graeme mitchell

This is a portrait of the French Kicks done for an editorial feature. They ‘re a chill and charming bunch. They’re also becoming a prominent prominent feature on the indie scene…deservedly. Give them a listen and hit up their current tour (dates can be found on their myspace page).

Then you’ll be able to say you saw them when.

photo: French Kicks, Brooklyn NY, 2008. © Graeme Mitchell.

Details: shot on location in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn at band member Josh’s apartment.

I’d previously mentioned Brandt’s portrait of Francis Bacon here. But I want revisit Brandt, b/c I think he was one of the most visually creative photographers of the 20th century, certainly one of the greats to come out of England. It’s almost impossible for me to fathom how he took the pictures he took and, for lack of better words, got them to work, at least without losing the idea’s effect within the idea’s requisites, and more specifically how he was able to transform the plurals of form and content into a singular. Although, he was Man Ray’s assistant so… As an example and as the picture-to-really-consider-of-the-day:

photo: Micheldever 1948 ©Bill Brandt

A first edit is a difficult thing to do, approached chock-full of biases and nerves and without any distance from original intentions…so, well, possibilities are often missed. I’d like to say I casually return to contact sheets again after a few months, after a few years, to find what I’d missed, but honestly by then I’m tired of it and done with it and on to more pressing matters, namely, the next piece of film to be exposed.

I recalled this image from the portrait of Benjamin, but didn’t remember noting it, or even scanning it, but last night while backing up files, I saw it and its implicit complications suddenly became interesting. And the only reason I even had a scan of it was b/c Benjamin had seen the contacts and specifically requested it…I’d never have bothered.

Photo: Benjamin Diggles, 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Doing an edit is a series of conflicts, practical and personal and everything between. Despite frowning upon showing my contacts to anyone, I believe the strongest edits are those I’ve done alongside other people, be it a photo ed, my team or just people I trust.

For all the proliferation of the business of art these days it’s a relief and escape this morning to look back to one of the greats of portraiture, August Sander, who taking these portraits during the first half of the last century would have had little to no concern at all with art, but rather his concerns were of a documentation of a scientific sorts, a photographic record of the German people. When I look at these I wonder if he knew how good he was, how original…if he understood even partially the lasting influence he’d have on photographers of the genre to this day. As an aside, in the manners of refinement and dignity (not to mention tonality) they bring to mind Penn for me; a specificity and accuracy is apparent, an intentionality…it’s unlikely, I’d reckon, that there were many happy accident’s in Sander’s making these.

photo: from the series “Man of the Twentieth Century” by August Sander

photo: from the series “Man of the Twentieth Century” by August Sander

photo: from the series “Man of the Twentieth Century” by August Sander

Julian Tulip is a singer+song writer. He’s also brilliant, crazy, and a firm believer in conspiracies.

photo: Julian, 2007. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: Julian, 2007. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: Julian’s House, 2007. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: Julian, 2007. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

photo: Julian, 2007. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

There has never been any reluctance in sharing personal thoughts here; the pathos, the bathos, neither go unnoticed by me…ever. And, yes, I’m aware of perception, acutely, but, well, an old arbiter once spoke to me at a very appropriate time saying, this ain’t no dress rehearsal, and being in agreement with that, why fake coy?

Still, with that even, this particular post is, how should I say…more in earnest than usual.

I approach it wary. Very wary.

It’s about my youngest kid brother, Ian, and his misfortune, his tripping on that unseen and ubiquitous crack in the sidewalk and finding on the other side a rabbit hole to tumble down, to be consumed by… To shambles. To disarray. Know that my heart clamors. My mind grits. B/c even Alice was guilty of curiosity. She sought. She was asking for it. Ian didn’t ask for anything. Ian really just had some terrible awful horrible luck. Moreover, and unfortunately, unlike Alice, Ian isn’t dreaming…

We are all excruciatingly awake.

Wary, very wary.

photo: Ian Mitchell, Dec 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

photo: Ian Mitchell, Dec 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

The reason this is hard for me to talk about is b/c I simply don’t know what to say. There aren’t words for it. Or if there are words they are many; they are a book; they are a treatise; they are probably not mine; no; probably they’re words of poets… And I hate speaking when it’s gratuitous. I hate speaking when I know what I say will not be enough…not nearly enough.

It occurred to me just now that expression is the string of a belief cut into a hundred pieces and then spun into an endless knot of folly.

Or what I might say right now could be laconic and without compassion, perfectly pragmatic and utterly unfair. This is useful, but then what happens and what is said doesn’t matter at all… And things like this should matter. They should be made to matter.

So I’m left stuttering, and people I worry for are left ragged. Like all, they muster what can be mustered, what must be mustered… Still, it breaks my heart on a number of levels, and breaks it thoroughly.

My lips purse. My body purses. My heart purses… I shudder and shrink.

A thousand pieces spun into an endless knot of folly.

Sure, it’s going to work out in the long run. Scott, my other kid brother, reminds me of this, and when necessary, I remind him. Not much is said, never has been, never will be, b/c not much needs to be said. We understand one another. We grimace. We force laughter.

But I think we both have a distinct notion that nothing is laughing back.

photo: Scott Mitchell, Dec 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

photo: Scott Mitchell, Dec 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

So now all I can think to do is to hug my brother, Ian, pat him on the back, and take his portrait before his entire life is turned upside down and before he takes a deep breath to climb his way back out of that rabbit whole.

I envision Sisyphus.

I envision a void, perfect and very very simple. A child can’t see it, or sees past it - I don’t know - but older eyes, squinting, pleading, speak of it, scream into it…what remains is just whispers, infinite pieces spun into an infinite knot of folly…

After all, it is that which is ineffable.

This is all old news. The same stories are yellowing memories and mythologies predating our histories. Ian doesn’t know it, but he is a parable. If he learns this, he will be indestructible. In his shades fading, his outline will grow bolder. Bolder and bolder. He could, I believe, glow… I hope that he molds suffering, and that it doesn’t mold him.

But then these worries and hopes are all feeble, academic garnish, abstract fillings. Because I imagine a fixedness that is inscrutable, a trajectory that is singular…I said that he may be a boulder that we all risk breaking ourselves upon.

So portraits. Ha! All this shit and I bring to the table some platitudes and portraits…and here no less… Hope springs eternal for whatever the antonym of absurdity may be… But I’m growing more skeptical…and I fret as millions have fretted before, pacing those same vast halls, the halls cognition has kept sparse since antiquity.

Even so, I mean to rue nothing. Or am so inclined. And hope the same for my brother, my brothers.

These are portraits of my younger brothers and I.

Keep your chins up little brothers, because this will all roll off someday like a fog off a mirror, and know for now that you’re there whether the mirror reflects you or not.

photo: a picture of me taken by my brothers, Dec 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007

While lighting this portrait Benjamin watched me slump focused over a freshly pulled Polaroid.

You don’t like it, he asked.

It’s not enough, I responded staring at the Polaroid…I mean it’s not human enough.

Well, he said, I’d just like this picture to show how tired I am, how exhausted the last few years have left me.

Exactly, I said.

Two more Polaroids and then we shot these,

Photo: Benjamin Diggles, 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Benjamin Diggles, 2007. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

This is a man named Gordon who I used to stop in and talk with; within the 2 year time frame that I visited with him he transformed from an old eccentric still having one foot in reality to delusional and living in a near entirely fabricated world. I remember a mixture of sadness and fear the last time I stopped in to say hi b/c I saw that he - his sane self, that is - had almost entirely dissipated. That’s when I took this portrait. It was an intense situation, surreal in retrospect.

photo: Gordon at Lewis Motel in Oregon City, 2003. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

As usual this post begins in a bookstore, where I came upon Sally Mann’s beautiful and instantly classic book, Immediate Family. This book and I have crossed paths a number of times before, but up until now while looking at it I’d never thought of Caddy from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Now I can’t seem to separate them. If you know that Faulkner once wrote, to paraphrase, that the entire story of The Sound and the Fury arose from imagining the sight of a girl in dirty underwear climbing a tree, then the parallel may make sense to you too. That Mann and Faulkner’s works are both so intrinsically tied to the South and the gothicism of the South is also an obvious similarity.

Anyway, if you’ve not taken up either of these books, I suggest to.

photo: from Immediate Family (1990), © Sally Mann.

photo: from Immediate Family (1990), © Sally Mann.

On a separate note, it’s well known too that the title of The Sound and the Fury came from the Old Bards, Macbeth. I’ve always adored the passage, which is a soliloquy of Macbeth’s (and also a friendly reminder to read more Shakespeare):

text: Macbeth, Act V, Scene V. By William Shakespeare.

It’s incredible for me to think of Nadar doing this kind of work, taking these kind of portraits, that in sensibility feel so modern, over 150 years ago. I try and imagine him in Paris during the peak of Romanticism, mixing with and photographing the likes of Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, and living during this pique of beauty and aesthetic. Somehow this must come through in his portraits, yes? Maybe in the sense of the theatrical, b/c I’d guess, despite the admirable earnestness of their ideals, the Romantics might have been guilty of theatrics. Just as so many artists are. Regardless, there’s a sense that not only did Nadar know exactly what he was doing, but he also captured a certain spirit of a time and idea - which is something, considering he was working with photography in it’s infantile stages…though I guess the opposite line of thought could be true: that maybe such work is easier borne if uninhibited from the history of what’s come before… It doesn’t really matter. Just see that, as far as portraiture goes, there is a lot to learn from Nadar. (Mind you, I really know nothing about him historically, nor much about photographs history, so…)

photo: Eugene Pelletan, 1855-1859, by Nadar.

photo: Pierrot Laughing, 1855, by Nadar.

To close, the Baudelaire poem, Au Lecteur, or To the Reader:

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.

On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist,
Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds,
And the noble metal of our will
Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.

The Devil holds the strings which move us!
In repugnant things we discover charms;
Every day we descend a step further toward Hell,
Without horror, through gloom that stinks.

Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites
Tortures the breast of an old prostitute,
We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure
That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.

Serried, swarming, like a million maggots,
A legion of Demons carouses in our brains,
And when we breathe, Death, that unseen river,
Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.

If rape, poison, daggers, arson
Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs
The banal canvas of our pitiable lives,
It is because our souls have not enough boldness.

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,
The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,
In the filthy menagerie of our vices,

There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!
Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries,
He would willingly make of the earth a shambles
And, in a yawn, swallow the world;

He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears,
He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.
You know him reader, that refined monster,
— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!

-Charles Baudelaire
Translated by: William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Portraits have been keeping me up at night. You could say I’m obsessed. The thing I want to say is that taking a portrait is easy, so easy, but to take a great portrait - and I mean great - may be one of the most challenging things to do in photography. What is a great portrait? I’ve no idea; there are no rules; I figure it just is. But I don’t want to belabor all of this. So for fun I thought I’d combine two of my favorite things, Literature, or writers rather, and portraits…

First, Joyce by Abbott. The other day I read (I forget where) the perfect description of Joyce, calling him, the Einstein of Literature. Perfect b/c Joyce, like Einstein was a genius: a brilliant, creative mind. When you read Ulysses, you are shared the thoughts of someone who’s ability to think and use language is well beyond normal. And then when you read Finnegan’s Wake, you experience that same thing but you watch it run away from you and normal comprehension. Then you see this portrait, and you see how fragile that genius must have been. Joyce looks like he knows something we all don’t, and that thing he knows is sad…maddening even.

photo: James Joyce by Bernice Abbott, 1926.

Then two from H.C. Bresson. These speak for themselves. The Matisse (not a writer, I know, still…) portrait I think is absolutely wonderful, but, overall what strikes me as interesting about these Bresson portraits is that he was working with a sensibility that is standard convention in todays celebrity portraiture. That is: the fostering of a concept of the person. Yes, the figures Bresson was working with were famous, but it seems to me that Bresson worked to further the ethos of this public persona through his images. The painter with his birds. Camus the, uh, renegade intellectual looking, well, renegadish. Maybe what I’m seeing is obvious, but it strikes me as something I wish to applaud Bresson for: he understood the power of simplification…stereotypes if you will.

photo: Henri Matisse, Vence, France, 1944 by H.C. Bresson.

photo: Albert Camus by H.C. Bresson, 1947.

And of course Avedon… Beckett I suspect was probably one of the hardest people ever to photograph. His hyper-awareness of the situation and all levels of what was happening would probably inhibit him from any sort of action, paralyze him even. You could imagine he was a calculating man, in a good way, in a smart as hell way. Where, on the other hand, you have Pound, who would probably be easier to photograph, to say to least. Though, the fragility of his state of being might break my heart, watching him out on the fringe, precarious.

photo: Samuel Beckett, writer, Paris, April 13, 1979. ©Richard Avedon.

photo: Ezra Pound, Poet, Rutherford, New Jersey, at the home of William Carlos Williams, June 30, 1958. ©Richard Avedon.

And finally, Pynchon. The recluse. This I assume is from a old high school yearbook…?

photo: Thomas Pynchon, source unknown.

Brandt’s portrait of painter Francis Bacon has always left me speechless.

photo: Francis Bacon © Bill Brandt, 1963.

Creative director and friend, Garett C. Stenson.

photo: Garett. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

(After making these pictures, Garett and I were driving to the airport to catch a flight to Vegas for the fashion trade shows, I was quietly thinking over the pictures to myself then I began to explain to Garett how taking a portrait of a friend or family member brings forth circumstances not usually present when photographing strangers. I reasoned that the taking of a portrait is mostly psychological, often violent in a manner, exploitive, a situation where I strive to objectify the person, and that there can be hang-ups when doing this w/ someone you’re close with. Though reaching as an analogy, think of it as trying to have casual sex with a friend…

photo: Garett. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Now, Avedon made a statement once about preferring to shoot people in the studio b/c it reduced them to symbols of themselves. I would take this one step further and say I want to reduce the person to something even more fundamental, into a symbol of something at once more vague and more simple - to transform that person into a parable. Yes, ambitous, but it’s a long term goal…

photo: Garett. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

And it is hard to truncate someone you know intimately, to make an abstraction of them. Or it is for the first roll of film anyway. After that, like on any good day, things become elevated and and just sort of happen, and it becomes an act that is shameless, ruthless, unreasonable, and exhilarating.

photo: Garett. ©Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Anyway…)

This will be part of an ongoing series of portraits to be shared here.

These first are a series of artist, Alex Steckly at his apartment and work space in NE Portland on a Friday morning.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex’s Ashtray. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex’s Plant. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

And with his girlfriend, Laurel, who I realized quickly functions with him in the beautiful and classical sense as a muse.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photo: Alex. © Graeme Mitchell, 2007.

Photographer, Steve Steckly and girlfriend, Michael-Anne.

I enjoy this picture b/c it is a Polaroid, thus making it one of kind, and also b/c it is attributed to neither Steve nor myself. I believe it could only ever be attributed to our collective love of making photographs…indeed, it makes me think of the practice of working for works sake, even if often an abstraction, is wonderful and something to remind one self of from time to time.

photo: shot at Steve Steckly’s studio in Portland, OR. ©Steve Steckly and Graeme Mitchell, 2007.