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| Paper birch, Wright Park, May 2013. By its size and probable age, this magnificent tree was here long before the park was founded in 1886. To my eyes – though it's apparent only on maximum enlargement – the image is spoiled by slight camera motion. This was the result of being unable to use my medium-weight tripod, an otherwise-excellent all-metal Bogen from the early 1960s; I couldn't set it up on the steep slope from which I framed the image, hence resorted to hand holding despite considerable arthritic pain imposed by my position. For the re-shoot I'll use my heavy Tiltall, never mind how damn uncomfortable it is to lug around. Rolleicord III, Tmax100 in D-76, exposure (after my Gossen Luna-Pro SBC went nuts and started reading 10 stops over), as suggested by the light meter in my head: f/11 at 1/100th. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.) |
THE ONE COMPENSATION of being
permanently blacklisted and therefore professionally dead is its
freedom.
As those of you who regularly read this
space already know, the ultimate legacy of the fire that in 1983
destroyed my life's work was a long and ruinous battle with clinical
depression. The associated odium – the loathing with which USians
view anyone afflicted by any sort of mental illness – effectively
ended my journalism career. And even had it not, by the time I was fit to return to work,
the nation's daily newspapers had been gobbled up by the media
monopolists, whose first official acts invariably included imposing
on hitherto independent editorial departments the exclusionary
oppressiveness of Big-Business hiring protocols. In my day, to get a
job on a newspaper you merely talked to the managing editor and
showed samples of your work; most times you got an immediate and
definitive answer. Now like any other corporate drone you have to go
through a personnel office, which means trying to conceal even the
slightest deviation from the Cleaver Family norm in order to lie your
way past a succession of hostile, psychologically invasive
gatekeepers who are also amongst the world's most skillful
interrogators. Now too in newsrooms just as everywhere else in the
corporate world, the only successful job supplicants, whether male
or female, are modern versions of the archetypal Organization
Man.
This is how management ensures the lockstep obedience demanded of reporters and photographers who have been reduced to nothing more than
stenographers for the One Percent, with even their most commonplace
stories deliberately crafted to reinforce the ideologies of Ayn
Rand fascism. Moreover there is now also deliberate socioeconomic
news-profiling; where reporters formerly lived by their so-called
“noses for news” and stories rose and fell on the basis of the
number of people to whom the information was significant, now news is
defined only by its economic value, published only if it appeals to
the upscale customer base demanded by the advertisers. That's why the
opening of a new country club goes Page One, top-of-the-fold even as
calculatedly murderous welfare and health-care cutbacks are relegated
to the inside pages or, more likely, not covered at all.
Those few journalists I know who still have
jobs have repeatedly told me, always in furtive whispers, the
resultant newsroom atmosphere is frightfully oppressive – so much
so a Nazi time-machined from the offices of der Voelkischer
Beobachter would in all probability assume the Axis had won –
that Josef Goebbels and his descendants now rule the USian mass media
as reichsführers of information. Given the Fourth
Reich nature of the USian Global Empire, it's at least arguable they
do.
The overall Big Business goal,
imposition of an entirely new paradigm of USian journalism, also of
course demanded a sweeping change in the sociology of the workforce.
Thus in an occupation once as famous for the blue-collar and/or
déclassé origins of its editorial workers as it was for its
iconoclasts and cynics, now the only allowable caste is the college
elite, the only permissible attitude is unquestioning optimism and
the only acceptable personality is therefore that of the abject
conformist. In other words, to be hired on a newspaper today, you've
got to pass muster either as a compliant, jock-worshiping frat boy or
a Barbie-doll-minded sorority girl, complete with the characteristic
bigotry produced by psychological self-conflation with the One
Percent – or as we socialists say, “identification with the
oppressor.” In this new, zero-tolerance editorial domain, which
with its anti-union bias and social-club personality requirements is
as cliquish and bully-dominated as any 1950s high school, I might
have lied my way past the outermost gatekeepers, but eventually a
credit-check or some other invasion of my privacy would have revealed
the terminal blemish of post-fire traumatic stress disorder. By then
though I'd probably already have been rejected as an unwanted misfit
merely because some “human resources” inquisitor would have
spotted the permanent scars of my (let us say) “challenging”
childhood. Hence from the first time I heard the words “personnel
office” in a sentence about journalistic employment, I suspected my
days in the Working Press were numbered, and once “clinical
depression,” was added to the paragraph, I knew life as I had known
it was ended forever, though for a while I was still sometimes able
to get part-time work. Now, having publicly declared myself not only
a Goddess-worshiping pagan but an eco-socialist (and a
Marx/Engels-influenced eco-socialist at that), there is not
even the possibility of freelancing – not that my prospects would
be much different given the genocidal, starve-all-the-surplus-workers
reality of the post-American-Dream economy, particularly its
now-endemic exclusion of elders, no doubt because we (dangerously,
subversively) remember when “worker” was not necessarily
synonymous with “slave.”
A former colleague of mine told me
several years ago one of the big reasons he went into journalism was
he loved the camaraderie, the we-don't-take-shit-from-anybody esprit
de corps of the old-time newsroom. Though my own primary
attraction to journalism was a subset of class-consciousness –
recognition it was the only avenue by which a non-aristocrat could
sometimes foster genuinely progressive change – I too was drawn by
the quality my colleague cited. It was an almost-military solidarity
that prevailed even on non-union papers, probably because –
whether a paper was Guild or not – the old-time editors were almost
always promoted from within the ranks. The result was typically a
unique bond uniting reporters and photographers with the editors who
supervised us – precisely why the practice is now forbidden under
the CEO-as-god style of USian Big Business management and Ayn Rand
capitalism – aka fascism – in general. “But I didn't want to
work in a place like an insurance office,” my one-time colleague
lamented, explaining how, having witnessed his father's
executive-level struggles in sales and administration, he desperately
wanted to avoid all the back-stabbing and brown-nosing and mutual
out-ratting that characterizes the internal dynamics of USian
business. But now under the corporations that's exactly what
newsrooms have become – “not just any old insurance office, but
an insurance office from hell.” The last time we spoke, in the
mid-1990s, he had come to despise the job he once loved, and now only
hoped he could keep it another decade until retirement. Whether he
succeeded or not I cannot say: we have lost touch with one another.
And I am enough persona non gratia in today's newsrooms, I
dare not inquire, lest it jeopardize the respondent.
Hence
the compensation I referenced in
my lead – the good part I celebrate every day – is the blessed
freedom that comes from the fact I no longer have to cope with the
new but at the same time horribly familiar fear that now permeates
todays newsrooms. For me, it was the huge anxiety potential employers
might find out who and what, from their unforgiving perspective, I
really am: not just repugnant for having been (in their merciless
judgment) so weak and worthless as to have “chosen” (according to
an aristocratic half-brother's denunciation) to be felled by
depression; but also (and under today's corporate protocols at least
equally damning), the fact I am (again from the executive vantage
point) a genuine deviant, the spawn of a childhood forever warped by
truly savage familial dysfunction. The fear that was mine in
these recent years was thus, perhaps ironically, the age-extended
version
of the fear that ruled my childhood, the constant, almost bottomless
terror my school-mates would discover my familial circumstances and
banish me from their tribe – as they invariably did, a couple of
times nearly fatally. But now I am free of all that. And age has
liberated me also from the parallel necessity to hide myself from the
parents of lovers and wives and friends. Now I can say things I
never before dared say in print – witness this blog – and do
things I would never have allowed myself the time or guilt-free
pleasure to do, as for example experiment with my old Rolleicord,
perhaps even reanimate it as my primary camera. Indeed it is a
wonderful tool. As long as I limit myself to black-and-white film, I
can develop it in my own bathroom, then have the imagery digitized
by Robi's Camera in Lakewood, three 12-exposure rolls at a time, for
$25.06, tax included. It is a sum I can afford probably only once every
two
or three months, and then only if I have no unforeseen additional
expenses, but it is maybe the most worthwhile expenditure in my entire
budget.
Meanwhile though I am intensely curious as to how this new discipline
might change what I see and how I see it, what the images will be,
what I will learn about my environment and myself and above all else
what the Muse might deign to show me.
A couple
of weeks ago, when I first acknowledged my fondness for
twin-lens reflexes,
the need for brevity and the avoidance of distractions from the
story's main thread prompted me to omit four relevant facts about my
infatuation. The first and most important of these is I regard a TLR
with its its 2¼-inch
square format as an impoverished person's view camera – not the
machine I've (secretly) wanted ever since I realized the Pacific
Northwest had become my permanent home, but close enough in terms of
120 roll-film's much bigger negative size, and (particularly given
how crippled I'm becoming), a damn sight more portable than even the
smallest view cameras, which utilize the 4x5-inch sheet-film format.
The second fact explains why despite my photojournalistic bias I'm
drawn to larger formats: the truth is I am fascinated by their
heightened ability to explore textures, as in the image above, which
I will probably eventually use in a sandwich, though it seems to me
it could also stand alone, a celebration of the textures I see as yet
another dimension of the vast choreography of being that is Nature.
The third fact is the xenophobic, sometimes violently enforced taboo
on street photography that prevails in these parts often makes the
TLR a better carrying camera than even the smallest 35mm or digital
machine. This is because a TLR is so baroque, so archaic, there is
seldom even a temptation to try for decisive-moment reportage, the
recent nastiness in Wright Park not withstanding. (Someday, just as
the photographic equivalent of an uplifted social finger, I probably
will take pictures of the kids playing in the Sprayground, and if I
do, I'll publish them here – if only to vex the censorious parents.
But I'd do it fast, in 35mm with glass no shorter than 100mm, and
I'd be gone before anyone could react.) Which brings us to my fourth
and final TLR fact, a pure act of confession: that I am reluctant to
admit the depth of my fondness for TLRs because of my contrary and
equally deep loathing for the local Ansel Adams cult, which in
unacknowledged but nevertheless archetypal Ayn Rand fascist
malevolence damns all human-condition photography as “politicization
of art,” hence a waste of film, chemicals and paper. Indeed I have
clashed with the cult's sneering Zone System disciples almost since
the day of my arrival here in 1970, when one of their number
haughtily informed me I should have “pre-visualized” and
“carefully metered” a picture I had shot in Washington D.C.
during the anti-Nixon, anti-Southeast-Asian-War demonstrations
immediately after the massacres at Kent State University and Jackson
State College. “Maybe so,” I said to the Adams Zone sycophant,
“but it's a bit difficult getting an accurate light reading off a
rapidly dissipating cloud of pepper gas.”
LB/30 May 2013
-30-
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