the Second World War. A man’s disembodied voice filled the cube, speaking in a gentle tone that compelled belief as he described these rooms where he grew up, before he was sent as a refugee to Israel and his parents were sent to Auschwitz. In the paper transcript, (available in the gallery), we read that “the original interview was conducted in Hebrew. In the gallery, the English translation is voiced by an actor, Mika Adler. The artist would like to extend her special thanks to Mr. Yair Noam, the name taken by Mr. Nomburg.”

The artist is setting the documentary scene in the usual way, giving background information and credits. But wait—the voice is not a specific man in the act of remembering—it is an actor, reading words that had been transcribed, originally spoken by Manfred Nomburg who is no longer Manfred Nomburg, but Yair Noam, the name (and perhaps the persona) that Nomburg became in exile. The images are not photographs, as they appear at first glance, but are digital reconstructions of rooms that have been imagined by the artist. The text is spoken in German-accented English, delivered without either emphasis or the ordinary hesitations of a person trying to remember; instead, with a neutrality that undermines the specificity of a person stumbling among memories, and supplants him with a stream of untethered recall.

Why should we trust the narrator to be a teller of truth simply because image and text implicitly claim correspondence? Here they are not nearly as meticulous in their relationship to one another as they seem. What that relationship is—seemingly straightforward on the surface—is never exactly clear. Nor is it clear to Nomburg/Noam himself: on seeing Living Room, he did not recognize his putative ‘own’ past. Maya Zack writes “He said it’s very interesting and it’s very impressive, but it doesn’t remind him at all of where he grew up. But that, of course, was the point.”

The whole edifice of documentary stability shakes, as it should. The artist’s mischievous manipulation of recorded ‘reality’ changes Living Room from testimony to a meditation on memory and its inconstancies.

“. . . there seem to be no permanently held pictures of anything . . .”
—Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, writing on ‘Storing Images and Forming Images in Recall’

We are in the territory of other artists who work with the disjunction of images and text to represent memory, notably among them writers W.G. Sebald and filmmaker Chris Marker. Sebald was a magpie, collecting ephemera that he found at thrift shops and garage sales, dropping photographs, restaurant bills and reproductions of paintings uncaptioned into his texts. Some writers contend that Sebald used visual materials to anchor his text, to provide evidence that “this really happened.” I think otherwise—the photographs are the Sebaldian equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ ‘The game’s afoot’— a strategy intended to send a reader’s nose quivering, following a trail of clues sprinkled by a trickster’s hand, one’s interest sustained by the author never giving away whodunit. (Sebald, a trickster? This master of melancholy, the man about whom Susan Sontag wrote an essay entitled The Mind of Mourning? Indeed, a trickster goes back and forth across borders, living in limbo, an itinerant state artistically commensurate with loss as well as mischief.)

Whodunit? This is the question we are made to ask of images and narrators. In his essay-novel The Rings of Saturn, Sebald invents a narrator who hovers between an autobiographical and a fictionalized “I”. Is Sebald asking: Are there such big differences between the two? Does it matter—to you, to me—whether I am telling my own experience or something I’ve imagined? Or an amalgam? And, in the larger picture, is this space of not knowing closer to the truths of our experience than the certainty of choosing one side over the other?

The space of not knowing is where the self is receptive and porous, the sine qua non of creativity. The best description of porosity that I know occurs in Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, around 1900, a book that shares psychic space with Sebald and Zack: “Early on, I learned to disguise myself in words, which really were clouds. The gift of perceiving similarities is, in fact, nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become similar . . . In me, however, this compulsion acted through words. . . those that made me similar to dwelling places, furniture, clothes.” Berlin Childhood is a collection of memories from the beginning of the twentieth century written as fragments from the double perspective of the child who is entering the life of objects, and the adult who is shadowed by his knowledge that these objects and rooms are about to vanish.

This is not a Benjamin we often get to know; it is the philosopher as poet who, in his contemplation of the everyday, is closer to the Pablo Neruda of Elemental Odes than to the Theodor W. Adorno of Negative Dialectics. Benjamin has written an ode in prose to the erotics of socks that also conjures his fascination with the useful simultaneity and conjunction of so-called opposites. “I would come upon my socks, which lay piled in traditional fashion —that is to say, rolled up and turned inside out. Every pair had the appearance of a little pocket. For me, nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into its interior. I did not do this for the sake of the pocket’s warmth. It was ‘the little present’ rolled up inside… I drew it ever nearer until something disconcerting would happen. I had brought out ‘the present’ but ‘the pocket’ in which it had lain was no longer there. I could not repeat the experiment on this phenomenon often enough. It taught me that form and content, veiled and unveiled are the same.”

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, the persona of the narrator is both veiled and unveiled, a strategy similar to Sebald’s for asking questions of identity. An unnamed woman is reading letters, voice-over, from a cinematographer, Sandor Krasna, whose use of the first person suggests  that the filmmaker and the letter writer are one and the same; Krasna, however, does not exist, although he can be construed at least partly as an alias for Marker. (For readers who want to see this artist’s mischief in action, I recommend going to: Sandor Krasna’s photostream at flickr.com; Marker has also assigned Krasna a birthdate and biography as well as a musician kid brother.) Along with Zack and Sebald, Marker uses words as though they are unreliable witnesses in a court of ambiguous images, supposedly used to nail down the facts of time and place, but seem instead to have been placed there by an authorial imp who knows that they owe their existence to somewhere else entirely: here to draw out through juxtaposition Marker’s critique of the devastations of the twentieth century.

“It’s tempting to speculate about whom he {Chris Marker} might identify as the “director” of  Sans Soleil,. . . The twentieth century seems a likely guess…” —Jonathan Rosenbaum

The twentieth century is the director too of Maya Zack, of Walter Benjamin, of W. G. Sebald, all making art in a time of unprecedented migrations, diasporas, and exiles. How do they and we as artists reconcile the safety and comforts of the living room with the perils and absences of the leaving room, the shift from security to a precarious place that no longer exists but still haunts? Remembering his visits to his grandmother’s apartment, Benjamin writes, “What words can describe the almost immemorial feeling of bourgeois security that emanated from this apartment,” continuing this theme with its aftermath: ‘The images of my metropolitan childhood. . . will at least suggest how thoroughly the person spoken of here would later dispense with the security allotted his childhood.”

Loss demands new forms of expression. In Living Room, Maya Zack offers viewers the option to look at her images with and without 3D glasses. For many people, certainly those who wrote their comments in a guest book, the magic of the piece seems to come when they put on the glasses  and see, as the curator describes it, “the images came to life.” But with that eliding comes resolution which is, I think, two-dimensional. For me, the moving aspect of these images is before one puts the glasses on, when each object is surrounded by red and blue ghostly filters that seem to quiver in anticipation of resolving into one vision. Seeing the color separations is to participate not in an illusory space but rather one that represents the rifts of history: split, fragmented, disjunctive, vertiginous.

Benjamin writes,“I believe it is possible that a fate expressly theirs is held in reserve for such images. No customary forms await them …” No customary forms indeed. The strategy of deliberate ambiguity, of not either/or but both, leaves room for an artist to create subtle representations of self. That loss of security in Living Room leads to a visual metaphor that surprises; in the midst of the bourgeois rooms with their music stand and tea kettle and china cups and saucers is a broken wall, a big gaping space behind the kitchen sink that looks as though it has been attacked with a hammer. “There were many things that I added,” Zack said, “Like the hole in the wall—that was my invention.” The hole is the space through which the artist is peering. She has left room for her observing eye and consciousness. The disruption of a broken wall in a supposedly intact room; to the viewer, a potent metaphor for how an artist sees in relation to what she makes.

Naomi Pitcairn, activist, photographer and contributor to Times Quotidian, has a choice—and she chooses Oakland. When my husband and I were contemplating a move to the Bay Area she was begging us to please be open to the East Bay with it’s diversity in art and culture. When the community calls she left the comfort zone of her sequestered studio work and took her camera to the streets to be a part of Occupy Oakland. Naomi is also a long time member of the Fresh Juice Party , “a politically prejudiced media group who produces custom media packets for causes we believe in.” FJP sponsored two free vegetarian lunch programs for the protestors via the sympathetic Fountain Cafe. The Fresh Juice Party Band has also been invited to sing on stage at several occupations.

Here is FJP’s song OCCUPY WALL STREET Occupy Everywhere. Solidarity.
Music: Craig Casey, Lyrics: Prathibha Gautam, Vocals: Jessica Czeck

You can download FJP’s OCCUPY WALL STREET from iTunes here.

Protesters here have renamed Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, the site of their encampment, Oscar Grant Plaza. Oscar Grant, 22, was shot in the back by policeman Johannes Mehserle, 28, while lying on the platform in a railway station on January 1st 2009. Mehserle claimed he had thought he had his Taser in his hand rather than his gun. The shooting, which was shown on YouTube, led to a riot in Oakland, and there were fears of further trouble if Mehserle had been found not guilty. The verdict meant the jury thought Mehserle had been criminally negligent but had not intended to kill Grant. The trial was held in Los Angeles because of the tension in the Oakland and neighbouring San Francisco over the shooting.

This is the second installment of a three part series on the Nests of Lindsay Wildlife Museum. Part 1, “First Encounter” tells how the author-photographer first became a part of the museum’s conservation efforts. Part 3, “Outreach” is an interview with the museum’s Natural History Curator, Marty Buxton.

Behind the Scenes
The word curator comes from the Latin word cura, which means care. Also known as a keeper, the museum curator needs to be an authority on the subject of his/her collection to not only assure the collection’s good condition, but to organize, and interpret it’s contents for the public. By designing meaningful ways for others to interact with the subject matter the curator’s expertise is manifest whether through exhibitions, catalogs or commissioned programs for use by educational institutions.

A curator of a natural history museum requires knowledge of an extremely broad topic: the entire natural world. The basement of the Lindsay Wildlife Museum is bustling trying to keep pace with all that requires. Specimens are identified, inventoried, and lent back out for educational purposes. Exhibits are researched, designed and prepared. Educational games and teaching programs are created. Mounts have to be prepared and repaired, bones cleaned of flesh by a team of carnivorous beetles. Destructive beetles and moths must be eradicated. Calls from the public are answered when bats invade a home, a marmot is mistaken for a beaver-out-of-water, or what appears to be a meteorite lands in someone’s yard. A visiting entomologist stops by to help with a difficult identification or an expert on Native American basket-weaving comes in to advise on an exhibit.

The large part of the items in many museum collections are stored behind the scenes. The Lindsay Museum’s collection contains about 17,000 items. Photographing something of that size may take more than what I have left of my lifetime, but it’s pleasurable work, communing one on one, one by one, with such compelling objects. Most of the collection is native to California, not only nests, but rocks, minerals, fossils, bones, fur, nuts, insects, animal mounts, (including a passenger pigeon), human artifacts, and of course books on all these subjects as well.

Birds nests in particular, frequently host parasites and other potentially destructive insect or arachnid visitors and need to be frozen, in order to kill such things before they can be mixed in with the other specimens. The sight of a fluttering moth would cause considerably more stir in the Lindsay basement than a poisonous spider, wasp or scorpion would cause. Shouts of “kill it, kill it” will ring out, although nobody you will find there the least bit afraid for their own safety. The nests are blissfully free of feces though, I am happy to say. The mother bird takes that away in her beak. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Please click to enlarge to observe the arresting intricacies of these nests.

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In spite of their drab coloring though, our local California flycatchers are cute, acrobatic and are voracious mosquito eaters. They can be quite delightful to watch as they sally out and back from a favorite tree branch hawking after their prey.

Right: Oriole —Unlike the old-world birds also known as orioles, the new world orioles are a member of the Icteridae, or blackbird family, so they are related to brewers blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds and other, tropical icterids like the fabulous oropendolas who’s remarkable vocalizations are among my favorites.

Like most icterids, they build remarkable hanging, basket-like nests, woven out of fine materials. The nest in the photograph has been opened up and you can see the round, bird-body-shaped interior. I have always wondered what you do with your long bird tail when entering a saclike nest of this sort. It must be hinged much more flexibly than I could have imagined.

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The Least Bell’s Vireo is an endangered species in Southern California, mostly due to a loss of riparian habitat and brood parasitism by the Brown-headed Cowbird. Cowbirds, a member of the blackbird family (Icteridae) mentioned below, who have the ungracious habit of laying their eggs in the nests of smaller bird species. They then go on their merry way, leaving the poor victim to care for their offspring who quickly takes the lion’s share of the food, thus starving the legitimate babies.

Right: Brewer’s Blackbird —Brewer’s blackbirds are common visitor at California supermarkets, my bird watching, East Coast cousin was nonetheless excited to see one. The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior explains that Brewer’s Blackbirds “have learned that car grilles are wonderful places from which to pick off nutritious insects. Within minutes of a car being parked, a Brewer’s Blackbird may begin to investigate the grille and clean it of anything edible” Many female icterids, including Brewer’s Blackbirds are known to sing, a behavior limited to males in many other species. While female Red-winged Blackbirds sing a very different song from the males, the song the female Brewer’s blackbirds sings, is similar to that of the male.

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They are cavity nesters, taking up in an old woodpecker-excavated or natural cavity and lining it with moss, fur, bark, leaves grass, feathers and snake skin. They form long-term pair bonds with the young of a previous brood occasionally helping at the nest. Their diet includes spiders, spider eggs and a few snails, although their primary food is acorns.

Right: Brown Towhee or California Towhee — Available materials, my neighbor’s Malamute’s fine, long hair has been a favorite source on my property. Towhees like to build their nests dense chaparral, particularly in poison oak, where they can feast on the pale, white berries. They also eat berries such as elderberry, coffeeberry, acorns, and garden produce like peas, plums, and apricots. May also eat spiders, millipedes, and snails. You won’t see them at feeders often unless you put out millet.

They forage mostly on the ground, and have an ungainly appearance in flight, using lots of wing power to travel short distances. They always look a little panicked to me, when I see them taking off of the ground. They are one of the most common birds in California although they don’t live much further East than the central part of the state.

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Left: Western Flycatcher —Unlike the Western Flycatcher nest in the top row, which is uses oak and birch leaves along with grass and feathers, the flycatcher who built this particular nest relied heavily on oak flowers. There is also a fair amount of shredded redwood bark present. This is probably the garden mulch I call gorilla hair. It was a huge with my garden birds. I found it in more than one of my nest boxes. The group of New World flycatchers or tyrannids, tend to favor sheltered nesting spots. The person who collected the nest describes observing “a bird flying up under the peak of a roof, carrying nesting material throughout the day. A high wind came up and the nest was found on the steps below.”

Right: Brewer’s Blackbird – Although the Brewer’s Blackbird nest here resembles those of Jays and Crows, the blackbirds are significantly smaller and They are just smaller than a robin, the males, a glossy black with a sheen of iridescent midnight blue, metallic green and purple when seen in full sun, accented by a striking, pale yellow eye. The females are a modest, brownish gray with a dark eye and slightly darker wings and tail. You can see them in large flocks sometimes, performing feats of synchronized flying or settling down noisily at night in a sheltering tree. Like pigeons, they can nest on cliffs, which is what may make them able to successfully colonize urban areas. As the paper straw sleeves testify, they make use of available local materials.

The Photograph and Text, An Inquiry
by Janet Sternburg

My fascination with words and images began when I was a teenager and encountered I Am A Lover, a book of photographs by Jerry Stoll with accompanying quotations selected from various sources by writer Evan S Connell, Jr.. For me, living a provincial life on the East Coast, I was enchanted by these black and white photographs of bohemian life in the San Francisco of the fifties — poets reading their work, jazz musicians in clubs, artists’ studios, street life, photographed not as documentation but as smoky evocation. And then to read, next to, above, under, on the opposite page, words that were sometimes humorous, sometimes lyrical, always apposite and oblique to the image —this was revelation. Together, the words and photographs side and side made a unity, a single poetic vision that spoke to the young person I was then. My spine unraveling copy, threads loosely hanging from what is left of the binding, remains in my ‘honored books’ shelf.

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In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it is photography that has created a revolutionary relationship between images and texts. One photographer who pioneered the “photo-text” hybrid was Wright Morris (1910-1998) whose career spanned the twentieth century. I imagine Morris making choices for his 1948 photo-text book, The Home Place. What is written and where does it sit in juxtaposition to the images? How will the photos relate to the story? What is literal, what is illustrative, what is metaphor? How can I connect the two in order to make, in effect, a third thing? What is the resulting synthesis?

These questions belong to anyone working this vein, but Morris’ solutions were uniquely his. “. . . each page of text would face a photograph. The relationship would sometimes be explicit — the object photographed would be mentioned — but in the main the photographs would provide the visible ambience for the story. . . ” In this novel of a man returning after many years to a farm in Nebraska, the photographs were to function as objects the protagonist found. “[they] would be cropped. These mutilations removed them, as a group, from the context of artworks, as ‘images,’ and presented them as ‘things’ and artifacts.”

Morris’ experiments did not win acceptance. “Most of the readers . . . objected to the distraction of the photographs, and those who liked the photographs largely ignored the text.” People asked him, as they ask of artists today, which is more important, the text or the photographic image? Is it necessary for a single instrument to dominate in order to considered serious? For many years, he came up against the demands of the marketplace and couldn’t sustain the practice of “Both” together. In a letter written in 1949, his publisher advised him, “People are uncomfortable with the ambidextrous.”

Now the twenty-first century sanctions, even demands, the merging—the linking of genres. A year or so ago, I was sitting around a dining table with an informal group of Harvard students, all of them in the arts. They went around the table identifying themselves and their interests, several mentioning multiple fields, combined areas of concentration. When I asked, “Do you feel any pressure to define yourself as one or the other?” One student answered, “That’s an old question. We don’t think that way.”

New technologies and a new mentality might well render my question obsolete but, for all that its implication may belong to another time, the fact of it doesn’t. It belongs to now, because the territory of combination is still largely unexplored, because it implicitly asks so many questions of us as artists, and because it lies ahead of us. Ambidexterity, once seen as problematic, is giving way to multidexterity.

I believe that for a very long time we have been tragically split in two, words and images separated so that when they appear together in art, the correlation seems odd, self-conscious, an inorganic and arbitrary decision. However, I’ve seen otherwise. In the 1970s, for five years I went to New York primary schools as a visiting artist with a program of my own devising; I brought in poems and experimental films that related to one another and used these unfamiliar images to spark children’s writing. The third-graders were a delight. They wrote poems and made drawings on the same page, animated by the same creative impulse without questioning whether one or the other took precedence. But in the fourth grade, the children shut down. They would express themselves in words only, without accompanying pictures. If they met with anything out of the ordinary, they said, “That’s weird.” I asked a full-time teacher why this might be happening, and she wasn’t surprised. “The fourth grade,” she answered, ‘is when we socialize them.”

Does being ‘socialized’ destroy what may be a natural tendency to link? Could it be that connecting words and images is part of our biological apparatus? Do the language centers of the brain travel at more-than-lightning speed to meet up with the visual cortex, and perhaps together they continue their journey to the frontal lobes, before parting into right side/left side? There’s work to be done.

What has the ambidextrous artist been seeking? What is the animating spark for this work? One, surely, is to explore the play of one’s mind; simply, to put things together and observe the outcome. Another is to overflow, to be so moved that there’s virtually no choice but to make conjunctions. Another is to summon contemplation, to empty out the mind, looking to see what fills it of its own bidding, at which point words and images enter as the gift of a meditative relationship. Another is the specific refusal of polarities, instead to open a space for greater porosity.

Wright Morris was clear about what he wanted from his photo-texts: “This recombining of the visual and the verbal, full of my own kind of unpeopled portraits, sought to salvage what I considered threatened, and to hold fast to what was vanishing.” To salvage is a radical act of resisting time’s depredations by rescuing something about to be discarded and instead holding it to the light—why wouldn’t one want to draw on all the means at hand? Photographs alone are not enough to tell Morris’ story; in The Home Place the narrator is necessary because it is he who is returning to the farm in Nebraska, it is his consciousness that endows the artifacts with meaning. Nor could words alone convey the visual formality that gives religious connotation to the boarded isolation of a barn, and historical resonance to a congregation of utensils on a crumpled newspaper.

In Robert Frank’s book Thank You, there’s a related impulse at work but cast through a different sensibility. How remarkable to learn that a personal and intimate Robert Frank saved postcards that were sent to him by friends and admirers over a forty year period. At the beginning of the book is an image of a postcard from 1960: “Dear Robert, That photo you sent me of a guy looking over his cow on the Platte River is to me a photo of a man recognizing his own mind’s essence, no matter what.” (n.b., The writer of that 1960 card signs himself Jean, ton copain or in english, Jean, your buddy. That buddy, we learn from the index in the back, is Jack Kerouac whose given first name was Jean-Louis.) Instantly the reader/viewer understands that the subject, here and throughout, is consciousness, presented in a light way, the photographic and textual equivalent of Fred Astaire. About Thank You, Martin Parr has written: “How can we prevent our journey from becoming so broad and ponderous? . . . I’m just hoping we can keep the spirit of the humble postcard in mind while looking at people, places and things.”

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While the book seems to be a small miracle of unselfconsciousness, the way that images and words are displayed on and across pages is paradoxically suggestive of informality and also deep and scrupulous intention. At the end of the book, Frank tell us: “I have saved these cards over many years / I was touched how many people wanted to tell me / their appreciation of what I was doing / without asking anything in return.  This small book is my way of saying Thank You” Sometimes salvage means to keep the grace notes, to acknowledge the connection between one’s friends and oneself by making a new composite, a dance of reciprocity.

Lately I have been making a physical and mental shelf of artists creating new forms of image and text. On it is Peter Kennard, whose Domesday Book is a photopoem (others have called it a visual fiction, or photo-essay)  that combines poetry, photomontage, photography and drawing to convey political power and human destruction. Kennard amplifies on his use of word and image, inventing as Morris does a necessary narrator: “a wandering figure who arrives at the Millenium Dome as it is still under construction. Caught in the flash of security lights, the narrator, in a fragmentary and hallucinatory fashion, flicks through images of the twentieth century. . . “ Next to a solarized photograph of the back of a man’s head as he is looking down curving tracks to those menacing and impersonal lights, Kennard places a poem:

Speaking out from the O,
Traces stain traces –
Traces endure.

Somewhere in the tension between haunting and vanishing lies a key to photography in general and specifically when it conflates with other arts, most especially with words. Even though Kennard’s work is very different from Wright Morris‘ and Robert Frank’s, a tension imbues them all. Salvage becomes more than just holding on: it is a push-and-pull between what an artist is able to glean from a complicated past, what he/she chooses to keep or to erase, and what new forms are required to express the shifts of presence and absence.

My shelf also includes books with very different kinds of impulses: work that uses photographs and words to give context, to provoke thinking, to expand the frame of understanding as Alan Sekula has done in his pioneering works, Geography Lesson: Canadian Notes, and Fish Story, ‘sitting’ side by side with Sophie Calle’s fictions; John Berger’s Another Way of Telling; the Gerlovins’ photoglyphs; Steven Roden’s book i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces in which he sequences vintage photographs along with cds of found recordings and spoken passages about sound; Joakim Eneroth’s Short Stories of the Transparent Mind, in which he is searching for the point when “the story line fades away. . .”

Please write and tell me what else you think belongs on that shelf. Meanwhile I’ll be thinking about a title that slips out from under the wire of separation, and summoning my own resources of mind, heart, and contemplation.

Janet Sternburg is the author of Optic Nerve, Photopoems, Red Hen Press, 2005 and Phantom Limb, University of Nebraska Press, 2002. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

This is the first installment of a three part series on the Nests of Lindsay Wildlife Museum. Part 2, “Behind the Scenes” will take a look at how the nests are collected, categorized, conserved and studied before display. Part 3, “Outreach” is an interview with the museum’s Natural History Curator, Marty Buxton.

First Encounter
I am not a birder, too much looking through binoculars and neck strain, but that doesn’t keep me from being fascinated by their lives. I first came to the Lindsay Wildlife Museum and Hospital with a small finch, a pine siskin, that had flown into my house, having been attacked by my cats. After delivering my bird, who sadly did not make it, I walked around the museum, fascinated by the live collection of Raptors and Owls. These are birds that could not be released because of some kind of permanent damage they have experienced that prevents them from being able to survive in the wild. Most birds I see are either far away or pass too quickly to allow any kind of detailed observation. It still amazes me to see them in such close proximity, although it is sad to see such fabulous creatures unable to fly free as they were intended to by nature.

I was working on my “Exquisite Corpse” series at the time and always looking for subjects that were in good enough condition to meet my standards of exquisiteness. I thought that volunteering at the hospital would perhaps not only be an interesting and useful way to spend time, but also could perhaps avail me of a steady supply of less fortunate patients. After thorough training and indoctrination, that spanned over months of weekends and ended in an exam, I began volunteering as what pretty much amounted to an “orderly” in the hospital. People that commit large chunks of their time over years, can acquire skills that rival those of a veterinarian, but I decided to limit myself to one shift a week at the hospital and one a week doing taxidermy for the non-live collection that is used to help educate the public, figuring that what didn’t survive the hospital would eventually end up there, in the basement.

Not only does the museum house a live and a stuffed animal collection but the ~17,000 items in their collection include insects, rocks, minerals, bones, nests and fossils as well. When Marty Buxton, who is in charge of the collection offered me the opportunity to photograph it in its entirety, I jumped at the chance to commune with so cool and interesting things, up close and personal, to be able to touch them, turn them around, play with them and learn from them. I started with the bird nests.

Please click to enlarge to observe the arresting intricacies of these nests.

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Left:  Steller’s Jay — Is a member of the Corvid family, which includes Crows and Ravens as well as Jays. Jays tend to be colorful, ranging from blues to grays and greens and they hop on the ground unlike the crows, who walk. (Hopping is thought to be more energy efficient for certain kinds of leg anatomy. Many songbirds hop rather than walk.)

Jays are among the most recent line of birds to evolve and one of the most intelligent. They are great mimics and their problem solving skills have been the subject of many an experiment in bird intelligence. The ones who live around my house seem to delight in imitating the food cries of the Red-tailed Hawks and watch the small birds go scurrying for cover. They run in a noisy rowdy gang are also notorious nest robbers eating not only the eggs but the nestlings of smaller, song birds.  They are my first warning that a predator, be it fox or raptor, is in the area.

Right:  Orange-crowned Warbler — Warblers are a large family of little migratory birds that are one of the main attractions for North American birders in the spring and fall. Peterson’s Western Birds lists about 50 different species describing them as “active, brightly colored birdlets, usually smaller than sparrows, with thin, needle-pointed bills. Most warblers sport some yellow although the Orange-crowned Warbler is one of the duller species, described by Peterson as “dingy” and their orange crown as “seldom seen.” Their summer and winter ranges overlap in California, which is the southern part of their breeding range, which reaches all the way to northern Alaska.

They feed not on seeds but by gleaning insects and eating fruit, nectar and tree sap and are known to feed at red-naped sapsucker wells. They are of scientific interest because they are the only host for a species of blood-feeding lice who’s reproduction is triggered by the bird’s own reproductive hormones. This “synchronized breeding by parasite and host, enables the lice to spread to other hosts especially the nestlings.

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Left:  Wren — Known as “Troglodytes” or “cave dwellers,” wrens are cavity nesters. Because of a scarcity of “snags,” people tend to cut down the dead trees that many birds need for nesting, House wrens and Berwick’s Wrens often nest around humans, utilizing homes or outbuildings or provided nest boxes. My rotted out parking deck provided just such a hole for my Berwick’s Wren. I waited until the babies had fledged before starting the necessary repair and when it was finished, I placed a wren box as close to the original location as possible.

Every year since, my wrens have been back, using the box, now that their original hole is gone. They are tiny, brown and have a downwardly curved beak and a upwardly sticking tail. I generally get the impression that they are cursing me by their buzz-like squawk, which seems to defy their small size.

Right: Oriole — Orioles are gorgeous, ranging from yellow to a fantastic yellowy-orange, highlighted accentuated by deep blacks. They are also master nest weavers. Unlike most birds, whose nests sit, those of most American Orioles hang. “Attached at rim or secured at sides to a drooping branch; woven of plant fiber strips, lined with fine grass, plant down, hair” according to “The Birder’s Handbook” which I rely on for all kinds of behavioral information, including birds diets, nests, incubation and fledging schedules. It’s a great resource.

They build the nests, carrying one fiber at a time, hanging onto the nest twig with their feet, winding the fibers into complicated knots hanging from 3 or 4 places that will become the edges of the nest. Clinging to the tangles they have created, they proceed to weave a “skeleton” that gets thicker and thicker until they can get inside and wiggle around, shaping the nest to the size and shape of their breasts.

Lindsay, has a “tame,” un-releasable Bullock’s Oriole that they use for their “Animal Encounters” program but it is flighty in it’s cage and much harder to get to know than say, the Acorn Woodpecker, who clowns around his cage, hanging upside-down, flashing his white iris and calling out to people.

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Left:  Red-winged Blackbird — Distant relatives of Orioles, blackbirds tend to also sport brilliant colors although red, yellow and black rather than orange, are their most common color combinations. Red-winged Blackbirds are common in swampy areas where they straddle their nests, often above water in reeds, cattails, rushes and sedges bound to the stems with milkweed fiber.

Their epaulettes or “badges” are not always visible and are believed to function as territorial warnings, primarily to members of their own species. Experiments where birds’ red badges were dyed black resulted in an increased difficulty in defending their territories. And they are territorial. I remember once, while walking through Central Park, hearing a loud squawking and looking up to see a Black-crowned Night Heron, fleeing the reeds with a Red-Winged Blackbird firmly attached to his rump.

Right:  Robin — Robins are everywhere. Although they are not seed eaters, they eat fruit in addition to insects and so are able to overwinter in northern climates. They can be seen feasting on berries in the autumn, my Pyracantha, for instance, although learned at Lindsay that the story that they “get drunk” on the berries is apocryphal. This was after I committed my erroneous belief to paper, by the way. This is, perhaps a good opportunity to correct that misconception that I, myself, am guilty of disseminating.  Robins are in the Thrush family, hence their melodic song. The Thrushes arguably sing some of the most beautiful songs of any bird. They use the syrinx, which unlike our larynx, is located where the trachea forks into the lungs, is capable of producing more than one note at a time, allowing thrushes to harmonize with themselves.

Robins glue their nests together with mud that they carry in their beaks and their eggs are a beautiful, greenish “Robin’s egg blue.” Methods for bonding the structural parts of the nests together vary considerably among species, saliva being another useful binder. Saliva from the swift nests is the prized ingredient of bird’s nest soup.

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Left:  Western Flycatcher —A member of the Empidonax group of Flycatchers or “empids” and perhaps actually two species, Western Flycatchers are medium-small birds, mostly grey with a crown on their head and hard to tell apart.

They feed exclusively on insects. Their hunting style, known as “hawking” is to sit on a branch and fly out when they see an insect which they almost always seem to easily catch. They are also known to fly into swarms of mosquitoes, making them a helpful ally.

Their nests are found in a wide variety of situations including stream banks, roots of upturned trees, eaves, cliff ledges and cavities in small trees. There nests are build from moss, lichen, rootlets, grass and leaves and lined with shredded bark, hair and feathers.

Right:  Brown Towhee —Brown Towhees are common in California. Not as striking as their black, white and rust colored Rufus-sided or Spotted Towhee. Both species spend a lot of time on the ground, kicking up leaves in search of seeds, fruit and the occasional insect.

Their metallic “chink” can sound downright neurotic when they are anxiously raising their nestlings. They have reason to worry though, as the Steller’s and Scrub Jays are always eager to rob their nests. I learned this the hard way after finding a Towhee’s nest in a Bay tree and clipping one of the branches that was concealing it. The parents were very upset with me and I with myself when the nestlings quickly disappeared, victims of the Jays and my ignorance.

My favorite lakeside conversation is the one that I indulge in with myself. The distances I have traveled on foot pale in comparison to the distances I have traveled inside my mind. Not a meditation, more of a circumspect rumination. Here at the reservoir I surf the vortex of mind matter that rents space in my brain. My mind matter often takes on a density, behaving more like an event horizon than the lithe notes of a Mozart score. But then, there is the walking. And as vigilant as is my predisposition to codify, to conserve, the walking let’s you know that where you started is not where you ended. Indeed contrary to what you think has just gone down, the reality is that it all has metamorphosed regardless. So move along!

Like the rest of the billion iPhone users I think of it as an extra limb. And with the advent of the many sophisticated photo apps I am now all consumed with my device, much like Solvieg Dommartin obsesses with her dream recording device, in Wim Wenders Until the End of the World. These photographs of the mostly bucolic Lake Hollywood Reservoir seem to have taken a cinematic turn, one more comfortable in the world of Lars Von Trier than say that of Judd Apatow. Actually their provenance most closely resembles how I imagine David Lynch’s backyard plays out. — Nancy Cantwell

Lake Hollywood Reservoir
Construction began in 1923 and the lake was first filled in 1925

Lake Hollywood is a man-made reservoir built in 1924 to hold more than 2.5 billion gallons of water. The reservoir is part of the Owens River Aqueduct system. The Mulholland Dam was built by engineer William Mulholland who designed and built the system of aqueducts and reservoir providing Los Angeles with most of its drinking water.

The dam is located in Weid Canyon, East of Cahuenga Pass. The dam is 210 feet high, 933 feet long and 16 feet wide at the crest with a maximum depth of 183 feet. 172,000 cubic yards of concrete were used for the construction of the Mulholland Dam.

© Nancy Cantwell

Time is deceptive. It is always hiding something. The present is so fleeting that only the past and future may be comprehended. The nano-second of immediate event perception, the “specious present” is understood only in reflection. Every moment of consciousness is spent processing what has just past while constantly anticipating the future. The brain must contextualize each thought to make sense of the world, time-traveling relentlessly in an information-saturated world that threatens to overwhelm  the ceaseless internal dialogue that defines us to ourselves.

“Time isn’t like the other senses. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a small, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless of course, you have synsthesia…) ‘Brain-time’, is intrinsically subjective”, states Houston Neuroscientist David Eagleman, in the April 25^th issue of the New Yorker, “The Possibilian” by Burkhard Bilger.

Barnet Bar-Gas, exact expiration date unknown,  c. 1920’s, processed 2007

Pianists scan the score they are playing approximately two bars ahead, anticipating the requirements of the measures to come, while their hands play what their eyes have already read and their ears listen to what has just been played; all the while reflecting on what was just heard and adjusting their fingering to create the next musical passage; concurrently reading the future while interpreting the past.

In conversation, we must gather all the words of each sentence into our short-term memory in order to make sense of what we are hearing. We can infer (from the history of personal experience) content as we listen, but any unexpected deviation will re-order what has just past so that the intended meaning is passed from the speaker to the listener. Additionally, in order to avoid aural overload and to absorb what is relevant, much of what we hear is filtered out as ‘white noise’. Hence each person’s recall of the conversation is purely subjective, the memory filters allowing only what is necessary for comprehension.

Making sense of the visual world is no less daunting. From the moment we open our eyes, we are assailed by imagery. The ‘visual clutter’ of our everyday world is reduced by our ability to zoom in, focus and contextualize the chaos which bombards our eyes, so that we can get the information that is pertinent to our immediate needs.

Photography is the one media that overtly attempts to arrest time. The fastest shutter speed currently available on a Digital SLR is 1/16000. But photographers often try to blur time with long exposures such as Mark Klett’s night-sky images or the images of Hiroshi Sugimoto of open-shutter exposures of movie theater screens or his candle-light pieces, In the Praise of Shadow.

At the opposite pole are the recognizable “decisive moments” of Cartier-Bresson, or the fictional instants of diCorcia’s elaborate set-ups or Tina Barney’s familial scenes caught in mid-motion or Larry Fink’s subjects trapped unawares in his flash or the “fragmented narratives” of Todd Hido. These are all examples of slices of life, stopped in time, so that the viewer can reflect and evaluate their subjective experiences with the subjective view of the photographer.

The majority of photographs made in the world fall into the above two categories: stop time or stretch time. When one visits the international art fairs such as Paris Photo or AIPAD in New York, one wanders from booth to booth, looking at isolated slices of time, delineated by their square or rectangular formats and bound by frames. The frames serve to lessen the phenomena identified as “visual crowding”. The predicament with displays in art fairs, and museums for that matter, is how to prevent visual over-load. One goes to a museum and after looking at twenty or so pieces, the work begins to blur, particularly if the exhibition is ‘themed’. The differences between the works lessen, and their similarities begin to merge. Like the invisible gorilla experiments, there is only so much the brain can process at a time and so begins to delegate pictures into a background of visual white noise.

At the most recent AIPAD exhibition, the work of Alison Rossiter resisted all unintentional attempts to be filtered out. At the fair, Rossiter was represented by two galleries: Stephen Bulger, Toronto, and Yossi Milo, New York. Her work was not just visually different (it was), it was arresting on account of its escape from the two basic time categories of stopping or alternately blurring time. Her work carries and aura of stillness, yet the images are all about the effect of time, so the contradiction is riveting.

Left: Origin of Species – Charles Darwin, 2004
Right: Principia – Isaac Newton, 2004

Rossiter, a photographer since the 1970s, first began her experiments with camera-less images in 1984 however, in 1997 she began to seriously concentrate on the photogram with her book series. The series was inspired in part by Louise Lawler, the conceptualist artist who would show films, with only the soundtrack, and a black screen, or the opposite; make photograms of vinyl records with the name of the album as the title. Each album-photogram looked virtually the same; however the implied content of the object was both dense and diverse. Rossiter, in her book-photograms stands the book on the photographic paper and exposes it to light, capturing the shadow as light. She then assigns the title of the book to the image: Principia – Issac Newton or The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin. These two books written in 1687 and 1859 respectively, radically altered the world view. In Rossiter’s photograms, they are rendered silent (like Lawler’s record albums), yet we know from the titles, the profound influence upon mankind that they hold. The images form an interesting dichotomy: illumination defined by shadow; elucidation defined by obscurity. But Rossiter has admitted, “It’s hard to be clever” when coming up with subject matter for photograms, a difficulty Adam Fuss seems to have mastered.

Eadweard Muybridge, Ruth Bucking, 2003

Extending her ‘straight’ photograms, she began sketching with light wands, taking inspiration from her interest in horses. By using masked pen-lights she began her Dark-Horse and Light-Horse series. The images are made by “drawing” on the paper with various masked pen lights. She learned that if she held the light very close to the paper, she could make relatively precise lines. When she pulled the pen light away from the paper, the line would form a halo of varying shades of grey. The resulting images are reminiscent of the Paleolithic cave drawings at Lascaux and titled: Dark Horse, Buck, 2006 or Work Horse at Rest, 2004.

In 2003, Rossiter volunteered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation, under Nora Kennedy. Kennedy, along with Peter Mustardo, founded The Better Image, in Milford, New Jersey. (Rossiter now works at The Better Image as a conservation assistant.)  Her interest in photographic conservation served as the gateway to her heightened appreciation of photographic materials, particularly expired black and white papers and their instability as a unpredictable yet pliable medium to work with.

In 2007, looking on the internet for 5×7 film for a camera she had, she purchased the contents of a darkroom on EBay. The seller included an unopened box of paper which Rossiter tested for fogging and was surprised by what came up in the developer tray. The paper had degraded from the effects of time and the environment, and those effects, when developed, appeared as a Mark Tobey rubbing, or a Cy Twombly-ist like canvas. Most delightful was her discovery of a photographer’s finger print who had touched the Kodak Velox F3 that carried an expiration date of May 1941. Inspired by the latent images, she began purchasing expired, fiber-based paper whenever she could find it and now owns a stock of about 1000 papers. The oldest is Eastman Kodak Dekko which expired January 1, 1900.

Kodak Velox F3, expiration May 1941, processed 2007

These camera-less images from her ‘Lament’ series, aptly named for the obsolescence of photographic materials, are unique, not only in the world of art-photography but as one-of-a-kind objects as well. Rossiter coaxes the papers to reveal their latent degradation which results is an array of subtle colors; from flushes of purple-grays to rainbow edged patinas. “I hadn’t seen that tonality in my negatives.” she remarked in wonderment. If she finds that the paper has been completely exposed to light, (developing out black) she selectively dips edges in the developer or pools the developer to make solid abstract forms. The density of the high-content silver papers produces inky blacks that appear depthless and recall the abstract expressionists Robert Motherwell and Franz Klein. An expansion of Rossiter’s Lament Series is her photograms of expired sheet film. Laying a sheet of film on photo paper, she exposes the paper, and develops it. These ‘found’ rectangles, replete with their notch codes, tend to float off the paper, lending a two dimensional effect to the piece, evoking Rothko’s floating squares, sans color.

Nepera Carbon Velox, expiration May 1906, processed 2008

The multi-layered aspect of Rossiter’s work is mesmeric. First, there is the time-element: the work is a throw-back to Herschel and Talbot’s early experiments in light-sensitive material. There is the excitement of discovery of alteration, like an archeologist uncovering an extinct technology; highlighted in Rossiter’s titles: Defender, Carbon Argo, expiration August 1908, processed 2009, or Barnet Bar-Gas, exact expiration date unknown, c. 1920’s, processed 2007.

The images reveal the beauty of science and technology, tied inextricably to the relentless progression of nature working in the dark: light-sensitive materials responding to an environment outside of what they were intended for. The images refuse to be defined by what we identify as a ‘photograph’; the capture of an instant; yet they mark the inexorable march of time. Her photograms of books capture antique tomes that continue to influence the contemporary world, while her light-drawings of horses are ancient cave drawings produced in the present.

Left: Fuiji Gaslight, expiration c. 1920’s, processed 2009
Right: Kodak Velvet Velox, expiration 1918, porocessed 2009

From the aesthetic point of view, one is reminded of the abstract expressionists. As Rothko once said, “We favor the simple expression of the complex thought…”  The effect of Rossiter’s work is the same as if one was wandering around the classical galleries of the MET and then walked into the modernist gallery. The effect is immediate. We must come up with a different set of viewing criteria as the old ones are no longer applicable.

Ultimately, Rossiter’s work combines both Eagleman’s theory of “brain-time” with “Newtonian time”, creating works whose silence stands out from the white noise of narrative photography. As Rothko once said of his own paintings, “their silence is so accurate”.

Expanded ‘Spotlight’ from B&W COLOR – Ross Periodicals: Issue 84