Obama Debate Watch party, Jack’s Valley, Douglas County, Nevada.
October 7, 2008. Photo by Jon Winet

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

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Overhead Projector

Acting partly out of desperation and partly out of hubris, John McCain chose to walk into a fair, refereed fight tonight in Nashville and try to go head-to-head on the issues with Barack Obama. This was a reckless, arrogant, possibly fatal mistake.

Granted, this was supposed to be McCain’s format. He’s done hundreds, maybe thousands of these “town meeting” style appearances, and he feels comfortable in this setting. But from the opening coin toss, Obama had the edge in this one, speaking clearly and convincingly about his new policies and about McCain’s failed ones: “He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked and we need fundamental change.” McCain revealed his one new proposal (to stabilize home values by buying up bad home loans) in his first minute, and his timing was shot from then on. His jokes fell flat and he couldn’t connect with the questioners in the audience, Tom Brokaw, or Barack Obama. To conceal his reluctance to face his opponent and look him in the eye, McCain retreated to his stool after each speech and pretended to write furiously in a notebook. When Obama wasn’t speaking, he sat confidently, looking directly at McCain. Obama was more aggressive here than in the first debate, but he never hit McCain when he was down. And McCain was down a lot.

This debate made it clear that John McCain and the Republicans are in the same position that John Kerry and the Democrats were in 2004. By accepting the basic terms of Obama’s original message of change, all McCain has to offer now is a watered-down version of what his opponent is proposing. If voters can get the real thing with Obama, why should they choose a less vigorous form of it with McCain?

Outside the debate, McCain and Palin have gone negative with a vengeance, recycling the old Reverend Wright and Bill Ayres guilt-by-association smears against Obama. This race- and radical-baiting is an attempt to resuscitate the old Vietnam War era animosities, to energize the base. The trouble for the Republicans is that the people who are going to put Obama over the top if they come out in force next month weren’t even born in 1968. The time has run out on this tactic, and it is rapidly running out on John McCain.

Filed on Tuesday, October 7, 2008, after the second presidential debate, in Nashville, TN.

Tim Davis: Kings of Cyan

Exhibition on view: May 30, 2008 – October 18, 2008

galerie mitterrand + sanz
5, lessingstrasse
zürich

An exhibition of the work of Tim Davis, who’s book My Life in Politics was published by Aperture in 2006, is on view in Zurich, Switzerland. Like the book, this exhibition focuses on Davis’s exploration of political imagery. In this show of political portraiture, he focuses on the remnants of posters of politicians who hold a diverse range of beliefs. With time, the colors on the posters have faded until only the cyan, which typically has the most staying power, remains. Davis explains, “After a few months, these full-color images look like ghosts of themselves…I thought of [this blue] as the blue of disappearance…[The images] may be all surface, but their surfaces —faded, degraded, familiar, scraped away— have something to say.”

David Levi Strauss, Aperture magazine contributing editor, noted writer, and current Chair of MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department, School of Visual Arts, shares his unique perspective on the current political landscape.

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Special Needs: Style & Substance

Two extraordinary things happened last night in St. Louis. First, Sarah Palin showed up for the debate with her A game. She was well prepared and poised, and turned in a sterling performance. After disastrous TV interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, in which she looked like a clueless student in a high school current events class, Palin appeared last night as the formidable politician that so excites John McCain. From her very first words to Joe Biden, “Hey, can I call you Joe?” she was on-message and relentlessly appealing. Deflecting Gwen Ifill’s insightful questions like a goalie at the net, she delivered her prepared remarks like a seasoned professional, peppering her speech with trademark folksy Fargoisms that made it seem like your gutsy, sexy mom had gotten fed up, put on her best black skirt and heels, and come to Washington to kick some ass.

The second and, in light of expectations, even more extraordinary thing that happened last night was that Joe Biden observed this miraculous make-over and brilliant performance, read Palin’s tone and body language, and carefully calibrated his own delivery to perfectly counter it. He treated her with the respect due a dangerous adversary. He listened closely to what she said and responded forcefully, letting the greater substance of what he was saying speak for itself. He did not overreact or become impatient. This was the most disciplined, magnanimous, and moving performance of Biden’s long and storied career.

I think operatives on both sides expected and prepared for a quite different debate, so there were a number of odd juxtapositions, with each candidate responding to something the other hadn’t said. But the Biden team’s strategy was essentially more generous, and was, in the end, able to absorb and subdue Palin’s style, which would have worked much better against, say, Hillary Clinton.

When the Roviacs discovered and deployed Palin, they were returning to the old Reagan playbook, to appeal to the psychopolitical narcissism of some American voters, who want “someone just like them” to lead the most powerful nation on earth. This weird perversion of populism (Pop populism?) helped to get George Bush and Dick Cheney elected. Going back to it now, after eight years of failure and devastation, is a desperate move, and last night, Joe Biden shut it down.
Filed on Friday, October 3, 2008, after the vice-presidential debate in St. Louis.

Photo by Jessica Todd Harper

Artist’s Talk: Jessica Todd Harper

Tuesday, October 7, 2008
6:30 p.m.
Free

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, New York

Join Aperture and the Parsons The New School for Design, as they co-host a discussion with photographer Jessica Todd Harper. This event is part of an ongoing collaborative lecture series between the two institutions. Harper has been the beneficiary of several awards for photographic achievement and has been featured in many publications.  Her work focuses on the private worlds of family and friends and was inspired by her grandmother’s advance into Alzheimer’s. She currently teaches at Swarthmore College and the International Center of Photography. For more details on the event click here.

Melting Ice, Parson’s Swamp Road, March 24. 2007. Photo by Joel Sternfeld

Joel Sternfeld: Oxbow Archive

Exhibition on view: September 6, 2008 – October 4, 2008

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, New York

Tomorrow is the last chance to see the Joel Sternfeld exhibition at Luhring Augustine gallery. The exhibition is comprised of large-scale photographic prints from Sternfeld’s new Oxbow Archive series, which is featured in the current issue of Aperture magazine. The images exhibited both in the show and the magazine document seasonal changes taking place in a nondescript field of Massachusetts. As Aperture contributor Gretel Ehrlich notes in her article on the series, these images not only capture the scenery, but also are symbolic reminders of climate change. Sternfeld describes the field in his images as, “just an ordinary field. Completely unmemorable.” Yet he notes, “no matter how often I come, it’s never enough. There’s so much here. Every minute brings change…the scene is a whole story in itself.”

Backyard of the home where Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor lived in Berkeley, CA. (L-R) Wayne Miller; Joan Miller; John Dixon; Meg Patridge; Dan Dixon; Chrissie Gardner; Rondal Partridge. Photo by Tim Wagner

As part of the ongoing celebration of the 75th anniversary of The New Deal, Dorothea Lange, one of the founders of Aperture magazine and famous for the legendary Migrant Mother, the photograph that sums up the Great Depression, was honored by Fotovision with a garden party on September 21, 2008 at Lange and Paul Taylor’s home in Berkeley. Guest speakers were Dan and John Dixon (sons of Lange and her first husband, Maynard Dixon), photographer Wayne Miller (90, co-curator of the seminal Family of Man show), his muse Joan Miller, Rondal Partridge, (91, photographer, son of Imogen Cunningham, and Lange’s assistant while she worked for the FSA), and Chrissie Gardner (88, Lange’s assistant during her project on the Japanese Internment at the beginning of WWII). Filmmaker and daughter of Ron Partridge, Margaret Partridge, and photographer Ken Light were co-moderators.

The circle of family and friends told stories of Dorothea’s coffee klatches (she made coffee cakes by the dozens), her photos (legendary), and swapped insider gossip about her, like the story of when she was invited to Shirley Burden’s daughter’s wedding, he being one of last of the Vanderbilts and a major photo supporter for Aperture and MoMA. Dorothea reportedly wore a $12.50 Montgomery Wards dress but glowed, even when sitting between Fred Astaire and Nat King Cole, who talked over her head the whole evening. Shirley had asked her to be the wedding photographer, and though she declined, she took photographs of the occasion which she sent to him later.

Dorothea was famously social and held a party for Edward Steichen while he was curating the Family of Man exhibit in 1955. She invited all the important west-coast photographers so that he would not leave them out of the exhibit and, as a result of her efforts, that landmark show had works by Lange, Ansel Adams, Ruth Marion Baruch, Shirley Burden, John Collier, Matt Farbman, Consuelo Kanaga, Otto Hegel, Wayne Miller, Homer Page, Ron Partridge, and Edward Weston.

Click below to see additional photos from the party.

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