Leave the gun. Take the cannoli

Years ago, I went to see an exhibit at the Corcoran entitled "What Remains," by the legendary photographer Sally Mann. Usually associated with provocative large format images of her children, this time Mann had turned her camera to a more ethereal subject, the paradox of what effect time and the earth have on our bones, and, conversely, what effect our bones have on the earth and time.

I was fascinated (and grossed out, truth be told) by Mann's haunting images of femurs and fibulas slowly turning into ash. In a peculiar twist, an escaped convict was shot and killed on Mann's Virginia farm and she began photographing the spot where the man had died, looking for any clues that the earth changes just a bit each time it witnesses such an event. Not exactly a crowd-pleasing topic, but Mann has never been one for pleasing crowds. Years after seeing that exhibit, the concept of "what remains" has stayed with me with me longer than the photograph themselves.

It certainly popped to the surface the other day after a series of bizarre coincidences had unfolded. As you all know, bizarre coincidences follow me almost as much as my neighbor's cat, Sparkle. I sometimes feel like Rod Serling is going to pop out from a corner and tell me that it's all been one long Twilight Zone episode.

So the other day was November 13th. It was Cooper the Wonder Dog's 10th birthday. Did I remember? Of course not. I reminded myself to remember all week but forgot when the actual day came around. The funny part is that the night before, on November 12th, I stumbled upon my 1997 pocket diary. I have no idea why it suddenly turned up on my nightstand, though I'm assuming the cleaning ladies found it in the closet or something. So there I was, sitting on my bed, perusing this ten-year-old artifact of dates and contacts, a glimpse back into every appointment and assignment I had that year. According to my book, on January 20th I photographed the inauguration, on April 22 I met the Dali Lama while shoting an assignment on Larry King, and on October 7th I went out to buy a silly rocking horse for a Chris Rock shoot the next day at the Four Seasons hotel. Don't ask. I laughed as I tried to figure out who half the names in the address book belonged to. It's both amazing and disheartening to realize just how many people were prominent in your life ten short years ago, people whose whereabouts today are a total mystery.

Anyway, there I am looking at this freshly certified relic, when I thought I should see what I was doing exactly ten years ago. The answer should have been obvious: We were arriving, at 7:35 a.m on Air France 29, in Paris for our honeymoon. The only other notation was for the next day, November 13, a big asterisk that said "Katy Kelly's BD!" (It didn't say "Cooper's birthday," obviously, because there's no way I could have known Cooper was about to be born the next day.)

Katy is a great friend of mine, dating back to my USA Today days. We used to go out on assignments together in the early 1990's. Then one night we had to drive to Baltimore to cover a convention of adults who collect Barbie dolls and we haven't stopped laughing since. And since I forget so many birthdays, I felt like there was some divine influence at work here. I thought, how cool is this, I would have never remembered Katy's birthday the next day if not for finding this ten-year-old date book.

Well, guess what? I forgot to call Katy the next day. So now I'm 0 for 2. I forgot my dog Cooper's birthday, as well as the birthday of my friend Katy. Serendipity, shmerendipity.

And what does this have to do with "What Remains?" Well, on the day before my day of forgetting things, I happened to bump into a friend on the street in Georgetown. I was crossing R Street into Montrose Park, a place I've shot so many portraits over the years that Sally Mann might want to come over and see what effect one playground can have on an individual, when my friend Alexandra Kovach pulled up and said hi. Alexandra is in charge of events at Evermay, just down the block, one of the most beautiful places one can be married in Washington. It's an old mansion in Georgetown that oozes a different kind of history than most other important landmarks in our nation's capital. Unlike, say, neighboring Dumbarton House, with its Federal era mannequins and its Society of Colonial Dames, Evermay's history is all family, all personal.

Evermay was home to the Belin family for much of the last century and their presence can be felt all over the grounds, including the final resting place of several family members. Photographs of the Belins can be seen all throughout the house, from the day in 1923 they moved in to some of the overseas conferences Mary Belin, the family matriarch, attended when she was a translator for the State Department in the 1930's. (An accomplished tennis player, she also played on center court at Wimbledon in 1938!)

Every time I photograph a wedding at Evermay I find myself staring at Belin family photos all day long. There's something about the staying power of one single image, of one fleeting moment in a family's life, that makes me marvel. It's the opposite effect of walking into a Pottery Barn and seeing all the living room setups lined with fake books and fake photos. At Evermay, all of those people in the pictures actually once called this place their home. This isn't a museum, it's a home. And without the photographs, it would just be another venue.

And so the day after my day of forgetting meaningful things, I Googled Alexandra Kovach to get her number at Evermay and follow up on our chance. But Google gave me something other than a phone number.

The first thing it listed was a story written in the Washington Post by one Alexandra Kovach, titled, "What Fire Couldn't Destroy." Intrigued, I began reading. Dated October 27, just a couple weeks ago, when fires were ravaging Southern California, the story is a first-hand account of the effects another terrible fire, the Oakland Hills wildfire of 1991, had on a little girl. Kovach writes:

I still visualize our house on Vicente Road. I have dreams that take place there. I can still feel the lace on my mother's wedding veil, which my sisters and I would sneak out of its box when we were little girls with big ideas. Or the texture of my parents' bedspread, as we read "The Wind in the Willows," leaving my dreams filled with visions of Mr. Toad floating down the river, night after night. And that giant box where my mother would proudly store the artistic treasures we brought home from school. I would love to see now, or to show my children one day, how I drew the sun when I was 5.

Before I could even finish I picked up the phone and called Alexandra.

"Hey, funny bumping into you on the street yesterday. Um, I was trying to find your number and I Googled you and found this beautiful and sad story about the Okaland Hills fire of 1991. Is that you??" (I mean, how many Alexandra Kovach's can there be, right?)

"I did write that," she said.

"Um, you won't believe this, but I was there that day," I said. "I covered the Oakland Hills fire. I was up from Los Angeles for the Cal football game. I've never seen anything like that. There were only chimneys left as far as the eye could see."

Just another coincidence in my life. Here is someone I know writing movingly about a fire that took her childhood home away in a flash--and with it all her toys and books and photographs--and it turns out I was in the very same place those sixteen years ago, looking at the same devastation, though from a very different perspective. 3,000 homes were burned that day in 1991 and now I felt odd, hoping that Alexandra's house wasn't one of the ones I photographed.

And if you think the Rod Serling stuff is over, think again.

Like many of the people who asked me when my own piece was in the Washington Post in September, I asked Alexandra how she came to write the story for the Post. She told me that she had mulled it over while watching the news, but that it was reading my story in the Post that gave her the courage to pursue it. I was floored. Even by my standard of coincidence and serendipity, this was getting downright spooky.

If you haven't already, please read Alexandra's touching essay. It goes right to the core of "What Remains." What do we keep? What do we lose? What are the remainders?

As Alexandra tells it, the only photo album her family was able to save from the burning house was the one that she and her sister had made of "reject" pictures no one else wanted to save. The ones with the bad expressions, the bad complexions, the eyes closed.

"Overnight, these snapshot disasters became our greatest treasures. Today's digital photos can be modified or erased within seconds of being taken, wiping away all signs of human imperfection. These albums had held the outtakes of our lives so far, but in their flaws, they were true testimony to the children we were and the adults we became, making them all the more precious."

For years I've been trying to explain to people the importance of photos that are real, not staged and manipulated. I've bitten my tongue when the occasional wedding client rejects a stupendous photo because his or her hair was out of place, or when a Georgetown mother rejects a gorgeous photo of her child because he has a scrape on his chin. You're missing the forest for the trees, I usually mumble to myself. And now Alexandra Kovach, the friend who I bumped into on the street that day in Georgetown, a chance encounter that caused me to Google her, an internet search that led to the discovery that her own home was burned to the ground in a fire sixteen years earlier, a fire I witnessed, and an emotional story she felt confident in relating partly because of my story in a newspaper sixteen years later, that Alexandra Kovach was now perfectly summing up my very own feelings about photography itself.

One of the great ironies of the digital era is that in the end, only paper will survive. Faced with raging fire, no one ever runs to save their hard drive. People run to save their photographs. A photograph on a laptop is data. But when printed on paper it is a relic, a prized possesion. It's these photographs that have so much meaning to us, the ones that we put in frames and tape to our monitors and store in the attic. The printed photograph will never die, even in 2057, when we're all driving flying cars and the metric system will have finally arrived, because it will always have one leg up on its digital counterpart. Like humans, the printed picture is alive, gets beat up, and becomes frail and brittle over time. Data is just that--data.

She may not have thought much about this, but I now realize that Alexandra is the perfect person to be at Evermay, a house filled with so many important family photos. In fact, each time I'm photographing a wedding at Evermay, I feel drawn to read and re-read the same letter that is on display in one of the cases. It's a letter from Harry Belin to another family member describing the night he went to pick up his son who was arriving from Germany. Something terrible happened that night. Thankfully the son survived, but the account of the tragedy is so gripping, so riveting in its fountain pen cursive script on yellowed and torn paper, that I often drag wedding guests over to make sure they've seen it. It's incredible: The fire, the "burning hulk crashing to the ground," the desperate search for and reunion with family.

Oh, did I mention? The Belin boy was on the Hindenburg.



Matt

p.s. Speaking of important keepsakes, the pictures that accompany this post are all from last month's Photo Marathon. Click them to make them bigger.

The Great Joni Mitchell Cover-up

A rant, a rant and a rave tonight.

And to get to those items faster, I'll dispense quickly with the obligatory apologies for taking so long to blog. As I said last time, this is crazy time in the life of any photographer, the holidays just around the corner, and I've been a tad busy. This past weekend, for instance, I shot seven portrait jobs. Like I said, a tad busy.

Now that's we're clear on that, on to rant number one.

Many of you know that I'm a bit of a Joni Mitchell nut. To say that I consider Joni to be a part of my family--as odd as that sounds--would not be a stretch. I've listened to Blue so many thousands of times in the past 25 years that I sometimes think I'm the one who needs a river to skate away on. Like a security blanket, Joni is always there for me. From Hejira's Coyote (love that Bay of Fundy) to Turbulent Indigo's Magdalene Laundries, I've stayed true. None of this fair weather stuff. (That great scene in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, where the space aliens tell him that they love his films--"especially," says the martian, "the early funny ones.") Nope. I've been with Joni for the long haul.

Now, friends can be hard on a lifelong Joni fan. You get teased in ways that, say, a lifelong Bruce Springsteen fan might not. One friend who shall remain nameless, unless, of course, you've read my last blog entry, has accused me of listening to "mopey chick music." Fair enough. Coupled with my love for Aimee Mann and Nanci Griffith and Gillian Welch (the mopiest of them all--Maya once attempted to throw herself from the car when Gillian started singing The Revelator) I guess I can see the argument. But Joni isn't really mopey at all. I mean, how could you not love someone who can write like this:

I met a redneck on a Grecian Isle/ He did the goat dance very well/ He gave me back my smile/ But he kept my camera to sell.

When I read in the New York Times recently that Joni was set to release a new album, Shine, as well as lend her songs to a new work by the Alberta Ballet, I was excited. I wasn't too thrilled to learn that the album was being marketed exclusively on Starbuck's Hear Music label, as corporate synergy has worn me down of late, but excited nonetheless.

So a week or so ago, as I waited for my venti hot chocolate at the Macarthur Blvd. Starbucks, a joint where the baristas work so damn hard and still get your order wrong all the time, I noticed the album for the first time. I scooped it up, knowing I had a nine hour drive to Savannah in front of me, and hit the road.

That's when Maya noticed the cover. Or should I say cover-up?

The cover of Shine is a beautiful photograph of dancers with the Alberta Ballet engaged in a lunar leap of sorts. It's evocative, it's moody, and it's a noticeable departure from many of Joni's albums that feature her own artwork. I feel ridiculous stating this, but for the record, the muscular male dancers are all wearing tights. There is not a nude body to be found.

But in the spirit of John Ashcroft, who was so offended by the sight of a woman's breast that he ordered a new set of drapes, someone at Starbucks clearly has some issues. How else can one explain the hideous band of blue paper that covers, quite neatly, every single tush in the photograph? It's as if buying a Joni Mitchell album has suddenly become akin to leaving an adult bookstore with a paper-clad girlie magazine.

Would someone wake me when this all ends? Have we become so absurdly prudish as a society that the bodies of male dancers--clothed!!!--can't be shown on an album cover? Is someone worried that a child might see these dancers and, god forbid, dream about going into the arts? Nigel Tufnel couldn't understand why the "Smell the Glove" cover was censored in This is Spinal Tap. But that was a movie farce--this is real life.

I went back into Starbucks to see if any other album they sold had an added "wrapper," but couldn't find one. And to head off any explanation that the wrap was added to give more visual clarity for sales purposes, Joni's own Blue, which features one of the hardest to read titles of any album--blue on blue type--is also sold at Starbucks, sans wrapper.

That someone in the corporate world would actually worry that ballet dancers' derrieres might be offensive--only in America, right?--is not surprising. But I am very surprised that Joni would go along with such a harebrained scheme. We're talking about a woman who, by her own admission, didn't go near a piano for the last ten years because she so despised the record industry. Et tu, Joni?

Back in the late 1970's, when I was attending Mattlin Junior High School on Long Island, a music teacher named Miss Sparrow was trying her best to be hip. She was teaching a lesson about "modern" music and was about to play Jimi Hendrix's version of the Star Spangled Banner. (Other favorites included overly deep analysis of the Beatles' incredibly simple "Michelle.") But before she let the needle drop onto the record player (record player!), Miss sparrow cautioned our class that the music we were about to hear was so powerful that we could be potentially be harmed. As if she was about to give us all LSD, she dutifully asked if anyone wanted to leave the room. One of my classmates, David L., sheepishly raised his hand and left.

Jimi Hendrix would no doubt get a kick to learn that ballet dancers have joined his club.

Rant #2.

Last night Maya and I went to see Bruce Springsteen, courtesy of my friend and former bride, Laura Gonzalez. Laura knows that I'm as big a Bruce fan as I am a Joni Mitchell nut. I won't forget her kindness very soon.

The concert was sublime. I first saw Bruce at the Carrier Dome in 1985, on the Born in the USA tour, and it's hard to think that almost 22 years have past since that show. And even if I factor in the handful of times I've seen Bruce since that first show, none of them can top last night. Sure, the Verizon Center felt a tad geriatric, as middle aged bald guys maneuvered down the stairs clutching their beers, but big deal. The true believers showed a little faith and there truly was magic in the night. As Jon Stewart said last night, a Springsteen concert is about nothing but pure joy.

(Alexandra's great parlor trick, as four-year-old parlor tricks go, has always been her rendition of Thunder Road. I love the way she blissfully skips past lines like "Lying out there like a killer in the sun...")





As the show progressed, Backstreets morphed into Thunder Road. Thunder Road into Born to Run. All the anthems you could have asked for, and all framed by the incredibly powerful songs off the new album. I'm not sure what constitutes an instant classic, but I was almost moved to tears by Devil's Arcade, a heartbreaking song told from the perspective of an Iraqi war widow.

Remember the morning we dug up your gun
The worms in the barrel, the hanging sun
Those first nervous evenings of perfume and gin
The lost smell on your breath as I helped you get it in
The rush of your lips, the feel of your name
The beat in your heart, the devil's arcade

So, if everything was as great as you describe, Matt, what's to rant about?

Cell phones. And for a laugh, not because of their noise.

As if I didn't have to deal with enough dopes and their ever-ringing cellphones at weddings each week, I now can't go see a live music event without seven hundred people holding up their phones for the entire event, all of them trying to not-so-secretly record some absurdly low-res video to post on YouTube. Do these people know how incredibly distracting this is? (Or do they even care?) For the record, I don't want to watch Bruce Springsteen as he is illuminated by the ever-present glow of your cell phone's LED display. I want to watch Bruce Springsteen, live and in front of me, not reduced to some minuscule mpeg movie.

I know, just forget it, Matt, watch the show. But it's really hard to watch the show when the guy in front of you is holding up a lit phone for two hours. And for what? Is there really so much of a rush posting a grainy, inaudible video clip for one's cell phone on the internet? And this was in a huge arena. I've seen the same thing happen at the Birchmere, an intimate music hall that seats only a couple of hundred. The room is dark, the mood is electric, and there's that damn glow of a cell phone being held aloft. Argh.

I always made fun of the tourists who arrived at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and descended from their tour buses with cameras in front of their faces. Didn't they want to just look at the canyon for a minute before they started snapping? It's not like it's going anywhere. But there's an odd obsession with capturing something, with taking something back with you. It makes no difference that the video is jerky and pixelated and garbled. You've got a little bit of Bruce in a bottle, and if it means pissing off the hundreds of people around you for a few hours, well, by god, it's worth it.

The old commercial used to go, is it live or is it Memorex? The implication was that the tape was so good it practically felt like you were there. These days I'm convinced that more people would just rather have the tape.

*****

And now, finally, a couple of raves.

Yesterday, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (or Les Disparus, as it's known in Paris), by my brother, Daniel Mendelsohn, was awarded the Prix Médicis étranger, France's most prestigious award for a work by a foreign author. To give you an idea of the company Daniel is now in, previous winners of this prize include Milan Kundera, Umberto Eco, Philip Roth and Doris Lessing (who just won the Nobel Prize for literature a few weeks back). Not bad.

In a country that takes reading quite seriously, Daniel was treated like royalty. He dined last night across form the former prime minister, who insisted that he be seated next to Daniel, as well as greeted by microphones and cameras the minute he steeped into the hotel. If you're going to have your fifteen minutes, you might as well have them in Paris.

Congratulations, Daniel.

***

We've all been working hard here at Matt Mendelsohn World Headquarters. We have two new employees, Katie Persons and Ashley Dally, whom we hope will speed up our workflow a bit. Ashley hails from Defiance, Ohio and will tell you the entire history of that town if you ask her. So don't get her started. Katie has only been with us a short time and she's already chchangedur lives by introducing us to www.pandora.com, a site that instantly creates a personalized radio station based on your musical preferences. Really neat.

But without a doubt, the hardest worker has been Maya. She has the tough job of making every image look as good as it can. And I can say that our images have never looked better. Most people don't understand the digital process very much, their only point of reference being the old days of dropping film at a lab. But these days there frequently is no lab. We're the lab. And all of the care that a lab once gave to making images look beautiful has now fallen back to the photographer.

It's counter intuitive, I know, but most digital images require more, not less, work than their film cousins. Every image we process gets intensive individual care to bring out contrast, tonality and vibrance. There are no quick fixes.

So I'll leave you tonight, as the clock here strikes 2:00 a.m., with some of our fall portraits.

































































Take care. (And, as always, double-click the images for better viewing.)




Matt