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On Representations of Disability: A Reading List

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Around the age of 3 or 4, Harriet McBryde Johnson sits in front of her family’s television set and thinks, “I will die.” The thought comes to her after an advertisement for the Muscular Dystrophy Association flashes across the screen, one that depicts a small boy’s journey from running bases as a baseball player to using a wheelchair and then to bed, one he never rises from. Born with a neuromuscular disease, this commercial, and then a telethon around the age of 5, are Johnson’s first encounters with depictions of disability in mainstream media, as she writes in her memoir Too Late To Die Young. From that first scene, the line I will die, I will die, I will die, serves as a sort of chorus, one that punctuates Johnson’s progression from kindergarten student to law school graduate to protestor and beyond. Johnson reclaims the line; as she moves through life, I will die is no longer a source of fear, but rather a lyric of defiance.

The negative representations of disability Johnson encounters in childhood do not leave her in adulthood, particularly in relation to her wheelchair. She protests against entities like Jerry Lewis, who claims, in a letter penned for Parade Magazine, that wheelchairs are a form of “steel imprisonment,” a “dystrophic child’s plight.” When, being photographed for The New York Times Magazine, the photographer asks to remove Johnson’s chair from the frame, saying that Johnson looks “frail.” The photographer argues that Johnson will look “beautiful and powerful out of the chair,” “brave,” but Johnson advocates for herself.

Johnson’s memoir reveals a litany of ableist assumptions directed toward her and other disabled people, as well as the emotional and physical tolls these perpetual violences take on her throughout her life. Harmful messages, distributed through television ads, telethons, looks others give her while she’s out, snide comments, the highly inaccessible way our world is physically built, seep so much into her consciousness that at one point, she sees wheelchair dancing as being “undignified.” It takes her years before she reckons with her own beliefs, questioning whether they are borne from what others have told her about her disability or about what she herself has experienced in her body. Then, she explains the joy that comes from moving through the world in her wheelchair, saying, “we can in our own way play with sight and sound, combine rhythm and form, move in our chairs and with our chairs, and glide and spin in ways walking people can’t.”

Though Johnson’s life experiences are unique to her, the underlying themes within her book resonate far beyond. I saw myself reflected in some of her passages, particularly when I thought back to my own experience using a wheelchair for a few months as a result of neurological symptoms, during which time I felt a sense of shame. Johnson’s reckoning with her own internalized ableism helped me realize that my feelings came not from my use of the wheelchair, which allowed me to move through the world, often with great joy, but from how I thought others might perceive me.

Her memoir, too, encouraged me to ask questions: How does pervasive ableism affect the way our society continues to be architected? In what ways have disabled people been represented in media and how can representation continue to evolve so that disabled people have more agency? How are invisible disabilities treated versus visible? What have other disabled people’s experiences been engaging with different accessible tools and technology? The essays curated here cover an array of topics related to those questions, as well as delve into intersections between disability and race, class, and gender.

1. Common Cyborg (Jillian Weise, September 24, 2018, Granta)

Jillian Weise writes against Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto,’ exposing numerous flaws in Haraway’s argument, namely, the fact that Haraway neglects to acknowledge disabled people. Weise discusses what it means to claim a cyborg identity, and how disability is treated by a group of people she names ‘tryborgs,’ who “preach cyborg nature,” but “do not actually depend on machines to breathe, stay alive, talk, walk, hear or hold a magazine.”

They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to ask the hearing to learn sign language. Instead they wish for us to lose our language, abandon our culture and consider ourselves cured.

2. What It’s Like to Be a Disabled Model in the Fashion Industry (Keah Brown, September 5, 2018, Teen Vogue)

In this essential reported piece, Keah Brown, author of recently published The Pretty One, interviews three models with disabilities — Chelsea Werner, Jillian Mercado, and Mama Cax — and draws on her own experiences with cerebral palsy to emphasize the need for increased representation of diverse bodies in advertising, media, and modeling.

Disabled people and disabled models are still left out of most campaign ads and runway shows. This lack of representation has implications: When you go so long without seeing yourself it is easy to interpret that lack of representation to mean you’re ugly and unworthy, that you deserve to be invisible or even worse, are grotesque.

3. How Designers Are Failing People With Disabilities (Justin Rorlich, March 6, 2014, Hazlitt)

With estimates that there are 1.3 billion disabled people in the world who control more than $8 trillion in disposable income, you’d think there would be competition within the wheelchair market to create products with sleeker, more efficient design. But no, as Justin Rohrlich exposes in this piece, hardly any work is being done within big corporations to advance wheelchair design. Instead, individuals like Andrew Slorance are taking matters into their own hands.

In no other market do we force people to simply take whatever product gets shoved down their throats, especially one of this size,’ Donovan says. ‘It’s really sort of unbelievable.

You’d think that companies would have figured out long ago how to sell to a cohort this size. For some reason, it remains barely-touched.

4. The Complicated Dynamics of Disability and Desire (Lachrista Greco, April 6, 2016, Bitch)

After a teacher in middle school tells Lachrista Greco she’s using her invisible disability as a “crutch,” Lachrista begins to make a connection between her disability and how wanted she feels in relation to others. In examining harmful cultural moments like Kylie Jenner modeling with a wheelchair, essays by other disabled writers, and personal memories, Lachrista explores how disability is connected to desirability, both in her life, and in our culture as a whole.

Jenner appeared on the cover of the magazine sitting in a brass-colored wheelchair—sexy, glamorous, and blank. It’s fetishization to the nth degree for Jenner, an able-bodied person, to pose in a wheelchair wearing a black latex bodysuit. It’s “crip drag,” as comedian and disability rights activist Caitlin Wood calls it.

5. The Amputee Cyclist’s Art of Self-Repair (C.S. Giscombe, May 23, 2019, The New York Times)

After seeing a banner that reads “Do you remember when prosthetics weren’t mind controlled?” while on a bike ride through the U.C. campus, C.S. Giscombe reflects on his own prosthetic; ruminates on intersections of race, class, and disability; and confronts ableism.

He was amazed — as some people are, ‘because of your handicap’ — that I was riding at all, and as we talked and climbed the topic of touring came up and he was quick to inform me that it was a thing sadly beyond my capabilities, though we had just met. ‘Typically, disability is viewed as a tragedy,’ as my friend the poet Jennifer Bartlett has observed.

6. Products mocked as “lazy” or “useless” are often important tools for people with disabilities (s.e. smith, September 20, 2018, Vox)

After seeing a device called a Sock Slider ridiculed on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, s.e. smith compiles a list of other tools mocked on the internet: “banana slicers, egg separators, jar openers, buttoners, tilting jugs for dispensing liquids, and much more.” In interviewing people with disabilities, disability scholars, and compiling research about costs of attendants, smith not only makes clear that the use of these gadgets enable some disabled people to live independently, but also examines the role of the internet in spreading harmful messages.

When content mocking the disability community — like memes about ambulatory wheelchair users getting up to grab something high at the store — spread like wildfire, commentary from the affected community is rarely attached. This has a dehumanizing tendency, creating a world that rewards judgmental, snappy commentary and eliminates nuance.

7. I Love ‘Queer Eye.’ I Don’t Love The Way It Portrayed People With Disabilities. (Jessica Slice, July 26, 2019, Huffington Post)

Representations of people with visible disabilities on television are far and few between, so when the Fab Five of ‘Queer Eye’ featured Wesley, “a Black man, loving father, 30-year old community activist and wheelchair user” on an episode, Jessica Slice had hopes that the team would empower Wesley to embrace his identity as a disabled man in the same way they encourage others featured on the show. Instead, the episode falls short in many ways, which Slice chronicles in this well-researched piece.

Critically, being disabled is not a negative. It’s an identity, just like being queer, Black or Latinx is an identity. If it makes you pause to hear ‘Black, but not really,’ or ‘gay, but not really,’ then you should have the same reaction to ‘disabled, but not really.’

8. (Don’t) Fear the Feeding Tube (Kayla Whaley, May 8, 2018, Catapult)

When her mom brings up the idea of a feeding tube, Kayla Whaley recoils. She feels shame and fear thinking about such a concrete change being made to her body until she speaks with others who have gone through the surgery. This essay, in addition to providing a history of gastronomy tubes, also chronicles Kayla’s emotional turn from revulsion to delight in relation to her g-tube, and the ways in which her feeding tube allows her to connect with her body in new and surprising ways.

More than that, knowing what was inside felt like sharing a secret with myself. Seeing inside my gut, learning to recognize its patterns and moods, felt intimate in a way that was wholly unexpected but altogether a joy.

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

What Does It Mean To Be Moved?

A Dutch Ship, a Yacht and Smaller Vessels in a Breeze, c. 1660, Willem van de Velde the Younger. Found in the collection of the National Gallery, London. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Jennifer Wilson | Longreads | August 2019 | 10 minutes (2,734 words)

 

“Why does a ripe apple fall?” Tolstoy asks in War and Peace. “Because the wind shakes it…or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?” Technically, the wind is the movement of air across space; but in our poetry, myths, and moving pictures, wind is something else entirely. For Tolstoy, it was the forces of nature tilting downward to meet man’s desire. For others, the wind is something that gives us permission, permission to move off course, to be blown away, to be held back longer from our destination, to act wild. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Aeolus, the divine keeper of the winds, hands Odysseus a bag containing all the winds of the earth. Aeolus conjures the west wind to send the men home. But just when they have Ithaca in their sights, Odysseus’s men, convinced the bag has gold inside, open it up. The winds escape and transform into a storm that sends their ship all the way back to Aeolus. However, this time he refuses to help them, certain Odysseus has been cursed by the gods.

We have rendered wind a metaphor for anger, passion, unreason; we use it as an excuse when we want permission to lose our minds. It is that extra push to be the person you really want to be, or to explain who we already in fact are. As Wallace Stevens put it “The wind shifts like this/ Like a human without illusions/Who still feels irrational things within her.” In Joan Didion’s Los Angeles Notebook, she writes about the strong, dry Santa Ana winds that leave coastal California in disarray, sometimes on fire. But for Didion, the Santa Anas are something else too; their arrival allows for a certain relinquishing of control. “We know it [is coming] because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air.” I remember reading these lines for the first time and wishing for a wind like that, something that I could surrender to. Read more…

Images Present Themselves: A Conversation With Photographer Burk Uzzle

The famous Woodstock photo by Burk Uzzle.

This month is the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. Originally billed as the “Woodstock Music & Art Fair presents An Aquarian Exposition ­— 3 Days of Peace & Music,” the gathering changed American culture in unanticipated ways. Photographer Burk Uzzle became an unwitting documentarian of the event, and captured an image so representative that it became the cover of the Woodstock soundtrack album. Uzzle’s career spans six decades. He documented the tumultuous 1960s and continues to be a powerful example of how an artist can function as an agent of change. I spoke with him earlier this year in his studio in Wilson, North Carolina.

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Tom Maxwell: Can you describe your experience taking that iconic picture and your experience being a photographer at Woodstock?

Burk Uzzle: I had gotten up early one morning and left the little lean-to that I’d made for my wife and two children, and just went out to walk around. As the light came up, people started to wake up and roll out of whatever they were sleeping in or on or whatever mud puddle they were trying to transcend, and I just walked around.

This couple was standing up, wrapped in a blanket, holding each other and trying to stay warm. I think maybe they were one of the very few couples standing. Most people were still asleep. It was just so beautiful, the way they were holding themselves up and wrapped in a blanket. It all composed very nicely with the hillside in the background and the foreground objects on the left and the side. It lent itself to a very beautiful composition.

‘We’ll just go and make a nice little day trip out of it, going into the music festival.’

As I walked up to them, I did the sort of body compose technique which street photographers do. I would sashay to the left or sashay to the right so that when I got to within the right amount of distance to make a nice composition with them standing there, filling the frame as much as it needed to be filled, they were perfectly placed. Then I quickly raised my my Leica loaded with black and white and took a few frames, and then I took my normal lens off of that camera and took a few more frames on the Leica loaded with color film. I did not have a lot of color film, because I’d gone up there to camp out with my wife and sons, and we got locked in. The rain came and the crowds came. Once we were there, we couldn’t get out.

TM: Were you on assignment?

BU: No, I had turned down all assignments. I don’t like to work on assignments — at least when it’s something that I think is important. It’s fun to do commercial assignments where somebody needs me to go be an eloquent spokesman for an oil company or whatever, but when something is happening like Woodstock or Martin Luther King’s funeral, or the pictures I do these days driving around the United States or in my studio, I don’t want any direction from any kind of editor whatsoever.

TM: You just sensed that Woodstock was a big deal.

BU: Right. I had heard about it and about the bands that were going to be there. It sounded like good music. I was living in New York, so we all decided to get out of the city for a weekend. I think it was the director of Magnum Photos in New York, to which I belonged at the time, she and her husband owned a lot of acreage up in the Catskills near Woodstock. We decided to camp on a trout stream very near to Woodstock. We pitched our tent and were having a great time on the side of the stream for a couple of days.

Then the morning the festival started, we decided, “Well, let’s drive over to Woodstock and go hear a few tunes. Then we’ll come back tonight and get back in our tent. We’ll just go and make a nice little day trip out of it, going into the music festival.” Once in, we couldn’t get out.

TM: You said something very interesting to me, that most of the other guys were taking pictures of the bands, of the musicians.

BU: Well, they were all working on assignment. Their editors had told them to be sure to get pictures of this musician or that musician. Like I say, I don’t like to work on assignment, so I had been offered assignments but declined. I was free to respond to what actually happened.

TM: Not to get too inside baseball, but as a freelancer you also own the negatives of whatever it is that you shoot.

BU: That’s correct. I do that anyway. I would never give up copyright to anything. Even all the years I was at Life magazine, the reason I did not accept a staff position at Life magazine when offered a job was because I wanted to own the copyrights. I said, “I’d like to work for you, but I’d rather just have a contract, be a freelancer, and I’ll own the copyright to all my negatives.” That was one of the very few smart business decisions I ever made in my life.

TM: How old were you when you entered into that agreement with Life?

BU: Life hired me when I was 23. I was the youngest photographer they had ever hired. That was a good way to start learning how to be a good professional or educated. They sent me all over the world. I had never wanted to go to college. I, to this day, break into a cold sweat if I go into a classroom of any sort. I have spent time in prisons and I have spent time in colleges, and I don’t like either one of them. They both make me feel the same way.

I have spent time in prisons and I have spent time in colleges, and I don’t like either one of them.

TM: To pull back a little bit, the year before you attended Woodstock, you were taking pictures of Martin Luther King in his coffin. What a roller coaster that must have been.

BU: It was a roller coaster. Martin Luther King had become a hero of mine because he was my very first magazine assignment when I was about, oh, I don’t know, 19 years old.

I had quit my job. The only salaried job I ever had in my life was in Raleigh, North Carolina, as a staff photographer for the News & Observer, where I was paid, I think, $48 or $50 a week. My wife was seven months’ pregnant, so I had to find something to do. I was hired on as an assistant to a very good magazine photographer in Atlanta. He was out of town one week, and Jet magazine called up and said, “We need your boss to go and photograph Martin Luther King tonight.” I said, “Well, he’s out of town.” They said, “Well, can you take pictures?” I said, “Yeah, I’m his assistant. I was a newspaper photographer until I moved here.” They said, “Well, would you run over and photograph Martin Luther King sitting on his couch in his home? He’s a young unknown. Nobody has heard much about him, but he seems like a promising young preacher and he has a father who is a great preacher.”

I took the assignment, visited his church in Atlanta, and went to his home and did the picture. Jet magazine published it, and they continued to hire me to do more assignments. I continued to follow him. That was the beginning of the decade of social protests in the United States. It was a very interesting decade. I got beaten up. You get banged around a lot when you’re trying to photograph the kinds of demonstrations that were going on all through the ’60s, but I did. That was my first year of social protest.

TM: Did you feel that being a documentarian was, in fact, a political act?

BU: I felt that, as I do now ever more strongly, artists are probably the only people who can make a real difference with the nature of the political corruption in the country now. It’s up to the artist to do their best to photograph, to document, but do it interpretively so you bring our own sense of truth and dignity to the pictures you’re taking. You do that and you get them published as often as you can and as well as you can. That’s what I endeavor to do.


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TM: Can you give me an example of one of your photographs that embodies what you just described?

BU: Life magazine gave me an assignment to spend time on death row in Chicago’s Cook county jail, because there was a man named Paul Crump, who the warden had described as sort of a hero of the jail. He had been sentenced to death, but he was doing a lot of wonderful things in the jail, attempting to mentor people and making them better people. In fact, there was a fellow in there that was having an epileptic seizure. My friend, Paul Crump, saved his life. He knew exactly what to do for him.

That story was published in Life magazine. It had so much response. People were writing all kinds of letters on Crump’s behalf to the governor, that the governor actually commuted his sentence to life imprisonment instead of death.

TM: As the decade progressed, the 1960s became more violent and divisive. There’s an extraordinary image, one that when I visit you and look at it, it shocks me in its beauty and in the way it describes the scene, which is of King in his coffin and a woman touching his face in a very loving and open and innocent gesture. I wonder if you could describe that moment.

BU: This was in Memphis, and his body was going to be shipped to Atlanta to be buried. We decided that we would hang out there and wait to hear what was going to happen. They announced they were going to open up the funeral home where his body was being kept, for just a short time. They let myself and about three or four other photographers in, and just a very few people, apparently close friends, to view his body in the open casket.

Indeed, one would see the expected kind of thing, where people would see his body and throw their hands up in horror. and cry and carry on and grieve in very visible, loud ways. We all took those pictures. Then, all of a sudden, this one woman came by, and she just reached over and caressed his face in the most loving, beautiful way, and then moved on. That picture was on the same role of film as one of the pictures of one of the very loudly demonstrating women, which became the cover of Newsweek. It was such a beautiful and tender photograph.

It’s up to the artist to do their best to photograph, to document, but do it interpretively so you bring our own sense of truth and dignity to the pictures you’re taking.

A friend of mine, who lived in Chapel Hill, was here in my studio one day, looking at all the Newsweek outtakes. He saw that picture. He said, “This is such a tender photograph. Why don’t you send it off and get it scanned and get a print made of it?” which I did.

TM: Had you ever made a print of it?

BU: I had never printed it.

TM: It was just on the roll.

BU: It was just on the roll. Newsweek had taken a look at the film and they saw what they wanted and gave me the film back. Magnum sold those pictures around the world a few times. I had never printed it, and by then, that transparency was here in Wilson. The Ektachrome film in those days was not very stable, and the picture had faded terribly, but I sent it off to the man who did a lot of my scanning, Todd Gangler at the Art & Soul Lab in Seattle. He managed to salvage the picture and make a decent file out of it, which could be printed. He made a print of it, and we hung it here in the studio.

One day a tour came through the studio. One of the people in the tour saw that picture on the wall and said, “Oh, do you know who that is?” I said, “No, I have no idea. She was just a women who was being very tender with Martin Luther King.” He said, “That’s because she was one of his mistresses.” He told me her name, which I regretfully forgot to jot down. He told me their story and that Martin Luther King had a big, long history of having lots of mistresses—and indeed, that’s how J. Edgar Hoover kind of kept him in line, by threatening to tell his secrets. He never did, and Martin Luther King kept on keeping on. That picture was here and so it was interesting to know the story about it.

TM: Moving forward then to Woodstock, and you’re there because it feels like some place you should be, and you probably had a limited amount of film. You probably got a lot of good pictures, but that couple in the sleeping bag on that hill, you said the composition offered itself up to you. You could recognize how to compose the frame pretty quickly. Did you think it was anything other than a good snap when you took it?

BU: I felt, at the moment I took it, that it was a really lovely picture. I understood right away that it was a very beautiful composition. It was one of the tenderest things I had seen. It was very dark. It was a slow exposure, hand-held camera. The color film, in those days, was not very fast, before the days of digital. But yeah, even then, I felt that it sort of summarized the feeling of the place. I had been running around photographing all the people getting undressed up by the pond and so forth, and the people who had wandered away from the stage to take their clothes off and go skinny dipping in one of the little lakes up there. There was a sense of beauty and peace about the men and women who were in the nude, wandering around and having a great time. The event seemed very likely to turn itself into a people story rather than a music story. They summarized that. They were the essence of it.

TM: That’s key, really, isn’t it — because the publications who put photographers on assignment to take pictures of the well known musical groups , that was sort of a one-way communication. You concerned yourself with some of the half-million people that made up the population of that temporary community, which was the real story.

BU: Right. The people became the real story. Well, back to the story of the film: We were only expecting to stay there a few hours, for the day at most, having a couple of kids that were first-graders, basically. I stuck a pocketful of black and white film in my pocket, and we carried a little knapsack with some canned fruit and animal crackers and a poncho. You never go anywhere with kids without a poncho. That was our story, so I quickly ran out of that film.

I realized I had to shoot very selectively, and I would do one or two frames at a time rather than the characteristic three and a half rolls anytime you would see anything. I said, “Hmm. This is pretty interesting.” I kept going down to the stage. I knew a lot of the photographers, and I would borrow color film. I would tell them, “You know, the most wonderful things are happening up on the hills. People are all taking their clothes off!”

The event seemed very likely to turn itself into a people story rather than a music story.

There was one Magnum photographer who was a really good friend of mine, Charles Harbutt. I said, “Charlie, you’ve got to get up there and take some of these pictures! There is great stuff to see.” He said, “No, the editor wants me to be sure to get Jimi Hendrix and Ravi Shankar. I’ve got to get Ravi Shankar. The editor would be furious with me if I left the stage and took those photographs, just photographed people when I need to be photographing musicians.” I said, “Well, in that case, would you loan me some film?”

There were two or three occasions when I would go down and borrow a few more rolls of film from him. That picture, the cover picture, was taken on film I borrowed from Charlie Harbutt.

TM: Momentos, like souvenirs or photographs, often tend to stand in for memories and they can replace a memory. because it recalls this thing for you. “Remembering a past event is a present experience,” as Alan Watts tells us. Is your relationship to past pictures now different than it was at the time that you took them, or can you describe any where that might be the case?

BU: Yes. My relationship with American society — the nature of our culture all through that decade — it was pretty rocky. It had been a bad, hard decade. In fact, two weeks after Martin Luther King’s funeral, I photographed Robert Kennedy’s funeral. I remember marching down the streets in Cicero, New York with the people of color, and people were throwing bricks off of rooftops, trying to hit us on the head. This is not a nice thing to do. It doesn’t make you feel really good about your country.

John Kennedy had been killed, Robert Kennedy had been killed. I saw it in Ethel and Robert’s faces at Martin Luther King’s funeral. I could see that they knew that he was going to be killed. How could he not be killed, and he was! Two weeks later, I photographed his funeral. Woodstock happened, and Woodstock is when American culture turned on a dime. You could see it all around. You could see the way people treated each other. You could see people that were expected to riot, and people were expected to hurt each other, because they were described as wild-assed hippies or whatever they were. They were being really nice to each other. They were taking care of each other. It was raining. It was muddy. There was not a lot of food. But people were really trying to help each other through this event. I think that picture summed up that feeling. It became a profound moment of spiritual peace, sociologically speaking.

I think that picture summed up that feeling. It became a profound moment of spiritual peace, sociologically speaking.

I’m not a religious person at all, but if there had ever been anything that happened in my life that would have made me believe in a higher power, it probably would have been Woodstock and seeing the way the couple in that photo held each other, and how everybody else treated each other. They were really a symbol. They were representative of a whole lot else that was going one. They were just the most visually eloquent example of it.

TM: Your work continues and your relationship to your subjects continues. Where are you at now as a photographer? What is it that you want to document?

BU: I have pictures hanging on my studio wall of an AR-15 I borrowed from a friend. Actually, I wrapped it up in what may even be the same little space blanket I had with me at Woodstock. There it is now holding an AR-15. Standing behind it are a dozen or so grammar school kids — black, white, multi-racial and what have you. I asked them to hold hands as if they were about to be shot. It’s a picture which I call “Targets.” It’s a terrifying and sad, horrible picture to have to look at.

Then there is another one where we already took a picture of a door that says “colored” on it. That was found a block and a half from where I live in the basement of a building that was about to be remodeled.

TM: That was meant for a bathroom or some segregated facility? It still has the word “colored.”

BU: Yes, it has “colored” on it. This is an easy thing to find in the South. Growing up, I would see these doors all the time. I borrowed the door, brought it to my studio, hung a noose over it, hired some black dancers to come and take their clothes off and stand on a little pedestal as if to visually paraphrase what used to happen when they’d get off the slave boats in Charleston or New Orleans to be auctioned off to slave owners. They were told to undress. There they are. It’s a very beautiful but troubling photograph because there they are. I had a friend make a noose to hang over their heads and I call that picture “Heritage,” because that’s the black heritage.

I have to do it. That’s why I am on this earth.

TM: Obviously, you put two black people into what is not a comfortable situation. Maybe as dancers, they’re used to being disrobed, but here they are with all of this horrible iconography that still casts a very long shadow over our society. What did they say to you?

BU: Well, I told them the same thing that I told the school kids that came here. I said, “I want to tell the story of violence. I want to tell the story. I want to do a photograph which speaks to the issues of violence in our culture today. I’m asking you to cooperate with me.” They happily agreed, “Absolutely, let us participate in telling the story. We’re honored and happy to do it. Let’s all work together to make this a powerful photograph.”

TM: What have you seen through your lens that gives you hope, because you still travel all over and shoot outside of your studio?

BU: I see in the landscape, I see the joy of the eccentricity of the Southern culture, which gives me great pleasure. Now the South is a very special place. It’s hateful and racist on the one hand, and it’s loving and poetic and eccentric on the other. Those two poles bounce off of each other almost within every block you see in a small town in Southern America.

I love to drive the backroads, the small towns. I find examples of both and then I photograph them and put them in my archive. I put them on my website and show them to museums. Sometimes I’m lucky enough for museums to buy these pictures and put them in their collections, although I was told a really interesting thing by a very good museum curator who lives and works in the South. “You will never sell any of these pictures that deal with racism to a museum in the South. They don’t want to touch it. They don’t want to be known for racism, so you may never, ever have a picture in the permanent collection in a Southern museum that deals with this.” I was recently on a trip across country, and in Austin, Texas, I went to see a museum and they said, “No, that’s not true. We could very well see ourselves buying these photographs for our permanent collection.” They looked favorably upon the box of photographs that I showed them. They said, “We want to keep all of this in mind.” I think there are some Southern museums that would buy them for their collection. So far, that’s been the most optimistic thing I have heard.

TM: You, of course, are undeterred in pursuing the things that you believe need to be documented.

BU: I have to do it. That’s why I am on this earth. I’m on this earth to photograph what I see around me, that which I love and that which hates me and that which loves me me back and that which I really dislike seeing. I trace a lot of it these days right back to Donald Trump. How can I not?

***

Tom Maxwell is a writer and musician. He likes how one informs the other.

Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

I’ll Be Loving You Forever

Richard E. Aaron, Jason Kempin / Getty

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,077 words)

 

“You are not wearing that shirt right now.”

Even in this establishment’s near-black 4 p.m. lighting, the bartender, a guy about my age dressed in the Portland Gen-Xer uniform (“Henry Rollins, but a dad”), has made out the faded names and visages adorning my bosom: Donnie. Danny. Joe. Jordan. Jon.

“Oh,” I tell him. “Not only am I wearing this shirt, but I’m about to go see these very motherfuckers. With Gretchen, my best friend from middle school. Who I haven’t seen in years. She was on my gymnastics team, and she flew in from Wyoming. Just to do this.”

When I’m excited I tend to overshare, but I do not admit that the pint of Kölsch I’m ordering is for Gretchen and me to split. I am 42 years old, and if I drink more than half a beer I will sleep through the “rock concert,” as we used to call them, which I have paid $162 to attend.

I can attempt to explain, using human language, the extent to which Gretchen and I were fans of New Kids on the Block. I can explain that my room was a four-walled decoupage of Tiger Beat pin-ups. I can explain how I had the bed sheets and comforter. The trading cards. The marbles (why?). The comic books. The bubblegum (a bit too on the nose). How I had, God help me, the dolls, which my little brother took great pleasure in arranging in flagrante and placing on my bed. I can explain all of this in words, but it’s the kind of thing best expressed in scream — specifically, the scream of a 13-year-old’s terrifying nascent sexuality, sublimated in real time into something safe in its simultaneous unattainability and ubiquity.

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‘Horror Is a Soothing Genre … It’s Upfront About How Scary It Is To Be a Woman.’

Head of Medusa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Photo by Araldo de Luca/Corbis via Getty Images)

Laura Barcella | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,597 words)

 

In her acclaimed 2016 debut, Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear … and Why, feminist author and cultural critic Sady Doyle dissected the ubiquitous American pastime of simultaneously idolizing and vilifying female celebrity. Her new book, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, also looks at how the morass of misogyny poisons everything — including our psyches, our popular culture and our everyday lives. But this book focuses more intently on … horror.

Not the horror genre — though plenty of those examples are included — but about the horror of living as a woman in a violent patriarchal society that fears you, despises you; even wants you dead. Pulling from a broad range of cultural references, from Freud to Aristotle to the second-wave feminist theories of Dorothy Dinnerstein to obscure slasher films like The Mutilator, Doyle examines the myriad ways that the world is monstrous to women — and how the world has made monsters of us. “Women have always been monsters, too, in the minds of great men; in philosophy, medicine, and psychology, the inherest freakishness of women has always been a baseline assumption,” Doyle writes in the introduction. “A monster does not merely inspire anger, or disgust. A monster, by definition, inspires fear.”

The fantastically smart book that follows is broken into sections covering the monstrousness associated with the entire socially-prescribed female life cycle, from the spark of adolescence; to marriage and motherhood (with their attendant domestic indignities); to the solitude of old age. Read more…

Whiteness on the Couch

Paint texture by Punkbarby / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Natasha Stovall | Longreads | August 2019 | 28 minutes (7,061 words)

 

“Father, Mother, and Me/

Sister and Auntie Say/

All the people like us are We/

And everyone else is They.”

Rudyard Kipling

“England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses/

It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.”

—Sinéad O’Connor

 

The couch in my therapy office is occupied mostly by white people. Anxious white people and depressed white people. Obsessive white people and compulsive white people. White people who hurt people and white people who hurt themselves. White people who eat too much, drink too much, work too much, shop too much. White people who are bored, envious, guilty, numb. Racist white people and antiracist white people. White people who look across the room and see a white therapist listening. We talk about everything. Except being white.

***

An old saw about therapy is that the thing you don’t talk about is the thing. The therapist and patient together avoid this thing, this shameful and threatening thing. The thing is unconscious — sometimes partially, other times totally. You only know it by the silence and illogic that surrounds it, and the extremes to which the patient will go to erase any sign of it in their own mind, and in their therapist’s, too. The first step towards unpacking the thing is finding a way to talk about it. Just talk about it, moving step by careful step into a psychic place so raw that even acknowledging this unconscious thing is a threat to safety and sanity. Freud called this process “making the unconscious conscious” and it has defined psychotherapy ever since.

What if whiteness is the thing?
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Mountains, Transcending

Illustration by Jason Raish

Ailsa Ross | Longreads | August 2019 | 22 minutes (6,062 words)

It’s the winter of 1923 and a five-foot tall woman is shooting at brigands in Tibet. She’s surviving a blizzard by eating boot leather. She’s accepting a maggot-dancing stew from a drug-addled butcher and having a face-off with a snow leopard.

This woman is Parisian opera singer-turned-anarchist Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, and she’s kicking through Tibet’s wild hills and steppes as she strides on foot across the Himalayas from Kanchow to Lhasa.

Alexandra’s starlit memoir recounting her adventure is no Thoreauvian nature journal. This is a tale that demands to be read in a cool bed while the night paws at the windows — or in my case, by the fire while my dad watches Come Dine With Me repeats on a black January afternoon.

I started reading My Journey to Lhasa because I love adventure stories. And while I’ve never pushed myself to extremes, still I felt a kinship with Alexandra. “Ever since I was five years old,” she wrote, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.” She didn’t dream of towns or parades, but a solitary spot where she could “sit alone, with no one near.” As a child, her nannies often found her crouched behind bushes or hidden up trees in Paris gardens.

Quiet spaces — I’d needed those since I was a teenager.

I was most in search of a quiet space while teaching in Seoul in 2012. I was twenty-four and tired — of living in that crunching city of 26 million, of being in a job I was no good at, of lying awake in the self-hating 2 a.m. dark with a burnt throat from smoking cigarettes on the kindergarten rooftop. I wanted to feel clean again, like a child who’d spent the day by the sea. Read more…

When Friendship Fades But the Images Linger

Photos by Cody Doherty & Barron Roth, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Eryn Loeb | Longreads | August 2019 | 14 minutes (3,579 words)

It started with pictures of Alice. She didn’t mind being put in awkward situations or uncomfortable positions for the sake of a photo. That made her a good friend. I put a tangled Rapunzel wig on her head, a plastic gun in her hands. I had her stand in the middle of the road, wearing a plaid bathrobe. Straddle a highway median in a tulle skirt and sneakers. Swan around the woods in a feather boa. She had a classically pretty face that could suggest everyone or no one. I blazed through rolls of black and white film, which I developed in my high school darkroom with clumsy chemistry and a pounding heart.

On the strength of those pictures, I was accepted to a summer photography workshop in Rockport, Maine. A small group of us — mostly but not entirely college students and recent grads — paid reduced tuition in exchange for doing odd jobs: hosing down vans, painting picnic tables, moving furniture. When we were lucky, we got to pay our dues in the darkroom, turning around contact sheets and prints for students who attended the pricey weeklong workshops, many of them taught by famous photographers like Mary Ellen Mark, Eugene Richards, and Joyce Tennyson. For those more typical students, relationships and revelations were fast-tracked. We watched their tentative arrival and swift blossoming, the compressed intensity between introductions and teary-eyed goodbyes. Our own seven week stretch wasn’t all that long, really, but measured in units of other people’s personal growth, it felt almost permanent.

It was summer and I was 19, living with a bunch of other young people who had stepped away from their fledgling lives to devote time to some version of art. Maine was dreamy, with quiet stretches of woods full of swimming holes and rope swings, lobster traps stacked in pleasing geometries. There was a glass-blowing studio in the ground floor of the house where we lived, and an old cemetery just down the road. I liked to walk around and take pictures of elaborately carved headstones memorializing wives and mothers, running my fingers over their names and honorifics. I was never without my camera. I spent hours in the darkroom but still found time to get sunburned.

When I wasn’t out shooting or cooped up printing, one of my favorite places was the library. It was a hot, lofted area in the small campus’ main building. A sign posted at the base of the stairs gave me solemn shivers. “Enter with respect for the knowledge that resides herein and with honor for those who are about to share with you their secrets and wisdom,” it read. “Maintain a serene presence.” I sat on the floor and pored over monographs: Francesca Woodman’s pictures of herself crouching in corners, hanging from window frames, a wild blur in an abandoned house. Nan Goldin’s pictures of herself and her friends all tangled up in each other, the color shots suffused with adulation and danger. Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, feral despite their polish. Judy Dater organized her images by gender; portfolios of men, of women.
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Losing My Religion at Christian Camp

Illustration by Homestead

Katy Hershberger | Longreads | August 2019 | 25 minutes (6,207 words)

“Will you pray with us?” It was my fifth day as a camp counselor; I was 17 and the three girls who asked me were probably 12. The five years between us was a teenage lifetime, though now as adults, we could be classmates, colleagues, barflies on adjacent stools. Then, we were children. I pushed myself up from the cool summer ground. “Um, yeah. Do you — ” my voice cracked, “ — want to be saved?”

It was July 2001 in rural Virginia, the last night of Christian summer camp. A hundred girls sat in a circle around the campfire, the smell of embers and bug spray permeating our clothes. We sang praise songs, lifting our hands toward the Virginia stars, toward God. The camp director led us in prayer. Then she implored the campers: If you want to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, ask a counselor to pray with you.

A week earlier, I had graduated from CILT, a three-year counselor prep program. The acronym stood for Camper in Leadership Training, though Caring Imaginative Loving Teachers was printed on our t-shirts. I collected songs and games in a “resource file,” I taught a daily drama class during the week-long camp sessions, and I stockpiled readings and Bible verses for daily devotionals. I did not learn how someone becomes a Christian.

I don’t remember what the girls wanted to ask God that night, but it was, blessedly, not to be saved. We huddled away from the crowd, holding hands, and I stood above them, just barely the tallest. I prayed, my voice husky with uncertainty, and stared at the grass, glancing at the girls’ faces to see if I was doing this right. I asked God to help and guide them, and I silently asked the same for myself.
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Nashville contra Jaws, 1975

Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

J. Hoberman | An excerpt adapted from Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan | The New Press | July 2019 | 30 minutes (8,492 words)

June 1975, six weeks after Time magazine headlined the Fall of Saigon as “The Anatomy of a Debacle” and wondered “How Should Americans Feel?,” brought two antithetical yet analogous movies: Robert Altman’s Nashville and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Each in its way brilliantly modified the cycle of “disaster” films that had appeared during Richard Nixon’s second term and were now, at the nadir of the nation’s self­-esteem, paralleled by the spectacular collapse of South Vietnam and the unprecedented Watergate drama.

In fact, in their time, Jaws and Nashville were regarded as Watergate films and, indeed, both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act in the summer of 1974. On May 2, three days after Richard Nixon had gone on TV to announce that he was turning over transcripts of forty-­two White House tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee, the Jaws shoot opened on Martha’s Vineyard with a mainly male, no-­star cast. The star was the shark or, rather, the three mechanical sharks — one for each profile and another for stunt work — that, run by pneumatic engines and launched by a sixty-­five­-foot catapult, were created by Robert Mattey, the former Disney special effects expert who had designed the submarine and giant squid for the 1956 hit Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Brought to Martha’s Vineyard in pieces and cloaked in secrecy, Mattey’s sharks took longer than expected to become fully operational, and Jaws was further delayed by poor weather conditions. Accounts of the production routinely refer to the movie itself as a catastrophe only barely avoided: “All over the picture shows signs of going down, like the Titanic.”

In late June, a month when Jaws was still unable to shoot any water scenes, and while Nixon visited the Middle East and Soviet Union in a hapless attempt to, as the president wrote in his diary, “put the whole Watergate business into perspective,” Altman’s cast and crew arrived in the city of Nashville. They were all put up at the same motel, with everyone expected to stick around for the entire ten­-week shoot.

There is a sense in which Nashville represented a last bit of Sixties utopianism — the idea that a bunch of talented people might just hang out together in a colorful environment and, almost spontaneously, generate a movie. Even by Altman’s previous standards, Nashville seemed a free­form composition. It surely helped that neophyte producer Jerry Weintraub’s previous experience lay in managing tours, for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley among others, and packaging TV specials. Read more…