I. INTRODUCTION
This is the first in a series of essays paired with specific photo galleries. As a rule, the essays are about the process of capitalist place formation. Each one examines an actually existing place using the theory and concepts that are presented in "Place" and "Capitalism."
This essay breaks the rule. Here, I want to tell you a personal story about how Framing Capitalism in Place came to be. Two stories, really: one is about the death of my parents (that's them in the photo above) and the other is about my on-again, off-on affair with photography (also in the photo above).
In sharing these stories with you, I violate one of the cardinal rules taught to every practitioner of documentary photography: Never reveal your active presence in the creative process. It's not about you, it's about the work. Let the pictures do the talking.
I am sympathetic with this position―up to a point. That point comes when the reluctance of the photographer to explain how and why the pictures were taken deprives viewers of an opportunity to engage critically with the work.
I'm reminded of the scene in the The Wizard of Oz, where Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal that the ruler of the Emerald City, the "great and powerful Oz," is nothing but a snake-oil salesman from Kansas. Caught red-handed, the unmasked wizard tries to cover his tracks with one final blast of false bravado, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" When this doesn't work and his outraged petitioners accuse him of being a phony, the wizard finally comes clean.
In doing so, the imposter discovers that he actually does possess a magical power. The wizard has the power to show the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and Dorothy that what they are searching for―courage, brains, a heart and a return ticket to Kansas respectively―is within their grasp if only they would take a peak inside themselves.
We can learn from the wizard. Once the documentary photographer steps out from behind the curtain to address the audience not as an oracle but as a fellow human being who happens to share with them a curiosity about the world and how it works, the door is open for a genuine exchange of ideas.
Things don't always turn out this way, of course. Forty years of classroom teaching taught me that much. But when the lecture turns into a conversation, it's like magic.
II. DEATH
It was October 2019. My wife Allyson and I had retired the previous year after long careers in teaching. What better way to celebrate our rebirth as state pensioners than a trip to Italy? Back in the Eighties as childless newlyweds, we spent a glorious week in Rome and Florence. Loved every minute of it. Reminiscing about that vacation and how impossibly young we were, tallying up all the things that had changed and changed us during our nearly forty years together—well, Italy beckoned almost like a homecoming party. Our son had tied the knot in August. Our new daughter-in-law checked off all the boxes. We were empty nesters. Time to pack up and go. Ciao!
But there were other, less joyful reasons for wanting to get away. Both of my parents had just died after a seven-year holding pattern in a pair of nursing homes, the last one in Los Angeles, the city where my father and I were born. (My mother and her kin come from New Orleans.) Dad died in August 2019, Mom three weeks later. Two sputtering candles extinguished by a whisper.
The photo was taken twelve years before their deaths. It's reading time at the dining room table. Dad has his signature cup of black coffee. Mom is keeping her ever-watchful eye on the world that revolved around her husband.
They seemed to have been dying for as long as I could remember. The first signs of Mom's descent into Alzheimer’s appeared not long after I took the picture you see here. I wonder now if she could read what she is looking at so intently or if she is just content to share a quiet moment with her husband and son. Once ensconced in the nursing home, she rapidly lost the ability to walk and speak, feed and clean herself. A "vegetable" by the end, to put it bluntly. An angel brigade of underpaid women from Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines cared for her.
Dad was strong, alert and still practicing his specialty of dermatopathology when he decided to put her in a nursing home. This was in 2013. He sold their house and practically everything in it. Then my impulsive father, who was quite the fashion plate in his day, emptied out his closet and chest of drawers. Tossed the whole wardrobe into a dumpster, right down to his last pair of socks and his eye-popping collection of bikini underwear (another signature accessory of the old man). When my parents left the last house they would ever own, on Fire Mountain in Oceanside, California, they didn't take much more than the clothes on their backs.
If it had been anyone else, I would have chalked up this behavior to shock and grief. After all, here was a guy beginning the process of saying "Adiós, mi amor," to his companion of sixty-eight years. But there was a method to the madness. Dad subscribed to the doctrine that the best way of dealing with life's ups and downs was to make a decision and never, ever look back. As a kid growing up, I had watched him make clean breaks of this sort many times.
When I was old enough to see my parents not as abstract forces of nature but as two flesh-and-blood people doing the best they could, I attributed Dad's no-bullshit philosophy of life to his historical moment: he was a child of the Depression, a World War II Navy vet, a beneficiary of the postwar "Golden Age" of capitalism which seemed to create endless opportunities for self-invention in the sprawling white Southern California suburbs where he started his family and I grew up.
It was my brother Mike who phoned to tell me about the clothes in the dumpster. I don't remember being overly concerned. The old man's okay, I thought to myself. He just needs time and space to adjust to the new reality.
As part of this adjustment, Dad did something that still causes me to sit up straight at the thought of how badly I had underestimated him. It turned out that he wasn't yet ready to live without his wife, nor would he ever be. Dad found a nearby memory-care facility with an available two-bedroom apartment. The management had no objection to collecting double rent from an Alzheimer patient and her high-functioning, eighty-six-year old soul mate.
Dad moved into memory-care with Mom.
Surrounded on all sides by cognitive decay and disrepair, and separated from the outside world by a heavy door that locked automatically to keep patients like my mother from wandering off, Dad soldiered on. He set up his computer and microscope on a desk in his bedroom, and operated his medical practice from there.
The car keys were his best friend. Every other Saturday, Dad fired up his Toyota and drove from Oceanside to his former clinic in Palm Desert to read slides for his colleagues performing Mohs surgery. Two hours there, two hours back. A brutal commute, even for an alert and cautious driver. But alert and cautious were the last words anyone would use to describe my father when he got behind the wheel. This hearing-impaired octogenarian was never happier than when he was playing Puccini's La Bohème at full blast on the car stereo while belting out "Che gelida manina" in his best Italian. With Dad at the helm, the Toyota was a bel canto missile streaking across the hills, shrublands and desert wastes of his beloved Southern California.
We tried to convince him to surrender the car keys. Not a chance. Each time I came out to see my parents, the Toyota sported a new coat of dents, scratches and dangling sideview mirrors. It started looking more and more like cut-up heavyweight Jerry Quarry after his 1970 fight with the then Cassius Clay.
But that was my old man. Speed demon. Opera lover. Hardhead. Healer.
Four years later came the massive stroke that grounded Dad for good. He now joined his wife on the receiving end of the healing arts. No more reading slides or running errands to get adult diapers for Mom. No more daily workouts at his gym. No more morning walks on Carlsbad Beach. No more quiet time sitting on his favorite park bench which offered panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean. On that bench, he seemed truly at peace with himself, a copy of the LA Times in one hand and a cup of bad coffee in the other, both courtesy of the local 7-Eleven on Carlsbad Drive.
The two love birds now shared a perch in a skilled-nursing ward, nested in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains. The facility was located in Eagle Rock, not far from downtown LA, where Barack Obama went to college. My folks had identical hospital beds set a few feet apart.
Mom had no idea where she was, as best I could tell. (I said she was a vegetable, but how can you know for sure?) As for Dad, he was often in panic mode after the stroke, thinking he had misplaced his wife somewhere, on a street corner he vaguely remembered or in the booth of one of their favorite restaurants.
“Where’s your mother? I can’t find her.”
“She’s right here, Dad, in the next bed. She’s fine. Don’t worry.”
That’s the way things were at the end. “Mush brain” is how my father sometimes described his crippled mental state. In these lucid moments, which seemed to come from out of nowhere, his black Irish humor flashed its teeth.
I have three brothers who live in California, two in LA and one in the Bay area. We divided up the job of monitoring our parents during their final days. Brother Mark was on point. Brother Dan was on call in case of an emergency. Brother Mike continued to oversee our parents' financial and legal affairs. After the stroke, I did my bit by catching a flight from Atlanta to LA every other month. My home away from home was a Comfort Inn on Colorado Boulevard, close to the nursing home. I'd spend a week powwowing with the brothers and visiting my parents. Visiting is a euphemism. Holding vigil is more like it. The angels fed Mom; I fed Dad.
Their bodies were cremated and their ashes entombed in a cemetery wall at San Luis Rey de Francia, one of the original Spanish missions in California. (I come from a family of recovering Catholics on both the LA and New Orleans sides.) San Luis Rey is a lovely spot located a few miles from my parents' last home. It is also an active community of Franciscan friars. The church and grounds are seeded with San Damiano crosses in honor of the order's founder, St. Francis of Assisi. Everyone's favorite saint. I'm looking at one such cross right now. It hangs in my home study. I purchased it at the mission gift shop on my most recent visit. Not sure when, or if, I'll return. Allyson says, "No ifs. You'll be back."
(FIY, Allyson and I made the pilgrimage a year after I wrote the words above.)
When parents die, they leave behind children to grieve. At least that's how it is supposed to be. This grieving son found himself thinking about Italy glowing with light and life, which seemed to be about as far away from Alzheimer’s, mush brain, hospice care, cremation, and cemeteries as a person could get. That’s why I was so hell-bent on getting there.
III. PHOTOGRAPHY
Years before my parents died, photography leached its way into my blood stream. While I have never turned water into wine or raised the dead, I'm pretty sure that shooting film is the next best thing to performing a miracle. The image slowly comes to life in the developing tray under the red glow of the safety light. Pure magic. I did not want to shoot the kind of pretty pictures that make Ansel Adams so popular on the nature calendar circuit or the performance pieces that put Cindy Sherman on the postmodern map. My heroes were Eugène Atget, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gary Winogrand and André Kertész, the masters of street and documentary photography.
Let me pause a moment to explain what I take to be the differences between these two approaches to picture-making. Street photography is set in the "street," defined as any public space, usually outdoors, where people gather, interact, perform. It aims to capture, in Cartier-Bresson's words, the "decisive moment" when the built environment and the social life contained therein chime together. It pays tribute to the single magical image that succeeds in catching the mystery and beauty of human bodies frozen in a never-to-be-repeated moment. And it seeks to evoke a palpable sense of playfulness, irony, humor, weirdness.
Documentary photography, on the other hand, has no self-imposed limits in terms of setting. What matters most is that the subject being photographed contributes to the story being told. This does not require the direct presence of human beings; landscape and still life are perfectly acceptable if they advance the story line. Rather than enshrining the singular image or decisive moment as expressive of some larger whole, documentary photography strings together a series of images, each one building upon the others, to tell a story against a specific spatial and temporal backdrop. And it tends to embed the narrative at the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum, projecting either fiery moral indignation or cool analytical detachment.
Both approaches appealed to me, street photography for its attention to visual surprise and psychological spontaneity, documentary photography for its attention to narrative coherence and historical context. But if I had to make a choice, I'd go with documentary photography.
I was trained as a historian, so I worked with documents all the time. Historians subject documents to close textual analysis, put them in context and use them to construct arguments about the past. But documentary photography has an extra bonus: it creates documents in the here and now. The world opened up to me in a new way when I began to look at it through the lens of a camera. Suddenly, everything I saw crackled with meaning and significance and beauty. Before me lay a world of pictures begging to be taken, documents waiting to be created.
Before long, I was toting around a heavy bag of photographic equipment. Cameras of all formats, lenses of all lengths and enough film to keep me shooting for a long time. I built a darkroom in my basement, spent hours and hours processing film and making silver gelatin prints. I was convinced that however fickle my other interests might be, my love for photography would be forever true.
The course of true love never did run smooth, to quote the Bard.
I stopped taking pictures sometime around 2015. Why? Partly because documentary photography is a very physical enterprise, hard on the back, knees and ankles. I had to lug around a lot of heavy equipment, to say nothing of standing on a concrete floor day after day, bent over developing trays. This brought me face to face with something I preferred not to think about: I was no longer a young man. I decided to take a temporary break and give my weary bones a rest.
Temporary turned into four or five years. With the benefit of hindsight, I think I now understand why my affair with photography ran cold. The aches and pains of old age weren’t the real reason I shut down the darkroom and put my cameras in storage. I had spent nearly a decade photographing Atlanta's housing crisis and the ferocious war being waged against the city's largest homeless shelter. During most of that time I served on the board of directors that operated the shelter. We fought hard to keep it open. We lost. You'll learn more about this in the next gallery and essay, "Surplussed Atlanta."
People process death and defeat in different ways. I processed them by disengaging.
Was I depressed? Maybe so.
When I disembarked at Rome International Airport on October 12, 2019, I did so without a camera. But I arrived with something even better. I should say two things: Allyson and her smartphone. I can remember being appalled when she bought it. High-tech was verboten for me. My old flip phone was just fine. Above all, no digital photography. I rolled old school, black-and-white film and nothing else. A dinosaur and proud of it.
It took the crystalline air and golden light and street carnival of Italy to bring the dinosaur into the twenty-first century. If our vacation had one hiccup, it was the tug of war over Allyson's phone. I essentially commandeered it in order to make images unlike any I had ever made before. When I was doing photography back home, my cameras kept getting bigger and bigger as I moved from 35 millimeter to 6x7 medium format and finally to large format. By the end, I was armed with a 4x5 Speed Graphic manufactured in the 1950s. I was the spitting image of Weegee.
Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with these terms: the point is that my bulky gear screamed out to anyone who saw me approaching, “Watch your step. Here comes a pain-in-the-ass photographer.” While some people were curious about cameras that reminded them of something their grandpas might have used, most turned on their heels and headed the other way. Not a few hotheads got up in my grill. Such are the occupational hazards of large-format, documentary photography.
What freedom and weightlessness, that smartphone! I could get as close as I wanted to any subject. No worries about inciting a riot or getting a beatdown. It wasn’t that people wanted me to take their pictures. They seemed completely oblivious to my presence, so busy were they snapping selfies with their own smartphones. Digital technology, as I came to see, was a boon to both the craft of photography and the culture of narcissism.
In Italy, I put aside my documentary inclinations and became a street photographer, not for some deep philosophical, political or aesthetic reason, but because jumping back into the crowd and feeling the human energy around me felt good. Just what the doctor ordered.
I've come to the point in this essay where you might expect me to say something specific about the photos and how they relate to the process of capitalist place formation. The truth is I don't have anything to say here about capitalism or place. These are not documentary photographs of the sort that will bulk large in the galleries to come. If they document anything at all, it is the state of my mind in October 2019, when I was looking to make a fresh start.
Italy was my fresh start. It put me on the road to Framing Capitalism in Place.