Would a Street Photographer Go to Chernobyl ?

 

On Valentine’s Day, I received feedback about my last posting on January 25^th where I was using a rocking chair covered in snow on our balcony to discuss some of the comforts even harsh times can bring to us (https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2021/01/show-some-mercy-to-this-chair-which-has.html).

The feedback started with “hm, street photographer is flirting with rocking chair with veil of snow…”

The point is very well taken and it reflects the reality we all face around the globe, namely that people are not in the streets as much, and surely there are no mass events which provide a street photographer with the opportunity to observe and capture human behavior.

Yes, I do miss carrying a couple of old mechanical cameras with me and going out looking for a human story. I have done that around the world for half a century but in the past year I rarely take any camera with me since I know the streets will be empty.

While it chagrins me as a photographer, the past year has be delightful for my dog as he comes with me at every outing and has a great time meeting dogs who, just like mine, seem to be dragging their human counterparts behind them, on a leash!

But when I am driving I have my 1960s leather camera carry bag with me where a 1972 Soviet Salyut-S medium format camera and a 1953 Canon L3 35mm rangefinder camera are at the ready in case the stars come together for a frame or two.

So, after reading the comment on February 14^th, I pulled out a few photos that are taken in the streets but not always of people. Indeed, they are photojournalistic and represent the past year. Specifically they demonstrate that when people vacate the city streets, wild animals come down and roam these streets day and night. Here are examples:

Peccaries at sunset: Around here they are called “wild pigs” but they are not boar. Originally from Latin Americas, peccaries indeed look and get as large as wild pigs. Most importantly they travel in groups and families, and the males can be very aggressive in protecting the group. They have long, spear like canine teeth hence are called javelin/javelina in Latin Americas.

The photo on the top of this page is of javelina crossing our neighborhood street after sunset.

 

Bobcat kittens next to our house: Native of North America, the bobcat (Lynx rufus) is a medium size predator that lives in warmer climates. It is not dangerous to humans but to all other animals of its size or smaller. It is also a very reserved, solitary and nocturnal hunter, but in the past year we have seen a number of predator mammals roam our empty streets. Here are bobcat kittens, delightful as any cat can be. But in a few months they will be looking for small dogs for dinner!

 Mountain lion (Cougar): Now we are talking about big cats! Indeed, an adult cougar can weigh more than 100 kg and attack humans and large animals like deer and elk.  We rarely see or hear about their nocturnal passages from our neighborhoods, but a couple of weeks ago the ground snow left the carte de visite behind our house…  The paw tracks are as large as my hands.

In the SouthWest  and NorthWest U.S, mountain lions pose a real danger to hikers and mountain bikers. Here is a sign from Arizona making that point:

 

Coyote: Of course these are the representatives of the SouthWest desert fauna. They are tricksters, smart, survive practically any environmental change and are accustomed to humans. But they are also very destructive to agricultural stock, dogs and cats, but rarely to humans. One can see coyotes everyday in cities and open desert spaces, but in the past year they grew totally unafraid of humans.

On Christmas day 2020, this one came to take a nap next to our car in the driveway….

 So, what is a street photographer to do when there are no humans in the streets? Of course I am optimistic that there will be open air concerts soon; that folks will ride their bike to shop at open stores; and, that the only four legged mammals we will see in the streets after sunset will be a dog we know or a cat we have seen before.

But till then, here is a perfect image of how few are benefiting from empty streets early in the morning!

And the cropped section shows the delightful resemblance between her body posture and that of the "pedestrian crossing" sign -- during a pandemic pedestrians can cross all streets, at any time!

 

February 20, 2021

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021

Show Some Mercy to this Chair Which Has Stretched Out its Arms to You for So Long; Please Satisfy its Desire to Embrace You! (Molière)

 

It has been a massive storm now covering Northern Arizona’s high country where mountain ranges of the high desert go from 5,000 feet altitude to close to 7,000 feet. Almost 3 feet of snow fell in the past 24 hours transforming the desert topography to Nordic scenery.

I was not sure what to expect so in optimism and anticipation, I loaded my 1970s Soviet Salyut medium format camera with B&W film. Unfortunately the sun has been covered for two days now and, if I carry the 4 pound monster camera outside, the 25 mile/hour winds would fill my old “light box” with snow in a minute!

So, I was watching the storm from a window overlooking the balcony. One of the rocking chairs started to be filled with snow and stopped rocking alone at the wind.

My immediate reaction was that it was a sad chair. Lonesome and cold.

And that, somehow, reminded me of a poem by Jane Hirshfield titled “Chair in Snow” I had read many years ago online. Then, I had thought it was a tangible metaphor most people would identify with except perhaps the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert!

So, I found that poem online⁽¹⁾ and read it again.

 

…“and yet a chair in snow is always sad

 

more than a bed

more than a hat or house

a chair is shaped for just one thing”

 

I stopped for a minute. What was that “one thing” for me?

Clearly a chair is for humans, although cats and dogs often make a chair their own. A chair is shaped in many ways, some inviting like a dulcet bed, others requiring uncomfortable acrobatics to use. But the purpose is often the same – to settle for a moment.

However, not everyone can settle down or in. My favorite summary of this character trait is by André Gide, Nobel Prize 1947:

Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.

And leave he did. He left norms and some literary traditions behind to become the most famous French writer in the 1930s and 40s. In his words:

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.".

So, a chair has to be matched to a person's character. A true character I recall from the sports world, cricket more specifically, was the New Zealander Glenn Turner. He put it simply:

"Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do but it gets you nowhere”

Of course, all Turner thought about while playing cricket was to hit the ball and run between the wickets to make it to the other end without a fielder hitting the wickets with that ball. He did not seem to have been the type to worry too much – just run.

…I looked at the chair again. The storm had dumped (or the wind had moved around) much more snow leaving only half of the rocking chair visible. At this point it seemed that snow was sitting in the chair with a "snow arm" on the left arm of the chair.  It was a strange sight and I took a couple of photos with the Salyut.

Why?

Why would one take a photo of a chair “filled” with snow?

Perhaps because of what Andy Warhol once typically said:

“You would not believe how many people will hang up a picture of an electric chair, especially if it matches the colour of their curtains”

Ha!

So, after my own musing about Hirshfield’s idea as to that one thing a chair is shaped for, I continued reading her poem:

 

… “to hold

a soul its quick and few bendable

hours

 

perhaps a king

 

not to hold snow

not to hold flowers”

 

… My chair was now holding snow, and letting the wind blow parts of it away. The snow made my chair happy; its sadness seemed to fly away with the cold wind.

I thought it was a good thing to happen to a lonesome rocking chair. And it made me smile on this gloomy day. Maybe even made me happy like Albert Einstein suggested:

 

“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?”

Nothing really. Or perhaps a warm blanket for a good night's rest in that chair.

January 25, 2021

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021

 

⁽¹⁾https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/a-chair-in-snow-poem-by-jane-hirshfield/

When a Dog Knows What We Hide from Ourselves

 

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

                  Pablo Neruda

For the past 45 years, I always found myself at the other end of a leash.  The five dogs that walked me every morning during these days were bitches, studs and sires, and every one of them was the master of passing moments.

I am with my last dog now. He is heavy, strong and big. He can drag me into the brush if he sees a deer or a wild pig. Sometimes I think I can ride him like a pony when tired of the daily long miles of walk. But I let him take me home, at his own pace, pulling on the leash.

He is my last dog because I do not see myself with a small dog. I do not see me carry a dog in my lap when going to a restaurant or a store. My dogs have all been strong but careful with their strength. They all snored at night at the end of their lives. Some snored even as a puppy.

I have trusted my dogs to decide first who is friend or foe. They somehow, in a split second, decided who was good for me. And they were never wrong.

… It is a snowy day and he is all joy. All joyful. His large paws, wide open to run in the snow, have already marked all the pristine snow covers of this morning. He will soon get tired and sleep by the fireplace.

He may even snore and not hear the coyotes howling outside.

He is my last dog, and I already know I will not learn how to walk with a leash alone if he goes first.

 

January 23, 2021

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021

The Balcony that Wasn’t – the Pandemic that Still Is

 

A year already – we are still in the grips of the coronavirus at every corner of the world.

Those of us, who will make it through, will be the raconteurs of a time when the planet got confused in the midst of all the advances in medicine and public health. Poets will write words to inspire, journalists stories from here and there, and cinematographers will give free flight to their imagination by patchworking stories till the end of time.

But for each one of us, there will be a special moment we will keep in us till our last breath. Perhaps it is the moment our loved one entered the hospital and never came out again. Perhaps it is how all relationships suddenly became virtual and deprived us of a touch or a kiss. Or perhaps it is how we celebrated the end of 2020, alone or with one other person, reading the pandemic statistics on the TV screen.

Yes, there are a million ways to letting 2020 and the pandemic permanently scar our memories.

… For me, it is the soo Italian behavior in Rome after the mayor Virginia Raggi invited city residents in lockdown to open their windows or step out onto their balconies for a singsong, at 18.00 every evening!

I had tears in my eyes every day following that first “balcony outing” when news from Italy showed the national anthem sang first from windows, balconies and rooftops in a Rome with empty streets and no traffic. There also were violin serenades, opera arias, or the clanging of pots and pans to demonstrate that coronavirus cannot stop the celebration of dolce vita. But that rather it can enhance the national gratitude, as throughout the country, people in windows, upon balconies or on rooftops every evening applauded medical professionals for their fight and dedication.

For me, that is what I will hang on to support my optimism in human nature and collective destiny.

… In many ways, 2020 has been a tug-and-pull between what we want and what the new situation tells us to accept. Namely that what we need to minimize or eliminate is exposure: to the virus and carriers, to unfounded opinions about how we can evade a pandemic, and to our own fears about helplessness.

Interestingly, when I followed the “balcony outings” in Italy a few synapses were made with my previous life as an epidemiologist.  Indeed, I recalled that as a student learning cancer epidemiology, I was most interested in the work of Bernadino Ramazzini who in 1713 identified the risk of breast cancer in women to nulliparity. He reported that women who had no children had higher odds for developing breast cancer than women who were single and nuns. He stated that parity and risk of breast cancer establishes “this marvelous sympathy of the breasts and uterus, those two sources of desire.”

It took almost a century for the Italian surgeon Domenico Rigoni-Stern in 1842 to analyse mortality data from death registers in Verona to confirm Ramazzini’s proposed association between parity and breast cancer, but in the process discovers an inverse relationship between uterine cancer and parity. That is, breast cancer patients had lower odds for uterine cancer i.e., nuns and unmarried women had lower risk of dying from uterine cancer.

If parity (or marriage and children) are the “exposure” that would provide protection against the odds of breast cancer.  But that there may be another cause for uterine cancer – hence the early suggestion of infectious diseases.

For me, the challenge of 2020 was convincing people that there are exposures that can be minimized or eliminated to win the fight against an infectious causative agent. The challenge remains.

My second synaptic cleft in between the balconies of Rome and the pandemic came after thinking about Verona and Domenico Rigoni-Stern. This time it sounded like:

          O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

Strange, no?

Well, the reason why I thought about this has to do with Juliette’s balcony from where these immortal words were spoken.

But now, in the year 2020, this balcony was a symbol of unfounded and untrue “knowledge” that I believed we needed to minimize exposing ourselves to during this pandemic.

Why?

Well, Shakespeare never described a balcony. Rather he wrote that Juliet “appears in a window above”.

Hmm, so why do we think that Juliet was on a balcony? Well, because on via Cappello in Verona, there is a 13^th century house called “Casa di Giulietta”.  And it has a balcony that is not original.

So where did the balcony come from?

This is where Hollywood enters the scene. In 1935, George Cukor initiated the production of the first Romeo and Juliet movie starring Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer in the title roles.  The MGM  scenographers were sent to Verona to design the set for the film.

Well, there was no “Juliet house” in Verona nor her tomb as Shakespeare had described! So, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and minister for press and propaganda, helped MGM recreate a balcony on that 13^th century house in the heart of Verona in 1937.

And that is what people believe Shakespeare wrote.

So, the entire story about the house is untrue – Juliet never lived there! But more importantly, Juliet is a fictional character – she never existed. Shakespeare wrote his famous play based on a 1562 poem entitled” The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet” by the English poet Arthur Brooke, who in turn is said to have been influenced from a tale written by the Italian monk Matteo Bandello in 1554….

There we have it – millions of tourist flock to Verona to visit la Casa di Giulietta and touch the bronze statue of hers in the yard.  Even if it is all fiction and Hollywood!

… It is 2021 already. We do need to believe in Romeos and Juliets because it makes the challenges we have easier to cope with.

But we also need to realize that balconies, even when real, are part of a building.

January 18, 2021

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2021

Piercing the Veil of Time -- The Only Beauty of 2020 to Celebrate

 

This morning the cloud upon the mountain range was like a flat saucer and then a while cloud seemed to jet out of it. It was like a lance; like a bolt as what perhaps Zeus would have thrown from the top of Mount Olympus.

And it was a perfect moment to think about the end of a year when every land of our globe got touched by disease, unknown prognosis, lockdown, shutdown, elimination of socialization with fellow humans, and the wearing of the mask.

Many of these aspects of an epidemic have happened before in human history. But a pandemic in year 2020 when the world travels, when the people believe that they are invincible because man has conquered all infections with a pill or an injection, yes, in that case a pandemic is like that white “Zeus Cloud” I saw this morning.

…. I have always been attracted to the concept of a veil. Because it keeps secrets gracefully, with beauty even. A veil is what separates what we know from what we see. It dissociates our fears but also our trust.  A veil is privacy, like an iron fence can be.

And the pandemic pushed us to wear our masks, not to keep secrets from others but to not share and receive what is dangerous and contagious. Or contagious and dangerous depending if we think of the mask as a veil.

And in the privacy of our isolation, for 10 months now we have found a certain comfort. Even if large numbers of people resist the notion that a mask can be life saving.  In fact we have created virtual masks though our isolation. We may communicate even continue to work through virtual images of ourselves on a screen large or small, but we are not there. Because we are worried.

We are worried that our veil would not protect us anymore from our own secrets. From our own memories. From what we have forgotten once to say; from what we indeed once said.

And in that way, the mask protects us from sharing what we harbor, but the veil protects our time. The time we have stopped and placed behind that very veil.

… This morning I realised that the veil, like that flat saucer–shaped cloud atop the mountain range, is not only harboring and protecting frozen personal time but with the passage each one of us proceeds through, the veil becomes time itself. More, the veil becomes the mask of time. So we do not share what is harbored, through time, with others.

Sometimes even not with ourselves anymore.

So, when I took a photo, I did not think of clouds or Mount Olympus, but of a moment when our isolation within the year 2020 has suddenly pierced the veil of time!

And that is a wonderful way to end such a personal year.

 

December 28, 2020

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020

Like a Drunken Boat – Pandemic, Isolation and the Wisdom of Rimbaud and Baudelaire

 

In my multicultural and multilingual upbringing and education, I have kept a soft spot for languages that allow poetry to flourish. French is one of them, and over decades I have revisited the classics either in time of extreme anxiousness, uncertainty or to recalibrate my compass regarding where my serenity waits for me.

The past year has certainly made me revisit many books in different languages. Isolation seems to provide the ample space for reading and writing.

So, it was a commentary I heard a few days ago that made me think of Arthur Rimbaud, one of the”enfants terribles” of French symbolic poetry. I heard a commentator define 2020 as the year when “countries navigated through the pandemic like a drunken would through the streets of an unknown city.”

Fair enough. So, I went to search for the “Le Bateau Ivre” (Drunken Boat) by Rimbaud.

Rimbaud was a capricious writer. He wrote a few poems, the most remembered entitled “Le Bateau Ivre” was written in 1891. It is a symbolic poem where a boat (bateau) is describing, as a human would do, its travels. It is also about escape, new horizons and discoveries.

As such, a perfect construct for someone in isolation to understand and use for his own mental, emotional or spiritual travels.

And that brings us to another “poèt maudit”, namely Charles Baudelaire who in 1857 wrote a poem entitled “Le Voyage” in his most famous poetry book “Les Fleurs du Mal.” In pure Baudelairian arrogance, he described the “real travelers “/ (vrais voyageurs) as those who travel on the impulse for a journey but without a journey. Just for the sake of adventure. He wrote :

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-là seuls qui partent

Pour partir, cœurs légers, semblables aux ballons, 

De leur fatalité jamais ils ne s'écartent, 

Et, sans savoir pourquoi, disent toujours : Allons !

So, it is spontaneity that counts, even when we may not know why we take on the journey. For after all, it is a futile one. We never learn why we stay, why we go. We just realize that we have to go.

Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat” seems to follow a similar pattern of self discovery.  Here are a few lines from his twenty five lines of alternate-rhymed alexandrines:

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré. Les aubes sont navrantes,

Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer.

L'acre amour m'a gonfle de torpeurs enivrantes.

Oh! que ma quille éclate ! Oh! que j’aille à la mer!

It is the futility of the journey that Rimbaud realises, just as Baudelaire did toward the end of his poem. From my high school days, I still recall these lines, although now I understand them better as my own boat, sober or drunken, has taken most of its journey.

And for my bilingual readers, here is a masterful translation of Rimbaud’s poem by Samuel Beckett. In fact, Beckett titled it “The Drunken Boat” and his translation is more of an interpretation than a literal translation:

But no more tears.

Dawns have broken my heart,

And every moon is torment, every sun bitterness;

I am bloated with the stagnant fumes of acrid loving –

May I split from stem to stern and founder, ah founder!

 

… As I wrote these lines, I recalled a photo I had taken in a small New England town in the North East of the United States. It was of a small boat that was in the middle of a forest…

So, we can ask “How did that boat get there?” but the answer would be simple – because someone dumped it there. Maybe it was taking in water; maybe the engine could not keep up with the journey.

But the real question, the one that Baudelaire and Rimbaud have been faced with would be “Why did that boat get there?”

Maybe one day I will know the answer.

 

December 10, 2020

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020

“It is Forbidden to Spit on Cats in Plague-time.” ― Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947

It was only a question of time before I gave up on all the sensationalism around the world about Covid-19 and decide to re-read, Albert Camus’ La Peste/The Plague. Last time I revisited this book was when I was in Taiwan during the SARS epidemic as the story is about an epidemic where rats die of but still transmitted the bacterium Yersinia pestis via their fleas in a fictionalized Algerian town called Oran. While it is a fictional novel, the science, epidemiology and population’s behavior are factual as Camus had studied all documentation of past plague outbreaks before starting writing La Peste in 1941.

The story is indeed a familiar one. It is a tense co-habitation between science, human attitudes, political posturing, and the eventual impact of the bacterium.  As I read the book, this time in digital medium on the internet, I was mesmerized by a few sentences that had escaped me in the past. For example:

“The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. One the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.”

It almost reads like the opening paragraph of news reports we have seen in the past few months.

The original language, French, is much more to the point on this:

“Le mal qui est dans le monde vient presque toujours de l'ignorance”

How about:

“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in someone's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, and purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.”

Wow. Our globe is still struggling with this. Wearing masks seems to be at the core of Camus’ statement above. But also our attitude about the disease and our responsibility.

“…in a careless moment we breathe in someone's face and fasten the infection on him.”

In an interesting way, this attitude of carelessness, lack of vigilance and perhaps celebrated ignorance reminded me of a photo I tool at The Leopold Museum in Vienna. I never thought of it as the attitude of two people exhibiting the above attitudes. But today it does seem to describe just that.

Finally, there was a line that marvelously encapsulated the situation of populations held prisoner to an epidemic or a pandemic. It does have a profound message of hope and love shadowed by the specter of the unknown and consequent death.

« À Oran comme ailleurs, faute de temps et de réflexion, on est bien obligé de s'aimer sans le savoir. »

This roughly translates as:

« In Oran like anywhere else, short on time and reflection, we are bound to love each other even without knowing it.”

I believe that Camus, in a single sentence, described the generic state of a population during a pandemic.

And that reminded me of another photo, shown at the outset, I took in Prescott, Arizona on a back street of a local bar. There was an anthropology I could not ignore in the posture of those mops. There was acceptance, cleaning of the mess, but also a comfort of being together through the ordeal.

November 29, 2020

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2020