12 May 2013

The Provocateur in the Park: a Lament for USian Freedom

Kids playing on East 5th Street, Manhattan, 1967. Speculative work – unassigned random pictures such as this image, made for potential sale or inclusion in a portfolio is a big part of photojournalism. I've photographed in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, Canada, parts of South Korea and probably some other locales I don't remember, but the only hostile reactions to my spec-photo efforts came from Seattleites, who in their well-documented xenophobia seem to regard “photographer” as synonymous withinterloperif not “intruder.” Yet even in Seattle, where the sorts of street photography I had routinely done in Manhattan provoked so much anger I gave it up entirely, I was never hassled for photographing in public parks, even when the subject was children at play – pictures that often, though not always, were later published in The Seattle Sun. But earlier this week, when I attempted to shoot a mere three frames of spec work I thought might interest the Tacoma Metropolitan Parks District, I discovered that if you're an elderly, crippled male, merely pointing a camera at kids on a playground can put you in real danger of being lynched. Data: I used Bic Wite-Out and a red Marks-A-Lot, the only suitable paint-like materials I had on hand, to deface the print. The film is Tri-X; its grain structure says it was processed in Microdol-X at 400 ASA, but the rest of the information was lost in the 1983 fire. Because I snapped only one frame on East 5th Street before these attentive kids spotted me and started mugging for the camera, I was obviously not using one of the VT Canons on which I then normally relied, which means I was shooting with a Pentax H1A and probably its 55mm f/2 Super-Takumar – the choice of lenses indicating it may well have been that camera's maiden voyage. Photograph copyright Loren Bliss 1967, 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)    

*

THE POST-TRAUMATIC atrial fibrillation that made this piece so tardy has finally stopped, and now I can tell the story as it deserves to be told rather than as a narrative disjointed by bitterness and anticipation of death, but to put everything in sharp focus, I should preface all that follows by the mundane admission I cling to film cameras because I cannot afford the approximately $1000 it costs to convert to a digital single-lens reflex. The realities of Social Security, Medicare and the post-American-Dream economy make it clear I will never have that sort of money in whatever remains of this lifetime. Thus to any onlooker even the least bit camera-savvy it is obvious I remain the technological equivalent of an ignoramus or a bum or a weirdo and possibly all three. True, M Leicas were the best and therefore most prestigious 35mm cameras on this planet, but the retirement of the last factory-trained Leica repairman in the United States mandated their return to Germany even for routine cleaning and lubrication, which I was authoritatively told would take a year or more, not to mention the prohibitive costs of shipping plus the near certainty of huge hassles with our ever-more-tyrannical customs officials. Hence last year I sadly realized I had no choice but to to sell these beloved machines while they were still operational, and with funereal sadness I did just that. Since then my only 35mm cameras are relatively low-end SLRs, specifically Pentax MXs and K-1000s, which I formerly employed only as bodies for long lenses. They are certainly durable, and the associated optics are superb, but they are not Leicas, they are at least 30 years old, and I fear they'll die before I do. 

Because I am also fond of the 120 format, I've likewise kept a 1953-vintage Rolleicord III. For those unfamiliar with the wonderful machines formerly made by Franke & Heidecke, Rolleicord is to Rolleflex as Volkswagen is to Porsche. This means the 'Cord is mechanically simple enough it need not be returned to Deutschland for repairs – that even given the notorious ineptitude characteristic of too many USian camera mechanics, with careful shopping I can (probably) find someone stateside to clean, lubricate, adjust and – assuming the continued availability of spare parts – even fix it if it goes Tango Uniform. And I love what can be done with medium-format negatives. There is also the fact I am inordinately fond of twin-lens reflexes. My first camera, which my father gave me for my 12th birthday, was a TLR, a Kodak Brownie Reflex that used 127 film, and I learned my first (self-taught) grab-shooting lessons with its eye-level sports viewfinder. The first newspaper-issue camera with which I worked – this at age 16 for The Grand Rapids Herald in Michigan – was a Zeiss Ikoflex, a Rolleflex competitor. The second, during my 18th year, was a Rolleiflex itself; it was issued by The Fountain Citizen, for which (if memory serves), my first picture assignment produced a rather pedestrian but nevertheless Page-One-worthy image of U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver braving a torrential East Tennessee summer thunderstorm as he campaigned for re-election in 1958. Then maybe four decades later I realized the tacit bowing of one's head to the subject – the gesture mandated by the waist-level finder that defines all TLRs – evokes a response that is entirely different from the what obtains during eye-level photographic encounters, especially amidst the Cyclopean intrusiveness of SLRs. At about the same time it dawned on me one of the great but mostly unacknowledged attributes of M Leicas, VT Canons and I guess all other 35mm rangefinder cameras is how they enhance photographer-subject intimacy because the machine never completely masks the photographer's face. Hence I concluded a TLR operated at waist-level appears safe, compliant, respectful, even reassuring, to the person or persons on the other end of the lens, which makes it a very useful tool indeed – except of course in the Land of Omnipresent Hatefulness the U.S. has become since 9/11 – or more accurately since 11/22/1963. 

*** 

The senior housing project in which I reside is not far from Wright Park, one of Tacoma's better recreational facilities. The park's 27 acres is especially convenient for walkers and joggers because a single circuit of its perimeter path measures exactly one mile. It was also a primary beneficiary of the $84.3 million improvement bond the Tacoma Metropolitan Park District convinced the voters to approve in 2005 – fortuitous timing indeed, as two years later the One Percenters began their deliberate downsizing of the USian economy and thereby ended forever any electoral willingness to invest in expanded government services. But the park is in a high crime area, and its interior was ruled by criminals even in daylight until it was reclaimed about four years ago through the cooperative efforts of the local neighborhood association and the Tacoma Police Department. The park is now not only attractive and well maintained, it is also notably safe, and it has become a favorite spot for mothers with children. But when I walked there Wednesday, children were not on my agenda. I was intent on photographing only a huge paper-birch – a tree so big it probably predates the park's 1886 founding by as much as a century. Though I soon realized my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC had finally died of old age – had I followed its reading I would have over-exposed my negatives by five stops – the light meter in my head seemed as good as ever, and nine frames later I had what I wanted – textural studies I intend to use in some new sandwiches. 

As I walked back toward my apartment I passed one of the more notable improvements the bond issue had funded: a water-playground for children. Called the Sprayground, it was built to replace a conventional wading pool. It features a number of fountains, shower-head devices, stationary hoops and exercise bars, many of them distinctly sculptural and therefore visually interesting, all designed to allow kids plenty of room to run and play while granting them the pleasure of a thorough soaking on a hot summer's day. And now watching the girls and boys joyfully dart around and through the gleaming columns of sun-bright water, I understood why some of my neighbors here in geezer manor had been urging me to visit the Sprayground with a camera. I also saw immediately how much safer it is for children than playing in streets doused by sprinkler-headed fire hydrants, a summertime sight so common in the urban neighborhoods of New York City, it long ago became a journalistic cliché – one to which I surely contributed my own share of hackneyed images during those halcyon years before gentrification exiled me forever from my home. Now, knowing I had three frames left on the Rolleicord's 12-exposure roll of Kodak T-Max 100, I wondered if I might get a non-cliché image I could peddle to the park district. What better than the Sprayground to illustrate the reclamation of the park from its former criminal masters? The pictures would be all the more telling because the kids I was now watching – a dozen children ages five through 10 – were of such obvious ethnic diversity.
 
It is relevant at this point to note I was casually but reasonably well dressed – blue-gray flower-patterned shirt, khaki bush jacket, navy blue slacks, tan straw hat. My shirt collar was neatly folded over the collar of the bush jacket. The Van Dyke that in 2005 or so replaced the full beard I had worn since the 1980s was freshly trimmed, and I was wearing new dark brown leather sandals over black wool socks. I bore a tan canvas shoulder bag with a medium-sized matte-gray aluminum tripod collapsed and hooked to its top, the strap slung diagonally over my right shoulder. As always – thanks to a knee injury from junior high school football and the spinal injuries inflicted on me by a habitual drunken driver in 1978 – I walked with a cane. In other words, I looked exactly like what I am – an elderly, obviously crippled but nevertheless dedicated photographer, most likely a resident of one of the multi-storey apartment complexes that abound near the park. 

As I usually do before I start exposing film – unless of course it is a riot or a fire or some other such emergency – I stood and watched, absorbing the possibilities of the scene, framing and otherwise previsualizing pictures. The visual geometry of the interactions between the romping children and the water and the hard bright circular and linear forms of the facility itself were fascinating, and the potential for transcending cliché – particularly since I was shooting black-and-white film – seemed uniquely promising. But the two-stop difference between sunlight and shadow was tricky, especially with all the added glare. My old Luna-Pro was now garbage, I no longer have a darkroom in which to manipulate an image, the burn-and-dodge capabilities of my Gimp photo software are minimal at best, and I learned long ago the over-priced local labs are less than adept at remedial custom printing. Hence it took me a couple of minutes to decide an exposure – f/11 at 1/500th, and to get the shadow detail just right I would bracket one stop each way, f/16 and f/8. But after I had shot only one carefully composed frame, a young white woman approached me – a pretty woman scarcely more than five feet tall, golden-brown hair to her shoulders, a seemingly intelligent face. Curiously enough I don't remember the color of her eyes, but she may have been wearing sunglasses; I know she was a few minutes later. I wasn't paying that much attention; I merely assumed she was going to do as so many other parents have done on nearly all the (relatively rare) occasions I've photographed children – that she would ask who I was and how she might get a print “if the pictures come out.” Instead she quietly asked if I had any children there in the Sprayground. 

“No,” I answered, instantly concerned yet another economically ruined parent had abandoned yet another hungry and heartbroken child and had chosen the park as the place of abandonment. “Why, is there some kid here missing a par...” 

Her response interrupted my question: “you're creeping us out. What are you doing photographing these children?” 

“I'm a professional photographer,” I said. I reached into my bush jacket for my black leather business card wallet, extracted a card, held it out for her. “I'm just...” 

She interrupted me again. She ignored my offering. Now her voice rose several decibels: “Who do you work for?” 

“I work for myself, anymore. I'm retired. Before that I worked for newspapers and magazines. But I still...” 

Her third interruption, and now she was yelling: “why are you here? Why are you even looking at these children?”

“Because...” 

Interruption number four: “we don't don't want you here. You don't have any right to be here.” 

“Ma'am, look, I'm trying to explain but you keep interrupting. Take my card...” 

“I don't want your damn card.” Her voice became a loud belligerent screech. “We don't care who you are or what you are. You're creeping us out. We” – her sweeping gesture indicated everyone within the Sprayground or just beyond its circular concrete perimeter – “want you out of here now, creep. Now! NOW!” 

The vehemence of her words bespoke an enmity I had not encountered since confrontations decades ago with segregationists in the Jim Crow South. Now she looked a why-aren't-you-here-yet look toward a group of white males who stood maybe 30 yards away at the perimeter's far side, four or five young shirtless men staring in my direction though not yet really glowering. And now I felt the first twinges of fright. The woman's facial expression and body language suggested the sugarpie-that-man-just-insulted-me combination of lust and sadistic yearning you see on southern belles and other female bloodhawks when they're trying to goad their beaux into making them wet by beating someone senseless or dead, and I realized the woman's tantrum – never mind it was utterly unjustified and unprovoked – might be putting me in real jeopardy. 

My muddle of emotions – vexation at how easily she had ambushed me, anger at her consummate unfairness, astonishment at the Ku Klux caliber of her hatred, growing fear of her now-obvious effort to instigate violence, profound shock at how such a fine productive day had been so suddenly and totally ruined – now coalesced into pure outrage, and I finally answered her as I should have answered her from the very beginning, as I would have answered her had I not been deceived by the deliberate lie of her falsely pleasant initial approach. 

“Look, lady,” I snarled in my most defiant basso, “I've been Working Press more'n 50 years, long before you were even born, so don't you imagine for a minute you and your band of thugs over there can tell me what I can and can't photograph. You're in a public place, you're fair game. You got a complaint, go call the cops.”

“I already have,” she shrilled, turning away, tossing her hair, literally stomping back around the concrete perimeter toward the men she obviously still hoped she could draw into the confrontation. 

“Good,” I growled. “You people ever hear of the First Amendment? Maybe the cops'll teach you what it really means.” 

By then of course the woman's malicious braying had metastasized her hatefulness throughout the Sprayground. It was clear she had intended to provoke the selfsame hysteria that spawns lynchings and pogroms and witch hunts, and now it seemed as if all the parents were glaring at me and herding their children out of the water. Recognizing I was potentially in harm's way, realizing the severe penalties by which Washington state punishes assault on the working press might no longer protect me in retirement, knowing I would have no allies here until the cops arrived, remembering all the lynch-mob horrors vindictive southern white women have sadistically inflicted on southern black men, wondering if now in Tacoma I would be the first white male in the United States to be lynched by an interracial mob, I closed up the Rolleicord and hobbled away. Yet somewhere amidst all this madness I was also blessed with a single quick sympathetic glance from a young African-American woman. She was a mother seemingly no different from all the others, but her liquid-brown eyes surreptitiously met mine and seemed to grow huge with deep concern, as if she were saying “yes I've seen all this before and I pray you don't get hurt.” It was just a fleeting instant, an impression so ephemeral I later wondered if I had imagined it, but at the moment it assured me I was not totally alone after all – never mind this woman (very wisely, I thought afterward), dared not publicly defend me.
 
And now my own blood was up, boiling with an intensity I have not experienced since my years in the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam-War and Back-to-the-Land and alternative press movements and my last long-ago encounter with violently Christian vigilantes, and though within hours I would be paying the geriatric price of such increased adrenalin – a night and a day and another night of scary cardiac arrhythmia – I now openly glared my own contempt and hatred in return. Meanwhile the hair-trigger white woman and her companions and the other parents she had provoked to tripwire hostility continued to regard me as a hate-object. Too bad I had never suspected my presence might evoke such a hostile response; otherwise I'd have had the proper equipment to photograph the provocateur in full rant, and we would get to see her nominally attractive features in all their hate-distorted ugliness, but the old Rolleicord with its baroque film-advance knob and its independently cocked shutter and its relatively shallow depth of field is entirely too genteel a machine for such high-intensity reportage. At least though my rising anger prompted me to hobble far more slowly in the defiant hope prolonging my departure would give the cops time to show up. I am known to the Tacoma Police Department not only as a retired journalist but as an outspoken member of the neighborhood association that helped liberate the park from its former gang-banger masters, and I relished the likelihood the cops would inform the provocateur – in terms she could understand even amidst her convulsions of paranoid loathing – that I had every right to be in the park and every right to photograph as I had intended. 

Once I was beyond the Sprayground, I paused on the adjacent hillside to shoot my last two frames of film, another act of defiance that wasted good emulsion on prosaic silhouette-images of a young couple talking under a big maple but nevertheless made the point I would not be driven from the park. By then I was probably 100 yards from the provocateur, but behind her sunglasses she continued to glare at me as if I had not moved a foot since her initial assault. Her malice remained palpable. For just a moment she seemed to scowl with obvious disgust at the bare backs of her male companions, who were now oblivious to my presence; again I sensed her fury she had not been able to provoke them into lynch-mob action. Then she resumed her glaring. I glared in return. I considered giving her the finger but dismissed that as too predictable, too likely to re-provoke her coterie of males and in any case insufficiently insulting to be worth the risk. Finally she averted her gaze. Maybe five minutes later I had hobbled out of the park. The cops never showed up. 

*** 

In all my years in journalism, whether as a photographer or reporter or both, I have never encountered anything quite like what happened in last Wednesday in Wright Park. Certainly I have been attacked, but always only by the usual suspects – Klansmen, Nazis, crooks whose scams I have exposed, perpetrators of police brutality, sundry other fascists, goons and thugs. But not since the horrors of my (involuntary) years in southern public schools have I been assaulted merely for being who I am. Though perhaps I should not be surprised; I have long noted the xenophobia, the conformity, the anti-intellectuality and all the other depressing qualities the present-day population of the Puget Sound area shares with the reflexively hostile public school students I encountered in Florida and East Tennessee as the Yankee son of a Yankee carpetbagger in the 1940s and 1950s. Swap the racism of the South for the socioeconomic bigotry of Pugetopolis, and you've a near-perfect match. But I never imagined I might someday again be confronted by a 21st Century version of the schoolyard psychodynamics that several times got me mauled by jocks – this to “put (me) in (my) place” for saying hello to somebody's prom-queen girlfriend and thereby crossing some forbidden caste line. Hence immediately after I returned to my dwelling from the park, I initially assumed what had happened there was merely another ugly dimension of the so-called Seattle Freeze, the defining element of Puget Sound regional culture that – especially since the death of the American Dream – has escalated into a war against lower-income people of all ages and ethnicities. But then I opened my email as I always do following a day afield whether good or bad, and the first item I read told me what a federal jury had just done to the Oak Ridge Three

Suddenly, realizing the news from Knoxville was of a kind with what happened to me in Wright Park, I was more frightened of my own nation than I have ever been. I realized the long-feared termination of USian pretend-democracy is upon us, its death signaled not just by the fate of the Oak Ridge Three but by the fatal persecution of Aaron Swartz and the de facto martial law imposed on Boston in the wake of the terrorist bombings. Indeed the house-to-house searches conducted by militarized police  in Watertown, where cell-phone and video footage clearly shows that to be a civilian was to be the enemy, reminded me of nothing so much as the documentary footage I have seen of the Nazis' rounding up the Jews of Poland and savaging all the diverse peoples of the western Soviet Union. Obviously the nominally mindless Right was eerily prescient when it characterized Obama as a new Hitler. But what neither Right nor Left dare acknowledge is the extent to which Obama's Hitlerishness is the true expression of this entire nation's malevolent will. As in Wright Park, as in Knoxville, as all across the land from coast to coast, from border to border – precisely as it was demonstrated to me personally by the Sprayground provocateur and the would-be goon-squad she nearly recruited to bolster her persecutorial zeal, exactly as if she were an official jeerleader at an Orwellian Five Minute Hate.

I cannot imagine any other rational explanation for her vindictively provocative tantrum. Did she think I was a terrorist? Did she imagine I was a Russian spy? (It is true many people say I look Eastern European, probably because of my tiny fraction of Mohawk blood or maybe because, as familial genetic studies have revealed, my most distant pre-Celtic ancestors were indeed people of the Steppe.) Perhaps she feared I was a private detective out to catch a parent in adulterous company or a child with a forbidden relative. Possibly she thought I was a Jew, as even now with my formerly coal-black beard and darkest brown hair gone mostly gray, I am occasionally assumed to be – and therefore automatically despised by a surprising number of allegedly “progressive” Puget Sounders, some of whom years ago in Bellingham and Seattle actually challenged my right to reside in Western Washington. Or maybe she felt her children weren't prettied up enough to be photographed. Perhaps she assumed because I did not have a shiny new digital camera, I was nothing more than a bum. Maybe she herself is on the lam and is running from an Amber Alert or fears her picture might show up on Most Wanted. Possibly – especially considering how she damned me as a “creep” – her private litany of bigotries convinced her my gender and age and disability and lack of digital equipment identified me as some sort of pervert. But that makes no sense either. If she believed me to be a sex criminal, why did she reject my effort to prove my identity? Besides, a real pervo would have been lurking in the bushes, clandestinely shooting from afar with a long telephoto lens, not obviously photographing in the open as I had been attempting to do.

All that said, it seems to me the most indicative elements of the confrontation are how the provocateur repeatedly interrupted my attempts to identify myself as a legitimate photojournalist and refused to allow me to explain my purpose. This suggests my photographic effort was hardly the issue, a probability further substantiated by the wording of some of her assaultive questions – especially “why are you here” and “why are you looking at these children.” Therefore my best guess is I was targeted because (a) I am elderly, (b) I am visibly disabled and (c) I am a male who conforms to no approved USian stereotype. I wear a fedora rather than the ubiquitous baseball cap that identifies the “American” jock-worshiper whether male or female as a conforming and therefore reliable citizen of the One Percent's de facto Fourth Reich. I wear Nike sandals, not Nike athletic shoes. Instead of a team jersey, I like nearly all photographers of my generation wear a bush jacket to compensate for the lack of pocket-space in modern shirts and trousers. But Puget Sounders do not wear bush jackets. Neither do they wear their shirt collars turned out over their jacket collars, nor do they wear fedoras. Though I never gave it much thought until now, my sartorial choices, shaped as they were by work and mostly in Manhattan, would probably say “outlander” nearly anywhere in the United States, bespeaking origins in (despised) realms like New York City or Europe. Mostly I suspect my lack of digital equipment plus my obvious age and disability suggested to the provocateur I am impoverished and – in the malevolent irrationality of present-day USian public opinion – therefore to blame for all the savagery that afflicts capitalist society, just as the Jews were allegedly to blame for all the afflictions of Weimar Germany. In any case I was clearly someone from Elsewhere, at the very least a Nonconformist, and given my age, disability and antique camera, obviously one of the hated poor – the 21st Century USian equivalent of the Weimar Jews. In the ever-more-Nazi-like atmosphere of today's zieg-heiled USA! USA! USA! with all its imperial self-righteousness and witch-hunt fervor, I might well have been similarly attacked had I merely lingered too long while walking through the Sprayground area, camera or not.

In this context, the fearsome magnitude of the provocateur's hatred is the predictable byproduct of a carefully structured process – another example of how ideas have consequences. The entire episode is therefore a teachable moment. It is bitter proof of the core toxicity that now characterizes not just the population of Puget Sound but the vast USian majority whether Democrat or Republican; its universality is confirmed by public acceptance (and therefore at least tacit support) of previously intolerable atrocities that range from assaults on the working press to the death-dealing consequences  of the Sequester and the pending cutbacks  in Social Security and Medicare. It is as common amongst so-called “progressives” as it is amongst alleged “conservatives,” its poison immediately recognizable by any of us who have witnessed the idiotic fanaticism of the Ku Klux Klan or the equally ignorant anti-gunowner frenzies of the forcible-disarmament cult or the rabidly moronic furies of the Nazis whether old or new. It exemplifies the mindset that facilitated the original Holocaust and now facilitates a new USian Holocaust based not on ethnicity or race but on age and health and socioeconomic status. Its earlier manifestation gave Hitler control of Germany; without 35 million human sacrifices by the soldiers of the Red Army and the men, women and children of the Soviet Union, it would have given him the world. Now 68 years later it is the reason a jury condemned three prisoners of conscience to potential 20-year prison sentences on the same day a provocateur tried to muster a lynch mob against me at the Sprayground in Wright Park. It also explains why there is not now (nor ever will be again) a viable USian resistance to capitalism – why resistance is pointless and ultimately suicidal and above all else simply not worth the effort to squander one's life however long or short in rebellion that will always suffer betrayal at the hands of provocateurs and their submissively lockstep followers. It is the hybrid venom of greed, ignorance and moral imbecility and – precisely because of how deftly its festering is concealed beneath new pathologies of celebrity and trinket materialism and the old Nazi pathology of the Big Lie – it has become the closest approximation to Absolute Evil our species has yet unleashed. And now it transforms this nation from the birthplace of constitutional democracy to the death house in which Liberty herself is being murdered and the grave in which she will soon be buried forever. 

LB/8-12 May 2013
 
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