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
