in the stream of consciousness: the truth is just a plain picture
“Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of, of, let’s say a tramp vomiting man into the sewer you know? And then and uh, next door to the picture you know, is Mr. Rockerfeller or you know, Mr. C.W. Jones on a subway going to work, uh you know, any kind of picture. Just make some collage of pictures which they don’t do, there’s no ideas in TIME Magazine.” BOB DYLAN, “DON’T LOOK BACK”
In “Don’t Look Back,” D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal rock documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 English tour, Dylan goes on a vitriolic rant about the nature of media. His incendiary explosion of ideas contains the very seeds of his stream-of-consciousness, and the scene, playing out at an unusually long seven minutes, is what many remember most about the film. His sharp retort to TIME magazine’s Horace Freeland Judson reflects the seismic cultural changes that were at play in the 60’s but which had already begun in the 50’s. And it was this inevitable shift that ushered in the voices of cinema verité masters like Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers and also the daring and unprecedented work of photographers like William Klein, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand. Dylan’s proclamation put a fine point on what was becoming a new truth: that the most interesting new work felt uncontrived and undisciplined; it answered to no master and was very much an act of spontaneous intuition.
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I. “You see what you see.” HELEN LEVITT
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In 1945, a woman made a short documentary called “In the Street” which was finally released in 1952. It was an early expression of cinema verité, long before the phrase was coined. Helen Levitt, sounding as flip as Dylan, described her photography as follows: “People say, ‘What does this or that mean?’ And I don’t have a good answer for them. You see what you see.”[1] It sounds simple enough; Levitt doesn’t care to interpret her work, because so much of her impulse was instinctive. “Levitt’s street resembles the unconscious, a dense system of half-buried wishes mingled with half-forgotten memories… Everything in the frame belongs to the picture; as in the unconscious, nothing is lost, nothing without point, no signal that is not a clue.” [2] This quote from “Seeing What You See,” Alan Trachtenberg’s essay on Levitt, equally describes the work of all the photographers I will discuss here.
Levitt was well ahead of her time. Viewed now, her work feels as spontaneous as it did when she shot it. Her technique of blending into the environment — she used a right angle viewfinder (the winkelsucher) which allowed her to shoot people without actually pointing her camera at them — assured her of capturing the most honest and unguarded moments. “In the Street,” filmed in Spanish Harlem, is a poetic document: a love letter to New York City. It opens with this:
“In the streets of the poor quarters of great cities are, above all, a theater and a battleground. There, unaware and unnoticed, every human being is a poet, a masker, a warrier, a dancer: and in his innocent artistry he projects, against the turmoil of the street, an image of human existence.”
The film foreshadows the cinema verité aesthetic in its handheld camera use, and grainy black and white stock that feels similar to the look of “Don’t Look Back.” Pennebaker might have been seeking a somewhat objective story in following Dylan on tour, but I would argue that like Levitt, whose purpose was to visualize her own stream-of-consciousness and reflect that upon her subjects, he was essentially doing the same thing. While Levitt’s off-the-cuff technique has the appearance of being objective, it masks — just enough — her subjective impulse. And it is this subjectivity that became common in the mid 50’s, starting with William Klein and Robert Frank. The construction of “In the Street” feels casual, like a collection of snapshots assembled together as a collage, but there is great serendipity in how these images work together, primarily because the film focuses on people and how they play off each other in their encounters, whether with each other, their pets, or in particular, children. At one point, an impeccably dressed brunette strides through the neighborhood. Like a tangential shift in a piece of music, she creates a brief but exquisite counterpoint to the action.
In the language of cinema verité filmmaking, Levitt and Loeb (her collaborator) “allow their subjects ‘to play out’ their emotions, without directorial intervention, thus ideally allowing for the documentation of ‘life as it is’.”[3] Yet “life as it is” is still a construct — in the end — of Levitt’s imagination, and very exquisite one. Levitt’s career reached into the 1970’s, when her first foray into color placed her street photography in a more radical context, alongside New York City’s other documentarians like Winogrand and Klein. Shot with slide film, they are gritty photographs, yet warm and humane, a typical expression of Levitt’s character. While many consider her black and white work to be her career high point, her color work is outstanding. Her storytelling conceits are a reflection of turbulent recession years in New York City, when the streets were once again as rough as they were in the 1940’s when she shot “In the Street” in Spanish Harlem.
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II. “Anybody who pretends to be objective isn’t realistic.” WILLIAM KLEIN
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While Helen Levitt’s books — in particular “A Way of Seeing” and “Crosstown” — are excellent compilations of her street photography, there is no chronicle of New York City quite like William Klein’s “Life is Good & Good For You in New York” (now commonly titled “New York 1954–55”). The original title was an ode to the times: a verbal hopscotch of beat poetry and jazz: the chatter of new bohemians bent on creating challenging new work. The counterculture was awakening and it was only 1956. Photographer Minor White’s review of Klein’s book (published in Image Magazine, Journal of Photography of the George Eastman House, September, 1957) riffs its own poetry:
“Raucous is the word for William Klein’s New York. Sensational in the worst sense of that word; still after the cacophonous din gets out of your eyes, the pictures resemble memories of what one has seen in the big, bad city. And after one stops feeling sorry for the poor scientists who slave, sweat, and die to make photographic materials that yield continuous tone, beautiful continuous tone, the book begins to look exciting. It may even be truthful in a narrow vein… There is no point selecting a few favorites; if one does one misses the violence of contrasts. If one stops to decide which pictures are good and which bad, the turmoil of pulsating life is not experienced. And if that is lost, the rest is nothing.” [4]
“New York 1954–55” bursts with the energy of the street. It is raw, cacophonous, haywire; it slaps you awake and throws you down on the floor. It is as if the book cannot contain any of these photographs, full-bleed, cheek-by-jowl. Page after page, images slam together with an aggressive energy that feels chaotic but is in fact, thoughtfully assembled. Klein called this his “dada blast,” a reaction to the sort of photobooks he found “inviolate, academic, boring.”[5] It should come as no surprise that people didn’t understand it when it first appeared. Like Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” Klein couldn’t find a U.S. publisher. Both books were initially published in France, “New York 1954–55” not finding a U.S publisher for several decades. Such was the squeamish, regressive culture of the U.S. But the wave of new countercultural ideas was gaining momentum. Adventurous photographers of the era were skeptical of the old ways, in particular, the LIFE magazine aesthetic — one that held steadfast to the template of descriptive text with photographs, leaving no room for interpretation. The ambiguous photo story lay in wait, and it would soon become the persuasive one.
Like Levitt’s chance visual combinations in “In the Street,” Klein’s “New York 1954–55” has a visual sensibility that is just as poetic, only savagely so. He was only 26 when he tore through the streets of New York in three short months. “I went to town and photographed non-stop, with literally, a vengeance… I saw the book as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, over-inked, brutal layout, bullhorn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get.”[6] Given Klein’s personality, it is easy to imagine his energy unleashed upon the city, as he searched out — and easily found — throwaway episodes. They are now ingrained in our imaginations as classic New York moments, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who continues to look for contemporary versions of them on every trip to the city, (not much chance of finding a midget being hoisted in the air by his buddies in Little Italy these days… or is there?) but then nobody will be able to capture New York and its primal energy quite like Klein. His photos made his heart race. And ours.
Martin Parr explains this notion of stream-of-conscious photography in his indispensable “The Photobook: A History Volume 1.” He describes it as “the visual equivalent of the stream-of-consciousness writing of the 1950s American ‘Beat’ writers such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. It is a quality that runs through much 1950s American art — bebop jazz, the ‘action painting’ of Jackson Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues, method acting, hand-held movie making, improvised performance art.” [7]
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III. “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” ROBERT FRANK
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Where does one begin in any discussion of Robert Frank? His work and influence is the pivot point around which most other 20th century photography arcs. Before him, one thinks of the empathetic FSA social documentarians: most famously Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White, and Walker Evans. After him, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and countless others have paid him their respects. Picking up a camera to document the world around you in an intuitive and spontaneous way is basically a declaration of love and a longing to channel Frank. The subconscious impulse behind his technique involved posing questions that couldn’t be answered, and disputing the status quo. The result was an ambiguous narrative, an act of the personal being thrown out into the world to be grasped by the collective. Frank’s methodology was the playbook of the counterculture and we will see it being used time and again throughout the work of photographers in the latter half of the 20th century.
He was the right man at the right time to document his vision of “The Americans,” a book with a simple title but a freighted premise. On his Beat-style road trips across the country during 1955–56, Frank, with his outsider’s eye, was able to comprehend with his camera what most Americans took for granted and were blinded by. When his book was released in the U.S. in 1959, a year after its French publication, it felt like a needle tapping into the collective nerve, and people didn’t want to like it or understand it, a typical response. Those that did get it were part of the counterculture, and they were the ones who were choking on the platitudes that ran through LIFE magazine photo essays.
One of the great pleasures of any vintage photobook lies in the written introduction: James Agee’s for Helen Levitt’s “A Way of Seeing” is prosaic; Klein’s for “New York” is loudmouth and cocksure; Kerouac’s for “The Americans” is pure beat prose:
“What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind.” [8]
Like Klein and Levitt before him, Frank’s method of shooting was intuitive, reflective and often, only a single frame was taken (famously, so it is said, of “Trolley–New Orleans”). At a time when Americans were turning escapist, when they couldn’t reconcile their idealistic notions of a country that was, by the late 1950’s, slipping far from its notions of moral superiority (sounds eerily familiar), Frank defiantly held a mirror up to what was really going down. While his melancholy document was a highly personal evocation of the state of the country, his stream-of-consciousness essay has become the most important photobook of all time, and like Kerouac’s “On the Road”, is another “art talisman.” One cannot look at it now and not see a prescient document of an America in a state of cognitive disconnect, on the cusp of becoming another, less hyperbolic version of itself. The book was also a harbinger of the design of future photobooks, where images are presented ambiguously, leaving the viewer space to intuit their eloquence. And like all great poetry, we can’t help but return to “The Americans” again and again. Definitely more than twice, Mr. Frank.
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IV. “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.” GARRY WINOGRAND
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It’s strange to find one of Garry Winogrand’s early photographs (a man lifting his girlfriend out of the water, Coney Island, New York, 1952) making an appearance in “The Family of Man.” As his career trajectory ascended, he made no secret that it was this kind of literal storytelling that really got his Bronx knickers in a twist. It represented a world of platitudes, much like the magazines he felt stuck working for during the 1950’s. The empires of LIFE and LOOK magazines was great for cash, but like many photographers in his circle, he grew restive at the thought of cranking out one more feel-good story. If he strayed from the script, he was chastised by his editors. Photographic stories were often storyboarded by the magazines, and many of Winogrand’s best shots were omitted, in service of a play-it-safe script.
When John Szarkowski replaced Edward Steichen as the director of MOMA’s Photography department in 1962, he renounced the heroic claims made by the FSA photographers in his mission “that the most important aspect of a picture was not the thing it described, which had no absolute meaning, but how that thing was subjectively presented… He championed photographs that, though they seemed a clear glass through which one saw the world plain, were in fact a magical glass, which tinted the world with the knowledge, questions, and heart of the person who made it.”[9] Banished forever were Steichen’s “Family of Man” sentimental tropes and what Szarkowski called its “maudlin humanism close to kitsch (which) was the earth from which Steichen’s show grew.”[10] Winogrand was embraced by Szarkowski, beginning with the MOMA show “Five Unrelated Photographers” in 1963, a title that sounds very Ed Ruscha in its deadpan simplicity, and followed by the “New Documents” retrospective in 1967, where his work was shown alongside Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander.
Winogrand was no exception to the notion that “adventurous photographers (tended) to be less interested in what they already knew than in what they might discover… that photographs might leave open the questions they were expected to answer; that they might be more precious for how they saw the world than for what they showed.” [11] While he was interested in specific subject matter (beautiful women, middle-aged men, children, animals) his expression of that subject matter was very germane to his idiosyncratic voice. His Manhattan is slightly more restrained than Klein’s, but no less arresting. He focused on the area between 34th and 96th streets, and within those large parameters — in Winogrand’s world — anything could happen. An interracial couple strolls with their two monkeys in Central Park; a young woman walks towards us, suitcases in hand, head lowered in her own private world, lost in thought as she leaves or enters the city; an Upper East Side couple strolls down 5th avenue, in great spirits, the husband looking outrageously pleased with himself. Winogrand lets us wonder about context, like Frank before him. One gets the sense that he documented Manhattan at the perfect time: his late 50’s early 60’s shots show the city in a very prosperous mood and the shots all but scream “Mad Men” era in the inhabitants’ personal style and attitude. When he returned to shoot a down and out New York in the 70’s, his camera was met with suspicious glares and hostility. These shots pale in comparison to his earlier work. Helen Levitt was having much more luck prowling the streets of her 70’s New York than Winogrand. Perhaps her cloak of invisibility was much more effective than his more “in yo face” style, as befitted a Bronx boy.
In his heyday, he carries us along by a New York whose streets unfold endlessly and rhythmically. “New York was for Winogrand a vast, demotic theater where dramas large and small, staged and spontaneous, comic and tragic were continually being enacted and where infinitesimal events grew large with uncertain but urgent meaning.”[12] The narrative content may be slight, but that is his intention, privileging free investigation over context. In the words of John Szarkowski, the FSA photographers had aimed to show “what was wrong with the world, and persuade their fellows to change it” while Winogrand and his contemporaries wanted “not to reform life but to know it.”[13]
My favorite Winogrand photograph is of an overfed middle-aged yeoman staring uncomprending at what can only be the Beatles, somewhere to the right of Winogrand, while a screaming hoard of teenage girls cheer frantically behind him. Leave it to Winogrand to focus his lens on this character instead of The Beatles as they enter the Warwick Hotel. We should be glad he did. This photo encapsulates another decisive moment in America’s great pop-cultural shift. Imagine in the yeoman’s place an out-of-touch Don Draper, forever left behind, sinking into his Eames chair with an Old Fashioned on the rocks and little else to console him. Here is Winogrand sharing the contempt of the young for the lies they have been told, the very same code Dylan cracks in “Don’t Look Back:”
“Okay you hear it, see it, and it’s gunna happen fast and your not gunna get it all, and you might even hear the wrong words. You know? And then afterwards… See I’m… I won’t be able to talk to you afterwards, I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write, I mean I just write them, I’m not gunna say anything about them, I don’t write them for any reason, there’s no great message. If you wanna tell people that go ahead and tell them, but I’m not gunna have to answer to it. And they’re just gunna think ‘well what is this TIME magazine telling us.’ But you couldn’t care less about that either, you don’t know the people that read you.” BOB DYLAN, “DON’T LOOK BACK”
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V. “Without ever saying or doing anything (Dylan) would create scenes. As if just for his own interest, that I knew would be film scenes. We never discussed theory or strategy…” D.A. PENNEBAKER
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D.A. Pennebaker was terrified of what Dylan would think of “Don’t Look Back” when he finished editing it, but he need not have worried. Dylan was savvy enough to understand that Pennebaker’s film would deconstruct him in a way that was absolutely in keeping with his mystique. One can easily make the case that cinema verité is the documentary equivalent to rock and roll. It is uninhibited, it breaks all rules, it is both hot and cool as a medium, and it is the apotheosis of an era filled with convergent and radical voices. Bob Neuwirth, a close friend of Dylan who appears in “Don’t Look Back” comments in the DVD, “This film was similar to the work that Dylan was doing in music. It hadn’t really been done before… It was not a slick Time Life documentary. This was a view into a life and style and a kind of evolving that was taking place on a lot of levels in the 60’s that no one else had entré to.” Pennebaker adds, “It was an avant-garde filmmaking style and at the time, so was Dylan’s songwriting. “We hadn’t planned it that way but it certainly came together.”[14]
Dylan was naturally predisposed to allowing his stream-of-consciousness full reign. Pennebaker creates the filmic equivalent and Dylan is his perfect subject. If there is a reason why so many believe “Don’t Look Back” is the greatest rock documentary of all time, it is because these two men were at the peak of their creative powers, both creating spontaneous, intuitive and radical documents of their lives while one films the other. “Five years earlier, we simply couldn’t have filmed it,” admits Pennebaker. “The technology simply didn’t exist — you needed lighting rigs, and sound equipment that was connected to the camera.”[15] Technological determinism was responsible for the ease in which cinema verité documentarians were able to slip into their subject’s lives while remaining a discrete, if not invisible presence in the room. A single lightweight camera allowed Pennebaker to move about and swiftly capture unexpected events, not unlike the small cameras that allowed Levitt, Klein and Winogrand to capture New York City street life so efficiently. And yet, while the whole movie feels freeform, there was staging at work, not to mention Dylan was a knowing collaborator with Pennebaker in creating his charismatic persona. And while this always calls into question that somehow by collaborating with your subject, the ethics and rules of documentary are broken, there is no way “Don’t Look Back” could maintain its shrewd insight without Dylan’s explicit cooperation and his playful but perspicacious awareness of the filmmaking process.
Much has been said about the film’s critique of the era’s dominant media, and the essay “Don’t You Ever Just Watch?” by Jeanne Hall[16] is a master class on this discussion. Dylan’s clever disambiguation of TIME as the current elixir for the masses is absolutely on point. He articulated, in a completely Dylanesque way of course, the essence of the issues with media of that era, and he wasn’t going to be played a sucker by it. His thoughts are the very same ones that informed the work of Frank, Klein and Winogrand. His cultivated outsider status, and his winsome folk era persona would soon be ripped to shreads by his legendary switch to electric, greeted with boos at the Newport Folk Festival in July, 1965, two months after “Don’t Look Back” was filmed. This sealed his fate as a visionary.
Like Dylan in his new guise, cinema verité is an electric medium, and once its stylistic tropes became the norm, there was no going back to the formal voice-over documentary aesthetic — the film version of LIFE’s photo essays — which to repeat William Klein’s perfectly phrased criticism, was “inviolate, academic, boring.”[17] The new medium brought with it an intuitive, energetic spirit that violated all the old paradigms of documentary filmmaking. Regarding his instinct on “Don’t Look Back” Pennebaker said, “You know in moments like this that just take hold of you, I never think, ‘I better film him, I better film him.’ I have no memory of what makes me go shoot where. I kind of just go with it and it happens.”[18]
Cinema verité allowed for the unexpected, nowhere more amazingly than when the Maysles Brothers captured the stabbing of Meredith Hunter by the Hell’s Angels at Altamont. “Gimme Shelter” goes toe to toe with “Don’t Look Back” as the greatest rock documentary ever made. The Maysles were there to shoot what the Rolling Stones thought would be the peak experience of their tour: a free concert that would rival the love-in at Woodstock. When it turned out to be quite the opposite, the Maysles were positioned to capture an astonishing cultural moment, and their verité shooting style (combined with the good sense to have a whole team shooting all over the event) allowed them to do so with great precision. They captured a critical event with what seemed like ease, and like Pennebaker, they created a trenchant historical document that will forever capture the turbulent spirit of the times. Altamont sealed the fate of the 60’s countercultural love-in, making that movement feel weirdly similar to the naïve optimism LIFE magazine was selling in the 50’s.
Looking at the careers of Frank, Klein, Winogrand and Levitt, Dylan’s argument applies to their stream-of-conscious methodology as well as to that of Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers: the truth is just a plain picture. Sounds like poetry to me.
“God, I feel like I’ve been through some kind of thing.” Bob Dylan at the end of “Don’t Look Back” / Stephanie Power at the end of her 4589 word essay. (written as part of the Ryerson School of Image Arts Documentary Media program, 2015)
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Trachtenberg, Alan. “Seeing what You See: Photographs by Helen Levitt.” Raritan 31, no. 4 (Spring, 2012): 1–18.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Horak, J. “Seeing with One’s Own Eyes: Helen Levitt’s films.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 8(2), 69. 1995
[4] White, Minor. Review of William Klein’s “New York,” originally published in Image Magazine, Journal of Photography of the George Eastman House, September 1957
[5] Klein, William. New York 1954.55. Manchester, England: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1995. 256.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger. “The Indecisive Moment: The Stream-of-Consciousness Photobook.” In The Photobook: A History. London: Phaidon Press, 2005.
[8] Frank, Robert. “Introduction by Jack Kerouac” The Americans. Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1978.
[9] “Garry Winogrand’s Republic.” In Garry Winogrand, edited by Leo Rubinfien, 32. New Haven and London: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2013.
[10] Ibid. 21
[11] Ibid. 32
[12] Ibid. 33
[13] Ibid. 35
[14] Pennebaker, D.A. “Don’t Look Back” DVD commentary.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Hall, Jeanne, “‘Don’t you ever just watch?’: American Cinéma Vérité and Don’t Look Back”, in Barry Keith Grant and Jeanette Sloniowski (Eds), Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video pp. 223–237 Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998
[17] Klein, William. New York 1954.55. Manchester, England: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1995. 256.
[18] Pennebaker, D.A. “Don’t Look Back” DVD commentary.
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Transcript. “Really the truth is just a plain picture” Bob Dylan Time Magazine interview. 10point1.blogspot.ca.
http://10point1.blogspot.ca/2010/10/really-truth-is-just-plain-picture-bob.html
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