Michael Lesy
Author
of
Wisconsin Death Trip talks with Robert Birnbaum
Michael Lesy was raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio and attended Columbia
University, The University of Wisconsin and Rutgers University.
He studied with William Appleman Williams at Wisconsin, Warren Sussman
at Rutgers and was befriended by Walker Evans at Yale. Lesy is the
author of the classic Wisconsin Death Trip, Dreamland, Real
Life, The Forbidden Zone, Bearing Witness, Time Frames, Rescues,
Visible Light and most recently, Long Time Coming.
He is currently a professor of literary journalism at Hampshire
College in western Massachusetts.
Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America,
1935-1943 draws on the Farm Security Administration's Documentary
Photography Project archive of more than 150,000 images, created
by forty photographers including among others Dorthea Lange, Walker
Evans, Ben Shan and Arthur Rothstein. Michael Lesy assembled four-hundred
photographs (some not previously published) continuing his own revealing
documentation of American history.
Robert Birnbaum: Is it possible for you to recreate
what you were thinking when you wrote your dissertation? Had you
intended publishing Wisconsin Death Trip as a book?
Michael Lesy: Sure. I wanted to make it a movie.
But it cost too much to produce. So it was just a poor man's way
of making a movie in book form. But, I came on the photographs—I
was in Wisconsin, I was in Madison. I had gone to Columbia and I
missed the riots, barely. And so I was sitting reading the newspaper,
the NY Times everyday, on the lake (Mendota) thinking, "What
a boring place." And I had a book that the Museum of Modern
Art had published called The Photographer's Eye by John
Szarkowski, and it had one picture in it from the Wisconsin Historical
Society. I was really quite bored. I was there ostensibly to get
a Ph.D. in European History. So I went in just to look at the picture
and I met the guy who ran this photo collection. His name was Paul
Vanderbilt and he was a twinkling magician. He had lots
of pictures, and no one ever came in to see him.
RB: These were the 3000 of the 30,000 images that remained intact.
ML: Yeah that's right. So I stayed and looked, and the first time
I used the photographs I knew, this was thirty years ago when book
publishing of photographs was just beginning. So you knew some things.
You had seen some things, but mostly it was anecdotal. People talked
to people. That's how the history of photography was spread around.
People told each other stories. And I had seen the pictures by August
Sander, who decided he would photograph the whole human race. I
immediately understood what Paul was showing me was the equivalent
of the Sander stuff except it was in a small town. A small-town
photographer but the same sort of faces that Sander did of the peasants.
I think the German word is Die Bauer, the peasants, the
country people. So the first time I ever used the images, I made
slides for an underground film series that I was part of and showed
the slides while we were changing reels…it was still film,
so we had to change the reels.
RB: Was your idea of doing movies from these materials in the way
that Ken Burns does movies now?
ML: I suppose. Before Ken Burns. At that time, the hottest piece
of film equipment, which I believe, is now very common, was some
sort of fluid-mounted optics that could pan across the face of a
cigarette box as if it was panning across Mt Rushmore. I eventually
got to the people who had that stuff. They were making things for
the Smothers Brothers' TV show. They'd splice together a one minute
long, quick "Moment in American History"— as a kind of
filler. Made of stills. These guys, interestingly enough, were a
firm of guys who worked for Woody Allen. They edited for him and
they'd make the "Movie about the Movie" for him, "Behind
the scenes of the new Woody Allen…" They were Dutch Jews.
Originally diamond cutters, 'Schnitters'. I met these guys through
a student of mine at Rutgers. That kid was an apprentice film editor.
I pitched my idea to his bosses. By then I had the photographs.
This was long after I had met Paul [Vanderbilt] and he had shown
me the stuff. These editing guys were in New York. By then I was
at Rutgers. I pitched the movie to them—and they turned me
on to this guy, an African American, who actually made those thirty-second,
jet propelled, TV versions of American history. But it just cost
too much money. I didn't have any, and I didn't have any way to
raise the capital. I had the images, and I had the impulse. I also
had a little bit of experience making tiny little 8 mm and 16 mm
movies with my buddies and then editing them. So, I did the best
I could: I made a book that had film sequences in it.
RB: It was published at Pantheon. Was it a big thing to get it
published?
ML: Andre [Schiffrin] was there. One of the film editors had kids
who played with Andre's kids. The film editor handed Andre my movie
proposal. Plus: Andre knew Warren Sussman and Warren knew Andre.
Warren was the guy I was studying with at Rutgers. Warren knew everything;
Warren was like a walking library. Also, the agent I ended up with
was Gerard McCauley. McCauley was William Appleman William's agent.
Williams was one of the great, Revisionist American Foreign Policy
historians. He taught at Wisconsin. I'd ended up in William's seminar
there. Williams introduced me to McCauley. McCauley took me on as
a client, thinking I was crazy …but, so what. That was the
era. Andre took me on, in part, because I said the Death Trip
would be the first of seven books. I'm sure Andre [also] thought
I was nuts.
RB: In Warren Sussman's introduction he refers to some "methodological
confusions," which I think does foreshadow the uniqueness of
this book…
ML: Warren was a very smart man.
RB: He also makes mention of Hippolyte Taine. He referred to Taine
as a historian, but the history he is quoted from is his History
of English Literature. Wouldn't that, today, be the turf of
English literature, not history?
ML: Yeah, sure. There were real confusions of boundaries during
that moment in the writing of history. There were one or two 18th
century guys that everyone admired. Guys like [Giambattista] Vico.
Vico inspired Joyce. People would talk about Giodorno Bruno. They'd
talk about crackpots like Immanuel Velikovsky—or comparative mythologists
like Mircea Eliade. Geniuses like Erich Auerbach and Siegfried Giedion.
People would talk about the kabbalist, Abram Abullafia. People would
talk about Jung, or [Erik] Erikson, or [Robert] Lifton. People actually
thought there was this new discipline called "Psycho History."
I think people were trying to redefine what historical data were—how
to pay homage to reality in ways that were not entirely linear.
RB: The first book you published which was to be the first of series
was Wisconsin Death Trip. Looking back at it now, what
is your sense of it besides the obvious, that it was the beginning?
The idea when you
make art is to spawn other art. What you want is to turn other
people on so they make their own stuff. |
ML: In terms of the topography, it's obviously
dated. The collages were inspired by Max Ernst and by Heartfield
— all the surrealist stuff going on in France and all the
political stuff going on Germany after the First War. To the extent
that the collages intervene in the book: At that time they were
meant to be sledgehammers. Because everyone felt at the time that
the potential reader of any visual book was jaded and numbed by
trash. Whatever was published then—Life and Look
had just gone under—but it was a world of visual garbage.
So, I tried to create sequences that would be interrupted by rather
heavy-handed interventions to say, "Think and look again."
I'm not sure if I would do that again. I also think, in general,
the book failed because people are just, in spite of everything,
left-brained. They read text—and the text overwhelms what
they see. The text had one message—but it was meant to be
combined with the messages of the images. The right-brained stuff.
The right-brained stuff in the book is a very, very complex combination
of things. Of course, there are funereal images, but there are images
of…
RB: Horse genitalia.
ML: The stallion and the young man showing his muscles. Families
and youth and marriage and happiness. And the intent was to hope
that one could create through this complex layering of information
or collage making a kind of soup bowl in which information would
be mixed inside the brain of the viewer, and it would all be combined
and sucked on and enjoyed. But it didn't work that way. So people
remembered the horror stories. And only remembered the horror stories
in their reading. And the intent was something different. The text
was to be a soundtrack. The ideal image was the Walker Evans/James
Agee book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In that regard,
the Wisconsin Death Trip was a complete failure.
RB: There was an HBO film made a few years ago.
ML: Yes, it just was released on DVD [October 2003]. James Marsh
made it.
RB: I haven't seen it. What is it like?
ML: James is an artist. He did fine.
RB: Is it what you would have done?
ML: No, but that doesn't matter. The idea when you make art is
to spawn other art. What you want is to turn other people on so
they make their own stuff. And that's what James made. James and
I talked a lot. And I think we are still friends. I like him very
much, and I think he likes me. He made what he made. I think he
is an artist.
RB: Why would HBO even do such a project?
ML: I don't know. People would come at me for years wanting to
make a movie of it. And they were all fools or hapless or inept.
And James had one of the things that is a really good thing in an
art maker. He had stamina. He had persistence. It was a joint BBC
and Cinemax project. It was a work based upon his own willfulness.
RB: I asked your contemporaneous view of what you published in
1973 and what you think of it now because in 1973 when I saw this
book I didn't understand it. It didn't have the impact that it had
when I saw it later and when I saw it recently.
ML: That means for whatever reason, the book has its own power.
Beyond whatever I intended or made. I made it thinking to myself,
"Well, boy I made that just in the nick of time. There are
bound to be a dozen other people doing this stuff. A month from
now or two months from now." I remember I was hired after the
book came out, to teach for a year in American Studies at Yale.
And I couldn't wait to get out of there because I thought that there
was a whole bunch of competitors breathing down my neck and they
were about to scoop me on the next one. So I couldn't wait to do
the next one. My wife never forgave me. I could have stayed at Yale
for the allotted seven years and had my passport stamped properly.
But I thought that it was as obvious as you are sitting here today.
It was just clear. It was just, nothing to it as far as I thought,
at the time. So the fact that you can go back to the work of art
and go back to the work of art and go back to the work of art means
that I was doing something better than I ever imagined. [pause]
I take full responsibility for the book, but at the same time I
would never have imagined that thirty years on it would still be
around.
RB: Where is it shelved in the bookstores?
ML: They could never figure that out. They never can. I come on
books that I make all the time and there is no telling where they
are going to stick them. It's hard.
RB: In Mark Feeney's piece on you in the Globe you said
you were surprised that people weren't making books like this.
ML: I am. But then again, you get a guy like [Ken] Burns. Burns
is a teacher. He has a proper liberal agenda that he wants to teach.
So —Burns is close to what I do. But, I have different methods
and agendas. I am a teacher—but I think I'm a much more subversive
teacher [than he is]. I much more inclined—much more interested
in creating wonder and fear and amazement and confusion than to
preach, "We should treat people justly." Burns is a much
nicer man than I am.
RB: How do you know? How do you know what you evoke?
ML: I don't really know. But that's my intention. I hear from people.
You said, "Shit, I thought the Death Trip was one
thing, then I thought it was something else and now I think it's
something else." That's the idea. If you are good at what you
make, you create something that's a puzzle that can be worked but
that always leaves the person unsatisfied, leaves him wanting to
work it again, to solve it better.
RB: Of your books there are only Dreamland and Long
Time Coming that are in the mode of Wisconsin Death Trip.
 ML:
There's Real Life, there's Time Frames.
RB: I don't know Time Frames.
ML: You ought to take a look. It's about snapshots and their meaning
as wakeful dreams. Visible Light was different…
RB: That was about four photographers.
ML: Yeah, it was biographies, but it tried to move back and forth
between who they were and what they made. The inevitable enterprise…
RB: And then you did Rescues, that book about heroes,
and that other one, called The Forbidden Zone.
ML: The Forbidden Zone was just prose; it's about people
who deal with death professionally.
RB: That makes me think of Thomas Lynch who is an undertaker and
writer…So here we are about thirty years later and you have
recently published Long Time Coming, a book of Farm Security
Administration images from the government's Great Depression documentary
photography
project. You could have done this book anytime. Why did you
do this book now?
ML: I had an agenda. I wanted to take bites out of American history
in a steady way. I wanted to talk about the United States, decade
by decade by decade. I got to the Thirties, through Time Frames,
which is about people who lived through the Depression and the Second
World War and, in fact, into the Korean War through their family
snapshots and through their own recollections. I was working my
way towards a kind of decade-by-decade "photography of history."
But the publishing climate affects such plans. Photo histories cost
lots of money to make. And it's not like they sell tens of thousands
of copies right off the bat. To be the 'author' and the 'editor'
of such books—it's almost like working for nothing. Because
publishers never pay me—or anyone else—enough to do the work required.
So it’s like, “Would someone publish such a book? And
if they would publish it, would they pay me enough for my time?”
The answer is, "Barely." "Would they pay for the
prints to be made?" Again, "Barely." To publish a
book like Long Time Coming is a gradual, difficult, incremental
project.
RB: Aren't you assured of a certain part of the print run being
purchased by libraries?
ML: If you look at library sales of these books it's modest.
RB: So it has a print run of four or five thousand…
ML: Oh sure, the print run for Long Time Coming was a
little over five thousand. It sold out the first print run. They
did a second printing. It’s a sixty five-dollar book. I can
tell you exactly how many libraries have bought this thing so far—and
it's not five thousand libraries. If you get into a decent library,
you can consult on line databases. One database is something called
WorldCat— short for "World Catalogue." You can
type in any author's name and WorldCat can tell you how
many libraries own which copies of a particular book.
RB: I had commented
on this book and Bronzeville on Identitytheory and
it is clear to me that such books require an enlightened publisher.
ML: It's weird. It's very weird. I think this book will make money
over time. Because it's wonderfully well made and it will be around
and it has some legs to it. It's very, very strange about photographic
archives. People—really, really, smart, subtle people—have
been working as photographic archivists for generations now, keeping
these archives, extending them. Making them more and more accessible.
Acquiring other collections. All waiting for people to show up to
say, "Damn, here it is!" And all they get is people looking
for Woodrow Wilson after he had a stroke. So the treasure trove
of this stuff has been amassed and is being amassed, waiting.
RB: In short order there was Long Time Coming and then
Bronzeville. Have there been many books drawing on the
FSA images?
ML: Of course, let your fingers do your walking for you. There
is a wonderful book that one of the archivists did with two scholars—
one was Alan Trachtenberg, called Documenting
America [1989]. It's about the whole collection. It's a
marvelous book. It's a book of photos and essays and chapters about
each of the photographers and the work that they did. And it's a
scholarly source book.
RB: I would expect there to be academic books, I was thinking more
mainstream publishers.
ML: New Press did Bronzeville. That's funny money, foundation
money. Andre [Shiffrin] tries to run that as if it were a university
press without it being a university press.
RB: When has the climate for publishing these kinds of book been
better? Has it ever been really good?
ML: When the Death Trip was first published. That would
be a mark of a really good publishing climate. Because that book—we
realized that it would have some hardcover sales but that the market
we wanted to go for was a paperback market. The paperback penetrated
markets nationally and internationally, and that's the indication
of a kind of high water mark for visual books. It probably held
for seven years that market. For whatever reason, in the case of
Wisconsin Death Trip, it had its own life and momentum.
So it became wired into a small of group of intellectuals and artists
and perpetuated itself.
RB: It's referred to as a "counter-cultural classic."
In terms of your methodology, I share your puzzlement about why
there aren't more books like this, but I wonder what happened to
the great enthusiasm for the wonders of hypertextuality as represented
by CD-ROMS. For your kind of method it would be…
ML: Great, because it would be hypertext. But you cannot beat a
book.
RB: No argument from me.
ML: You can't. Whether you are devoted to it or I am devoted to
it, the fact is—all the technology is loaded on the front
end so that the user end is simple—no cords, no wires. It's
all been done before you bought it. And you don’t have to
do anything except carry the thing with you. You don't need technology
to use the book.
RB: If your ambitions are to present a certain array of historical
cultural information and images then while I am reading this text
I might want to click and get a music sample and so on…
I much more inclined--much
more interested in creating wonder and fear and amazement
and confusion than to preach, "We should treat people
justly." |
ML: Right, right, absolutely. It's true in terms
of the density of information and velocity of information and the
quickness of retrieval and free association, which is what you want
in a book—the ability to free associate and not be lost. That's
a problem even with hypertext. If you can free associate, you still
can get lost. And with a book it's not perfect, but for whatever
reasons, which are not your concern or mine, CDs didn't work. Yet.
Something will happen, but it isn't that.
RB: You are a professor of literary journalism.
ML: It's a pretentious word.
RB: When I hear that phrase coming from fiction writers they look
upon it as a discredited pursuit. Why is it pretentious and why
is that your title?
ML: I don't know. That's what they bought. When they hired me to
do it I didn't even know what it was. But on the strength of two
books I had made, Rescues, the one about heroes, and the
book about the professionals that deal with death, they said, "You
are a literary journalist." But it's the New Yorker,
it's narrative non-fiction. That's all it is. It's storytelling.
Factual.
RB: It's minimally competent narrative non-fiction.
ML: Yeah.
RB: What happens on the first day of class? What are the course
titles?
ML: I teach a course in Biography and I teach a course in Autobiography
and, of course, if you teach people who are in their twenties a
course in autobiography, it's like catnip.
RB: [laughs heartily] Okay.
ML: [chuckles] What I tell them is, "Look, I really do not
care about you. What I care about is the worlds that you bear witness
to. You are nothing more than a dog with a video camera strapped
on its back. As you walk the streets looking for a place to mate
or piss or eat, the camera is on and we will see the world because
of you. And that's really what is fascinating. You carry the camera
and we enjoy the world." That takes a little bit of convincing,
but it works. Then it's very entertaining. Because they get themselves
into some unusual situations. And the same with biography. Again,
it’s reading and writing biography. So, let's say for the
Autobiography class I'd ask them to read the suddenly controversial
book by Vivian Gornick called Fierce Attachments…
RB: Apparently it's controversial because she has opened
her mouth about her own methodology.
ML: Well, she says she has talked about it many times before. Anyway,
I use Krakauer's book Into the Wild, for the biography
class. All non-fiction is driven by character or the creation of
character and the deployment of characters. So what I teach is different
ways to create character, to build character, to deploy character
in scenes. And I insist that these be characters in scenes that
have to talk. Because all these kids have been taught in their secondary
school to write visually, "His skin was the color of a withered
brown tobacco leaf, turned brittle in the autumn sun." Just
awful stuff. And all you have to do is give someone some words and
they come off the page. And give them some gestures and they come
off the page. And you don't have to write this clotted visual with
all these adverbs and adjectival descriptors. So I teach them how
to create and then deploy characters in scenes and—if they
can do that biographically or autobiographically—then they
can write narrative non-fiction. Because: If you hang out with people
who, for example, smuggle Cuban cigars or sell trinkets at Ground
Zero or just baby sit for their grandchildren—that's great,
that's enough. It's all really interesting. People's lives. That's
all I teach.
RB: I was saying to myself that at least you don't have an opening
class speech where you tell them that…
ML: Oh I do.
RB: …as one professor of literature allegedly told his students
that it would be necessary to kill one of their classmates.
ML: Yeah sure.
ML: You scare 'em?
ML: Sure. At Hampshire College—and this is probably true at a
lot of schools like Hampshire—- these kids have been privileged.
As a result, they have both very large and very frail egos. You
and I both know that the world of publishing is brutal and shitty
and unfair. The students think that all they have to do is really
mean what they say and things will work out for them. That's not
true. It's terrible and painful and sad. And it's shitty. So the
students sit there, thinking that they can be writers—and my job
is to try to tell them that, in the end, it's like a bar room fight.
It's who's left standing. They don't even suspect that. They think,
of course, "I’ll be left standing." It's so funny.
They come with more experience than you would imagine kids in their
twenties might have. But they are also very shy. So when you say
to them, in a course, “I want you to go home or I want you
to go to the neighboring town, and I want you to find something
that really interests you, something that you have always been curious
about. Bus drivers, maybe. Or, you have always been curious about
taxi drivers or guys who work the first shift in a bakery or the
night crew in a supermarket…. I want you to find someone and
talk to them and then I want you to get their permission to write
about them.” The response is that they get very uneasy. It
turns out that, in spite of all their vacations and their, shall
we say, 'recreational experiences', they are very timid. Very shy.
RB: Why do you think?
ML: I don't know. Because they have had it their way.
RB: Because they haven't had to reach out?
ML: It's like you go to one school and go to another and camp is
arranged for you and vacations are arranged for you. Your friends
have interesting adventures and do naughty things. You think that's
life. For whatever reason, they both imagine themselves to be more
able than they often are and more experienced than they really are.
But it's an interesting process of growing up. And that's what this
work at this level of education enables some of them to do. Which
is to grow up and to bear witness and to understand that all the
shit that they read and listen to on NPR or in The
New Yorker or in The Atlantic has taken tremendous
effort and tremendous work to make it just a good read. They don't
understand that. They think it's like salted nuts at a bar. Right?
RB: Is your intention as a teacher to give your students a dose
of reality?
ML: Sure.
RB: Also give them vocational training and guidance?
ML: Sure that's part of it. It' s a morally driven education. In
the end they're going to put themselves in what they understand
to be in harm's way, in order to learn something really interesting.
And then to bring it back so that we can be better people. And know
stuff that we would not have known if they hadn’t of taken
whatever risk they define as risk to tell us what they have learned.
That's great. That's a moral education.
RB: To take your "salted nuts at the bar " metaphor further,
it's your view that they don't think they have to pay anything along
the way as they do this work? No dues paying?
ML: They have no idea what the 'dues' are. You could say to them,
"This is hard work. You are going to have to pay some dues.
You are going to immerse yourselves." Those are just words
for them. I could say to them, "Here's the motto you need to
live by: 'A man must know how to hope and how to endure.' That's
what the Count of Monte Cristo believed." And they are going
to say, "Yeah, okay." But what do they know? They don't
know how to hope. They don't know what hope is and they don't know
how or why "hope" is juxtaposed with "endure."
They just say, "Okay."
RB: Do they take notes and write that down?
ML: Some of them do. So what! None of this really matters! It's
like that book Conversations with Don Juan where Carlos
says to Don Juan, "Don Juan aren't you scared that I am writing
all of this down and then people will know your magic?" And
Don Juan, who, of course, never existed, says to Carlos, "Who
cares? It's just a book." Just words.
RB: Let's go back to Long Time Coming. It draws on archives
that contain between 150,000 to 200,000 images, however that's determined.
Has it been catalogued?
ML: It is still being catalogued. Eventually people will say, "We
got it." And they probably have said it already. But again,
if you look at the Appendix to the book, I alluded to Documenting
America. Beverly Brannon is a wonderful archivist and is one
of the people who wrote that book. The Appendix has all those numbers
and depending on how you sliced the bologna, [Roy] Stryker did this,
but then before Stryker this happened. And after Stryker this happened…
RB: Does it include the ones that he X-ed out and punched holes
in?
 ML:
Sure. He didn't punch holes in all of them, believe me. The guy
was an asshole at times—but not always. He got better. He
got wise.
RB: He went to work at Standard Oil, after his long stint at FSA,
to do the same sort of thing. Is there a Standard Oil photography
collection?
ML: Yes, it's
at the University of Louisville. It's quite wonderful.
RB: Has a book been made out of those photos?
ML: Yeah. Nick Lehmann, who is now at the Columbia Journalism School
and before that at The New Yorker and before that at Texas
Monthly did a book called Out of the Forties. It's
a wonderful collection. It's all nicely bound and they have the
negatives nicely preserved.
RB: Who shot those photos?
ML: Many the people who had worked for Stryker at the end of his
time with the Feds got hired and some new people too. Very good
photographers. The rationale was, "There's a drop of oil in
everything. So whatever oil touches we can photograph." Right?
RB: I have spent some time in Cuba and when I have taken
photographs there I have felt that I could close my eyes and
click the shutter and so many things made wonderful pictures. The
FSA photographs are wonderful and interesting but how much talent
did it take to make these photographs?
ML: Plenty. Jesus Christ! Spend some time with the archive and
the number of hits compared with misses and near misses is substantial.
There are a lot of near misses and a lot of banalities. Russell
Lee was a photographer who was in love with banalities. He was known
as a cataloguer. If you asked Russell to photograph how a Texas
boot was made, Russell would do photograph the process from the
beginning to the end. I guess such boot making is now a lost art.
Russell's pictures look like they are out of an encyclopedia or
a manual. But those FSA photographers were not monkeys seated at
typewriters. They had to wake up everyday and make some art. Every
day. Every day.
RB: I remember looking at a Robert Capa book and saying to myself,
"I could take that picture." And then, as I turned the
pages, I realized that I couldn't have taken so many of those splendid
photos.
ML: I Just saw a movie called The Professional. It's about
a guy who is a professional killer and the young girl he befriends.
It's a magnificent, noble film. Because what he is able to do is
he is able live a life of a noble knight. Singular, alone, spare
and he is able to do things in a way—they are horrible things—but
he does them with a kind of clarity and elegance that is impossible
to do even once for most people without their hearts ripping out
of their chests. And he does it all the time. He is a broken man
and a solitary man and a heart broken man. But he is able to do
this one thing that is a mortal thing and at great risk with great
simplicity. And that is very hard to do. And the art of these FSA
photographers was similar. They were able to do it every day. And
not die. Oh, a lot of them suffered. Lots were broken people, a
lot of drunks, a few crazies. But they did beautiful work. At their
best, they did beautiful work.
RB: There is a Walker Evans photo of an Alabama coal miner. In
the corner of the frame is part of a camera.
ML: Oh yeah, he is sitting next to a guy in the car. I don't know
who his traveling companion was. I came upon a couple thousand Walker
Evans, that no one had captioned because Stryker didn't like them.
RB: [laughs]
ML: Or they weren't good enough. And they weren't good enough in
many cases. But there might have been twenty or thirty that were
just wonderful. Really true pieces of art. And that was one of them.
I for the life of me I don't know who he traveled with. I know a
scholar like Trachtenberg could tell you in minute just by triangulating…
RB: I didn't care so much who it was as why it was in the frame?
I don't know that he had great concerns about cropping.
ML: No, he didn't. Walker cropped. Walker thought that photographers
were dummies. He wanted to be a writer. He had a literary mind.
He was a sly man, a cunning man—a bit of an outlaw type. He
didn't give a shit about method and propriety—except when he did.
He was a very fastidious man. He always carried two cameras. He
worried a lot and he never had enough money. But if you would tried
to ask him questions about gray scales as if he were some sort of
an Ansel Adams, he'd have thought you were a fool of a veterinarian
asking questions about the bowel habits of some large farm animal.
Who cares? Art is mind. Remember the cliche: "Guns don't kill
people, people kill people." "Cameras don't take pictures,
people take pictures." "Mr Thoreau tell me about your
pencil? I understand that your family were pencil manufacturers
and you wrote using a pencil. What kind of pencil was it?"
[ML makes a chopping sound]
RB: What do you called yourself? Are you a historian? Writer? Photographer?
ML: That guy [Mark Feeney] who interviewed me for the Boston
Globe. He asked the same question. I think that what I am—I
think I have a polymorphously perverse imagination and so—I
will use whatever I can to try to tell some version of the truth.
Whatever that is. I really believe in the truth. I think it exists.
There are words for the truth in many human languages. They all
have words for the truth.
RB: That sounds like John Updike's argument for the existence of
God: that because there are so many attempts to argue for God, he
must exist.
ML: So I say the best thing to do is to try not just to bear witness
but to imitate the truth. Imitate in such a way that others can
experience not just as you experienced it, but as 'it' might very
well be. That is, of course, an impossible undertaking. Can't be
done. Any one who thinks it can be done: they are obviously dangerous
fools. So, the process of 'telling the truth' is always a process
of doing something that is always wrong. Always impossible. Which
is something that is good to do. If you were to ask me why I want
to do this shit, I couldn't tell you.
RB: I am not about to ask you. My question about your self-description
is about the real world. That is, in terms of getting things done,
you are called upon to, in some way or other, represent yourself
or sell yourself. Much like the issue of where your books are shelved
in a bookstore.
ML: That's been the story of my life. Good luck.
"Are you this?" "Yeah, for now." It's like,
whether it was Marx or Engels or Rousseau, in the ideal state you
are one thing in the morning and another thing in the afternoon
and a third thing in the evening and they are all one. Robert Lifton
wrote about that,
The Protean Self. I think Proteus is the right word.
I think being Proteus is admirable. I think shape shifter is a good
word. I don't know. To the extent I have an ability to use words,
and to the extent I have the ability to use photographs, other peoples'
photographs, to talk about what passes for historical reality. So
figure it out. I don't know what that is. No one knows what that
is. They could say, "You're an intellectual." And that's
very good and the Europeans have used and defined the word 'intellectual'
in a proper way for a long time that we haven't— someone who
loves ideas and uses ideas.
RB: That's a discredited preoccupation in the US. How about being
called a narrator?
ML: A narrator is a good word. Honestly, I wish I knew. It would
make me happier. It would really have made me happier if I had been
able to tell someone a long time ago what it was I was. But I don't
really know and to tell you the honest truth—and think I said
this to Mark Feeney, "Half the people in the world think I
am a complete fool and half the people think I walk on water and
I never know which half I am talking to."
RB: What argument is presented that what you do is not important
or meaningless or trivial? How would someone frame that?
ML: It is trivial. I mean, who cares? You could say that about
any literary or artistic or intellectual enterprise. For instance,
your enterprise—talking to five hundred people for a magazine
and over a hundred for a website. That's trivial. It's all trivial.
RB: As specks of sand in the Universe?
Look, I really do
not care about you. What I care about is the worlds that you
bear witness to. You are nothing more than a dog with a video
camera strapped on its back. |
ML: As specks of sand in the flow of American
money and power. It's trivial. Look at these people who you have
never met and very few people have, who are these photo-archivists.
They are like monks— women and men who amass vast archives
of wonderment—and no one fucking rings the doorbell except
to say, [in a shrill voice] "Do you happen to have a recipe
for chocolate chip cookies?" Right?
RB: Or photos of Calvin Coolidge.
ML: Or whatever.
RB: Are we talking about contemporary standard and values or something
more…
ML: Eternity. It's right out of Borges. That's why I included it
["Tlon,Ughar, Orrbis Tertius" from Borges' Ficciones].
It's like that Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy with Harry Selden
who is a psycho-historian. He has it all made. [sighs deeply] Oh
man! [Historian William Appleton] Williams was, by the way, a real
fan of the Foundation trilogy.
RB: I was too, but I stopped reading those years ago.
ML: Dune is still a great book.
RB: That's the last speculative fiction that I read. You have asserted
your great belief in the book, what books are you working on next.
ML: I have at least three books that I am thinking about doing.
It's a matter of the practicality. I wanted to do a book…[long
pause] I won't say because it's public. I have three different schemes.
RB: Along the lines of the photographic archive books?
ML: They are all photo books.
RB: I suspect that you know something about how to make pictures.
How is it that you haven't made or used your own pictures?
ML: It's like, “Don't give up your day job.” I am a
good photographer. I don't think that's where I am going to leave
it. I think being a good photographer is a manifestation of a good
visual sense. That then serves me as someone who looks at other
people's pictures, as an editor, as a chooser. As someone who loves
to look. My idea of a good job would be to be paid really well to
sit on my ass all day to look at pictures. That's why I do admire
Stryker and why I really, really admire Paul Vanderbilt. Those guys
loved to look. It's like Chauncy Gardner [in the film Being
There], "I like to look." Oh, yes.
RB: The Globe piece mentioned you have looked at close
to six million images?
ML: Who knows? I think at the time when Feeney asked that I might
have considered and added stuff up. Certainly when I was looking
at pictures that turned into a book called Bearing Witness,
I know I looked at about a million images in the Library of Congress
and the National Archives and the Pentagon. I don't really know
and at a certain point the thing that I do would be a really entertaining
episode of The Twilight Zone. Or a forty-second episode
from the David Bowie film The Man Who Fell To Earth. [long
pause] I understand why I am an odd person, but I don't understand
why there aren't more odd people like me. We are a visually saturated
culture.
RB: I think there are more people like you than you think. Perhaps
the oddest thing about you is that your oddity has been combined
with the perseverance and fortitude to move your projects forward.
Where other odd people are lacking in that. Also, to look at your
work someone might rightly say there is only going to be one book
like that…
ML: Yeah, so why do it?
RB: So I don't think you are alone. You mentioned Nicholas Lehman
earlier. In a New Yorker piece on Michael Powell [the FCC
chairman] he mentioned a conversation he had with his high-school
aged son about American History, concluding that “the problem
with American history we that there was too much of it.” Which
I took to mean that we teach too much about the factual details
about treaties and legislation and leave out the narrative juices.
ML: In the same way that you can assure me that I am not alone,
I would say to you look at Undaunted Courage about Lewis
and Clark or the David McCullough books. These are wonderful stories
and people read them. The guy who runs C-Span reads them all the
time. So these magnificent tales are available and are published
and people buy them and unfortunately Nick's son may not have had
a chance, at the moment, to read them.
RB: So you are optimistic that US history is accessible and appreciated
by our fellow citizens?
ML: Who knows? It's like the people who listen to classical music
and go to Tanglewood. Ten years from now it will probably be a cow
pasture because no one will show up. And ten years from now all
the people who read McCullough's latest great book on the Adams
family will all be buried, dead.
RB: Not to throw cold water on your good feelings here, but there
is such a thing as an unread best seller. That book sold well over
a million copies in hard cover. I don't know that all those copies
were read.
ML: That's true. It's like that guy who is confined to the wheel
chair.
RB: Stephen Hawking?
ML: They bought the book but they probably couldn't—people
have said that about his books, "Oh man the guy can't move
and he can't talk, but he is a goddamn genius. He's a genius man.
Here, I bought his book." Yeah, it's a consumer product. I
think the stuff; the really interesting stuff about American history
is unprintable. All the stuff that is coming out now from the White
House tape machines.
RB: Unprintable because corporate publishers aren't going to print
it?
ML: It’s so fucking dangerous. It's not
just some cliché like "These fuckers are all crazy;
they're all Dr Strangeloves; they're all Nazi, drug infested, degenerates."
That's just a bedtime cliché. That's just a dark, nightmare
fairytale. A story told to scare grownup children. The reality is
worse than that…
|
Posted:
September 16, 2003
