Notes From Nowhere

Christie’s has its big photography week with works from the Miller-Plummer Collection, and “The American Landscape: Color Photographs from the Collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman.” And more. With the auctions due later in the week, most of the work has been on display since Saturday. If you are in town, I strongly recommend to go and see it. The American Landscapes are nice, too much so almost. There’s much alikeness, and a romantic desire to please the eye. So much of it in the same place, and you feel (with some nostalgia perhaps) that the 1950s/60s/70s were an era when ‘America’ could be captured in perfect type, cool car design, and the ideal mix of pastels and straightforward color. The glorious, sometimes whimsical past of color photography! But if you want to see a lot of Eggleston, Shore, etc., hanging side by side, you must go. Sally Mann I never understood, to me this is the lowest form of 1980ies kitsch (lowest because of the pretense); but it’s there too.

So which one would I buy? I would not buy “Madrid, 1933” by HCB, but I think it’s a masterpiece, albeit in the dead language of the ‘decisive moment.’ I would buy an ingenious, timeless piece by Ray Metzker (“Ray Metzker, Untitled, 1983-1984, 14 gelatin silver contact strip composite, signed and numbered ‘5/20’, 30 x 13 3/8 inches”). There is no point in following the link (here) to Christie’s abysmal website, even the zoomed in version does not translate at all. The detail is most intriguing, you can look for a long time, and the longer you look, the more you see. And with the all-too-rare sensation that not just the work, but this kind of visual experience is quite unique. You have to go and see the thing in the flesh.

On a trip to France, when I was 14, I remember the sink of estrangement when, in an extended gathering of my host-family, I was meant to greet each of the members of the party––a group of some forty or so. Now as we know, personal greetings in France take the form of a two-time brushing of cheeks––three and sometimes four with regional variation––or in case the parties are men, a sober shaking of hands. So strange to me, and so embarrassing, was this clamour of kissing that I found myself refusing when it came time to leave. I would not make the rounds again, I waited outside.

At that time I learnt that personal greetings in France extend to class-mates and peer-groups (I am supposing henceforth from an eligible age). What happens when class-mates, as is frequent at a certain age, find themselves in the midst of a feud? Is feuding cause for exemption? Or are French habits of greeting so inexorable that cheeks must be brushed lest the heavens fall?

Greetings in Paris follow an inexorable plan, albeit with contextual variation. In small shops, for example, there is always the same pattern, though it is uttered with seeming sincerity to each on every occasion. Sincerity is sounded at once in the tenor of ‘Madame’ or ‘Monsieur,’ a different intonation for everyone standing in line––seeming acknowledgement of our particularity. While that may be the rationale, shopkeepers sustain themselves in greetings all day by setting these to a kind of song, and that you are this Madame and not that is a function of where you fall in a phrase (and of course there are repetitions).