Not Making Art With Marina Hasselberg
Saturday, January 12, 2019
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| Marina Hasselberg |
For most of my life in Vancouver (1975 to now) I was careful
to define myself as a competent if not a very good photographer. I never
considered myself an artist. In Vancouver which is run (like in most other
cities) by an elitist art mafia, to think one is an artist is dangerous. The
almost certain subsequent failure will bring bitterness and depression.
Years ago after being obsessed with chess I realized that I
was not good enough and in chess the only certainty of this is the fact that I
lacked brain power.
So it is safe to not call oneself an artist and to quietly
soldier on. This is what I do but I do have the benefit (if not honour) of
being considered an artist by my friend, the Argentine painter
Juan ManuelSánchez who inspired and egged me on to work in what I like to do.
There are many in this city, that use an expression that for
me is verboten. This is, “I make art.” It sounds suspect to me. I have no idea
where I would begin in order to make it!
In this digital age, sitting at a monitor (mine is a cathode
ray tube Dell) can be fun and is almost as addictive as that ruination of our
century by Mr. Jobs. I find myself experimenting and fiddling. That I do this
without being in a damp and smelly darkroom, perhaps is a benefit.
Last night I bleached four Fuji Instant Colour Film peels.
These were the peels that most photographers (including this one) used to throw
away. I have a large box with a many of them. I wrote about the
process here.
It was a most pleasant surprise to find that from one of the
black peels emerged my cellist friend Marina Hasselberg. I look at this
picture. I smile and wonder why she does not own a cat.
Albert Galindo - Exposed & Processed
Friday, January 11, 2019
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| Albert Gailindo - Dancer |
This version of the original in colour below is the one I opted for. The white edge of the original was much too white for me.
Photography is a technique that involves trial and error,
exactitude, a follow through pattern that can be repeated and the whimsy of
that word lovely word,
latency.
Even until you bring back the picture you have just taken
with a digital camera there is that very short moment when you don’t know. That
is a short lapse that is almost latency. True latency was the time between
exposure with a film camera (be it sensitized metal plate, glass plate, paper
or celluloid) until it was processed (or to use a fine word of the 19th
century “developed out”.
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| The Fuji Instant Film (Fujiroid) |
In a darkroom exposure of a negative with an enlarger
onto photographic paper there is that magical moment when the exposed paper is
placed in the developer tray. From a blank (the latent image) the image
emerges.
For years we photographers who tested our exposures and
shots with Polaroid backs on our cameras, we would peel them and quickly throw
away the peeled negative. How were we to know then (before the advent of the
home scanner) that there was an image imbedded in that dark peel.
With the
Polaroids the image (a negative one) remained for a few days. Scanned and
reversed in Photoshop the resulting image was (only recently can I say was!) an
unpredictable surprise.
When Polaroid stopped making film for my medium format
Mamiya RB-67 I bought the Fuji Instant Film. The image of the peel faded
quickly. One of the methods was to quickly bring it to a waiting scanner and
quickly scan it after first rubbing it to the glass.
A second method is to put the Fujiroid face down with the
black back side up and to tape the edges with Gorilla Tape on a large dinner
plate. With a spray bottle of half water half bleach I spray it and rub it with
my fingers until all the black backing is gone. I remove the tape and place the
negative in water and then I hang it to dry. When dry I scan it and reverse it
in Photoshop. The resulting image I play around with contrast and levels.
And presto,
always a surprise!
The McNamara Wall - Piss Poor
Thursday, January 10, 2019
The book is not a fast read. Attempting to figure out how a
pilot and and EWO ( Electronic Warfare Officer) in a Thud (F-105 Thunderchief)
lure a SAM (Surface to air missile) site run by North Vietnamese personnel and
aided by Soviets to turn on its radar guiding system so as to ID the location of
the missile site is difficult for me to understand while marvelling at the fact
that these Wild Weasels, as they were called were actually sort of saying,
"
I dare you to shoot me down with your missile!"
The book is not a fast read. Attempting to figure out how a
pilot and and EWO ( Electronic Warfare Officer) in a Thud (F-105 Thunderchief)
lure a SAM (Surface to air missile) site run by North Vietnamese personnel and
aided by Soviets to turn on its radar guiding system so as to ID the location of
the missile site is difficult for me to understand while marvelling at the fact
that these Wild Weasels, as they were called were actually sort of saying,
"
I dare you to shoot me down with your missile!"
The book
The Hunter Killers by Dan Hampton reveals all kinds
of stuff that many of us did not understand about the Viet Nam war and how all
that happened then has bearings with our scary present. And then there is the
story of McNamara's Line (wall) and the urine bags. I will not write here of
another great idea the American used. This involved creating more mud by using
silver crystals in clouds. And then they modified Calgon to make the mud
stickier and redder. A confused American flyer was told to bomb enemy
elephants. Understandably the pilot was flummoxed. He was told that enemy elephants would have muddy and red undersides.
Below is Dan Hampton's revelations of McNamara's Wall something so timely today
1967…But McNamara’s real
emphasis was a barrier – a fortified line by which infiltration could be
stopped and the North contained. Called “an iron-curtain counter-infiltration
system,” it would stretch from the South China Sea across the DMZ [Demilitarized
Zone] and Laos into Thailand. If interdiction could not be halted by bombing,
then the Viet Cong could be strangled when the Ho Chi Minh Trail was
permanently cut. Again, this illustrates a fundamental miscalculation regarding
the trail’s logistical importance, since most support for the VC was indigenous,
and the few tons of required supplies leaked to South Vietnam despite American
efforts. The barrier would also contain the People’s Army, or so McNamara
believed. In fact discussions about such a plan went back as far as 1965 but
ultimately it was quite correctly regarded by the military as totally
impractical.
All through the summer of 1966 various studies had been
commissioned, including those by the Institute of Defense Analysis and the
JASON group. By that September, disregarding all practical opposition, cost and
wasted manpower, the secretary of defense ordered the barriers implemented in
one year. Phase One would run from the coastal area near Gio Linh, just below
the DMZ, west to Con Thien. Phase Two would extend farther west into Laos and
would be constructed at a later date. More than 50,000 miles of barbed wire,
five million fence posts, and 200,000 tons of other materials were needed. The
initial cost hovered around $1.6 billion, which included $600 million for a
command center at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand. Phase One fell entirely within the
3rd Marine Division’s area of operations and General Lewis Walt, the
Marine commander, was not at all happy about it.
McNamara brushed off Walt’s very real operational concerns,
just as he had ignored the Joint Chiefs; construction commenced. Under the
title Joint Task Force 738, also called “Practice Nine,” the bulldozers, Rome
plows, and engineers began clearing terrain. The main concept was an
overlapping system of physical obstacles and sensors tied into a centralized,
computerized command center. Seismic and sonic sensors would detect movement
and sound, respectively. Electrochemical sniffers like the XM-2 personnel
detector were supposed to detect urine on the premise that where there was
urine there were people. Others were employed that would find the enemy by
smell, though no one seemed quite sure of body odor differences among
Vietnamese, or even Americans who’d been living
of native food.
However it was to happen, when infiltrators were detected,
cluster bombs, mines, and barbed wire would discourage them, or at least give a
warning to close air support aircraft or ground teams, who would then respond.
To the surprise of no one, except perhaps the secretary of defense, the barrier
didn’t work. As axiomatic as it sounds, the greatest vulnerability to high technology
often seems to be low-technology solutions. The North Vietnamese promptly blew
up the initial fourteen guard towers along the cleared trace then moved the
acoustic sensors far off the Trail. They also draped urine bags near the
chemical sniffers and herded domestic animals in all directions to mislead the
seismic sensors.
Practice Nine was headed by Lieutenant General Alfred
Starbird, a 1933 graduate of West Point who competed as a pentathlete in the
1936 Olympics, then earned a master’s in engineering from Princeton in 1937. A
Wizard by training, Starbird was also a combat engineer who’d been in the first
unit to cross the Rhine River during World War II. Following the mediocre
results of Cedar Falls and Junction City [military operations] in early 1967,
the pressure was on to make the barrier – The McNamara Line, as it came to be
known – a success. So despite the failure of fixed fortifications in history
from Hadrian’s Wall to the Maginot Line, Starbird persisted. By early 1967,
McNamara overlooked test results and complaints by those in the field and
declared the system operational.
Some of the projects were interesting, some marginally
effective, and some as shown, were outright wastes of time. As such, these
projects illustrated the fact that winning the war was no longer Washington’s
priority, if it ever had been. What is certain is that vast amounts of men,
materials, and money were diverted from the real fighting, where a difference
could have been made if Washington had decided upon a military solution.
In a website that had a virus attached I read that the Vietnamese at one time considered rebuilding part of the wall for tourists.
